Elections

When I was a philosophy grad student in the ancient times at the U. of Virginia, some over-smart logician pointed out to me that voting is not rational, since a single vote is never decisive. It's all the other stuff that's rational: appearing to have voted, applying a sticker to your bumper, registering voters, making phone calls -- because all of that stuff has the potential to spread sufficiently to make a difference in the election, or perhaps in a future election or in other forms of civic engagement.

But, of course, unlike the model "persons" in philosophical or economic mental experiments, actual people tend not to be sociopaths. Pretending to vote without voting is far more work than actually voting, which -- while it may be irrational -- does no harm. And so, good citizens tend to vote even understanding its irrationality, and even when there are no candidates worth voting for.

Some smart friends of mine argue for a particular type of quasi-rational voting in such situations. Because of our antiquated electoral college that pretends an entire state voted for Tweedledee even if 49% of it voted for Tweedledum, moral voters should, this argument goes, vote for truly good candidates -- even write-in candidates -- in most states, in order to send a message. But they should only do so because there are too few such informed ethical strategic voters to actually swing the state. In the all-important handful of Swing States, however, where the contest between the two Tweedles is too close to call, we are advised to vote for the less hideous of the two.

This is a difficult argument to face down. It seems to leave the vast majority of us free to vote our consciences, while requiring that those of us with the (mis)fortune to live in the states that count are required to grit our teeth and do our civic duty. No matter how godawful the less-evil candidate may be, the other one is more evil and therefore worth resisting. This is not a time for self-indulgent purity. Lives are at stake. Mr. Less-Evil will kill a great many human beings through war, climate-crisis-aggravation, and misdirection of resources, but Mr. More-Evil will kill more people faster and bring on the risk of complete catastrophe faster. Ergo we have no choice. Suck it up. Vote for the occupier of brown countries who's not the racist.

If elections changed anything, said Emma Goldberg Goldman, they'd be banned. Policy-driven independent activism is far more important. We can make that case. It's not who's sitting in the White House but who's doing the sitting in, said the late great Howard Zinn. But some of the people making the above argument for letting the electoral college determine who you vote for are also leaders in-between elections in independent risk-taking creative nonviolent activism. I'm thinking of people like my friend Daniel Ellsberg.

But that's just it: the people who manage to think this way tend to be few and far between and usually worthy of Nobel Peace Prizes, if those prizes were still given out for -- you know -- peace.

People, as a general rule, do not function as the theoretical sociopath who could pretend to be a voter and not vote. This is why employers have begun instructing their employees to vote for Republican candidates. We have secret voting. An employee could act as if he or she were going to vote as instructed and then vote for someone else. But many employees will not draw sharp lines in their minds between the employer's threat to fire them and the employer's false claim that electing Democrats will require firing workers, any more than they will draw sharp lines between sticking a Romney sign in their yard and punching Romney's name on a voting machine owned by one of Romney's companies. When employers hold mandatory anti-union meetings, their intimidation and propaganda mix. Some workers turn against a union out of fear but tell themselves it’s a strictly strategic choice; for most it's probably a combination of the two. The same will happen with mandatory pro-Republican meetings in the workplace.

The number of registered likely voters with a high enough level of information to vote strategically by state is probably too small to swing any Swing State. This is a sliver of the population that understands the truth about the less-evil candidate (i.e. his evilness) but is willing to urge others to vote for him (one vote makes no difference, remember; they must urge others to do likewise for their action to be worth anything). They must then immediately or even simultaneously devote themselves to a movement of resistance to that candidate, and open their minds to information on his or her ongoing crimes and abuses, information that is not helpful in campaigning for them. For, without that resistance movement there is no way to break out of the downward spiral that gives us ever-worse lesser-evil candidates. We can choose the less-evil one each time, but if next time they are both more evil, some other tool is needed for positive social change.

And here we come to a second key factor that our rational strategists fail to adequately reckon with. The problem is not just that people are irrational, or that I am giving them too little credit in terms of their ability to become rational. I do think people overwhelmingly IDENTIFY with candidates and parties and begin to self-censor their intake of information and their expression of disagreement. They become fans instead of participants in self-government. But, beyond the people, there are the organizations. A movement that can fix what ails our politics cannot be driven by organizations, think tanks, labor unions, activist groups, and media outlets that identify with and seek patronage from a party or an elected official.

