…So, with the most recent BLS data, 20% of the popular vote would be less than 48 million people. Of course, let’s be frank. Neither political party wants every American to vote. Voter suppression in both parties is as American as apple pie. The Republicans don’t want all of those people they have thrown under the bus to come to the polls. And, the Democrats don’t want all of those voters showing up that they endlessly lie to with empty promises. If one person-one vote democracy was really an intent under a system controlled by political parties, money couldn’t buy a politician, we would have a national voting day where everyone had the day off, we would have a system that truly educates people on issues rather than one of demagogy and lies, we would provide free public transportation to those unable to get to the polls themselves and numerous other incentives for people to vote. The smaller the turnout, the more the status quo benefits in a system of looting, pillaging, exploitation and corruption. Or so their perception goes… – link
One thing is certain – both corporate puppets support the system that is killing you:
Post Script:
An important point was brought up by Alex Smith of EcoShock Radio about the numbers in this post. The list of top campaign contributors by Opensecrets does not include the dark world of Super PACs and other tax-exempt groups which can shield the identity of their donors – a billion spent on the presidential race. See the comments section of this post for further details.
A nice example of the disconnection from reality that the elite reside within was exhibited this past weekend between NY Mayor Bloomberg and the survivors of the recent apocalyptic manifestation of human-induced climate change. Apparently the New York climate refugees that Sandy left in its wake felt that diverting much-needed resources to a marathon run was a little heartless and misappropriated as far as priorities were concerned:
What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know that acknowledging the historic and unprecedented nature of such monster storms will disrupt this big fossil fuel-burning party we have going on here at planet Earth. For Christ’s sake, these new Frankenstorms are just the free market’s way of weeding out the wheat from the chaff. So what if the sea levels are rising faster than expected?!? If you can’t afford a walled fortress that can withstand future climate chaos along with the sky-high insurance premiums that go along with living in such vulnerable seaside spots, then move inland along with the rest of the uncompetitive and undeserving peons. In such a dog-eat-dog world, the wealthy will retreat behind their strongholds, complete with small farms and an army of private security guards to fend off the starving masses.
Some people like to comfort us with the idea that the economy will collapse long before we humans can continue burning all that coal and other carbon energy into the atmosphere. I guess such bloggers forget about all those pesky feedback loops and ecological tipping points we have already unleashed which will come to fruition no matter what we do at this point, or the fact that global dimming by sun-blocking aerosols is masking an additional 2 degrees of warming by some estimates. That kind of thinking – expecting a complete economic collapse to avoid the worst of what is already in the climate change pipeline – is just as hopelessly delusional as those who put their faith in a techno-fix like geoengineering or believe that God would not allow humans to destroy themselves.
Paul Street is one of the more insightful writers I follow and he has a new essay out which lists his version of the top threats to modern civilization. The conspicuous absence of these grave dangers from our political discourse prompts him to start off his article as follows:
The content and character of the 2012 U.S. presidential election does not bode well for the human race and other life on Earth. If the American people do not broaden the sphere of public concerns that matter far beyond the ones being discussed in this the latest big money-big media -major party-narrow spectrum-corporate-managed candidate-centered “electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky’s phrase[2]), then there is not going to be a decent, desirable, or democratic future worth inhabiting. If we accept this and other such periodic U.S. elections as an adequate expression and spectrum of democratic politics and popular voice, we’re done for.
Well Paul, it is all corporate-funded theater and bread & circus for the mesmerized and pacified masses. What more would you expect from a society whose governing institutions and news media have been usurped by the greed of monied interests? Both mainstream parties are on the corporate dole, a situation best summed up by the following comment:
…America’s history has always been about the battle between plutocracy and democracy. Since WWII, we’ve built the military-industrial complex, we’ve allowed campaign funding to reach insane proportions, we’ve introduced the most effective means of propaganda ever created (the TV) into every home, and we’ve de-regulated Wall Street into a behemoth. We’ve allowed the corporate structure to infect our democracy at the deepest levels as well as most people’s personal lives in a fundamental way (health care and pharmaceuticals, banking and debt, the fact that most of the country has to shop at Walmart to be able to break even each paycheck, etc.).
