“ . . . ever more elections, and ever less democracy . . .”—Michael K. Smith
We are nearing the end of the billion dollar assault on consciousness that protects corporate power from the threat of democracy. It’s called the presidential race, or—in hysterical-get-out-the-vote fashion—the most important election since The Creation, or 911, or the last election.
If we don’t support the corporate Republican, radical Muslims, socialists, gay illegal immigrants and godless abortion fiends will destroy us all. On the other hand, if we do not re-elect the corporate Democrat, Christian fanatics will murder women, children, gays, blacks, Latinos, and all other minorities except evangelical whites, while invading other nations not already under American attack.
Of course, both corporate flunkies will bipartisanly continue passionately sucking up to Israel and threatening mass murder of Iranians.
All but totally obliterated in the advertising blitz are alternative candidates offering programs that are pro-democracy by being anti-corporate. The electoral system makes it incredibly difficult for so-called minority parties and candidates to ever reach the national ballot, let alone national consciousness. But voters able to break through the plastic curtain and find people like Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson will be delighted to hear and see reflections of themselves and real hope of a better future for America.
In fact, a 5% vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party would assure millions of dollars in public funds to help create a real alternative electoral voice for the future. That’s why she was locked out of national debates and even locked up by the police to assure her silence. If that had happened in Iran, shrieks of horror would reverberate across the land. Here, it got less attention than soccer scores from Tibet.
No matter which corporado wins a minority vote, things will get worse for some and better for others because that is the nature of the system. It is bringing even greater profits to fewer and fewer people while inflicting greater loss on more and more people. That’s the way it has always worked and will continue to work until we change it, hopefully before it destroys us all in a final cataclysmic achievement of full, negative equality.
Everything that happens in this economy is to create profit for a minority private sector first and benefit a majority public second, if at all. Birth, death and all the stuff in between are unnaturally treated as commodities, purchased, rented and leased as units of marketable goods. Nature works in a non-profit fashion but capital has had our earth mother locked in a polluted senior facility for generations. She seems to be growing angrier at her treatment and might lash out in a fury we can’t anticipate if we don’t soon change our behavior towards her family—humanity—and end worshipping a patriarchal dictatorship posing as democracy and destroying our world with its profit and loss perversion.
A form of paternalistic capitalism has had enough crumbs slipping off the table of wealth to afford many among what were once working people to become middle class and buy lots of consumer goods. With identity individualism we’ve also established the right for some members of alleged minorities to act as complicit in all of this as any other group. This irrational equality sees to it that certain privileged women can profit and be as successful, obnoxious and murderous as men, that certain privileged “people of color” can profit and enjoy the benefits of abuse of less privileged people of color, or no color, and married homosexual couples can profit and join with married heterosexual couples to invest in the same corporate markets that all other people—with enough money—are free to invest in and make even more money. Until the next bubble bursts and the market crashes and all become members of the “loss” majority.
Some have missed out on getting privileged members of their groups to rise in the profit system food chain and feed on other losers rather than being fed to them. For example, not one Arab-American Lesbian HIV-positive Rosicrucian can be found on any corporate board, or managing a professional sport, or firebombing a suspected drug house in America or a terrorist house in a foreign country. But as long as corporate propaganda works, we may soon have a token member of that group “affirmed” to assure that another reduced segment of humans is appeased and doesn’t notice the collective destruction of our race by this forced division into lesser minorities.
Bringing a few of us onto the profit side of our consumer ghetto while leaving most confined to the loss neighborhood has worked so far, from the extremes of gated-to-keep-people-out communities to gated-to-keep-people-in prisons. All remain divided minorities with relatively little to absolutely no power so that the rich minority with almost all the power can keep it, and thereby maintain the process that shows signs of a global breakdown menacing all humanity.
A system close to collapse back in the 1930s was saved by introducing a measure of social democracy called the New Deal. This got profiteers at the top to give up a little bit of their wealth to trickle down on the great mass of working people so that they might enjoy a better material condition and not rebel against capital. It worked for a generation which saw workers transformed into a middle class in a culture that introduced consumption and wanton waste for the masses in order to create incredible wealth for the few. That began to change in the 1970s when capital reverted to its traditional need to accumulate more by giving people less. Its royal divinity still masquerades as democracy for people who might as well watch TV as bother to vote, since they have far more choice on their multi-channel remotes than on their bipartisan ballots.
Hopefully, more citizens will tire of being fooled by a voting process which reduces us to acting like a nation of voting fools. This election can be a turning point but only if we reject the lesser evil choice and vote for what we want, need and deserve: A future of real hope based on a political voice that will ultimately represent far more of the 99% along with those in the lower 1% who reject their masters and join with their fellow citizens.
Vote for Jill Stein and The Green Party and give yourself, and everyone else, a chance for that future.
Frank Scott writes political commentary and satire which appears in print in The Independent Monitor and online at the Legalienate. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.
