Tag Archives: voting

Hail to the Chief

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Hail to the Chief

Democracy is so precious that it has to be rationed,
voting must be guided least it undermine the nation.
A confederation of complacent parasites
triumphs over a panic of anguished bigots’ fright.
The great zombie beast, dazed and confused,
plows on forward, prodded and amused.
The ruptured traditions all have been preserved,
the fragile ideals have successfully been reversed:
The task of public schools
is to press children into tools,
the goal of private schools
is to carve robots out of fools.
Dynasties arise and ancient unions fail,
memories turn over, and to the chief we hail.
No dreams have been deferred, they’ve simply been forgotten,
corrupted as ambition, or as despair turned rotten.
With clarity intact, and old visions of uplift,
with your world I’m out of time, athwart your synchronism.
With insights you attack, I’m now thankfully adrift,
this solitude of mine is freedom from your prison.

22 October 2016

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Fear & Loathing in American Voting, 2016

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In the diagrams above:
“tax Wall Street” = “deal with climate change” = “socialism” = “no wars.”

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The following rather moralizing (and no doubt futile) essay is a bonus with today’s posting.

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When The You We See Is The You You Are

My response to Charles Eisenstein’s essay (cited just below) follows:

The Lid Is Off
by Charles Eisenstein
http://charleseisenstein.net/the-lid-is-off/

Charles Eisenstein presents the dilemma posed by modern electronics communications and recording technology eroding the ease of concealment of unsavory personal behavior and attitudes, which ease of concealment was up until recently an intrinsic aspect of human society. He describes three examples:

1. Exposure of lewd “locker room” talk about women by Donald Trump, audio recorded a decade or more ago,

2. Exposure of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street bankers (her actual political beliefs, opinions, and promises to the financial industry); by hacked e-mail.

3. Exposure of many instances of police brutality (e.g., beatings, fatally shooting unarmed civilians, even non-fleeing unresisting ones); by cell phone video.

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When I began work in the classified arena (1978) I instantly learned to consider every communication, and even research inquiry, whether face-to-face and verbal, or written, and especially through any electronic means (via computer networks), to be the equivalent of a postcard: it would be readable by anyone and everyone who could come across it, or eavesdrop (or “wiretap,” or “hack”). This was a procedural form of “say what you mean, and mean what you say.” In other words, understand and accept the consequences of what you are saying (or writing, or making research inquiries about). So, it never occurred to me to try running any money-making schemes, or seek out porno through my employer’s computer/internet systems (not so hard to do since I had no interest in these things, but people who did were invariably caught and fired).

At a more basic level, the “solution” to the dilemma posed by Charles Eisenstein is simply to not be a hypocrite. “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Speak and act as if every moment is a “postcard” entirely visible to any and all, and easily recorded by them. Naturally, no actual human could ever maintain a perfect record in this regard, but making the effort to do so will improve your character and thus self-esteem, and it is very likely to keep you out of a lot of trouble.

The way to do this is to become self-aware, either by the luck of good parenting and education (when you are young), or by the luck of learning this truth as a result of the blowback from your own folly that you (also) luckily escaped from and got to live down (and then reform yourself). Once self-aware, you identify any disparities between your persona (the public you) and your shadow (the hidden negative aspects of your personality), and you breach the wall of hypocrisy and denial you had maintained between these two, letting in disinfecting light (and public view) that clears up your hidden rot: mean what you say and say what you mean.

So, for the Trump part of you: enjoy your sex dreams within the vast expanse of your own mind, but leave them there. There is no need to share them as part of boasting and ridicule expressed to boost comradeship, which is in fact a form of intimacy (between boys and boys, and girls and girls) that you veil with bravado to hid from yourself your embarrassment about it. Don’t act to demand attention and dominate, but command respect and gain trust by how you consistently act.

For the Hillary part of you: enjoy your daydreams of Machiavellian manipulations of people that result in your glorification, because like Walter Mitty, Billy Liar and all brides, it is so enjoyable to be the star of your own movie. But, keep these dreams (of inadequacy desiring power) within the vast expanse of your own mind, and make sure you do not deceitfully actualize them, thus splitting yourself into a persona that is a lie, and a shadow of hidden corruption as your motivating core. Instead of “me against the world” (like Rastignac at the end of Balzac’s “Le Père Goriot”), seek to be in and with the world in a way that maintains an honest self-respect.