The plutocrats have been routing democracy in a steady succession the past 50+ years. Our democracy is now a hollowed-out shell completely subservient to corporate interests at all levels. This is not crazy liberal talk – it’s simple reality. Citizens United was just the icing on the cake…
Number one on Paul Street’s list cannot be denied – climate change. Here’s what he writes about this civilization-ending problem which has been avoided at all costs by the mainstream media even after the devastation in New York:
Climate change is a threat multiplier. It will make unstable states more unstable, poor nations poorer, inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely,” Huhne is expected to say in a speech to defence experts. “And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change.”
He will warn that climate change risks reversing the progress made in prosperity and democracy since the industrial revolution, arguing that the results of global warming could lead to a return to a “Hobbesian” world in which life is “nasty, brutish and short”.
And the U.S. military already acknowledged the threat of human-induced climate change to the stability of nation states in a 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. In recent years, congressional witnesses speaking on the dangers that climate change poses have been unequivocal in their warnings:
· On October 15, 2009, retired USAF General Charles F. Wald testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, reiterating the CNA finding, saying that “we must… now prepare to respond to the consequences of dramatic population migrations, pandemic health issues and significant food and water shortages due to the possibility of significant climate change” and that “Energy security and a sound response to climate change cannot be achieved by an increased use of fossil fuels.”
· In May, 2009, retired USN Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pointed to an “over reliance on fossil fuels” and said that “climate change has the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters on a scale and at a frequency far beyond those we see today.
So we should expect that a future of unstable climate which increasingly puts our food production in jeopardy will also lead to an increased risk of weapons of mass destruction being used by failing countries – desperate and angry fingers on the trigger of nukes. Homer-Dixon’s scenario on climate change and armed conflict is prescient. An article from 2007 reveals the inevitable truth about the energy-water-food-climate nexus and social breakdown:
…Homer-Dixon was writing more than 15 years ago about climate change leading to a rise in violent conflict and state failure.
Then, his pronouncements found only a small audience, and held little sway in the halls of power in Washington or New York.
Now, he is briefing UN Security Council members about his theories of “synchronous failure”, a much in-demand author of a bestseller warning of impending catastrophe, The Upside of Down.
…Homer-Dixon believes “major volatility” in nation-states and in the international order is the inevitable outcome of climate change. His theory rests on the premise that many nation-states are highly stressed and hopelessly addicted to energy, what he terms the “master resource”.
Climate change will be the factor that pushes many vulnerable states to the edge, and over it.
Some nations will find their resources overwhelmed as they struggle to cope with massive internal movements of people displaced as fertile land becomes unproductive and water shortages emerge.
…a rise in the Earth’s temperature of one to two degrees – will have significant impacts.
He says modern states are in a similar predicament to the declining Roman Empire.
The massive cost to Rome of maintaining and feeding its subjects, bureaucracy, militaries and cities required more and more energy. In the end, the energy could not be found, leading eventually to the collapse of a great empire.
Similarly, a “complex” globalised world is expending more and more energy to underpin societies reliant on relentless economic growth.
In what Homer-Dixon describes as an “astonishing statistic” he notes that the energy consumed in producing and transporting food around the world has risen 80-fold in the past century while the population has quadrupled to 6 billion over the same period.
Using a measure he called the “energy return on investment”, Homer-Dixon finds the search for energy is requiring an ever-increasing amount of resources at a time when demand for it is rising rapidly.
It is a situation that he says is fast becoming unsustainable. Oil will become too expensive, while nuclear energy requires a massive investment in money and energy, just to get it off the ground.
And he notes another dilemma. Fixing the effects of climate change will require massive amounts of energy in itself.
“Building sea barriers, moving huge numbers of people displaced by changing weather, building new infrastructure … all these types of things, the solutions to climate change, require lots and lots of energy.”
