Saturday, December 17, 2011




Third party candidates for president always pose the risk that by voting for them, you siphon off votes from the lesser of the two evils, and end up with the primary evil. Ala Ralph Nader pulling energy from the would be Gore supporters and giving Bush the margin he needed to steal the election (with the help of Jed and the Justices’) So all us Progressives ended up suffering the Bush Light era (which ended up being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nightmare) So, when it came time to get out of that, no one was going to go third party. Obama had full support of Dem’s and Progressives. Then we saw Obama in action. We kept thinking, “Wow, that’s strange. Why would he do that?” We kept saying he had too much opposition form the Republicans. But then all the things he kept doing on his own accord were baffling us. Hum…. Why is he still allowing the drone planes to kill people in Pakistan? Isn’t he the commander and Chief? Why is he picking people from Goldman Sachs to run his financial departments? Why is his attorney General not fighting to end the endless internment of innocent prisoners? Why is he backpedaling on environmental policy? And why does he sound just like Bush when he talks about the need to protect American interest abroad?
Obama, as far as I can see, is towing the line for the corporate class, protecting the military industrial complex, and seems happy to keep, and even expand, the type of executive privilege powers coveted by the last administration. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” So, progressives like me, find ourselves in the dilemma of what to do. A vote for Obama in 2012 means we really don’t want the alternative, yet, as we vote for Obama, we feel betrayed by the person we are voting for. On the left, we are supposed to have our values. We are, after all, the real “values” demographic. That is why we are called soft and idealistic, by the Machiavellian Reich. I mean rite, I mean right. What is a progressive to do? My good friend Jeff hit me over the head with this questing one day. “ Do you vote, cynically, to keep the guy you hate more out of office by voting for the guy on the other side you are disgusted with? Or, do you vote your conscience and let the chips fall where they may?” I think my best answers to this question come from two comments I recently overheard. The first came when I was in the company of a man form England. In a quip about the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have taken over a Episcopalian church property in England, The English guy’s comment had to do with how much money the occupier’s were costing the church every day. I heard that and I thought to myself, “Hum…. I wonder how much it is costing humanity, every day, to continue our obedient silence as the forces of havoc, wreck the known universe.” The second came from an interview on Democracy Now with the first progressive third party candidate; Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. When asked how exactly he was going to run for president, i.e., as a third candidate, or an independent, or what? He said he was running as a second party candidate. His point was that as much as the Dem’s and Republican’s go at each other, in practice, they are all doing the bidding of the one percent. So his point was that we effectively have one party running the country, the corporate military industrial complex filthy rich bastard party. That point made a lot of sense to me. If you vote Dem, or Rep, you are basically, for all practical purposes, voting the same party. The Plutocracy Party. In this light, the question is not whether you are voting for a particular faction within the Plutocracy party, as much as it is whether you are voting for, or against, the plutocracy party. When I put it this way to myself, the answer becomes a no-brainer. I am against the plutocracy party. I want the opposition to plutocracy to win. And I am obligated, by my progressive sensibilities, to vote against the bastards, no matter what the odds.

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