A couple of years ago, AFSCME, a labor union that had favored nonprofit universal single-payer healthcare for many years, brought a bus tour to Charlottesville, Va., to hold a rally for something called "the Public Option." Whatever that was, it was not a demand that had originated with AFSCME members or any other group of ordinary people outside of our government. The rules for the rally were laid out ahead of time: speakers and posters that favored or mentioned single-payer were forbidden.

This year, President Obama came to Charlottesville, and a number of us handed out flyers and held up posters outside the entrance to his event. We discovered that the crowd going in did not support policies such as his "kill list" assassination program. Rather, they had never heard of them. They had clearly gone to great lengths to avoid major news stories that would have occupied their attention and their passions were the president a Republican.

In considering how we deal with elections, we cannot avoid dealing with the way our activism and its funding and its communications work year-in and year-out. Do we become hopelessly compromised? Clearly, there would have been a greater chance of creating a single-payer system had we not censored the demand. Clearly, there would have been a greater chance of winning the pathetic "public option" had the demand of people in the streets been for single-payer, and had the "public option" become a compromise. And clearly the positive bits in the atrocious corporate giveaway that was passed in the end would not have suffered from a full-throated movement of greater size and clarity demanding healthcare for all. What did us in, in this case and thousands of others, was not lesser-evil voting in an election, but people and organizations acting as if they were doing lesser-evil voting even when there was no election.

Half the country does not vote. Most of the country has no idea there are truly great candidates like Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson on the ballot. Some activists are urging people to not vote, in order to "send a message." But half the country doing that has already failed dramatically to send any message for many years.

What might do some good would be to vote for a good candidate, whether or not you're in a Swing State. I understand that you could then be blamed, and not without cause, for the election of President Romney and all of his evils. Truly you would have to be irrational to face that risk. But being blamed for something is hardly the greatest risk our current situation demands of us. Many of us will have to face far worse if we are going to prevail. The case for casting your irrational vote for someone like Jill Stein is not that they are likely to win (and completely unconnected to whether they will "spoil"), and not that your one vote will put them over the top, or that the votes of others you recruit will do the trick. The reason to vote and campaign for a good candidate is that we need to build an independent movement that's honest, that doesn't self-censor, and that supports candidates or elected officials who come to us -- rather than us running to them. We also need a movement that makes reform of our electoral system a central part of our agenda. It is very hard to work for electoral reform properly if we are devoting ourselves to acting within the broken system. The Swing States are where the action is. Backing good platforms in the 38 states from which all candidates and journalists have fled misses huge opportunities. A national movement devoted to protecting lesser-evil officials in Swing States will behave as a fan-club for those officials in-between elections in every single state. And the fact is that electoral work for lesser-evil candidates drains huge amounts of time and energy away from other projects for the Ellsbergs among us, no matter how much good activism they do for three years out of four.

We desperately need automatic voter registration, just as we have automatic war draft registration. Door knocking could then be done on behalf of peace and justice, which -- after all -- are far more popular than any Duopoly candidate. We need to break out of the notion that electoral busy-work created by anti-democratic legislators counts as activism -- and in fact amounts to the complete array of possible activism. We need access to vote, access to placing names on ballots, access to media, and to debates. We need free air time for qualified candidates (for a limited time period!), a ban on private spending, an end to the electoral college, and verifiable counting of paper ballots where they are cast. We won't vote ourselves any of these things. We will only compel them through the true array of activist tools: educating, organizing, communicating, boycotting, blockading, marching, rallying, interrupting, mocking, mobilizing, inspiring, shaming, and struggling our way forward. Women did not vote themselves the right to vote. Nobody elected us workplace rights, environmental protections, or a safety net. We moved the whole country through policy-based movements that often involved moving third- and fourth-party candidates.

