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Why I won’t vote (and you shouldn’t either)

19th June 2011, 10:00 pm by Stan

In the 2008 General Election in the United States, I cast my vote for Barack Obama to become the President of the United States. I stated publicly that it was important to me to vote for Obama for three reasons.

First, I wanted to rebuke the race-baiting of the campaign, beginning in the Primaries with Clinton and in the General Election by most of the Republican street. It became a question of solidarity with black people, not an election.

Second, I wanted to rebuke the Republicans for the lawless Bush years.

Third, I wanted to demonstrate once and for all to die-hard Democrats and ever-hopeful independents that the wars, the economic crisis and the depredations of the rich against the poor were not the exclusive province of Republicans. I said so before I voted. I said that Obama would behave like a Bill Clinton, because he is of the same ilk – a tireless shill for the Democratic Leadership Council, which is a tireless proponent of whatever Wall Street and the war-makers tell them.

I was proven right about the last; and that proof still fails to penetrate the consciousness of many who will support Obama even if he were to dress up in a pig costume and masturbate into the fountain at DuPont Circle, singing “Deutschland Uber Alles.”

Disclosure

I am not categorizable within the current popular discourse about politics. I am not a Democrat or Republican. I am not a conservative or a liberal or a progressive.

Being Wrong for the Right Reasons

The reason I am finished with this kind of probative voting is that by now all who can be convinced probably are convinced; and all who treasure the delusion of American democracy more than the evidence of their senses will continue to cling to those delusions until they die. Now, I want to convince those disillusioned with Obama to consider a deeper problem than Obama’s personal moral failures, which accompanied his naked ambition far in advance of his announcement for presidential candidacy. I want to convince as many people as possible to quit voting altogether.

I for one am registered to vote now in the State of Michigan; and I intend to go to every major election to stand outside the polls with a sign that says, “I am not voting because the choices are intolerable.” I hope a million others will join me in 2012 to do the same thing; but I doubt they will. Those who care enough to think about voting at all are already in the minority; and of those the majority remain convinced that elections might fundamentally change society.

This is wrong for all the right reasons. People who are unhappy with the status quo and who want to change it for unselfish reasons – and there are many of these people from across the political spectrum – are genuinely motivated by their good will. They simply don’t understand yet that the most important choices are made by flows of cash before a single voter has a say in these so-called elections. They don’t understand that the most important topics related to changing our society are excluded by both parties, censored by ruling class media, and that these excluded topics mask the substantial agreements between the putative opponents. They don’t understand that elected officials have very little power once in office, or that the system is now designed to prevent anyone in office from having power in any critical realm sufficient to make changes in the relative power of the rich and the rest.

The only exception to that, in my opinion, is the ability of the President of the United States to stop wars and end the forward-deployed US military presence overseas. No candidate who advocates this with any seriousness will get past the first gate. If she does, I’ll break my promise and vote twice for her.

The reason it won’t happen is that any candidate that doesn’t give behind-the-scenes reassurances will face a tidal wave of money.

Differences

Let me start explaining myself by responding to the strongest argument I’ve heard for voting. The argument goes something like this:

Whether you like it or not, the political system we are stuck with for the time being chooses officials by election; and those officials make, interpret and enforce laws that shape society. Even if the choices we get in elections are choices between two or more people whose access to cash is the major determining factor in deciding who can run for office, the result will determine who exercises that power. If there is any difference at all between two hypothetical candidates, then we are obliged to ensure that the least offensive candidate wins.

In presidential races, this argument is ramped up a bit by the power of a President to appoint members to federal courts and in particular to the Supreme Court.

Many opponents of this argument make the claim that there is no real difference between candidates, and that the two parties are really a single party with two names. This claim contains a grain of truth, even though it is essentially dishonest. There are differences between the two US political parties, and restating the similarities – which are striking and important – does not disprove the differences.

Some notable similarities between the two parties as a whole (there are a few dissidents tolerated in each party, so long as they don’t have the power to derail the majority positions) are commitments to capitalism, to US imperial power, to so-called drug wars, to agricultural subsidies for agribusiness, to Zionism, to neoliberalism (and its public face “free trade”), to the military-industrial complex, and to expansions of executive privilege when either party has executive power. These common positions are seldom discussed because (1) competing parties don’t emphasize similarities, they emphasize differences, (2) the ideology in which the public has been schooled by ruling class media, the punditocracy, and mainstream academics considers these aspects of the status quo to be axiomatic, (3) the practices of imperial power, neoliberal economics, etc. are essential to the stability of the existing organization of social power, and (4) raising these issues for a genuine debate could threaten the positions of people who are in power, whether that power inheres in politics, industry, finance or media.

Notable differences between the two parties have evolved and continue to evolve based on the evolution of competing interests among various constituencies. White men tend to vote Republican. African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Small business owners tend to vote Republican. Labor unions tend to vote Democratic.

These tendencies have changed over the years, as society has changed. The Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th Century proudly called itself the party of white supremacy. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the growth of the military-industrial complex (he actually gave it that name).

In the 1960s, the Republican Party took advantage of white discontent at two Democratic Presidents who had signed civil rights legislation into law. Richard Nixon’s campaign called this the “Southern Strategy,” and it led to a massive migration of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic Party. Likewise, there was an exodus of white voters from the Democrats to the Republicans.

Since then, a new demographic appeared on the American scene – the suburbanite. Suburbanites, according to Matthew Lassiter – author of “The Silent Majority,” had a fixed set of common political identities: homeowner, taxpayer, commuter, school parent, and consumer. As the suburban population grew, this set of political identities became hegemonic in American politics, and both parties now cling to their traditional popular bases as they compete heavily for the loyalty of Suburbia.

So there is a dynamic evolution of parties and bases that constitute a recursive feedback loop of influence. And there are differences between the two parties as a result, even though the struggle for Suburbia is further homogenizing the parties.

Right now there is a crisis in the Republican Party because it consists of two antithetical narratives – libertarians and conservative evangelicals. Time will tell how this contradiction shakes out. There may be a similar shake-up in the Democratic Party between technocrats and populists, though this hasn’t yet reached the boiling point.

Because both parties define themselves against one another, each has a stake in the two-party system; and because neither party disagrees on the stability-fundamentals (military-industrialism, neoliberalism, Wall Street, etc.), the debates between them are limited to the ways in which each defines themselves against the other.

Electing one candidate instead of the other can make a difference. It will not be a systemic difference, but short-term differences can be pretty scary.

Fear

Black people, as one example, have good reason to fear Republicans. For many years now, since Nixon’s Southern Strategy in fact, the overriding appeal – never spoken aloud in public – of the Republican Party has been an appeal to white negrophobia. In 1981, Republican strategist gave an interview in which he said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now… you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is… blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Despite Atwater’s claim that encoding the language (called “dog-whistling”) is somehow defusing racism is fairly preposterous, but the admission is clear that Republicans are signaling to constituents to arouse their negrophobia.
So Republicans are arousing fear in black people (more and more now of Latin American immigrants, too, though some Democrats have also jumped onto that bandwagon); and many black voters vote Democratic – regardless of how mediocre the Democratic politician – out of fear of Republicans.

An African American friend of mine once told me, “Voting for Nader is an exercise of white privilege.”

She was in a very real sense right. I am not advocating voting for Nader. I’m advocating not voting at all; and her critique could be leveled against me as well, if I believed that the short term defensive interests of African America outweigh the long term damage that has been done and will continue to be done to African America and a lot more people by short-term, defensive voting in the two-party monopoly. It was Bill Clinton that signed the law that facilitated the shameful overflow of American prisons with African American and Latin@ prisoners.

A similar phenomenon exists with regard to legal abortion. In a 2009 Gallup Poll, 44% of women supported legal abortion, while 49% opposed; and 54% of men supported legal abortion, while 39% opposed it. For those voters who are most passionate on this issue, there is a clear difference between the two parties. The Republican Party largely opposed legal abortion; and the Democratic Party largely supports it.

Many anti-abortion voters consider abortion to be tantamount to murder, so they have a real fear of pro-abortion officials. Conversely, many legal abortion advocates see this as a women’s rights issue and have a genuine fear of anti-abortionists.

Given the powerful fears generated around these issues, it is more difficult to make the case for simply not voting, when there are clear differences between the parties at least on some issues. It is dishonest to make the claim that there are no differences between the parties; and if this is the sole reason for discouraging voting, it can easily be invalidated.

That is not my argument for not voting. I don’t believe, however, that fear ought to be a reason for voting either.

One of my arguments for not voting is that participation itself in the process legitimates something that is not legitimate.

There is also an argument against the legitimacy argument that goes like this:

If voting makes any difference at all, then voting the lesser of two evils – while not a solution – does at least apply the brakes when the polity is headed in the wrong direction. Refusing to vote simply because it might legitimate the process is refusing to get one’s hands dirty and allowing the greater evil just so you can claim some moral high ground, while real people will be affected if the greater evil prevails in the election.

Again, this strikes me as a powerful argument, assuming one accepts a utilitarian moral standpoint – that is, that the ends justify the means. Some of the ends are pretty persuasive, e.g., protecting Social Security (one near and dear to my aging 60-year-old heart), protecting the minimum wage, etc.

Boiling the Frog

The problem with the argument is that appeals to specific, short-term interests to continue to legitimize the process with our participation is never a one-time tactic. It is renewed indefinitely, as long as there is something that needs protection through rearguard voting. There will always be something that qualifies as an end that will continue to demand the same means. Meanwhile, many of those practices and policies that both parties agree on (Wall Street hegemony, foreign wars, subsidies for the rich, etc.) are perpetuated and legitimized along with those more narrow interests. We are demonstrating our dependency on the lesser evil that allows lesser-evil politicians to claim a mandate for themselves, as they continue to take our votes for granted while they betray many constituents once they are in office.

There is simply no end to defensive voting; and what it has resulted in over time is a steady increase in power for the most powerful who control both parties. So the short-term advantages are actually lost incrementally over time. This is the frog-boiling process. The frog won’t jump out of the pot of water if you turn up the heat very slowly, because the frog gets used to the gradual increase in heat… until the frog is boiled.

Defensive voting, because it is inevitably recycled through every election is the very basis of the current trap’s stability. There is little doubt what Republicans will do in office when they control the executive and legislative branches. We have seen them in action. But what never gets mentioned in this equation is that we have seen exactly the same things happen, on exactly the same trajectories, when Democrats were in control, giving the lie to the idea that Democrats will defend anyone except Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Obama’s performance so far is living proof of precisely this, and was true before Democratic sellouts of their constituents led to their election debacle in 2010. He has expanded Bush’s wars, rubber-stamped the Bush policies to consolidate arbitrary executive power, refused to support the unions and workers, continued the drive to privatize Social Security, continued the policy of illegal kidnappings and torture, the support for building more nuclear power plants, co-signed a coup d’etat in Honduras and tacitly endorsed the Bush coup in Haiti, continued the same disastrous policies of the Federal Reserve Chair and bailed out the very same bad actors in Wall Street whose depredations led to our current economic malaise (a process that was substantially facilitated by Bill Clinton’s administration).

The only efficacious political group is the ruling class, no matter which party is in power. To believe otherwise is to ignore the empirical evidence of history. And voting for third-party candidates that don’t have a chance in hell of getting elected is just as silly an exercise of faith in the same system.

The problem is not electoral outcomes; it is elections. The things we call elections in the United States are not in the least democratic. They are a consumer choice between Coke or Pepsi. Why do we try to convince ourselves otherwise? Choose neither. If someone pours it down your throat, at least the coercion is not something we help to cover up by wearing a sticker that says, “I voted.”

Voting defensively, that is, voting out of fear of the worst, has not stopped and will not stop the inevitable movement of policy and law toward an ever more reactionary orientation. This is not the result of elections, but of changing material conditions for the ruling class. They have squeezed what they can out of the world, and now that the world is drying up, they are coming for you.

Concentrating Incentive to Power

Clearly, those with the least stake in elections are the least likely to participate in them; which sets up another dynamic wherein fewer and fewer people participate, and the remaining voters who continue to vote gain comparatively more influence. It’s fairly simple math: if 75% participate, then winning requires 37.51% , whereas if 25% participate, then winning requires a mere 12.51%. These smaller and smaller groups that vote are more likely to be massaged through policy by elected officials, leaving out the non-participants; and voting blocs that remain intact will gain more influence during low participation because they constitute a greater portion of active voters.

The concentration of incentive via lower turnout leads to greater responsiveness to those smaller interests and greater neglect of non-participants, who then have even less incentive to vote. The political organization of insider-groups increases; and the political organization of outsider-groups disappears.

This might seem like an argument for greater participation, but the two parties have learned to game the system for big turnouts and for small ones; and the two parties backers are the same stratum, often the same people.

Show Me the Money

The hypothesis that simply getting people to turn out to vote can change the overall picture does not take into account that money and organization are the most effective means of turning out voters; and those with little of either cannot make a dent in the numbers. Media buys, in particular, make a tremendous difference in organized, well-funded campaigns and grassroots campaigns. One television ad can reach more potential voters than 10,000 canvassers working around the clock.

Here is one of the crucial realities about elections: money. There is nothing original that needs to be said on this topic. Money and politics research has shown again and again, unequivocally, the single most important factor in getting someone elected is a campaign treasury. Money buys influence in school districts. Money buys influence in neighborhood associations. Money buys influence in churches. Money buys influence in politics. This is a money-dependent society, where money counts more than everything else.

