Capitalism is the historic evolution of Private Property Relationship of Alienation, Exploitation and Suffering of humanity in a modality of Commodity Production
Withhold your vote from a tainted, self-disparaging bunch of candidates who are dishonorably motivated unfit for office.
For once can we not unite to get them all out and a fresh new beginning in?
You have the power to create a better system. We can send space craft to the outer reaches of the universe.
Can thinking up a better way to conduct our affairs in the 21st century really be that much of an impossible challenge?
Don't support the current system by voting another bunch of amoral gravy-trainers in.
Lives are at stake.
The higher powers still think they can keep it all going by giving you the illusion of choice.
Some of us are awakening to this fundamental reality. There still are far too many still sleeping. These sheeple have fallen prey to the American culture, and have whored out their souls in return.
We the few, no longer fall for it.
It's not that difficult to think of a new way to govern. But we, together, must demand it and must not be timid in our refusal to accept years more of this shambles.
People are starting to become aware that in unity, we have enormous power. We, together can get rid of them by consensus, together.
We must stand up for our convictions & take some responsibility.
If you vote, it sends a perpetuated message and a thumbs up signal for 'more of the same please.
Politicians love it when you vote.
How can a president stand “elect” if the majority of the people do not vote?
Humanity faces enormous challenges. It's a matter of urgency that we equip each country with a modern survival mechanism. The current system has failed for over a hundred years.
Your government does not love you.
There are many kinds of theft. Theft of money, resources, material wealth, of people's lively-hood, well-being, right to life & right to be left in peace, of integrity, reputation, theft of a nation's future safety through reckless policies. Theft of souls through unnecessary greed-fueled warfare.
Worst of all the high jacking of ideals & morals to suit the needs & future plans of the few.
Spreading hatred across the world as immoral acts of subversion & corruption are perpetrated in our name or our God's name.
A remarkable, darkly tragic disparity exists between the inexplicable haughty cynicism defending their various greedy exploits & the hopeless despair of those who've lost everything simply by being on the other end of the foreign policy of these heartless, free-loading thieves.
The depleted uranium effects last forever, but they didn't warn civilians or troops.
If your government will knowingly permit the use of these weapons - which will effect innocent civilians, air, water & food supplies of a region, & our own troops...if they'll hire assassins/financial hit men to sabotage a nation's stability & march in to 'save' them afterwards...they talked about 'naughty Saddam' for years yet behind closed doors; they know their American cousins put him there then played him.
How much do you think these people care about your welfare?
Truth hurts....yes it does, ...the answer' needs to be faced up to.
Today, amerika targets Iran with "sanctions" .... sanitizing, and de-humanizing it’s people. ....it’s nothing more than a legal mass murder; don't continue to delude yourself.
If you vote, then you agree with everything your government is perpetuating, and your participation shall place every death of a civilian on your shoulders.
I may not have all the answers on how to do this, and what will become of our nation if we change the way we have been governed. I don’t have those answers.....but I’m sure together we can come up with many alternatives. I do not need anyone speaking for me in the same way that I don’t need anyone to die for my sins.....I can do both of those myself.
I may not know how to fix this problem, or what exactly needs to change, but I sure know we can’t go on this way. We need to change everything about us. [source]
One hopes that at some point the American people will come to the realization that most elected officials these days do not serve the public interest, but their own economic self interests and those of their financial backers. The few who would serve the public interest are filtered out by the insurmountable fortress of capital that is the bulwark of electoral politics, especially at the federal level. Genuine public servants have roughly the same chance of winning a seat in Congress or the White House as one has of winning the lottery.
For the totally uninitiated, or those on narcotics: the odds are astronomical.
It requires unfathomable sums of money to even play the game, and that, in and of itself, precludes the majority of us from meaningful participation. It filters ordinary people possessed of ordinary means from serious contention. Ordinary people overwhelmingly comprise the national demographic, and yet they are wholly without representation in government at virtually every level. Without substantial financial backing, you can play but you cannot win. You are relegated to the outer fringes of the system, a distant planet circling a distant sun in a distant orb.
A game in which only the wealthy can afford to play assures that only the wealthy will win. The result is that we have a system of electing politicians to serve a very tiny segment of the population—less than one percent, while simultaneously working against the great majority and, accordingly, the public welfare.
In the rarified lexicon of corporate run politics—profits matter, people don’t; no matter the self righteous proclamations to the contrary. The wonder is that so many people continue to invest so much of their precious time and energy in a system that has so obviously and completely abandoned them.
