I could have named this article “Damage Control” — because it essentially is about that, related to the lobotomizing dilemma of “lesser evil voting”.
But let me be clear at the outset. I have already voted for Jill Stein. I had no other choice. I am firm in my conviction that to vote for sociopathic, narcissistic, self-serving, ruthless, guileful corporatists is an unconscionable act and a major crime against my country, irrespective of the convoluted rationalization which might attempt to justify it.
Now let me offer reasoning that goes beyond my “morally pure” posturing.
The accepted wisdom is that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. This analysis purports that anyone voting for Stein would likely be a former Clinton supporter, and such a vote would subtract from Clinton’s total.
Even though Hillary’s elitist, warmongering, anti-democratic, demonstrably criminal world view is diametrically the opposite of Jill Stein’s, and I can’t imagine anyone who’s moved by the Green Party’s agenda for the briefest moment being fooled by Clinton’s phony populism, for argument’s sake I’ll accept this proposition.
While I consider both Trump and Clinton to be equally unfit for office, I do not for a moment believe they would be equally ineffective.
Hillary has for good reason become the choice of the oligarchs, the MIC, the bankers, the media, the people who actually run the country. She will serve them well. She knows her way around the system — she’s been gaming it most of her adult life — and has all the right connections. Which is why even many prominent Republicans have joined the feeding frenzy and flocked to her like vultures over fresh kill.
Hillary will continue her faux-populist bloviating to keep the stinky masses in line, while her closest allies, the rich and powerful, continue to loot the Treasury, hollow out what’s left of the U.S. economy, and bankrupt the middle and lower classes.
Much to the delight of the neocon-infested Department of State, Department of Defense, security agencies, MIC, and media, Hillary will “get tough” with Russia and China, press the war on Syria and the rest of the Middle East, promote and spread more chaos, death, and destruction across the globe in pursuit of military conquest, ultimately world empire. It’ll be good for business and pumping up the already inflated egos of the exceptionalists.
On the other hand, Trump will fall flat on his face. His trademark bull-in-a-china-shop approach to making deals has no chance of success in Washington DC. He has no support — his own party has all but disowned him — no connections, at least not the political ones necessary for promoting his agenda. Yes, the politicos drank his champagne and ate the food at his extravagant bashes. Who wouldn’t? But they don’t owe him anything. Nada! Trump’s much heralded talents for making great deals will confront hostile Democrats, contemptuous Republicans — a perhaps long-overdue bipartisanship — closing ranks to isolate and defeat the outrageous and vulgar outsider who thought he could buy and muscle his way into political power.
He’ll try to build his wall. When Congress gets done with it, it’ll be a 200-foot white picket fence in Calexico. He’ll attempt rapprochement with Russia. That will be sabotaged with a false flag attack, maybe dressing some disgruntled maquiladora workers as Russian infantry men and mounting an invasion on the U.S. — probably in Calexico — or by John McCain threatening to fall on a grenade or blow his brains out in the Senate chambers if America doesn’t immediately nuke Moscow.
Despite his self-proclaimed success in the business world, Trump simply does not know the rules of the game in Washington DC. Unless he “fires” everyone — declaring martial law and sending all members of the legislature to a FEMA labor camp in Montana — he will either be the most ineffective president in history or be impeached. Maybe both!
In a phrase, Donald Trump as president will do ‘less damage’.
Anyone who has read my blogs knows that my greatest concern about a Hillary Clinton presidency is her truculent foreign policy. A decade ago, I might have believed that she was misguided. Now I realize — as quite a number of others do — that she is completely insane. She’s become drunk on power, poisoned by surrounding herself with neocons and warmongering humanitarians, possessed by visions of herself as the Warrior Queen.
Or as many other writers have been saying . . .
A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for World War III.
So . . .
Vote for Jill Stein!
We’ll have our first female president, a great president at that!
One we can all be truly proud of. The world will breathe a sigh of relief!
At the same time, if voting for Jill Stein ends up electing Donald Trump . . .
So be it.
At least we’ll come out of it alive. And . . .
We’ll have four more years to figure out how America got so screwed up.
Hillary can go back to taking bribes and looting impoverished countries.
Hard choices . . . so many helpless victims, so little time.
A Look At Some Other Numbers
On July 20th, I
created The “I’ll vote for Jill if you will” Pledge Campaign. This included setting up petitions at four reputable petition campaign sites to keep track of the number of participants. Off to an encouraging start, I got signatures on the very first day.
This whole effort addresses what I consider to be the primary obstacle to Jill Stein getting elected. That is, it offers a mechanism to work around the predictable fears that most voters have that if they vote third-party, they will “throw their vote away” and even worse, end up electing one of the major party candidates who they abhor. Those who voted for Ralph Nader — I was one of them — were wrongly accused of throwing the election to George W. Bush. Though this is easily established as false, the idea of the “spoiler vote” continues to persist and serve the agenda of the two-party monopoly, preventing any real challenge from either the progressive left, the libertarian right, or any party for that matter functioning outside the narrow, tightly choreographed corporate mainstream.