And as governments become incapable of discharging their basic responsibilities of statehood, the vacuum will be filled by chaos and conflict…
Number three and four on Paul’s list is mass poverty and inequality. He writes:
Perhaps we should mention that mass poverty and inequality stem from unfettered capitalism which has reached its full fruition in the buy-off of our government and the total corruption of regulatory, judicial, and legislative institutions by the profit-driven interests of multinational corporations. The social contract has been broken; the political discourse for the public has degenerated into meaningless wedge issues; and society has been atomized and isolated into ‘individual consumers’, a mere member of a marketing demographic whose only voice is to choose between product X or Y.
Number five on Paul’s list is the likelihood of another epic financial crisis. Our financial system is limping along, but its demise is written in stone. Without cheap energy, the underlying backbone of our economy, our growth-oriented system cannot survive for very much longer. As I said before, money is simply a token of energy exchange and has no intrinsic value of its own. If we now take into account our fossil fuel energy system’s external costs (environmental damage, ill-health costs, climate change destruction, resource wars such as Iraq, etc), then we’d be in debt up to our eyeballs. As I explained in this post, the net benefits of burning fossil fuels will eventually be negated by the net costs.
Number six on Paul’s list is “long-term structural employment and enforced obsolescence of tens of millions of formerly middle and working class Americans.” The worker is disposable, and long-term unemployment is endemic to capitalism. The corporate drive for maximizing profits is the primary goal and thus follows the policy of keeping worker numbers and their wages as low as possible. Automation, outsourcing of jobs, and employing part-time workers are some of the ways corporations suppress labor.
Paul lists number seven as “racism and racial inequality.”:
…Nobody raises a peep about racially disparate mass incarceration or segregated schools or black inner city neighborhoods with unemployment and poverty rates over 40 percent…
Looking back in history to the genocide of Native Americans and now to today with the ‘War on Terror’ and its related racism towards Muslims, the U.S. empire has always demonized anyone who stands in its way. Nationalism, racism and xenophobia always rise in times of economic downturns, no matter the country, when scapegoats are created to vent people’s anger and frustration as well as shift blame. Today is no different:
And the last one is U.S. militarism. I would rank this one much higher on the list and I’ve posted on this subject extensively, but the following video does a nice job of summing things up:
Rising sea levels, monster storms, hordes of fleeing climate refugees, crop-destroying droughts and floods, hellacious forest fires, dying ocean sea life, rogue geoengineering projects, and distraught scientists – the beginnings of these are all taking shape as climate change starts to kick into gear, putting into question the future of the human race. Ten years earlier, the effects of a storm like that of Sandy were foretold in a report entitled “Nation Under Siege” by Architecture 2030, a “non-profit, non-partisan and independent organization, established in response to the climate change crisis by architect Edward Mazria in 2002.” As Inside Climate News reports, the most disturbing part in this study is a 3-D map of New York (pictured below), illustrating the effects of a 3-meter (9.8-foot) rise in sea level: “Lower Manhattan, the East Village neighborhood and the FDR Drive underwater. That’s exactly what Sandy’s 3-meter storm surge delivered.”
In a recent post, I mentioned that one of the world’s premier insurers, Munich Re, was pricing in the rise of climate change disasters. Speaking from an Australian perspective, a very astute and sobering comment was made on this very subject of the insurance industry and climate change damage. Note that in addition to the ineffective carbon trading scheme, this is the best response we are likely to ever get from our ‘free market capitalist system’ (bold emphasis is mine):
We can take it as a given that nothing of scale will be done about climate issues until the bells toll at a deafening level. Sort of like a heavy cigarette smoker puffing his life away in spite of getting a clear diagnosis of very ill-health.
Meanwhile the insurers, Swiss Re(the big one), and Munich Re, set their numbers folk on the problem and come up with a price(premium) for geographically weak areas around the planet. The price for living in say, flood prone Manhattan, will be determined by these numbers. Fire risk, no problem, theft, no problem – but acts of nature, well the historical data is on our side, to a degree where no one can dispute it, as is the call of the world’s foremost climate experts, which governments ought not argue with. Consequently the premium for flood and tempest will be high – Indeed very high. Do you want this element of our insurance coverage? – and by all means try another insurer. They will tell you the same thing. A bit like going to bat for a fair priced earthquake cover in Christchurch at the moment, let alone in the decades to come.