I once turned down a chance to run as a Veep candidate on a truly great ticket, primarily because I want to redirect attention away from personality-change politics to policy-change politics. But I had other reasons. I didn't want to offend half my friends and allies. Again, people are not rational about this. They take sides, identify with those sides, and passionately oppose the other sides in a mental space that does not divide itself along state lines. Additionally, I confess, I didn't want to make myself unemployable in an activist world where I know of no organizations with any funding that agree with what I've written above. But just imagine if that ceased for a moment to be the case. Imagine if the labor movement, cast aside by President Obama like a cheap mistress, didn't respond by dumping more hard-earned pay than ever into his election effort. Imagine if well-meaning people and groups took one election cycle off. The money saved could create a television network, a newspaper, a team of investigative journalists, and a grassroots organization, all of them dedicated from here on out to a nation in which every person has the right to a living wage, full education, full healthcare, a sustainable environment, peace, and civil rights. Wouldn't that be worth something? Wouldn't it have been valuable to have those things when Bush was president? Wouldn't it even -- admit it -- have been nice to have those things these past four years?

In my view, the severity of the militaristic and climate crises we face recommend my strategy over lesser-evil voting.  I'm not proposing utopia.  I'm proposing merely daring to to dream of human survival.

Another little step.

By Dan DeWalt

Tuesday's Presidential debate spoke volumes about the sorry state of politics today. Granted, both contenders gave a good show: Obama was back on his game and Romney did his best to sound like Ronald Reagan. The pundits have been given a lovely hopper of fodder to hold them for a week or so. It has been agreed that Americans only care for a spectacle, so this debate will be analyzed and judged the same way any theatrical event gets reviewed by the critics.

Next Tuesday, October 23rd, 9 p.m. ET, there will be a different sort of presidential debate.  It'll be in Chicago, hosted by http://freeandequal.org and I'll be there in Chicago covering it for Al Jazeera.  Six candidates have been invited to participate, and four have accepted: Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson, Gary Johnson, and Virgil Goode.  The moderator will be Larry King.  You can submit questions here.

I know we've all thrilled to the body-language and tone analysis that has followed the debates between the guy who favors 12 more years in Afghanistan, imprisonment without trial, lower corporate tax rates, for-profit health insurance, assassinations, corporate trade pacts, imprisonment without trial, oil and coal and nuclear power, charter schools, a military budget outpacing the rest of the world combined, and an ongoing "war" on drugs, . . . and the other guy who favors all of those exact same things.

I know it's been tantalizing, in a grotesque I-can't-stop-staring sort of way, to watch debates that don't mention climate change or drone victims or poverty or the possibility of prosecuting mortgage fraud or torture or war, or the alternatives that exist to military spending and tax breaks for our oligarchs -- alternatives like free education, green energy, infrastructure, transportation, and housing.

Yes, yes, there are differences between Romney and Obama.  But imagine if, when you'd finished cheering Obama for accusing Romney of opposing coal pollution (gotcha!), your brain had to wrap itself around a third candidate -- someone with a serious proposal to stop burning coal?  Sure, Obama is less enthusiastic about massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare than Romney is, but imagine if the two of them had to answer to someone who spoke for the rest of us, pointed out the advantages of lifting the cap on payroll taxes so that the wealthy could start funding Social Security at the same rate as the rest of us, and advocated expanding Medicare to all who want it -- someone who swore not to allow any cuts -- even backdoor cuts -- to these successful programs?

A relatively small number of us have seen a facsimile of that kind of debate by watching the coverage on Democracy Now! But the non-corporate candidates have not had the same amount of time to speak as the two participating in the corporate-sponsored Debate Commission self-parody.  Nor have the locked-out candidates been able to address the two moneyed candidates directly.  And they've been asked the same alternate-universe questions asked by the corporate moderators: "What will you sacrifice on the altar of deficit reduction?" Et cetera.

I know. I know. Larry King is no Amy Goodman.  But if Larry King is given good questions to ask, he'll ask them.  And his approach of avoiding knowing anything before an interview actually works well for an audience -- if, as I hope, there is one -- that has never before heard of the Works Progress Administration and doesn't know that military spending lowers employment.

There should, in fact, be far more debate among the four candidates taking part than there is between the two media-approved gentlemen. 

