Why is it that we have no "real" democracy? Every day we are confronted by headlines bemoaning the corruption endemic in our society - the waste of resources, misappropriation of public monies, the abuse of civil rights, the corruption of officialdom.
Curiously enough we know that this is happening but seem powerless to change any of it.
I contend that the real reason this is continuing despite the disgust of the general public is because our implementation of democracy is past its sell by date.We are ham-strung by the execution of the ballot box. We are only allowed to exercise our discretion in very narrow and constrained circumstances, and even then out choices are limited to voting for people (not issues) in general elections.
The technology available to us today means that there could be a real time exercise of democracy. All expenditure could be tracked from source to sink in real-time. Every citizen could conceivably be allowed to vote on every and all topics in front of parliament. The citizens could be the real parliament. We could have websites feeding live voting topics to the public who can then vote online or via cell phone on any topic they felt passionate about.
We could have public booths where passers by could drop-in and exercise their voting right. We could have decentralization and federalism as well as a national system. What is the point of RICA if cell phones can't now be traced? Banking has moved online, so don't tell me the system is not secure enough.
The truth is it is not in the politicians interest to modernize the voting system. They would all too soon be shown to be superfluous, and the real agenda be exposed - which is to deny the true exercise of democracy by filtering all public assets through the hands of the few who are misappropriating and mismanaging our children's future.
So ultimately this is still a class project, the "ruling elite", the "governors" and the "governed", all we have is colonialism 2.0, we need democracy 2.0 - and we need it now!
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