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I can't help thinking that we likely need some new form of politics.
Like in the USA we have grid lock and to be frank the political elections there go on for over a year meaning not much is done for the country during that time. Also there is a total lack of compromise between political parties.
Then we do seem to have career politicians in that there are many that make a full time living from it. Many also have no practical knowledge of the departments they run.
Then the media seem to be fixated on giving us the two opposing parties to comment on any situation and you know before they start talking that one side will always disagree with the other side.
The other problem I see these days is that you need lots of money to run for political office. That means only the wealthy can run for office. I can't help but wonder if Abraham Lincoln could ever have been President of the USA in todays world.
Then if you look at where the world is right now you can see that politicians are not doing their best for the constituency but rather always looking for where the votes will come from. Like we can now see that all countries should have been spending less and being more frugal with our money. That's our politicians to blame for this. Sometimes tough decisions need to be made but that normally means people will be displeased with them for doing that and so these decisions are not being made.
Then of course the whole banking crisis is showing just how corrupt our banks have become. What were our politicians doing to allow that to happen. I might add that they didn't allow that to happen in Canada and that was a political decision so it shows how politicians could do the right thing but didn't.
And now we find that the European countries are perfectly prepared to suffer high unemployment to try to fix the problem. There really doesn't seem to be any creative thinking from them to fix this issue. So what use are they?
We find that many major companies are right now cash rich. So there they are sitting on a pile of cash just getting richer. We all are responsible for this as through our pension plans and investment plans we look for maximum returns and by doing that we encourage companies to make the maximum return for as little cost as possible. All that means is more unemployment.
I can't help but think that we need to make our politicians more accountable. We elect them to represent us yet they spend most of their time in the Capital and so quickly get out of touch with their local constituency. Perhaps it's time we had an annual poll which asks if we are happy with our local politician and if more say no then they have to go into a re-election process. Why should we allow them to serve four or five years before we get a chance to vote them back in or out of office. And do we really need political parties? How about if all of them ran as independents and thus to get elected they have to show how they intend to support their constituents.
Then I hit a situation locally here in Chatham where I admit to voting Conservative. However I don't like the local Conservative MP as I don't believe he is doing much at all for the local area. However I don't have a choice on my vote as if I still want to vote a Conservative agenda then I have to vote for him and I don't want to vote for him. So will that mean next time I'll vote Liberal just to get him out of office?
I don't have any solutions right now but believe we need to seek a better way forward.
Like in some respects I might be a communist. I keep seeing very high unemployment for young people... like in Spain it's over 50%. That's just terrible.
I believe we are all too greedy and want things we really can't afford but run up huge credit card bills to get them anyway. So if we want to bring down unemployment there might be a case for actually reducing an individuals pay so that more people can be retained or employed by the company. Like with some companies making billions in profit why can't they instead make less billions but employ more people? The oil companies, banks, Internet companies are all making obscene amounts of money. Yet if you try to contact Google or Microsoft you simply can't. You can only go through their forums to talk to them. They simply don't make it easy to talk to them direct.
And so why can't our local MP, Senator or Congressman have regular meetings with the major and minor players in their area to explore how they might all work together to reduce unemployment? The he or she might then talk to more people in the area to explore possibilities with them. How flexible might the local population be to thoughts and ideas on working towards full employment?
Then look at our infrastructure which is failing all over the world and compare that to the many unemployed people. Is there some way to get the unemployed working on fixing these issues? I mean any infrastructure project needs all kinds of skill sets from admin to labour.
The we might look afresh at China where they don't have democracy but by all accounts have done very well indeed and from what I see the people on the whole support them although there are certainly cases where they don't. However is there something we can learn from their political situation?
Look where we've come over the past 100 years. Back then there really wasn't that much to spend your money on as we didn't have cars, computers, phones and even all these large houses to purchase. We didn't even get much in the way of holidays.
Now both parents have to work to pay the mortgage.
So I just think there needs to be a total rethink on how our political system is run and how we can get more involved in the process.
Any thought on how we might change things for the better?