Jill Stein is a fantastic candidate.  I've spoken with her a number of times during this campaign, and am more impressed each time.  She stands with majority opinion against wars and waste and corporate welfare, for green energy, education, nonprofit health coverage, and full-employment.  She tried to enter the corporate debate this past Tuesday and was arrested for her trouble.  She was handcuffed to a chair for 8 hours, and if you hear how powerful and popular her proposals are you'll have a good guess as to why.

I'm hoping that Stein pushes Rocky Anderson a little on his limited acceptance of militarism.  He's no Bush-Obama-Romney.  He'd cut the military significantly (at least half the Pentagon's budget) and scale back the global cowboy killing, but that's a very low hurdle.  Without a clear vision of why war is never acceptable, we won't move our nation and the world decisively away from it.  That being said, I know Rocky and consider him a tremendous candidate with courage, integrity, and experience.  He'd make an excellent president, especially if we had a Congress, and a media.

Gary Johnson will be the newest to me.  He's a Libertarian and tends to agree with me by opposing every horrible thing governments do and to disagree with me by opposing every useful thing governments do.  I'm eager to see that worldview go up against Stein and Anderson.  I'm hoping for something more enlightening than the he-said / he-said squabbles between Romney and Obama in which we are asked to choose between someone who blames anti-U.S. sentiment on a stupid movie and someone who blames it on unfathomable ingratitude for our benevolent invasions and occupations. There's truth in Johnson's opposition to centralized national control of schools and many other things, just as there's truth in Stein's desire to provide schools with adequate funding currently wasted on prisons and highways and weapons.

All four of these candidates will be less imperialistic than Obama or Romney, but not all of them will be less exceptionalistic.  My former congressman Virgil Goode will bring the racism and the xenophobia full throttle.  It's his answer to every question.  I'd love to see one of the other candidates ask if Goode understands the history of U.S. wars generating immigration and U.S. capitalists demanding more immigration.  Goode will try to play the Libertarian, but those of us in his district who kept asking him in vain to stop funding wars know different.

Of course, Goode was bumped out by Tom Perriello riding Obama's '04 '08 coattails, and Perriello funded every war he could, only without any public opposition to speak of due to his being a Democrat.  He lasted one term, and peace protests of his Republican successor Robert Hurt have been minimal since the wars are either now Obama's and therefore good or are imagined not to exist at all.  This district in South-Central Virginia has been swept by the same wave of ignorance that is washing over the rest of the nation.

Not everything will be on the table on Tuesday.  All four of these candidates, like virtually everyone else in the country (and even the New York Times now), will oppose some truly crazy ideas, like more years in Afghanistan.  We leave those to the "good" and "bad" pair of often indistinguishable candidates that we so cherish our right to choose between.

I'm not asking anyone to think their way out of lesser-evil voting in swing states -- at least not anyone who truly understands and acts on the understanding that independent activism around policy changes is far more important than electoral campaigning for personality changes.  But I do encourage watching this alternative debate.  And if you watch it on Al Jazeera I promise not to devote my commentary to the candidates' body language and facial expressions.

By John Grant

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
- P.T. Barnum
  

By Linn Washington, Jr.

After spending much of her 94-years as a civil rights activist this Washington, DC resident is understandably supportive of the Barack Obama presidency because she like many African-Americans never thought she’d ever see a black man sitting in that Oval Office seat designated for the most powerful person on earth.

HELICOPTOR WILL TAKE AERIAL PHOTO
 
WHAT: On Saturday a thousand Americans will lay their bodies down on a San
Francisco beach to spell out "DUMP CITIZENS UNITED!"
 
WHEN: Saturday, October 13, 2012, 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
 
WHERE: Stairway #7, Ocean Beach, SF – 200 yards north of Beach Chalet
Restaurant.
 
WHY: Some truths are so self-evident that the Founders felt no need to
mention them. Truths like, “Corporations are NOT People.” “Money is NOT
Speech.” “Elections are NOT Auctions.“ The 2010 Supreme Court ruling on
Citizens United spit in the face of these sacred principles, swamped our
democracy in corporate cash and must be overturned. Also, this election San
Francisco voters can vote Yes on Measure G to tell Congress to Dump Citizens
United!

on the bright side ryan refused repeatedly to acknowledge his team's proposal to increase military spending, and biden pretended repeatedly to have voted against the wars in iraq and afghanistan

hypocrisy is the compliment politicians pay to the peace movement

ryan even moved the debate much further in our direction by pretending that his opponents favor a smaller military than any since before World War One. Lets build on that idea.