As a result governments, both local and Federal, will have to become insurers of last resort – putting them in position where they too can face bankruptcy, like all of the other insurers who failed to crunch the numbers.
More than likely this is how the business-as-usual world, will approach the climate problem.
Structurally it is already happening in Australia in a quiet way, where CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) have passed their climate models over to state governments, who in turn have passed the buck to local councils about the risks of rubber stamping building permits in storm and tempest prone coastal areas. Ergo, rate hungry local shires can be bankrupted in a trice from several directions. For one, the landowners claim they trusted the shire permit system – yet the insurers(if they take on the bet), have a clear path to recover their losses. Given that shires defied expert opinion from the country’s foremost climate authority, insofar as they were handed their projections, yet ignored them.
On the one hand some commentators might take these real world scenarios as leading indicators of how we are traveling in the climate fix – but the reality suggests they are trailing indicators at best. An after-the-event pricing for climate problems.
As for a global fix on climate – well insurers are leaving politicians in their wake. Coming up with real world pricing models, and all that.
As for the unwashed millions around the world – well there’s no money in them.
An interesting adjunct to this may be found in Australia’s refugee policy, where currently it appears to be suffering quite some stress. Yet it fails to include climate refugees in the decades to come. Say Bangladesh, where a small rise in sea level will have twenty million people on the move – begging questions from the UN – how many millions will Australia take.
Ian Angus observes on the website Climate and Capitalism that the masses will be left to fend for themselves like the survivors of Katrina:
As Naomi Klein wrote in the same year, in The Shock Doctrine, “It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. ”
In short, now we all live in New Orleans.
Though the cost of Sandy to the Northeast is a small fraction of the total cost incurred by Katrina, this time climate change hit the seat of power and money in America rather than the poverty-stricken plebs of New Orleans who were quickly written off.
Even further back than the above study was one done ten years ago entitled “The Metro East Coast: Climate Change and a Global City.” One of the authors of that report and a senior research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who heads the Climate Impacts Group is Cynthia Rosenzweig. She was on Democracy Now yesterday speaking about the forewarnings New York had been given:
CYNTHIA ROSENZWEIG: New York City—when we started over 10 years ago, we really started looking at New York City. New York City is actually—our estuary is shaped like a funnel. And hurricane winds and storms go counterclockwise, as we all know now. And when we have that arm, that strong arm of the storms, coming around, slamming right into our—the cone of our—the funnel of our estuary, we said over—over 10 years ago, we showed the maps of how vulnerable Lower Manhattan, Long Beach, parts of Staten Island, the low-lying areas—we’ve been telling people for over 10 years that these are the areas that we need to protect. We need to plan and protect them.
We’re also vulnerable because we have so much infrastructure. And, you see, we can’t think about our infrastructure in silos. “Oh, here’s the transportation system. Here’s the power. Here’s the water.” All of those three are interdependent. And we know now so strongly that when one goes out, especially the power, there’s cascading effects throughout all the systems…
Writing on Dissident Voice, Robert Hunziker comments on another Democracy Now interview from this week concerning the vulnerabilities of New York:
Here are a few pictorial commentaries from the net on Sandy:
And a perverse reaction from the barbarians at a Romney rally when a climate activist tries to break the silence on climate change:
No, it’s not dystopian fiction anymore; it’s terrifyingly real. Time to contemplate our existence on this little blue orb and decide what’s worth fighting for.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said corporate leaders should look in the mirror before lecturing the American people on ways to tackle the deficit. After the heads of more than 80 big companies issued a statement Thursday on deficit reduction, Sanders released a report detailing how many of the companies headed by the same CEOs have avoided taxes, sent American jobs overseas and took taxpayer bailouts. “There really is no shame,” Sanders said. “The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.
Next we have Physicist Paul Beckwith’s open letter to the Canadian PM about the destruction of our food supply by way of human-induced eco-collapse. This letter should be sent to all leaders of industrialized nations.
