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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (17067)	5/17/2005 8:45:16 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

jttmab, I'm disappointed at how timid you are about real voting reform. You seem to be willing to rearrange the bed linen while the house in on fire around you. It is my contention, and I've got copious evidence and reasonable hypotheses, that the elections in America are completely fraudulent. In particular, there is deep and abiding suspicion that the 2004 Presidential election was the result of a synthesis of various means of voters suppression and outright vote machine manipulation. There's a newspaper I can recommend that has a plethora of information on this matter, It is the Free Press of Columbus, Ohio, run by a professor named Jim Fitrakis and others. There's dozens of links to Jim's excellent work on my thread here: Subject 55322 *** Re: I don't know what FIRST-PAST-THE-POST VOTING means. Another way of saying this is "winner takes all". This is the common system in America and the UK. In systems with proportional representation, such as in Germany, the voter votes for the party which represents their views and the parliament is created based upon the proportion of votes each party recieves. So, in the UK you have the anomalous and anti-democratic situation where the Labour Party recieved 36% of the votes in the last election, yet got about 55% of the seats in Parliament. The Liberal Dems, on the other hand garnered 22% of the vote, but were able to only secure about 10% of the seats in Parliament. Such a system is clearly not representative of the will of the people. In Germany, in contrast, the Green Party has made astounding gains in progressive and intelligent legislation while still only representing about 10 to 15% of the vote. In Germany, seats in the Bundesrat are assigned on the basis of the proportion of the vote that each party gets nationwide. Such a system would radically alter the landscape in America. Clearly the Republicans would be the big losers, as they should be since they represent such a small slice of the American public, much of which is deliberately alienated from the political process by the special interests represtented by the Republican Party. *** As to MONEY in politics, I think you have a very rigid view of the realm of the possible. For example, Arizona and Maine are two states that have gone to a 100% public financed system. This would be brilliant if it could be made the national standard. It would eliminate the obscene nature of our politicians having to grovel on a permanent basis before those in our society who have the money to donate, and the expectation of rich rewards for the bribes tendered. I no longer call our system fair, just or justified. It is rank plutocratic bribery that we have in most national election contests today. I believe that there should be a complete ban on wasteful, disingenous (at best) and not-designed-to-inform advertisements for candidates. We need drastic reform if we are to save the American Republic and prevent the inexorable slide into a criminal imperial police state. George Bush has done more in the last 5 years to ruin America than any other phenomenon in the history of this nation. He has been involved in synthetic terror, ruthless deceit, moral depravity and blatant cronyism. The system is broken, and anything short of massive modifications of how we conduct our political affairs is going to ruin this nation.