Turning Points

Yet another chapter from Michael J. Smith’s online book, Stop Me Before I Vote Again. In this chapter, Smith implies why it is so important to vote for third parties – they drag the consensus away from what the duopoly says is reality. Read it and then think about the effects of the controversy over Ron Paul. Isn’t Paul’s campaign the very definition of how to counter the ratchet effect? And why Paul’s campaign is encountering such shrieks of outrage from both the Democratic and Republican Parties?

II. The ratchet effect

The ratchet is a simple, ubiquitous, ancient bit of machinery. There’s one in your bicycle wheel (it allows you to coast without pedaling), there’s one in your watch (if you’re the old-fashioned type and have a mechanical watch) and there’s one in the jib sheet winches of your boat (if you’re a yachtsman; but then in that case you probably aren’t reading this book). What the ratchet does is permit rotation in one direction but not in the other. Here’s a diagram:

The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties — Republicans and Democrats — play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation.

The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward. Continue reading →

Make that Happy Friggin’ New Year. Your president just signed the indefinite detention act and sold your rights, both civil and legal, right down the damn river. Indefinite detention for American citizens is now the law. And of course, the man you worship as a hero did the dastardly act on New Year’s Eve, when all of you were out getting drunk, partying, and not paying attention. Who, me? Why should I care about indefinite detention? That’s for those terrorists. You were warned.

What, pray tell, is your definition of a terrorist?

Now, I guess we’ll get to find out how much “Justice” Roberts cares about Constitutional rights for Americans. Not much, I think.

I am so very impressed with Michael J. Smith’s online book, Stop Me Before I Vote Again. I’ve encountered much opposition to my decision to vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary (how dare you!!) and for my decision to vote for a third party in the general election next fall. But I’m unmoved by the arguments and I’d encourage any open-minded person to read chapter 15 of Michael Smith’s book before telling another person that voting for a third party is a vote for the Republican Party.

As you get towards the end, keep in mind what the OWS people have been doing. Michael J. Smith was absolutely correct – he was just a little bit early.

Here is Chapter 15. Read it. Please.

XV. What is to be done?

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

–Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1932

Many pages ago, I promised Annie that I would suggest some alternatives to voting for a Democrat and then resigning ourselves to the inevitable disappointment. Now it’s time to fulfill that promise. But before I do, let’s make one thing perfectly clear, as Nixon used to say: I don’t know what will work. I don’t claim to be clairvoyant, or even to have any greater insight into American politics and American culture than the next guy. Nobody knows what will work — until we stumble onto something that works.

One thing I do know, and after all these pages I hope you know it too: I know what won’t work. What won’t work is voting for people like Clinton, and Gore, and Kerry. All these guys, and all their epigones stacked in the warehouse, were stamped out by the same factory, the Al From Republican Knock-Off Mill. Whether they get into office or not, we have nothing to hope for from them. Continue reading →

I’ve posted before on this topic, asking why people consistently vote against their own self-interests. My conclusion in the past has been the same as that of Annie, in the following article. Lots of liberals and progressives have shared our opinion. I never had an answer to my own question – my response was an attempt, quite unsatisfactory, to come to a conclusion. It wasn’t until I read the following article that the whole problem was solved. Read the article and see if you don’t agree with the author. The article is actually chapter 14 of an online book. It was written by Michael J. Smith in 2005 and never finished, apparently. If you go to the site where you can read it, you will see that some of the chapters are hyper-linked and others are not. That is because the ones that are not hyper-linked have not been written. That’s a real shame, because I think Mr. Smith is really quite accurate in his ideas and they deserve wider dissemination. I hope to contribute to that, if only minutely!

As you read the chapter, which was written in 2005, by the way, keep in mind what is going on with the Occupy Wall Street movement. I think that Michael Smith hit the nail squarely on the head back in 2005 – he was just a few years too early in his analysis. This is a very interesting piece of work – I highly recommend visiting the blog where it can be read, Stop Me Before I Vote Again.

XIV. What’s the matter with… liberals?

Annie is very puzzled by most of her fellow Americans. She doesn’t understand their taste in food, or clothing, and she really doesn’t get why so many of them go to church. More than anything else, though, she’s baffled about why they hate liberals so much.

Social Security, student loans, interstate highways, subsidized mortgages, electricity in every darkest Dogpatch of the benighted South — all these things, and more, were the liberals’ gift to America. They’re all things that regular Red-State Americans consider their birthright. In fact, it’s not too much to say that all these liberal initiatives built the world the liberal-haters live in. So what’s their problem? Why do they have to bite the hand that feeds them — that’s fed them for three generations now? Continue reading →

With all of the saber-rattling going on vis-a-vis Iran, I thought that I’d provide a link to what I thought was a balanced view of the country of Iran. I don’t know a lot about Iran, other than that it is a Persian country whose language is Farsi, not Arabic. Steve Ricks, the narrator, is a well-known television personality who focuses on European travel. Those who own a TV, unlike me, probably know this. Anyway, if you are interested and have the time … the video is about 55 minutes long. It was a nice introduction to the country for me, even if it was filled with platitudes and over-simplifications. If I wanted to know more, I’d read The History of Iran, by Elton L. Daniel, to fill me in on the details that are missing in this documentary.

