Vote for Me!
Less than a week to a Federal election in Canada, and there isn’t a single candidate worth voting for. News World had a special last night about the declining rates of people voting. In the 60’s, more than 80% of Canadians voted, then along came the new drug, television. If you follow the demographics of the age groups that voter decline is taking place (the under 40 crowd mostly), you’ll find it follows the same pattern as television standards in that as they dropped while the “news” became more and more entertainment rather than information. Since the mid-70’s just thirty short years, or a single generation, the people participating in the electoral process has declined to just 61%.
Gives the whole experience a very Amerikan feel having the thing played out on television; using their method of electing the people that pay for the most television advertising is fast encroaching our country too. It gets worse when you split the numbers up into income categories, the poor and under educated are the least likely to vote, which leaves their fate to the people that are most interested in exploiting them – the rich ones that have the time and access to read about what the candidates really will do once they are elected to office.
A little more exploitation of the poor reported in the NY Times this am, the entire US is now using electronic debit cards for food stamps. This gives total control and monitoring of poor people with a minimum of effort. The ones making the money like it, they get paid within 48 hours now and the govt. likes it because no longer do the recipients get change back from their coupons. The exact amount is taken out and so when there’s a few dollars left over in the kitty at the middle of the month (when most people have used up their food coupons), it just goes right back into the governments pockets instead of the recipient or taxpayers.
We do have one party worth voting for, a Green party that has at least an interest in our environment as something other than a resource those with the money can exploit; but they have been locked out of the process by the people that hold the $ bags and they get zero television time in the debates or news. Some complain that even though they have good motives, they “wouldn’t know how to run a government” which translates to me that they wouldn’t be accountable like the other candidates to the lobbyists that give them power and money to exploit others, so are not acceptable to the establishment.