United States Pirate Party

  In many ways I consider the Pirate fight to be a fight over propriety.  We fear, and frankly observe, the ownership of our culture, processes, and systems by individuals who have no right to claim such ownership.  There is a unified rally for 'the way things used to be' and 'the way things have always been done' in our government offices, business places, and industries.  Those that seek fair change and modernization are often met with extreme opposition by the culture of those who seek 'not to rock the boat' in these places.  This culture IS the culture of propriety, and as such are the pirate foe.
 
One way that this fight is fought is through patent, trademark, and copyright.  The desire to innovate and to propose innovative ideas is often shot down initially with claims that the systems required are too time intensive, too expensive, or are frankly just too complicated.  Misunderstandings, often intentional, about open alternatives to owned systems such as Microsoft software and Skype and so on leads to conclusions that any change would be unmanageable.  This may have been true a decade ago, but it certainly is not anymore.
 
The topic I want to get at is the propriety of the electoral system.  There is a culture that seems to believe that the major 2 parties of the United States claim ownership of our electoral system.  They honestly think that they have some form of right to run and make law that further ensures that no other players infringe on their political monopoly of the country.  They are every bit as closed and exclusionary as any software manufacturer or hardware designer and yet they operate without opposition to their monopoly because, "That's just the way it is".  
 
Well, it is NOT just the way it is.  Just like any system there are options to roll out innovative new approaches, ways of directly polling a constituency and creating dialogue where there is a traditional monologue.  The American public can now count itself, can now wiki it's desires, and can run it's own fiber.  We now have the tools and the ability to innovate the way we pave our roads, process our taxes, count ourselves, and all the other myriad tasks that make up the responsibilities of the Municipal, State, and Federal civil servant.
 
No group owns the way we interact with each other, in theory.  There is no 'one way' to establish a relationship with a contracting company at the municipal level.  It is sold to us that there is, and you have to go through a network of hoops and outright bribes in order to get such access, but this is a bold-face lie enforced by walls of loopholes and meaningless forms designed to keep an outsider from getting access to the systems that make up the country.
 
We much take the innovative spirit that exists in the open movement to the doorsteps and podiums of our local governments.  We must displace the gatekeepers that think they own the doors to politics and replace them with new open systems that ensure that every man woman and child in the US has fair and even representation.  The intention of the constitution, as well as most of it's words, demands this from us today and every day.
 
The sense of ownership the major political players have, the sense that they are the only game in town, is a flawed and feeble one.  We see today the cracking of the 2 major parties under their own hypocrisies, a cracking that it is our duty to exploit.  We must take our country back from those who claim ownership of it, or learn to live in a world where all things are licensed and no things are free.