Even a simple city council race in many places costs tens of thousands of dollars. As of 2008, the average campaign for a seat in Congress cost more than $1 million. Senate races cost tens of millions, with the hotly-contested Minnesota Senate race costing more than $46 million between the two candidates. Presidential races will from now on cost in the billions. Obama spent $730 million in 2008, next to McCain’s $333 million.

The idea that popular political forces can amass campaign treasuries that outstrip giving by the rich is an ill-informed fantasy. This fantasy does not take into account the wealth stratification that precedes elections. 24% of all wealth in the US in 2010 was held by one percent of the population. When you look at the top 20% of the population, that quintile controls fully 85% of the income. This means that if you are in the bottom 80% of the US population, your combined assets are five percent less than the combined assets of the top one percent. Moreover, the further down the scale you are, the lower the percentage of your wealth is available for spending beyond necessity. So if the bottom 80% percent of the population gave five percent of their total income to one political campaign, that would be 3/5% of the total, which could be outstripped by the top one-percent using a mere 1% of its total income.

In the United States, the majority of the most powerful enterprises are multinational corporations (MNC), with substantial holdings overseas. The MNCs are partnered with non-US financial elites, who with their US partners and their US corporate charters, have a direct vested interest in US elections. Worldwide, this income-asset stratification is even more profound, with two percent of the global population controlling more than half of the monetized wealth in the world, with one percent holding 40% of global wealth.

This doesn’t even take into account the strategic spending that goes on through campaign contributions and lobbying directed at key gatekeepers within the established order. Key committee chairs in Congress can act as roadblocks to any legislation they wish. Buy one, get a lot of stuff free.

So the truth is, when you get your choice between a pro-this or anti-this candidate, you are second in line. Anyone who is pro-80% against the interests of the one-percent has already been culled from the herd. And there is not one single thing that any of us can do about it. We are all trumped by money. We ought to just admit it.

As long as the system is challenged on its own terms, the logic of money will be invincible.
— Alf Hornborg

Fantasy Tweaks

I once worked for an organization that promoted something called publicly-financed elections, that is, elections that are subsidized using public money, disallowing private campaign contributions. In theory, this is a grand idea. Each candidate who can show a minimum level of support through petition signatures can qualify for a fraction of the total public campaign fund. Everyone gets the same; and there are no thermonuclear spending escalations like we see every year now. The problem is that this system has to be voluntary; and no one who accepts the public money will be able to spend a fraction of what the privately financed candidates can. And money is required to get the signatures in the first place.

So the better idea is to impose spending limits on a campaign. But the Supreme Court has ruled that campaign money is a form of constitutionally protected speech.

That’s how this works. Citizens want something that will threaten incumbents who know how to operate in the current system (by fundraising), and their counterparts in the courts trump any future legislation in an arena where citizens have no power to intervene.

Someone might suppose that the internet will enable a poorly-funded but charismatic candidate to end run the wealth primary; but anyone who knows information technology knows that money is the decisive factor in I.T.’s employment, too.

What if you run a candidate from a different party? Most, but not all, political junkies know that the US has very strong laws that prevent ballot access by third parties. Each state has its own separate laws, but all of them make it very difficult to get on the ballot as a third party; and the history of third party runs is so embarrassingly difficult, that most voters who agree with the positions of the third party candidate will fall back on the fear-based utilitarian practice of choosing the lesser-evil who is “electable.”

Democrats vote against expanded ballot access as ruthlessly as Republicans do. Everyone who is in office got there with support from the party’s bureaucratic apparatus, which each one knows how to navigate, and they are not going to enable future challenges from the outside. Both parties would have plenty to fear from expanded ballot access. Because expanding access nationwide would entail 50 separate statewide campaigns, each challenging a system of long standing party-interest group codependency and patronage, this becomes an uphill struggle. In states where Greens and Libertarians have gained access, the states have made them re-petition every four years, starting from scratch, to get back on the ballot.

If they can’t get you coming, they are going to get you going.

Party Bosses

The parties will not allow a dissident candidate to run unless that candidate is safely contained in a single district (think Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul). If a dissident goes for a more important office, as Kucinich and Paul did, or if a candidate pisses off key funders and interest groups, the party will dump that member with all the regret a snake shows for eating a mouse.

Both parties have bosses. These bosses are bosses in every sense of the word. And they look after the health and welfare of their parties as their boss-life-support system, not as an agent of social change. These are vast, top-down institutions.

In 2001, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of DeKalb County, Georgia, made public remarks critical of the State of Israel. This flew in the face of Democratic Orthodoxy; and in 2002, her own party fielded a well-funded candidate – Denise Majette, a black woman like McKinney – in the primaries to defeat her. The Democratic Party knew full-well that in an open primary (where voters can choose which party’s primary to vote in), pro-Zionist Republicans would cross over to vote for Majette because they knew no Republican could win in her district.

This kind of cynical maneuvering is apparent in both parties. And both parties receive their money from many of the same sources… from the one-percenters.

What is the Alternative?

Why does there have to be an alternative to voting? The idea of there being an alternative to voting presupposes that somehow voting is efficacious. I think I have shown that it is not. That is the crucial point. Voting only makes a temporary and cosmetic difference in the real world, the real United States, right now, in 2011.

The alternatives are boycott, strike and non-violent disruption. Even before those measures, the alternative is to delay, dissemble and disobey where necessary. (Warning: these take more work than voting.)

Power

A mistaken-in-my-view idea that is widely and thoughtlessly embraced is that people exercise power through voting and that any other kind of power is illegitimate. This belief presupposes that our relations with other people are antagonistic, and that we all need to participate in a process of determining which 51% ought to exercise power over the remaining 49%. Even if the issues that are put to a vote weren’t predetermined by the guardians of the ruling class (which they are), and even if many important issues weren’t foreclosed to voting by the same ruling class (which they are), I don’t want to be part of imposing my will on someone else.

There are two kinds of power: the power-over and the power-to. One of our main problems is that we have surrendered our own power-to to the people and institutions that have the power-over. The same government that drops bombs on Afghani children is educating our own children. The same government that is indebting out children to Wall Street is the same government that will put them in prison if they don’t accept their lot.

The state is a reflection, condensation and expression of existing power relations. It has never been otherwise. Behind the public personalities of elected officials are hundreds of thousands of functionaries spread throughout the recesses of the state’s administrative apparatus. Each one of them has a job, a job they want to hang onto, because most of them have families that are in some way dependent on that job. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of jobs in the “public sector,” the industries that have a critical fraction of their contracts with various government agencies are also tied to the system. The employees of those industries are likewise bound to the status quo, as are the families of those employees. The people who work in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors are definitely tied to the system, since the last bailout went directly to their employers. Most farmers are bound to the public sector with subsidies, as are most utilities. The retail sectors that surround government establishments and military installations depend on those regular government issued checks.

Because people are loathe to exercise friendship or hospitality to the down-and-out, we have used our governments and our churches to institutionalize care… to provide impersonal services in service warehouses, because while we claim to embody some Judeo-Christian tradition of care, the command to love the neighbor is too difficult to take literally and personally. Then we can debate, far away from the “service stakeholders” who does and who does not merit “assistance.” One side will refuse to help with its own resources and invoke the right to property, and the other side will blame them for their lack of compassion (with appropriated funds) while never lifting a hand themselves to befriend or personally assist these compassion-object abstractions that they’d really rather not deal with. Let a social service expert do it; that is what they get paid for.
Yes, I am disrespecting right and left on this count. A society run by technocrats is a shit society no matter whose technocrats are running it. Take responsibility for one another, and quit relying on “experts.”

Now a host of people are dependent on the government for such services, and no one on either side of the ideological debate is willing to think outside the system that is running up against a systemic crisis. The very money that is the lifeblood of the whole system is in jeopardy of losing its value, and the secular trend of escalating fossil fuel consumption that underwrites our entire civilization is on the brink of a permanent reversal.

We see that wind-down already, on the financial end, as money is printed for Wall Street and states go broke; but the level of public discourse on the causes of these trends is so dismal that 99% of the people we come into contact with an any given day have no clue what is happening to them.

There are a lot of things people can do with the power-to, as opposed to the power-over. Mainly, they need to get to know each other and start hammering out solutions to their problems locally that in whatever way possible makes them less dependent on only-money. Money is what ties them to the system; money is what makes them dependent; money is the reason they can never exercise any power through the ballot-box

If the two parties were to dissolve into factions, with libertarians splitting from right-wing evangelicals, local business people getting fed up with corporations, progressives breaking with DLC Democrats, and un-categorizables like me off on our own, then I might vote. That is not on the horizon yet, but I’d be happy to be surprised. I hope no one turns out for that warmonger in the Oval Office in 2012. He has behaved exactly as his rivals would have; and on the issue of war, probably worse. He is now risking the ignition of a war in a nuclear-armed state.

The Ethical Arguments

My problem with elections is more than whether or not they are efficacious, and more than whether or not they legitimize a fraudulent system. As someone who is a small-l libertarian when it comes to making public policies (I don’t think I should tell other people they have to send their kids to state schools or any schools, force people to vacate their homes under immanent domain, tell them that they can’t smoke a joint, prohibit chickens in their yards or punish them for buying raw milk), I am very hesitant to use a ballot to co-sign policies and laws that force half the people to do something they don’t want to do.

We participate in a system domestically where voting allows 51% to impose its will on 49% (and let’s be clear – what either side believes is often the outcome of successful propaganda campaigns). The reason this is problematic may not be obvious to everyone. Why shouldn’t the majority rule? some may ask. Isn’t that democracy?

The question ought to be whether this is the only kind of democracy. This version of democracy means that in almost any case, there is a civil war enacted at the ballot box, which forecloses solutions sought by consensus or sought locally without some general rule being established that cannot take into account the idiosyncrasies of various situations.

I am a supporter of civil rights laws, so this is not an across-the-board Kantian position. Using that same power to force people let the state “educate” their young or jail them for growing pot at home or exercising immanent domain to throw families out of their homes to build highways is an abuse of that power.

I believe in some rules; but I also believe that once any community exceeds a certain size, rules become simplistic, nay idiotic, solutions to complex problems.

The problem is that people have lost any capacity to imagine any method but elections, laws and policies to deal with each other, putting us all on a permanently antagonistic footing.

We live now with dishonest politics, disinformed and disinforming media, disconnected cultures, disjointed economics, dysfunctional communities and disrespected citizens. To attempt to repair such conditions without a morally conscious politics makes as much sense as trying to revive a body without a heart.


— Sam Smith

A morally conscious politics, to me, is neither utilitarian nor rule-based. The ends do not justify the means; and everything we do doesn’t need to be regulated by simplistic, one-size-fits-all rules, that are administered by brainless bureaucracies.

The utilitarian trap is what we are in now, where we let charlatans continue to co-opt us into the gamesmanship of elections where we are forced to choose between two amoral, ambitious satraps for the rich into perpetuity.   It is a sham; and participating in a sham helps perpetuate it. Never forget that Hitler was elected.

Right now, the Obama administration – as reactionary in every sense as the Bush administration – is depending on the most disgruntled of its supporters having no choice in the next election. The power they hold over us is fear. Fear of Republicans, but we just survived eight years of them; and when we changed parties, those same policies remained.
Don’t give them the power. Walk through your fear. Refuse to vote. If those of us they count on shatter the Democrats, then the Ron Paul wing of the Republicans will feel empowered to do the same to the Republicans.

Refuse to be a part of the fraud that are US elections.

Category: General  |  Comment (RSS)

86 Comments

  1. Curt:

    Great article. My wife, who grew up in a former Soviet Republic, described to me how her country deligitimized its communist rulers. For 70 years, her little country had 99% voter participation and always voted for the communists. In 1988, when the people didn’t feel threatened if they didn’t vote, only 12% of them showed up at the polls. Although the communists won that election, they had been deligitmized as a ruling force and soon after, the nationalists took over and broke away from the USSR. The lesson is vote with your feet by staying put on election day and deligitimize the whole corrupt process.

    Mr. Goff, do you have an email I could write to you at? I have a small business proposal you might be interested in.

    Thanks,

    Curt

    20 June 2011, 2:08 am

  2. Stan:

    De made a point on a facebook entry re this post about black folk and wimmin getting the franchise and the struggles thereof. This is also a point that can’t be glossed over, as I suggested above with regard to “a vote for Nader is an exerdise of white privilege.” Aside from some African American comrades from the organized left, Nader did draw primarily disgruntled non-black (mostly white) voters.

    If it weren’t for the concrete realities suggested here, the argument that people suffered and died for it is about as powerful as it gets. However, even if what I say is correct about the efficacy of elections now, the struggle for that franchise accomplished more than the franchise (that was nullified by later machinations of the ruling class as well as demographic evolutions generally). These struggles were important to unmask contradictions in the system that were being used to justify power. MLK talked about living up to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution… because that was where the hypocrisy was on stark display.

    The struggle in South Africa was about the vote. But anyone watching what is going on there now has to agree that the struggle over the vote is over, and the struggle has to be taken now to the death grip of neoliberalism and how it is corrupting the parties.

    The struggle here needs to be twofold imho: first, unmask the system of elections for the fraud that it is, and second to determine efficacious actions to take in lieu of elections that address the underlying problems that electioneering discourse conceals (ie, those things that both parties are in total agreement on that are constitutive of the problem).

    Because we have been so inured to abstraction, we tend to think hypothetically at the expense of the evidence of our own senses. What I mean by that is apparent on facebook, where I see post from a couple thousand people now, and many of them will say things like… all we have to do is take over the Democratic Party one precinct at a time, because there are just a handful of people at that level.

