I'm still at a loss as to why people do that. Voting republi-CON is NOT a guarantee that you'll be rich someday like their bigshots are. I suspect there's a lot of that hope-against-hope. Like it is for so many people who faithfully buy lotto tickets week after week. SOMEDAY! They just KNOW it! And the chances are so damn slim. The REALITY is so stacked against it. And when you think that most of the assholes in charge in the GOP have no intention whatsoever of sharing the wealth, or helping somebody up to the top.
Just the way they view "competition" - that golden "free market" crap they talk about. Well, LOOK WHAT THEY DO. The goal for them is to trash the competition. Eliminate the competition. Corner the market so they own it all. I look at my former industry, broadcasting, as a prime example. I remember after deregulation, starting under "St. ronnie," all the top brass in the industry gushed - "Oh NO!!! It's NOT going to decrease competition, NOT gonna narrow listeners' choices, NOT gonna stifle programming choices. NO! There are only gonna be MORE! MORE MORE MORE!!! MORE choices and options and all the rest of it for the listeners! MORE! NOT less! You just wait and see!!!
And guess what happened? When Washington took the brakes off, all of a sudden you had this feeding frenzy like a bunch of hungry sharks gone mad - consolidating ownership, buying up properties right and left, merges and acquisitions, until the many Mom and Pop stations around the country that sailed under their own individual banners, provided work to so many jocks, newspeople, engineers, and other staffers, and took chances on newcomers because their risk level was comparatively lower. They all got bought up. The little guys grabbed for the gold, let the little stations be swallowed up into larger and larger broadcasting behemoths, until you basically had a few Goliaths owning EVERYTHING from coast-to-coast. Stations clotted together and upper management always streamlined immediately, because hey - why hire multiples of everything for all your station clusters, when you can have a few people doing double-duty. One news director overseeing two or more news departments. And you sure didn't need that second news staff. ONE could do the work of both. Etc, etc, etc, until I watched whole departments full of people get pink-slipped and walk out the door.
Now entire stations run canned stuff - ONE show out of New York that plays in hundreds of stations around the country so all you really have at the local stations is some board operator babysitting the place while the syndicated crap pipes in from elsewhere that pays the owners to run it. And the owners all say - See? We found a CHEAPER way to SERVE the COMMUNITY!!!! And it doesn't serve ANYBODY but themselves. And meanwhile all the local people who had been on staff are out of work, long gone, and demoralized. Especially since the few jobs offered now certainly don't pay as well as they used to.
SUCKS. And broadcasting is only an example. It's EVERYWHERE.
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