Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I recently had trouble with Norton Firewall. Basically, it made it so that I lost everything on my hard drive.

I went to the Norton web site to find a telephone number through which I could speak with a human being about my problem.

I finally found one, but it cost $29.99 to talk to a human being.

I figured it was worth it.

So I called the number.

I waited for one hour listening to music I didn’t like the first time I heard it.

Finally, a man with a very thick East Indian accent came on the phone. We struggled first to understand one another and then to figure out how to resolve the problem. We struggled for two hours.

Finally, he was able to talk me through taking every and any piece of software that had to do with Norton and/or Symantic off my computer.

I think he was about to tell me how to get it back on correctly when, yep, we were disconnected. I guess the communication between California and India is OK, but not perfect.

Outsourcing jobs to people who will do the job for considerably less of an income is something that corporations love to do.

I heard recently that outsourcing is good because it creates parity among nations.

Well, I agree, it creates parity.

Corporations send their work out to people who are poor and pay them the wage that they’re used to, $1.00/hour or less for 24/7, 365 days a year, and they take jobs away from the workers in industrialized nations, like the former United States of America, dropping those workers to the same level as the workers who get the work. So, yes, there’s parity. Only the parity does not happen as it was presented to me.

We don’t make workers in third world countries better off by outsourcing. We just keep them poor and make American workers, or former workers, just as poor.

Yep, parity.

How do we stop this?

Stop voting for Democrats and/or Republicans, two arms of the same party.

They both take tons of money from corporations to run their sophomoric campaign adds on TV and then, if they're elected, they let the corporations make policy (just think about Cheney not telling people who was at the meeting that set energy policy for the US).

It's us, people, you and I, who are going to obsolete the Democrats and Republicans. We have to vote for those who are not yet bought and paid for.

Maybe it means spending four more years under the control of the "king", but it's worth getting parties like The Green Party of the United States of America into a position where they're taken seriously.

I agree with you that Bush and Kerry are two arms of the same party... even though if I were an US citizen I would vote for Kerry at this particular moment. The risk to have an úlcera and to feel stupid some months after that exist but I think it could be for you at least a (limited) change option.
I´m afraid that the revolution isn´t for the United States.
What other options of vote do you have?. You mention the Green party. Are there others?
Saludos,

Arcadia

Arcadia, the first thing that we have to do here in the United States is to 86 the electoral college.

I don’t know if you know how it works and please don’t feel that I’m being condescending. I just want to make sure that you’re as unclear about it as we Americans are.

There are lots of web sites that try to explain it. There are lots of web sites that talk to abolishing it and those are the ones that I suggest reading, not just because they share my views, but because most that I’ve read give a non partisan, factual history of the electoral college. They talk about why it was created and how it served us well at a particular time in our history.

However, it needs to be abolished.

As you probably know, the presidential candidate that most Americans wanted to win in 2000 actually lost the election.

Now, you can talk all you want about how rigged the after voting processes were, but, if there was one person, one vote, the rigging would have been more difficult to pull off.

Once the electoral college is removed and we go to a one person, one vote process, people won’t be afraid to vote their conscience for fear that they may pull votes from the lesser of two evils and actually shoot themselves in the foot by allowing the person they absolutely didn’t want to win win.

We can have a run-off style election where, when you vote for the candidate in whom you really believe, you have another chance to vote for the lesser of two evils if your candidate doesn’t win.

That, at least, will get what we so condescendingly call “third parties” more respect. They will actually play a logical role in elections.

Once the electoral college is abolished, we need to shorten the time for political campaigns.

George Bush, and I’m sure Bill Clinton, began campaigning for their second term the minute they took the oath of office.

So, members of the opposing party who are at all interested in the job feel that they have to begin campaigning against the incumbent immediately.

We have people from the party that is out of power announcing their candidacies two or more years before the elections.

This means that money needs to be raised at that time and, of course, the incumbent also needs to raise money.

The Corporacracy comes in here.

They begin their “donations” to candidates that promise payback. It used to be called graft, remember?

The Democratic and Republican parties are on a virtual continuous fund raising mission. The corruption starts here.

Meanwhile, the parties that haven’t built up this treasure chest or parties that won’t accept corporate money, like The Green Party of the United States of America, are behind the eight ball from the start. There’s no way that these “third parties” can ever catch up to the well oiled machine I call The Corporacracy.

We need to set a time limit of six months or so during which any obvious campaigning can be done.

It should, I don’t know if it would, but it should make the voters more interested and more active in learning about the candidates because they won’t have these years of the candidates saying the same shit over and over again until voters believe it. That’s how American voters get their information now – through years of sophomoric campaign ads.

Oh, and the ads that the candidates would be allowed to run would probably touch more on the issues and not so much on character assassination. Or, it might backfire and we may have nothing but character assassination for six months.

The caveat, of course, especially with the incumbent, is how does one tell the difference between his campaigning and his “addressing the nation”.

That would have to be sorted out, but the time’s just got to be shortened.

It would certainly level the playing field a little for “third parties”.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the president limited to serving one term, maybe one five, six or seven year term. Then he or she wouldn’t have to spend any time campaigning for a second term.

Right now, though, we are run by one party. I say it’s made up of two arms, The Democrats and The Republicans.

But, in actuality, it’s closer to being an octopus.

Our political party is made up of IBM, Disney, Rupert Mudoch’s media empires, Ted Tuner’s media empires, Mobile, Exxon, Dow Chemical, Monsanto, etc. Our government is made up of global corporations that buy front men, and so far they’ve all been men unfortunately, who do their bidding. There’s no philanthropy involved, I can tell you that much. Money is the end towards which all means must point.

The real question is how do we make these sweeping changes when the people who have the power to make them are the very same people who benefit by them?

If someone in main stream politics doesn’t become honest and create a following very soon, we will be a third world country and you know how governments are changed in third world countries.

well, third parties, third world countries...why not?
Thank you for your answer, Michael!. I didn´t know what you said about your electoral system.
See you,

Arcadia

That's OK, Arcadia, not many Americans understand our electoral system.

Of course, with The Republicans ownership of the electronic voting machines established, there won't be much left to understand anyway.