One thing you can say about the financial industry. It has no sense of loyalty.

Chavez Win Strengthens Bolivarianism

by Stephen Lendman

Several previous articles said Venezuelans won't tolerate going back to their ugly past. On Sunday, they proved it. They voted in record numbers.

Long lines queued hours before dawn. Polls stayed open well into the night so everyone coming out could vote.

Expect Bolivarian Victory in Venezuela

by Stephen Lendman

October 7 is the moment of truth. Venezuelans get to choose between populism and neoliberal harshness. 

They're not stupid. They won't tolerate reinventing the bad old days. Expect Bolivarianism to triumph. Too bad it can't everywhere when it's most needed.

The presidential debate ignored the root causes of the present Depression:

• Out of control military/industrial/political complex that spends more on the military than all the other countries of the earth combined.
• Allowing private banks to create our money supply out of thin air when they loan us money.
• Unregulated speculation by Wall Street banks that has left them functionally bankrupt with $trillions of worthless derivative bets on their books
• Free trade policies that allow U.S. corporations to close factories at home,  pay sweatshop wages overseas and then import the goods here duty free.
• Reduction of the income tax rate on surplus income of wealthy Americans from the 70-90% range of 1940-1980 to current 35%.

The results are:

Flim Flam Substitutes for Debate

by Stephen Lendman

So-called presidential debates are well-rehearsed, prescripted theater. Theater of the absurd best describes them. Election outcomes aren't influenced. They don't edify. They insult. Wednesday night was no exception.

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama was was painful to watch at the debate on Wednesday night.

Time after time, he allowed Mitt Romney to make fraudulent statements or empty statements without slapping the Republican presidential candidate down.

We're told Obama messed up the debate last night because of a bad format, bad camera angles, and bad coaches, and because it was his anniversary.  Never mind that four years ago he could talk about closing Gitmo, ending the very mindset that gets us into wars, providing universal healthcare, restoring the rule of law, reforming NAFTA, creating the right to organize in the workplace, ending the Bush tax cuts, and so forth. 

You can blame his failure to actually attempt any of those things on the Republicans or Rahm Emanuel or his dog Bo, but all the post-debate analysis ignores the real way in which Obama must now debate with one hand tied behind his back.

America's Sham Electoral Process

by Stephen Lendman

It's bad enough to make some despots blush. It doesn't rise to the level of good fiction. No respectable film producer would accept a script explaining it. Who'd believe a democratic system so implausible. It's more fanciful than real.

Longstanding electoral fraud alone subverts democracy in America. The entire process lacks legitimacy.

Bolivarianism v. Fake US Democracy

by Stephen Lendman

On October 7, Venezuelans go to the polls. Expect Chavez reelected again overwhelmingly. Expect the freest, most open and fair electoral process in the Americas. Perhaps it's the best anywhere.

On November 6, polls open in America. Voters have no choice. Democrats and Republicans barely differ. They're in lockstep on issues mattering most. 

Inciting Unrest in Venezuela

by Stephen Lendman

Last month, Duke University's Patrick Duddy published a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) paper titled "Political Unrest in Venezuela." 

From August 2007 - July 2010, he was Washington's Venezuelan ambassador. He represents imperial, not popular interests.

By Conor Friedersdorf

Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution, and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney's flaws, which I've chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.

Don't they see that Obama's transgressions are worse than any I've mentioned?

I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers. 

Nope.

READ THE REST AT THE ATLANTIC.

By Dave Lindorff

Netanyahu blinked.

That’s the takeaway from the goofy address by the right-wing, Cheltenham,PA-raised, MIT-educated Israeli prime minister to the United Nations General Assembly Thursday.

Chavez Opposition Disintegrating

by Stephen Lendman

On October 7, voters get to choose Venezuela's next president. It's all over but the cheers, postmortems, and perhaps opposition planned disruptions. 