Alastair
Like in the USA we have grid lock and to be frank the political elections there go on for over a year meaning not much is done for the country during that time. Also there is a total lack of compromise between political parties.
Then we do seem to have career politicians in that there are many that make a full time living from it. Many also have no practical knowledge of the departments they run.
Then the media seem to be fixated on giving us the two opposing parties to comment on any situation and you know before they start talking that one side will always disagree with the other side.
The other problem I see these days is that you need lots of money to run for political office. That means only the wealthy can run for office. I can't help but wonder if Abraham Lincoln could ever have been President of the USA in todays world.
Then if you look at where the world is right now you can see that politicians are not doing their best for the constituency but rather always looking for where the votes will come from. Like we can now see that all countries should have been spending less and being more frugal with our money. That's our politicians to blame for this. Sometimes tough decisions need to be made but that normally means people will be displeased with them for doing that and so these decisions are not being made.
Then of course the whole banking crisis is showing just how corrupt our banks have become. What were our politicians doing to allow that to happen. I might add that they didn't allow that to happen in Canada and that was a political decision so it shows how politicians could do the right thing but didn't.
And now we find that the European countries are perfectly prepared to suffer high unemployment to try to fix the problem. There really doesn't seem to be any creative thinking from them to fix this issue. So what use are they?
We find that many major companies are right now cash rich. So there they are sitting on a pile of cash just getting richer. We all are responsible for this as through our pension plans and investment plans we look for maximum returns and by doing that we encourage companies to make the maximum return for as little cost as possible. All that means is more unemployment.
I can't help but think that we need to make our politicians more accountable. We elect them to represent us yet they spend most of their time in the Capital and so quickly get out of touch with their local constituency. Perhaps it's time we had an annual poll which asks if we are happy with our local politician and if more say no then they have to go into a re-election process. Why should we allow them to serve four or five years before we get a chance to vote them back in or out of office. And do we really need political parties? How about if all of them ran as independents and thus to get elected they have to show how they intend to support their constituents.
Then I hit a situation locally here in Chatham where I admit to voting Conservative. However I don't like the local Conservative MP as I don't believe he is doing much at all for the local area. However I don't have a choice on my vote as if I still want to vote a Conservative agenda then I have to vote for him and I don't want to vote for him. So will that mean next time I'll vote Liberal just to get him out of office?
I don't have any solutions right now but believe we need to seek a better way forward.
Like in some respects I might be a communist. I keep seeing very high unemployment for young people... like in Spain it's over 50%. That's just terrible.
I believe we are all too greedy and want things we really can't afford but run up huge credit card bills to get them anyway. So if we want to bring down unemployment there might be a case for actually reducing an individuals pay so that more people can be retained or employed by the company. Like with some companies making billions in profit why can't they instead make less billions but employ more people? The oil companies, banks, Internet companies are all making obscene amounts of money. Yet if you try to contact Google or Microsoft you simply can't. You can only go through their forums to talk to them. They simply don't make it easy to talk to them direct.
And so why can't our local MP, Senator or Congressman have regular meetings with the major and minor players in their area to explore how they might all work together to reduce unemployment? The he or she might then talk to more people in the area to explore possibilities with them. How flexible might the local population be to thoughts and ideas on working towards full employment?
Then look at our infrastructure which is failing all over the world and compare that to the many unemployed people. Is there some way to get the unemployed working on fixing these issues? I mean any infrastructure project needs all kinds of skill sets from admin to labour.
The we might look afresh at China where they don't have democracy but by all accounts have done very well indeed and from what I see the people on the whole support them although there are certainly cases where they don't. However is there something we can learn from their political situation?
Look where we've come over the past 100 years. Back then there really wasn't that much to spend your money on as we didn't have cars, computers, phones and even all these large houses to purchase. We didn't even get much in the way of holidays.
Now both parents have to work to pay the mortgage.
So I just think there needs to be a total rethink on how our political system is run and how we can get more involved in the process.
Any thought on how we might change things for the better?
Alastair
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