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Politics : The Citizens Manifesto -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (334)	7/30/2005 3:50:42 PM
From: Road Walker	Respond to of 492

The largest voting block in this country is now "independents" at 37%: Democrats Faring Better Recent Gallup Polls have shown growing positive momentum for the Democratic Party, even while Bush's ratings were somewhat higher. For example, the July 22-24 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found 52% of Americans rating the Democratic Party favorably, while just 46% give a favorable rating to the Republican Party. When the question was last asked in April, each party was rated favorably by 50% of Americans. Additionally, Gallup has observed a consistent edge for the Democrats in terms of national party identification in its recent polls. In the current poll, 33% say they are Democrats, 28% Republicans, and 37% independents. This is the fourth consecutive poll in which Democrats have outnumbered Republicans in Gallup Polls. More than 1/3 of people are disgusted with the major parties and their pandering to special interests. There is no doubt that an ethical third party, that represents the middle class, would capture these votes, as well as the votes of many that call themselves Reps or Dems. Those that talk about working within the current two parties to effect change are deluding themselves. The only thing that will save this country is a new party of and for the people. Isn't that what democracy is all about? John

To: combjelly who wrote (334)	8/1/2005 12:53:00 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 492

Amy posted this comparison between Germany and the US. Its written by a German who has lived here for a long time......in fact, in MPLS. To stay on topic, I posted the section that talks about political parties but I thought you might want to read the whole thing since you just got back from Germany. For the most part, he seems pretty right on except that Mpls. is a fairly different part of the US and so not all things translate well to other parts of the US. *************************************************** A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States** Democracy There are many differences between the two countries in their approach to democracy. Most importantly, the US uses the majority system throughout, meaning that voters get to decide between several candidates, and a candidate needs more than 50% of the votes in order to win. Germany uses a mixture of proportional and majority systems in order to ensure that the proportion of parliament seats a party receives is exactly the same as the proportion of voters favoring that party (if that proportion is bigger than 5%) while also allowing for local representation. The German system gives more power to the parties, since they can decide which candidates to place on the list from which the parliamentarians will later be drawn. Parties finance the election campaigns; the candidates themselves do not need to raise substantial amounts of money. In return, there is a very high party loyalty in the German parliament. Parliamentarians vote their conscience only on rare, very important questions; most of the time, they vote the party line. Parties are financed by the taxpayers according to the proportion of votes they received, by donations from big business, and by membership dues. By contrast, Congress persons in the US are much more independent: they raise campaign money on their own (or use their own money) and the party cannot even decide who will be their candidate in a particular race: this is decided in so-called primaries, races between the various candidates where every voter who declares themselves a supporter of the party gets to vote. Once in Congress, the legislators can vote their conscience on virtually every question. American politicians are almost constantly raising money for their next campaign. Since they are free to change their voting pattern on almost any topic, moneyed interests have much more political influence than in Germany. A little-known and blatantly unjust feature of the US system is "redistricting". The country is divided into congressional districts, one for each member of the House of Parliament. The person who wins the most votes in a district gets the corresponding seat in the House. Every 10 years a census is carried out, and then the state governments go to work and redraw the congressional districts, purportedly to make them all the same size. The real reason is of course to keep the other party out of Congress: the census provides enough information to know where supporters of the other party live, and the new district boundaries are drawn so as to segregate all of them in as few districts as possible. This same game happens every ten years, and it seems to outrage no one but me. It is often believed that the position of president in the US is an extremely powerful one; this is wrong. Essentially all he can do is govern by changing administrative rules and veto or sign laws written by Congress, where the majority is often hostile to the president. Presidential vetoes can even be overridden by a 2/3-supermajority in both houses. By contrast, the chancellor in Germany is elected by the parliament, the Bundestag, which means that a majority is behind him and most every law he wants to enact will pass, because of the above mentioned party discipline. Most laws, the ones not affecting the German states, do not have to be approved by the second chamber, the Bundesrat. The American parties are located to the right of their German counterparts. Former President Clinton for instance, a democrat, would have to be placed at the right wing of the German conservative party CDU. Some people at the right end of the American Republican party are so radical that they would probably be under surveillance in Germany. There is no social democratic party to speak of in the US; it is the biggest and oldest party in Germany, and indeed all parties in Germany are social democratic to some extent. Even though US politics are located to the right of German politics, there is a very real sense in which Germany is more conservative. New technologies and new ways of doing things are embraced much more enthusiastically in the US. Even conservatives will often propose quite radical policy changes, such as throwing out the whole income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax. On a whim, some states will introduce gay marriage and others will put a prohibition against it into the state constitution. Things appear to move much slower in Germany. It is not very well known in Germany that most US states have systems of direct democracy, where citizens can bring up ballot measures if they raise enough signatures. There are no restrictions on the contents of these measures: tax reductions, criminal laws, recalls of unpopular politicians and changes of (state) constitutions are all fair game. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges are also often directly elected by the citizenry. In Germany, these are all appointed, not elected. Despite of this, large segments of American society ignore the political process altogether. Even the big presidential elections see fewer than 50% of the eligible voters participating; other elections have much smaller participation. In Germany, the numbers for federal elections are around 80%. I can see three possible reasons for the low voter participation in the US: votes always take place on regular working days making it difficult to participate (even though many businesses grant time off for voting), the majority system locks out supporters of smaller parties, and the system of voter registration (which requires every voter who moved since the last election to fill out a form several weeks before the vote) makes it unnecessarily difficult to vote. 66.102.7.104