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Even if equality is impossible, that does not mean that between varying levels of inequality, the high ones are preferable in a healthy society. Even the "capitalist" United States actually acknowledge that in practice.

It's not only the sale of votes, it's also voter intimidation.

http://www.demos.org/publicati...

But how? Canada is a socialist utopia?

High and low are relative terms, knucklehead. "Low income" in Canada is about a 25% higher actual income than "low income" in the US.

http://www.demos.org/blog/1/5/...

> Well, seems they are going to be rolling out "Work Scores" -- ratings of performance of employees that companies can use when the time comes to hire.

Old news.

Also you should be pissed that Equifax has access to salary info on one third of americans and is selling access to that.

> Politicians make lots money from the "poor" demographic, so they will get inundated by the worst, most dishonest advertising of them all.

No, the richer you are the more likely you are to vote.
The poor have substantially less turnout than the national average.

After Bush made it impossible to shed student loans through bankruptcy, tuition went up dramatically. Because it could.

I think part of the problem is the government will loan tens of thousands of dollars to anyone as long as it is spent on education. No collateral and no plan for how the loan is going to be paid back is required. The current result should have been expected.

If I walk into a bank and try and get a business loan without collateral or any sort of business plan, I'm not getting the money.

After Bush made it impossible to shed student loans through bankruptcy, tuition went up dramatically. Because it could.

When one sees rather large, suspicious issues crop up without any investigation or repercussion, one wonders what else is going on below the radar. The small fraud alleged earlier in this thread is near trivial compared to what could be* going on and isn't investigated.

*But isn't.

A lack of evidence and prosecutions does not necessarily indicate a lack of investigations. They can also indicate innocence.

There have been investigations, even one's launched and investigated by Republicans, yet they continue to find almost no evidence to indicate voter fraud.

Don't you Remember? Back in 2007 GW Bush even fired a bunch (between 7 and 9) of his own federal prosecutors because:

1) They couldn't find the evidence of Democratic Voter-Fraud that he was sure was there.
2) The only people they COULD find to prosecute for voter-fraud were Republicans.**

**Scroll Down to: Administration rationale unclear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy

And here is "An Analysis of Voter Fraud in The United States" from 2006 that I just happened to find while looking for info on the firings.
http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Analysis.pdf

Or, are you saying that the Democrats are successfully conspiring to conduct a massive cover-up of another massive conspiracy to commit fraud, and has been going on for decades? And that in all that time, no one involved in these conspiracies has ever had a change of heart, or a change of party, or let slip the secret to anybody. And that the Democrats are so competent and crafty that they've been able to successfully hide all evidence from the world, and that the Republicans are too incompetent and / or stupid to put it together and gather evidence? You know, it's just too bad there are no Republicans who know how to do the kind of police, detective and intelligence work and "aggressive" military / CIA type interrogations that would be able to uncover this type of conspiracy.

If that's what you truly think, if the Democrats are so competent and so intelligent, and the Republican are so incompetent and so stupid. Maybe you should let the Democrats work their magic competence on the government, and get those incompetent Republicans out of the way.

Do the mechanical lever voting machines in use for about a hundred years produce a paper audit trail of each vote? (the requirement that suddenly seems to be the de facto standard of an accurate vote counting process)

Wasn't the push for "We need to have electronic voting machines so this never happens again" pushed by the Democrats and Civil Rights groups following the 2000 election because their voters were "confused" by the butterly "paper" punch card ballots (that happened to be designed by the Democrats in those counties in Florida with the alleged irregularities)...

http://www.demos.org/page14.cfm
http://www.reformelections.org/publications.asp?pu bid=475

I'll start to listen to Robert (puff puff) Kennedy about honest elections when he acknowledges what happened in the 1960 presidential election in Cook County, Illinois... (he has a show on Air America called Ring of Fire on the weekends if you want to hear his voice directly)

http://streamingradioguide.com/radio-show.php?show =1015

Personally, I have no problem with paper ballots - technology is not the solution to every problem. The opposing argument (and the one enforced by the new HAVA law) is that the voting system must catch and correct voting mistakes - like voting for 2 people for president by mistake... with mechanical voting machines, that is a non-issue as the machine has a mechanical block that prevents over-voting.... only punch card or paper ballots have that issue... hence the claim by the electronic machine makers that there are very few votes with errors... Some people tend to assume that if a voter didn't vote for anyone on the ballot for an office that this was a "mistake" or that the person must have "meant" to vote for their candidate, but was "confused". Perhaps not.

I recommend reading Tamara Draut's Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead" http://www.demos.org/pub663.cfm (which nicely explains the present-day situation).