For the chest-thumping alpha-male gorilla in you: play by the rules when exercising your power, be unbiased in how you treat others, and never forget your humanity when dealing with another person, whether you like them or not. Every moment of your life is a postcard. Make sure that any unbiased (and ethical) observer who happens to read any of your postcards of the moment can conclude he/she would have acted as you did if he/she had been in your place; or he/she can accept the choices you made in those circumstances. When acting as an agent of society to maintain order (peace and safety), do so in a manner that upholds the ideals of that society. You will be proud to have served honorably and ethically, and with a consistency of such action you will earn appreciation and gratitude.

Developing and maintaining good character during the course of your life will prevent the occurrence of many possible regrets when it comes time for you to die.

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National Character & Old Gals for Empire

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The Character of a Nation

The lower the moral and intellectual development of the masses, the less effective are democratic processes for solving national problems, improving the lives of people, and making wise use of national resources.

Elites can only control and exploit a people who have allowed themselves to become culturally primitive, socially degraded and disunited.

The fate of a nation is set by the character of its people.

 

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Old Gals Just Want To Have Fun (with Hillary’s Bill)

The easiest way to destroy a man’s career today is to accuse him of being nasty to the ladies. However, this is only true for abusers of women who are unpopular with women, like Donald Trump. Abusers of women who are popular with women, as John Kennedy was and Bill Clinton remains, are immune from such censure. A majority of American women retain favorable opinions of Bill Clinton, and many thousands would be delighted to flop on their backs and spread their legs for his enjoyment, despite him being a narcissistic sexist clod.

This masochistic devotional fervor is all to the benefit of Hillary Clinton’s political ambitions. She is America’s Livia Drusilla who aspires to be America’s Margaret Thatcher, and now seems likely to gain the White House to become America’s most successful influence peddler, much to the delight of the Wall Street banksters by whom she is bought and paid for. Hillary Clinton is cashing in on the yearnings of a majority of America’s older female voters, for compulsory celebratory recognition.

This is the popular force that is overwhelming any concern over climate change, nuclear war with Russia, securing fair and just futures for America’s youth, and stopping the “genocide by indifference” [1] that accompanies American foreign policy and imperialism. Such is the force of American middle-aged female vanity longing for adoration.

So, screw the kids and their desires for worthy futures in Bernie’s revolutionary social democracy; screw the brown people in foreign lands getting bombed to support American weapons sales; screw the dumped American labor force whose jobs are offshored and whose housing unaffordable in order to fatten the Wall Street take; screw the future desperate patients of Veterans Administration hospitals, who will have absorbed the incoming from America’s wars-of-tomorrow; and screw everybody who is going to get burned out or washed away by climate change, necessary to fill the corporate treasure chests.

For too much of the older double-X portion of the electorate, the self-image paragon to be deified is Hillary Clinton, along with her co-enabling super-predator Bill Clinton, barking and humping at the end of a long leash. Everybody else, worldwide, will just have to suck it up and bow down to the old girls’ triumph in becoming vicariously powerful; it’s their turn to come out on top. Nothing else matters.

[1] Robert Pearsall.

Voting For Against

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Voting For Against

There’s a sucker born every minute, and they all vote for the lesser evil.

Bernie Madoff is in jail for life for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded the rich. His colleagues running similar scams are free, rich and celebrated because they defraud the working and workless poor. From their legally protected offshore treasure chests they fund the lesser evilism of a rigged electoral system that keeps governments under control by corruption that shakes down the public to slop the troughs of the high rollers.

Election night is always a heartbreak for the old-timers who’ve seen the lesser evil scam cycle over and over again, and wish they could see it killed off before they die.

Election night is a big yawn to the nonchalant youth busy playing in their chill sandboxes without a thought to their unbroken futures as sucker carrion and cannon fodder.

Election night is an exciting drama to the vain shallow-minded selfish useful idiots who think what’s good for them is good for the country, and that either of those is offered by lesser evilism.

Today’s politicking is a furious clash between hot air and vapid prattle, devoid of truth while demurely united in criminality, to entrance the hollow-headed with a circus that spoofs attentiveness, so as to allow the hidden hand to continue stealing the public bread.

To be alert, compassionate and ethical is to resign yourself to being marooned in a moral wasteland on a lost planet.

America’s Enslaving Freedoms

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America’s Enslaving Freedoms

The White people who came to the American continents and eventually established the many nations of the Western Hemisphere, including the United States of America, were united in their belief in three motivating principles:

1. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, and to persecute those who did not,

2. They wanted the freedom to practice genocide of the native populations in order to gain real estate,

3. They wanted the freedom to practice slavery, both chattel slavery and wage slavery, to gain wealth.

In today’s United States, these three freedoms are somewhat tempered for political expediency, but their motivational cores remain as the essence of this nation’s attraction to immigrants from around the world.