Chavez remains overwhelmingly popular for good reason. He's a shoe in for reelection.

Why would I even ask that question?  I've been trying (with virtually no success) to get everyone to drop the election obsession and focus on activism designed around policy changes, not personality changes.  I want those policy changes to include stripping presidents of imperial powers.  I don't see as much difference between the two available choices as most people; I see each as a different shade of disaster.  I don't get distressed by the thought of people "spoiling" an election by voting for a legitimately good candidate like Jill Stein.  Besides, won't Romney lose by a landslide if he doesn't tape his mouth shut during the coming weeks?  And yet . . .

It matters to me whether our elections are stolen in any number of ways in which they can be stolen, some of which would simply mean Romney robbing Obama, but others of which are related to the barriers facing non-corporate candidates.  Most of these dangers face congressional candidates as well; election theft is not exclusively a presidential problem. Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have just published "Will the GOP Steal America's 2012 Election? Corporate Vote Theft & the Future of American Democracy," with an introduction by Greg Palast.  I recommend it especially for the history of election fraud back through the centuries, but also for the collection of Fitrakis-Wasserman articles that make up the vast bulk of the book.  The book opens, however, with a systematic survey of the ways in which your vote can be disappeared.  Here's a taste:

"The Republican Party could steal the 2012 US Presidential election with relative ease.The purpose of this book is to show how, and to dissect the larger -- potentially fatal -- warning signs for American democracy, no matter which corporate party is doing the stealing.Six basic factors make this year's theft a possibility:

"1.The power of corporate money, now vastly enhanced by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens' United decisions;

"2.The Electoral College, which narrows the number of votes needed to be moved to swing a presidential election;

"3.The systematic disenfranchisement of -- according to the Brennan Center -- ten million or more citizens (a million in Ohio alone), most of whom would otherwise be likely to vote Democratic;

"4.The accelerating use of electronic voting machines, which make election theft a relatively simple task for those who control them, including their owners and operators, who are predominantly Republican;

"5.The GOP control of nine of the governorships in the dozen swing states that will decide the outcome of the 2012 campaign; and,

"6.The likelihood that the core of the activist 'election protection' community that turned out in droves to monitor the vote for Barack Obama in 2008 has not been energized by his presidency and is thus unlikely to work for him again in 2012."

Each of these points is explained and elaborated in the book.  Why, you might ask, does it matter which party a governor belongs to?  Well . . .

"Without his brother Jeb as governor of Florida 2000, and Kathleen Harris as secretary of state, George W. Bush could not have become president of the United States.  As we have seen, Governor Bush purged Florida's voter rolls of tens of thousands of likely Democrats.  Various ballot 'problems' emerged, including the electronic 'glitch' in Volusia County.  Then Secretary of State Harris stalled a statewide recount and opened the door for the Supreme Court's Bush v Gore decision.  Without Governor Robert Taft and Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio 2004, Bush could not have gotten a second term.  Taft facilitated another purge of voter rolls, removing some 300,000 names from the lists.  Then Blackwell ran an astonishing range of dirty tricks aimed at Democratic voters, culminating in his now-infamous late-night manipulation of the electronic vote count that moved the victory from Kerry to Bush.  The personal, private election day visit the President and Karl Rove paid to Blackwell in his Columbus office may have been their most important stop of the campaign."

Fitrakis and Wasserman also don't skimp on proposals for actual change of the sort you won't hear discussed much, if at all, in the Romnobama Debates in October:

"1.Money must come out of politics.  No nation can allow a tiny handful of million/billionaire corporatists to pour unlimited cash into our elections and expect to emerge with even a semblance of democracy.  If elections can be bought, so can our government, to the detriment of us all.  Citizens United must be reversed, corporations must be stripped of legal personhood, and money must be banned from the electoral process.  This will take an unprecedented nation-wide grassroots campaign resulting in at least one Constitutional amendment.  The odds may seem daunting.  But George III was not Divine, and corporations are not people. 

"2.Elections cannot be administered by partisans.  All local, state and federal election officials must be banned from playing any role in any campaign relating to the election they are administering.  A strict non-partisanship must apply to establishing congressional districts and all other aspects of our democratic process.