The success of my campaign to unite potential Jill Stein voters into a bloc, essentially by “pre-polling” the voting public, was predicated on ascertaining in advance that there were sufficient voters to elect her. Ascertaining that meant voters could comfortably vote for her without fear of wasting their votes, perhaps inadvertently electing Donald or Hillary, whichever might be judged worse — though in my book it’s a toss-up.
The target was 50 million or more voter signatures, which I determined would be enough, if distributed appropriately in important swing states, to put her in the White House.
The key to getting that many signatures was the power of an exponential multiplier, or as I euphemistically dubbed it, the power of numbers. If each person who signed the petition — and in doing so agreed to participate in the program — told only two others, instructing them to each likewise tell two others, in less than 30 days we could have over 67 million people signed up, more than enough to eradicate all anxiety about voting for Jill Stein.
So how did we do?
On September 9th, we finally hit 5,000 signatures across all four petition sites.
That is, we managed to get 5,000 well-meaning folks — and judging from the comments very passionate supporters of Jill Stein — to jump on board, and it only took 52 days.
Mind you, I didn’t just sit back and twiddle my thumbs. In fact from the day I started the campaign till now, I’ve sent out over a thousand tweets, posted it on over ninety Facebook pages, posted it as comments on some fifty plus political media sites, posted it on Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Blogger, Delicious, and Live Journal.
Which suggests that assuming I don’t suffer from dwindling returns for my effort — highly doubtful since the “low-hanging fruit” gets used up quickly — in order to get to 50 million signature, I would only need to keep doing what I’ve been doing for the next 1,424 years.
What do you think? Should I keep going?
Alright . . . what happened?
That is perhaps the easiest question in the world.
People didn’t recruit anyone else. Despite their personal enthusiasm for Jill Stein, despite many of them — judging from the enthusiastic praise I got for the idea — thinking it was a highly ingenious way to make her a viable candidate in the eyes of a fearful voting public, despite them making a firm pledge when they signed the petition which committed them to the action which was the critical core of the strategy . . .
“I will now contact two other people who I respect and trust, let them know there is a real alternative to the Clinton vs. Trump political spectacle, explain that if we frustrated voters join together, we don’t have to throw our votes away, we can elect a great president, America’s first female president no less.”
. . . they just couldn’t bring themselves to talk to and convince others that this was a necessary and worthwhile project.
Am I surprised? Of course not. Disappointed but not surprised.
As citizens we have become paralyzed by our own timidity and fear of failure, intimidated and rendered dysfunctional by the dysfunction all around us. We’ve become disengaged and numb from the constant trumpeting of counter-productive memes, false narratives, the insultingly banal media coverage of politics, the disinformation and propaganda that bombards us 24/7/365. We have been made cynical and immersed in despair by endless violations of the public trust by our leaders, by the condescending and cavalier lies we are constantly told by our politicians and other puppet-masters in the pulpits of power. Most tragically, we have become afraid, afraid of the police, afraid of the government, afraid of one another, afraid to act. We’re just too afraid to turn to a couple other people and say: “Hey, look at this. I think it’s a great idea!”
But here is the problem . . .
No matter how hopeless and difficult it seems, we must act. We must get involved. Time is running out on democracy. There still remains some small hope that we as citizens can make a difference. But that hope is shrinking fast.
What probably the majority of citizens apparently fail to understand — or if possible avoid thinking about — is that in our current social and political environment, under the “rules of the game”, we have no choice but to participate. Just being a citizen means you are intrinsically a functional “activist” in a system which determines everything that is happening now and will happen in the future.
There is widespread reluctance to recognize and embrace a simple fact: The future is still ours for the taking.
The numbers are with us across the board — on many key issues, on outrage and contempt for Congress, on collective revulsion for the choice we are being waterboarded with via the two major party presidential candidates.
What is lacking?
Courage. The courage to just reach out to others and say:
“I’ve had it! I’m not playing this game anymore.”
Yes, many are saying this but only to themselves. Until the American public hears a loud roar and a thunderous chant, and each and all realize they are not alone, they individually will again buckle to their fear, and be afraid of a simple act like reaching out to just two others — even two others of like mind and thinking — and talking, just being open and honest about issues that confront all of us but from which we retreat like cowards.
Recognize this . . .
Being paralyzed by fear and hopelessness is a form of “citizen participation”.
As is surrender or any other form of capitulation or acknowledging defeat.
It’s self-sabotaging but participation no less.
To not act is counter-intuitively an act.
Because to not act is a choice.
And all choices have their consequences.
We will live or die by what those consequences look like.