Why I Will Probably Never Again Vote for a Demoicrat

THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS explain why it's almost certain I will never again vote for a Democrat – not even Bernie Sanders. Each essay describes an aspect of the defining truth of present-day U.S. politics: that when we vote a self-proclaimed Democrat into office, we almost always discover afterward we have elected a Republican instead.

This has been the result of an overwhelming deception – simultaneously Orwellian and Machiavellian – that became the operational core of U.S. “democracy” in 1964, when President Lyndon Banes Johnson presented himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were engineering the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify the Vietnam War. Thus LBJ escalated limited military assistance to the viciously anti-Buddhist Diem regime into a major regional conflict that killed millions of human beings and reaped the USian One Percent literally untold profits.

While the Republicans make no secret of their warmongering and their intent to savage us every way they possibly can – “us” meaning the U.S. 99 Percent, and “every way they possibly can” including the slow-motion genocide of intentionally deadly social-service cuts – the Democrats raise our expectations by feeding us an entire mushroom-farm of bullshit humanitarian rhetoric. Then, exactly as if they were Republicans in disguise, they methodically inflict upon us all the GOP's proposed depredations – all the while claiming “political reality” leaves them no other choice.

In other words, just as it took a seemingly pacifist Father Gapon to set up the original Bloody Sunday,  so does it take the Democrats to turn the Republicans' visions of a permanently enslaved Working Class into inescapable and ever-more-harsh U.S. reality.

This is the Big Lie writ large, and the ultimate example of how it has become the Democratic Party's signature strategy is President Barack Obama's 2008 election campaign. Obama the Orator proclaimed “the audacity of hope” as the one sure path to “change we can believe in,” only to demonstrate – by his instantaneous and obviously pre-planned post-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer – that hope is imbecility instead.

Three additional examples of the imbecility of hope should suffice to underscore the point, but here for the record are five...actually six, when I include the fact that – despite Washington state's (allegedly) Democrat administration – its Department of Social and Health Services has begun inflicting on seniors the same deliberate viciousness that has always characterized its response to the needs of younger impoverished people.

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Example One: Democrat Doublethink – Cancellation as “Restoration”

ACCORDING TO AN obnoxiously upbeat newsletter snail-mailed to all registered voters in September by the House Democrat Caucus of the Washington State Legislature – bear in mind, Washington is allegedly a “progressive” state – the Democrat-approved budget for the 2015-2016 biennium “restores damaging cuts to public assistance programs made during the lean years of the Great Recession.”

Sounds good, right? (We'll take up the ironically misplaced modifier – apparently the combined work of a less-than-literate writer overseen by a woefully incompetent editor – in a moment.)

But days before I received this latest example of Democrat deception as part of the daily deluge of huckstering that endlessly floods my Postal Service mail box, I had gotten a disturbing notice from the Washington State Department of Health Services:

“You have been getting help paying for your home phone (landline) through the Washington Telephone Assistance Program (WTAP). We are sorry to tell you that WTAP will end August 31, 2015. This is because the legislature did not fund WTAP in the current budget. As a result, your landline phone service will cost you more.”

The bottom line is that, thanks to the Legislature's decision to eliminate WTAP, our telephone bills will spike approximately $17 per month, in my case an increase from a subsidized $2.97 to an unsubsidized $18.80 or 533 percent. This combined with other devastating cuts in 2016 (for which see below) will inflict enough of an income-loss to force many low-income seniors and disabled people to cancel their landline telephone service. The only alternative will be going without food, medicine or shelter.

It was the Republican Senate, the Democrats claim, that made us do it. But it was the Democrats who in 2013, when they controlled both houses of the Legislature,  enabled the 2015 destruction  of WTAP by abolishing its tax base. The legislation that ended WTAP's funding was part of a measure that increased phone bills by imposing Washington state's highest-in-the-nation retail sales tax on residential telephone service. This year's termination of the WTAP program and its potentially ruinous phone-bill hike was thus not only predictable but obviously planned at least two years beforehand.

Welfare bureaucrats – never truly empathetic with the poor – now say people afflicted by the end of WTAP should apply to the federal government for free cell phones.  But here in Washington state, this is all too reminiscent of the infamous “let them eat cake” comment that – whether apocryphal or not – was one of the provocations of the French Revolution. That's because in Washington, severe storms are the wintertime norm and seismic or volcanic disasters are a constant threat. Cell-phone service, especially in rural parts of the state, is notoriously unreliable – and therefore effectively useless as a (life-preserving) communication medium.