Happy Holidays!

There is a movement building for progressives to temporarily change their voter registration from whatever party they are registered as to Republican, so they can vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary. The idea is that if Ron Paul is the nominee, Barack Obama will be forced to defend his war mongering and unconstitutional actions in signing the NDAA bill.

Initially I rejected the idea, because I am not a Republican and would never vote for a Republican. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. So, today, I am mailing in my voter registration change form so that I can vote in the Republican primary on January 31, 2012.

I will vote for Ron Paul in the hopes that he becomes the Republican nominee. Then, Barack Obama will have to defend his miserable record of war mongering, spying on Americans, and working for the Wall Street banks.

I would encourage other progressives to do the same. Will you get your hands dirty? Yes. But you can always wash them.

When I tell people that I refuse to vote for Obama, they somehow think that I am going to vote for Ron Paul or some other moral cretin endorsed by the Republican Party. What is it about this country’s people that they think their options are so limited that they can only pick between two political parties?

I read an interesting rant by John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine, which originally appeared in the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, entitiled, President Obama Richly Deserves to be Dumped. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it on the Providence Journal website, but it appeared on the Common Dreams website, where I suggest you go to read it if you are so inclined. I found the comments (320 so far, as of early Sunday morning) to be quite interesting, too. This one caught my eye: ” The mindset of the US electorate needs to change from accusing third party voters of ‘wasting their votes’ to accusing Democratic Party and Republican Party voters of wasting their votes.”

Indeed. Starting now, I will respond this way whenever someone tells me that I am wasting my vote by voting for a third party candidate.

Now. Why is it that I am going to vote for Rocky Anderson or Jill Stein? David Swanson has supplied as good an answer as anyone. Read it and think about what he has to say. I’ve italicized the first paragraph, because David is dead right about this. Why are we obsessing over a clown show when this country is going down the toilet?

Try Not to Think of a Newt

The current President and Congress are destroying our Constitutional rights, our planet’s climate, and the vestiges of a social safety net, and you are obsessing over a freak show of self-hating homosexuals and anti-intellectual intellectuals jumping through hoops in a corporate media circus with Ringmaster Donald Trump. Is this a good use of your time?

The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you’re concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me? Continue reading →

Would anyone care to educate me as to who appointed President Obama chief judge, jury, and executioner?? For those who don’t know what I’m referring to, please read Glenn Greenwald’s opinion on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. Be sure and read the comments, too – they are quite illuminating.

Oh, and after reading Greenwald’s piece, let me know why you are still going to vote for the tool of the 1%. Because he is the lesser-of-two-evils? I voted for him in 2008 but I most assuredly won’t make that mistake again. Would you rather die by hanging or by the firing squad? It is way, way past time for Americans to vote their conscience and not be led to slaughter by the criminal political class in this country. I hope there are twenty candidates for President next year and that every single incumbent is voted out of office. Every single one of them. They are all crooked and servants of the ruling elite in this country.

I’ll do my part to make that happen. Guaranteed.

As furious as I am with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (93-7 in the Senate and 322-96 in the House) and as unimpressed as I am with Obama’s pledge to veto the bill, I overlooked one thing until I read Paul Craig Roberts’ incisive analysis of the Machiavellian scheming of the Obama regime. For those who think Obama will veto the bill (and he probably will), how likely do you think that the veto will be sustained? With a 93-7 majority in the Senate and a 322-96 majority in the House? Really?

But I digress. Paul Craig Roberts offers us a critically important insight into the reasons for Obama’s promise to veto the bill. He says, in his article on CounterPunch, that the Obama regime does not want military detention because passage of the bill will codify the treatment of those detained and that those detainees will have to be treated according to the Geneva accords. In other words, those detainees will not be able to be tortured or shipped to CIA black prisons in other countries to be tortured. Above all, the Obama regime, which is a continuation of the Bush regime, does not want to be held accountable for its crimes. The Obama regime wants the “flexibility” to deal with the nation’s “security” as it, and it alone, deems appropriate.

From the article:

“In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to whom it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.”

Read the article. It is important. Very, very important. And keep in mind Paul Craig Roberts’ thoughts when you listen to or read Obama’s speech, given today, in Osawatomie, Kansas. More deceptive rhetoric from the silver tongued back-stabber. Obama is a Republican, not a Progressive. Of any kind. Trying to polish his reputation by invoking the record of Teddy Roosevelt (at one of Roosevelt’s campaign stops, no less!) reminds me of Glenn Beck invoking the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C. not long ago.

Pitiful. Laughable. Deplorable. But a majority of the Obamabots in this country will lap it up, because they want to believe that Obama has their best interests at heart when an objective look at his record proves the exact opposite.