    Any time I hear “all we have to do,” a little red flag pops up that says this is they way I thought back in 1996 when I took a job as a lobbyist and advocate on money and politics issues. Haven’t figured out why, but it is also a very whiteguy thing…

    So someone has done the math and it sounds easy, but when you actually try to do it, you run into all sorts of obstacles. First, you find out that it is very hard to get a dozen people to participate in a scheme like this (whereupon you become irritable and say that the stupidity of others is what is preventing your scheme from working), and you find that people don’t have the time for stuff like this… and at each step along the way, provided you do all the footwork, new obstacles appear, and if you pop up on someone’s radar, they swoop in with their existing organization and resources and crush you like a bug.

    I don’t know how many “if only” schemes like this I’ve heard, that gestate in the minds of people until they appear as full-blown panaceas (campaign finance reform is a big one – also ballot access, proportional representation, instant runoff, et al).

    These hypothetical notions always founder on the rocks of power, which are more formidable and slippery than you imagined. The game is fixed, and they’ve been playing it for a minute now.

    Way back when, I posted a thing about Obama and war that analyzed to some extent the game-theory aspects of national politics. I could try an associate that with Dunbar etc, but right now I have to write this and go to work. The point being at some level beyond the local and beyond certain numbers, game-theory takes over, and the dog-waggery of politics begins. What this engenders is plain dishonesty. I’ve played this game enough to know that when the campaign begins, inconvenient truths are sacrificed daily. Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.

    I know some people say that this is refusing to get your hands dirty, if you abstain from elections to you can tell the simple truth – Obama is making more wars, eg, and more dangerous ones. But I think that’s a false analogy. If I get my hands dirty in the garden, I have not compromised my integrity. I have not given people a good reason not to trust what I say because they know I will equivocate and prevaricate in the service of a game.

    I just have this feeling that we need abstaining truth-tellers more than we need more campaign shills.

    That’s the first struggle as I see it anyway. Get people to recognize and state the truth, without all the management distortions that happen when agendas trump the truth.

    Gotta go to work.

    20 June 2011, 7:52 am

  3. BrianR:

    Stan,
    What about local elections held to vote for council people, judges, board of education, etc.? Would you vote for them?
    -Brian

    20 June 2011, 9:03 am

  4. Bob:

    Yup…votin` just encourages `em…also ..trouble with voting, the government always gets in.

    20 June 2011, 12:23 pm

  5. Stan:

    Local elections are a different animal, I think, depending on the size of the locality. New York is certainly too big to be exempt from this analysis, while Carrboro NC or Adrian MI might not be. I see my mayor at church. But in this case elections are not the abstracted thing they are when too many people are contained in the polis. There is a much higher level of involvement possible between elections. This rant is really one argument for relocalization.

    20 June 2011, 1:14 pm

  6. Michael Anderson:

    I wonder about BrianR’s post….sometime back you stated. Stan, that local elections matter more because the people still have to answer to the local population. I question that, now—-moving back to the old “home town”, and watching events unfold in a place that is economically depressed (and also has a sign on the County marker saying “we honor veterans”), I think that the major systemic rot has gone all the way to the local level. Local politics have always been fractious, but I think the BIG system is in control now. I’d be happy to be varying degrees of wrong….but my heart tells me no.

    20 June 2011, 1:19 pm

  7. Morocco Bama:

    This is an excellent analysis, and I find myself agreeing with most all of it. There are some minor points of quibble, but they’re trivial to the overall point(s) and sentiment.

    I will also add that voting will be ineffective when you have a populace that hasn’t the capacity to think critically. The education system has ensured that the majority are useful idiots, and at this point, manufactured consent is no longer necessary…….the dolts will pretty much do as they’re told.

    However, even if we did have a populace who’s majority could think critically, voting for a leader of the entire population would still pose many challenges and obstacles considering the crisis with which we are confronted. I’m thinking, of course, of Dunbar’s number and how that relates to a Centralized Governance and Representative Democracy in a nation of 310 million. They appear to me to be incompatible and at odds. I’m sure someone will try to rationalize a union of the two, but I think it would be just that, a rationalization to justify trying to fit a square into a round peg hole.

    See, Stan, my understanding of the System isn’t so different from your understanding. Sure, if we take it down to a detail level those differences may be more prominent, but at the level at which you wrote this essay, it’s pretty much spot on, even up to, and including the point about not being easily categorized, and not appreciating being labeled and categorized. Ironically, in political debates, I’ve been called both a Fascist and a Marxist. If anything, I’d say I’m more likened to some form of Anarchist, but even that’s not adequate.

    And, the part about not voting because it legitimates an illegitimate process….I have made that point on other blogs in the past 6-7 years….the very same point. Of course, the rebuttal has always been that of you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to criticize. I love how people abuse the word “right.” Bush often did this…in taunting fashion, IMHO. He would say “and that’s their right,” but with that patented smirk of his as though what he really meant was “for now, you can get away with it…..but just wait, not for long”

    20 June 2011, 2:14 pm

  8. Stan:

    Ah yes. “If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to criticize.”

    It’s fundamentally illogical statement. The conclusion fails to proceed from the premise. In this case, not voting is the criticism.

    I guess I can’t criticize the war, since the guy I voted for has kept it going and expanded it, just as his opponent would have. Same logic, just reversed. I mean, all we are allowed to criticize is what we voted against, right?

    20 June 2011, 2:27 pm

  9. Morocco Bama:

    Michael, that is a great point. The overall System has created, or is creating, such desperate conditions at the local level, that people will vote for expediency, even though that vote is not in their long-term interest….or even their short-term interest. It’s as though a metaphorical gun is to their head….at least those who can think straight. A great example is the gas fracking issue that’s taking place across the entire North American Continent. For those of you haven’t seen this documentary, you really must. It is excellent, and yet another thing to raise your ire….as if there aren’t enough things to do that already. Death by a thousand cuts, as Gail at Wit’s End so aptly put it.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8

    http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2010/11/death-by-thousand-cuts.html

    20 June 2011, 3:13 pm

  10. Susan/catlady:

    Have you read Chris Hedge’s latest on the Tim DeChristopher story? He’s the guy who went to a BLM auction and starting bidding against oil/gas companies for parcels of land. He now faces up to 10 years behind bars.

    But what he had not prepared himself for was the way the justice system would be stacked against him. It became clear during the selection of the jury that he did not stand a chance. As the prospective jurors entered the court, activists handed them a pamphlet printed by the Fully Informed Jury Association. It said that jurors had a right to come to any decision based on the evidence and their consciences.

    “When the judge and the prosecutor found that out, the prosecutor, especially, flipped his shit,” DeChristopher said. “He insisted that the judge tell the jurors that this information was not true. The judge pulled most of the jurors in[to] the chambers and questioned them one at a time. He talked about what was in the pamphlet. He said that regardless of what the pamphlet said it was not their job to decide if this is right or wrong, but to listen to what he said was the law and follow that even if they thought it was morally unjust. They were not allowed to use [their] conscience. They were told they would be violating their oath if they decided this on conscience rather than the evidence that he told them to listen to. I was sitting in that chamber and could see one person after another accept this notion. I could see it in their faces, that they had to do what they were told even if they thought it was morally unjust. That is a scary thing to witness in another human being. I saw it in one person after another brought in the courtroom, sitting at the end of a long table in front of the paternalistic figure of [the] judge with all the majesty around him. They accepted it. They did not question it. It gave me a really good understanding of how some of the great human atrocities happened with the consent of the population, that people can accept what is happening, that it is not their job to question whether any of this is right or wrong.”

    When [Hedges] asked DeChristopher why he did not work within the system, perhaps by backing a progressive Democrat, he answered that “if there was such a thing I might consider it.”

    “I don’t see anyone in our political system advocating for significant change,” he said. “I haven’t ignored the political system…..”

    20 June 2011, 3:51 pm

  11. Todd Boyle:

    I’m a single issue voter, and I will not vote for anybody who won’t try to stop the continual series of wars. Our situation is like a family where one of the family members makes a living by robbing and killing people… gosh it’s so hard to confront them, and to break with them… especially when you get addicted to the money they bring in.

    There’s sociopaths amongst us– the war people– who want to continue a way of life based on killing people in other countries. One after another. The war people first of all are the US military and its supplier industries. Wars always have other segments of Americans promoting them. The oil people, the war churches, or financial people supporting the dollar, etc. These are real, discrete people performing particular roles in a system legalized killing of foreigners, akin to organized crime. I will not tolerate it. I am not on board the American project. I refuse to work in any career related to the financial or power system, or to buy gasoline, period. I condemn most of all, those who keep working for this system when they *know* its morally wrong.

    20 June 2011, 3:53 pm

  12. Ken:

    Stan, the only weak part of your argument is “voting for Nader is an exercise in White privilege?????” So supporting a political platform that supported everyone having access to employment, health care, and housing is “white privilege? This is simply a race baiting argument to justify support for the Democratic Party!

    20 June 2011, 4:23 pm

  13. Stan:

    It is not actually a part of my argument, but an argument I attempt to rebut; though my rebuttal is different from yours. I don’t consider it race-baiting at all. She was saying that white people are not in the gun-sights of this system the same way black people are. On that, I agree with her. This is a much harder choice for black people, because there really is a power differential. If I’d have failed to acknowledge and validate that, I feel I would have been dishonest. There is a reason that so many African Americans populate the US gulag. This is a much scarier country for black than it is for white.

    Nothing to do with an program that had zero chance of winning.

    A program that won’t be employed – even if it says all the right things (they usually try to say too much, which is why the new parties stay so small even before elections) – is cold comfort when the reality ain’t gonna change any time soon.

    I owe an explanation of my parenthetical remark. The left will disagree with me about not voting, suggesting instead that I vote for third parties to strengthen them. As an alumnus of left formations, I’ve seen the Herculean effort that goes into chasing issues to promote all-encompassing programs that never break out of small, bickering, widely-dispersed groups who are joined purely by ideology.

    They claim to be materialists, but they keep trying to fume together parties based solely on shared political beliefs, and they eschew practices that might be formative of a different mindset. I have built more solidarity this year, and had more influence on moving people from a competitive to a cooperative mindset by working in a community garden than I did in any five years of purely “political” (read ideological, ergo the relentless demand for ideological purity) work. Ideas grow out of practice. I think Marx said that.

    The Greens didn’t show me anything different. Sectarian quarrels took up more of their time than most anything else; and that’s because they had no practice except the construction of programs and campaigns… programs and campaigns that had something in them to piss off everyone who wasn’t as evolved as they were, because every issue had to be addressed as if the revolution was going to happen tomorrow.

    No thanks.

    20 June 2011, 5:14 pm

  14. m.c.:

    In 2006 Progressives had relatively good news for the fact that the Democratic Party won the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, the most grass-roots of the the three Federal Election Systems, for the first time since 1994. This was maybe as big a deal in a small way as Obama’s election victory in 2008. If the Domocratic Party can win back the House in 2012, I think its maybe a bigger deal than Obama winning re-election. In the U.S. Senate having less than 60 votes doesn’t matter that much who has the majority. I guess Harry Reid is slightly more than marginally better than Mitch McConnell, and having Democratic Chairs with Subpoena Power is real.

    BTW, did anyone notice Ron Paul winning the Republican Straw Poll in New Orleans yesterday. In an 11 way race, he got 41% of the votes, with Jon Huntsman jr. coming in 2nd with 25%.

    20 June 2011, 8:30 pm

  15. Michael Anderson:

    @ Morocco:

    Downloaded “Gasland”—-thank God Oregon has a dearth of fossil fuels! What is vexing the locals here is how to rehabilitate industry, after the ONLY industry the area has ever known since the beginning of the industrial revolution, lumbering, went south in the 80′s—literally, to the Southern U.S. and the Philippines—draw your own conclusions. That’s all the damn fools can think about—-money. The Indian Casino is the BIG money-maker in town now, and one could certainly argue the Tribes (ALL of ‘em, nation-freakin’-wide) have been corrupted by the Mob. There IS arable land, and good fishing (how long that will last is anybody’s guess), and a healthy climate…and also, 50 miles out to sea, sits a subduction fault that is 50 years overdue for an earthquake of the 9.0 variety.

    We live in interesting times.

    20 June 2011, 8:48 pm

  16. Morocco Bama:

    I hear ya, Michael. That Logger Mentality. I hate to introduce another movie, but I can’t help myself. This was Paul Newman’s directorial debut, and it dealt with a Logging Family and the Logging Mentality. I think it will resonate with you, being from those parts. Here’s a harrowing scene from it. It’s entitled Sometimes A Great Notion.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKdF-IP7rE0

    20 June 2011, 9:50 pm

  17. ethan:

    I want to print this piece out and distribute it all over my neighborhood before every election. Excellent.

    20 June 2011, 10:49 pm

  18. Michael Anderson:

    Saw that one its premiere weekend in ’77 in Eugene, Kesey’s hometown. I think It’s a great film, and one that amply illustrates something that, in the case of areas similar to this one, that TPTB exploit for their gain, and something that Joe Bageant (RIP) wrote well about in “Deer Hunting With Jesus”, and “Rainbow Pie—A Redneck Memoir”.—-proud “Self-reliance”, even if the neoliberal market is the driver, and your so-called self reliance is nothing more than trying to stay alive while the system rolls over you. This is part of the obscene Kafka-esque sell-job we get in the 24/7/365 election cycle our corpo-gubmint spins to us every day.

