Occupying the Voting Booth

I won’t be voting Republican, that being said I think it’s important that we should be able to have an honest discourse on just how bad it’s gotten under the good guys, a discussion which would leave our candidate in a pretty bad light all in all . This is too taboo to discuss among true believers in the democratic camp because the other guys are “even worse” which is exactly the danger in the lesser of two evil approach to politics.The danger being that the most important issues of our times are now too taboo to truly reflect upon in the public forum. Essentially no matter how far to the right the democrats move or how awful the policies they embrace, they seem to be the only choice left us within the system. A system transparently, in the wake of Citizens United, entirely bought and paid for by large for profit corporate interests. Over ninety percent of all congressional elections are decided by the candidate with the most money.

 Obama has expanded the definition of war, enlarged and embraced the neo cons attack on civil liberties and stands with the Bush Administration before it on the assumption of sweeping new powers for the executive, such as, we are told, the right to assassinate American citizens, abroad or at home .These powers include the authority to arrest and detain us on no charges or try us on secret charges in front of a military tribunal. Meanwhile domestic spying according to the ACLU has risen exponentially under Obama’s watch. He has resurrected the Espionage Act and despite protection of whistle blowers being one of his major campaign planks now brags that his administration has prosecuted twice as many whistle blowers under it than any other in history . This of course is the diametrical opposite of what he campaigned on previously .

 Drones ravage civilians and children , 800 of them in Pakistan alone, a country we are not officially even at war with. The images of their bodies never make it onto the evening news. The military budget grows uninterrupted and the health care offered by Obama is itself little different from Romney’s in Massachusetts, straight out of the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank. The man has done virtually the opposite of everything he ran on and that’s inexcusable. Remember FISA ? It’s gone downhill dramatically since then . We’re like the Nazis in this country , both parties .

 So what’s the downside to a knife in the back exactly and why should the democrats ever move to the left ? They can merely offer you any alternative short of the unthinkable and you will vote for them anyway. The government is no more than a subsidiary of industry, the entertainment division, as Frank Zappa aptly put it , of the military industrial complex. Unfortunately both at home and abroad what happens here will have dramatic consequences for all of us because of America’s present position on the world stage .

 One half of all life on the planet will disappear in the next 100 years . Scientists now believe the Arctic will be free of summer ice within the decade .As a result of the fact that one third of the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere ends up settling into the oceans scientists predict a mass extinction event in those oceans “unseen in human history” within the next few decades .The Greenland ice sheet melted in four days this summer. Hear about this at the debates ? Didn’t think so.

 We do know through the Wiki Leaks documents that the lesser evil party bribed and threatened smaller countries NOT to sign on to any binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions though and have opened the arctic up to oil drilling. They also apparently support a pipeline to bring Canada’s tar sands to Texas for refining, a move Nasa’s chief climatologist has called game over for the planets climate because it is far more polluting than what we have been using till now and will dramatically extend our use of dirty fuels way past our species expiration date.

This is not advice on how to vote , for that I suggest you use your own best judgement but please stop fooling yourselves with your cheer leading, the good guys aren’t very and have managed to rival the worst of the Bush years while you all remained silent out of political convenience or actually defended what should be indefensible if you care about the fate of the human species or democracy in America.

Originally posted Thursday October 18, 2012 1:54 pm

 http://my.firedoglake.com/freeman/2012/10/18/occupying-the-voting-booth/