Click to go to original…
And finally we have poetic justice in the form of what has been dubbed a ‘Frankenstorm’ bearing down on the seat of power in the U.S. As nature continues to drop hint after hint to those in charge, how much longer can the fossil fuel PR machine of climate change denialism continue to pull the wool over the eyes of the public?
Physicist Paul Beckwith explains here how this ‘Frankenstorm’ is a result of anthropogenic climate change:
All storms veer to the right in the northern hemisphere due to the spinning of the earth (1 revolution per day). Except when there is a tilted high pressure region northward and it has to go left and there is a massive low pressure region left that sucks it there as well. Why the high pressure ridge and massive low pressure? Because the jet stream is wavier and slower, a situation that is happening more and more often, because of massive sea ice decline this summer. Which is due to Arctic amplification feedbacks. Which in turn is due to rising greenhouse gases. Which is due to humans.
I noticed that reader Tall commented on this site’s ‘About’ section with a link to Charles C. Mann’s new article:
The crux of the argument is the following (from an audio interview with the author)…
…All species are the same at some fundamental level. They are all living creatures, and all species seek to increase, to multiply, and to fill the Earth… If we are serious as conservationists then we should recognize that human beings are just another species, and they have the same impulses that animate bacteria. And the natural course of events for us will be to fill up the Earth, consume all the resources, and then kill ourselves off. And that would be the normal thing for us to do. So that conservation, the idea that we should hold back, was in fact deeply unnatural, almost perverse from the point of view of biology, to imagine we would be doing this [conservation] …
This thinking goes along with the theme of ‘Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?‘ From a purely primordial urge for survival, we are no different than other organisms. But we are intelligent enough to recognize that what we are doing will lead to our own extinction in the not too distant future. I don’t believe any other species has that ability to forecast the future and see dangers. So perhaps the battle for humanity is partly recognizing that we have these basic biological impulses to multiply and consume, but that such urges will eventually lead to our own extinction. This is where embracing climate and environmental science as well as biophysical economics will go a long way in halting our own self-destructive behaviors. It may well take a much greater materialization of our ongoing ecological crisis before the powers-that-be internalize that message.
Halloween is around the corner and it’s become a bit of escapism for me from the real monsters sitting at our doorstep. When I was a kid I never had any idea or warning from my peers that everyday life would be wrought with so many bloodcurdling terrors. Such realities as climate change and ocean acidification are ever-present boogeymen slowly and methodically stalking us. Compounding the fear was the revelation that the cause of such civilization-ending phenomena stemmed from our exploitation of energy sources serving as the very foundation for our economy. We were killing ourselves and no one could stop it! This is a scenario more frightening than anything dreamed up in a Hollywood horror movie.
Delving deeper into these subjects only brings more unease as we learn that our self-inflicted eco-collapse is happening concurrently with the depletion of our carbon-based energy sources. Good God! Our food supply is at risk! We’re running straight for a cliff! Surely if we turn on the television set we will be greeted with warnings of our impending calamity, and our leaders will be doing everything in their power to save us. Holy Christ! Television has devolved into a mere propaganda tool of corporations! The politicians are whores to big business! The democratic process and elections are no more than an ultra-expensive ‘reality tv’ series funded by monied interests! The Supreme Court, along with all other mainstream institutions, has become a puppet of the corporatocracy.
Well then certainly the captains of industry will be intelligent enough to steer us away from this approaching doom. For the love of God! They are corrupted as well! The masses are simply pawns in their game of profit accumulation and market domination! The purpose of the Security and Surveillance State is to protect the interests of the elite and crush dissent! The Earth is just another planet to be commoditized by the ‘Free Market’, a force looked upon as more tangible and important than anything in nature! We’ve constructed a dual reality in which money is more important than air, water, and soil! God help us!!!
My last hope is that I can talk to people about all this scary stuff and maybe get some consolation. For the love of God! They all think I’m a doomsday nut and don’t want to hear about any of it! They say that I’ll be locked up in a mental institution if I keep talking about such crazy things, or I’ll get caught up in the net of Homeland Security for rocking the boat! Everyone is going about their daily lives as if none of what I point out is real and that things will go on as they have in perpetuity! “Technology will solve everything,” they say. “Don’t worry about it!”