    I wonder—-if enough of us DON’T vote, will we get letters asking us why we didn’t? Just thinkin’…

    21 June 2011, 12:29 am

  19. DeAnander:

    Speaking of logging, dog-waggery, public amnesia, defective journalism, externalised costs, unaccountable colonial extraction…

    City of Nanaimo (I live here at the moment) is considering a large — $64 mio I think — upgrade to its water system. Reason: water quality is degraded, there’s turbidity, more filtration needed, blahblah. Now… in the last couple of decades the slopes around the watershed that feeds the city system have been systematically clearcut, often closer than the legal limit to stream banks. You can look on Google Earth and see the ravaged mountainsides and how the streams flow into the lakes from which we draw our water. Every rainfall washes silt off those wrecked mountainsides now that the trees are all gone. There is also some speculation that the timber industry used NPK fertilisers on the factory-tree-farm seedlings they planted to “replace” healthy forest. That nitrogen washes down into the streams and guess what, eutrophication plus unaccustomed doses of warm sunlight: overgrowth of algae and other murk-inducing species. Not your clear, cool mountain stream any more: that stream is a product of trees as well as of rock, snowfall, topography etc.

    So the water quality is degraded, and it’s not surprising. But is there any public memory of the sweetheart deals given to the logging companies? Is there any public memory of the logging? Is there any move to demand compensation from the corporadoes who wrecked the watershed? Am I kidding? No, the water just spontaneously became inferior in quality and the taxpayers will just have to deal with it. It all takes place in an ahistorical Now, a kind of Government by Alzheimer’s where there is no yesterday.

    I’m not sure the value of the timber taken from those valleys was as high as $60 mio.

    BTW, I seem to recall that the pulp mill just South of town has negotiated (with the City) an amnesty for taxes. See, they “provide jobs,” so they argue they should not have to pay any property taxes. So the taxpayer who is going to pay for the water quality remediation is the private taxpayer, not the pulp mill that benefits from the (transitory) supply of cheap logs.

    I may not have got every fine detail of this stupid, maddening, and entirely too typical story right, but am fairly confident of the gist. And this sort of thing is happening everywhere on earth, all the time.

    Sometimes I consider the liquidator class, the owners of the factories and logging equipment and all the rest, and I wonder what kind of wonderful it seems to them to own all the worthless money in a crashed economy in an increasingly uninhabitable biosphere. Or do they *really* think they’re going to run off to L5 space colonies or be uploaded into marvelous virtual realities, just in the nick of time (the TechnoRapture)?

    21 June 2011, 12:43 am

  20. joal-tired:

    “They say, ‘If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain,’ but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.” – George Carlin. – just had to. ;)

    This was just another great article to read from FeralScholar, but sadly its the real message that people never get to read…

    While I may not agree that inaction is the best course of action, there is definitely something to be said about the idea of not voting, specifically the power and message it would broadcast, if the majority of the population caught on. The voting process is probably the single most (sadly) important and political involvement that an average person is exposed to. It’s the day that we go out, and do our diligent duty to elect the leader of the “free world”. If a message was going to truly be sent, it would be through the lack of votes at the poll. It would signal not only a message to the politicians (nobody cares/you have no power), but most importantly to the PEOPLE. Because right now, everybody is content with only having 2 parties, 2 freaking pairs of incompetency, as our only selection. They dont ever bother to ask themselves, out of the 300 million people in the country, these 4 individuals are the BEST representation we have a choice of? Nobody ever thinks about the other choices, the other parties, the other philosophies of politics, because we are so engrained in a two party system. Nobody could see through the fog of power, corruption, even when a president’s own son becomes the president under a decade of time. I mean really? Our president has to not only come from the same bloodline, it a father-son relationship, and THEY are the MOST competent leaders we can find? HA! But thats the thing, some people do see the tragic humor in the entire situation, but its mainstream that criticizes and ignores the real issues.

    But back on topic, the right to withold a vote can only be maximized, once people recognize the TRUE meaning behind it. People get caught up in exactly what they want you to believe. That its all just lazy, angry, uneducated, unpatriotic (the killer) people who don’t vote. Its the publics perception of non voters that needs to change, in order to really get this ball rolling. That can be accomplished, if enough people start to see the message via the lack of votes at the polls. Because it has to start somewhere. People need to feel like they not only have choices, but that the choices actually MEAN something.

    Of course, voting is only a small cog in the political machine that requires a COMPLETE overhaul, but it sets the stage for bigger exposure, and ultimately the people’s mainstream opinions and influences over the politics of their own country.

    21 June 2011, 12:44 am

  21. Kit Kimberly:

    Hi, Stan

    Thanks for this piece. It gives me a lot to think about, analysing some issues and expressing some conclusions in ways I couldn’t quite get to myself.

    I would, however, like to question your stats here:

    “In a 2009 Gallup Poll, 44% of women supported legal abortion, while 49% opposed; and 54% of men supported legal abortion, while 39% opposed it. For those voters who are most passionate on this issue, there is a clear difference between the two parties. The Republican Party largely opposed legal abortion; and the Democratic Party largely supports it.”

    First of all, in the polls I found, these numbers reflected whether people called themselves “pro-life” or “pro-choice”, not whether or not they supported legal abortion. A person who is TRULY ‘pro-life’ DOES support legal abortion, because she knows that when abortion is illegal, women die.

    I found THIS poll (also Gallup) that reflects actual attitudes on the legality of abortion: http://www.gallup.com/poll/127559/education-trumps-gender-predicting-support-abortion.aspx

    In this one, 78% of women believe that abortion should be legal under any OR under some circumstances. 26% believe it should be legal under any circumstances, 52% under some circumstances. “Under some circumstances” is a broad category that can range from “if the life of the mother is endangered” to “only within the first two trimesters”.

    I also believe you have the male support/opposition reversed: according to the (original) poll I found, 39% of men consider themselves “pro-choice” and 54% “pro-life”.

    It is bad, and misogyny in the US is rising at an alarming rate (or rather, I think it has always been there but the backlash has allowed it to thrive and rear its ugly head), but it’s not QUITE as bad– and women don’t hate themselves QUITE as much– as your stats seemed to indicate. Based on the recent Walmart vs Women (I know that’s not the real name, but that’s essentially the case), though, I think Roe may well be doomed.

    But again, thank you.

    Sincerely,

    Kit Kimberly

    21 June 2011, 1:33 am

  22. Stan:

    I want to vote for Sepp Holzer.

    21 June 2011, 6:31 am

  23. cabdriver:

    Regarding the election system, my take is that none of it works.

    Voting Democrat doesn’t work.

    Voting Republican doesn’t work.

    Voting third-party doesn’t work.

    Writing in a gag vote doesn’t work.

    Not voting doesn’t work.

    Like you, Stan, I voted for the Democratic candidate for president in 2008. The rational I provided is that even if there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, I’ll settle for the $.01-$09.

    I didn’t even get that. What I got instead was a queasy feeling of complicity in a fraud, along with a suspicion that somewhere, people were laughing up their sleeves at having gotten me to kick a football that they’d once again yanked out of the way.

    The system is broken. It requires a structural solution.

    My particular favored solution is ranked-choice, instant runoff voting. Even if the voter were allowed only two ranked votes (as opposed to ranking the entire selection), that would be a considerable improvement over the present system, where one is forced to choose either one of the two parties of the Duopoly, or risk the role of “spoiler”.

    I think that simply having something of a more detailed and accurate illustration of the spectrum of voters in the tabulation of the ballots as a result of adopting this reform would be a worthwhile first step. And I think that it would attract a lot of people who presently sit out national elections, disdaining them as hopeless exercises.

    But in the conversations and Internet fora where I’ve brought up this reform, I haven’t found sufficient interest in this idea to even generate a discussion.

    One of the most discouraging things about living in this country in this era is that even most of the dissident and the alienated folks seem to be virtually dependent on a hive-buzz in the US mass media to turn their attention toward a given topic. If a television network somehow began doing a week-long special report on instant runoff voting, there’s be a hope of developing a quorum for discussion.

    The biggest obstacle faced by reformers and people with vital ideas in this country is the lack of consciousness of their fellow citizens. That’s the stage where the game is stuck- consciousness raising. Most Americans are apparently content with following the media news cycle, as if they’re greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

    And I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t force people to think for themselves. And I have no interest in forcing my own ideas on them.

    It’s a cynical cliche to say that only catastrophe- or, somewhat more hopefully, the likely prospect of impending catastrophe- carries the power to focus the mind on serious matters such as the ones being discussed here. And most people aren’t there yet.

    21 June 2011, 11:47 am

  24. Stan:

    I really think it is a question of scale. I haven’t formally worked it out, and may never do so; but I have this sense that big is always eventually bad. That’s why – even though I have in the past been an advocate of procedural change, public financing, ballot access, proportional representation, instant runoff, et al – I’m not sure these resolve the problems created by sheer scale.

    The more people that you try to cover with a single rule, the more often that rule will be applied in ways that the rule could not anticipate.

    At a certain scale, likewise, the raison d’etre of elections is hijacked, or transmogrified. The game theory supercedes the relations.

    When everyone becomes preoccupied with the game (the elections) and begins to believe that the game is the only way to change relations, then they are co-opted into the game, isolated, increasingly ideological. When people engage in simple, practical cooperation with people they know, there is something fundamentally different going on… and nowadays, it is subversive to whatever extent it diminishes the extent of our overarching dependency on bureaucracies – whether left or right bureaucracies.

    21 June 2011, 1:47 pm

  25. BillB:

    Some comments: I agree that voting for Obama in 2012 is useless. That said, there is room for debate on some of the points. 1) The lower 300M people could contribute $3 per capita to an effective $1B presidential campaign. Spending more than this is currently ineffective (remember “Governor” Meg Whitman.) So the money advantage of the top !% can’t be brought to bear.
    2) Even the upper class is not completely monolithic. Sometimes too hard a line can backfire, 3) Voting for a 3rd party candidate or even Mickey Mouse is registering a protest, but not voting will be interpreted as just apathy, unless there is a well-known vote vote abstention movement. 4) Do we really need to blame it all on Nader, even indirectly? 5) In Wisconsin and elsewhere the Right is working hard to restrict the franchise, doesn’t this prove that voting is worth at least something?

    21 June 2011, 2:19 pm

  26. Stan:

    I don’t blame Nader, and I have nothing but contempt for the Democratic operatives who attacked him. But I don’t care if anyone interprets my abstinence as apathy. It just doesn’t work, and I’m not going to go along with the illusion that it does because someone who still believes it does judges me to be apathetic.

    Republicans and Democrats both try to find ways to restrict the franchise, either directly or indirectly. I lived for many years in NC, where Democrats ran that state like their fiefdom. That’s part of the gamesmanship. From the standpoint of each party in their competition with the other party – a competition that is real as far as it goes – the people the Republicans want to disfranchise are those with whom I probably share greater interests, true.

    But the single greatest disfranchisement in the US right now is for felonies, and the guy that signed the crime bill that put more people in prison than any country in history was Bill Clinton.

    Your hypothetical math doesn’t take into account that the top 1% could match and quadruple that $1 billion without breaking a sweat. There are a few individuals who could. A few examples (a la Whitman) does not balance the across-the-board correlation between money and electoral success. The wealth primary is effective before the general election.

    21 June 2011, 2:38 pm

  27. cabdriver:

    Stan, I agree with you about scale. I think the limit for a workable polity is probably around 60 million people.

    Currently, each Congressional representative speaks for a population of around 700,000 people. That’s another sign of a broken system.

    But subdividing the almighty USA into five regional states is out of the question. We’re stuck with this mega-nation- which in turn isn’t nearly as sovereign as it pretends to be in many respects, and this was true even during the reign of that supposed rogue unilateralist, George W. Bush.

    That’s a political statement. I think the US military is being employed for purposes other than the national interest, and the attribution of an American Empire in the nationalist sense is in many ways a pretense at this point. The USA has entirely too many creditors to qualify as a sovereign Empire these days.

    So there’s that, too. I’m doubtful there’s much a presidential election can do on that score. Although I’m given to understand that Donald Trump would disagree.

    In any event, I think there’s a larger point to be found in your remarks: instead of Politics, the USA has Elections. Show biz.

    Consider all of the columns that have been written in the US news media in the last 8 1/2 months, since November 2010, that amount to nothing more than handicapping the future prospects in both the primary contests, and the 2012 general election- an event that’s some 16 months away. I really would like to know what percentage of political news has been taken up by these irrelevant tout sheets. I mean, if you think it’s that important, call up a bookie in London.

    Meanwhile: what actions do ordinary American citizens take to affect day to day outcomes in their legislatures, or in terms of setting or altering the political agenda?

    If such action is taken in the absence of news media attention- does it even rate as happening?

    After all, the US media have election races to handicap…etc.

    So yeah, I guess the answer is to start with a local nucleus of face-to-face community, build local affinity groups, and then link to counterparts wherever you find them in cyberspace.

    Meanwhile, at the national level, no US presidential candidate makes it through the screening process to the final contest unless they’re on board with the hard-power regime of bozo imperialism and global structural readjustment that currently passes as a grand design for the planetary future, among the owners of the stable for that particular racecourse.

    21 June 2011, 5:00 pm

  28. Stan:

    Gamesmanship and “public relations.” You know the history of “public relations,” right? Edward Bernays?

    I’d go way lower on the size of the polity. A small city maybe. They say there is a secession movement in Vermont. But that’s not what will happen.

    Not sure the US debt is a liability. As Michael Hudson points out, that debt is the full-nelson the US has on the rest of the world. We double-dog-dare ya to sell down the dollar! And the printing presses roll on.

    I expect the dissolution to come not by political intent… politics will always be a half step, whole step, two or three steps, behind developments. I expect it to be ecological. Rome’s demise was far more ecological than most historians suggest… and the trends are much scarier, more general, and more likely to develop into catastrophic cascades now.

