Quote of the Day
This quote by Norman Spector really sums up how a lot of us feel these days:
“Once, politics was a clash of ideas and policies in furtherance of the public interest; now, it’s increasingly a spin war among competing lobbyists seeking to cash in on access to power. Media coverage of elections increasingly focuses on them, their tactics and on the horse race.”
It’s pretty tough to add anything to those thoughts.
Norman Spector is someone with whom I generally disagree on policy. He is, however, a thinking person; and I understand his arguments, because they seem based in reality and he openly states his first premises. He was in a (badly done) debate with Mo Sihota when I first saw him, talking about the environment, and he was quite clear that he thought people’s jobs were more important than a given other species (I think they were discussing wild salmon).
The lightbulb went on for me, because obviously I think people are important too, and we agree on more than we disagree on. I probably do want to save wild salmon for their own sake: but my primary motivation in environmental concerns are not wanting to destroy the biosphere my grandkids will depend on.
I’m not so sure it’s so much a “spin war among competing lobbyists seeking to cash in on access to power” as it is a spin war among competing parties seeking power for the sake of money and power.
– then again, since it’s not exactly difficult to see the political parties as lobby groups themselves he may be right.
I don’t agree with many of his policies either Arwen. I find a lot of his opinions to be of the crotchety old conservative variety.
However, in this case, as a former insider himself, I think it took some stones to publicly admit where the problem lies
“it is a spin war among competing parties seeking power for the sake of money and power.”
To an extent, SL, but if you look at who actually runs the election campaigns, where they come from and where they end up after the election, it is in the much more lucrative business of providing or buying access to power; the same guys the lobbyist helped to get into power.
My brother thinks that one answer to this issue is for the federal government to operate on a budget approved by the provinces who are in turn operating on a budget approved by the municipalities from the pot of all Canadian tax revenue
I can’t imagine how it would work.
I think he means that he wants to be able to be involved on a more personal level with the folks that he is remitting the bulk of his taxes to, in a small town everybody knows your business sort of way.
“I can’t imagine how it would work.”
Me neither. His scenario sound suspiciously like the proverbial lunatics taking over the asylum.
>then again, since it’s not exactly difficult to see the political parties as lobby groups themselves he may be right.
The prize is big, so it attracts people who like big prizes. The larger the stakes become, the closer the struggle between factions edges towards outright violence. Many people seem to be very happy with big government, provided their faction (the proper-thinking one, natch) controls the levers…if only those other, tiresome, irrational people could be made to go away forever.
How did it all get this way? Whenever I get a chance I ask people older than me if it was always like this, and invariably the answer is no.
If no, then when, how, and more importanly why did it all turn out like this?
I make no secret about my intentions to seek public office when I grow up, but sometimes I think that the idea I have of politics is romanticized and a throwback to a bygone era. Someone, please, say it ain’t so!
Sorry dude, once upon a time it may have been different, but in saying that we need to remember that the past is always romanticized, whether we lived it, or are hearing about it from others.
>How did it all get this way?
When I ask the people older than me, the impression I receive is that “government” was a bunch of people in a city far away, who collectively had very little impact on one’s day-to-day life.
“Progressives” are ecstatic about the source of power they’ve discovered and grown to make everything in life better, but they’re shit-scared, angry, and rude when it falls into the hands of the “not-progressives”. Vice-versa pro-government “conservatives”. Have the last 8 years or so of deranged responses to election losses not convinced anyone that the time has come to agree to pull the teeth of the monster and learn to solve “problems” the hard way instead of with Mao’s political energy source?