The freedom of religion is an umbrella under which we gather our many forms of enjoying ignorance and being comforted by bigotry. Racism, anti-science irrationality, paternalism, sexism, child abuse, homophobia and traditional religious intolerance of all kinds are all enthusiastically maintained here.

The freedom to practice genocide is now a systematized slow-motion process of wealth-driven legality degrading and displacing depreciated populations to extract material advantages from those being impoverished. The combine of the banking, real estate and fossil fuel industries, and their many land-grab schemes for: gentrification, urban commercial development, large-scale industrialized agriculture, privatization of scenic areas, pipelines and natural resource extraction, all find their motivational root in this freedom of the wealthy to exclude.

The freedom to enslave remains as popular today as it has always been. Gaining the rewards from the unpaid and even forced labor of others is an enduring desirable among our species. Again, in today’s America the raw slavery of the past is difficult to practice on a grand scale, though many individuals do manage to be masters over their own hidden slavery operations (of economic as well as sexual slavery). The major slavery plantations serving USA owners today are the tragically vast private prison and slavery complex, and the internationally outsourced de facto slavery operations of pittance wage labor producing “low cost” (high profit) products for import to the USA.

One can easily see strong resonances of these three principles as the foundations of many US foreign policies, entanglements and alliances; with Israel and Saudi Arabia for example.

Most Americans adhere to these principles, even if they don’t realize it, because they are easily distracted shallow thinkers whom corporate media indoctrinates without difficulty. Our public political discourse is confined to the narrowest of ranges centered squarely in neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy. The grotesque fluff that passes for political debate, currently between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is entirely about the inconsequential atmospherics that each presidential contender would prefer to exhibit were they to be appointed the manager of the existing, unchangeable and continuing neoliberal economic regime.

The purpose of the US corporate-owned government is to maintain the conditions that allow today’s corporate wealth-generating schemes to continue their extraction from the national and world common good. There is no room for the voice of wage-slave America in the political process imposed for the benefit of the wealthy. That was the bluntly obvious message, sent by the ownership class to wage-slave America, in the blocking of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Jill Stein and the Green Party valiantly carry on with the most popular yet least supported agenda for wage-slave Americans, but again, too many are imprisoned by their fear-based indoctrination.

Remaining faithful to learned delusions for enslavement is more comforting to most of the electorate than breaking out into a rebellious independence of logical thought, based on facts, that leads to politically disobedient actions. However, in 2016, the sheer odiousness of the leading presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, has shredded so much of the camouflage hiding the naked reality of American capitalism, that it is impossible for any sane person to remain unaware of it. Some very optimistic observers are hopeful that this ‘pantsing’ of American neoliberalism will be the beginning of a collapse of wage-slave America’s support for both the Democratic and Republican parties. We have all seen:

1. The loutish honesty of Donald Trump in accurately expressing the attitudes of the American wealth elite; and

2. The smarmy manipulativeness and blatant dishonesty of Hillary Clinton, which has exposed the corruption of the government professionals serving the American wealth elite.

Donald Trump’s popular support has come at the expense of the viability of the Republican Party as a vehicle supporting the careerism of its professional politicians, because that support is a populist insurgency that overwhelmed the pros. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s support is centered among the careerist professional politicians of the Democratic Party, and has come as a result of excluding the voice of the people, who in turn have lost enthusiasm for that party and its “first female president” candidate.

So now, the Trump-led Republican Party flounders with chaotically amateurish ebullience, while the Clinton-led Democratic Party is a tightly scripted flat tire. Will more of the electorate wake up, and move on? We can only hope.

Voting in 2016: Compassionate Pragmatism Versus Ideology

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The following is a modified version of comments I posted on Louis Proyect’s website (blog), “The Unrepentant Marxist,” where I was arguing against the Marxists’ idea of: not voting for Bernie Sanders (or anybody), on the principle of not supporting the capitalist electoral system because doing so would drain away activist energy that should instead go into forming an “authentic” socialist revolutionary movement. Proyect himself is a lively intellect, an amazing researcher and scholar, and a prolific author who frequently publishes penetrating insights about politics and culture. We both used to write essays for Swans.com (between 2003 to 2013, for me). Here are those comments (from 18 April 2016):

I had the unfortunate experience in 1968 of being called by the draft for induction into the US military during the height of the Tet Offensive (Vietnam War). My initial draft deferment was soon revoked because I was confused with some other New York Puerto Rican, who had flunked out of school (I was on the Dean’s list). This error could not be changed because “once we start the process we just keep going” (how the Draft Board explained it to me on the phone).

