"ratfucking" – American Political Sabotage

1) As we saw clearly in the Nixon years, uncovered by the investigation that is the topic of this thread, the political parties are (or at least were, but I assert still are) invested in ratfucking at the local level, and especially at the level of student governments, in part because the stakes are so low. And from this, we see a natural selection of the best ratfuckers to run party operations in state, national, and international domains.

2) Decisions made in Washington, DC receive proportionally enormous media coverage compared to the actual economic and policy impact on everyday lives. Student governments are situated in exactly the opposite posture. They make decisions that have enormous impact on local communities (particularly their campuses, but often their municipalities as well), on present and future academic funding, on the tone and personnel of committees which determine the outcomes of funding and curricular deliberations which impact whole generations of knowledge, and on the matter of access to higher education itself (and the degrees of debt in which different classes of students find themselves after the fact).

As a way of mollifying student protests in the 1960s and 1970s, Student Governments were often the recipients of power and money. Student Governments at large state universities have budgets of millions or tens of millions of dollars, and more importantly the authority to appoint personnel to many of the most important decision making bodies. These powers have naturally drawn major party ratfucking into student politics (as Segretti and others have acknowledged) and become a vector for control of educational systems.

I believe that many student elections and governments continue to be ratfucked. At SUNY New Paltz, when I was elected President in 2006, elections on campus were operated and overseen by the county elections commission (as was the case at all 13 SUNY Colleges and 4 University Centers), and were conducted using the same mechanical voting machines, with the same audit trails, as local, state, and national elections.

Since that time, due in large part to persuasion from SUNY (and, it would not surprise me to learn, under-the-table money changing hands), these elections have are now conducted by unaccountable third-party contractors, and the election machines are closed-source, unauditable web and mobile apps.

I think that a significant part of pulling the USA out of our current political mire will come from paying comparatively less attention to the children in Washington DC and more attention to the young adults at campuses in our communities.