Which means the legislators have undoubtedly murdered some of their constituents. No such death has been reported yet – at least not to my knowledge. But the winter is young. And the first time one of the cutback victims needs to call 911 for emergency medical care but has no way to do it, he or she will almost certainly die.

Why then are we denied reliable landline service? One reason is to enable the state to continue its obscene, largest-in-the-nation's history tax exemptions for Big Business.  The other reason – increasingly axiomatic amongst lower-income seniors – is the Ruling Class wants us dead, albeit without the public embarrassment of death camps.

WTAP served at least 121,404 households including 19,500 persons age 65 and above,  all of whom the Democrats hurled under the proverbial bus. (Alas, thanks to ever-intensifying efforts by the One Percent and their wholly owned politicians to conceal the true magnitude of U.S. poverty, 2008 was the last year for which I could find WTAP recipient statistics.)

Oh, yeah: one more thing:

Out of perverse curiosity, I checked to see if DSHS had publicly announced the end of WTAP,

It should have been big news when the Democrats met in a back-room during the 2015 legislative session and decided not only to end the program forever but to make sure their decision was kept secret until it was too late to fight it.

But did DSHS even bother to send out a press release reporting the death-dealing decision to end the program? Of course not. See for yourself.

Nor was it ever reported by “mainstream” media – not surprising, since “mainstream” media is owned by the same One Percenters who own the politicians who killed the WTAP program. Indeed it is “mainstream” media's (intentionally) damaging refusal to adequately cover politics that provides the cover under which our plutocratic overlords are looting the country.

But the point here is the restoration of public assistance programs touted in the Democrat newsletter is (another) Big Lie – (another) example of how the Democrats talk humanitarianism but actually govern as if they were Republicans.

Perhaps, though, that phrase “restores damaging cuts” should be taken not as a badly misplaced modifier but as a sneaky statement of truth a crafty, subversion-minded editorial team slipped past the censors.

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Example Two: Routine Betrayal of the Most Powerless Constituents

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION – which like all persons and groups labeled Democrat tries desperately to hide the party's Ayn Rand viciousness behind a smokescreen of deceptive oratory – is more effectively hostile to the social-safety net than any presidential administration since Herbert Hoover.

Yes, it was President William Jefferson Clinton – aka “Slick Willie” or “Blowjob Bill” – who by so-called “welfare reform” sentenced untold numbers of welfare recipients literally to death  and created a new and particularly insidious form of institutionalized racism  as well.

But Democrat Clinton's depredations were inflicted during a time of relative prosperity, which means they pale by contrast to the economic wounds inflicted on us by Obama the Orator and his cronies after his speed-of-light post-2008-election transformation into Barack the Betrayer.

First there was the death of Employee Free Choice, which ended forever any hope of resurrecting the U.S. labor movement. Next was the death of real health-care reform, also the death of the remnants of our (former) constitutional rights.

Then there was Obama's steady escalation of the war against the poor – the constant, obviously methodical destruction of the already-damaged socioeconomic safety net. It is a process that is ever more obviously a carefully conceived program of slow-motion genocide – a “final solution” by any other name – against all of us the Ruling Class deems useless because we are not exploitable for profit.

The Republicans threaten it openly, but the Democrats, hiding behind their “humanitarian” rhetoric, are the ones who make it happen. Every time.

Thus the slashing of food stamps, first, in 2013, by $35 a month for a family of four, then, last year, by $90 more  – a savaging the Democrats deceptively applauded as “maintaining the important benefits for families” (doublethink by Sen. Debbie Stabenow) and making the program “more legitimate than it was” (doublethink by Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack) – truly Orwellian examples of Big Lies  topped only by the Betrayer himself, who said the cuts will “make sure America's children don't go hungry” – probably the most damning example of presidential doublethink to date.

Indeed that's almost as big a Big Lie as “change we can believe in,” since proven to be the biggest Big Lie in U.S. presidental history.

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Example Three: Depredation and Disenfranchisement by Appointment

JAY INSLEY, THE Democrat governor of Washington state, appointed a plutocrat to run DSHS, the state's largest agency, which has long been deservedly infamous – especially amongst welfare rights activists and the few remaining members of the working press who actually care about the increasingly Dickensian circumstances of lower income people – as quite possibly the most arrogantly vindictive governmental bureaucracy in the entire United States.