I was 1A (classified as ready for immediate use), holding out on month-to-month appeals (you were allowed a hearing, and there was a big backlog!) until the draft lottery of December 1969 gifted me with a very high number (they drafted people whose birthdays fell into the first 200+ picked out of a big jug, as in bingo; my birthday was in the 360s). And so, like a small-fry catch-and-release trout, I was tossed back into the wild.

I have never had illusions about Democrats or Republicans or anyone else. My point about voting (one way or the other, or even not at all) is very simple: I believe in pragmatic action, “people over ideas,” especially given unusually favorable opportunities like the wildly popular Bernie Sanders campaign (a rarity). I believe in being pragmatic instead of hewing to an inflexible ideology, which is basically a fundamentalist religion, “ideas over people.”

Here is one example of what I mean. When Louis Proyect — the “Unrepentant Marxist” — allowed himself to be moved by his heart, instead of his supposedly rigid anti-US-imperialism Western-leftist comfort-zone isolationist “intellect,” and “ideology,” over the imminent (and subsequently thwarted at the last minute by NATO intervention) Benghazi massacre by Gaddafi (in March 2011 during the Libyan Civil War), and also over the continuing war and atrocities by Assad against the majority of Syrians who don’t want Assad as their dictator, he (Louis) was pilloried by many of his Marxist colleagues because he broke ranks with the ideology (anti-interventionism regardless of circumstances). He had blasphemed against the word-as-law, really “the word” as secular god. I have unbounded admiration for Louis because of this display of compassion, which causes him now to have so many rhetorical and semantic difficulties (on his blog) in doing the verbal origami necessary to fashion a “logical” argument for these stands being correct and direct conclusions based on the ideology supposedly shared by the Marxist (argumentative and disunited) community he has been a lifelong activist and author in.

By the way, the argument I am giving here is the central moral principle of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (“a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision, and conscience suffers defeat”). So, if you can view voting as a tactic (even if perhaps often trivial) rather than a Holy Sacrament or a potential Mortal Sin, and you can feel solidarity with most of the people (the actual people, even though I personally don’t like most people) who have awakened to Bernie Sanders’ message, then given a sound heart you easily chuck “the word” and vote to help make this magnificent (and never-to-be perfect) revolution succeed, because it is both a once-in-a(my)-lifetime opportunity, and it is BIG and REAL.

Are you really going to suffer by “going against your principles” in this situation? Is the question of voting “all about me” regardless, even over participating in a genuine popular movement to overturn much of the enslavement and corruption imposed on us today? Do you realize what a real revolution $15/hour nationally, and Medicare-for-all, and socialized public college would be for perhaps 100,000,000 Americans today?

Instead of waiting for the perfect revolution to drop into you laps sometime in the future (never, basically), don’t you think you would have much more influence in organizing for that grander revolution from within the movement that has captured popular enthusiasm today: the Sanders revolution? And we all know that Bernie is just the current flag-bearer of this revolution, we may need to find new personifications of it after July, or November. It is clear Bernie knows this too.

What makes Bernie run?: he has 7 grandchildren, he cares about their futures, which is NOW. What makes me spend this time writing to you?, I have three children and am far more concerned about their futures (which is NOW) than about the purity of my ideological allegiances and cohesiveness of my intellectual constructs: people over ideas.

The ideas (and “faiths”) are useful to give you a sense of direction, and sharpen your awareness and remind you of compassion, but the realities of your life and the currents and incidents of the history (and chaos) you live through should be the actual forces you dance with to produce your actions. It’s all very simple: is it about me, or is it about us? “I rebel, therefore we exist.”

Voting Affirmatively

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“If you are a believer in Ron Paul’s Libertarian ideology, then voting for him is an obvious right choice. Why would anyone else vote for Ron Paul? Because Ron Paul has been consistently opposed to America’s wars, most recently in Afghanistan (ongoing) and Iraq and Libya (both done), and because Ron Paul is against prohibitions on recreational drug use and its criminalization, many leftists and/or progressives and/or social democrats and liberal Democrats have stated they would consider voting for Ron Paul if he is a candidate for president in the November 2012 election. From a leftist perspective, this is a stupid idea because it will only set back the leftist agenda, however you choose to define it.” For more, see

Voting For Ron Paul Is Stupid For Leftists
12 February 2012 [203rd birthday of Charles Darwin]
http://www.swans.com/library/art18/mgarci40.html

Vote affirmatively, instead for the “lesser evil.” In either case you may not influence the political choices of the nation, but only with the former do you maintain your self-respect.