The above picture depicts a vote in Moldova to elect a president with two candidates in play, one favouring the EU as an alignment the other wanting to take the country back deeper into the Russian sphere of influence. My understanding is that here, as in Bulgaria, pro-Russian candidates have come out ahead in the voting. It could be that the Russophiles have better campaign machines, and it’s reported that the pro-EU parties are considered to be “cleaner”, i.e., less corrupt. It matters little as these seem somewhat like the familiar choice that gets presented to voters in so many jurisdictions where neither of the options is likely to yield a particularly beneficent result.

There is also the question of the information available on which to make a decision, with neither country having a particularly sparklingly clean reputation for press freedom or integrity. This flows from the lack of integrity of the background organizations, the EU and Russia: it seems a choice between one oligarchy and another under either of  which small countries tend to get broken to the wheel of some sort of deep exploitation. It seems clear, in the aftermath of the US election, that many people voted against one or the other of the candidates, often with the sense that neither would be able to bring about an improvement of conditions for most of the broader part of society. Our own election of a year ago seems increasingly to have been fought mostly on a platform of smoke and mirrors, giving us a bit of a gong-show parliament in which the opposition criticizes the government for implementing the same policies that they followed for a decade, and the government plows ahead with the same destructive energy that they promised to alter with their real changes. There have been similar outcomes in Britain, and it looks as though the unSocialists in France are likely to go down in flames for having continued the Sarkozyst line of neoliberal pandering to large international business, to be replaced with some amalgam of rightist plunderers under the banner of Les Répubicains or some such thing.

There are some valiant efforts to relocalize as much of the peoples’ business, but a lot of this is being thwarted by meddling from senior levels of government who work to ensure that there is as little local economic autonomy as possible, leaving the initiatives under way as mostly debate clubs.

What happens when all and sundry find that the options are all being co-opted?

A brief post scriptum to congratulate Steve Darling on his exit from Global BC and subsequent joining of Jas Johal in the parade of press people enlisting in the Christy Clark crime syndicate. Perhaps Steve should read Laila’s List before enlisting, as we can never be too sure that those who read the news actually know what that news is, or what it means.