    The collateral damage is already horrific, and we haven’t seen the worst. The Independent just did an article about scientists who are warning we could kill the oceans within one generation, and I’m not seeing anything that is going to stop the momentum.

    Some kinds of culture will grow up in the interstices. It happened in the early Middle Ages; it will happen again. I’m already there. New agrarian Benedictine, or whatever you wanna call it. Make friends. Build little outposts of decency and sanity on the refuse of a broken civilization. Grieve and pray.

    21 June 2011, 5:19 pm

  29. Morocco Bama:

    I don’t know if I would call the System broken. I think the System is working as designed. In fact, it’s even been taken to new and more effective levels, but the purpose remains the same.

    http://www.hermes-press.com/completing.htm

    21 June 2011, 6:18 pm

  30. Les:

    While it’s certainly true that you can’t vote your way to positive political change, you can certainly vote in negative change. Maybe you think you’ll be ok whatever the right wingers do, but I won’t be. People actually die when the far right gets political power. I’m under no illusion that Obama or anybody is else is going to save the world, but far right candidates will hurt me and others. I hope you feel very morally superior standing outside of a polling station and afterwards when more black people go to prison, when women can’t get safe abortions, when nobody can get healthcare and when LGBT people are murdered. Maybe you could write on the back of your sign a long screed explaining why you’re smarter than all of those people.

    21 June 2011, 6:42 pm

  31. Morocco Bama:

    People actually die when the far right gets political power.

    When was the last time the “far right” was in political power? Apparently, you haven’t understood. The electoral process is gamed and owned, and you are presented Shit on a Stick and Shit on Stick with Sprinkles, meaning you don’t have a choice, really, just the illusion of one. In either case, it’s still shit and people die whichever shit is in office.

    Also, and this is a moot point considering my view of the electoral process and voting, but I can’t ignore the observation. Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to elect someone based off of the color of their skin, i.e. their race? I can’t tell you how many people told me that is why they were voting for Obama. Is it prudent to open that door? Really? Don’t get me wrong, many people do just that, although they don’t vocalize it, but hell, you can’t protest bigotry by engaging in bigotry, and voting for a candidate based on the color of their skin is bigotry, no matter how much lipstick you want to put on that pig.

    And what I mean by open that door, especially if you’re not white, is what comes out of that door, because you’re telling the white man that it’s alright to be a bigot, and to be vocal about it, by example. If you have to vote, at least do it for the right reasons, and not because you think the candidate is like you because his skin has the same hue.

    It’s the same with separation of church and state. The Evangelicals and Fundamentalists wish to break that divide, but do they realize the ramifications? Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. What if one day, and it is foreseeable, Islam became a significant religion in the U.S. and a fundamentalist faction of it pushed through Sharia Law? Sure, they say “nah, never here.” Yeah, okay, never here. The U.S. will be a vastly different place fifty years from now. It will be unrecognizable, for the most part. So much is going to change. Hell, it might not even be the U.S. at that point.

    It’s the same principle as when Moses told Ramses that if there was one more plague upon Egypt, it would come from Ramses.” Ramses, obviously, didn’t care to decipher Moses’ cautionary riddle and instead ordered the first born son of all Jews be slain. Instead, the Angel of Death descended and took the lives of the first born sons of the Egyptians.

    21 June 2011, 7:34 pm

  32. George Entenman:

    I find this extremely well-reasoned – making me think….

    One quibble, perhaps. You say “voting allows 51% to impose its will on 49%” – but according to the main thesis, 51% of the population never gets its way – it’s the monied powers.

    21 June 2011, 8:01 pm

  33. cabdriver:

    Les, contrary to what you’re presuming- at this point, my giving serious consideration to non-participation in voting in a presidential election is motivated neither by “moral superiority” or by a desire to show off how much “smarter” I am than voters.

    It’s more based in resignation, with the primary motivation being that it’s imperative for me to stop lying to myself.

    Your post shows you to be yet another of a long line of people making the same Demopartisan argument, and hurling the same charges:

    1) You only seem to count the deaths of the innocent when Republicans are in power.

    2) You prophesy the total fulfillment of some conjured right-wing agenda of a minority-targeting police state, criminalized abortion, corporatized health care, and LGBT mass lynching campaigns.

    In truth, we already have a minority-targeting police state- and Barack Obama doesn’t show the slightest indication to do more than cosmetic reform of that situation.

    The Republicans will never re-criminalize abortion. This country is too socially liberal to tolerate it. The Republicans milk the anti-abortion vote with lip service and symbolic feints in much the same way that the Democrats play various of their constituencies on issues like reforming the marijuana laws.

    We already have corporatized health care, a public insurance program that’s apparently designed to work like a leg with two extra knee joints in order to cut the insurance companies in. The Republicans simply want a more direct version of it.

    LGBT people are no doubt going to continue to be murdered, occasionally due to their sexual orientation. Many other people are also undoubtedly going to be murdered, for equally loathsome and senseless motives. I don’t buy the prediction of a Republican-instigated lynching campaign. That just sounds like a desperation appeal by an Orthodox Democrat Loyalist- and it’s a measure of how far they feel they need to go in order to assert any important distinction between their own party and the Republicans. Because like it or not, two years into the Obama administration, it’s become very difficult for me to tell the difference from the agenda of the Bush regime, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.

    3) Having dispensed the usual boilerplate disingenuous hyperbole, sum up your case with an attempt at shaming. A passive-aggressive appeal, based on the self-exonerating slogan “we aren’t as bad as the Far Right Extremists.”

    I’ve voted in every presidential election since I’ve been eligible to vote, Les. As I said previously, the last time I did it, I said I’d settle for a 1-cent difference in favor of my political ideals from the Democratic administration over the Republicans. I haven’t even gotten that.

    Go on, rake me over the coals. Try to shame me into voting Democratic some more. Maybe you can come up with something I haven’t already heard this time.

    21 June 2011, 8:12 pm

  34. Les:

    On the state level, there have been many new laws recently designed to restrict women’s access to abortion: http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/06/20/gvsa0620.htm . I don’t have the statistics at hand, but for a very large percentage of women in the US, there is no abortion provider in their county. Often women have to travel long distances, possibly out of state and take days off work to cover waiting periods. This essentially has already made abortion unavailable to many women. The same procedures that are used to terminate pregnancy are often also used with women who have had miscarriages and thus women who miscarry also are having trouble getting access to these procedures, sometimes being forced to deliver a still birth when a surgical intervention would have been faster, safer and much less traumatic. This is not milking a vote with lip service, this actively making life harder for women on the state level.

    The US is already one of the most dangerous countries in the world for trans women, especially trans women of color. When a public figure starts talking about how LGBT people are a dangerous threat to morality, this does correspond with an uptick in violence against LGBT people. Obama has not been as good for LGBT people as one might have hoped. He did take (some) action on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and is no longer defending the Defence of Marriage Act. I would rather had anti-discrimination laws passed in jobs, education, housing, etc. One surprisingly good thing that Clinton did was make it quite a bit easier for trans people to change their passports. It’s small, but it never would have happend under McCain and it does positively effect my life, especially as it’s now my sole government-issued ID.

    Again, I have absolutely no illusions about the Democratic party or even the Green Party. Meaningful, positive social change will never come from a ballot box. Nobody has ever voted their way to a better world. Meaningful, positive social change comes from activism, protest, pushing your ideas, etc. Just because voting in positive change is impossible, this does not mean the inverse is true. Obama’s not all that great, but I really doubt things would be better now under McCain. I strongly suspect Al Gore would have been less terrible than Bush. You’re quite right to note that the lesser of two evils is still evil, but I don’t think the moral response to that is to just let the greater evil run amok.

    It’s already common for less than 40% of eligible voters to turn up, so abstaining will not delegitimise the election further. Indeed, the new anti-voter fraud laws being passed in several states, specifically designed to disenfranchise people likely to vote democrat will also vastly reduce voter turn out. I think it’s fair to infer that a low turnout does not alarm the ruling classes. Indeed, it’s what they want. They really want you to stay home. Or even better, show up in your lefty district, telling other people not to vote. Why don’t you find local candidates that you agree with and help them instead? Today’s city council member is tomorrow’s senator.

    21 June 2011, 8:48 pm

  35. Les:

    ETA: http://www.lifesitenews.com/blog/silver-lining-federal-fight-to-defund-planned-parenthood-has-led-to-state-d/

    21 June 2011, 8:52 pm

  36. Stan:

    Today’s city council member is tomorrow’s senator.

    Not unless he or she has access to several million dollars. Have you looked at the Senate lately?

    The person doesn’t change the real (not putative) job description. S/He either conforms to the job description or gets weeded out.

    21 June 2011, 8:54 pm

  37. Julio Huato:

    Stan,

    I just posted a reply to your note here:

    http://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu/msg21773.html

    Best,

    Julio

    21 June 2011, 9:57 pm

  38. cabdriver:

    Les: okay, now you’re sounding like my mind, running the other side of the argument.

    I admit, there is an element of pride in my considering abstention from the ballot. It’s galling for me to feel as if through my casting a ballot in a presidential election, that I’m providing those people with the impression that their con is working, and that I’m assenting to their trickery.

    22 June 2011, 1:42 am

  39. DeAnander:

    I’m idly thinking that democracy — voting, the democratic process — suffers from the same problems as many social institutions (like computer networks, or identity, or currency) that rely on authenticity or authentication (like an honest vote counting method and an honest presentation of honest candidates). Identity theft, falsification of results, degrading signal/noise ratio are all hard to defend against.

    Someone (often the wealthy and powerful) has enough free time to figure out how to game the system. After a while, reforms are suggested (like getting rid of the rotten boroughs, or extending the franchise to a wider selection of the populace). The reforms seem to improve things, but meanwhile the “hackers” (the PTB, whatever) who have lots of free time on their hands figure out *new* ways to game the system. They simply have more resources, time, and motive to find ingenious ways to hack the voting/electoral/political system than the “rest of us” who were hoping to use it to express our wishes to a representative government.

    It’s like trying to protect your mail server from spammers. You come up with a graylist and a set of filters, but within a week or two there are new more-sophisticated spam generators that can get past your filters; you refine your filters, but you (the average you) don’t have the time or energy to refine filters as enthusiastically and persistently as the spammers. They, on the other hand, have nothing else to do — it’s their living. So the people trying to game/overwhelm the system seem always to have the advantage, and it gets more and more corrupt until Boom, the society (mail server, whatever) collapses under the load of spam (corruption) and all service is lost. All same with computer viruses: the crackers designing the viruses have way more free time than you do, and it’s their hobby. They’re obsessed; you’re merely annoyed and discommoded by their attacks on your machines. You’re always one or two steps behind them, trying to react to their innovations.

    I think of fungible money as a kind of virus, and I think of the human propensity for hierarchy and wealth accumulation as a kind of virus. Figure fossil fuel as a toxic agent that overstimulates the cultural body politic into a feverish state of heightened metabolic vulnerability. And mass media, I don’t even know what to call that in my already-creaking metaphor. The two viruses together working in the overheated organism seem to be a real whammy, knocking out the immune system altogether, faster and more thoroughly than the usual social defences can repair it.

    Hence the *idea* of representative democracy, the processes and methods for implementing it (like an operating system) are overwhelmed by the determined, sustained, obsessive attacks of hackers wielding the viruses of wealth, power, and gamesmanship… And at this point the entire OS is riddled with backdoors, easter eggs, etc and the only solution is a reinstall from scratch. OK, maybe I’m raving. It’s late and I’m dead beat. A very merry summer solstice to you all; it is the shortest night. From now on things get darker (for a while).

    22 June 2011, 2:39 am

  40. Ononimous*:

    Is it to far fetched to imagine that the reason Gore did not challenge Bush and the republicans more forcefuilly over cheating in Florida and that Kerry did not challenge Bush and the republicans in Ohio is becasue they never really had any intention of winning? Is it to much to imagine that the Republicans never had any intention of allowing McCain to win over Obama because it was time to make it look like the US election system is not a subsidiary of the Word Wide Wrestling Federation? Is it to hard to imagine that outcome of US elections are as controled as those in the USSR or Iran? At least for the Presidency and perhaps for some or many Conngressional races as well.

    22 June 2011, 6:01 am

  41. Stan:

    @Julio

    I appreciate your engagement with the debate and your thoughtful response.

    I think you have me wrong on a couple of counts.

    First, you say, “Stan implies that, by not voting, people should be able to reduce their political loses, if not turn them into gains. (Although, at a point, Stan rejects this mode of analysis as utilitarian.”

    You actually contradict yourself here, based on an implication ascribe to me that I went to a great deal of trouble not to make. I don’t think we will turn our political losses into gains – a can’t see where I said that anywhere, or implied it. I said as explicitly as I could that the system is so completely absent any possibility of political gains that it is time to report the abuse and get out of the house. If elections are what we count as political, then we are in a fixed game.

    You also suggest that I have only recently discovered that, and that I have projected my personal discovery into the public arena based on my personal epiphany.

    I take the blame for this because I was not explicit enough about my timing, but the reason for the timing of this particular rant has nothing to do with my personal aha! moment.

    I stated my reasons for voting Obama, which was a one-time only event and I would not have voted for a white Democratic candidate in 2008. I had argued against voting for both Gore and Kerry, and took a lot of heat from fellow-antiwar activists for saying that I believed Gore would have eventually invaded Southwest Asia the same as Bush.

    There has been adequate time now for Obama to reveal himself; and I no longer feel that I am subject to the criticism from African Americans – to which I was and am very sensitive – that people ought to give Obama a chance. If I were back in 2008, knowing what I know now, I would vote him again. I haven’t discovered much about him that I didn’t already know. I was well aware of the DLC wing of the Democratic Party, and their total commitment to neoliberalism and American empire. That wasn’t the basis of my vote.