Perhaps abandon is not the appropriate word. Betray might be a better choice. Electoral politics in the US is the realm of high rollers and robber barons, not of ordinary people from working class backgrounds struggling for a piece of the much ballyhooed ‘American Dream.’ That system has utterly betrayed them, leaving them out in the cold to fend for themselves as best they can, against the very crooks and thieves who are mortgaging their future to the Corporate States of America.
The people’s plight is akin to playing the lottery and hitting the jackpot against enormous odds. It is a game of desperation in which defeat and loss are the predictable outcomes for all but a few. The money system wins, we the people lose; and we look like fools and chumps for having played the game against such tremendous odds. But, as Thoreau said so well, “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” Collectively, we have yet to show much wisdom. We just keep doing what we have always done and keep getting the same sorry results, and wonder why things never improve.
When the choice is between Hillary Clinton, Rudi Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Edwards and Barach Obama, there is no meaningful choice. The difference between these candidates is primarily a matter of semantics. In each case you are getting essentially the same person representing the same economic self interests, the same policies. All of them are pro war. Contenders are in contention because they are the recipients of serious corporate money, not because they are champions of the people or servants of the public welfare.
Ron Paul is not the answer either, as so many so desperately want to believe. Like his neoconservative brethren, Dr. Paul seeks to shrink the public domain and privatize everything—including all public lands. Economic self interest is the centerpiece of Paul’s political ideology and that not only does not serve the public interest, it undermines it. Dr. Paul is as much a product of Milton Friedman’s economics as any neocon and equally dangerous.
We have an electoral system that always chooses between two evils, what Ralph Nader calls, “The evil of two lessers.” But choosing the lesser evils assures that evil rules and, as we have seen, the evil is deepening with each successive election.
Genuinely progressive candidates are cynically used by the party leadership to create the appearance that the party still has an effective liberal wing when, in fact, it does not. The progressive wing of the party exists but it has been marginalized through lack of media exposure, lack of financial backing, and through the lack of support of the party leadership.
Candidates with the qualifications of Dennis Kucinich only serve to retain the party loyalty of progressives. It keeps progressives playing the game while also preventing them from doing anything meaningful or revolutionary.
We saw what happened to Howard Dean a few years ago; and Dean was a very moderate liberal, at best only slightly left of center. Progressives will not be allowed to compete.
More people already choose not to participate in electoral politics than those who vote. It is not difficult to understand why: because they see elections as the sham they are, riddled with corruption and illegitimate to the core. The people intuitively know when they have been disenfranchised. They know that elections are about profiteering, not about public service or the collective good.
It must also be noted that the previous two presidential elections were stolen by George Bush and his cohorts. There are serious concerns about the efficacy of paperless electronic voting machines, like those manufactured by Diebold with its close ties to the Republican Party and neo-conservatism. A system in which foxes are the guardians of the hen house is not in the people’s interest; nor is it in the interest of justice.
As US citizens, we should have enough integrity that we do not allow the public wealth to be stolen with our blessings. We should denounce the process that unabashedly transfers the public domain into the private sector as the outright theft that it is. We should not pretend that it is the pubic interest or that it is a democratic process because we voted for it. It is self-interested greed and nothing more.
I could not blame any sane person for not voting, for non-participation in a process that is so obviously fixed. We need to devise better and more imaginative strategies through which to express our dissatisfaction, our outrage with the process. A good beginning might be to wash our hands of that system entirely.
Clearly, the solution is to get the special interest money out of politics. But how can the people achieve such an ambitious objective against such tremendous odds? Those who benefit from the system effectively own it, and they are not going to voluntarily dismantle it. It is too lucrative for them to let it go and erect a genuinely democratic system in its place.
Participation in a sham system, while pretending that it is legitimate, will only prolong the prostitution and continue the corporate feeding frenzy at the public trough. We must do something different than what we have always done in the past, if we are to get a different result.
One method of undermining the system may be to boycott the 2008 elections by not participating in them. Since the outcome is already predetermined by the selection of only pro corporate candidates—war mongers and disaster capitalists all, there is really nothing to lose. The system is rigged to keep the war profiteers and corporatists in power, by keeping genuine public servants out of contention. The appearance of democracy and citizen participation is just window dressing, more facade than real.
As democracy craving citizens in an ever more dangerous emerging fascist state, our energy would be better spent denouncing the electoral process that only masquerades as a democracy than participating in it and giving it the appearance of legitimacy to the outside world. We have an obligation to expose it for the sham it is and say,
“No more!”
This might be accomplished by boycotting all federal elections until the special interest money is coerced out of the process, and the playing field is leveled; where outcomes are determined by ideas and commitment to public service, rather than access to huge amounts of capital and cronyism.
Perhaps then Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader might have a legitimate chance to win office, or even your next door neighbor. Public service could be put into the political process thereby legitimizing it by making it democratic.