You see, I wasn’t kidding about the frights of Halloween being pretty lame when compared to what’s confronting us in the world of globalized industrial civilization.
Below is an interesting video documenting the issue of climate change over the last 25 years amongst our ‘talking head’ politicians. It amounts to a lot of lip service while global fossil fuel usage escalates. Could it be that our present way of life just isn’t possible without carbon energy? Without some unforeseen breakthrough in energy and a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, the answer is yes. Current alternative energy sources won’t fill the gap. Can we power down from the globalized industrial economic model to a more sustainable, smaller human-scale economy? Yes, but it would be radically different from what we have now and social power would have to decentralized into the hands of local communities. Even with an environmentally benign energy source, we would still be running into other planetary barriers with our infinite growth economic model.
The “C” Word: Climate Change Goes Missing From 2012 Election:
In this short video, science historian Naomi Oreskes gets at the heart of why we fear withdrawal from our carbon-based way of life.
The price of inaction is obviously too great to ignore – possible runaway climate change, mass starvation, and the collapse of modern civilization. Yet the inertia of the system, corporate dominance of the global economy, and the self-interests of our elite prevent the steps required to avert disaster.
Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren’t these the processes driving the environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them. ~ George Monbiot
Certainly building personal resilience and preparedness may help you in the short-term, but what about your children and grandchildren? We are all at risk from a global ecological collapse, no matter how big your food vault or how robust your off-the-grid homestead. Getting involved with those who want to change the system is not a waste of time.
What was that Einstein quote again?…”Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Another blogger, the Conflicted Doomer, posted a write-up of why she was voting for Obama this November:
…I’ve thought about voting for one of the third party candidates – either the Peace and Justice Party or the Green Party – but, quite honestly, neither has a chance in hell of winning and by the time either gained enough strength to have a viable chance, the party will likely be over (though that wouldn’t preclude me from voting for them for Congress or at the local level). If there is any chance of enough change coming to at least hold a nation together while the Empire goes down, it will have to come from the Empire’s rulers because they think it will save the Empire. It won’t, of course, but it might save the nation.
You may see that as compromising my principles. I see it as pragmatic. I’m not telling you how to vote here, only why I am voting for the person I will vote for in November. You have already, I hope, done your own wrestling and come to your own conclusions as I write this.
I’ve often said here, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties when it comes to running the country, because neither party can let go of the illusion that the Empire is the nation. For the most part, I believe that, although I do think that if you stand that dime on its edge, you might find such a difference. And in the end, it’s that slim, dime’s edge of a difference I see that finally decided which way I’ll cast my vote…
While I understand her logic, I don’t agree with her conclusion. Casting your vote with one of the two parties is what the establishment wants the populace to do. It keeps the oligarchic powers in place and preserves the ongoing corruption. Thinking that change will have to come from the figureheads of status quo is a naive and dangerous belief, and it’s this foolish mindset that has gotten us the “elections” we have today – a corporate-funded reality TV series that runs every four years with the same results…
Voting pragmatically is what keeps the indistinguishable and corrupt two-party system in place. Wedge issues are simply red meat for the populace to fight over and keep voting for “the lesser of two evils.” Core issues like U.S. militarism, the security and surveillance state, wealth inequality and the destruction of the middle class, monied interests controlling government, climate change and a fossil fuel-based economy, as well as other environmental issues, etc. will stay the same between the two parties.
M. G. Piety explains why voting within the confines of a morally bankrupt system only leads to further entrenchment of corporate rule and a deeper grave for the long-dead liberal class.
…There’s been a lot of angry posturing from Americans who think of themselves as progressive about how the purported political center in this country has been moving inexorably to the right, yet it’s these very people who are directly responsible for the shift. If you vote for a candidate whose farther right than you would prefer, well, then you’re shifting the political “center” to the right. Republicans aren’t responsible for the increasingly conservative face of the democratic party. Democrats are responsible for it. Democrats keep racing to the polls like lemmings being chased by the boogeyman.