    As to voting Obama to demonstrate the perfidy of the Democrats, I think the Obama administration is uniquely situated – historically speaking.

    We had gone through the 2000 election fraud that put a Republican in the White House, about which people were rightly angered. Close on the heels of that pivotal moment – when the Supreme Court had taken an unprecedented step in drawing up a decision that they themselves then said could never be employed in the future as a precedent (Bush v Gore) – the 9-11 attacks happened, and the Bush government took unprecedented measures, which we all remember, to capitalize on the attack and alarmingly strengthen executive power in all those ways we remember so well.

    When the war fever wore off (most of the country was foursquare in favor of killing some Afghans, and but a few of us spoke against it), and the Bush administration began its preparations to take Baghdad, another pivotal moment occurred in my opinion, and that was the rapid assemblage of a broad-based antiwar movement, the first in the US since Vietnam.

    While many of us on the left (as I identified at the time) were framing our opposition to the war as anti-imperial, the personified targets of the anger that fueled this movement were (deservedly) Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld. While sections of the antiwar movement were critical of the US establishment, this clique was so prominent and vocal and (admit it) easy to attack, that for a wide swath of the antiwar movement, this was an anti-Republican movement.

    In that process, however, a lot of moderates and liberals of the mainstream were rubbing shoulders with critical folk from the left, and a lot of those ideas rubbed off. There was movement in the ideological center of gravity, not as much as many would like to have believed, but significant.

    Fractions of the left who still believe in the left-center formula felt validated by this shift, and they began to try and consolidate it through conventional political means, which led them to throw in with Democratic operatives who wanted to take advantage of this powerful anti-Republican feeling.

    In 2004, the election was questionable again (by its own standards), and the anti-Republican movement, which was now merged with the antiwar movement, was given an additional boost by the justifiable fears of another four years with the Bush clique, and by then a war that was going very badly – so badly that even former war supporters began to grow disenchanted. This was the year of Abu Ghraib, the Najaf rebellion, etc. I was working with vets by then, and they were gaining prominence in the movement.

    Long story short, the Bush administration, by dint of its personality – its arrogant dismissal of opponents and reality, had by 2011 strengthened the Democrats; and a lot of people were just so energized by their own numbers and by the chance at a real electoral win, that the fantasy of Change became irresistible.

    The result was that the antiwar movement was drawn away from the war and into the elections, and no amount of warning from the left or other dissident minorities in the antiwar movement could divert the masses from this “chance” they saw after seven years of Bush.

    In those seven years, everyone who was 18 at the beginning of that period was now 24, so a whole new generation of young adults had come online (and would be the shock troops of Obama’s campaign). They were not largely privvy to the decades of leftist critique of the parties or the elections, and they were immensely enthusiastic about Obama, who pandered shamelessly to his left wing, tough he never took an antiwar position.

    History was unlikely to have any broad effect on the Obama base, which also included Black voters after Clinton went racial in SC and shit her own nest. Now there was more at stake in the debate about the election than just the cooptation of the antiwar movement by the Dems; there was a real question of demonstrating solidarity with African America at this particular moment – which is something I take very very seriously. There is significance in the fact that a Black candidate could win the presidency, apart from Obama’s many defects. That’s why I would do it again. It may not matter to non-African American leftists, but it mattered to African America who was looking at white people like me and saying, where are you? This included my children (we are a racially heterogeneous household) – who were coming of age. I could not do other than I did, and I said the same thing to others.

    Moreover, there was a contradictory synergy to this election, in that – for this generation of young activists, and for all those who were still being conscientized by the tumultuous politics of war, followed by the 2008 economic meltdown – we had this chance to make history (and it was a real and terribly important milestone) by putting an African American in the White House, and also to demonstrate, over time, to those who have not yet discovered ruling class hegemony within the electoral process (I wrote four books between 2000-2006 that will demonstrate this was not some personal epiphany in 2011), to replace the Republicans – the personification of all they thought was wrong in the world – that the Democrats would do just as the Republicans did, and that they would exclude their voices as effectively as the Republicans. Obama – the Democrat – has accomplished this, for people now who may not be historians of the left or analysts of late capitalism, more thoroughly than we could have ever hoped.

    Perhaps I should call this an amendment to the original piece, to disabuse anyone from the notion that I was somehow ignorant of the political process, or that this little provocation is a personal expression of my own sudden enlightenment.

    With respect to your arguments about organizing, I gave a cursory answer above (in the comment that closed with “No thanks”), which I have fleshed out in other venues, based on my evolving beliefs about the scale-dynamics of organization generally.

    Thanks again for your engagement and thoughtfulness on this. I take responsibility for some of the misunderstanding here, which I hope I have cleared up, even if we are not in agreement. I’m enjoying many of the remarks on the subject, and unfortunately now I have to make a few bucks to keep the lights on and milk in the fridge for the baby.

    22 June 2011, 10:02 am

  42. Charles:

    I disagree. Vote.

    22 June 2011, 1:58 pm

  43. Charles:

    In fact, vote for Obama.

    22 June 2011, 1:59 pm

  44. Charles:

    On a different subject than this particular thread, but an issue important in the longer history of this blog:

    Woman walks through market holding severed head of man who tried to rape her
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk

    22 June 2011, 2:00 pm

  45. Stan:

    In fact, vote for Obama.

    No.

    22 June 2011, 2:59 pm

  46. Morocco Bama:

    I had this discussion on another blog last December and some of the commentators were waxing nostalgic and wanting to return to the days of FDR and LBJ, if you can believe that. Here’s what one had to say:

    You are right on the mark with your last remark! A return to FDR/IKE/LBJ domestic policies would restore the republic. The Gilded age policies ushered in by Friedman/Jarvis/Reagan 32 years ago have been disastrous.

    I thought the Ike inclusion was interesting, but nonetheless, I had this to say on the matter:

    Don’t fall for this again, folks. It’s a fail safe, containment measure to save the Plutocratic Oligarchy when they lose their bearings and go off the wagon sucking up every last ounce of blood, sweat and tears like a foaming at the mouth rabid dog. The U.S. is not a Republic, and never was. It was always a Plutocratic Oligarchy designed to protect the status and vested interests of the budding Empire’s Elite. I’m not advocating a return to the conditions of the gilded age, but I am advocating eschewing the notion of returning to the containing capitulation of FDR and LBJ. It’s time to shred this Plutocratic Oligarchical system once and for all and replace it with something just and equitable. I know that’s not going to happen, but it’s what should happen. I also know there’s no going back to the FDR/LBJ capitulationist containment policies. That’s not in the cards, and you’re powerless to change that fact within the System using the System. Within this System, you have no say in the matter, nor do I, but I’ll continue to bark at the moon until they rip my vocal cords from my cold, dead throat.

    22 June 2011, 3:54 pm

  47. Morocco Bama:

    I posted this about Obama on another blog in August of 2008. It was spot on, and has been validated with Obama’s track record.

    What Billmon is gushing about, and let’s face it, that’s gushing for him, is the pinnacle of success of the campaign by the plutocracy to pacify and incapacitate any shred of progressive reform in the U.S. For starters, it’s a blasphemy to label Obama an African American. Sure, his father was an African, but he was never an American. His mother was Caucasian, and Obama was raised by his Caucasian grandparents. So, culturally speaking, Obama has not truly lived the African American experience. His parents were not the descendents of slaves, and he was raised outside the culture. And you know what, it shows. He’s perfectly suited for the liberal vote. The following is tongue in cheek for those who don’t understand satire. He’s so articulate for a black man, and so intelligent. He doesn’t mumble like Jessie Jackson or talk jive like Al Sharpton.

    Of course, many, if not all black folks will vote for him because of the symbolism Billmon gushes on about. It won’t matter that the symbolism is mere projection, and that when the veil is pulled back, there resides yet another establishment pawn. It’s masterful, you must admit, and actually quite riddled with plutocratical hubris. The plutocracy seems to be thumbing their nose at us, once again. The guy’s name alone is an in your face joke. As others have mentioned, you can’t make shit like that up. He was tapped long ago for this, and I’m sure they got a huge laugh at the time, and continue to laugh to this day, that they can pawn off this transparent trojan horse on a completely unwitting, uncritically accepting, somnambulant liberal voting block.

    Aug 28, 2008 8:10:03 AM

    Of course, as you can imagine, the “Liberals” and/or “Progressives” gave me all kinds of hell. I was called all manner of things, to which I had this to say:

    Yeah, that’s part of my point. It’s 40 years since MLK was murdered, and we’re still electing presidents and politicians on the color of their skin, be it black, white, brown, yellow and their gender. How the hell can one call that progress. Let’s not forget, MLK was offed because he crossed the line, not because of his stance on the issue of race. When he sought to wage a class war, and a war against imperialism and empire, he had to go, and when they placed him in the dirt, any progress he had inspired in that regard was buried with him. Face it, there is no choice here. It’s the same choice. I so want to believe, but common sense and critical analysis preclude my irrational desires. Obama has been vetted, and he is a witting tool of pacification. If he wasn’t, he never would have made it this far, this fast. He’s where he is because tails you lose and heads they win. The Plutocracy is that smart, and yes, we’re really fucked. The Empire is choosing to go down in a Blaze of Glory and the next president will share the infamy of Captain Edward Smith. Full Steam Ahead. Let’s not equate realism with despair. It only serves to marginalize and dismiss, which doesn’t make for constructive dialogue.

    Aug 28, 2008 2:51:31 PM

    The vitriol towards me continued unabated, at which point I decided it was no longer worth the effort and had one final parting comment.

    Wow, I’m stunned. I might as well be talking to Fundamentalists, because that’s exactly what it is. Religion comes in many forms.

    Obama can do no wrong with people this blind. He could launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia and they would find a way to rationalize his actions, as their skin melts and their children scream in agony, just as those on the right rationalize the actions of their chosen ones.

    Like I said, it’s masterful. Unlike many of you, I refuse to watch any of the spectacle, because Marketers are the Magicians of yesteryear. You’re being hypnotized and your objectivity is clearly compromised.

    Don’t take my word for it, though, I’m just a little old nobody.

    Aug 29, 2008 8:11:02 AM

    So, here we are, three years later, and I’m hearing the same contrarian arguments. It’s not surprising, but always disappointing.

    22 June 2011, 4:10 pm

  48. Stan:

    Here is a politics I can get behind.

    While recently shoveling aged horse manure around berry vines on my small organic farm to fertilize them, which gives me great pleasure, I thought about what I have learned about the community of the land by farming over the last two decades. I noticed how spreading brown gold–to which I add the green manure of decaying plants–utilizes waste to transform plants and help them grow. The animal-plant connection is essential to life.

    FULL

    and here is Bob Scheer with a reminder that this is not the Bush-created economic crisis:

    Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president.

    FULL

    22 June 2011, 4:46 pm

  49. Stan:

    President Obama’s contention that the United States is not engaged in “hostilities,” much less war, against the sovereign state of Libya shows him to be fully as sick and arrogant an imperial misanthrope as his historical predecessors on both sides of the Atlantic. America’s First Black President is wholly compatible with the old-school imperialists of Europe, now reborn and rejuvenated through NATO as the unchallenged masters of Africa. Ten thousand sorties of Shock and Awe scream that Euro-American rule is returning to Libya – but not, of course, by means of war. Oh, no, this is a case of “humanitarian intervention,” and not hostile in the least. Call it brotherly love – yeah, that’s the ticket. But don’t call it war.

    FULL from Black Agenda Report

    22 June 2011, 5:11 pm

  50. Les:

    Voting is, quite literally, the least you can do. You complain that this tiny act doesn’t have a huge positive impact, but of course it won’t. According to Howard Zinn, historically, getting involved in electoral politics has sucked the life out of social change movements.

    However, the stakes are too high to just let whatever neanderthal gets the republican nomination have the white house. President Palin? President Gingrich? Bachmann? If it takes a few minutes of my time to tick a box for a guy that I don’t particularly like in order to stop that disaster, then it’s worth the few minutes. Encouraging people not to vote is just campaigning for those guys. The problem is that you expect too much from voting. What you want has never been there and never will be there. It’s just a way to decide for the lesser evil, which is quite a bit more desirable than the greater evil.

    Yeah, Obama sucks. After the country moved so far right under Bush, there was no possibility of getting a progressive. It takes time to move a country that’s been trending further and further right over the last 20 or 30 years. This doesn’t mean we should just let the far right have control of the government.

    23 June 2011, 12:46 pm

  51. Michael Anderson:

    @ Stan:

    Watch out for drugs and antibiotics in horse manure.

    23 June 2011, 1:30 pm

  52. Michael Anderson:

    Staying on topic…and politicos full of it….horseshit, drugs, and antbiotics, that is.

    23 June 2011, 1:32 pm

  53. Stan:

    I would find President Bachmann hugely entertaining, just as Bush frequently was. Funny how the next guy quit being entertaining, but held to the same policies… some worse.

    23 June 2011, 1:58 pm

  54. (Boer) Tom:

    I do think USans should be encouraged to register to vote – in many areas, jury duty selection is on the basis of voter registration – the frequency of horrendous outcomes can be reduced.

