A long discussion about voting.

Submitted by folkie on 4 September 2011 - 4:59pm

This is from a mailing list and personal emails:

The first item below is something that Rocky Neptun sent out to his mailing list. The second is a response to Rocky published as an op-ed in the Activist San Diego newsletter of August 29th, and the third is my response to both.

Rocky's article:

As a high-classed, sassy, male hustler in Hollywood, I used to be bustled off, half-clad, to the homes of some of the biggest names in Tinseltown in the 1970's. As a poor boy, from the other side of the tracks – white trash – some would call us; I would have, gliding along Sunset Strip, such tremendous excitement, a burgeoning sense of expectation at dating such famous people and a great hope that the hopes and dreams I had would be furthered by these encounters.

What I usually found were frantic luminaries, desperate for any kind of affection and support. Their movie and television images of courage and prowess, from which I would draw macho nectar, like a bee from a flower, for days before the date, would create in me an inflated ego, a sense of being somebody, of being accepted within the recognized elite. Only to crash amid the reality of who these people really were.

It was interesting last Saturday that some of these same experiences kept me from attending the Labor/Community Forum. I was on my way from my lover’s house in Rosarito Beach, sitting in my car at the border, when an image of one of my old tricks, Robert Reed from the Brady Bunch television series, burst forth, It was the day he cried on my shoulder and said the danger of creating an image of oneself, an illusion of action, is that the shadow becomes more real and we become trapped by who we think we are based on who we want others to think we are.

“We build glass houses, malls and even restaurants because we need for others to look in….to define and validate who we are by where we are, who our chummies are and how much we posture,” he had whimpered. He died alone, bitter and wretched.

For many years I have attended left-wing, progressive forums in San Diego. From the 2000 Ruckus Society training at the Che Café at UCSD to the 20002 grand convergence of the Cultural Creatives at Springfield College to the 2004 Affordable Housing Forum at Golden Hall where several thousand attended. And for just as long, I have watched power liberals, strut, posture and be awash in their aura as “the loyal opposition.” Their hierarchical, self-serving, activism (many are paid professionals) has long ago abandoned organizing in the neighborhoods, the hoods and barrios. Their liberalism, weak, shallow; it tinkers rather than confronts, compromises rather than challenges, sends you to “break-out sessions” rather than to the streets.

I attended a meeting of Activist San Diego recently on nuclear power and it was so disgusting, I went away in anger and refused to even write an article about the event. Power liberals, seeped in their agendas, like putrid tea bags left in the water for too many years, rambled on about their projects, theories and personal philosophy, talking, as my grandmother used to say “to hear their heads rattle.” Very few of the new people there, mostly young, were allowed an opportunity to express their questions, concerns and fears, much less their opinions and went away disappointed and turned off by our progressive movement here in San Diego.

Saturday’s so-called labor/community forum was, indeed, as Frank Gormie pointed out in his article at the Ocean Beach Rag website, the first time that organized labor has come to the progressive community for back-up. So…..where has the political power of the labor unions been all these years? Feathering their own nests? Now, weakened and under attack, they seek allies.

Where was the AFL-CIO Labor Council in 2001 when a small group of activists, known as the HOPES Committee, later expanded into the Affordable Housing Coalition of San Diego County, picketed Mayor Murphy’s first State of the City speech for decent, reasonably priced housing? Where was organized labor when whole families, some third generation, in the last decade, were being displaced from City Heights, then other neighborhoods like Barrio Logan, by gentrification? Where was labor all these years that the Renters Union has been trying to get rent control on the agenda or ballot?

Where has the labor council been all these years while ill San Diegans and their safe, legal access to their medicine has been under attack by a vicious District Attorney?

Where were labor leaders during the first decade of 2000 when the homeless were being hammered with beatings, arrests and harassment? And, to come down to the nitty gritty, why haven’t the unions tried to organize one big union for the city which would cover all those stressed out AM/PM clerks, service workers, gardeners and just about everyone else who works by the hour?

I do hope something concrete and confrontational comes out last Saturday’s event; that it just wasn’t another episode of diversion theatre with the usual cast of activist actors, like Daddy Brady, spinning shadows, an illusion of what could be. Only time will tell us, but the record in our city has not been great.

Jeeni's response in the Activist San Diego newsletter to Rocky's article :

Two weeks ago I fell off my bicycle and broke a bone on my hand. It hurt but could have been worse, and that’s got me thinking that the next fall could do a lot more damage. The same can be said of bikes as horses, when you fall off, you have to get back on again right away, because the more you think about it, the less likely you’ll try it again. Perhaps the same can be said of anyone who has been working for social justice. Lately, it seems like everything positive we try, lands us in a worse place than where we started. Some days it seems like the only thing we get for our efforts is criticism. I’m beginning to feel about the same about activism as I do about bike riding – afraid of falling/failing again.

Tonight, as I was considering what to write for this op-ed, I read a post on the OB Rag by a long time activist that was a scathing criticism of “power liberals”. The author chose to use his literary gifts to fire a barrage of cynical criticism against recent efforts to organize the working class. I understand his anger and frustration. For too long we have been banging our heads against the wall as we watch every advance we’ve fought for in fairness, equality and human rights, falling apart. Programs that should be helping people in these terrible times are being starved to death or commandeered to serve developers and investors. We’re all feeling battered and bruised and afraid of getting “back on that bike” anymore!

Every day I ask myself, “Why am I doing this?” So far, I have been able to convince myself that feeling ineffective is a lot less painful that conceding defeat to the forces of greed and hate. And fortunately there are many others who also persist against all odds in the work for justice. We may not agree on strategies or even agendas, but for godsake please, if you’ve reached the point where you just can’t fight the fight any more, don’t be pulling down the people who have the courage and vision to keep getting back on their bike, or horse or whatever they choose to ride into this desperate battle.

In his inspirational keynote address at the Economic Summit for a Better San Diego this weekend, Richie Ross said, “The politics of anger is unsustainable.” I’d add that if we turn thatanger on each other, we’re all screwed.

Jeeni Criscenzo del Rio

President, ASD

My comments:

I'm not sure what Richie Ross was referring to by "the politics of anger," but I'd say that political decisions to wage six simultaneous wars of aggression, run covert actions in more than 70 countries, maintain military bases in close to a thousand countries, and continue actions that have already killed more than a million innocent civilians and by some accounts are more than halfway toward killing the second million, could be considered angry. In the long run Richie is correct and these angry political wars are not sustainable, but in the short run they can go on for long enough to kill at least a few billion innocent civilians before running out of oil to fuel the planes and drones that drop the bombs.

I'd also say that the response of Brian Willson, who will be speaking in San Diego again on September 3rd, although nonviolent, was an angry response. Rather than just wave signs and sign petitions, Brian lay down on the railroad tracks in front of a train that was carrying weapons to a war. The train ran him over and he lost his legs. But he was tired of ineffective methods that never brought about change.

I agree with Rocky about the putrid power liberals. They're certainly not angry enough to ride into battle, whether on bicycles, in their cars, or on foot, or to throw their bodies on the cogs of the machine as Willson did. They're definitely not angry enough to oppose the system, indeed, like all liberals, they believe in the system and think that they can work within the system because to their way of thinking it is a basically sound system and only needs a few little tweaks or reforms or different figureheads in order to be fully acceptable to them. Liberals thought this way back when the United States was committing genocide against Native Americans, and while liberals may have deplored the genocide, they weren't in a position to oppose it because without it they wouldn't benefit from the stolen land and resources that were the results ofthat genocide. Liberals thought this way back when the Framers were writing a counterrevolutionary Constitution to protect slavery and betray the values of the Declaration of Independence for which blood had been shed. Liberals thought this way throughout hundreds of foreign military interventions by the US to benefit private corporations like Standard Oil and United Fruit, and liberals are incapable of thinking differently. As one liberal explained it to me, liberals simply aren't capable of acting rationally. They are herd animals who want to be part of the crowd and are incapable of breaking free and of thinking and acting for themselves.

I remember the lead up to the 2008 election when I was pleading with liberals not to vote in an election where the only possible outcome would be more wars ofaggression. If they were opposed to wars, as they claimed, how could they vote to delegate their power, give their authority, and grant their consent of the governed to a government engaged in wars of aggression? One liberal actually told me that the only way to bring about peace was to vote for war criminal Obama and then try to convince him to change his mind. I presume she's still trying to convince him. Obama, of course, like Bush before him, and like any President in our capitalist system who doesn't want to be assassinated, obeys the dictates of the big money elites and the military-industrial complex and, as Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, said clearly, does not allow public opinion to influence his policy decisions. The definition of a democracy is when public opinion actually has a voice in policy decisions--when public opinion is not allowed to influence policy decisions you have a tyranny, not a democracy.

Anger does not necessarily mean violence. But it does mean opposing the system instead of submitting to it, working within it, and going along to get along. It means, at the very least, not giving a system based on genocide your personal imprimatur. It means not granting candidates you can't hold accountable, the right to ignore public opinion once they're in office. The actions of liberals may seem worthwhile from their point of view. But as I wrote earlier,

I guess that the actions deemed appropriate by those who support the status quo, i.e., the current power structure, are actions which are allowed by the current power structure. While such actions may improve things for many, they do not actually change the status quo. Personally, while I will support such things, such as the community gardens, I believe that unless we change the power structure, we'll end up with things like radioactive organic gardens with inedible produce when San Onofre and other nuclear power plants do a Fukushima, as they inevitably will unless they are shut down first. But with a corporate power structure, the fact that unsafe nuclear power plants bring in profits as long as they are kept running, but would cost a lot of money to decommission, very few are likely to be shut down before they melt down. That is just one of many reasons I believe that the system itself must be changed.

Fukushima is still emitting radiation and it has been measured here in California. There does not appear to be any technology to stop it. New oil slicks in the Gulf ofMexico indicate that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was never fully capped. Again, the technology seems to be lacking. Do liberals think that governments which perpetrate genocide on innocent civilians elsewhere, won't continue to perpetrate atrocities against us when they deem it profitable?

I have another problem with liberals. Many of them are liars. I know for a fact that many of them campaigned for and voted for Obama, and some even tried to silence me because I didn't think that was a good idea. But now some of them are telling me that they didn't vote for Obama, the same way that many Germans tried to pretend that they hadn't supported Hitler. It is a transparent lie because they will always support whatever war criminal their party nominates, and they are preparing to hold their noses and vote for Obama again in 2012.

This is what Tripoli looked like before the NATO bombing: http://livinglegacy.ning.com/profiles/blogs/libyan-crisis-a-report-from?xg_source=activity

If the bridge was elevated and a few of the buildings a bit taller, would it remind you of anywhere? Now, after five months of Obama's drone bombs, it looks like Baghdad, mostly rubble. Obama's actions are not ensuring that it won't happen here, they are ensuring that it WILL happen here. Our government has withdrawn from all international treaties and conventions, including the Magna Carta, but it cannot repeal the Golden Rule. We have incurred the enmity of by world by treating others in ways we would not like to be treated, and we deserve no better in return.

--Mark

(continued)

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Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 4 September 2011 - 5:04pm.

I don't think many "liberals" will disagree that there is a war going on here. It is not between the Islamic world and the Christian world, although you hear that a lot. It is essentially between the haves and the have-nots, between the first world and the third world, and more correctly today between the corporate citizens and us humans. A bloodless coup has already occurred, but few people are even aware of it, and fascism is right around the corner.

Some people will only talk about the fight, others will engage in the battle. Some will simply complain that people are not fighting hard enough and say that the people involved are simply posturing and are like "putrid tea bags." Of course, such talk does no good at all, except to undermine our efforts.

Of course, a meeting of Activist San Diego is not supposed to be a battle front. It is for planning and education of both activists engaged in the fight and supporters who will do what they can to help. I was at the nuclear meeting and I did not have the same reaction, but perhaps I was one of the putrid tea bags, in his eyes.

Such meetings amongst ourselves will only go so far. Usually, once the presentation is over, people ask, "What can we do?" and more often than not, no plan is placed on the table, or someone asks for donations to support some organization that supposedly is the answer. Why aren't plans easier? For one, plans are difficult since almost all avenues for objection have been eliminated. You can't even object to a new nuclear plant on safety reasons, for example. Voting is almost a worthless exercise. Public comments are usually ignored. We are up against billions of dollars and have no war chest to speak of. Our adversaries have billions on the table that they will fight very hard to keep, and they undoubtedly have corporate spies at all meetings of this kind to see if the group will actually describe the plan so they can undermine it. So an ASD meeting is no place to do any battle plans.

What I find disconcerting about this discussion is it has completely missed the target. The battle front is about nuclear energy and the proliferation of unsafe power plants, and the extension of operating licenses to plants that have already exhausted their design life. Instead, turns the conversation to self-reflection. We find ourselves looking at our own belly buttons and seeing who has the most lint. It is a great strategy to try to throw a productive group like Activist San Diego off track. When I hear that someone is playing this "distract everyone into talking about themselves" card, it may be from someone who is a paid infiltrator who is bent on disrupting their opponent. There is nothing unexpected or unbelievable about the play, and it means that the battle front has indeed moved into the Activist San Diego meeting, and that Rocky is not just an objective reporter, but either a paid infiltrator and disruptor, or a sloppy operator who is scoring a goal in their own basket, and then somehow being proud of it.

Nuclear energy -- It is not an easy topic, and perhaps it is above the pay grade of a male hustler from Mexico, a label he describes at some length to gain liberal street cred . "I'm a real liberal because I am a male hustler from Mexico, and thus you should listen to me about how screwed up other liberals are that I saw at an education and planning meeting. And, BTW, I have nothing of any value to say about nuclear energy. I have no plan, no new reflection on the information. In other words, I am no help at all."

Actually, Rocky is probably nothing more than a struggling writer who is responding to a media world that values confrontation and flaming over honest coverage of a serious topic. It's too bad he can't see through the belly-button lint to see the real battle front and write about that instead.

Mark is similarly confused and thinks that we should stop fighting just because we don't seem to be making any ground. "Stop voting," he says. If we do that, then I daresay we will not be better off that we are now, and the likelihood that they will gain even more ground is undeniable. No, there is no perfect party. There are forces in each party that are disgusting. There are personalities that are in it for personal gain in some agenda they have set out for themselves. The system itself breeds corruption. All that is true. Will we be successful at turning around the system, undoing corporate personhood, and wresting the nation from the grips of fascism? I'm not sure, and perhaps we are too far down the slippery slope. But to say we should stop trying to change the system "from within" makes no sense. What harm is there in trying? None, of course. So that's why this whole notion of giving up just sounds stupid to me.

But more importantly, I ask my friend Mark to propose some other options, some other plan. What will work?

--Ray Lutz

Ray, if you disagree with anything I wrote at this link, I'd like to know about it: http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1172

As you can see, the person I wrote it for did not disagree, but simply confessed to not being capable of acting rationally.

Do you have a different argument, or do you simply agree that liberals, including yourself, are incapable of acting rationally?

Can you dispute any specific points I made? Not simply repeating the old canards I've refuted, but a genuine reasonable argument as to why I'm wrong about any specific point.

It was true that in the election boycotts in South Africa, Cuba, and Haiti, only the most conservative elements voted, and the governments did try to install the "winners" with only a 3%, 7%, or 10% turnout, but in all three cases the governments lost legitimacy because the turnout wasn't high enough for them to claim the consent of the governed. When there have been consistent turnouts of 40% to 55% here, if there was suddenly only a 20% turnout, meaning that only those who approved of what our government is doing voted (the actual figure in that case would be closer to 11%), nobody could say that suddenly the rest had become apathetic. It would obviously mean that people had stopped being apathetic, stopped granting legitimacy to a government that doesn't listen to them and implements policies that are in direct conflict with the will of the majority, and stopped wasting their time on something they already know to be a worthless exercise.

When corporations spend billions of dollars on elections, donating to both parties in almost equal amounts, and both parties have a history of catering to corporations and ignoring the general welfare, informed consumers should be aware that it is a multi-billion dollar advertising campaign that is necessary to sell people something they don't want or need, and not buy into it.

I'm not claiming street cred like Rocky, or establishment cred like you, I'm simply pointing out that voting, which we already know to be a worthless exercise, is indeed the worthless exercise we know it to be, and explaining why it might be a better idea to at least stop doing it until there's a better plan. That may seem counterintuitive, as many political party operatives want to see the better plan first. But if you know for sure that you're going in the wrong direction, but aren't really sure which would be the right direction to go, it really won't help to keep going further in what you know to be the wrong direction, and it might be a good idea to at least stop and try to get your bearings before proceeding. Continuing in the wrong direction may feel like a better option than stopping, as at least you're moving instead of standing still, but if you're moving into quicksand, and you keep sinking further with every step you take, stopping can save your life. In our situation, stopping has the potential to also save millions of lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. Every day that passes, our government, which claims that it can't afford to fund health care or education, or to house the homeless and create jobs for the unemployed, spends millions of dollars bombing innocent civilians. If we had a voice in government, we'd be able to insist on fewer guns and more butter. Those who mistake a vote for candidates who don't let public opinion influence their policy decisions and who cannot be held accountable, for a voice in government, are so apathetic that they don't even care if they have no voice in government policy. How then can they call themselves Democrats, democrats, liberals, activists, or even politically engaged?

--Mark

I do not agree that I am "incapable of acting rationally". I simply don't agree that your statement: "voting, which we already know to be a worthless exercise" is a true statement. You may believe that it is, and many times it is, but voting is not always worthless. Are you willing to say that never in the history of the world has there been an election where voting made a difference in the outcome? Are you willing to say that it is impossible to have a democracy?

Quite the contrary. Elections have consequences. The candidates are NOT identical. The results are not identical. Sure, there maybe many similarities. But if we would have had John McCain as president, we would have had a different outcome, and by quite a bit. DADT is a simple example. I can guarantee that McCain would not have pushed that through. Obama did. Therefore, there is a clear difference in outcome.

Of course, you don't really believe this, because in the end, you hope that eventually, after you overthrow the current corrupt govt, you can install your own brand of govt which is somehow not corrupt at all. I don't know if you plan to use voting in that new govt, but I hope you change your tune somehow or all bets are off. In fact, your entire concept is inconsistent because you believe that in the future under conditions that will somehow arise spontaneously after a "we won't vote" revolution, voting will somehow suddenly work. I guess you must be advocating a dictator or perhaps a monarchy. Gee, I don't think I'm interested in that.

Indeed, you are promoting the concept that getting enough people to abandon the flavor of democracy we have here (admittedly a somewhat distasteful flavor) that in essence, that will be accepted as a vote against the system, and you hope to high heaven that then the people win power will say "gee, we didn't get enough people to vote, and so I am going to voluntarily step down and allow my opponents to have power." I see no rational reason why that could ever occur. Regardless of your pitiful protest, the people in power would not step down.

The only other option I see to working within the system is a honest to God revolution. All the examples you mention in your blog at 1172 where you note that voting was down, not voting was not the activating energy behind those revolutions. It was simply an effect of the underlying cause. It would be like saying that you build a house by putting the roof on. You can't put the roof on until the structure of the house is completed. If you try to put a roof on without the structure, it will just fall to the ground and break up in to pieces. That will be the same result if you try your not voting tactic as if it were going to be able to also build the house, and without a true revolution, it will be unsuccessful.

Moreover, by pushing everyone to build a roof before the structure of the house is built, you make it impossible to make progress on the house so the roof will ever be possible to install. Analogously, encouraging people not to vote undermines any useful attempt to change the system "from within" while also distracting everyone from any true revolution.

In essence, you can't be regarded as sincere about this notion because you likely will rely on voting in your future "more perfect" political system where voting does work. Your entire initiative is based on a false premise, and the whole thing falls to the ground in an ugly heap.

What form of government do you propose if voting will never work?

--Ray

P.S. Butter isn't that good for you either.

Ray, it was you who wrote in your first comment in this thread, "Voting is almost a worthless exercise." But it happens to be worse than worthless in our system. If you oppose war, and the only two candidates with any chance of winning in our two-party winner-take-all system are both pro-war, even if you cast a blank ballot, you are voting for the wars you claim to oppose, that is, voting against what you claim to want. Now it is true that one candidate might only drone bomb a million innocent people while the other might drone bomb a million and ten innocent people, but voting which makes you complicit in the crime against humanity of taking even one innocent life just to bloat defense contracts, cannot be justified on the basis that your war criminal is slightly less evil than the other war criminal. Voting, even for peace candidates, in elections where only war criminals can win, is complicity in war crimes.