The plutocrat's name is Kevin Quigley,  who said from the beginning he would run the welfare department like a business – that is, by doing everything possible to maximize the gains of the stockholders (in this instance the state's taxpayers) and therefore doing everything possible to enslave the workers and short-change the customers.

Selecting a capitalist business executive to head a state welfare bureaucracy is thus rather like appointing a Ku Klux Klansman to run a for-profit nursery school for African-American children. By definition a capitalist is one for whom insatiable greed is the highest virtue, and the fulfillment of that infinite greed is the ultimate in virtuous behavior. The poor – no matter our circumstances – are viewed either as serfs to be exploited for maximum profit or as lazy and therefore worthless parasites to be eliminated as expeditiously as possible – again, as already noted, without the public-relations damage done by death camps.

Quigley's definitively punitive, definitively exploitative (Ayn Rand) conception of welfare and welfare recipients is glaringly evident in one of DSHS's recent press releases about food stamps, for which SNAP – Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – is the current acronym:

“DSHS Takes Additional Steps to Reduce Food Assistance Fraud...The Department also has worked hard to improve the efficiency of the program. In fiscal year 2013 (the latest federal data available), the total administrative cost per SNAP case associated with eligibility determinations was $18.24, compared to $22.51 in fiscal year 2012. This efficiency is saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month, based on an average monthly caseload of 595,115 cases. Washington’s SNAP administrative costs are among the lowest in the nation, and much lower than Oregon ($25.81) and California ($67.84).”

Note how the text of the release methodically reinforces the public image of welfare recipients as thieves and thereby focuses on “saving taxpayers in excess of $2.5 million per month” rather than the agency's (alleged) purpose of helping people escape poverty.

Indeed this is more evidence of the same 180-degree turnabout – the shift from defining the poor as victims of circumstance to damning us, a la Ayn Rand, as perpetrators of our own wretchedness – that underlay Clinton's “welfare reform.” It – and the ongoing Randification of USian public opinion – is also reflected in the fact that, between 1970 and 1990 inclusive (and as shown by data in Statistical Abstract of the United States), the federal and state welfare bureaucracy increased its administrative costs by 5,390 percent even as it slashed stipends and services to recipients by 66 percent.

Nor is Washington state in any way exceptional. The Democrat/Republican war against the poor is equally evident in how Obama has stacked the Social Security Board of Trustees with people who want to slash stipends and privatize the program, another of the (deliberately unreported) facts that show how the Democrats are working hand-in-glove with the Republicans.

The Democrats' intent – identical to the Republicans' intent – is to pay back their capitalist benefactors by robbing us of the money the government deducted from our paychecks. The downsizing and privatization of Social Security has at least two purposes, further intensifying economic fear within the Working Class, and giving the money to the Wall Street robber-barons the Democrats and Republicans so dutifully serve.

Here is a list of Obama's trustees and a brief description of their views and activities, with Wikipedia links for documentation:

Jacob J. Lew – Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee of the trust funds. (Clintonite, bankster, unindicted housing-bubble criminal, loved by the Republicans.)

Thomas E. Perez –  Secretary of Labor and trustee. (Clintonite, hence presumably in favor of Social Security cuts but hated by the Republicans nevertheless.)

Sylvia M. Burwell –  Secretary of Health and Human Services and trustee. (Bankster associate, former Wal-Mart exec, loved by the Republicans.)

Carolyn W. Colvin –  Acting Commissioner of Social Security and trustee. (Obvious Obamanoid; will no doubt do whatever the president orders; significantly, approved by most of the Republicans.)

Charles P. Blahous III –  trustee. See also here. (Bushnik, outspokenly conservative, is Obama's chief destroy-Social-Security hitman on the board of trustees – hence his presence as Obama's appointee reveals the Betrayer's true [and truly genocidal] agenda.)

Robert D. Reischauer –  trustee. (Obama's token [apparent] liberal, but like all Obama appointees, he would not have been chosen were there any question about his unquestioning obedience to the president's orders.)

Virginia P. Reno –  trustee. (Seemingly a friend of the worker, but scanty on-line biographical material makes her true ideology and intent uncertain.)

Admittedly I don't know how much influence the anti-Social-Security majority on the board had over the decision to deny us a cost of living increase in a year of skyrocketing medical expenses. But what is significant here is that despite my reportorial resourcefulness, I could not find anybody in authority willing to talk to me about it.