“This is not the election to vote for real change” runs the democratic refrain. We’re in a crisis! We must do whatever it takes to ensure that the republicans don’t get in office even if that means voting for a democrat whose policies we don’t really like and which are only marginally distinguishable from those of the republican candidate. That “margin” is important, we’re reminded again and again. That little difference is going to make all the difference.
Even if that were true, which it ought to be clear by now it is not (see Bart Gruzalski’s “Jill Stein and the 99 Percent”), it would still offer a very poor justification for voting for a candidate one doesn’t really like. Why? Because it is an expression of short-term thinking. Thomas Hobbes argued that privileging short-term over long-term goals was irrational, and yet that’s what we’ve been doing in this country for as long as I can remember. Americans are notoriously short-term oriented. As Luc Sante noted in a piece in the New York Review of Books, America is “the country of the perpetual present tense.” Perhaps that’s part of the anti-intellectualism that Richard Hofstadter wrote about. “Just keep the republicans out of office for this election!” we’re always commanded. “We can worry about real change later!”
Of course anyone who stopped to think about it ought to realize that that mythical “later” is never going to come. Our choices are getting worse not better, and if we keep invoking the “lesser of the two evils” to justify them, we are in effect, digging our own graves…
Voting with your conscience is the right thing to do despite the belief that a third party has no chance. Registering your disgust with the system is the best action you can take in our faux election process that amounts to nothing more than a corporate auction.
Some other thoughts on the subject…
“The lesser-of-two-evils argument is morally obtuse, and dangerous, the first, because it means complicity with policies ultimately destructive, the second, because it induces an undeserved self-righteousness which next time around would yield further compromise. If the people are gulled and lulled into the acceptance of mock-democracy, courtesy of Goldman Sachs and waterboarding apologist Brennan, with Obama presiding over the bread-and-circuses routine, heaven help us.”
~ Norman Pollack
“The only people who will benefit from the election of either Romney or Obama are those associated with the private oligarchies that rule America.”
~ Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
“As the Republicans get more right-wing, the Democrats follow them, staying just one step behind. That will continue as long as right-wing Democrats can get elected by saying that the Republicans are worse.”
~ Richard Stallman
For those who continue to fall back on the comforting excuse of “voting for the lesser of two evils” in the morally ambiguous and desperate hope of receiving some social bread crumbs, you are complicit in supporting America’s inverted totalitarianism and the strengthening of a Corporate Fascist State.
I was doing a little net surfing this morning and wondered what my buddy Jeremy Scahill has been up to. Shoot, it’s been 6 months since I’ve seen an article from him. A recent video of him reaffirms why I like him so much…
We live in this culture where we have this reality television which has become the real world, and what’s being done with our dollars, and with our soldiers, and in foreign countries in our name has become page seven. ~ Jeremy Scahill
He still has a sense of humor too.
Concerning those debates, which in this day and age are only another reality TV production brought to you by Wall Street, Democracy Now had a truly jaw-dropping show on the corporate takeover of the political debates over the last couple of decades. Secret agreements were formed between the two parties which framed the “debates” so that only predetermined, soft-ball questions would be asked and no third party candidates would be allowed to participate. When you watch a “presidential debate”, what you are seeing is pure fluff and staged answers. You might as well be hearing ventriloquist voices emanating from manikins. And to top it all off, one of the primary corporate sponsors of the debates is Anheuser-Busch. How fitting… Bud Light and cheesy made-for-TV “reality” shows constitute the method by which the American sheeple choose their ‘leaders’. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I urge you to watch this interview. It explains a lot about the development of the modern American Cororatocracy and the dumbing down of its population of “consumers”.
Here is George Farah’s Website (click the pic to go there):
Epic ice melt in the Arctic puts on a spectacular demonstration illustrating the consequences of our orgy on fossil fuel consumption, yet the global bureaucrats’ and corporatists’ only reaction is to race northward for further resource plundering.