I'm certainly not saying that all voting is worthless everywhere. In some countries the popular vote actually has to be counted, whereas here, as the Supreme Court noted in 2000 when they stopped the vote count and decided who the President would be themselves, there is nothing in the Constitution that says that the popular vote in federal elections has to be counted. Moreover, more than 92% of US ballots are "counted" by central tabulators and therefore are counted secretly and cannot be verified. People just have to take the word of crooked elections officials, some of whom have been convicted and gone to prison for rigging elections, and a corrupt corporate media which is known to have deliberately spread false propaganda on many occasions, as to what the results were, as we have no way to verify the results for ourselves. In many countries the election systems are fully transparent and fully verifiable. Germany, for example, banned all computers in elections because they are not verifiable and therefore conflict with the most basic principles of democracy.

As for the hot-button emotional non-budget issues like abortion, immigrants, guns, gays, God, etc., the candidates are welcome to differ on those, so long as their budgetary policies favor the rich and expand the military-industrial complex. Want DADT? Vote to kill another hundred thousand innocent women and children in Afghanistan. Want the DREAM Act? Vote to kill another hundred thousand innocent women and children in Pakistan. Want reproductive rights? Vote to kill another hundred thousand innocent women and children in Libya. As long as what you want doesn't interfere with catering to the rich and increasing the bloated profits ofdefense contracts, you might get a few token crumbs. But you'll get them because the rich and the military won't lose a dime, and in return all you have to do is become complicit in crimes against humanity. I'm surprised that the political system in the US hasn't come right out and told voters, "Look, we'll stop being a tyranny and let you have a semblance of democracy if you just agree to vote to allow us to destroy the rest of the world completely." I'm sure many US voters would be happy with a deal like that.

I'm not saying that democracy would just happen, but I do believe that if people understand that uncounted and/or unverifiable votes for candidates who cannot be held accountable while in office and who do not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions is not democracy, and insist that they will not vote until and unless they were sure that all votes had to be counted, that the results would be verifiable, that politicians would have to represent the will of their constituents, and that they could be held directly accountable if they didn't, a more democratic form of government would result. Why allow democracy if people are willing to grant their consentof the governed to a genocidal tyranny?

I'm not saying that those in power would voluntarily step down, just that if they couldn't demonstrate the consent of the governed, they would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the world, lose allies who wanted their own populations to believe they were democracies, and become laughing stocks. Successful election boycotts have led political leaders in other countries to either flee into exile or to make political concessions. Because it has happened, it is possible and therefore it could happen. On the other hand, voting for the status quo will never bring about change.

A revolution, in my opinion, can not be successful if the people who are rebelling voted for the government they are rebelling against. If you voted for it, you granted it the authority to suppress civil dissent and it will use the power you gave it against you if you change your mind.

As for building a house with just a roof and no house beneath it, that is what voting does now. It tries to put a nice roof on a house with a rotten foundation. Many voters in 2008 claimed that they wanted change, but thought they could get it by voting for the status quo. That will never happen.

As for what kind of government, you and everyone else on this list knows the answer. A government that provides for the general welfare instead of just catering to the rich. A government where all votes are counted and the results are verifiable. A government where the public has a voice in policy decisions and the will of the people determines government policy. In other words, a democratic form of government.

I didn't say that voting will never work. I said that voting in our current system will never work. That votes which Constitutionally need not be counted, and are often uncounted, will never work. That votes in elections where the results are unverifiable will never work. That votes in a two-party, winner-take-all system without proportional representation, where only the wealthiest have true representation in government, will never work. That votes for candidates who don't have to allow public opinion to influence their policy decisions and who cannot be held accountable will never work. That only votes which are counted and verifiable, for candidates who are required to represent their constituents and can be held directly and immediately accountable if they don't, will work.

You know that, Ray. The form of government that I'm proposing is a democratic form of government as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence, not the plutocracy established by our counterrevolutionary Constitution which betrayed those principles and continues to do so.

I'm not the one saying that it is impossible to have a democracy. I'm saying that this is not a democracy, that you know that it is not a democracy, that others who call themselves liberals also know that this is not a democracy, and that as long as people continue to vote for an undemocratic form of government, they cannot bring about a more democratic form of government. Why should the major parties allow a peace candidate to become their nominee when they know that their voters are willing to vote for war criminals? Why should our government allow honest, transparent, verifiable elections when they know that half the country is willing to vote in easily rigged and unverifiable elections? How can we bring about democracy when half the country is willing to vote for tyranny? Do you really think that putting a new President at the head of the same old system is any different from putting a new roof on a totally rotten house?

When people talk about guns and butter, they are talking about imperialism vs. socialism. Unless you believe that it is better to force millions of children to starve to death so that a handful of plutocrats can increase their already obscenely bloated profits, than it is to stop imperialism and provide for the general welfare instead ofproviding welfare only to the wealthy, you'd agree that our government has its guns/butter priorities wrong, and that we've got too many guns and not enough butter. Certainly too much butter wouldn't be healthy either--all things in moderation. But those innocent women and children who are starving to death or being drone bombed to death due to the policies of our imperialist government could be taught to use butter in moderation, if they were alive and if they had any butter.

--Mark

From Steve Kowit:

The question of whether or not to vote doesn't seem ultimately very important. No one is going to convince millions of Americans not to vote & the thought that such a tactic might bring down the state is fanciful. But Mark says something at the heart of the problem: "the only two candidates with any chance of winning in our two-party winner-take-all system are both pro-war." & that's the problem. That the Democratic Party has bought into the Obama wars without any real protest (he's our guy, after all)--just as the Democratic Party was full partner in our colonial slaughters in Korea & Vietnam, our overthrow of the Iranian democracy and the Chilean democracy, our wars against Granada, Guatemala, etc,l etc. etc--- hardly needs be argued. The well fed American citizen of either party doesn't care that we're fighting a bunch of utterly unjustifiable colonialist wars in far-away places & probably knows that cheap oil is at the end of it. So a few American boys get blown up every week & some unknown number of Afghanis & Iraqis & Pakistanis get killed & every now & again the US (I mean NATO, America's Nom de Guerre) blows up a wedding party or fourteen civilians or... No one even demands a body count, no one cares to know how many Afghanis died in the past 24 months or in the course of our occupation. And the Democratic Party does not ever in its local chapters or thru any of its statesmen-spokespersons say a word against it, utter a word of protest. No one in Obama's party--no one who counts-- is screaming to get out of the wars. No Democratic club is buying even inexpensive advertising space to say WE OBJECT TO THESE GODAWFUL CRIMINAL WARS. PRESIDENT OBAMA WILL NOT HAVE OUR SUPPORT UNTIL ALL OUR TROOPS ARE OUT OF, etc. .... But since the Green Party & the Socialist Party can't raise the vast billions to run a high-profile campaign & the two ruling parties pretty much have each national election sewn up, the truth is that the US --the Democreepublican party---represents, in foreign policy, continual, unending, mass murder, neocolonialism, occupation, theft of natural resources, & perpetual warfare on a scale the planet has never before seen. And almost invariably these wars support dictatorships & tyrranies; The US never anywhere supports democracy or the forces of democracy. (& yes, that's probably true in Libya as well). The US is feared & hated around the world---for perfectly good reason. & the Democratic Party, along with the NeoCons of the right-wing & the Republican Party, supports --indeed creates--those policies, from its sanctimonious support of racist Israel --a country that stole another people's entire homeland--to our refusal to let Haiti have its elected democracy. Poll after poll attests to the fact that most of the world despises & fears the US, & the American people, obedient to CNN, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, the highfaluten rhetoric of Barack Obama, to say nothing of Fox News, still imagine themselves the champions of the oppressed. The Democratic Party has about as much honor left as the liberal wing of the National Socialist Party did during the Third Reich.

I agree with the rest of your comment, Steve, but not with the part about voting. Despite the corporations having spent about five billion dollars getting out the vote in 2008, 45% of the electorate here did not vote. But billions of dollars are necessary just to get a 55% turnout in a Presidential race. Money has to be spent on saturating the airwaves so that nobody can turn on the radio or TV without seeing one candidate or another being glorified or smeared. Political party operatives have to hold cheerleading sessions and interact with voters one-on-one to shame, terrify, or bully them into voting for candidates they don't like. When people say that they'll hold their noses and vote for their party's nominee, they know what kind of excrement they're voting for and would prefer not to, but are made to feel that they don't have a choice. Anyone who tries to tell you that you don't have a choice is not somebody who values or respects your rights and freedoms. How dare they limit our choices or tell us that we don't have any except for the unpalatable options they give us?

Both Congressional Republicans and Democrats have no more than an 11% approval rating among their own voters. People aren't eager to vote for them, so fortunes have to be spent to convince people to vote. And big corporations don't throw away billions of dollars for nothing. They want to get the consent of the governed for the candidates they know will favor them over the interests of the governed. When a defense contractor donates a million dollars to a an election race, divided almost equally between Democratic and Republican candidates, it is because they know that they'll get billions of dollars in government contracts in return. Corporations are not altruistic and they are in no way democratic.

There is great anger in this country about the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, to allow corporations to spend as much money as they wish in political campaigns. All it would take to nullify Citizens United would be one election boycott in which people announced that they were not going to vote until corporate money was removed from politics. Given only a ten or twenty percent election turnout for their expenditure of billions of dollars, corporate boards of directors would never allow such expenditures again. We have a powerful weapon, our consent, but if we don't know how to say no and always give a blanket consent to whatever the government wants to do, the government can continue to screw us. Because our government is a militaristic police state, violence is not likely to be effective, but because it wants to pretend to be a democracy, election boycotts can be.

--Mark

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 4 September 2011 - 5:16pm.

From Steve Kowit:

Yes, Citizens United was a game changer. But although it will mean more Republicans in office, far more corporate power than we have even now, the problem at the moment, is the Democratic Party, the party that progressives might be able to do something about. Imagine 100 Democratic Clubs around the country declaring they will do nothing to support Barack Obama or any candidate who does not unequivocally declare his or her desire to see all our troops brought home at once--no "advisors" or "trainers" left over, no Blackwater mercenaries, no US air bases, no fifteen year disengagement. Imagine the national publicity such an act would generate: Democratic clubs bucking the party & Obama. Maybe even running an anti-war candidate, or threatening to unite behind an anti-war genuinely progressive Democrat. What a humiliation for the Democratic powers in Washington, what an outrage it would be. Every newspaper in the country would be covering that revolution inside the Democratic Party on a daily basis! The deal would be if Obama declares publicly & unequivocally that he will bring all US troops home from our wars within ten months & begins the drawdown immediately, we will support him. If not, that progressive, maverick wing of the Democratic Party will give him neither money nor any other form of support. Something like that could renew the Democratic Party & begin to restore its honor. And more importantly it would let the American people know that those "small" wars around the world --the slaughter of a few thousand or tens of thousand of peoples every couple of months-- will no longer be the American Way. Our brutal, unconscionable thirst for empire and our love of slaughtering defenseless populations will come to an end. For a nation born in genocide (& two hundred years of denial of that genocide) it might be the beginningof a new day! & for the rest of the world, to get the US off their backs, what a gift!

The Democratic Party can counter such a threat by simply saying that fewer votes for Obama just means more votes for Republicans.

If the Democratic Party did not have to compete with and wasn't partnered with the Republican Party in our two-party system, it might be vulnerable to internal revolts. But because it needs big corporate donors in order to survive, compete, and ultimately collaborate with the Republicans, the Democratic Party, like the Republican Party, has no choice but to nominate whoever can raise the most corporate money, regardless of that candidate's positions or popularity. If necessary, the party will simply use superdelegates in the primary to overrule the will of their voters, and if that doesn't work it will change the rules. It is a question of survival to nominate whoever can raise the most corporate money, while retaining voter support in a system where votes don't even have to be counted, is not crucial.

If they didn't back the Democratic Party, local Democratic Clubs would no longer be Democratic Clubs. They'd be disowned by the party and would have to find some other name for themselves. The crux of being a member of a Democratic Club or a registered Democrat, as somebody pointed out in another discussion, is that even if you rebel in the primaries, you vote for the Democratic Party nominee in the Presidential election. Knowing that pre-primary revolts are merely symbolic, and that anyone who wishes to continue to identify as a Democrat has no choice but to vote for the eventual nominee, the Democratic Party and the media can afford to ignore them. They'll get some press, but they won't get a response from the party leadership.

--Mark

From Steve Kowit:

No, not at all symbolic if the groups state clearly that they will not support his candidacy & will not vote for him! That means not raising money, not getting out the vote. Their being disowned by the party is very likely but in truth the President & his henchmen & local candidates rely on Democratic clubs & street worker volunteers to get out the vote & bring in the money. That the two parties have a lock on the system, that the system is about raising vast amounts ofmoney & that both parties are completely committed to foreign aggression against small but important countries (sources of oil in particular) is true. That Democrats will do what they're told & will believe what they read in the NY Times is also true. At the very least, progressives (Socialists, Green Party people, & Progressive Democrats) should be engaging in an ad campaign declaring the wars to be unethical and urging young Americans not to enlist! What a lovely act ofsubversion against the US Death Machine that would be!

---------------

I'm amazed that people believe that Democratic clubs and street worker volunteers are needed by the political parties to "bring in the money." They're needed to help get out the vote, but not to bring in the money.

Even if Obama doesn't get a cent from Democratic Clubs and ordinary voters, he will still raise enough billions from big corporate donors to be the party nominee.

I don't know if I can give you an analogy for how this deception works, but I'll try. Suppose I'm a billionaire in a city like San Diego and I decide to build a new community center. I have an architect draw up the plans, I get all the required environmental and other studies done, and I acquire all the necessary permits. But I want the community to believe that they have a stake in this community center, so I invite the public to give comments and to donate money to the building. Whether they do or don't, it is still going to be built. If people do donate money, I make sure it gets a lot of press so that people will think that they helped make it possible.

Bush became President in 2000 without popular support or much small donor money. Gore/Lieberman won the popular vote. Very few small donors gave money to Bush. He became President because the Supreme Court stopped the vote count and put him in office. If he had only gotten two votes and no more than fifty cents in small donations, he still would have been the Republican nominee and the Supreme Court's selection for President because the big corporations and the military-industrial complex wanted him in office. Yet many small Republican donors and voters think that they helped put him in office. It's an illusion.

In 2004, Democrats were so angry about the 2000 "election" that billionaire John Kerry was able to raise millions of dollars from small donors by promising that he would not concede early and that he would ensure that every vote was counted, promises he broke and that he didn't have the power to keep if he'd wanted to. But he didn't spend the money he raised from small donors. He didn't need to. He stashed that money in his war chest. Small donors like myself, so desperate for an honest election that we were willing to gamble that a billionaire might represent our interests, even borrowed money to donate to him and had to spend years paying it off, while he never needed it in the first place, never used it, and never gave a single thought to repaying those he had betrayed.

Yes, the wealthy political beneficiaries of the multi-trillion dollar multinational corporate campaign donors will allow little old you to give them your last penny to reelect Obama, since it will make you believe that you had a part in it and therefore a stake. But if you don't give them money, the only loss will be to your inflated ego--they don't need you or your money. I learned that lesson the hard way in 2004. Where were you, or have you simply forgotten?

--Mark

I doubt that anything would occur, short of ostracism of the clubs by the Democratic party proper. Case in point. The Progressive Caucus of CA drafted a resolution to support a primary opponent to Obama to get these issues discussed. The party did or at least thought about pulling the charter for the caucus, etc. Insiders in the party are overly pragmatic about whether they can have their party win the election and those considerations trump any ideological concerns.

The vast majority of people are not at all concerned about all this crap. They are concerned with the fact that they have no work, no money coming in, and no job offers on the table, and no unemployment. They are SOL and abandoned by a don't-care Ayne Rand-style capitalistic system that does not do squat to invest in job creation.

The raw truth is that the deck will be shuffled completely in the next few years as we live through the energy crisis we will soon enter. The reality of cheap energy is over, the corporate masters will lose their positions, and a new economy will become reality. If you are ready to create new businesses you will have the oppty to reap great rewards. Others will not be so lucky.

The concept of not voting I think is a crock. Sure, voting is not that great. But it is not a zero. We just have to be aware that most of the game is nothing more than a distraction and feel-good exercise. They start them sooner so people will have a hope and not revolt. But, especially in local races, the result can be quite substantial.

--Ray

No, I don't believe, as you do, that voting for the best choice in an election means you are complicit in war crimes as a result. This is just stupid. It is like saying that if you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away, that you are endorsing problem gambling. Or if they cheat on your wife, that you are in favor of endorsing wife cheating. War is legal in this world, unfortunately. Presidents can congresses can start and declare wars. That is legal and not a crime, but lying about it is certainly a sad fact of recent admins. Sure, war is an evil fact, but since we have a system that allows it to happen, you can't fault those who are put into power for engaging in in anymore than you can fault students who misused other students in the Berkeley prison experiment. So I don't agree with your statement that "voting which makes you complicit."

On the contrary, it is important to vote for the least likely to start wars. Believe it or not, our world is getting more peaceful on the whole. in the 1990s, more wars stopped than started. That was a wake-up call to those who drafted the Project for a New American Century because it meant less profits.

In the end, I don't think your dream world will be any better than the current world, and once you have a revolution of not voting, even with the best outcome, we would be left with human beings who will twist the system until it is just as bad if not worse than the system we have now. So in the end, I do not support the notion that not voting is any sort of solution. It is a dream wrapped in a delusion wrapped in a set of false assumptions, and you are so married to it, that you can't realize that it is no solution at all because it really does not solve anything at all.

--Ray

From Steve Kowit:

I agree the voting issue is a crock. The fact that the progressive cucus got nowhere is because most of its members--almost all-- will safely support the ticket & vote the ticket & work for the ticket. Within the system there is nowhere else to go--no possibility even of a third party challenging the structure. The system is all but fullproof (foolproof)-- Both parties ultimately, so far as foreign policy, are playing the same game--world dominance by coersion, bribery, intimidation, or warfare. Globilization, that is corporate colonialist control of resources, wages, international trade. Domestically dems would like to see a fairer distribution of the wealth though are utterly unwilling to challenge the fundamental system. So this is what we have. The heavy money wins as usual. God was apparently pissed off that Perry has overtaken Bachman in the polls & sent a hurricane.

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 4 September 2011 - 5:22pm.

If you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away or cheats, and you didn't know beforehand that they would do it, you are not endorsing gambling or cheating. But if you know that the person is a habitual gambler or cheater and you vote for them anyway, then you are.

I do fault the students in the Berkeley prison experiment who abused other students. Not all students did it. Not everyone conformed to the majority or obeyed authority. Some people have a conscience and act on it. It is like the other experiment where people deny what their eyes tell them in order to conform to the majority opinion. Not everyone does. As one of those who do not follow the herd, I do fault people who deny what they know so that they can please authorities or be part of the crowd.

Just because our system allows things to happen does not mean that people responsible for evil should not be held accountable. Our system allowed the BP oil spill to happen. Does that mean nobody should be held accountable? Wars based on lies are wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Withdrawing from international law does not make them legal.

Your belief that no matter what happens, people will twist the system and make things worse, is extremely negative and hopeless. If you believe that it is impossible to bring about social change for the good, you'll never try because you think it is impossible. So you'll stick with the status quo because you think all other options are worse and that therefore it must be the best of all possible worlds. There is nothing wrong with having hopes, dreams, and visions for a better future. I don't advocate magical positivity, but when we've seen a small town in Peru stand up to the big world water barons and win, we know that it is not necessary for everything to be privatized and sold for the maximum possible profit. We know that people have a right to clean water and sometimes, if they are sufficiently determined, can defend that right. But not if they just say that things are as they are and cannot be any other way so we have no choice but to submit.

--Mark

It is precisely because there is nowhere else to go within the voting system, that the voting issue is not a crock. Only by challenging a fundamentally unjust system is change possible, not by continuing to vote for it and attempting to work within it, despite knowing full well that it is fundamentally unjust.

That's what was meant by the person in the discussion I linked, when they said that they and most people were incapable of acting rationally. If you know a system is fundamentally unjust, which you obviously do since your statement sums it up quite nicely, but you are incapable of challenging it, you are incapable of acting rationally.

--Mark

Here Ray starts interspersing his responses to my comments:

Hi Mark:

On 8/30/2011 7:27 PM, Mark E. Smith wrote:

If you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away or cheats, and you didn't know beforehand that they would do it, you are not endorsing gambling or cheating. But if you know that the person is a habitual gambler or cheater and you vote for them anyway, then you are.