Nevertheless I have no doubt the denial of a COLA will kill some of us before 2016 is finished. I also have no doubt the denial's deadly impact is intentional. Moreover, after years of covering municipal and state government, I know the interactive machinations of politicians and bureaucrats well enough to recognize the pro-genocide trustees undoubtedly influenced the decision.

Obviously, in this new United States – so different from the United States in which I was born – the fact I am old and no longer exploitable for profit has not just nullified but definitively canceled what I was taught were my rights as a citizen.

Worse, because I am old, I remember when the U.S. was – assuming you were white – a fairly good country to live in. And the fact I remember such good times makes me a genuine subversive. It does likewise to every other elderly person who remembers when the U.S. actually made an effort to live up to its ideals.

That's no doubt among the reasons we seniors are forced to live apart, ghettoized in age-segregated housing and activity centers. Obviously the Ruling Class fears our memories of good times might foster rebelliousness amongst our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It's also another reason the Ruling Class unquestionably wants us dead – the quicker the better.

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Example Four: How Media Silence Helps Democrats Abolish Tenant Rights

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has joined hands with the national landlord associations in a new effort to suppress tenants' rights – in this case by shifting pest-control costs from landlords to tenants.

What is especially significant about this story is that it isn't a story. Though OAN has several times over the years broken stories that soon thereafter were apparently picked up by major media, my exclusive report on the administration's curtailment of tenants rights has been resoundingly ignored. Once again, we see what happens when the government and the media are owned and controlled by the same unimaginably wealthy (and therefore unimaginably powerful) clique of One Percenters.

The bottom-line truth is that behind its seductive glitz and glitter, the United States is a fascist dictatorship little different from any of the world's other fascist dictatorships – those of Mussolini, Hitler or Pinochet. But here the dictator is a capitalist cabal rather than a single individual and the de facto propaganda ministry is the for-profit media monopoly, which includes the deceptive genius of Madison Avenue and its almost inconceivable skill at sustaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Though now, with Donald Trump bidding to become the dictatorship's public face – the 21st Century equivalent of der Führer...

I ask you readers: is the Trump poster in the photograph at the end of this linked report  disturbingly reminiscent of some of the Hitler posters here?  And does Trump's “Make America Great Again”  have the same jack-booted, Horst Wessel  resonance as “Deutschland Erwache”  (“Germany Awaken”)? Knowledgeable as I am in semiotics – including the unspoken messages in commercial art – I believe the answer in each instance is yes.

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Example Five: Democrat Precursors to Barack the Betrayer

LEST WE FORGET, the Democratic Party's standardization of the Big Lie began with President Lyndon Banes Johnson, who immediately after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 reversed the dead president's efforts to disentangle the U.S. from its escalating military involvement in Southeast Asia.

In this instance, the Big Lie was LBJ's presentation of himself as the “peace candidate” even as he and his henchmen were scheming to expand U.S. military aid to South Vietnam into a major war. In retrospect, this began the first of the USian Empire's efforts at preemptive global conquest or – failing that – the deliberate, shock-doctrine  creation of international chaos from which only capitalism can benefit.

An equally damning example of the Democrat Big Lie was the party's longstanding pledge to protect women's reproductive rights – a pledge the Clinton Administration knowingly violated with the North American Free Trade Agreement. Imposed in 1994, by 2003 it had already stolen 1,673,453 jobs from U.S. workers. Women were at least 35 percent  – and in many industries 66 percent  – of these job-theft victims. Thus were as many as 1,104,479 women denied health insurance and as a result robbed of their sexual freedom – an atrocity about which the USian feminist movement (shackled as it is to the Democratic Party) – remains astoundingly silent even now.

Those who wonder at the motives underlying this particular Democrat hypocrisy – and also wonder what force could possibly be powerful enough to so completely silence U.S. feminists – should read The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008), Jeff Sharlet's carefully researched exposé of how the U.S. government has become the global executive-action agency of fundamentalist Christianity, which itself is the ideological handmaid of capitalism.

But Clinton's betrayal of women via NAFTA was not the first instance of the Democrats' unreported collaboration in the deceptively labeled “Republican” war against women – which is, in ugly truth, a relentless campaign by the USian Ruling Class to force Working Class women back into domestic slavery. The first Democrat betrayer of women was the defiantly Christian theocrat Jimmy Carter, who even before he took office had effectively nullified the party's platform-pledge to protect women's reproductive rights.

