Columnists
Democracy— where art thou?
The world of who should run what is in turmoil. Companies buy out companies, then more companies, until there’s two companies left that supply our food, services, and even the planes we fly on vacation, some of which fall from the sky, because shareholder profits outweighed proper engineering.
Then we have the government, which pretends to control all of this private company game-playing, but really doesn’t. Revenue Canada is great at eyeballing us and our income, but piss-poor at providing regulations to control the enormous number of related companies who ‘serve’ us.
By ‘serve’ I mean join together, jack prices, and have a whole team on staff to explain why everything we consume—from food to gas—is spinning out of control.
Yes, I understand inflation. But I don’t think that’s the deal here. I understand the cost of trucking goods has gone up. I get that. But the costs of production haven’t changed that much, nor have the prices I charge at my shop, which are stuck in 2018.
There’s money being made, just not by us. Modern companies are, well, companies. They really don’t give a sweet damn about us, they are about making money for their shareholders. Period. Ads that used to say: “Built Ford tough right here in America for you!” have been gone for years.
This corporate mentality is why a door fell off on a Boeing airplane, just after lift-off. It’s a long story, but money for research, development and engineering was reduced to increase shareholder earnings. Cost-cutting was essential to serve this purpose. Get it fast, get it cheap as possible. Oops!
This is just a snapshot of what is happening in corporate North America. A company doesn’t need ‘pride of workmanship’ or even ‘keeping our clients from unexpectedly dying’.
As they say in the States: “It’s all about the Benjamins!” And it really is. Service, quality and safety are way down the list.
believe in the capitalistic system we have. It allowed me, as a young and stupid individual, to build a business that is fun, rewarding and useful.
As our County Magazine staff looks around, we see us. The people we love and serve. We see new young entrepreneurs setting up in the County, and we support them. I used to be them. We do what we can to help them, because I used to make a box of Kraft Dinner last for seven days, and I know the pain.
The point of this is: The difference between multi-million dollar mergers, which remove competition, but also seem to forget what a ‘business’ does—serve its customers—is a dangerous direction.
And yes, we have no control. We are not customers anymore; we are victims. In the circus world, they call us ‘rubes’.
Oddly enough, or not, this is not what this column is about, but I think you’ll get the connection.
WHERE DID DEMOCRACY COME FROM?
Glad you asked. The birthplace of democracy was in Greece. You probably remember Socrates and some other guys with similar names (which must have driven the Greece Postal Service crazy!).
In its essence, democracy involves people elected to represent them. Weird twist: They found that the people who wanted to be elected were not the best people for the job. They had agendas. They were just people who wanted to be elected, knowing it would serve them.
So they tuned the system, so that the representatives were decided by lottery! Strange, but it guaranteed that ordinary people—bakers or butchers—could be your representatives, instead of those who actually wanted a seat of power, so they could benefit from that power.
Not sure how that worked in my research, but it’s pretty much what we try to do here in the County.
HOW TO MESS UP DEMOCRACY
Okay, we do alright here in Canada, where we vote for a guy and are either extremely happy or horribly disappointed. Unlike the States, we have two choices to make. I’ve voted for many years, and I always been faced with a quandry. Love the local guy, hate the leader; Love the leader, local guy is a dork.
I hate decisions like this. This is democracy messed up. I like Todd Smith, though I am not a blue-heart Conservative. A vote for him is automatically a vote for Doug Ford, which made me uneasy, since my vote for someone good becomes some sort of a mandate for Doug’s popularity. I didn’t vote for him! Yet, I get him, because I believed in our local guy. Messed up.
GOOD NEWS! NOT AS MESSED UP AS THE US
They don’t know it, but they screwed up democracy. Some people don’t even care about democracy. Sorry for the sting, but Canadians are way different from Americans. Always have been, which is why their 1812 invasion of Canada brought resistance they did not expect. Canadians believe in a social network. If someone falls, we pick them up. Not so with Americans. If anything, Canadians embrace a belief that we all rise together.
FUNNY THING IS … THE STATES BUGGERED IT UP
They wave their Constitution, yet they throw it away when it’s convenient. Could have been easy, but they couldn’t see the merit in the Greek model: If you want the job badly, you shouldn’t have the job. Let’s find someone who can do the job, because they care about people just like them.
This, to me, explains the weird upcoming US election in which nobody actually wants either of the two front-runners. I’m afraid we’ll be facing the same thing here in our upcoming election. Following, as we do, the American way of choosing sides, left and right, and fighting it out til death for some bizarre reasonings, based on the little information we possess on how to actually run a country properly—it’s simply a recipe for disaster.
I don’t follow the run-up to the American elections; nor do I give a sweet damn about the Trump trials— though it shows how messed up democracy is when the question is asked: Can a newly elected President preside from a jail cell? I don’t think anyone saw that coming!
Here, it’s still left versus right, because we all love a great faked TV wrestling match, and cheer brainlessly for the guy we want to win.
This is not democracy. Canadians are mostly in the middle. The Far Left is a joke, pushing political correctness to the point of insanity. The Far Right is equally scary, pushing their agendas in an almost draconian fashion.
Democracy once came from the people. As in Greece, from the ‘citizens’. We’ve lost that. Now it’s tweets and shouts and a pile of stuff that spins facts and non-facts into some kind of strange brew in which we can’t even know what we think is actually the right thing to think.
Democracy is not dead. But it is in the government Intensive Care Unit, severely damaged, weak pulse, and everyone is praying for its survival.
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