Why Celebrities Should Be Political Reporters
Today I read an interesting commentary on the negative reaction people have against Oprah Winfrey endorsing Barack Obama. People seem to think she shouldn’t be all that partisan. I think that’s an interesting–and ignorant–point of view that undermines democracy. These days in Alberta, teachers are not allowed to run for school board, even in districts [...]
Downtown Ambassadors: Subsidizing the Thug Class
Well, it took a great deal of digging in the hopelessly inadequate free daily “newspapers” today, but it was eventually possible to get the full story on the city of Vancouver spending almost 3/4 of a million dollars to match the funding for the downtown’s Business Improvement Association’s private thug force. The privatization-happy neoliberal Non-Partisan [...]
Why I’d Rather Cast a Ballot in Venezuela than Canada or the USA
With Canada’s 19th-century first past the post electoral system and the USA’s rampant electoral fraud and conflicts of interest, voting in Venezuela seems like a tonic. And in Venezuela’s recent referendum on political change that failed by roughly the same infinitesimal vote as Quebec’s referendum failed a decade or so ago, the North American media [...]
COPE’s Ideas Conference and Re-Inspiring a Robust Democracy
In our society citizens are rapidly being re-framed as consumers. We need to seriously question just what democracy means to us. Politics is not an event that a bunch of us take part in every few years at an election. It is something that happens every day. If we choose to ignore politics except during [...]
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