I should note here I was a member of the working press during the Carter campaign and distinctly remember the (subsequently validated) pre-election concerns of my female friends, all of whom were veterans of women's liberation. Given Carter's publicly declared Southern Baptist fundamentalism – a declaration tantamount to proclaiming one's self a biblical-law misogynist – all these women (very rationally) feared he would try to abolish their sexual freedom. But most of them voted for him anyway because – in what I now recognize as preview of future Ruling Class election strategy – they were convinced their only alternative was voting for “the far greater evil” of a Republican.

When I am writing of such matters I always – at least whenever possible – authenticate recollection by documentation. Thus it is both relevant to this essay and indicative of the magnitude of our allegedly “nonexistent” Internet censorship here in the USian homeland that virtually every reference to Carter's pre-election public pretense of supporting women's rights has vanished down the Orwell hole. The last time I sought this topic's corroborative links, probably four years ago, I found many within a very few minutes. Now, after three hours of diligent searching, I have found only one – a formerly famous, once universally available Time magazine piece describing Carter's denial of abortion rights to impoverished women via the Hyde Amendment as “mean spirited” – a report that is now price-censored by a pay-wall.

Obviously – just as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia -- the historical revisionists have been busy. Thus does the malevolently theocratic USian Imperial Ruling Class  methodically protect its own.

Nevertheless, the Internet search paid off by showing me the best analysis and historical summary I have yet read anywhere of the Democratic Party's lethal transformation from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism, which is actually a new and frightfully Orwellian name for fascism.

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Example Six: Intensifying Bureaucratic Hostility to Low-Income Seniors

AT THE BEGINNING of this piece, I mentioned how DSHS, the Washington state welfare bureaucracy, has extended to seniors and disabled people the unprovoked viciousness with it has always responded to younger, more conventional welfare applicants. For the latter group, the function of DSHS was never to provide assistance, but rather to gate-keep public funds by maximizing denial, cancellation or reduction of stipends and services. But toward seniors and physically disabled people, the agency was until now relatively friendly, as I myself – a DSHS beneficiary since the Great Wall Street Ripoff permanently obliterated nearly 70 percent of my post-retirement income – can personally attest. Indeed it seemed to me DSHS personnel often went out of their way to be helpful to folks in my demographic group.

To me this was a double surprise, since I had encountered naught but hostility – often extremely vindictive hostility – when I was forced to deal with DSHS during the clinical depression that followed the destruction of my life's work by fire in 1983 and, in the decade before that, when I was a member of the working press, during my (invariably adversarial) contacts with DSHS when it was a source of news.

But under the plutocratic despotism of Kevin Quigley, the scornful antagonism that always defined the DSHS attitude toward younger welfare supplicants now defines its interactions with elderly and disabled people too. Two examples – each unthinkable in previous years – should suffice to illustrate the agency's new, decidedly Ayn Randish policy of deliberate nastiness:

The worst of these examples is the victimization of a woman of the lower-income Working Class who is both physically disabled and officially retired. A lower-level menial employee all her worklife, she was receiving pension payments of $255 per year plus a Social Security retirement stipend of $1001 per month for a total income of $12,267 annually. Including the two tiny pension payments, this averaged out to $1022.25 per month, which included subsidies for nearly 100 percent of her health-care costs. This is definitively rock-bottom poor, which also qualified her for $134 in food stamps each month. Apart from these stipends and subsidies, she had no other income, but by living frugally, she was able to survive.

A few months ago, DSHS randomly audited her case and mistakenly recalculated her pension payments as monthly rather than annual. Thus they abolished all of her health-care subsidies and food stamps,which leaves her only $870 per month to live on. When she appealed, submitting all the requisite documentation, the welfare bureaucrats rejected the documents as fake, called her a liar to her face and refused to reverse their decision. Now – denied all access to health care and needing more than half her monthly income for rent – she lives in abject terror, wondering which will kill her first, the denial of medical services, starvation or homelessness.

In the second example, various non-governmental organizations had stepped up to help process DSHS paperwork in the wake of the huge bureaucratic downsizing fostered by the Great Wall Street Ripoff – no doubt one of the primary reasons the capitalists engineered the crash, as I speculated in 2010  (and for which I was immediately and forever banished from Facebook). Typically the NGOs take welfare applications, verify the documentation and electronically forward the work to DSHS. Now however DSHS has begun rejecting these applications, demanding the supplicants appear in person at the local welfare office, bringing the documentation there for further review. This adds weeks (and sometimes months) to the process and – obviously as intended – also makes it profoundly difficult for many elderly and/or physically disabled people to comply.