    23 June 2011, 7:49 pm

  55. Stan:

    There was a different Obama beneath the optimistic campaign branding, one who matched the masters’ desire to keep the people pacified and bamboozled as the shit of the coming capitalist crisis hit the fan. This other Obama was appreciated by political operatives from America’s unelected dictatorship of money, who vetted the young political phenomenon and knew that the long neoliberal expansion was hitting its limits and approaching a crash (the signs were clear to insiders well before the plug was pulled). The coming correction would require an unusually fresh new face to provide pseudo-democratic cover for Wall Street bailouts and other plutocratic policies to come – certain to provoke popular anger as millions more faced joblessness, poverty, foreclosure and eviction. It was time for a bigger-than-customary makeover for “Brand USA” at home and (thanks to George W. Bush’s disastrous messianic militarism) abroad.

    FULL

    25 June 2011, 6:06 am

  56. Andy:

    “I believe in some rules; but I also believe that once any community exceeds a certain size, rules become simplistic, nay idiotic, solutions to complex problems.”

    I will add to that the ‘strangerness’ that grows with a growing population. Take for instance the cry of ambulance and fire sirens. They are a part of urban life, and yet we go about our business, as the cry of rescue screams through the air. I happen to live near a busy thoroughfare that is also a common, quick route for emergency services. There is almost never an evening going by without at least one ambulance or fire engine passing through. It’s annoying. One day I stopped myself – “Why should I should be so annoyed when the situation at hand is that life is in danger! Someone has been injured – a bad fall, spouse beating, gang fight, drunken gun play, attempted suicide, a fallen elderly, heart attack. And for the fire engine, many lives and livelihoods are in extreme danger!”

    A single instance of the siren should spring fear, worry, and some measure of compassion in anyone’s heart; yet the frequency of these occurrences is such that we become numb to it – “It’s just part of city living.” In a smaller place, emergencies are less frequent by virtue of the population. Now, I didn’t say that the smaller place is more virtuous, only that the frequency of emergency situations decreases with population. Yet I would venture to say that the people there are more likely to be aware, to be connected, and be concerned. Not having lived in a small town or community, I can neither prove nor disprove. It’s only a thought.

    Don’t mistake this for starting a diatribe on the “evil city.” My point is that the mind (and/or the heart) is limited in its capacity to be concerned with others in the immediate vicinity. People are limited in in their physical space to exercise compassion and kindness. I don’t think that this can be extrapolated to mean, then, that people haven’t the capacity to extend their awarenes and action to places beyond. Many charities with regional, national, and international scope are proof, clearly. In regards to daily living in one’s own dwelling, perhaps there is a limit. At what point does the mind naturally become disconnected?

    To put it another way, ignoring disaster and being apathetic is always unhealthy; yet the problem is that in large population centers, where emergencies are daily, we instinctively tune out the cries. “Unless it’s happening next door, or my place, it doesn’t concern me. What’s more, the government has placed professionals in service to deal with these matters.” And of course, this is not to criticize the existence of professional services with sufficient resources to respond to situations. That is certainly a blessing. It is rather the problem of how a fellow member of a supposed community (of 1 million, say) can tune out.

    This is just one example of the problem of large cities. Perhaps the frequency and density of human activity, good and bad, is too much for the mind to deal with. If the ideal is for each social relation to have a personal connection of communal interest, at the very least, then perhaps it is best if actual “communities” remain relatively small, or rather any growth should be more natural than what the machinery of capitalism spawns. And this should not drift into a discussion of population control, or some such thing. That’s not what my thought is about. It’s about the possibility of inherent limits to genuine, social connection in large populations

    I suppose there are others here, who do, or have lived, in communal situations (I define that rather broadly), who will set my thoughts straight. So with any comments, I welcome correction for my personally untested abstractions here. :)

    27 June 2011, 10:45 pm

  57. Andy:

    This article could not have come at a better time for me. The problem with electoral politics is that we invest power into a proxy. It’s one thing to do that with a small town judge or clerk, but to raise the stakes of daily life that we give power to people far and away is to trick people into another game – the lie that electoral politics is the only exercise of power available or otherwise viable to ordinary people. I don’t think that’s true.

    This is not the highest profile example, but in my own home state in Kentucky, a group of citizens in a tiny town in Floyd County banded together to petition the local government to put a stop to a strip mining company from purchasing more land. I saw this in a documentary titled “Deep Down.”

    http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/deep-down/film.html

    An ordinary woman, Beverly May, was the one who got this little movment going… and together they met with some success… all without putting all their faith in a Representative here or Senator there. It’s a great example of thinking globally and acting locally. You can check out the organization here.

    http://www.kftc.org/our-work/canary-project/campaigns/wilson-creek

    27 June 2011, 11:07 pm

  58. Bob:

    What a great article. I voted for Obama in 2008 also, never voting for a Dem or Republican again though. What you think about social networks providing catalyst for big changes in the world? Couldn’t oppressed populations like Egypt and Tunisia be great examples of people unifying virtually to get things done? Wouldn’t using the same types of tools/organizing allow us to bypass standard campaigning and vote in radically independent legislators that would shake things up? It seems to me that electing players that would change the system from inside would be the quickest way to fix or dismantle the broken parts we have now. Not voting at all to me seems to me like quite the waiting game.

    28 June 2011, 7:43 pm

  59. skholiast:

    Please see (if interested) some extensive comments on this post (mixed in with a good deal else, but you can skip that) here:
    http://speculumcriticum.blogspot.com/2011/06/beyond-alienation-in-search-of-theory.html

    29 June 2011, 12:04 am

  60. Stan:

    On the fly, skholiast, I just scanned you link. When things slow down, I want to give it the attention is really really deserves. Hope you’ll check some of the earlier conversations that emerged in the “”Why Kings” thread, where I waved around Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics pretty shamelessly. Welcome. (We can argue about class and gender later [wink].)

    29 June 2011, 9:10 am

  61. skholiast:

    Read the Why Kings thread and liked it, but while searching for it I came across the one from ’09 on “why I won’t call myself ‘progressive’”. Man, why you wanna dredge up all those unpleasant quotes about eugenics? You gonna spoil the party.

    29 June 2011, 11:02 pm

  62. metamars:

    I asked the accomplished political game theorist Bueno de Mesquita, (who has been twice as accurate as the CIA’s own analysts) about the stupidy of lesser evilist voting, and he confirmed that lesser evilism is indeed a stupid strategy.

    Your plan to boycott the general elections, but show up with a sign, is interesting, but I doubt that it would be effective. Please see Denis Rancourt’s article “Why we love to hate conspiracy theories: 911 Truth as threat to the intelligentsia”, at http://activistteacher.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-we-love-to-hate-conspiracy-theories.html, wherein Rancourt tells us that:
    “This is the sociological fact that the 911 Truth movement has failed to recognize [4]. Truth will not set us free. Truth and information do not lead to action. It’s not a question of how many folks know the truth.

    While Rancourt, himself, does not give what I consider particularly good answers to the question of what sorts of activism are effective, at least he asks the right questions.

    I have lately advocated interjecting progressive memes into the Republican PRIMARIES (by running progressives who will at least press on a few issues, such as SS and Medicare, in up to 435 districts.). This is in addition to interjecting even more progressive memes into Democratic PRIMARIES – again, up o 435 of them. For info on the latter, see jeffroby’s ”
    Full Court Press — what the OpenLeft brouhaha was about” at http://www.docudharma.com/diary/17796/full-court-press-what-the-openleft-brouhaha-was-about .

    For info on targeting Republicans, see my links, here: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/989734/42175233

    One problem with your proposed election day protest is that it only lasts 1 day. A similar day won’t come around for 2 years. It’d be smarter to drive wedges between the top of the Dem hierarchy, and the Dem rank-and-file, and ditto for the Republicans. That, you can do every day, locally, by remembering that public streets and sidewalks are indeed public.

    3 July 2011, 1:47 pm

  63. metamars:

    For more info on my communication for de Mesquita, see “The Jesus Christ of Political Game Theory on the Stupidity of Lesser Evilist Voting” at

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/18/986623/-The-Jesus-Christ-of-Political-Game-Theory-on-the-Stupidity-of-Lesser-Evilist-Voting?via=search

    3 July 2011, 1:50 pm

  64. Vivian Phillips:

    I agree with you Stan, but if I were going to stand outside the polls with a sign, I’d pick words with lots of “S” so that I could substitute $$$$.

    Greetings from–go figure–still expanding central NC.
    Viv

    3 July 2011, 3:19 pm

  65. Henry:

    Conspiracies

    By Paul Craig Roberts

    July 03, 2011 “Information Clearing House” — In a June column, I concluded that “conspiracy theory” is a term applied to any fact, analysis, or truth that is politically, ideologically, or emotionally unacceptable. This column is about how common real conspiracies are. Every happening cannot be explained by a conspiracy, but conspiracies are common everyday events. Therefore, it is paradoxical that “conspiracy theory” has become a synonym for “unbelievable.”

    Conspiracies are commonly used in order to advance agendas. In the July issue of American Rifleman, a National Rifle Association publication, the organization’s executive vice president, Wayne Lapierre reports on a congressional investigation led by Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and Department of Justice conspiracy to further gun control measures by smuggling guns across the border to Mexican criminals and blaming it on American firearm sellers.

    More:

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28473.htm

    3 July 2011, 6:07 pm

  66. Eric:

    Oh boy…not another conspiracy :(

    4 July 2011, 12:02 pm

  67. Stan:

    Your plan to boycott the general elections, but show up with a sign, is interesting, but I doubt that it would be effective.

    I don’t care about being effective. Everyone trying to be effective is exactly the problem.

    And I’m not a progressive. (-:

    My real message, if anyone wants messages from a little weblog, is that people need to quit screwing around with politics altogether and start peaceably fending for themselves and their neighbors as best they can with what they have…

    The problems with capitalism are (1) it valorizes conflict and (2) it rewards manipulation and domination. These are precisely the characteristics of politics as everyone seems to understand them… like capitalism itself, politics is a state of war. I’m suggesting (and I’m not the first) that people quit wasting time seeking out ideological affines for the purpose of this perpetual war, and instead seek out friends that live nearby (without the application of ideological fitness tests) and work together to make one another’s lives better.

    Michel De Certeau pointed out some time ago that strategies (inherently conflictual phenomena) attempt to establish dominance on one’s own terrain, then exteriorize everything else. The strategic base – literal or figurative – becomes the tail that wags all dogs. This kills any possibility for genuine intersubjectivity, even among those on one’s side, because the Prime Imperative is the strategy. All relationships become instrumental, that is, subordinate to the strategy.

    For any who haven’t figured it out, my mind has changed quite a bit on these matters in the last few years. It might change again.

    from our rotating quotes

    “If the ship of state can’t turn in time to avert catastrophe, it’s time to jump ship and put ourselves into small, mobile lifeboats, canoes, outriggers, and kayaks.” — Rebecca Solnit

    (hi viv)

    4 July 2011, 3:16 pm

  68. Karl:

    Stan, that comment directly above (4 Jul 3:16 pm) is very good, except I’m not so sure Solnit is worth quoting, at least not what I know of her from those who took her class at the University of Montana. What I gather is that she’s better at self-promotion than problem analysis/solution. I didn’t get much different signals from those who took her class. Not saying she doesn’t mean well. Saying more that she’s a bit like Eckhart Tolle.

    5 July 2011, 12:04 pm

  69. Stan:

    Being unlikable doesn’t always make you wrong.

    5 July 2011, 1:39 pm

  70. Michael Anderson:

    “…I’m suggesting (and I’m not the first) that people quit wasting time seeking out ideological affines for the purpose of this perpetual war, and instead seek out friends that live nearby (without the application of ideological fitness tests) and work together to make one another’s lives better.”

    You mentioned once while back about the necessity of getting along with people that we don’t have much in common with, and/or don’t like. It is hard….I find myself fearing to even interact with someone, let’s say, with a bumper sticker reading “Once a Marine, Always a Marine”, or, in your case in NC, “You Never Forget Your First KILL” (I don’t believe there’s a straw man here).

    When you and the IVAW were doing your “Walkin’ To New Orleans” a few years ago (when you had your “Road to Damascus” epiphany, I believe), you mentioned a situation that occurred between your group and a group of police, where the situation was resolved peacefully.

    I believe peaceful conflict resolution is important (God knows we’ve got ENOUGH of it), and relevant to the discussion here of getting outside of the political (sic) warfare process. Care to provide details on that altercation? What would the man from Nazareth have to say about this?

    6 July 2011, 2:00 pm

  71. Stan:

    I’m not suggesting we work together with people who are being just downright unpleasant or scary. But the garden project I’m working with now has, I’m sure, among its participants some ideas that I would disagree with… strongly. There are Boy Scouts involved; and I have plenty of issues with the idea of Boy Scouts. But when the actual people are there, we chat about gardening and the weather, since these are shared preoccupations, and everyone is quite agreeable, and not forcibly so.

    The cop thing was just them being dicks at first; but we had a conversation among ourselves about what they’d gone through during Katrina, then we talked to them about it, and some of them had lost everything. When we managed to commiserate with them about that, they managed to withdraw their stingers.

    6 July 2011, 4:13 pm

  72. Jan Martell:

    If being effective can be part of the problem and you don’t care about being effective, why not vote for a third-party candidate? I voted for Cynthia McKinney in 08 because I refused to vote for a warmonger, whatever his color. My son voted for Leonard Peltier. Both of them were write-ins. It burns me that the Dems think they somehow own my vote. After Clinton I looked for other alternatives. I joke that I joined the Greens after electoral politics became passe.

    I put all my imagination into local sustainability, but I still vote. I used to be much more cynical and disengaged, but lately I’m just pissed off and energized. It’s not an either or thing, you have to work on multiple fronts at once. And when the bastards get you to disengage, it’s one more little victory.