Not necessarily. You may not endorse gambling and cheating and still vote for the person if the other person is a worse gambler and cheater. You figure that by voting for the lesser of the two evils, you are reducing the tendency to gamble or cheat, and the net result is positive. In another scenario, you may know that the person cheats on his/her spouse, and even though that is a character trait you don't admire, he/her has so many admirable traits that is still a vote for the best representative. So I fundamentally reject the idea that voting for someone is an endorsement of mistakes or bad decisions they may make. And it is particularly true if they do something legal and common for leaders to engage in (unfortunately).

I do fault the students in the Berkeley prison experiment who abused other students. Not all students did it. Not everyone conformed to the majority or obeyed authority. Some people have a conscience and act on it. It is like the other experiment where people deny what their eyes tell them in order to conform to the majority opinion. Not everyone does. As one of those who do not follow the herd, I do fault people who deny what they know so that they can please authorities or be part of the crowd.

But what they found is that the poor treatment of other students was so rampant, that they had to shut down the experiment. This means to me that if you place an individual in a position of power, this screws with their head and they make bad decisions. Even if your protest works and you get a gleaming new democracy, it will not withstand the underlying psychological realities of human nature, and the system will be no better than the one we have, except that we have undermined the value of voting and we will likely never get democracy started again.

Just because our system allows things to happen does not mean that people responsible for evil should not be held accountable. Our system allowed the BP oil spill to happen. Does that mean nobody should be held accountable? Wars based on lies are wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Withdrawing from international law does not make them legal.

I agree completely. But just because you vote for someone does not mean you are complicit with their poor decisions. That's like the rationale that the sin of Adam is somehow handed down to all humans. I don't buy it.

Your belief that no matter what happens, people will twist the system and make things worse, is extremely negative and hopeless.

No, it is just reality. I don't think that a protest and a new gleaming democracy will be any better than the corrupt system we have. But that does not mean I'm going to give up and stop applying pressure in the other direction. If you know you may have a flat tire on a trip, you don't stop going on trips. You bring a spare, and then the "disaster" will not hurt your trip.

If you believe that it is impossible to bring about social change for the good, you'll never try because you think it is impossible.

But I don't believe that. I DO Believe it is possible to bring about social change for the good. I don't think that voting does very much, but it is one small power that we have that I don't think we should flush down the toilet just because it isn't that powerful. I believe other methods are more productive, such as direct observation of public officials, and that's why I started CitizensOversight.org, to encourage people to apply that sort of oversight.

So you'll stick with the status quo because you think all other options are worse and that therefore it must be the best of all possible worlds.

No, that is not the result. Just because I don't throw in the towel does not mean I am giving up. It is just the opposite. You are the one that says nothing can be changed and you are advocating giving up. I say I don't like the status quo and I'm willing to use voting for whatever it is worth.

There is nothing wrong with having hopes, dreams, and visions for a better future.

That's why I have hope that we can build a better democracy, but I realize that due to the frailties of human nature, it will never be very pretty.

I don't advocate magical positivity, but when we've seen a small town in Peru stand up to the big world water barons and win, we know that it is not necessary for everything to be privatized and sold for the maximum possible profit. We know that people have a right to clean water and sometimes, if they are sufficiently determined, can defend that right. But not if they just say that things are as they are and cannot be any other way so we have no choice but to submit.

I'm all for that, and if we have a movement of that nature, then using a vote protest might help us. But I do not believe you can improve the underlying voting system, which is fundamental to all democratic systems, by promoting the notion that voting is worthless. If you do that and you are able to convince a big group that it is true, and let's say you clean up everything (I still don't know how the protest would result in that as an outcome, and I don't even think you know what you want) then you would have to do an about-face and convince everyone that they should now trust the voting system and their new govt.

In essence, you can't use a voting protest to protest that the voting system does not work, and then restart the same system when you are done. This is insanity at its level worst.

Now I intersperse my replies:

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Raymond Lutz wrote:

Hi Mark:

On 8/30/2011 7:27 PM, Mark E. Smith wrote:
If you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away or cheats, and you didn't know beforehand that they would do it, you are not endorsing gambling or cheating. But if you know that the person is a habitual gambler or cheater and you vote for them anyway, then you are.

Not necessarily. You may not endorse gambling and cheating and still vote for the person if the other person is a worse gambler and cheater. You figure that by voting for the lesser of the two evils, you are reducing the tendency to gamble or cheat, and the net result is positive. In another scenario, you may know that the person cheats on his/her spouse, and even though that is a character trait you don't admire, he/her has so many admirable traits that is still a vote for the best representative. So I fundamentally reject the idea that voting for someone is an endorsement of mistakes or bad decisions they may make. And it is particularly true if they do something legal and common for leaders to engage in (unfortunately).

Again. you're being negative and saying that since the situation is hopeless, that's the best you can do. I believe we can do better.

I do fault the students in the Berkeley prison experiment who abused other students. Not all students did it. Not everyone conformed to the majority or obeyed authority. Some people have a conscience and act on it. It is like the other experiment where people deny what their eyes tell them in order to conform to the majority opinion. Not everyone does. As one of those who do not follow the herd, I do fault people who deny what they know so that they can please authorities or be part of the crowd.

But what they found is that the poor treatment of other students was so rampant, that they had to shut down the experiment. This means to me that if you place an individual in a position of power, this screws with their head and they make bad decisions. Even if your protest works and you get a gleaming new democracy, it will not withstand the underlying psychological realities of human nature, and the system will be no better than the one we have, except that we have undermined the value of voting and we will likely never get democracy started again.

Rampant doesn't mean ubiquitous. Just because most people may be susceptible to peer pressure or mob psychology, doesn't mean that everyone is. If studies showed that more than 90% of people, upon finding a wallet with ID and a lot of money in it, would keep the money and throw away the wallet, would you feel that it was okay for you to do the same? Would you teach your children that it was okay for them to do the same? Do you teach your children that if all the other kids are driving while drunk, it is okay for them to do it? Not everyone is corrupt. We are all subject to temptation, but we don't all cope in the same way. Some just succumb while others do not. Some of us even come up with extremely clever ways to manage to avoid succumbing to temptation and becoming corrupt. For example, some people in power, rather than surrounding themselves with yes men or others who are corrupt, surround themselves with the most honorable and uncorrupt people they can find, to help them avoid temptation. Hugo Chavez, for example, appointed so many wise female elders to his administration to keep him honest, that he is jokingly referred to in Venezuela not as The Father of the Revolution, but as The Grandmother of the Revolution.

Voting itself is not democracy. Stalin held elections, but nobody thought it was a democracy just because people could vote. The value of voting here has already been undermined because the votes don't have to be counted and the results can't be verified. Stalin himself said that isn't who votes but who counts the votes. In mistaking voting for democracy, you're making a fundamental mistake. There can be voting without democracy and there can be democracy without voting. The best combination,of course, is democracy with voting, but before voting can be a part of a functional democracy, you have to have a democratic system in which votes are actually counted, the results can be verified, and the popular will of the people as expressed through their votes is the final say and cannot be ignored or overruled.

People who won't vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, where the results aren't verifiable, and where the candidates, once elected, can't be held accountable, will be proud and happy to vote in elections where every vote must be counted, the results are verifiable, and the candidates can be held accountable. If a restaurant serves lousy food, they may not have many customers. If they get a new chef and they start serving good food, more people are likely to eat there. Voting isn't any different from anything else. When the quality is lousy, consumers aren't happy and products sit on the shelves. When the quality is good, lines form all the way around the block for a chance to get something that everyone wants. Right now the political parties spend billions of dollars to encourage people to use a lousy electoral system to vote for unpalatable candidates. If the quality of the electoral system and the candidates improved, they wouldn't have to spend a dime on advertising because everyone would want to vote.

Just because our system allows things to happen does not mean that people responsible for evil should not be held accountable. Our system allowed the BP oil spill to happen. Does that mean nobody should be held accountable? Wars based on lies are wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Withdrawing from international law does not make them legal.

I agree completely. But just because you vote for someone does not mean you are complicit with their poor decisions. That's like the rationale that the sin of Adam is somehow handed down to all humans. I don't buy it.

If you allow people you know to be corrupt to make your decisions for you, simply because somebody else might be more corrupt, yes, you are complicit. If you have small children and you are only offered a choice of two possible babysitters, one of whom is a convicted child molester who has molested three children, and the other is a convicted child molester who has molested thirty children, you can't tell me that you are not complicit if you leave your kids with the first molester on the basis that he is less evil. If you can't find a babysitter who isn't a child molester, stay home. Otherwise, don't try to tell me that you care about your children. It is the same with voting. If both candidates are war criminals and you oppose war crimes, don't vote. If you vote for a war criminal, don't tell me that it is justified because the other candidate is a worse war criminal. I don't vote for war criminals and I don't vote in elections where the only possible winner are war criminals. That's because I care about children, about human rights, and I'm opposed to war crimes. I'm not going to say, well, Ray votes for war criminals, so I should too. You have to live with yourself and I have to live with and answer to myself. I take responsibility for my actions and I won't let myself be influenced by people who don't, not even if they're the vast majority. I wasn't created to be an irresponsible blob, I was given a conscience and I show my appreciation for that gift by listening to it instead of listening to the herds ofirresponsible blobs.

Your belief that no matter what happens, people will twist the system and make things worse, is extremely negative and hopeless.

No, it is just reality. I don't think that a protest and a new gleaming democracy will be any better than the corrupt system we have. But that does not mean I'm going to give up and stop applying pressure in the other direction. If you know you may have a flat tire on a trip, you don't stop going on trips. You bring a spare, and then the "disaster" will not hurt your trip.

If you are deliberately ignorant of reality, and only allow yourself to see the reality that you want to see, you'll continue to believe that change for the better isn't possible and keep voting for the status quo. I have a friend who lives in Caracas and I've studied other countries where they managed to oust their oligarchies and establish true democracies, so that is the reality I know.

If you believe that it is impossible to bring about social change for the good, you'll never try because you think it is impossible.

But I don't believe that. I DO Believe it is possible to bring about social change for the good. I don't think that voting does very much, but it is one small power that we have that I don't think we should flush down the toilet just because it isn't that powerful. I believe other methods are more productive, such as direct observation of public officials, and that's why I started CitizensOversight.org, to encourage people to apply that sort of oversight.

That is a form of direct democracy. If voting worked in our system, you wouldn't need CitizensOversight because you could simply elect people who weren't corrupt and who would surround themselves with other people who weren't corrupt to help them avoid becoming corrupt. The system adopted by the Zapatistas in Mexico requires that elected officials cannot act before polling their constituents to ask what their constituents want them to do. If they then act against the wishes of their constituents, they are immediately removed from office and replaced with people who will lead by obeying. Because the people have a voice in government, they call their government the good government, and the corrupt government of Mexico the bad government. Where there is direct democracy and transparency, you already have citizen oversight. Where there is secrecy and corruption, attempts at citizen oversight are an exercise in futility because it is the government that holds the power, not the people. Look up the definition of democracy in the dictionary. It means a form of government where power is vested in the hands of the people, or, as Lincoln put it, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Government of, by, and for the corporations and the rich, including, at our local level, wealthy real estate developers, is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy. Voting for your choice of plutocrats and oligarchs is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy with symbolic elections to give people the illusion of participation, as I explained in my previous post. Just because plutocrats and oligarchs will let you vote for them, doesn't mean that they'll represent you once they're in office.

So you'll stick with the status quo because you think all other options are worse and that therefore it must be the best of all possible worlds.

No, that is not the result. Just because I don't throw in the towel does not mean I am giving up. It is just the opposite. You are the one that says nothing can be changed and you are advocating giving up. I say I don't like the status quo and I'm willing to use voting for whatever it is worth.

If it was worth anything, I'd vote also. But casting ballots that don't have to be counted, in elections where the results are not verifiable, for candidates who can't be held accountable while in office, is totally worthless. Only votes which must be counted, can be verified, and are either a direct voice on issues or a vote for representatives who can be held directly accountable, are worthwhile. That's the kind of votes they have in Venezuela. After their revolution, once they had ousted their corrupt oligarchy, they drew up a Constitution that guaranteed it. Their revolution is now in its 12th year and hasn't been corrupted yet.

There is nothing wrong with having hopes, dreams, and visions for a better future.

That's why I have hope that we can build a better democracy, but I realize that due to the frailties of human nature, it will never be very pretty.

Well, they do other things in Venezuela. Instead of saturating their youth with porn, their schools teach social values and responsibility. So their human nature is very different from ours. In fact, it is more a question of nurture than of nature. When Hurricane Katrina hit Cuba, they successfully evacuated two million people. They already had the plans in place, they cared about people, even poor people, and they did it. When it hit New Orleans, no plans were in place, poor people weren't evacuated, and it was a disaster. It isn't a question of human nature, it is a question of whether or not the system teaches selfish values or social values.

I don't advocate magical positivity, but when we've seen a small town in Peru stand up to the big world water barons and win, we know that it is not necessary for everything to be privatized and sold for the maximum possible profit. We know that people have a right to clean water and sometimes, if they are sufficiently determined, can defend that right. But not if they just say that things are as they are and cannot be any other way so we have no choice but to submit.

--Mark

I'm all for that, and if we have a movement of that nature, then using a vote protest might help us. But I do not believe you can improve the underlying voting system, which is fundamental to all democratic systems, by promoting the notion that voting is worthless. If you do that and you are able to convince a big group that it is true, and let's say you clean up everything (I still don't know how the protest would result in that as an outcome, and I don't even think you know what you want) then you would have to do an about-face and convince everyone that they should now trust the voting system and their new govt.

In essence, you can't use a voting protest to protest that the voting system does not work, and then restart the same system when you are done. This is insanity at its level worst.

Germany banned voting machines and central tabulators because they count votes secretly in a way that is easily hacked and cannot be verified. Are you saying that it is impossible for Germany to have done what they did? I'm not saying that voting is always worthless, just that uncounted votes are worthless, elections that are unverifiable are worthless, and elections for candidates who can't be held accountable are worthless. In most democratic countries the votes do have to be counted and the results are verifiable. Are you saying that Canada, England, Ireland, and every other country that has verifiable elections can't do what they are already doing because human nature is evil?

Let me explain to you how a voting protest works. Suppose you vote and you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted. You investigate and are told that there was a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you assume it was fixed and won't happen again, and in the next election you vote and once more you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you grumble a bit and the next election you vote again, and once again, after the election you learn that your vote wasn't counted and that once again it was supposedly due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or central tabulator, but that since our Constitution doesn't require that votes be counted, there is no reason for the Registrar's Office to spend the money to fix the bug or glitch, since your vote doesn't have to be counted anyway. Well, since it is your nature, you'll grumble a bit and keep voting in the next election and the next election, even if your vote is never counted. But in Ireland, since they had learned about the bugs and glitches in the voting machines when other countries like the US used them, when their government tried to introduce voting machines, the Irish refused to vote. They simply would not go to the polls. Their government had to warehouse and eventually scrap all the voting machines, despite the enormous amount of money they'd spent on them, because people wouldn't use them. That's how a voting protest works.

When people refuse to vote unless and until the voting system is worthwhile, meaning that votes have to be counted, the results are verifiable, and it is possible to vote for candidates who can be held accountable and actually be forced to represent their constituents instead of their big donors, the voting system will change because the government won't be able to get people to vote unless their demands are met. As long as people are so apathetic that they are willing to continue to vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, the results aren't verifiable, and the candidates can't be held accountable, nothing will change.

--Mark

(to be continued)

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 4 September 2011 - 5:31pm.

Again Ray intersperses his comments:

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Raymond Lutz wrote:

Hi Mark:

On 8/30/2011 7:27 PM, Mark E. Smith wrote:
If you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away or cheats, and you didn't know beforehand that they would do it, you are not endorsing gambling or cheating. But if you know that the person is a habitual gambler or cheater and you vote for them anyway, then you are.

Not necessarily. You may not endorse gambling and cheating and still vote for the person if the other person is a worse gambler and cheater. You figure that by voting for the lesser of the two evils, you are reducing the tendency to gamble or cheat, and the net result is positive. In another scenario, you may know that the person cheats on his/her spouse, and even though that is a character trait you don't admire, he/her has so many admirable traits that is still a vote for the best representative. So I fundamentally reject the idea that voting for someone is an endorsement of mistakes or bad decisions they may make. And it is particularly true if they do something legal and common for leaders to engage in (unfortunately).

Again. you're being negative and saying that since the situation is hopeless, that's the best you can do. I believe we can do better.

Quite the contrary. I do have the option to improve the situation, even if only a little bit, and I take it. That means I do not believe the situation is hopeless. You are the one who says the situation is hopeless, and you want a complete change and some sort of "new" and "better" democracy where there is no gambling or cheating or you want to stomp your feet and throw a tantrum. The sad result is your tantrum will do nothing to improve things, despite your desire to do so. This is not because I think the situation is hopeless. It is because I believe the tactic of encouraging everyone to not vote will not produce the desired result. You like a simple solution "stop voting and that will fix everything" and you say everyone else is hopeless if they don't think your approach will work.

Let's say you are in a battle. You have a few low caliber guns. You can shoot at the enemy but it doesn't do very much good. You each have one bullet per election, and only if you shoot all at once will it do much good. One approach is to try to get everyone shooting to have the best effect. You, on the other hand, say it is better not to shoot at all, and if we do that, the enemy will give up because they like us to shoot at them.

Honestly, it is the best thing they could possibly hope for! A movement to stop shooting so they can do whatever they want. You say it is hopeless, but everyone else sees that your approach is even more hopeless.

I do fault the students in the Berkeley prison experiment who abused other students. Not all students did it. Not everyone conformed to the majority or obeyed authority. Some people have a conscience and act on it. It is like the other experiment where people deny what their eyes tell them in order to conform to the majority opinion. Not everyone does. As one of those who do not follow the herd, I do fault people who deny what they know so that they can please authorities or be part of the crowd.

But what they found is that the poor treatment of other students was so rampant, that they had to shut down the experiment. This means to me that if you place an individual in a position of power, this screws with their head and they make bad decisions. Even if your protest works and you get a gleaming new democracy, it will not withstand the underlying psychological realities of human nature, and the system will be no better than the one we have, except that we have undermined the value of voting and we will likely never get democracy started again.

Rampant doesn't mean ubiquitous. Just because most people may be susceptible to peer pressure or mob psychology, doesn't mean that everyone is. If studies showed that more than 90% of people, upon finding a wallet with ID and a lot of money in it, would keep the money and throw away the wallet, would you feel that it was okay for you to do the same? Would you teach your children that it was okay for them to do the same? Do you teach your children that if all the other kids are driving while drunk, it is okay for them to do it? Not everyone is corrupt. We are all subject to temptation, but we don't all cope in the same way. Some just succumb while others do not. Some of us even come up with extremely clever ways to manage to avoid succumbing to temptation and becoming corrupt. For example, some people in power, rather than surrounding themselves with yes men or others who are corrupt, surround themselves with the most honorable and uncorrupt people they can find, to help them avoid temptation. Hugo Chavez, for example, appointed so many wise female elders to his administration to keep him honest, that he is jokingly referred to in Venezuela not as The Father of the Revolution, but as The Grandmother of the Revolution.

You're dreaming. Take a group of people and they, as a whole, will usually react about the same way. Sure, there are outliers in any probability distribution. But you can't bank on that.

Voting itself is not democracy. Stalin held elections, but nobody thought it was a democracy just because people could vote. The value of voting here has already been undermined because the votes don't have to be counted and the results can't be verified. Stalin himself said that isn't who votes but who counts the votes. In mistaking voting for democracy, you're making a fundamental mistake. There can be voting without democracy and there can be democracy without voting. The best combination, of course, is democracy with voting, but before voting can be a part of a functional democracy, you have to have a democratic system in which votes are actually counted, the results can be verified, and the popular will of the people as expressed through their votes is the final say and cannot be ignored or overruled.

But a democracy requires voting. If you undermine the essence of the system you promote, you can never have it.

People who won't vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, where the results aren't verifiable, and where the candidates, once elected, can't be held accountable, will be proud and happy to vote in elections where every vote must be counted, the results are verifiable, and the candidates can be held accountable. If a restaurant serves lousy food, they may not have many customers. If they get a new chef and they start serving good food, more people are likely to eat there. Voting isn't any different from anything else. When the quality is lousy, consumers aren't happy and products sit on the shelves. When the quality is good, lines form all the way around the block for a chance to get something that everyone wants. Right now the political parties spend billions of dollars to encourage people to use a lousy electoral system to vote for unpalatable candidates. If the quality of the electoral system and the candidates improved, they wouldn't have to spend a dime on advertising because everyone would want to vote.

That's why it is important that we fix those problems rather than encourage the insanity of not voting at all. Please.