The second-example maliciousness I have experienced personally: specifically the arbitrary denial of nearly $700 in medical expenses that – supported as they are by official receipts – would previously have been factored into my monthly food-stamp allotment.

Hence – and I say this again for emphasis – the purpose of the Washington state welfare bureaucracy (which is now the purpose of the federal welfare bureaucracy in Washington D.C. and in all the 49 other states), is not to help the poor, but rather to placate the ever-more-frightened taxpayers – that is, those who still have living-wage jobs -- by denying us life-sustaining stipends and services, and thereby shoving us as quickly as possible into our graves.

Welcome to the Democratic Party's United States.

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Conclusion: the Big Lie Has Become the So-Called “American” Way

THE ULTIMATE LESSON here is in the varied applications of Josef Goebbels' famed Big Lie.  His basic principle was simple: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Application of the Big Lie by the USian Ruling Class is evident two forms, firstly in how the Republicans routinely lie about reality (as in the “weapons of mass destruction” falsely claimed  to be in Iraq), secondly in how the Democrats routinely lie about their intent (as in Obama's “change we can believe in”).

The first Big Lie form – the knowingly false description of reality – is ultimately subject to fact checking and is therefore maintainable only by the strictest censorship, in which context the remainder of the Goebbels quite linked above is especially relevant: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State” (emphasis added).

In the Big Lie's second form – deliberate falsehoods about intent – the truth cannot be established save by the (invariably speculative) indications of past conduct, which in the case of a carefully managed candidate may themselves be deliberately deceptive. From the perspective of the Ruling Class, the primary advantage of the second form is that it requires a much-less-severe regime of censorship and is therefore particularly amenable to maintaining the Big Lie of USian “democracy.”

Thus, in these applications of the Big Lie – one to drum up support for an imperial conquest, the other to dupe the voters into accepting “progressives” who in fact are no less fascist than their Republican rivals – we see how the Democrats are far worse than the Republicans, not only in their savaging of the socioeconomic safety net (and of non-police, non-military government services in general), but most especially in the long-term damage they have done to the U.S. experiment in representative democracy – damage obvious in the unprecedentedly low voter turnout  and in the various expressions of public hopelessness that sometimes surface via random polling, for example here  and here. 

In short, the Democrats hide their malevolence behind humanitarian Big Lies even as the Republicans brandish their own viciousness to make the eventual Democratic alternative palatable – never mind in principle it is equally savage. The Republicans thereby create the perfect diversion behind which to camouflage the ugly fact the Democrat Party of today is as much the party of Ayn Rand as the GOP. The Democrats meanwhile lie about who and what they are, exploiting the genuinely humanitarian history of the (forever abolished) New Deal and the (never-to-be-fulfilled) expectations deliberately raised by carefully selected, allegedly “progressive” personalities such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson to further conceal the party's predatory intent. This is, indeed, the defining Big Lie of USian Empire politics – an alleged two-party system that is in fact a single-party dictatorship diabolically disguised as its opposite.

Why then vote at all? However much our election process has been perverted – and I believe that since Citizens United  it has been totally perverted – I think it is vital to preserve the franchise itself against the (faint) possibility of revolutionary reform. The more we don't vote, the easier it will be for the Ruling Class to abolish elections entirely.

For whom then will I vote? For third-party candidates: Communists, socialists, maybe even Greens if they'd set aside their white-bourgeois hostility to unions.

Why only third party candidates? Because – as we see from the above – the notion that not voting for a Democrat automatically aids the forces of reaction is yet another Big Lie. Both parties are instruments of the Ruling Class, and by playing the good-cop/bad-cop role, they intimidate us into giving the Ruling Class everything it wants. Hence, as a member of the Working Class, I know I'm fucked whomever I vote for – or whether I vote or not. That's because we in the Working Class are methodically denied any influence in U.S. governance,  whether it's the Democrats in power or the Republicans.

Again – and it cannot be said too often – that's why voter turnout is already at an all-time low and still declining. Why cast a ballot if your vote is meaningless?

Though the U.S. population yet remains too Moron Nation ignorant to understand the necessity of voting to preserve the franchise, it is at least awakening to the fact elections don't matter when the country is ruled by a handful of nameless, faceless plutocrats who, individually and collectively, have the same serial-killer mentality as Adolph Hitler, whom their fathers and grandfathers financed into power to be the savior of capitalism – the very role Trump now seeks for himself.

LB/10-24 November 2015

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