Enterprising Afghans are selling their voter cards for five bucks. Which is more than many Americans get for their votes. Democracy works – in Afghanistan!
I’ll Take That for Five Dollars
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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I’ve been asking why I must GIVE my vote away when representatives SELL their votes, for years.
We live in a capitalist dominated society, where the expectation is that things of value will be exchanged for money. Maybe in a socialist economy it would make sense to give things of value away, but not in capitalism.
Anyway, why the double standard that allows the privileged few to buy legislators, and we can’t even get some of the money the PR firms get to persuade voters, which amounts to serious money? I say cut out the middle man.
Federal Jobs Program? Yeah, right — that would be money well-spent. A bunch of yokels sitting around doing make work. Digging a hole then filling it back in on the taxpayer dime. Thanks, but no thanks.
Do you think that that is what happened during the WPA? The entire country is full of examples of incredible works, including enormous dams and great murals created by brilliant artists, that were created by government works programs of the 1930s.
We don’t need any dams and creating murals is make work. If I want a mural, I’ll buy one. I’m not spending MY tax dollars on make work murals. In fact we should be going in the other direction entirely. The NEA should be disbanded, totally. You want to be an artist, you pay for it — not me. No one forked over tax dollars to me so I could do whatever I wanted to do, why should I be forced to pay so some ballet company stays afloat. If ballet is so important, let the market decide.
Make work? No thanks. I’m fed up paying 33% with nowhere to side while the Mitt Romney’s are paying 12.9%. Since were incapable of making the rich and corporations pay their fair share, it’s time to slash and burn — starting with the NEA.
Yeah, I know. That’s what they’ve always wanted, those evil conservatives. Well they won. It’s over and they won. Pussy ass liberals won’t do shit to make a difference, so the battle is over. Corporatism won. Time to slash and burn.
We may not need dams, but we definitely need infrastructure. New York City, for example, desperately needs additional bridges and highways. As for murals, you might not appreciate them, but I think they’re pretty damned cool, and I don’t see any private-sector individuals funding them.
Well … there’s art and then there’s art. I understand that expenditures by the government for military bands surpass the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Nice to have lots of jaunty marching tunes playing to accompany the savaging of what’s left of public art in the US.
Gosh, exko, WPA would REPLACE welfare and the poor would at least be doing some kind of work- you ought to be all over that. Picking up litter might be a good start.
I’ve seen a couple of exhibits of photography that was funded by the WPA. Very educational. Funding the arts is like funding education- a long-term investment in a better society.
If you’re paying 33% you’re making well over 100K, where is that hard to live off of?
“I think they’re pretty damned cool, and I don’t see any private-sector individuals funding them.”
Then the market has decided when it comes to murals. The taxpayer should not be fleeced so some starving artist gets free money for a product no one wants. When I was a musician I worked with private funding, why is that not good enough for other artists? Why am I told that my tax dollars are freebie giveaways to artist that know how to game the system?
As for NYC, that’s a local issue. Tell Bloomberg to raise the necessary revenue. Or better yet, just seize Bloomberg’s assets and pay for it that way. (Za-zing!)
@ex: if we were waiting for the private sector or the marketplace to provide for everything that people wanted, that would leave a lot of popular things undone. For example, I don’t think that poor people would get to have their children educated if not for a public school system. I doubt that they would be a reasonably affordable way to mail a letter if it were reliant on the private marketplace.
And yet, public education and publicly subsidized mailing are both very popular.
“Then the market has decided when it comes to murals”–and on high finance.
Without the trillions of dollars the government supplied to oppose market forces, the parasitical masters of the finance world would no longer be functioning capitalists, for lack of capital.
Once again, Ex, I appreciate your participation as devil’s advocate.
Something like the WPA is badly needed. The USA’s infrastructure is old and falling apart. Medical care needs to be available to everyone and should be a single-payer system like most of the other developed nations in the world. The Citizen’s United decision needs to be annulled, and we need strict political campaign contribution laws. Most of our legislative representatives are corporate shills and need to be voted out. The military, NSA and other similar institutions need to be downsized like yesterday! Sadly, the average American citizen is too ignorant and occupied by other issues and TV series to even look in this direction – meanwhile, the Tower of Babel that is the Internet and the Media spews out so much spin and disinformation that it is hard to know what to believe unless you research it. Exkio has thrown in the towel, and that’s not going to do him or anyone else any good.
“Exkio has thrown in the towel, and that’s not going to do him or anyone else any good.”
I haven’t thrown in the towel, I just understand human nature better than all of you. Consider the failure of Occupy. It’s well-documented here that I predicted it would be a total failure, a complete and entire bust — not even partial or minor success. I was right. Ted was wrong.
There’s a reason for that, which I’ve noted. I understand human nature better than all of you. I’ve given it lots of thought and you might do the same. It will disabuse of these endlessly silly notions that “revolution” is at hand. It’s not. See you here in a decade, or two, or three — when you’ll still be saying “revolution is just around the corner”.
(Also, the Robocop reference in this title is wrong. It’s “I’d buy that for a dollar”. Not “I’ll take that for a dollar”. So, the proper title would be “I’d buy that for five dollars.”)
Democracy is a wonderful thing, worth, beyond question, every cent of that over 50 % of the US federal government budget that annually goes to the military and the (in)security apparatus designed to protect it – so long as the people who have money get to decide in the name of those who don’t….
Henri