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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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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