You can see the work I did on election integrity here http://www.copswiki.org/Common/COPsRovReport
This is still an active project. If you really care about a working democracy, help to make corrections which are desperately needed and are required regardless of whether you get a gleaming new democracy or not. But our system is not completely defunct. With oversight, it can produce fair results.

Just because our system allows things to happen does not mean that people responsible for evil should not be held accountable. Our system allowed the BP oil spill to happen. Does that mean nobody should be held accountable? Wars based on lies are wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Withdrawing from international law does not make them legal.

I agree completely. But just because you vote for someone does not mean you are complicit with their poor decisions. That's like the rationale that the sin of Adam is somehow handed down to all humans. I don't buy it.

If you allow people you know to be corrupt to make your decisions for you, simply because somebody else might be more corrupt, yes, you are complicit. If you have small children and you are only offered a choice of two possible babysitters, one of whom is a convicted child molester who has molested three children, and the other is a convicted child molester who has molested thirty children, you can't tell me that you are not complicit if you leave your kids with the first molester on the basis that he is less evil. If you can't find a babysitter who isn't a child molester, stay home. Otherwise, don't try to tell me that you care about your children. It is the same with voting. If both candidates are war criminals and you oppose war crimes, don't vote. If you vote for a war criminal, don't tell me that it is justified because the other candidate is a worse war criminal. I don't vote for war criminals and I don't vote in elections where the only possible winner are war criminals. That's because I care about children, about human rights, and I'm opposed to war crimes. I'm not going to say, well, Ray votes for war criminals, so I should too. You have to live with yourself and I have to live with and answer to myself. I take responsibility for my actions and I won't let myself be influenced by people who don't, not even if they're the vast majority. I wasn't created to be an irresponsible blob, I was given a conscience and I show my appreciation for that gift by listening to it instead of listening to the herds of irresponsible blobs.

Your belief that no matter what happens, people will twist the system and make things worse, is extremely negative and hopeless.

No, it is just reality. I don't think that a protest and a new gleaming democracy will be any better than the corrupt system we have. But that does not mean I'm going to give up and stop applying pressure in the other direction. If you know you may have a flat tire on a trip, you don't stop going on trips. You bring a spare, and then the "disaster" will not hurt your trip.

If you are deliberately ignorant of reality, and only allow yourself to see the reality that you want to see, you'll continue to believe that change for the better isn't possible and keep voting for the status quo. I have a friend who lives in Caracas and I've studied other countries where they managed to oust their oligarchies and establish true democracies, so that is the reality I know.

Just the opposite. You have a sweet little solution that you think is the cure for all evils. I see it as a lost cause, something that is self-refuting, a doorway to insanity. It does NOT mean I "like the status quo" and all that crap. The trouble is, you think that if someone does not think your solution will work that automatically they are bent on preserving the current system. Not true.

Now, perhaps you can explain in gory detail, how exactly not voting will do anything productive. I see it like slapping ourselves in the face, but maybe if you try to explain that, you will see that you really haven't thought it through very far. (But don't do that on this list.)

If you believe that it is impossible to bring about social change for the good, you'll never try because you think it is impossible.

But I don't believe that. I DO Believe it is possible to bring about social change for the good. I don't think that voting does very much, but it is one small power that we have that I don't think we should flush down the toilet just because it isn't that powerful. I believe other methods are more productive, such as direct observation of public officials, and that's why I started CitizensOversight.org, to encourage people to apply that sort ofoversight.

That is a form of direct democracy. If voting worked in our system, you wouldn't need CitizensOversight because you could simply elect people who weren't corrupt and who would surround themselves with other people who weren't corrupt to help them avoid becoming corrupt.

Not true. Even if we had pure democracy, we would still need citizens' oversight. The psychological realities will not change, greed, sexual urges, corruption, etc will not disappear just because we have a system that is more like pure democracy. So I reject this notion and the rest of the explanation that is based on it.

The system adopted by the Zapatistas in Mexico requires that elected officials cannot act before polling their constituents to ask what their constituents want them to do. If they then act against the wishes of their constituents, they are immediately removed from office and replaced with people who will lead by obeying. Because the people have a voice in government, they call their government the good government, and the corrupt government of Mexico the bad government. Where there is direct democracy and transparency, you already have citizen oversight.

No, you still need oversight because they could still lie.

Where there is secrecy and corruption, attempts at citizen oversight are an exercise in futility because it is the government that holds the power, not the people.

I disagree.

Look up the definition of democracy in the dictionary. It means a form of government where power is vested in the hands of the people, or, as Lincoln put it, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Government of, by, and for the corporations and the rich, including, at our local level, wealthy real estate developers, is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy.

Correct.

Voting for your choice of plutocrats and oligarchs is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy with symbolic elections to give people the illusion ofparticipation, as I explained in my previous post.

True, except that not voting does not do any good.

Just because plutocrats and oligarchs will let you vote for them, doesn't mean that they'll represent you once they're in office.

Right again. But that does not mean not voting will do any good.

So you'll stick with the status quo because you think all other options are worse and that therefore it must be the best of all possible worlds.

No, that is not the result. Just because I don't throw in the towel does not mean I am giving up. It is just the opposite. You are the one that says nothing can be changed and you are advocating giving up. I say I don't like the status quo and I'm willing to use voting for whatever it is worth.

If it was worth anything, I'd vote also. But casting ballots that don't have to be counted, in elections where the results are not verifiable, for candidates who can't be held accountable while in office, is totally worthless.

That's not true. #1, the elections are not completely unverifiable. Not all ballots are counted, but if we overwhelm the system, it will still have an effect. So to say that there are some problems and therefore, the value of voting is == 0, is incorrect thinking.

You have a big board you want to put up on the wall. You have little tiny brads you can nail in. One nail will do nothing, the board will fall. Many brads fall to the floor. The board is not exactly the one we want, but it is slightly better than the other one. If we get enough people to vote in our direction, it is like putting enough brads in the board to hold it up. Each brad does almost nothing but when combined with many other, we can push the system in the right direction, however slowly. A person in the back that says "Don't put any brads in the board, and we will get our way" is insanity. It makes no sense, will do no good, and only makes you sound like an idiot.

Only votes which must be counted, can be verified, and are either a direct voice on issues or a vote for representatives who can be held directly accountable, are worthwhile. That's the kind of votes they have in Venezuela. After their revolution, once they had ousted their corrupt oligarchy, they drew up a Constitution that guaranteed it. Their revolution is now in its 12th year and hasn't been corrupted yet.

There is nothing wrong with having hopes, dreams, and visions for a better future.

That's why I have hope that we can build a better democracy, but I realize that due to the frailties of human nature, it will never be very pretty.

Well, they do other things in Venezuela. Instead of saturating their youth with porn, their schools teach social values and responsibility. So their human nature is very different from ours. In fact, it is more a question of nurture than of nature. When Hurricane Katrina hit Cuba, they successfully evacuated two million people. They already had the plans in place, they cared about people, even poor people, and they did it. When it hit New Orleans, no plans were in place, poor people weren't evacuated, and it was a disaster. It isn't a question of human nature, it is a question of whether or not the system teaches selfish values or social values.

Bullshirt. There is porn in Venezuela too. Our schools do not "saturate our youth with porn." You are grasping for straws now.

I don't advocate magical positivity, but when we've seen a small town in Peru stand up to the big world water barons and win, we know that it is not necessary for everything to be privatized and sold for the maximum possible profit. We know that people have a right to clean water and sometimes, if they are sufficiently determined, can defend that right. But not if they just say that things are as they are and cannot be any other way so we have no choice but to submit.

--Mark

I'm all for that, and if we have a movement of that nature, then using a vote protest might help us. But I do not believe you can improve the underlying voting system, which is fundamental to all democratic systems, by promoting the notion that voting is worthless. If you do that and you are able to convince a big group that it is true, and let's say you clean up everything (I still don't know how the protest would result in that as an outcome, and I don't even think you know what you want) then you would have to do an about-face and convince everyone that they should now trust the voting system and their new govt.

In essence, you can't use a voting protest to protest that the voting system does not work, and then restart the same system when you are done. This is insanity at its level worst.

Germany banned voting machines and central tabulators because they count votes secretly in a way that is easily hacked and cannot be verified. Are you saying that it is impossible for Germany to have done what they did?

No, not at all. But they did not do that by not voting. They did it by insisting the facts and getting others to understand, to generate a movement. We are doing the same here. (Read my report on election systems).

I'm not saying that voting is always worthless,

Well, we are making progress then, because you've said that over and over. So I will chalk this up as progress.

just that uncounted votes are worthless, elections that are unverifiable are worthless, and elections for candidates who can't be held accountable are worthless.

Not exactly true. You are making mistakes of glossing over details. Uncounted votes are worthless, just as worthless as votes that are not cast, like yours. Unverifiable elections are not worthless, if they are overwhelmed, and there is always some measure of verifiability. Candidates can be held accountable at the next election, so that means they are held accountable. All these arguments hold no water at all. You are fooling yourself by using inexact logic.

In most democratic countries the votes do have to be counted and the results are verifiable. Are you saying that Canada, England, Ireland, and every other country that has verifiable elections can't do what they are already doing because human nature is evil?

Not at all. But verifiability always has limits, and we are in the middle of making corrections to our system. If you want to help, then come on board and do the hard work. But I can say that in no cases you list, did these countries fix their system by encouraging people not to vote. It is a nonstarter, a ridiculous tactic that will only harm eventually establishing a better democracy.

Let me explain to you how a voting protest works. Suppose you vote and you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted. You investigate and are told that there was a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you assume it was fixed and won't happen again, and in the next election you vote and once more you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you grumble a bit and the next election you vote again, and once again, after the election you learn that your vote wasn't counted and that once again it was supposedly due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or central tabulator, but that since our Constitution doesn't require that votes be counted, there is no reason for the Registrar's Office to spend the money to fix the bug or glitch, since your vote doesn't have to be counted anyway. Well, since it is your nature, you'll grumble a bit and keep voting in the next election and the next election, even if your vote is never counted. But in Ireland, since they had learned about the bugs and glitches in the voting machines when other countries like the US used them, when their government tried to introduce voting machines, the Irish refused to vote. They simply would not go to the polls. Their government had to warehouse and eventually scrap all the voting machines, despite the enormous amount of money they'd spent on them, because people wouldn't use them. That's how a voting protest works.

I don't buy it. I don't think not voting will work.

When people refuse to vote unless and until the voting system is worthwhile, meaning that votes have to be counted, the results are verifiable, and it is possible to vote for candidates who can be held accountable and actually be forced to represent their constituents instead of their big donors, the voting system will change because the government won't be able to get people to vote unless their demands are met. As long as people are so apathetic that they are willing to continue to vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, the results aren't verifiable, and the candidates can't be held accountable, nothing will change.

Incorrect. Things CAN change even if the system is not perfect, and even if voting is not the avenue to get change. Not voting is a completely incorrect approach. You think that because there were voting strikes that were coupled with other movements that the voting strike caused the movement, that is incorrect.

I suggest to you that you discontinue your campaign to get people to stop voting. We spend a great deal of time encouraging people to vote and engage in their democracy. Most of these people barely pay attention and getting them to vote is the first step out of netflix world of recorded films and into the world of reality. You, on the other hand, are undermining these attempts in an campaign that is based on incorrect logic and false premises. The net result of your voice maybe to undermine the shadow of a democracy that we do have. So, please, let's stop the campaign and work on fixing the system in other ways. True it is harder. You have to actually tell the system what is wrong and encourage them to change it. They don't always know what is the better way. Your campaign is completely negative and does not chart the course to the better way. It will not work because it only stops something that we eventually want to happen, and does not stop the bad stuff that we do not want to happen. It is a delusion you have constructed for yourself and I am holding you by your shoulders and trying to shake the senses into you. Snap out of it!

Please take some time to reflect on these things... Let's not process it further at this time. I've tried to shake sense into you and explain that it makes no sense, but it will be up to you to allow the possibility that your solution is incorrect and your thinking must change.

--Ray

This is getting a bit difficult to read, so I'm switching to green and bold with yellow highlighting so that my responses below can be more readily identified.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:32 AM, Raymond Lutz wrote:

On 8/31/2011 4:15 AM, Mark E. Smith wrote:

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:44 PM, Raymond Lutz wrote:

Hi Mark:

On 8/30/2011 7:27 PM, Mark E. Smith wrote:
If you vote for someone who gambles their fortune away or cheats, and you didn't know beforehand that they would do it, you are not endorsing gambling or cheating. But if you know that the person is a habitual gambler or cheater and you vote for them anyway, then you are.

Not necessarily. You may not endorse gambling and cheating and still vote for the person if the other person is a worse gambler and cheater. You figure that by voting for the lesser of the two evils, you are reducing the tendency to gamble or cheat, and the net result is positive. In another scenario, you may know that the person cheats on his/her spouse, and even though that is a character trait you don't admire, he/her has so many admirable traits that is still a vote for the best representative. So I fundamentally reject the idea that voting for someone is an endorsement of mistakes or bad decisions they may make. And it is particularly true if they do something legal and common for leaders to engage in (unfortunately).

Again. you're being negative and saying that since the situation is hopeless, that's the best you can do. I believe we can do better.

Quite the contrary. I do have the option to improve the situation, even if only a little bit, and I take it. That means I do not believe the situation is hopeless. You are the one who says the situation is hopeless, and you want a complete change and some sort of "new" and "better" democracy where there is no gambling or cheating or you want to stomp your feet and throw a tantrum.

I am not asking for a new or better democracy where everything is perfect. I am simply saying that what we have is not a democracy at all, it is a plutocracy, and that we need a democracy which, even if imperfect, is better than the tyranny of plutocracy and oligarchy. The reason our votes don't have to be counted is because we don't have a democracy, we have a plutocracy. The reason our election results aren't verifiable is because we don't have a democracy, we have a plutocracy. The reason we can't hold our elected officials accountable during their terms of office, which is the only time they are supposed to represent us, and we can't stop them from acting against the wishes and interests of their constituents so as to benefit their big donors, is because we don't have a democracy, we have a plutocracy. Plutocracy is not the only possible form of government and we do not have to settle for plutocracy. Democracy is possible, many countries have democratic forms of government, and democracy was the explicit intention of the founders of this country as they stated clearly in the Declaration ofIndependence, and the blood they spilled fighting for us to have a democracy was betrayed by the slave-owning plutocrats and oligarchs who wrote the Constitution to form a plutocracy where those who owned the country would always rule the country, instead of a democracy where, by definition, power is vested in the hands of the people. You can continue to stomp your feet and throw your tantrums and claim that democracy isn't possible and that we have to settle to attempting to have a slightly less evil plutocratic tyranny, but that is just giving up on democracy and saying that you believe democracy is impossible and that everyone should remain as hopeless as you are and not even consider opposing tyranny and demanding a democratic form of government.

The sad result is your tantrum will do nothing to improve things, despite your desire to do so. This is not because I think the situation is hopeless. It is because I believe the tactic of encouraging everyone to not vote will not produce the desired result. You like a simple solution "stop voting and that will fix everything" and you say everyone else is hopeless if they don't think your approach will work.

I gave you examples of how election boycotts worked in South Africa, Cuba, Haiti, and Ireland. In continuing to insist that tactics and strategies which have been successful in the past, cannot possibly succeed, you are denying reality and showing yourself to be incapable of thinking or acting rationally. Election boycotts are not a simple solution. They require an informed electorate, social consciousness, and determination on the part of the majority of people. This has been accomplished by other people in other countries and I see no reason to believe that people in the U.S. are genetically or otherwise inherently inferior and incapable of doing things that other people have done.

Let's say you are in a battle. You have a few low caliber guns. You can shoot at the enemy but it doesn't do very much good. You each have one bullet per election, and only if you shoot all at once will it do much good. One approach is to try to get everyone shooting to have the best effect. You, on the other hand, say it is better not to shoot at all, and if we do that, the enemy will give up because they like us to shoot at them.

If you had bullets, your reasoning would be logical. But suppose you are given blanks and told that they are bullets. No matter how many bullets your fire at once, if they're really blanks you won't accomplish anything. Votes that don't have to be counted, that can be manipulated and miscounted because they aren't verifiable, and that can be ignored or overruled by superdelegates, Electors, Congress, a winning candidate conceding before the votes can be counted, or Supreme Court intervention, aren't actually votes, they're the equivalent of shooting blanks instead of bullets.

Honestly, it is the best thing they could possibly hope for! A movement to stop shooting so they can do whatever they want. You say it is hopeless, but everyone else sees that your approach is even more hopeless.

Not everyone else. There are more nonvoters in this country than there are Democrats. You're the tiny minority who refuses to see the truth staring you in the face.

I do fault the students in the Berkeley prison experiment who abused other students. Not all students did it. Not everyone conformed to the majority or obeyed authority. Some people have a conscience and act on it. It is like the other experiment where people deny what their eyes tell them in order to conform to the majority opinion. Not everyone does. As one of those who do not follow the herd, I do fault people who deny what they know so that they can please authorities or be part of the crowd.

But what they found is that the poor treatment of other students was so rampant, that they had to shut down the experiment. This means to me that if you place an individual in a position of power, this screws with their head and they make bad decisions. Even if your protest works and you get a gleaming new democracy, it will not withstand the underlying psychological realities of human nature, and the system will be no better than the one we have, except that we have undermined the value of voting and we will likely never get democracy started again.

Rampant doesn't mean ubiquitous. Just because most people may be susceptible to peer pressure or mob psychology, doesn't mean that everyone is. If studies showed that more than 90% of people, upon finding a wallet with ID and a lot of money in it, would keep the money and throw away the wallet, would you feel that it was okay for you to do the same? Would you teach your children that it was okay for them to do the same? Do you teach your children that if all the other kids are driving while drunk, it is okay for them to do it? Not everyone is corrupt. We are all subject to temptation, but we don't all cope in the same way. Some just succumb while others do not. Some of us even come up with extremely clever ways to manage to avoid succumbing to temptation and becoming corrupt. For example, some people in power, rather than surrounding themselves with yes men or others who are corrupt, surround themselves with the most honorable and uncorrupt people they can find, to help them avoid temptation. Hugo Chavez, for example, appointed so many wise female elders to his administration to keep him honest, that he is jokingly referred to in Venezuela not as The Father of the Revolution, but as The Grandmother ofthe Revolution.

You're dreaming. Take a group of people and they, as a whole, will usually react about the same way. Sure, there are outliers in any probability distribution. But you can't bank on that.

Very few people are born sociopaths. Most are born with a conscience and a society can either nurture that sense of social responsibility, or make fun of it and use various forms of peer pressure to force it out of them. Democrats and Republicans are the outliers because they're the minority willing to cast uncounted ballots in unverifiable elections for candidates they can't hold accountable and don't really want to vote for but have been terrified into believing that the other party's candidate is worse. There are twice as many nonvoters are there are Democrats or Republicans. There are even people who have lower than average IQs and only a grade school education who have watched enough television or been arrested enough times to know that the good cop/bad cop game is rigged against them because both cops are on the same team, have the same big donors, uh, I mean bosses, and have the same agenda.

Voting itself is not democracy. Stalin held elections, but nobody thought it was a democracy just because people could vote. The value of voting here has already been undermined because the votes don't have to be counted and the results can't be verified. Stalin himself said that isn't who votes but who counts the votes. In mistaking voting for democracy, you're making a fundamental mistake. There can be voting without democracy and there can be democracy without voting. The best combination, of course, is democracy with voting, but before voting can be a part of a functional democracy, you have to have a democratic system in which votes are actually counted, the results can be verified, and the popular will of the people as expressed through their votes is the final say and cannot be ignored or overruled.

But a democracy requires voting. If you undermine the essence of the system you promote, you can never have it.

Voting is not the essence of democracy. The essence of democracy, the very definition of democracy, is vesting power in the hands of the people. A vote is not necessarily a voice in government, no less power over government. An uncounted, unverifiable, easily manipulated or overturned vote for candidates who can't be held accountable, is not and cannot be the basis of a democratic system of government. In a democracy every vote has to be counted and the count has to be fully transparent and subject to citizen oversight so that it is fully verifiable. That's how it is done in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, most EU countries, and most Latin American countries. Only in the US and certain dictatorships and tyrannies do votes not have to be counted or can be counted in secret or in such a way that citizens have no oversight and the results cannot be verified.