New Zealand’s Kennedy Graham MP, who has tried to raise such points with his country’s bureaucrats and corporatists, has an interesting article out which questions whether these business suits he deals with are living on the same planet he is:
…A quarter century, actually, since the US Senate and the Brundtland Report put the issue on the international agenda. We’ve had, since then, Rio and Cairo, Kyoto and Marrakesh, Copenhagen and Cancun and Durban, and Rio again.
But the past week has been especially intensive, and this for two reasons. The NZ Parliament is conducting hearings on the Government’s bill to amend the ETS[emissions trading scheme], in response to the Advisory Panel’s report of 2011. And, concurrently and with no strong causal link, the latest scientific findings of climate change are reported in.
So, in the past week, I have asked two questions of the Government on climate change. Taken together, they traverse the range of the issue – the NZ Government’s domestic instrument for combating climate change, and its appreciation of the global reality out there.
The first questioned the Government on what the Green Party critiques as a weak emissions trading scheme, ‘subsidising polluters’ and incurring considerable net fiscal cost to the taxpayer. The second queried whether, in drafting the latest amendments to the ETS, the Government had sufficiently taken into account the latest scientific findings.
In short, the Government’s response was as follows:
– The amendments defer any strengthening of the ETS because we live in fragile economic circumstances and it is ‘not a stellar time’ to increase charges and taxes. The changes did not amount to ‘subsidies’, and indeed New Zealand was on track to more than meet its five-year Kyoto obligations.
– The Government had, indeed, adequately accounted for the latest scientific findings, but it has to take into account a whole range of factors such as the global developments and employment levels in New Zealand.
This is as close as it gets to a meaningful exchange in the NZ Parliament on the future of the planet. I acknowledge that Ministers Groser and Bridges are well-meaning and competent. I count them as friends. Tim Groser, in particular, has huge international experience and reputation.
That does not make them necessarily right in what they are doing. It is possible for such people to be egregiously wrong, fatefully, fatally.
Effectively, the ministers are acknowledging that the amendments weaken the ETS in the sense of deferring sectoral obligations, and seek to explain why – protection of jobs, firms and investment at home against risk competitiveness during tough global economic times.
That is circular logic, and it rests on an erroneous premise. We are entering the Global Ecological Crisis. An ecological crisis means an economic crisis. They are one and the same thing. You do not defer measures to combat an ecological crisis because you are in an economic crisis. You deal with them as one crisis, and seek to resolve ‘it’ immediately.
The latest scientific findings are alarming. They possibly portend a new era for humanity – one where dangerous anthropogenic climate change may arrive within half a decade out, not half a century.
– Arctic ice extent, as measured this month by the US Snow & Ice Data Center, is 49% below the past 30-year average. Between 2007 and ’11 it has dropped from 4.17 m. sq. km to 3.41 m. sq. km., an 18% drop in four years. The different trends in Antarctica, where there is some cooling and ice-accretion, is understood by scientists to be consistent with an increase in average global temperature.
– Russian scientists on the Viktor Buinitsky research vessel have found methane fields in the Laptev Sea of 1 km. in diameter. Methane deposits in the seabed near Spitzbergen are effervescing to the surface.
– This has been described by Cambridge University scientist, Prof. Wadhams, as ‘terrifying news’. It facilitates the release of potent methane gas from land-based tundra and seabed floor, reducing Earth’s albedo effect, risking a positive feedback loop on temperature increase that can breach unpredictable tipping-points. While we must await the IPCC’s 5th assessment report in 2013, the latest specific findings are of far-reaching concern.
I confess I experience my share of surreal moments in the NZ House of Representatives when I ask these questions and receive the answers I do. It is as if we truly are, my National MP colleagues and I, on different planets.
For I am asking questions, in as measured tones as I can, of what appears to me to be about the future of the planet and humanity, and they are answering as if (a) it is just another problem and (b) I am something of an irritant.
No-one will be more relieved than I shall, if the science proves to be wrong or excessively ominous. I shall simply look stupid. That will be my preference, since my grand-children will have a decent future.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 