"3.All American citizens must be automatically registered to vote upon turning 18.  The arduous, unfair practice of forcing pro-democracy organizations to go out and register voters is nonsensical.  Voting is an inherent natural right and responsibility.  Citizens should be removed from voter rolls only upon death or renunciation of citizenship.

"4.All places of voting must be convenient, stable, well-known and easily accessible. 

"5.Voting should be available over a period of weeks by mail, and at polling stations through the Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday around Armistice Day, November 11.  The polls should be largely worked by high school and college students who will get school credit for the day, and who will get a holiday that Tuesday to count the ballots.

"6.All electronic voting and counting machines should be banned (as Ireland has just done, and as has long been the case in Canada, Japan, Germany and elsewhere) with all ballots cast on recycled paper, to be hand-counted."

Not a bad list.  Too bad you can't vote it into being.  But we probably won't get it at all if we lose every last pretense of legitimate elections.  Reforming our elections must be integral to our agenda, even once we've figured out that the Messiah hasn't been nominated.  After all, that realization is tightly connected to the realization that our elections need major repairs.  The Messiah will never be nominated, even after all of these reforms, but we might manage to nominate a junior assistant disciple -- which is actually preferable, and which will be far superior to the current crop of moneychangers.

Paul Loeb recommended Tom Hayden's latest pro-Obama article to Rocky Anderson. Rocky wrote this response and gave us permission to publish it:

Dear Paul -

I read Tom Hayden's piece several days ago and think it is so beneath him -- particularly the "white liberal-left" and "white blindness" racist condescensions.  There are, of course, many in the Black community who are justifiably appalled at Obama's performance (or lack thereof).  See http://blackagendareport.com/content/what-obama-has-wrought and http://www.blackcommentator.com/484/484_kir_betrayal_share.html.  If Hayden wants to make this about race, perhaps he should focus on the fact that, after four years of Obama, far more Blacks are living in poverty and four times as many Black women in the U.S. are dying in connection with pregnancy and childbirth than White women.

Hayden never would have written such an apologist piece for an imperial militarist and corporatist regime in the '60s or '70s.  Can you imagine such a piece by him then, gushingly endorsing Nixon because of his overtures to China, his signing of the Clean Air Act, and his establishment of the EPA?

Amazingly, he writes as if he is clueless about Obama's miserable performance regarding climate change and energy -- and the fact that tuition rates have skyrocketed under his administration.  He worries in the first paragraph of his piece about what Romney would or wouldn't do regarding these issues -- as if Obama hasn't made it all far worse.  

And doesn't it occur to Hayden that the reason so many Americans are misinformed is because our President is such a lousy leader/communicator?  (Why else would "only six percent of Americans believe[ ] the stimulus had created any jobs"?)  We could have had a single-payer Medicare-for-all health care system had Obama stood up against the insurance and pharmaceuticual industries.  Even with the vast majority of the American people favoring single-payer at the time, our President wouldn't even let it see the light of day -- then rapidly and cowardly abandoned a public option.

I've described my "strategic" thinking to you before.  You know full well that I am campaigning to help encourage and inspire a broad-based people's movement -- the only way we'll ever achieve real social, economic, and environmental justice in this nation.  You apparently think it healthy for everyone just to shut up and be polite in the face of the Obama administration outrages.  Amazing for someone who writes and teaches about the virtues of citizen engagement.  Truly amazing.

Paul, apparently you just don't want to face your utter complicity in the outrages of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.  You would like to see everyone just get in line and be quiet about illegal wars of aggression, the abandonment of the rule of law, the shredding of due process and habeas corpus, the abysmal health care system that causes the deaths of thousands of poor and middle class people (particularly people of color) every week, and the caving in to Wall St. campaign contributors at the vast expense of most people in the U.S. (and abroad). 