People who won't vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, where the results aren't verifiable, and where the candidates, once elected, can't be held accountable, will be proud and happy to vote in elections where every vote must be counted, the results are verifiable, and the candidates can be held accountable. If a restaurant serves lousy food, they may not have many customers. If they get a new chef and they start serving good food, more people are likely to eat there. Voting isn't any different from anything else. When the quality is lousy, consumers aren't happy and products sit on the shelves. When the quality is good, lines form all the way around the block for a chance to get something that everyone wants. Right now the political parties spend billions of dollars to encourage people to use a lousy electoral system to vote for unpalatable candidates. If the quality of the electoral system and the candidates improved, they wouldn't have to spend a dime on advertising because everyone would want to vote.

That's why it is important that we fix those problems rather than encourage the insanity of not voting at all. Please.

When a vending machine is broken, you can't fix it by continuing to put money into it. You have to stop putting money into it, post a note that it is broken over the slot so that other people won't put money into it, and contact the vending machine company so that they can fix it before you can accomplish anything by putting more money in it. Continuing to vote in a broken system is just like putting more money into a broken vending machine that has already taken your money many times and not given you anything in return. You can't fix the system by continuing to use it. You have to stop using it long enough to fix it.

You can see the work I did on election integrity here http://www.copswiki.org/Common/COPsRovReport
This is still an active project. If you really care about a working democracy, help to make corrections which are desperately needed and are required regardless of whether you get a gleaming new democracy or not. But our system is not completely defunct. With oversight, it can produce fair results.

I've been working on election integrity longer than you have. Uncounted or secretly counted, unverifiable votes might accidentally produce fair results, but nobody could ever prove that it wasn't just an accident. Honest elections have to be transparent, fully accessible to citizen oversight, fully verifiable, and the results have to be the final say. Even if the election processes are totally honest, if the election results can be overturned by the government, you don't have a democracy because power is with the government rather than with the people. A tyranny doesn't have to be a monarchy or dictatorship, it can be any system ofgovernment where the ultimate power is with the government instead of with the people. When both Republican and Democratic administrations state clearly and openly that they do not allow public opinion to influence their policy decisions, it means that you can vote all you want, but you won't be allowed a voice in government and that you do not have a democratic form of government, you have a tyranny.

Just because our system allows things to happen does not mean that people responsible for evil should not be held accountable. Our system allowed the BP oil spill to happen. Does that mean nobody should be held accountable? Wars based on lies are wars of aggression and crimes against humanity. Withdrawing from international law does not make them legal.

I agree completely. But just because you vote for someone does not mean you are complicit with their poor decisions. That's like the rationale that the sin of Adam is somehow handed down to all humans. I don't buy it.

If you allow people you know to be corrupt to make your decisions for you, simply because somebody else might be more corrupt, yes, you are complicit. If you have small children and you are only offered a choice of two possible babysitters, one of whom is a convicted child molester who has molested three children, and the other is a convicted child molester who has molested thirty children, you can't tell me that you are not complicit if you leave your kids with the first molester on the basis that he is less evil. If you can't find a babysitter who isn't a child molester, stay home. Otherwise, don't try to tell me that you care about your children. It is the same with voting. If both candidates are war criminals and you oppose war crimes, don't vote. If you vote for a war criminal, don't tell me that it is justified because the other candidate is a worse war criminal. I don't vote for war criminals and I don't vote in elections where the only possible winner are war criminals. That's because I care about children, about human rights, and I'm opposed to war crimes. I'm not going to say, well, Ray votes for war criminals, so I should too. You have to live with yourself and I have to live with and answer to myself. I take responsibility for my actions and I won't let myself be influenced by people who don't, not even if they're the vast majority. I wasn't created to be an irresponsible blob, I was given a conscience and I show my appreciation for that gift by listening to it instead of listening to the herds of irresponsible blobs.

Your belief that no matter what happens, people will twist the system and make things worse, is extremely negative and hopeless.

No, it is just reality. I don't think that a protest and a new gleaming democracy will be any better than the corrupt system we have. But that does not mean I'm going to give up and stop applying pressure in the other direction. If you know you may have a flat tire on a trip, you don't stop going on trips. You bring a spare, and then the "disaster" will not hurt your trip.

If you are deliberately ignorant of reality, and only allow yourself to see the reality that you want to see, you'll continue to believe that change for the better isn't possible and keep voting for the status quo. I have a friend who lives in Caracas and I've studied other countries where they managed to oust their oligarchies and establish true democracies, so that is the reality I know.

Just the opposite. You have a sweet little solution that you think is the cure for all evils. I see it as a lost cause, something that is self-refuting, a doorway to insanity. It does NOT mean I "like the status quo" and all that crap. The trouble is, you think that if someone does not think your solution will work that automatically they are bent on preserving the current system. Not true.

I never said that a democratic form of government was the cure for all evils or was perfect, just that in countries which have democratic forms of government, they have things like national health care plans because the people have a voice in government. We're still the only "developed" country in the world without a national health care plan, and the only developed country where life expectancy is decreasing rather than increasing. Why are people in the US the only people in the world whose human nature prevents them from caring about their own health? Aren't people in other countries also human? Don't they also have the same human nature? Why is it that every other developed country has allowed people to have a voice in government so that they could provide for their general welfare, but the US is certain that it can't be done, won't work, and isn't possible due to human nature?

Now, perhaps you can explain in gory detail, how exactly not voting will do anything productive. I see it like slapping ourselves in the face, but maybe if you try to explain that, you will see that you really haven't thought it through very far. (But don't do that on this list.)

I did it at the link I provide, which you obviously didn't read or simply cannot begin to allow yourself to understand because it conflicts with your deeply held, though false, beliefs. http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1172

If you believe that it is impossible to bring about social change for the good, you'll never try because you think it is impossible.

But I don't believe that. I DO Believe it is possible to bring about social change for the good. I don't think that voting does very much, but it is one small power that we have that I don't think we should flush down the toilet just because it isn't that powerful. I believe other methods are more productive, such as direct observation of public officials, and that's why I started CitizensOversight.org, to encourage people to apply that sort ofoversight.

That is a form of direct democracy. If voting worked in our system, you wouldn't need CitizensOversight because you could simply elect people who weren't corrupt and who would surround themselves with other people who weren't corrupt to help them avoid becoming corrupt.

Not true. Even if we had pure democracy, we would still need citizens' oversight. The psychological realities will not change, greed, sexual urges, corruption, etc will not disappear just because we have a system that is more like pure democracy. So I reject this notion and the rest of the explanation that is based on it.

Look, Ray, maybe you are totally corrupt, due to your human nature, and would steal anything you could because you believe that everybody else would, so why not you. But you started CitizensOversight because you know that no matter how corrupt people are, if other people are watching them, it is more difficult for them to get away with it. Where there are democratic forms of government, there is transparency and accountability. There will still be some who have no conscience, but everyone else will be able to keep an eye on them and to hold them accountable if they do bad things.

The system adopted by the Zapatistas in Mexico requires that elected officials cannot act before polling their constituents to ask what their constituents want them to do. If they then act against the wishes of their constituents, they are immediately removed from office and replaced with people who will lead by obeying. Because the people have a voice in government, they call their government the good government, and the corrupt government of Mexico the bad government. Where there is direct democracy and transparency, you already have citizen oversight.

No, you still need oversight because they could still lie.

Study the old New England Town Hall Meeting system, Ray. When citizens met to make policy and budget decisions, they met openly like the Zapatistas do, everyone was allowed to speak, and a consensus had to be reached before any action could be taken. No secret vote counts, so nobody can lie. If somebody promises to do something in front of the whole town, and then doesn't do it, they are then known to the entire community to be a liar and they can be held accountable, immediately removed from office, and barred from holding office again.

Where there is secrecy and corruption, attempts at citizen oversight are an exercise in futility because it is the government that holds the power, not the people.

I disagree.

You disagree? Suppose that you prove corruption by an elected official or law enforcement officer, provide documented evidence to the District Attorney, and they refuse to press charges. What good is citizen oversight if the DA has the power to ignore the evidence and let corrupt officials off the hook?

Look up the definition of democracy in the dictionary. It means a form of government where power is vested in the hands of the people, or, as Lincoln put it, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Government of, by, and for the corporations and the rich, including, at our local level, wealthy real estate developers, is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy.

Correct.

I'm glad we agree on something.

Voting for your choice of plutocrats and oligarchs is not democracy. It is plutocracy or oligarchy with symbolic elections to give people the illusion ofparticipation, as I explained in my previous post.

True, except that not voting does not do any good.

I gave you several examples of where election boycotts did bring about more democratic forms of government, and yet you continue to say that the facts don't matter because you believe that what happened elsewhere can't happen here, or what was possible elsewhere isn't possible here. Why do you believe that we are inferior to other people and aren't ready for democracy?

Just because plutocrats and oligarchs will let you vote for them, doesn't mean that they'll represent you once they're in office.

Right again. But that does not mean not voting will do any good.

In a democratic form of government, power is vested in the hands of the people. You agreed with that dictionary definition, Ray. What it means is that the people have the power to hold their representatives accountable, so that they either have to represent their constituents, or they can be immediately and directly removed from office by those constituents. That's power. But you don't get it by voting for candidates you won't be able to hold accountable. You have to say that you won't vote until and unless your vote counts. If you simply refuse to vote for candidates you can't hold accountable, you open up the possibility of bringing about a more democratic form of government and having the ability to hold your representatives accountable. As long as you're willing to keep voting in a system where you don't have power and cannot hold your representatives accountable, they don't have to represent you and you are denying yourself any possibility ofbringing about change. Hoping for a more benevolent tyrant isn't the way to end tyranny. You may see it as potentially making things a little bit better, but in a system where the people don't have the power to hold their representatives accountable, candidates have every incentive to lie because once they're in office nobody can make them keep their word. Only if the people have the power to hold their representatives accountable, do candidates have an incentive not to lie, because they wouldn't be able to get away with it.

So you'll stick with the status quo because you think all other options are worse and that therefore it must be the best of all possible worlds.

No, that is not the result. Just because I don't throw in the towel does not mean I am giving up. It is just the opposite. You are the one that says nothing can be changed and you are advocating giving up. I say I don't like the status quo and I'm willing to use voting for whatever it is worth.

If it was worth anything, I'd vote also. But casting ballots that don't have to be counted, in elections where the results are not verifiable, for candidates who can't be held accountable while in office, is totally worthless.

That's not true. #1, the elections are not completely unverifiable. Not all ballots are counted, but if we overwhelm the system, it will still have an effect. So to say that there are some problems and therefore, the value of voting is == 0, is incorrect thinking.

92% of ballots cast in this country are completely unverifiable. Check BradBlog.com He's done the research and has the documented facts. While it is true that 8%of ballots cast in the US are verifiable, that isn't enough to sway an election. Central tabulators are completely unverifiable. They are easily programmed to allocate a certain percentage of votes to major party candidates and distribute the remainder among minor candidates. So if the central tabulator is programmed to give candidate A 55% of the vote, Candidate B 40% of the vote, and allocate the remaining 5% of votes among minor candidates, if 100 people vote Candidate A will get 55 votes, Candidate B will get 40 votes, and the minor candidates together will get 5 votes. The same percentages will result if 1,000 people vote, a million people vote, or 300 million people vote. You can't overwhelm a system that is mathematically programmed to allocate votes by percentage, Ray. Even you should be able to figure that out. And because 92% of the votes cast aren't verifiable, nobody can ever prove whether the election was rigged or not. In many districts today they use the old Lyndon Johnson Ballot Box 13 trick, waiting until the results are in so that they can see how many more votes are needed to reverse the results, and then miraculously "finding" that many uncounted ballots. It was used in Wisconsin recently and they were denied a recount. But we know that recounts can also be manipulated, so that wouldn't prove anything either.

You have a big board you want to put up on the wall. You have little tiny brads you can nail in. One nail will do nothing, the board will fall. Many brads fall to the floor. The board is not exactly the one we want, but it is slightly better than the other one. If we get enough people to vote in our direction, it is like putting enough brads in the board to hold it up. Each brad does almost nothing but when combined with many other, we can push the system in the right direction, however slowly. A person in the back that says "Don't put any brads in the board, and we will get our way" is insanity. It makes no sense, will do no good, and only makes you sound like an idiot.

That's not an apt analogy as it indicates an ignorance of the many ways in which our elections are known and have been proven to have been manipulated. A more apt analogy would be that everyone puts brads in the wall, the board doesn't fall, and then some bully comes along and knocks it to the floor. That's what happened in the 2000 election. Gore won the popular vote but the Supreme Court knocked him down. In 2004 they didn't even have to intervene, as Kerry knew they could intervene if they wanted to and conceded to save them the trouble. He didn't really care if he had won the election or not, or if the ballots his voters cast for him were counted or not, he just wanted to ensure that the status quo didn't change. Elections where the votes don't have to be counted and can't be verified, are a way to get people to delegate their power, grant their authority, and give their consent of the governed to a plutocracy that doesn't allow them any power because it isn't a democratic form of government, but gives them the illusion of having a stake because they are allowed to cast their uncounted, miscounted, unverifiable, and easily overruled "votes" for candidates who can't be held accountable.

Only votes which must be counted, can be verified, and are either a direct voice on issues or a vote for representatives who can be held directly accountable, are worthwhile. That's the kind of votes they have in Venezuela. After their revolution, once they had ousted their corrupt oligarchy, they drew up a Constitution that guaranteed it. Their revolution is now in its 12th year and hasn't been corrupted yet.

There is nothing wrong with having hopes, dreams, and visions for a better future.

That's why I have hope that we can build a better democracy, but I realize that due to the frailties of human nature, it will never be very pretty.

Well, they do other things in Venezuela. Instead of saturating their youth with porn, their schools teach social values and responsibility. So their human nature is very different from ours. In fact, it is more a question of nurture than of nature. When Hurricane Katrina hit Cuba, they successfully evacuated two million people. They already had the plans in place, they cared about people, even poor people, and they did it. When it hit New Orleans, no plans were in place, poor people weren't evacuated, and it was a disaster. It isn't a question of human nature, it is a question of whether or not the system teaches selfish values or social values.

Bullshirt. There is porn in Venezuela too. Our schools do not "saturate our youth with porn." You are grasping for straws now.

I threw out my TV when it became saturated with violence. Surveys have shown that youngsters in our society are saturated with porn and consider it part of the culture. Our public schools do not teach social responsibility or critical thinking. Things are very different in Venezuela and Cuba. Children are taught socialism instead of capitalism, to put people before profits, instead of putting profits before people. That's why Cuba was able to evacuate two million people safely before Katrina hit, but New Orleans couldn't even evacuate a few tens of thousands.

I don't advocate magical positivity, but when we've seen a small town in Peru stand up to the big world water barons and win, we know that it is not necessary for everything to be privatized and sold for the maximum possible profit. We know that people have a right to clean water and sometimes, if they are sufficiently determined, can defend that right. But not if they just say that things are as they are and cannot be any other way so we have no choice but to submit.

--Mark

I'm all for that, and if we have a movement of that nature, then using a vote protest might help us. But I do not believe you can improve the underlying voting system, which is fundamental to all democratic systems, by promoting the notion that voting is worthless. If you do that and you are able to convince a big group that it is true, and let's say you clean up everything (I still don't know how the protest would result in that as an outcome, and I don't even think you know what you want) then you would have to do an about-face and convince everyone that they should now trust the voting system and their new govt.

In essence, you can't use a voting protest to protest that the voting system does not work, and then restart the same system when you are done. This is insanity at its level worst.

Germany banned voting machines and central tabulators because they count votes secretly in a way that is easily hacked and cannot be verified. Are you saying that it is impossible for Germany to have done what they did?

No, not at all. But they did not do that by not voting. They did it by insisting the facts and getting others to understand, to generate a movement. We are doing the same here. (Read my report on election systems).

Actually, it was two people, a father and son, who took their case directly to the German Supreme Court and got voting machines banned on Constitutional grounds because secret vote counts violate the basic tenets of democracy. But Germany has a democratic form of government. Their Supreme Court Justices have to be qualified and elected--they're not just crony appointments. And their Constitution established a democracy rather than a plutocracy. Our Supreme Court refuses to hear all but about 5% of the cases sent to it, and nobody would have standing to bring such a case to the Supreme Court here in the US because we do not have a democratic form of government.

I'm not saying that voting is always worthless,

Well, we are making progress then, because you've said that over and over. So I will chalk this up as progress.

just that uncounted votes are worthless, elections that are unverifiable are worthless, and elections for candidates who can't be held accountable are worthless.

Not exactly true. You are making mistakes of glossing over details. Uncounted votes are worthless, just as worthless as votes that are not cast, like yours. Unverifiable elections are not worthless, if they are overwhelmed, and there is always some measure of verifiability. Candidates can be held accountable at the next election, so that means they are held accountable. All these arguments hold no water at all. You are fooling yourself by using inexact logic.

You don't seem to grasp the definition of democracy, even though you agreed that the dictionary definition is correct. Holding people accountable after they have killed a few million innocent people who can't be brought back to life and indebted your grandchildren's grandchildren, is not democracy, even if it was possible. But waiting until the damage is done and then trying to elect somebody else you won't be able to hold accountable, doesn't change anything. Look at the paragraph about where I explained how central tabulators are programmed to allocate votes, to understand that you can't overwhelm an unverifiable secret vote count. But even if you did, the winning candidate could concede, as Kerry did, the Electoral College isn't bound to follow the popular vote, Congress doesn't have to accept the Electoral vote, and the Supreme Court can nullify the election on any pretext, with or without reason or precedent, and their decision cannot be appealed, as happened in 2000, because we do not have a democratic form of government. If we had a democratic form of government, power would be vested in the hands of the people, not in the hands of the candidates, the Electoral College, Congress, or the Supreme Court, the popular vote would have to be counted, be verifiable, and would be the final say which could not be overturned by any Supreme Dictator, Supreme Tyrant, Supreme Monarch, Supreme Deity, or Supreme Court. Supreme means ultimate. Our constitution vested power in the hands of the Supreme court, an unelected body that is not answerable to the people and over which the people have no power. That would not be the case in a democratic form of government, by definition, or do you now want to disagree with the definition?

In most democratic countries the votes do have to be counted and the results are verifiable. Are you saying that Canada, England, Ireland, and every other country that has verifiable elections can't do what they are already doing because human nature is evil?

Not at all. But verifiability always has limits, and we are in the middle of making corrections to our system. If you want to help, then come on board and do the hard work. But I can say that in no cases you list, did these countries fix their system by encouraging people not to vote. It is a nonstarter, a ridiculous tactic that will only harm eventually establishing a better democracy.

I did that work from 2000 through 2006, Ray. I studied the electoral process, observed elections, filed Public Records Requests, spent many days at the Registrarof Voters attempting to verify that election laws were followed, and even personally and individually all by myself took the ROV to court for violating election laws. The judge found that he had indeed violated the election laws, but rather than holding him accountable, the judge simply suggested that he not do it again. I took part in the CA50 lawsuit to try to get the Busby/Bilbray race verified, where Bilbray was sworn in while more than 50,000 votes remained uncounted and the election hadn't been certified, and learned that we have no right to a recount because the Constitution did not vest power in the people. Instead, in Article One (which shows you how important they thought it was to ensure that the people had no power), Section 5, the Constitution made Congress the sole judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own Members, and gave Congress alone the power to remove a sitting Member. Constitutionally, Congress has the power to judge that the loser of an election was the winner, and the people have no power to appeal that decision because the Constitution gave sole power to Congress. In the 2006 election Congress did exactly that in at least six cases, seating a Republican loser instead of a Democratic winner (and this was a Democratic Congress), and dismissed all Federal Elections Appeals by Democratic candidates without even bothering to look at the documented evidence that the elections had been stolen. In 2006 I asked voters, primarily people involved in the election integrity movement, peace activists, and progressives, if they would still vote if the only federally certified voting machine was a flush toilet. I was so stunned at the results that I repeated the poll online on a large progressive website and got the exact same results. About half the people polled said that of course they wouldn't vote if their ballots were just going to be flushed down a toilet. But the other half insisted that they would vote even if their ballots were flushed down a toilet, because voting is a precious right and the essence ofdemocracy. Election integrity activists, of course, would go to the sewage treatment plant and try to fish the ballots out of the effluent so that they could prove that their votes had been flushed down the toilet, but they wouldn't stop voting no matter how many times their votes were flushed down a toilet, because they believe that voting is a precious right that people fought and died for, and is the essence of democracy. They don't know the difference between an uncounted vote and a real voice in government. What people fought and died for was to give them a real voice in government, but they're willing to flush it away because they simply can't grasp that unverifiable votes aren't real votes and cannot establish a better democracy because they don't count.

