Back during the George W. Bush neocon regime, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W. Bush for the world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim. “Yesterday standing at this same podium was Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the sulfur.”
Chavez is one of the American right-wing’s favorite bogyman, because Chavez helps the people instead of bleeding them for the rich, which is Washington’s way. While Washington has driven all but the one percent into the ground, Chavez cut poverty in half, doubled university enrollment, and provided health care and old age pensions to millions of Venezuelans for the first time.
Little wonder he was elected to a fourth term as president, despite the many millions of dollars Washington poured into the election campaign of Chavez’s opponent.
While Washington and the EU preach neoliberalism–the supremacy of capital over labor–South American politicians who reject Washington’s way are being elected and reelected in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia.
It was the Ecuadoran government, not Washington, that had the moral integrity to grant political asylum to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The only time Washington grants asylum is when it can be used to embarrass an opponent.
In contrast to the leadership that is emerging in South America as more governments there reject the traditional hegemony of Washington, the US political elite, whether Republican or Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American people.
The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the rich, taxes which are already rock bottom, to block any regulation of the gangsters in the financial arena, and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.
Privatizing Social Security and Medicare means to divert the people’s tax dollars to the profits of private corporations. In Republican hands, privatization means only one thing: to cut the people’s benefits and to use the people’s tax dollars to increase the profits in the private sector. Romney’s policy is just another policy that sacrifices the people to the one percent.
Unfortunately, the Democrats, if a lesser evil, are still an evil. There is no reason to vote for the reelection of a president who codified into law the Bush regime’s destruction of the US Constitution, who went one step further and asserted the power to murder US citizens without due process of law, and who has done nothing to stop the exploitation of the American people by the one percent.
As Gerald Celente says in the Autumn Issue of the Trends Journal, when confronted with the choice between two evils, you don’t vote for the lesser evil. You boycott the election and do not vote. “Lesser or greater, evil is evil.”
If Americans had any sense, no one would vote in the November election. Whoever wins the November election, it will be a defeat for the American people.
An Obama or Romney win stands in stark contrast with Chavez’s win. Here is how Lula da Silva, the popular former president of Brazil summed it up: “Chavez’s victory is a victory for all the peoples of Latin America. It is another blow against imperialism.” Washington, making full use of the almighty dollar, was unable to buy the Venezuelan election.
How will a Romney or Obama win be summed up? The answer will be in terms of which candidate is best for Israel’s interest; which is best for Wall Street’s interest, which is best for agribusiness; which is most likely to attack Iran; which is most likely to subject economic and war protesters to indefinite detention as domestic extremists.
The only people who will benefit from the election of either Romney or Obama are those associated with the private oligarchies that rule America.
Copyright © 2012 Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. Associate Editor Wall Street Journal, Columnist for Business Week, Senior Research Fellow Hoover Institution Stanford University, and William E. Simon Chair of Political Economy in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. His home page is paulcraigroberts.org.
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The remarkable juxtaposition of those who feel the true futility of the duopoly electoral system and yet cannot send their vote to Jill Stein and the Green Party is an amazing twist that smacks of incredible duplicity with the duopoly or incredible cowardice in those who claim leadership in the left of the political scene.
Will the Left and their pundits begin to appreciate that the same Green Party candidate they so claim to admire is ready for the vote? If the duopoly is as bad as it actually is in fact then what in God’s name is keeping left Progressive voters from taking the vote to the problem and increasing the Green vote? Is it plain numbness or something more akin to the conservative voters who vote against their own best interest every election for the Republican liars and criminals?
Give America a chance and take your vote to where you claim to stand and Vote Green. Vote Jill Stein. Make the duopoly shudder with thile vote of 20% Green this coming 6th of November. Put the talk to the walk and can the dubious “advice” to strike the vote, it is an ignorant suggestion that produces nothing but a vacuum. The only wasted vote is the one that is not cast.
To ignore ones vote in this year is a travesty of political strategy. One has only to know that not voting is only enhancing the energy of the media to claim “one of the candidates” has won the “Mr. President” sham-competition “election”.
Use each of your votes to shake the hackles of the corporate rulers and give Green the sunshine of your vote. Our nation can only grow with the energy of a powerful vote for righteous liberal character such as the power and backbone of Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala.
We all know “you can’t have it both ways”. Don’t hold your ballot and pretend you are doing your country and cause any favor because you are not.
The only WASTED VOTE IS THE ONE NOT CAST.
Lead the nation to the 21st Century and start the Green New Deal, the Green Revolution with your valuable one vote. In the least sum of this election effort that will effect the major funding of the Green Party for 2016. Look ahead, see the real investment value of your vote for 2016, if not an outright victory along the lines of Truman and Lincoln.
A superlative article, as always from the keyboard of Paul Craig Roberts. He has come to understand the peril endangering all of us — the Forces of Greed and the Forces of Zionism at the peak of any list of dangerous entities. I am greatly admiring of his words about Venezuela and President Chavez, but I am most pleased at his first-itemized “…which candidate is best for Israel’s interest” in the penultimate paragraph. The conundrum is and will remain: How do we sever the “entangling alliance” fashioned by the Zionists for whom Israel and America are tools of their trade?