Electoral boycotts could be conducted by large numbers of public spirited citizens turning out not to vote, but instead to protest, which if widely publicized would be too large and too controversial to be ignored even by the corporate media—democracy in action indeed.
We really have nothing to lose.
As it is now, government is nothing more than a revolving door between political administrations and business. Corporate lobbyists are running the government rather than the people.
Voting is one of the sacred cows that symbolize a democratic republic but it does nothing to actually create such a republic, especially in the absence of meaningful choice.
The strategy of boycotts is low risk to the individual and it is legal. It requires very little physical effort and little personal sacrifice. Everyone can participate, regardless of political knowledge, income level, age and party affiliation. It could potentially become a grass roots movement toward real democracy and it could begin immediately.
If conducted on a large enough scale, it could provide real results too.
The idea of political boycotts does not originate with me but I believe the initiative has merit. Perhaps we should give it the serious consideration it deserves. How such boycotts might be organized will be left in more capable hands than my own. The first step is to widely publicize the idea and to generate serious discussion about it. Let the dialog begin.
Reform and Revolution
Electoral boycotts are one of many tools available to us as we plant the seeds of revolution and create the atmosphere for a major paradigm shift sometime in the future. Boycotts are a peaceful way of hastening the change that will eventually make a more just society possible; a world in which just people, not wealth and privilege, decides the future.
The political system should belong equally to every citizen, rather than to the moneyed gentry that have locked most of us out. No one is going to give us the keys. We must take them because they rightfully belong to us.
Revolution is possible only with a broad awakening to our predicament in a sham democracy that is subservient to immense wealth and power. Awakening must be followed by enlightenment through self-education and comprehension of the problems we face as a people. It will grow by having serious discussions amongst ourselves and by putting everything on the table.
Revolution is a word that scares some people because it conjures images of armed rebellion and chaotic violence. But it does not have to be so. India was transformed by non-violent resistance to horrible tyranny. The people and their detractors will decide what form it will take.
Revolutions do not just suddenly erupt. They are grown slowly and over increments of time, beginning from seeds that are carefully sown and nurtured. Sowing seeds are an act of faith; an expression of hope that there will be a future worth living.
Revolution should only frighten those who hold the keys to empire. We are only at the very beginning of a long journey of transformation. We are laying the foundation stones of fundamental change and redistribution of wealth and power that must be based upon justice and equality.
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Obomney
It's understandable not to want another four years of Barack Obama, after all, his tenure has been atrocious. Bailouts, "stimulus," money printing, cronyism, and health care fascism (just to name a few of his initiatives), are hardly the marks of a place that was once called "the land of the free."
But that's no excuse for supporting the pathetic Republican candidate, "Me-too" Mitt Romney.
Vote for Nobody. Here's why;
They are one in the same; no difference! Just a mere illusion aimed at the stupid american people (sheeple) to make them think they are actually voting; as if there is a real choice.
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It's understandable not to want another four years of Barack Obama, after all, his tenure has been atrocious. Bailouts, "stimulus," money printing, cronyism, and health care fascism (just to name a few of his initiatives), are hardly the marks of a place that was once called "the land of the free."
But that's no excuse for supporting the pathetic Republican candidate, "Me-too" Mitt Romney.
Vote for Nobody. Here's why;
They are one in the same; no difference! Just a mere illusion aimed at the stupid american people (sheeple) to make them think they are actually voting; as if there is a real choice.
Occupy Your Mind
As long as our elected presidents continue their corrupt collusion with banks, Wall Street and big corporations, the rungs on our economic ladder will continue to grow further and further apart. You and I have been put in the back seat while corporate profits remain unregulated in the name of a "free" market.
“It’s breathtaking. After all we've been through in recent years, there’s no greater privilege than watching it (the wealth gap) grow bigger and bigger each day. There may be a few naysayers who worry that if it gets any wider, the whole thing will collapse upon itself and take millions of people down with it, but I for one am willing to take that chance. Besides, something tells me I’d probably make it out okay.” - Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein
We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate --those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray - yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. (the people...have occuped Wall Steet because Wall Street has occupied America. –Bill Moyers
Then do the last thing they want or expect us to do… Occupy our minds, and don't vote.
Your article was written as if there were only two choices on the ballot, which is pretty pathetic in and of itself. Voting should be mandatory and "none of the above" or "no confidence" should be a choice. Furthermore, back to the choices argument you attempt to make, there are PLENTY of candidates out there who don't support the current establishment. They don't beling to the duopoly. NOT voting only keeps the power in the hands of the duopoly. You're doing exactly what they WANT you to do. They love it when REAL people don't vote.
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