Let me explain to you how a voting protest works. Suppose you vote and you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted. You investigate and are told that there was a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you assume it was fixed and won't happen again, and in the next election you vote and once more you find out after the election that your vote wasn't counted due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or the central tabulator. So you grumble a bit and the next election you vote again, and once again, after the election you learn that your vote wasn't counted and that once again it was supposedly due to a bug or glitch in the optical scanner or central tabulator, but that since our Constitution doesn't require that votes be counted, there is no reason for the Registrar's Office to spend the money to fix the bug or glitch, since your vote doesn't have to be counted anyway. Well, since it is your nature, you'll grumble a bit and keep voting in the next election and the next election, even if your vote is never counted. But in Ireland, since they had learned about the bugs and glitches in the voting machines when other countries like the US used them, when their government tried to introduce voting machines, the Irish refused to vote. They simply would not go to the polls. Their government had to warehouse and eventually scrap all the voting machines, despite the enormous amount of money they'd spent on them, because people wouldn't use them. That's how a voting protest works.

I don't buy it. I don't think not voting will work.

So not who's stamping their foot and throwing a tantrum? You can keep denying the facts and insisting on what you believe, but you can't change the facts just because you don't want to believe them. The fact is that it worked in Ireland and it is the only proven method that works. Had the Irish voted on those machines, they'd never have had another verifiable election and would have forfeited their democracy.

When people refuse to vote unless and until the voting system is worthwhile, meaning that votes have to be counted, the results are verifiable, and it is possible to vote for candidates who can be held accountable and actually be forced to represent their constituents instead of their big donors, the voting system will change because the government won't be able to get people to vote unless their demands are met. As long as people are so apathetic that they are willing to continue to vote in elections where their votes don't have to be counted, the results aren't verifiable, and the candidates can't be held accountable, nothing will change.

--Mark

Incorrect. Things CAN change even if the system is not perfect, and even if voting is not the avenue to get change. Not voting is a completely incorrect approach. You think that because there were voting strikes that were coupled with other movements that the voting strike caused the movement, that is incorrect.

Other movements can pressure governments, can use violence to try to topple governments, but only election boycotts have been proven to have the power to nonviolently delegitimize governments. Read the Declaration of Independence. Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Governments demonstrate that consent by holding elections. Your vote is your consent. If you consent to an undemocratic status quo, you can't bring about change towards democracy because you've already consented to be governed undemocratically.

I suggest to you that you discontinue your campaign to get people to stop voting. We spend a great deal of time encouraging people to vote and engage in their democracy. Most of these people barely pay attention and getting them to vote is the first step out of netflix world of recorded films and into the world of reality. You, on the other hand, are undermining these attempts in an campaign that is based on incorrect logic and false premises. The net result of your voice maybe to undermine the shadow of a democracy that we do have. So, please, let's stop the campaign and work on fixing the system in other ways. True it is harder. You have to actually tell the system what is wrong and encourage them to change it. They don't always know what is the better way. Your campaign is completely negative and does not chart the course to the better way. It will not work because it only stops something that we eventually want to happen, and does not stop the bad stuff that we do not want to happen. It is a delusion you have constructed for yourself and I am holding you by your shoulders and trying to shake the senses into you. Snap out of it!

Please take some time to reflect on these things... Let's not process it further at this time. I've tried to shake sense into you and explain that it makes no sense, but it will be up to you to allow the possibility that your solution is incorrect and your thinking must change.

--Ray

Don't treat me like a child, Ray. I'm older than you, have been involved in election integrity longer than you, and was probably voting before you were born. I've put much more thought into this than you have. You're a political party operative and sometime candidate and you want people to think that they should accept a shadow of democracy instead of holding out for the real thing. You wan to say that the Founders of this country fought their revolution in vain and that people should accept the counterrevolutionary tyranny of a Constitution that betrayed our revolution and established a plutocracy instead of a democracy. You've repeated every single canard that I'd already carefully and thoroughly refuted in the article I linked, just the way that every political party operative does. You're an unprincipled opportunist and you're terrified that by simply telling people the truth, I might single-handedly undermine a ten billion dollar Obama reelection campaign. No matter that Obama wasn't the lesser evil, that he started more wars based on lies than Bush did, gave more money to the rich than Bush did, and even appointed more neo-cons than Bush did, you still want people to believe that he is less evil than Michele Bachmann, who couldn't be more evil if the Devil himself was her running mate. Obama is bombing innocent babies in six different countries right now, for no other reason than to increase defense contracts. Obama deported eight times as many immigrants as Bush did. Obama is the first elected national leader anywhere in the world since the 13th Century to renounce the Magna Carta and give himself the right to assassinate anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason, including citizens of his own country. But it isn't his fault. Our military-industrial complex lies to Congress, only tells the President what they want him to know, and neither he nor Congress has any oversight power that could force them to reveal what they don't want the President or Congress to know. If they don't get all the wars and money they want, they'll do what they do best, what they did to JFK. That's the business they're in, the genocide-for-profit business, and they certainly won't let a President stand in their way. The only way to effectively oppose them isn't by playing their game, because they'll always win, but by refusing to play their game, refusing to elect their puppets, refusing to vote for candidates we can't hold accountable but they can.

But then I don't know a single progressive Democrat who is really opposed to genocide. They just want to be sure that it is done by a Democrat. When I ask Democrats who call themselves peace activists why they vote for pro-war Democratic nominees they just stop talking to me or, if they have the power, ban me and forbid me from speaking or posting in any venue under their control.

Voting in a democratic system is the way that the people exercise their power, either directly or through representatives they can hold accountable and force to represent their interests. Voting in an undemocratic system is the act of declaring yourself incompetent and designating guardians to manage your affairs for you. Fifty percent of us don't believe that we are incompetent. As for the other fifty percent, the fifty percent that vote, they may be correct--if they believe that they aren't competent, they probably aren't, and they certainly shouldn't vote or run for office.

--Mark

(to be continued)

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 5 September 2011 - 6:30am.

That thread had gotten very long a difficult to follow, so I started a new one, beginning with the post that I copied to Fubar as a discussion topic titled, "The Value of Voting." Here's that discussion so far:

A democratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the people. That's the dictionary definition and even Ray agreed to it.

An undemocratic system of government is one in which power is vested in the hands of the government. That government could be a dictatorship, a monarchy, a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or even a pseudo-democracy, but if power is vested in the hands of the government rather than in the hands of the people, the system does not meet the definition of a democratic form of government.

In a democratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the people, voting is the most precious right of all, as it is the way that the people exercise the power vested in them, either directly by voting on issues, budgets, and policies, or indirectly by voting for representatives who are obligated to represent their constituents and can be directly recalled by the people at any time that they fail to represent the people who elected them.

In an undemocratic form of government, where power is vested in the hands of the government rather than in the hands of the people, voting is totally worthless and a waste of time, as the people do not have power and the government doesn't have to count their votes, can miscount and/or ignore their votes, can overrule the popular vote, and elected representatives are not obligated to represent their constituents but can represent their personal beliefs or philosophies, their big donors, or whatever they wish, and cannot be held accountable as long as they continue in office, which is the only time that people need them to represent the interests of the people.

In an undemocratic form of government, voters can hope that their votes might be counted, can hope that their elected officials might represent them, but have no power to ensure that their votes are counted or that their elected officials actually represent them.

The system makes all the difference. As an analogy, breathing is a good thing and we humans couldn't survive without being able to breathe. But underwater or in a toxic environment filled with lethal gas, breathing can bring about death more quickly than holding one's breath and trying to escape. Breathing isn't always a good thing, it is only a good thing in an environment with oxygen suitable for human life.

The same is true of voting. In a democratic system, voting is precious and essential. In an undemocratic system, it can be fatal, as it can allow the destruction of the economy, military adventurism, obstacles to basic human rights such as jobs, education, food, clothing, shelter, and health care, and other tragic consequences of allowing government to exercise uncontrolled power rather than vesting power in the hands of the people.

Most people in the US today are opposed to our government's ongoing wars of aggression. Even those who are uninformed and uneducated, who aren't aware that historically, the way that most empires fell was because they became militarily overextended, sense that there is something wrong with spending trillions of dollars on foreign wars while basic domestic needs go unmet. But because we do not have a democratic system of government, we have no power to end the wars. The best we can do is vote for candidates we hope might end the wars, but if, like Obama, they expand the wars instead of ending them, there is nothing we can do about it because our government has the power to start or end wars and we do not. If wars were on the ballot, it could only be as a nonbinding referendum, as there is no Constitutional way to force the government to obey the will of the people. The Constitution vested power in the government rather than in the hands of the people.

I do not oppose voting any more than I oppose breathing. I oppose voting only when it occurs within an undemocratic form of government, thus legitimizing an undemocratic form of government and consenting to be governed undemocratically, just as I oppose breathing only when in a toxic or anaerobic environment where breathing can be fatal. Just as I would want to try to help anyone trapped in a toxic or anaerobic environment hold their breath until they could escape, I want to try to help people trapped in an undemocratic form of government withhold their votes until they can escape. If I tell a drowning person to hold their breath until they can get their head above water, I am not condemning breathing. If I tell people not to vote until they have a democratic form of government, I am not condemning voting. In both cases, I am trying to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to promote the general welfare.

--Mark

Encouraging people not to vote is insanity. Not all voting is worthless. Some local races have nothing to do with wars, big donors, and partisan philosophies. To encourage people to not vote at all is to eliminate the small but important power we have in a democracy, and will mean we have no impact on those races that are close to home, are easy to validate, and indeed, many precincts are hand counted every time.

We can do better. We can reduce the dilution of our voting power, but to not vote completely means we give up that power completely. To advocate that everyone should stop voting will mean that even those local races will be given over to our opponents.

The pitiful protest of Mark is based on an delusion. He thinks that if we all stop voting in protest, the evil forces that have and want more power will feel bad, and will do almost anything to get us back on the playground. Unfortunately, even if a relatively large number of people stopped voting because they did not have power means those in power will just get their way all the more easily. We will lose even our last vestiges of a shadow of the democratic system that we have left. Do not get caught in this cesspool of wrong thinking. Do not stop voting.

Now, do I think voting is all-powerful and the majority of people will actually rule, like they are supposed to in a democracy? Not at all. In fact, I don't regard voting as all that powerful of a right at all. More powerful is the right to freedom of speech, except that now, money is equated with speech when corporations do it. It's true, speech is less powerful that it used to be. But that does not mean we should all put duct tape over our mouths in protest and stop speaking our minds. Just like not voting, that would make our opponents overjoyed, because they would completely rule the world forum with their falsehoods.

Protesting is not as powerful as it used to be. We are relegated to protest areas, hardly covered by the media, etc. But we should continue to protest nonetheless.

Voting is not like breathing poison. It does not hurt you to do it. We must continue to vote, to speak, and to protest. Do not follow Mark E. Smith. His voting protest is a waste of time and even mental energy to think about.

--Ray

From Steve Kowit:

Yes, the power of big money is a central problem, probably the central problem. The fact that both parties--the only parties that count, unfortunately--are dependent on vast sums of money in order to win elections, means that money rules our state. Unfoprtunately both parties are committed to the imperial agenda, the New American Century agenda spelled out by the Neocons. Cinton & Obama were both willing to use bombs & troops to control the Middle East (& Latin America). The U.S. is the great terrorist state of our era. This terrorist state with imperial ambitions of world-wide domance is a plutocracy, not a democracy. The heavy money wants "globalization"--i.e., empire. No one has said it better than Brecht:

WHEN IT COMES TO MARCHING MANY DO NOT KNOW

That their enemy is marching at their head.
The voice which gives them their orders
Is their enemy's voice and
The man who speaks of the enemy
Is the enemy himself.

Ray, the CA50 race was here in San Diego, not somewhere else. Bilbray was sworn in while more than 50,000 votes remained uncounted. The Donna Frye Mayoral elections were here in San Diego, not somewhere else, and they were local, not national. Donna won the election three times but because our votes cannot be verified, never got to take office as Mayor here at the local level, in the exact same way that Gore and Kerry won the popular vote but never got to take office at the national level. Only 8% of precincts in this country have hand counted ballots with public oversight or any other verifiable vote count and we're not one of them. 92% of voting districts, including all those in the San Diego area, have unverifiable vote counts.

It is insanity to imagine that you have power you don't have. It is like driving up to a red stoplight, commanding it to turn green, and then when it turns green, imagining that it did so because you commanded it to. If you think you have power over the stoplight, try commanding it to turn purple or blue. It can only turn red, green, or yellow, and the sequence in which it does so is often computer controlled. I've programmed stoplights myself. They're much more democratic than our electoral system, as their timing may take into account the presence or absence of cars detected by weight, or pedestrians pushing buttons, but they do not respond to people verbally commanding them to turn green no matter how many people believe that they do.

Saying that local areas have nothing to do with wars, big donors, and partisan philosophies is delusional. The federal government has not exempted San Diego or any other local area from paying taxes to support wars, the way it exempts big donors and corporations. When the federal government cuts funding for States and for social programs, San Diego is not exempted. Much of San Diego's economy is based on defense contractors and the military, but San Diego has no voice in what contracts they get or where they'll be deployed.

You can't dilute or strengthen power you don't have. The pitiful repetitions by Ray of false canards and his inability to understand that not everything is Republicans vs. Democrats and that the Democrats and Republicans are not opposing parties but colluding parties, prevents him from seeing that we do not have the power he imagines we have. When votes for Donna Frye are thrown out because a Registrar of Voters decides that the Diebold machine corporation's rules are more important than the intent of the voters, and when the Governor threatens to veto any legislation that puts the intent of the voters first, it is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, that the voters have no power that the voting machine corporation, the Registrar of Voters, and the Governor cannot overrule. If we had power on the local level, we'd have been able to insist that our votes for Donna Frye be counted, that our votes in the Busby/Bilbray race be counted, and we'd have been able to verify that our votes were counted. We have no such power.

There are no vestiges of any shadow of a nonexistent democratic system to be preserved. Out votes don't have to be counted, often are proven not to have been counted, and we have no power to ensure that they are counted. Those who do have power get their way without bothering to count how we vote and it is a cesspool of wrong thinking to imagine that the more than 50,000 votes that remained uncounted at the time that Bilbray was sworn into Congress, or the more than 5,000 votes for Donna Frye that were thrown out, were actually counted or had any meaning. Worse than a cesspool of wrong thinking, it is totally delusional denial of reality. What good is an election integrity organization that pretends that uncounted votes actually count?

Voting in a democratic system is like breathing in an environment with oxygen. It is life-sustaining. Voting in an undemocratic system is like breathing in a toxic or anaerobic environment. It is deadly. The illusion that votes might be counted is not a shadow or vestige of democracy, it is an illusion and it has been disproven over and over again right here at the local level as well as countless (pun intended) times at the federal level.

Speaking out is important at the local level even if we don't control the mass media, but protesting is merely symbolic in a system where the government does not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions. Do you think Bush was lying when he said that he would not let public opinion influence his policy decisions? Do you think Hillary Clinton was lying when she said that the Obama administration does not let public opinion influence its policy decisions? You can protest all you want, as the 1,000 people getting arrested in front of the White House to protest the tar sands pipeline are doing, but neither Republican nor Democratic administrations allow public opinion to influence their policy decisions. On the rare occasions that they throw the people a crumb, it may look like they were responding to public pressure, but the power and the decisions are entirely theirs and are no more dependent upon the will of the people than a stoplight turns green because you command it to.

Voting in an undemocratic system is indeed like breathing poison because it legitimizes and grants the consent of the governed to tyranny while giving the illusion of democracy without the substance. It is fatal, not just for the millions of innocents our government kills abroad in our name, but also for those citizens who perish when sent to carry out those killings and for the local economies that become dependent upon such killings and cannot diversify.

When you say, "our opponents," Ray, who are you referring to? The Tea Party and the Republicans want the same wars of aggression and the same genocides that the Democrats do, they just want a Tea Partier or a Republican in the White House instead of a Democrat. There is no opposition party in the United States. The two-party winner-take-all system locks out third parties while the two major parties compete to attract funding from same big corporate donors by catering to the rich and devastating our economy at both the federal and local levels. The Democrats and Republicans are not opponents but collaborators, or as the late Walter Karp put it,Indispensable Enemies. Neither could exist without the other and they work together to ensure that power remains in the hands of the rich and not in the hands of the people.

Your imaginary remnants of vestiges of the shadow of what you think was intended to be a democracy don't exist. Our Constitution vested power in the hands of the government, not in the hands of the people. Our government does not meet the definition of a democratic form of government. A person who owns a car and has a driver's license has the power to drive. A child with a toy car can pretend to drive and say, "Vroom, vroom," over and over, but since their car is only a toy, they don't have the power to drive. Tell them that their car is only a toy, and they may burst into tears and insist that they really have a real car and really have the power to drive, but they don't. Pretending that you have the remnants of the vestiges of the shadow of power that you never had is childish. You don't have the power to ensure that your votes are counted. You don't have the power to ensure that your elected representatives really represent you. You have the illusion of power because you can vote, the same way that a child with a toy car has the illusion of driving, but because you have no power to ensure that your votes are counted and no way to force your elected officials to represent you, it is just an illusion. Perhaps it is a comforting illusion that you need to cling to, the way the child, unable to own and drive a real car, has a need to pretend to drive the toy car, but it is the illusion of power, not real power.

--Mark

Anecdotal examples of failure of the voting system does not mean it fails in every case. For it to be "worthless", it has to fail in absolutely every case. Even one case of a success means the system has some value.

Indeed, some cases have been successes. Debra Bowen being elected to the CA Secy of State position is an example of a very unlikely result if your theory that the system is completely broken is true. Her election had really nothing directly to do with wars, etc. but does have a lot to do with getting our election system under control. How do you explain the success of getting her elected, and a return to paper ballots here in San Diego, if votes have no value? If we follow your lead, we would be making no progress at all, Debra Bowen would not be in office, and we would still be voting on Diebold DRE machines.

Other examples also exist. The election of Al Franken as Senator is an example of a race that was carefully reviewed, with video feeds of every ballot being considered. I watched a lot of it, and I don't think anyone who followed this could claim that the election system was not working. With durable paper ballots, that sort of review was possible. It took months, but eventually all the attempts by the right wingers to keep him out failed. But if Franken supporters would stop voting because some people are voted in that continue war crimes, he would not have been elected.

Those are two examples which obliterate your claim that voting is worthless. Voting is worth something. Therefore, your campaign to not vote at all is based on a fallacy that the system is completely broken, with no examples of any successes. You are simply lying to yourself and everyone else if you continue this campaign.

--Ray

Minor exceptions to a rule only prove the rule, Ray, they doesn't mean that the rule is incorrect.

As for Bowen, the paper ballots are useless because they are processed through unverifiable optical scanners and then tallied by unverifiable central tabulators. When Bowen decertified/recertified Diebold voting machines, Democrats tried to say that she had decertified them, but San Diego ROV Deborah Seiler told me that the machines had been recertified. No Diebold machines, not even optical scanners and central tabulators, can be secured from hacking by insiders.

Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the only member of Congress who can act according to his principles and represent his constituents because he's an independent rather than a Democrat. All the other liberals, like Al Franken, Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, etc., can talk a good game between elections, but they're Democrats so even if they spend all their time between elections opposing wars, when election time comes they have to support the pro-war Democratic Party nominee. That means joining the Democratic and Republican majority in supporting the wars of aggression based on lies.

I did not make any claim that voting is worthless. I claimed that voting within an undemocratic system is worthless. Voting within a democratic system of government where power is vested in the hands of the people is the most precious right there is because it is the right through which the people exercise their power and obtain all other rights. In an undemocratic system of government like ours, voting is worthless because power is not vested in the people, it is vested in the government, so voting is the way that people forfeit their inalienable right to a voice in government and authorize elected officials to make decisions that benefit big donors and corporations instead of their constituents.

If you have a car with a cracked engine block, a broken axle, no pistons, no wheels, and no electrical wiring, you can insist that the car is still good because the steering wheel and the upholstery are still good, but you won't be able to drive it. When a system is disfunctional, it may still have one or two things that aren't totally broken, but that doesn't mean the system itself is functional.

There are 535 members of Congress. Pointing to a dozen or even two dozen who aren't totally beholden to corporations and the military-industrial complex doesn't mean that Congress would be able to end the wars, because they don't have a majority. Besides, even if they did, the President could continue the wars covertly without bothering to tell Congress and fund them from black budgets that Congress doesn't have to approve. My point is that the people of the United States have no say in any of this and that the popular vote, which doesn't even have to be counted, isn't verifiable, and can be overridden by the Supreme Court, is totally worthless. You got out the vote for Al Gore in 2000, he won the popular vote, but he didn't become President. You got out the vote for John Kerry in 2004, he won the popular vote, but he didn't become President. In 2008 both Obama and McCain were pro-bailout and pro-war, and the big corporations gave more money to Obama than to McCain, so the Supreme Court didn't intervene and he was allowed to become President, not because he won the worthless popular vote, but because he was the choice of the big corporations and the military-industrial complex. Like Bush before him, he does not allow public opinion to influence his policy decisions.