    6 July 2011, 10:46 pm

  73. Stan:

    Who’s disengaged? I’m way engaged, just not with politicians.

    8 July 2011, 4:55 pm

  74. Bittu:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRzNgoL9h4&feature=feedu

    11 July 2011, 1:40 am

  75. m.c.:

    “In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property.”
    ~~ Daniel Guerin

    15 July 2011, 6:48 pm

  76. Seer:

    “That is well said, replied Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.”

    -Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet] Candide

    Hi, Stan. I once met you in Bellevue, Washington at a small Veterans For Peace gathering. I saw in your eyes a sense of reality. Since that day I’ve kept track of you, finally catching up with you here at this website. Funny thing is, I think that I’ve actually been one step ahead of you; that is, my view of things has likewise changed as yours has, but I seem to have reached each step a bit before you have :-)

    Many people just seem to stay stuck. I’ve spent so much energy trying to un-stick them, get them to break out of their “if we only do MORE” mentality vis a vis politics, yet no avail.

    I stopped voting after the 2008 elections: voted for Ron Paul in the primaries, as there was no other anti-war/anti-empire candidate on the ballot; and in the General voted for Nader, again, because he was the only anti-war/anti-empire candidate on the ballot. I have Southern Baptist friends and I have atheist friends; people on the Left accuse me of being on the Right, and those on the Right accuse me of being on the Left. When you can’t be pegged you are free to be YOU.

    This past year I finally escaped to the country, where the struggle for life laughs at all the inane political crap. I can talk tractors and chickens while still standing up against the empire. What matters most is DOING, walking the talk: one of the most important things that I have learned I learned in the military (USMC), and that was to “set the example.”

    Buckminster Fuller said it best:

    “You never change anything by fighting the existing. To change something, build a new model and make the existing obsolete.”

    What matters most, is who loves you and who you love (saying from my ex’s grandmother). And stick with the TRUE fundamentals: Food, Shelter and Water. These are the things we should seek commonality with. It is the protection of these things that will allow us to come together.

    BTW – Excellent article!

    21 August 2011, 6:37 am

  77. Dónal Murphy:

    If voting would change anything they’d abolish – Ken Livingston (ex– mayor London) If you start voting at 20 and go on once every 4 years say until 80 you will have voted exactly 15 times. Not vey participatory or inclusive or even (god forbid) democratic. Phooey – the rich will alwayus rule you to your ruin – as long as we let them. They great only APPEAR great because we are on our knees and they have nuclear weapons. Let us rise.

    30 August 2011, 9:07 am

  78. kathy:

    Er.. you had me most of the way until this comment: “My real message, if anyone wants messages from a little weblog, is that people need to quit screwing around with politics altogether and start peaceably fending for themselves and their neighbors as best they can with what they have…”
    Seriously? I understand/support the disengagement from electoral politics, but are you now saying that any kind of organizing beyond fending for your neighborhood/community/family is futile? This to me is another effect of the neoliberal “restructuring” of ideology that has utterly coopted the Left leading to some of the politics you critique here. It is the communitarian face of the individualism, a kind of retreat and withdrawal (which is contradicted, happily, by your publication of this blog). I don’t have the solution but I do belief that the communtarian answer is part of the problem with how we live now.

    11 September 2011, 7:45 am

  79. kathy:

    Stan and De, or anyone, I’d love to see your responses to my comment here! thanks :-) Inquiring minds want to know…:-))

    17 September 2011, 5:53 am

  80. CE:

    Have you heard of Americans Elect, Stan? They’re planning on nominating a third ticket via an online convention. Looks like they’re on their way to ballot access in all 50 states. Would like to know your opinion.

    http://www.americanselect.org/

    17 September 2011, 12:28 pm

  81. Stan:

    @ CE, I’m done with elections.

    @Kathy… I can only speak for myself on this one. I bent the stick a good long ways with that statement; and while I won’t categorically preclude any participation in political activity (I believe living in exemplary community is a form of politics, perhaps the most effective one), I won’t cross the street for anyone or any group that produces a “program.” Programs are grandiose, idealistic (as in philosophical idealism vs materialism), and they assume a predictability that doesn’t exist. Non-violent direct action has proven efficacious to a degree, the Mavi Marmara being a recent example; and I’d never rule that out. It is perhaps the best form of issue-advocacy.

    Futility is not the issue with regard to mass organizing and large-scale organizing (or the various attempts that claim to appeal to a mass base whether they do or not). My problem with these kinds of organizing is twofold: the management dynamic and the game dynamic. They are related.

    Once a community of any kind exceeds whatever is the capacity for personal relations – covenantal relations – people require an intermediary to resolve disputes and other difficulties, especially if people are operating in an environment of scarcity.

    After reading Carole Pateman’s book, The Sexual Contract, I had serious questions about the whole notion of contract, which begins as a relationship that presupposes mutual suspicion. A covenantal relationship, on the other hand, like the one I have with my partner or my children or my friends, presupposes trust and requires no guarantees or oaths or signatures. But the contrast between contract and covenant is key here.

    Enter Dunbar’s number. His notion of a cognitive limit on the number of personal friendships the average human can sustain – for him that is around 150 – is not particularly controversial. We have limits on our cognitive ability, as well as limits on our time that circumscribe our capacity for personal (covenantal) relationships.

    The necessity of administration and management after a community exceeds a certain number of people (something like Dunbar’s number) creates structures of administration and management that inevitably become over-and-above structures, structures that apply to all, and apply rules to all, and therefore accrue certain kinds of power as gatekeepers and regulators. Again, a condition of scarcity worsens this situation, because these regulators then hold various purse strings.

    This is the tendency, I suspect, that creates most social hierarchies. In many older cultures where scarcity wasn’t an issue and tribe/clan sizes were small, social hierarchies like we have seen in civilizations never appeared.

    Groups requiring administration and management inevitably establish hierarchies that inevitably engage in dog-waggery. I can use the army as an example:

    Money and equipment and supplies in the army are finite, and each unit gets its share and no more. Someone has to decide, using some utilitarian calculus, how scarce resources will be allotted.

    Staffs manage in the army. Each office institutes rules that make its own job easier, sometimes because it has to, and sometimes out of a desire purely for convenience. These rules, then, have to be applied to all equally, or there will be trouble. In many cases, something happens that the rules didn’t account for, and the application of the rules creates a consequence contrary to the intent of the rules. But playing by the rules becomes sacrosanct, because the alternative is chaos.

    In the army, we had to fire up all our training ammunition each quarter, whether we needed to or not, because our allocation the next quarter was indexed to the amount we consumed in the last quarter, so if we didn’t waste what we had, we wouldn’t get any more next time, and each time we used less, we drew down our allowed allotment for the following quarter. Millions upon millions of dollars were wasted this way every quarter throughout the army, not to mention the pollution caused by all that lead.

    We referred to this as “the tail wagging the dog.” Dog-waggery. It happens in all large organizations, regardless of purpose or ideology; and I believe it is a big part of many problems that goes unnoticed because it has been inadequately theorized.

    This management dynamic is closely related to the game dynamic. The game dynamic is when “strategic” considerations pressure people and institutions to adopt “ends justify the means” utilitarianism, which leads to a creeping amoral transformation of the people and institutions themselves. The important thing is the issue, but we can’t get to the issue until we win an election, so the important thing is now the election, but we can’t win the elections if we don’t X, Y and Z …. and so it goes. Strategies inevitably create their own kind of dog-waggery. This too appears to me inevitable. I not only have a practical issue with that, I have a moral issue with it, not being either a Benthamite (end justifies the means) or Kantian (just following orders/rules… categorical imperatives).

    The other problem I have with de-localized political organization is that scale also creates a perceived need for experts; and I don’t believe in management experts. I think they are bunco artists (MacIntyre calls our cultural faith in experts “the fetishization of bureaucratic skill”; and Kightlinger epigrammatically points out that the bureaucratic “agency does not have power because it is competent; it is competent because it has power.”

    As for “retreat” and “withdrawal,” remember these are war words. These metaphors are lifted directly from the military, and they presuppose several things. They presuppose that we are at war, and they presuppose that our goal is to defeat an enemy, which ignites the strategic “game dynamic,” which also leads us to divide the world between friend and foe, which often leads to “if you are not with us, you are against us.” (I prefer “If you are not against us, you are with us.”) I found that when I was very politically active on the left I used “retreat and withdrawal” as accusation words, that had some decidedly masculine connotations – precisely the thing I’d tried to be self-critical about.

    And again, war is inherently immoral or it is not efficacious. It’s a dead-end, at which power will always prevail. If there is a “we” and if that “we” is going to win, I believe it will only happen by the power of love. Everything else is mutually assured destruction.

    Once I quit believing I was at war, I was open to the option of directing energy into solutions that are not policy-based but practical. And all practical activity is most efficacious at the local level. It is also based on friendship – a virtue that gets lost in a lot of politics, or becomes a limited offer only for those who share my ideas about politics. Speaking for myself, that is unacceptable.

    It is more than fair to call me a communitarian, as long it’s understood that it is a particular kind of communitarianism I advocate — along the lines of Dorothy Day or Alasdair MacIntyre or Vandana Shiva or Ivan Illich, given that one aspect of modernity I want to avoid is the moral incoherence of a society that tries to have its cake and eat it too with both utilitarian and duty ethics side-by-side (leaving us in the hands of the aforementioned experts). There are other ideas that go by the same name (as there are many contradictory notions calling themselves socialist or feminist or anarchist, et al) that strike me as just more programmatic idealism. I think “rights” talk is largely unintelligible, authoritarianism is unacceptable, and the notion of “social capital” is just another of those ghastly syncretic phrases designed to support the “fetishism of bureaucratic skill.” So I’m definitely not in league with the communitarianisms that throw this stuff around.

    Appreciate your questions, and hope I’ve given a credible account of myself; also hope this finds you well today.

    18 September 2011, 9:27 am

  82. Stan:

    Starting tomorrow, I’m going to the woods for ten days. Really, and out of range of computers (and cell phones). Just so folks know. Carrier pigeons or messenger moose might find me, but not much else.

    19 September 2011, 4:29 pm

  83. DeAnander:

    Just a quick aside on games and games theory.

    I ran into an interesting discussion of games and metagames (one of the Archdruid’s always-engaging essays got me into it). One of the pieces I read talked about finite vs infinite games. A finite game is one where someone wins, and the object of the game is to find out who will win. Then the game is over. An infinite game, however, is different: the object is to keep playing as long as possible.

    The author suggested that it may be axiomatic (I haven’t thought about this in depth yet) that finite games have to have fixed rules, but in infinite games the rules have to evolve and change, and they become “meta-games” of rule-rewriting.

    The first thing that leapt into my head was Jubilee, debt-forgiveness. The fixed rules of debt and money result in a finite game which someone (the rentier class) eventually wins. But by changing the rules every 49 years (or however often it was), one community tried to ensure that the game became infinite, i.e. the whole community could go on playing the game of commerce and money forever.

    I am also thinking here of ecosystems and self-regulating predation vs warfare (exterminism)… anyway, too tired to pursue these thoughts very far, but I have been musing about game dynamics. Maybe when SG returns (and I am less beleaguered by too many tempo tasks) we can take a detour into the notion of human culture as an elaborate game, and what happens when we view that game as finite vs infinite. A climax ecosystem seems to me an “infinite game” (modulo catastrophic or long, slow entropic changes). Could we learn something from that?

    21 September 2011, 2:41 am

  84. Michael Anderson:

    Contractual relations, and the death and destruction they engender….this is pretty obvious to most of us, but it is an illustrative point nonetheless:

    http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7418

    Antonia Juhasz

    Will US Stay in Iraq To Protect Oil Interest?
    Antonia Juhasz: Debate about Iraq exit continues as China gives US oil companies cover
    Watch full multipart Energy Wars

    14 October 2011, 11:57 am

  85. Kim Sky:

    “My name is Vermin Supreme; I’m running of the president of America. I stand for mandatory toothbrushing laws,” he said, delivering his on-the-fly stump speech. “I’m a friendly fascist, a tyrant you can trust because I know what is best for you. I am on the ballot here in New Hampshire, and you can vote for me. I am Obama’s primary primary challenger. I am challenging him and Ron Paul to a debate and an arm-wrestling match, leg-wrestling match and a panty-wrestling match to decide it all — the presidency of the United States.”

    Asked whether he plans to send troops back into Iraq, Mr. Supreme (Mr. Vermin?) said he wants to send troops “everywhere.”

    … Speech above, made at Ron Paul was campaigning in New Hampshire

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2012/jan/9/primary-pranks-paul-ambushed-vermin-supreme/

    9 January 2012, 10:14 pm

  86. Kim Sky:

    choices are intolerable — seems more pertinent than ever.

    from wsws (a bit off the top, but…)

    The trajectory after the elections is clear regardless which party controls the White House and Congress:

    * The next administration will be involved in another major war, or several wars. The leading candidates for a US-led attack are Syria, Iran, China and Russia, but others are looming in the background, including Mexico. A spate of recent reports shows that US planning for a military attack on Iran is far advanced, a fact that was underscored by the hysterical speech of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta charging Iran with planning a “Pearl Harbor” cyber attack.

    * What remains of basic social programs will be drastically restructured and cut. That includes Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps. An unstated aim of these attacks will be to reduce the life expectancy of working class Americans, so as to save on outlays for health care, pensions, etc.

    * There will be an escalation of the assault on democratic rights and the expansion of police powers that have been ongoing since 9/11 and were intensified under Obama. The Bill of Rights will be rendered a dead letter.

    http://wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/pers-o16.shtml

    18 October 2012, 12:52 am

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