Would you have imagined four years ago that you would be a cheerleader for a president who brags about his personal participation in deciding who will be killed in several nations, knowing that hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men, women, and children will be killed too?  And does it ever occur to you why so many so-called "terrorists" despise the U.S. and want to strike out against us?  Or that we're creating more enemies and instilling more hatred and hostility toward the U.S. as a result of our disregard of so many nations' sovereignty and as we kill and maim people throughout the Muslim world with such reckless abandon?  (I wrote this before the recent killings of the U.S. Ambassador and three other diplomats in Libya and the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo -- further evidence of the hatred we have generated by our international belligerence.) 

Would you ever have imagined you would so enthusiastically support a president who orders that U.S. citizens be assassinated?  (So far, at least three U.S. citizens have been killed by drones -- one of whom was a 16 year-old boy.)  Would you have imagined you would support a president who asked for, and signed into law, the authority to kidnap people anywhere (including U.S. citizens) and have them imprisoned up to the rest of their lives, without charges, trial, legal assistance, or the right of habeas corpus?  (Imagine what you'd be doing and writing were that same president a Republican.  The crass partisanship, instead of principle, that causes so many Democrats to blindly support this president is morally astounding.)

Damn straight I'm angry -- and disgusted.  Please read Ionesco's Rhinoceros, an allegory about the rise of facism in Europe.  Whenever you write lately, I hear you "harumphing" and can imagine that horn growing from your forehead.  In a decade, you can be really proud of your refusal to stand up in opposition to the march toward authoritarianism, the capitulation of our government to Wall Street, and the gross violations of civil and human rights. 

It's just amazing how "pragmatists" like you are selling out so conveniently, as our Constitution is being shredded and as our nation continues to cause so much misery in the lives of millions of people around the world.  And as the administration persecutes and prosecutes those who inform us about government crimes and other misdeeds, while allowing the criminals to go free. 

Please feel free to distribute this as you see fit.  (I'll do the same.)  As I mentioned to you when you were in SLC, I'd love to debate you any time and any place about all of this.  You and others need to be shaken into understanding what your blind obsequiousness is doing to our nation and world.

Hayden and you are so optimistic about what you can push Obama to do during the next four years.  (It all reminds me of abused spouse syndrome.)  Where have all of you been during the past four years to push Obama to bring war criminals to justice?  To bring those who have illegally spied on U.S. citizens to justice?  (It's worth noting that you supported Obama four years ago after he lied to us as a U.S. Senator and voted to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that had committed federal felonies by providing the Bush administration with confidential information about their customers.)  To end the drone killings of innocent people?  To break up the too-big-to-fail banks and regulate Wall St. to protect the American people (and millions of others throughout the world) from another financial melt-down?  To combat, rather than exacerbate, climate change?  To end the disastrous "war on drugs"?  To reduce, rather than continue to increase, the world-record incarceration rate, particularly of people of color?  To provide decent health care to all Americans?  To end poverty, rather than sit back and support a president who never speaks of it and who has "led" this nation while the poverty rate has increased to 1965 levels (and while our child-poverty rate is the worst in the industrialized world, except for Romania)?  Are you aware of his pitiful record on presidential pardons?  Or of the fact that maternal and infant mortality rates are almost the worst in the developed world?  Are you aware that he perpetuated yet another big lie in his embarrassingly sychophantic speech to AIPAC about Ahmadinejad supposedly saying (he never did say it) that Israel should be wiped off the map? 

Obama's not a statesman, nor is he a "leader".  He is a prostitute for the rich and powerful -- and has betrayed, with tragic results, the sacred trust placed in him by the American people.  The greatest problem we face is that too many, like you, seem to have no line you will draw.  Are no crimes too great, is there no undermining of the rule of law too egregious, for you to refrain from saying "No more"?

Best wishes to a citizen who seems to be losing his soul, Rocky

1.  Admit you are in a self-destructive relationship with the Democratic Party.

2.  Remove conflicting bumper stickers from your collection.  “Shut Down Guantanamo” and “Obama 2012” are mutually exclusive.

3.  Understand that kill lists and more unjust war is the wrong kind of change to believe in.

Obama v. Romney on Issues Mattering Most

by Stephen Lendman

Both candidates represent duopoly power. They're two sides of the same coin. Differences between them are minor. On issues mattering most, they're in lockstep.

In January 2013, America will be run by rogues whoever wins. Under either party, expect the next four years to be worse than previous ones.