Only in a democratic form of government where power was vested in the hands of the people and therefore public opinion could influence policy decisions and, actually was the ultimate decider of policy, would voting be worthwhile. Votes for Presidential candidates who do not allow public opinion or Congress to influence their policy decisions have no worth because they cannot influence policy decisions.

You need to begin to grasp the distinction between a worthless vote that cannot influence policy decisions, and a precious vote that can decide government policy. In an undemocratic system like ours, where power is vested in the government rather than in the hands of the people, the popular vote is worthless because it cannot influence policy. In a democratic form of government where power is vested in the hands of the people, the popular vote is precious because it is the ultimate decider of policy.

You're the one lying to yourself. You know that even if every single eligible voter voted for the Democratic Party Presidential nominee, it would not and could not end the wars of aggression that have killed over a million innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and which continue to spend trillions of dollars on killing innocent civilians abroad instead of providing jobs, education, health care, housing, and infrastructure here at home. When the government is committing crimes against humanity, and the popular vote has no influence on government policy and cannot end those crimes against humanity, voting is worthless because all it does is authorize and condone crimes against humanity. Unless that's your intention?

--Mark

What your argument boils down to Ray, is that yes, our government is committing crimes against humanity in our name which most people oppose, but that we shouldn't think about the crimes against humanity being committed in our name which we oppose, we should think about some small benefit that we might possibly be able to obtain for ourselves instead. If you ignore the crimes against humanity being committed in our name which we oppose, and instead focus solely on some small benefit that we might be able to obtain for ourselves, you can justifying voting even if it authorizes crimes against humanity, because you simply ignore the crimes against humanity, insist that you're not voting for the crimes against humanity, and tell yourself that the only reason you're voting when you know that the results of the election will be continuing crimes against humanity, is in hopes of obtaining some small benefit for yourself.

In Nazi Germany, the good German voters ignored The Holocaust and focused on Hitler's promise of jobs and land for Germans. In Israel today the good Zionists ignore Apartheid and the illegal siege of Gaza and focus on trying to force the government to lower the cost of housing and cottage cheese for Jews. In the US today the good Democrats ignore the wars of aggression and crimes against humanity and focus on local or hot-button issues that might produce some small benefit for themselves. By encouraging people to be selfish, self-centered, and oblivious to what is being done to others in their name, totalitarian and authoritarian governments can get people to vote for totalitarian and authoritarian policies including genocide and crimes against humanity. That's disgusting, shameful, fascist, and worse than worthless--it perpetuates tyranny instead of insisting on democracy.

--Mark

From Steve Kowit:

The problem with this discussion is that it is fanciful, if not delusional. We are nowhere near a point in the history of citizen disaffection to imagine that as an act of rebellion against the American political system, vast numbers of people will protest & "bring down the state" by not voting. That is delusional. It is neither a tactic nor a strategy. At best a tiny minority--mostly progressives who feel they stand outside the system--will participate in the de-voting campaign.... & maybe a few thousand radical right-wingers as well. It will not make a dent on the imagination of most Americans but might, at best (or worst), swing close elections to the Republican Party. That is the only effect it will have... & even that is doubtful because so few would participate in such a campaign. Perhaps at another time, sometime in the future, 70 years from now, if the state is already on the brink of collapse, if fast sections of the population are desperately poor and hungry, it might prove a significant tactic---though I doubt it even then. If anyone would like to bring down the imperial plutocracy of the United States, that campaign --to get millions of people to not participate in elections--is a non-starter. It will go nowhere. The theory is in the realm of fairy tale, building castles in the air.

There are more nonvoters right now, Steve, than there are Democrats or Republicans. It is fanciful or delusional to think that Republicans are more evil than Democrats, or that Democrats are more evil than Republicans. Both parties get huge donations from the same big multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex because both parties cater to the same big multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex.

There is no reason to be concerned about swinging close elections to the Republican Party. The 2000 election wasn't even close. Gore won the popular vote by a large majority. The Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the vote count, and made Bush President. It only took one vote, one Supreme Court vote, to make Bush President, because the popular vote doesn't really count. In 2004 Kerry won the popular vote. It wouldn't have mattered if Bush had really won the popular vote because Kerry planned to concede whether he won or lost. That's why he didn't spend a penny of the millions of dollars he'd raised on the promise of ensuring that every vote was counted, because he never intended to allow the votes to be counted.

If Obama is reelected, we will have more of the Republican agenda, with Republicans pretending to oppose their own agenda and Democrats blaming Republicans for everything that Democrats do, as usual. If a Republican is elected we'll have the same agenda, the only difference being that the Republicans will openly support it and the Democrats will pretend to oppose it (which they never do when they're the ones carrying out the exact same agenda). The agenda is the same, because it is the agenda of both parties who are both beholden to the same big corporate and defense donors. They have the same big donors and the same agenda. If you stopped repeating your religious mantra that, "Republicans are worse," and followed the money, you'd see for a fact that neither party is worse, that they are both the same. Democrats are people who hold the religious belief that Republicans are worse and Republicans are people who hold the religious belief that Democrats are worse. But both parties are equally evil. It is no different from members of two different patriarchal religions each insisting that the believers in the other religion are doomed and will go to hell while people who have the same religion as them will be saved.

Voting won't bring about change in the corporate/militaristic genocidal and ecocidal agenda no matter which pro-corporate, pro-war party people vote for. Not in 70 years, not in 700 years. All voting does is allow the big corporations and the military-industrial complex to claim that the political puppets they fund and own, have the consent of the governed. If the governed continue to consent to the destruction of their economy, their environment, and their national security through deregulated business practices and military adventurism by both Democrats and Republicans, we won't be around long enough to see any changes.

Only by withholding the consent of the governed can the genocidal and ecocidal plutocracy be discredited, delegitimized, and disempowered. There are no poor people in Congress. Everyone in Congress is a member of the top 2% who govern this country. They are all, both Democrats and Republicans, plutocrats and oligarchs. They do not and never will represent the interests of the majority, they represent the interests of their own class. Believing that the rich will represent the interests of the poor and working class is in the realm of fairy tales, building castles in the air, etc.

--Mark

From Steve Kowit:

Just about everything you say is horribly true. But there is no realistic possibility of that sort of rebellion among Americans. We are still very wealthy, no one is bombing us, & no anti-vote revolution is on the horizon or anywhere in the forseeable future. States collapse over time, empires fall, invulnerable nation-states are defeated in war & bombed & their power destroyed. An enormous economic catastrophe might bring about fundamental change, being nuked & seeing our major cities destroyed might well do it, but the vast majority of people who don't bother to vote in the US are not political visionaries making a statement, they are not a threat to the pax Americana. & suggesting that people not vote as a revolutionary strategy is not, I think, likely to prove convincing to just about anyone. We obey the media--they tell us what to think & believe: the NY Times, CNN, Fox News, the LA Times, et al. The project to convince the American citizen not to vote is fanciful though I share your

with the murderous system. We are a nation that was born out of genocide, & world domination thru violence is our agenda.

I have succeeded in convincing a few people, but there are some people who will never be convinced and I've been trying to figure out why. Like you, for example. If what I'm saying is, in your personal opinion, true, Steve, why isn't it convincing to you personally? Not to other people, just to you, Steve Kowit.

Is there no realistic possibility of you withholding your vote because you personally are still very wealthy, because no one is bombing you, and because you care more about what the media tells you than about doing what you know to be the right thing?

Forget about convincing everyone--that simply isn't possible. Even in countries that had successful election boycotts, there were still between 3% and 10% who voted because they truly supported Apartheid, colonialism, dictatorship, easily hacked unverifiable electronic voting machines and central tabulators, or whatever everyone else was opposing by withholding their consent.

The vast majority of nonvoters in the United States may not be political visionaries, but they are making a statement. They are saying that they do not consent to what they are being allowed to vote for. That they know what the result of the election will be (more wars, more economic decline, more environmental destruction), they do not think that our government represents their interests, and they will not consent to it. They are realists. They see the truth and they act accordingly. They are capable of acting rationally. It is the 50% who see the truth but are incapable of acting rationally that are the problem--those who know full well that the government doesn't represent them, that granting their consent to the government is not in their own best interests, but continue to vote anyway. People like you.

Yes, we are a nation born out of genocide and our government's agenda is world domination through violence. But not everyone agrees with it or consents to it. This evening I went to hear Brian Willson speak at the Joyce Beers Center. He believed what he was told when he was young, until he went to Viet Nam and saw the truth for himself. He has been working for peace ever since. I spoke about not voting during the Q & A after his talk and he agrees with me. What is the difference between somebody like Brian Willson who opposes war and will not vote for it, and Steve Kowit who opposes war but will continue to vote to consent to it because The NY Times, Fox News, the LA Times, et al, tell you to?

Okay, Brian is an extraordinarily brave person. He lost both his legs when a weapons train he was blocking ran over him, but he is still protesting wars. You and I probably aren't that brave. I happen not to be very brave at all. But it doesn't take any courage for me to withhold my consent and refuse to vote in elections where the preordained outcome, no matter who wins, will be wars that I oppose. If I oppose something, the least I can do is not grant it my support or consent. I don't care what the mass media tells me, if it doesn't cost me anything and doesn't put me in harm's way, I feel free to do what I think is right. What is it about Steve Kowit, Ray Lutz, Jeeni Cresenzo, and others who claim to be opposed to wars, that prevents you from withholding your consent to more wars?

Maybe you're too wealthy, maybe it is because you're not being bombed, and maybe it is because you're a slave to the media, but I really don't think so. Neither do I think that you're not capable of acting rationally. I think that you're secretly pro-war, and that the real reason that you continue to vote to grant your consent of the governed to a government which, no matter who is in power, constantly engages in imperialist wars of aggression and crimes against humanity, is because you happen to like imperialist wars of aggression and crimes against humanity.

When it comes to other things, I know that you're very individualistic and strongminded. If you don't like something, nobody can make you do it unless they hold a gun to your head. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to force you to vote. So the only possible explanation that makes any sense to me is that when you say you're opposed to wars you're lying, and that you vote for wars because you like wars.

--Mark

(To be continued if and when I get a response)

In the meantime there was another thread started by someone else, and I'll post that in the next comment.

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 5 September 2011 - 6:40am.

This thread was started by Nikki:

Okay enough already with the voting debate, try this one on for size, since ultimately that is where you have to go if voting makes no difference.........What do you think of Derek Jensen's solutions?.

Subject: Re: END:CIV - Resist or Die - WWW.ENDCIV.COM - YouTube

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Who said that voting makes no difference? In most EU countries their Constitutions require that all votes be counted and that all election processes be verifiable. While not perfect, they at least have somewhat democratic forms of government where votes count and are counted. In any minimally democratic form of government where votes are counted and verifiable, power is vested in the people and they exercise that power by voting, so voting is the most precious right of all because it is the right by which all other rights are obtained. Only in undemocratic forms of government like ours, where power is vested in the government rather than in the hands of the people, and where votes don't have to be counted and aren't verifiable, does voting make no difference.

Derrick Jensen's work, although totally derivative, is compelling and important. But if we had a democratic form of government where our votes were counted, verifiable, and enabled us to exercise a power that our Declaration of Independence says is our unalienable right but that was not vested in us by our counterrevolutionary and treasonous Constitution, which established a plutocracy or rule by the rich instead of the democratic form of government our revolution was fought for, we wouldn't need to destroy dams because we could simply vote to have dams which no longer serve a purpose, removed. We wouldn't have to allow corporations to destroy our environment and try to protest or stop them by force, because we could vote to require them to act responsibly.

In a plutocracy, or rule by the rich, which in this case means multinational corporations, the people have no political power over government. In a democratic form of government, by definition, power is vested in the hands of the people, not in the hands of government, corporations, or the military-industrial complex, and people can protect their environment by exercising their power when they vote. Look at countries like Germany, Switzerland, and other countries in Europe, and you'll see a lot less devastation and a lot more environmental conservation. Those countries are much older than the US, but retain more of their old growth forests, have cleaner air and rivers, fewer genetically modified foods, and even have socialized medicine. They're not perfect, but they do meet the most minimal requirement of democracy, that power be vested in the hands of the people, while our government does not.

--Mark

It was Derrick Jensen, Nikki, who gave what I think is the clearest explanation of what power is, a definition that is crucial if we are to be able to distinguish between a democratic form of government where power is vested in the hands of the people, and a tyranny where power is vested in the hands of the government.

Derrick was explaining what hope is, and although I don't recall his exact words, what he said was something like that when he is home, is hungry, and has food in the house, he doesn't hope he'll have something to eat, he goes to the kitchen and fixes himself something to eat. That's because he has the power to do something, so he does it. But when he is a passenger on a commercial airplane, he is not flying the plane, he has no control over the weather conditions or the way that the plane is piloted, so, because he has no control over the situation, all he can do is hope that the plane won't crash. In explaining what hope is, he also explained what power is. Hope is what you do when you don't have power. When you have power, you don't have to hope because you have control of the situation.

In a situation where we have a tyranny instead of a democratic form of government, and power is vested in the hands of the government instead of in the hands of the people, we have no power or control, so we can only hope that our votes might be counted and hope that our officials will represent our interests. In a democratic form of government where power was vested in the hands of the people, we would be in control and we wouldn't have to just hope, we could ensure that our votes were counted and that our officials represented our interests. Our Constitution ensured that we wouldn't have that power or control by specifically vesting power in Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, and by specifically not vesting power in the people.

In a democratic form of government, if, as happens to be the case now, the majority of the people were opposed to wars, we could vote to end the wars or vote to direct our representatives to end the wars, and not only would our votes have to be counted, but they could not be ignored because we'd be able to hold our officials accountable.

In a democratic form of government, voting is the most precious right of all because it is the right by which all other rights are obtained.

In an undemocratic form of government, or tyranny, voting has less than no value and is counterproductive, because by voting in elections where their votes don't have to be counted and cannot be verified, for officials they can't hold accountable, citizens waive their right to have a voice in government, and delegate their power and authority to government officials whose decisions are likely to violate the rights of their constituents. Many people who voted for Obama hoped that he would end the Bush-Cheney agenda and prosecute Bush and Cheney. Instead he expanded their agenda while protecting them from prosecution.

Whether Obama is reelected or whether some lunatic like Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry becomes President, the corporations who fund the elections will continue to remain in power and their agenda and that of the military-industrial complex will continue. We shouldn't make the same mistake that the Egyptians made and mistake the figurehead of a regime for the regime itself. After they forced Mubarak to step down, his regime remained in power and there were more protesters arrested, more military trials, and more torture of prisoners than before. The corporations that rule the United States will remain in power no matter who becomes President, so it will be the corporations themselves, not their figureheads, who will determine how their agenda is continued. People can vote for whoever they want, but even if they get an overwhelming landslide for their candidate, their candidate can still concede as Kerry did, or the Supreme Court can nullify the election and seat their opponent as happened with Gore in 2000. But even at the local level, the popular vote is meaningless, because even if somebody like Bob Filner becomes Mayor and attempts to do good things for San Diego, the federal government can defund state programs, forcing the state to defund county and local programs, and with our economy in desperate straits, the money to do good things simply wouldn't be available.

It is important not to confuse hope with power. Ray hopes that his vote will be counted and that the people who are elected will represent his interests. But he doesn't have the power to ensure that his vote is counted or to ensure that those elected will represent his interests, he can only hope. That hope may be comforting, but it is not the remnant of a vestige of a shadow of democracy, it is what people do when there is no democracy and they have no power. Even if he took office himself, he would find that he had no power to end the wars because the number of Congresspeople who are willing to forfeit corporate campaign donations in order to oppose the wars are not enough to carry a vote. Only if we had a democratic form of government where power was vested in the hands of the people instead of in the hands of the rich, would it be possible to get corporate money out of politics, ensure that our votes were counted, and force our representatives to represent us.

--Mark

From Nikki:

the issue goes deeper than voting, what is the nature and culture of the majority? what as Locke said, would ensure they would represent the minority when push came to shove, and can they when the issue is survival or a clash of values. It seems to me to argue about the value of voting and majority rule without discussion, of what kind of democracy you mean, and what shapes the majority opinion culture, desire, need, survival vs. self actualization, where does greed and need fit in to our society and why? If the culture you live in, or society to narrow it done is mentally ill --- doing things that go against our best interests, why or how could you put decisions that require a different perspective, shift in consciousness, higher degree of tolerance, compassion and education that truly fits the world of today (nearly impossible given the amount of information and different perspectives and contradictory facts for the most erudite among us, like yourself, possible?

Democracy, I believe we can agree requires and informed majority, or voters.... that's the heart of the question and how to make that possible is an action item, along with some common shared values. We can't even recognize the survival of our children and the planet is at stake. Would you trust democracy to this raving mob, mentality committed to material aggrandizement at any cost, including world wide killing of people, even our own, without any personal sacrifice in the prevailing psyche -- psyche that has it roots in our own history, mythology and national identity? How about going even deeper into what is the nature of human beings and how are we shaped, and what moves us. And most of all why we are ignoring the crisis we face ----- not today's simple who to elect and how, but a sick planet, with 7 billion mouths, 14 billion grasping hands, 14 billion legs trying to climb up the ladder, facing different levels of survival needs, like water, and food, which are growing and will be growing more scarce?

Not too long ago, Nikki, the local media did an actual poll to find out what San Diegans wanted most. It turned out that San Diegans right across the spectrum, liberal, conservative, right-wing, left-wing, whatever, wanted the potholes fixed.

Now since the roads are used for cars which use fossil fuels that are destroying our only habitat, that doesn't sound like a very good thing, but it really is. Because while the political parties are scare-mongering, trying to get everyone to think that if they don't vote, the other party will do the most horrible things imaginable, the truth is that if we eliminated hierarchical government and allowed policy decisions to be made by a majority of ordinary people, even those who want war the most would vote to fix the potholes first, even if doing so took some money away from the wars.

Rather than what was expected, such as banning gay marriage, deporting immigrants, making abortion illegal, etc., the radical right, along with the radical left and everyone in between, wanted to fix the potholes. Surprise!

Okay, so it isn't altruistic, far-sighted, or ecologically sound, but it's a hell of a lot better than what elected politicians do to placate their big donors.

Yes, we need a lot more consciousness raising, so that people will think first of others in need, and that the priority becomes preserving the planet for future generations, but as ignorant and self-centered as most of us may be, the consequences of having a democratic form of government right here right now wouldn't be the terrifying mob rule that the plutocrats feared so much, it would merely mean that the potholes got fixed. I could live with that a lot easier than I can live with genocide and crimes against humanity. After all, fixing the potholes may be selfish and ignorant, but unlike the massive environmental destruction and wars of aggression going on right now, it wouldn't be the end of the world. So yes, I would trust the people, even the most selfish and ignorant people, over the politicians any day of the week. Nuclear power plants and deep-sea oil drilling terrify me, but fixing the potholes, as sick and grasping as it may be, doesn't give me nightmares or cause me to lose a moment's sleep.

I think that when people act out of self-interest, it is possible to educate them so that they'll begin to understand the bigger picture and see what their long-term self-interests really are. I think that once they fixed the potholes, they'd focus on the high costs of gas, vehicle insurance, etc., and move on to demanding better public transportation. And eventually they'd come to understand that the high price of gas is directly related to the high costs of wars for nonrenewable fossil fuels, and demand that cars which run on water, which already exist, be produced. And eventually their love of animals, because people in the US of every political point of view happen to love animals more than they love other humans, would lead them to demand alternative and more sustainable modes of transportation like the horse and buggy. Twenty years ago most of us thought pedicabs were a third world phenomenon and that we'd never see them in San Diego, but now they're taken for granted. Maybe we're not really as stupid and evil as we think we are. ;)

--Mark

From Nikki:

I think when people think best interest there is little common denominator, and fixing pot holes is not going to stop the planet from becoming a living hell. Although when we run out of water, and food, survival will be a common denominator and I don't think the nice, thoughtful people, will fare the best.

Yes Nikki, in dire straits people will try to do whatever is necessary for survival and a future crisis would bring out that behavior. But your question was, "Would you trust democracy to this raving mob....?" and my answer is yes.

