Voting for the Green Party and Dr. Jill Stein has nothing to do with sour grapes or a protest over what should have been. It’s about embracing the ONE strategy left for saving liberalism in the U.S. Remember, the vast majority of states are not in play — are NOT “swing states.” If the Green Party gets 5% of the vote in 2016, then they get $10,000,000 in matching funds in 2020, a place on the ballot, and a likely seat at the debate table. The true left — which champions policies favored by 50-70% of the American people — will finally have a voice and an opportunity to reach the mainstream.
Conversely, pretending that welfare-slashing, mass-incarcerating, Wall Street-defending “Super-predator” Sec. Clinton is somehow — more than rhetorically… occasionally — to the left of Donald Trump (or Bush/Cheney, Reagan, or Nixon) means sanctioning the establishment and the “nominee” that was forced on us in a blatantly rigged primary that disenfranchised millions of Americans.
Voting for Clinton effectively kills off the left and empowers the far-right, both in terms of policy victories (neocon wars, “trade” pacts, mass-incarceration, etc.) and by swelling the ranks of the “deplorables” — uneducated/ignorant whites, predominantly, who understand, correctly, that the establishment that’s screwing them over is monstrously corrupt, but don’t know who to blame. These folks are extremely vulnerable to demagoguery, as Trump’s race-baiting “anti-establishment” popularity is demonstrating. Such people increasingly associate liberalism, tolerance, and diversity — the Democrats’ hollow platitudes — with the devastation and tyranny of the establishment. (Robert O. Paxton’s “The Anatomy of Fascism” makes clear that there is no surer path to bona fide fascism than warmongering, bankster-championing pseudo-liberalism… which discredits liberalism itself. This is why the most insightful, policy-informed analysts have identified Clintonian neoliberalism as “the disease” and Trump-style demagoguery as merely the “symptom.” And trust me, after 4-8 more years of the status quo, the next “would be fascist” that neoliberalism produces will be well to Trump’s right, Ted Cruz-style, or worse.)
If we objectively examine the record, the last two Democratic presidents have already done worse than most things people imagine Trump promises to do. In Syria alone, by continuing Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy, Obama is responsible for the deaths of over 400,000 Syrians and the creation of over ten million refugees (he marginalized Syria’s indigenous resistance and flooded the country with CIA-armed radical Salafists who began ethno-sectarian cleansing of whole towns and suicide-bombing, primarily targeting civilians). President Obama is also the ICE-unleashing, family-jailing (for-profit) Deporter-in-Chief, is he not? And the man who gave Wall Street criminals $16 trillion and facilitated their coup de grace to the middle class (especially minorities), with zero penalties or meaningful reforms. He’s the president who’s allowing Nestle to drain what’s left of our groundwater (effectively for free) while subjecting millions of Americans to carcinogenic water and worse (Flint, replicated thousands of times over, thanks to an industry-captured EPA). Yes, “The Donald” is an unthinkable, abhorrent train-wreck — and bosom chum of the Clintons — but he’s frequently taken positions to the LEFT of today’s neoliberal establishment, especially when it comes to the warmongers’ agenda and sovereignty-effacing “trade” pacts like the TPP. (It’s no mystery why the neocons, Kochs, Bushes, banksters, and other stalwarts of the far-right have rallied behind Sec. Clinton’s candidacy: she is 100% their horse in this race.)
Backing Clinton tells the establishment that you accept the neocons, their genocidal wars, policies of rampant assassination and torture — with the vast majority of victims being women and children, the vulnerable, and the impoverished. Voting “Blue no matter who” sends the clear message that you’re OK with the Obama-led assault on civil rights, democracy, journalism, whistleblowers, African-Americans, and the rule of law. Worse, it sends the message that you’re fine with the destruction of the planet’s life-sustaining systems, which has been dramatically accelerated by post-1980s “Democrats.”
FORGET THE RHETORIC AND THE CORPORATE BRANDING: What did President Obama’s representatives do at the Paris Climate Conference but demand that carbon emissions goals NOT be legally binding? That polluters must NOT be held responsible for the devastation they’ve wrought. It’s like the recent conference on refugees: the administration’s representatives demanded that language protecting children from incarceration be stripped from the final document. While green-lighting thousands of oil pipelines, the Obama administration has sold fracking to the world and opened up the oceans and the Arctic for deep-water drilling — at the same time that these same oceans are signaling collapse, and the sixth Mass-Extinction event is underway. At the same time Colony Collapse Disorder is wiping out our most vital pollinators, the bees (and Monsanto has no greater advocates than today’s Democrats). And the TPP deal that President Obama is championing, which Hillary Clinton has touted as “the gold standard” of trade pacts, will allow corporations to continue dictating our environmental laws, labor laws, food safety laws, and other regulations — in perpetuity — meaning, there won’t be any. Bizarre though it may seem, this position alone puts President Obama and Sec. Clinton to Trump’s right, when it comes to regulations of all types. (Not that a vote for Trump is REMOTELY an option — the demagoguery he’s spouting is even uglier and more dangerous than the race-baiting Birtherism the Clintons threw at Sen. Obama in 2008… not that they originated that smear; they merely trafficked in it, as The Guardian reported at the time… which the Clinton campaign admitted at the time, merely professing that their distribution of the “Kenyan Obama” photo was “misunderstood.”)
With a vote for Sec. Clinton, we surrender the last of our principles and proclaimed values in defense of one of the all-time movers of the far-right’s agenda: the planet-fracking, election-rigging, Nazi-funding, al Qaeda/ISIS-arming, Planned Parenthood-backstabbing, race-baiting, labor-crushing, school-privatizing, entitlement-slashing neoliberal candidate. For good-hearted, well-intentioned Americans to believe that Sec. Clinton represents liberal values — in any way — is a triumph of the corporate media and an indication that the SIX companies that generate 90% of everything that most Americans see and read have done their job and can now rest. It means that liberalism in America is officially extinct… like the free press and Bill of Rights (it was, after all, Obama who crushed peaceful assembly and OWS with a militarized and brutal, illegal, federally-coordinated, 18-city crackdown).
And that’s what I’ve been battling for over 20 years, with all my heart and soul: the death of liberalism. We cannot let it happen, and we sure as hell shouldn’t be voting for it. Peace, love, and friendship, but it’s time to champion facts and reality over corporate propaganda. It’s time to stop voting like sheep and right-wing dupes: https://invitation2artivism.org/?p=1491