DEMOCRACY, MEDIA, AND WHY IS CRIME IN THE NEWS SO MUCH?

Dec. 24, 2025:    There is major flooding going on in California right now.  But that story is not on the radio news I am listening to right now.  What's on the news is Crime.. Crime is ALWAYS big news in Canada.  The media must love crime because they give it so much coverage.  Literally it always leads the news.  

The growing threat of climate change?   Not so much.  This is because (I think) the people who own the media do not want us getting worried about climate change.  And that's because the corporate world that the Media Owners are part of makes its money from a consumer society that needs a never-ending supply of cheap energy.  Unfortunately that energy is, in the opinion of many, changing our climate.  But our rulers don't care about that; they care only about profit and power.  

So California is flooding right now.  We just had major floods in Indonesia a few months ago that destroyed some 100,000 homes.  Where are those people supposed to live?       https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqjgydnwxrpo       

But that's not big news in Canada.  Instead we get lots of crime.  And 'politics'.  Not 'good government' or democracy or actual facts about important issues our governments are deciding ... the media's not interested in 'that' kind of stuff.  But they focus a lot on politics.  Someone just crossed over from the Conservatives to the Liberals.  Wow; that's got to be big news.    But important facts about tax policy  -  and why we are running record deficits everywhere,  and why the rich keep getting richer, NONE of that is important to our Corporate Owned 'Free Press'.  

And that's because the owners of the corporate media don't want us, the Citizens, thinking about those kinds of things.  They don't want us knowing about tax policy or deficits or the reasons for income inequality.   They much prefer to have us thinking about crime.  Or sports.  Or music.  Or etc.

And have you noticed that we are not even citizens any more.  Instead we have been demoted to being taxpayers ... we used to be called citizens but they've removed that 'title' from us and created a new one, that we accept.  We are no longer citizens; we are now taxpayers.  Young people growing up will almost never hear us described as citizens.  They will think they are just ... taxpayers.  And I guess in the next step they will start to call us serfs or peasants.  That's where we are being taken, I think.  Although of course I could be wrong.      If I am,  I am interested in hearing other points of view that describe the reality of what is going on and what is being done to us.

So if we want to solve the problem of the ongoing destruction of ourselves, our society, and our planet ... if we want that then Canada needs to have a free press that actually cares about us and works in our interests instead of being owned by the .01% Corporate elite and caring only about them.    You'll notice that "PLASTIC IN OUR BRAINS" is not a big issue for the corporate owned media.  It's virtually never talked about; as if what could be LESS interesting than plastic in our brains put there by the oil companies, the plastic industry, the food industry, our politicians and governments, our Public Health People, and etc.  

But there is never, or very seldom, time in the media to tell us about plastic in our food, water, the air, the rain and etc.  And why should they tell us about that; might give people the wrong ideas and be 'bad for business'.  

But there is lots of time in the corporate media for crime.  Sports.  Attacks on one group or another.  The  media love creating anger, hate, and division. That's one of their biggest jobs.  

But one thing they very seldom talk about is ... democracy.  There is never time for a discussion about democracy, and how to have a better democracy.  Of course they always tell us that we ARE a great democracy.  And I certainly believed that for a very long time.  But when is the day or time when Canadians get to participate in our own governance in this great democracy of ours?  For example, did any of us ever vote for Homelessness?  Did we vote for back-breaking Rents and Mortgage Payments for millions of Canadians so that The Banks and The Investors and Speculators could make Billions from us?   Did we vote for that?  Did we vote for millions of Canadians barely being able to pay for food.  Did we vote for not having a doctor and waiting 10 hours in an ER for God's sake.   Even though we didn't vote for any of these things, they still did them to us because THAT is their plan.  We have these problems because our rulers caused them because they make lots of money from them.   Which shows just how powerless and irrelevant and pathetic we, the 99%, are.  

The sad fact is that, in Canada, Corporate Canada and our .01% Ruling Class OWN the media and they control every word that we get to see or hear or read in THEIR media.   It's not our media; it's their media, and we had better come to that realization pretty quickly.  All the corporate journalists always pretend that they work for us, but the fact is that THEY DON'T.  They work for very large corporations and they have to always do what the corporation tells them to do. That's true of all of us at work; we do what we are told or we are out.  Is that not true?  And it's the same in the media.  

I think the media are totally controlled by big business, including the CBC.  And of course the corporations completely control all of our top politicians and governments as well.  Do you think that your provincial or federal or city governments work for us?  Well they should, but they dont' because they have all been taken over by Corporate Canada; in a campaign that has gone on for a very long time.  Maybe forever in Canada, but it's also true that things WERE BETTER in many ways fifty years ago.  Canada was a more 'egalatarian' country back then.  There were no homeless people.  A lower income family could, on one income, easily own a home.  

People had TWENTY-FIVE year mortgages, which was the standard back then, so with a little bit of ongoing inflation the payments became easier.  There were no homeless people.  There certainly didn't seem to be the kind of crazy crime we have now.  Downtown was safe; to the point where I never even thought about it. There were no crazy or out of control people roaming the streets.  Things I wouldn't see in ten years when I was a kid I can see everyday now.  

So in that Canada of fifty years ago the rich were not too rich and the poor were not too poor.  And I think things were better.  Of course maybe I'm wrong.  But over the past fifty years the rich have gotten much richer, because they own the media and run our governments while we think we live in a great democracy and have a free press.  The rich have gotten much richer and they've taken it from all the rest of us.  That's why we have the housing crisis.  They deliberately created a shortage of housing in Canada in order to push up rents and prices ... so now people have to work harder and harder and give more of their money to the people who own the mortgages and get the rent.  It's brilliant.  And it's all done with the full compliance of our governments and media.

So the .01% Corporate Elites do seem to be destroying our planet AND our society.  There is, I think, a way to fight back.  But it will take determination and organization and work, and at the moment that direction is not really being followed; although hopefully we are seeing the beginnings of it with the rise of a stronger Left Wing in the NDP, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City as of Jan. 1, 2026, and etc.   

So hopefully that's at least a start; but the goal has to be simply More Democracy ... because real people need a voice, and only when the grass-roots are strong can the people (We The People) protect ourselves from the .01% corporate elite who have Far Too Much Power in our Canada.  So it's not really OUR Canada, it's THEIR Canada, and that is the heart of our problem.  And the simple solution is More Democracy.  

And we can do that.  People have always fought for democracy.  But the price of democracy, they say, is Eternal Vigilance.  Well we have been asleep for a long time, and it's time to wake up and get together and understand how truly evil the people who run things are, and begin to fight for democracy.  We CAN do it.  And we'll be better off for it.