The so-called "raving mob," meaning the majority of the great masses of ordinary citizens, are a lot less "mentality committed to material aggrandizement at any cost, including world wide killing of people, even our own, without any personal sacrifice in the prevailing psyche -- psyche that has it roots in our own history, mythology and national identity," than politicians who have to cater to big corporations and the military-industrial complex, if not for themselves, at least on behalf of their political parties who need those big donors in order to compete and survive in our rigged and totally corrupt system. Most voters, be they Democrats, Republicans, third party, independent, or protest voters, don't really want genocide and only vote in elections where the preordained outcome is continuing genocide because they are led to believe that they don't have any choice. In fact, I believe that if democracy was entrusted to ordinary people, we would be much less likely to face the future crises that are inevitable if we continue to allow politicians to destroy our economy and the entire planet along with it just so that they and their political parties can remain in power.

If you leave democracy up to ordinary citizens, which is actually what democracy means, power vested in the hands of the people, they will tend to their own needs first. If you leave policy to politicians, they will distract people from their own needs and continually terrorize people into fearing some mythical enemy that will justify the need for more trillions in fraudulent defense contracts and greater environmental destruction. While there certainly are some lunatics, if they only have one vote, they can't muster a majority, but if big corporations can fund their political aspirations, they can do irreparable harm to their communities and their constituents during their terms in office. Only the most venal, degenerate, and morally compromised among us can garner the enormous donations from big corporations and the military-industrial complex that are needed to obtain a major party nomination and run a successful political campaign.

To put it another way, "this raving mob," as you characterize your neighbors, is less committed to war and more interested in their own survival than their so-called representatives, and therefore less insane and less of a danger to us and to our planet.

--Mark

Continuing discussion.

Submitted by folkie on 5 September 2011 - 9:19am.

Got a response from Steve, so back we go to the other thread (Note how he is reverting to standard political party operative rhetoric and calling me delusional while avoiding any attempt to respond to what I wrote.):

Because it is psychologically far fetched that Americans would stop voting for the purpose of making the American system fail. The American people, Mark, DO NOT WANT THE SYSTEM TO FAIL! They might want Obama out of office, the health care law repealed, Sarah Palin or some left-progressive to be President, The Wars to end, the social security system destroyed or expanded, the rich to pay more taxes or fewer taxes, but they DO NOT WANT THE SYSTEM TO FAIL!! That the system would somehow dissolve if seventy percent of those who presently vote ceased voting is in itself highly questionable-- but that even 20 percent of those who now vote could bring themselves to stop voting on the grounds it might well make the system fail seems more than improbable. One-fifth of the American people do NOT wish to see their country dissolve, or have a revolution. There is probably no more than 3% of the citizens who want to see the system fail & be fundamentally restructured! You & I are in a minuscule minority, don't you see that? Voting is one of the "blessings of democracy," It's the most sacred act of the secular political system. You might as well tell people to bring down the system by cutting off their genitalia or tearing out their tongues and eyes. If people want a revolution they will picket, boycott, strike, protest, break windows & eventually take up arms against the state. But the American people are not anywhere near a revolutionary condition. They are by & large well fed & leading decent lives. To say bring down the whole house of cards, destroy the whole American political system is not going to win many converts. I'm sure you're aware that the American Communist Party has endorsed Obama! Surely that should tell you something about the revolution! The USA is engaged in "targeted assassinations" around the world as well as torture, bombing civilian populations & the occupation of oil rich states. But the US population is not suffering those crimes, are not being bombed into the ground. If we bombed Iran tomorrow the news media would be on board within twenty-four hours & they would speak with a single voice--Iran is a criminal state & we must liberate the Iranian people from their evil government. 80% of American liberals would be on board within a week & 99% of moderates & Republicans. And those not on board would keep their mouths shut or scream into the void. We've been there before. Very very recently. There would be no dissent whatsoever anywhere in the corporate media & the people would take out their flags & wave them patriotically as they always have in the past & demand more bloodletting, more bombs. You're not thinking realistically. There is no chance of convincing the American people to sabotage the system. When the people are desperate & stealing bread to feed their starving children you can talk to them about destroying the beloved American Democracy. If you think they are interested in doing that now you are delusional.

You're repeating yourself, Steve. You didn't respond to a single thing in my post. Calling me delusional is an ad hominem attack that means you have no rational arguments and have to resort to name-calling. You ignored my request that you speak for yourself, which you are qualified to do, and continue to pretend that you speak for everyone, which you do not and are not qualified to do.

Steve, the reason that both the Democratic and Republican parties have only about 11% approval ratings among their own voters is because THE SYSTEM IS FAILING and people know it. People don't approve of their party and don't vote for their party, they vote against the other party because the media convinces them that the other party is even worse and will cause the system to fail even more quickly than their own party. It is precisely because people do not want the system to fail that they have become thoroughly disgusted with both parties. While there certainly are minorities who want some or all of the things that you named, nobody wants the system to continue to fail and they see that it is failing.

Whether or not the system would dissolve if seventy percent of those who presently voted ceased to vote doesn't matter, because only about fifty to fifty-five percent vote now, so if seventy percent of them stopped voting the system would no longer be able to demonstrate the consent of the governed and could no longer claim to be a legitimate government or claim to be a democracy or a republic. Without the consent of the governed or even a minimal claim to legitimacy, the US would begin to face global challenges to imperialism and genocide, and would be forced to act more responsibly. That would be a boon to our economy because we'd have the peace dividend people used to talk about before Obama's election exposed them as lying fascists who really prefer war to prosperity.

Many people do picket, protest, strike, and some even take up arms, but most of them have come to realize that their actions are merely symbolic and that the government does not allow public opinion, protests, boycotts, strikes, broken windows, or even armed riots to influence policy decisions. People want their voice to be heard and they know that they can't make their voice heard through voting or in any other traditional way.

You're back to talking about other people when I asked about you. YOU, Steve Kowit. You might or might not know what other people think or feel, but you darned well know what you yourself think and feel. Are you so comfortable that YOU would not do anything that might endanger the system? Is that the reason that YOU continue to vote even when you know that your vote isn't likely to be counted, can't be verified, and won't be the final say? Do YOU vote for candidates and political parties who are destroying our economy and waging wars of aggression based on lies because you're so comfortable that you would rather allow the government to bring down the system than to attempt to establish a more democratic system where the people had a voice, government could be held accountable, and you could not only be comfortable but you could do it without committing crimes against humanity? Do YOU continue to vote because you see that our system is failing, that each generation is worse off than the last, and you want to see this country totally destroyed? Why do you imagine that everyone else is different from you? Did you read my discussion with Nikki? Left, right, and center, what your neighbors want, what other citizens want, are the same things that you want, a comfortable life instead of struggling to pay their bills, not having the dual burden of caring for aging parents and grown kids who can't afford to move out, an end to TSA molesting their children, not having to worry about cops shooting them because they got the wrong address, not having to worry about banks illegally stealing the homes they worked all their lives to pay for, and not having to allow corporation to poison their air, water, and food. In other words, they want the potholes fixed, not more wars. It is the wealthiest 2% of the country who fund the political campaigns to keep destroying this country because they have THEIR assets stashed safely in offshore tax havens. The 60% to 70% of us who oppose uncontrolled military adventurism that costs trillions of dollars are the majority, but even if we were only 3% as you seem to imagine, we'd still outnumber the wealthy elite 2% that owns 40% of this country's wealth.

Once the Communist Party became legal and part of our corrupt political system, it became as corrupt as any other political party working within our totally corrupt system instead of opposing it.

There happens to be more desperate poverty here than in Egypt. There are more prisoners being tortured here than in Egypt. The conditions are riper for opposition here than in Egypt. But just like in Egypt, people keep trying to change things though tactics and strategies that have been proven over and over not to work, perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of laziness, but more likely because they haven't yet figured out what would work.

People have been desperate and stealing bread to feed their children for a long time now. The middle class has all but vanished, jobs that pay a living wage have all but disappeared, our streets are full of families who can't house or feed their children, and our prisons are full of people to tried to feed their children by stealing bread, selling drugs, or kiting checks because they were desperate. You can try to pretend that because there are cars in the streets, that people are doing well, but you know that most of those cars aren't paid for and people constantly worry about the price of gas. Are you the only one who can't figure out that if we didn't have to supply diesel to fuel the lawnmowers for the golf courses at almost a thousand US military bases in foreign countries, at a cost of up to $400 a gallon because they're so far away, and if we didn't have government deregulating oil companies so that they can throw millions of barrels a day into the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico, and we didn't have to fuel a military that uses more oil than all the rest of us put together, gas would be a lot cheaper? Are you the only one who can't figure out that if lobbyists instead of citizens continue to write government policy, all nuclear power plants will be operated until they melt down like Fukushima because it would cost money to shut them down when they're known to be unsafe, and money is more important to our government than our lives?

But I'm not asking about your imaginary picture of what other people think, feel, or want, I'm asking you, Steve. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones who is so comfortable that you don't recognize that our system is failing, that our life expectancy is decreasing, that more and more of us are dying from the toxic side effects of properly prescribed drugs or from lack of any health care at all, that college has become unaffordable and graduates have very little chance of paying off their student loans, that those who lose their jobs have almost no chance of finding jobs that pay as much, if they can find jobs at all, that unions have all but disappeared and those which weren't corrupt have been weakened to the point of being almost completely ineffective, that banks have been illegally foreclosing homes that were fully paid for, and that the vast majority of people resent the fact that they have to pay taxes while the rich do not.

Maybe you're so stupid that you can't understand that unless a vote is a real voice in government, it is not precious at all--that the only time a vote is precious is when it is a real voice in government, which your vote is not.

Maybe you believe in voting the same way that some people believe that the earth is flat. There's no arguing with belief, so nothing is going to convince the flat-earthers that the earth isn't flat. But flat-earthers are a small minority. Most people have at least a small, tenuous connection to reality.

I think the truth is that you know full well, as you stated, that, "We are a nation that was born out of genocide, & world domination thru violence is our agenda," and you happen to love genocide and world domination, so you don't want to do anything that might change it, even if you see that it is bankrupting us and will inevitably lead to our empire's total collapse.

More people don't vote than vote for either major party, so it is the voters who are the minority.

You're correct that most people don't want the system to fail, but where you're wrong is that you don't see that most people really do understand that the system is failing, and that if we are to survive we have to find a way to change the system so that it stops spending trillions on needless wars and starts spending money in more constructive ways. As I noted before, it doesn't take a rocket scientist with a PhD in world history who knows that it is military overexpansion that caused all empires to fall, to want to stop our government from destroying us--even ignorant, uneducated, low IQ people sense that there is something wrong with spending trillions on wars that nobody wants while claiming that there isn't enough money to create jobs, house the homeless, feed the hungry, and stop our life expectancy from decreasing.

There are only two kinds of people I know of who have so much of a stake in this corrupt system that they'd rather see the entire country destroyed than have a better system that could ensure our survival. Their first are Zionists who care only about Israel's survival and couldn't care less about the US. The second are paid political party operatives whose livelihood depends upon the two corrupt parties remaining in power even if it destroys the country for everyone else.

--Mark

Continuing discussion - list owner shuts down thread.

Submitted by folkie on 6 September 2011 - 10:21am.

From Steve Kowit:

I made my beliefs & feelings absolutely clear in my previous email. I don't know how I can be any clearer. I think & feel & believe that the idea that you can convince any substantial number of Americans to stop voting in order to destroy the American political system is so outrageously unrealistic that it can appropriately be characterized as delusional. That is not an ad hominem argument: it is, rather, an attempt to use the language with precision. Those are my thoughts and beliefs and feelings about the issue of attempting to get the American populace to stop voting. People who are disillusioned by contemporary politics tend to vote for the lesser of two evils, which is sad indeed but it is not by any means irrational. American Progressives tend to vote (sometimes for a third party) & American Marxists, I would guess, also tend to vote (if for a third party). I have never seen or heard anyone until Mark suggest that a relatively small turnout was an indication of adamant, revolutionary opposition to the American political system. A great many people are indifferent to politics & don't vote--which is quite a different matter.

Steve, I didn't ask what you believe ABOUT WHY OTHER PEOPLE WILL VOTE, I asked why YOU will vote. NOT why you think OTHER PEOPLE will vote against their own interests to destroy this country, but why YOU will vote against your own interests to destroy this country. You, believe it or not, Steve, are NOT everyone. I've convinced many people, but right now I'm interested only in why YOU will continue to vote to destroy this country.

I want to know why nothing that I or anyone else says will ever convince YOU not to vote, not about why you believe that nothing I or anyone else says will ever convince everyone else not to vote. At one ASD meeting during the 2008 election campaign when I was allowed to hand out leaflets and speak for ten minutes, I convinced the majority of people there not to vote. Because I was so successful, I was never allowed to speak at their meetings again. So I'm not worried about convincing other people, because I know that if I have a chance to give them some literature and speak with them, most will be convinced. What I'm worried about is people like you who will never be convinced under any circumstances because they either cannot act rationally, are not susceptible to reason, prefer to listen only to the mass media, or need to preserve a corrupt system, even at the expense of destroying the country, in hopes that they might continue to derive some constantly decreasing personal benefits from it. But I wasn't asking you to speak for anyone else, I was asking you to speak for yourself, something you apparently cannot do.

When I ask why YOU will continue to vote, you always respond by repeating your belief that I will never convince everyone else to stop voting. It is as if you don't exist. The reason you do things seems to be that "all the other kids do it," whether or not it is in your best interests. You're saying that you do not, cannot, or will not think for yourself, that if the herd jumps off a cliff you will follow because I can't convince the entire herd not to jump off the cliff, and that's reason enough for you to jump off the cliff.

The old canard that nonvoters are apathetic is one of the many I refuted in my first post to the previous thread, in response to Rocky & Jeeni. I don't want to hear bullshit that has been refuted a thousand times repeated another thousand times. I carefully listed about a dozen of the typical canards used by paid political party operatives to convince people to vote against their own interests, and carefully refuted each one. Before you look down at your script and pick a talking point at random, please check to see if it is on my list, and try to respond to my explanation of why that particular talking point is false, rather than just repeating it over and over and over. It gets old, boring, tiresome, and robotic after hearing the same lies repeated thousands of times before every election for decade after decade after decade. With all their billions of corporate campaign donations, you'd think the political parties could pay somebody to come up with one or two new lies.

Voting for the lesser of two evils is indeed irrational because it means having absolutely no faith in other people or yourself and saying that evil is the best we can do, that we are not capable of good. As long as you continue to believe that good is not possible and that everyone has to choose between evils, you will continue to support evil on the grounds that everyone else does, so you have to do what everyone else does even if it is evil and even it if is against your own best interests and will destroy the country.

Not everyone is totally evil and not everyone will follow the herd off the cliff. Some people are capable of thinking for themselves and sticking to their personal and individual values and principles. No matter how many times I ask why YOU will continue to vote, you'll keep repeating that you don't think I could convince everyone else to stop voting. So if I wanted to convince you, I'd have to convince everyone else first. That's fine, Steve. When, and only when, the majority decides it is time to stop voting to destroy our economy, our ecology, and our lives, you will follow suit, not out of any sense of self-preservation, but only because everyone else does it. Of course I wonder if you went through life like that, always being the last one in your class to understand what you were taught, always being the last one on your block to get anything new, and never doing anything unless everyone else did it first. I don't think that's something you have any control over or could change, so I won't waste any more time trying to discuss anything with you because you obviously can't think and act as an individual and will only do what the herd does.

--Mark

From Nikki:

hey guys, by the time you all quite arguing about whether to vote or not and why, it will be game over.

It was game over a long time ago, Nikki. During the US attempt to help France recolonize Viet Nam, we outdid Hitler, killing over six million innocent Asian civilians. And lost the war. But the war profiteers made huge profits, so it was considered a success and the pattern hasn't stopped. An election isn't the game, an election is the ads and cheerleaders at halftime.

Everything that individuals and groups are doing in the way of urban gardens, transition towns, collectives, etc., is in recognition that the game is over and we lost.

We lost because our fascist government doesn't give a damn about us, it just wants to make all the money it can by killing innocent people for profit. I'm glad that more and more people can see that, but what I don't understand is people who understand that the game is over and we lost, but still care more about the halftime ads and cheerleaders than about surviving post-game. So even as they protest, plant their gardens, form collectives, and attempt to help their towns transition, they are still consenting to the destruction, still voting in elections that have the sole purpose of authorizing the government to continue to destroy this country and every other country it can invade, and still granting their consent of the governed to everything they oppose.

--Mark

From Steve Kowit:

I have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that says NOAM CHOMSKY FOR PRESIDENT. I've written him in before & will undoubtedly do so again in 2012, though if Naomi Kleini weren't Canadian it might be a difficult call between them! That's very much like not voting, of course. I have no problem in the least with people not voting out of thoroughgoing disgust---as in your case. And of course I'll be happier if Obama beats the far-right than if they take over the country. I will certainly vote for Bob Filner & I would without question vote for Ray Lutz if he ever manages to get on the congressional ticket. But I absolutely agree with you that both parties are mass murderers, imperialists, colonialists, occupiers & destroyers of other nations & the leaders of both parites, the Obama/Clintons & Bush/Cheneys, belong in prison. We are the great terrorist state on the planet & the US is, certainly in foreign policy, a criminal organization the destruction of which would be celebrated everywhere but in colonialist Western Europe. I consider both the Dems & Republicans to be terrorist organizations.

Steve, it doesn't matter if you vote for Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Cynthia McKinney, or Mickey Mouse, the only thing that the corporations and their political puppets care about is that you vote so that they can claim you gave your consent of the governed to mass murder, imperialism, colonialism, and the occupation and destruction of other nations leading to the ultimate destruction of our own nation. When they claimed a 50% or 55% turnout in previous presidential elections they included both the votes they'd counted and the millions of votes they hadn't bothered to count, including those who voted for the winner, those who voted for the loser, and those who voted for third party candidates, write-in candidates, or even cast blank ballots in protest. Why do they hold elections and then not bother to count the votes? Because, as the Declaration of Independence states, "Governments...[derive]...their just powers from the consent of the governed," and the only way they can demonstrate that consent is to hold elections. They don't need to count the votes and it doesn't matter who people vote for, if people do their civic duty to the fascist state and vote, they have granted their consent of the governed.

Voting is not at all the same as not voting. And it is more than just

with policy that causes many to stop voting. There was an old joke in the Soviet Union, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." The joke here should be that if they don't even pretend to count our votes, why should we even pretend to vote?

Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck, and others of the far right are no farther to the right than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. You can't get farther to the right than being completely fascist, and governments that wage wars of aggression based on lies no matter which party is in power, are completely fascist. In fact we outdid Hitler long ago. During the war to help France recolonize Viet Nam, we murdered more than six million innocent Asian civilians and then lost the war, but the war profits were so great that every administration since then has continued the same pattern.

You say that you will vote for Bob Filner and would vote for Ray Lutz, Steve, but that you consider both the Democrats and Republicans to be terrorist organizations. Do you think that people can belong to terrorist organizations and not be terrorists?

If our government considered the Democrats and Republicans to be terrorist organizations, anyone who was a registered member or who voted for or donated to them would be guilty of terrorism for giving material support to a terrorist organization.

I haven't asked him, but I suspect it may be possible that one of the reasons that Bob Filner is leaving Congress and running for Mayor is because over the years he saw that the harder he worked to help disabled veterans, the more disabled veterans the government created and the fewer resources it made available to help them. I think he may have, and this is just a guess on my part, as I haven't spoken with Bob about it, eventually realized that by being a Member of Congress, no matter how good his intentions (road to hell and all that rot), being part of a terrorist organization did more harm than good. As Mayor I'm absolutely certain that Bob will do everything in his power to help veterans and all others in need, just as I'm absolutely certain that Congress will do everything in its power to make it more difficult for him find the funding and accomplish anything at the local level. I think that he, Jeeni, and possibly even, or at least eventually Ray, willl find that in order to accomplish anything at the local level they will have to try to find local resources, and that no matter how much support they give the Democratic Party, it will not give them any support in return and will continue to place obstacles in their paths. The Democratic Party, and particularly the Democratic Party leadership and the majority of Congressional Democrats will do everything it can to try to take money from local sustainable endeavors and divert that money to foreign military adventurism. Imagining that the Republicans would be even worse is just silly, as you can't really be worse than totally fascist. Some individual fascists may be more intelligent, better liars, more well-spoken, personable, or even charismatic than other fascists, but that doesn't make them less evil.

--Mark

From Ray, the list owner:

PLEASE STOP THIS THREAD

I'm not even reading further posts on that topic. Mark, please stop posting about this topic.

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(So I guess Ray is shutting down the topic. I did get some personal emails from list members who agreed with me but did not wish to say so publicly on the the list. LOL)