Beware of the White Democrats

Back when the Trayvon Martin case was the outrage du jour, the media, most notably CNN and the New York Times, saw fit to identify his shooter, George Zimmerman, as a “white Hispanic”.   Was this to brand Zimmerman as some sort second rate, inferior type of Latino?  Was it to lump him in with what Dr. Leonard Jeffries would call the “ice people” who are "pathological," "dirty," "dastardly, devilish folks"?

Who’s to say?

However in the spirit of fairness and consistency, let the record show that not only is St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch who handled the Michael Brown investigation a Democrat, he is, like George Zimmerman, a White Democrat.

People of color, fear the White Democrats.  I do.

White Democrats were the party of slavery.

Following slavery, White Democrats were the party of the Klan, lynchings and Jim Crow.

White  Democrats resisted the Civil Rights Bill and old LBJ had to call on Republicans to get it passed.

White Democrats were the patrons of Organized Labor, who systematically excluded African Americans from high paying jobs for generations.

White Democrats illegally interred thousands of loyal, innocent and law abiding Japanese American during the Second World War.

Contemporary White Democrats like to say that they have put their raciest past behind them.  Really?

Non-White Democrat  Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal begs to differ:

"I have to tell you that there has been systematic racism, institutionally in state government for decades, including my own state party. So what we are looking at right now is a symptom of racism that has been swept under the rug for decades. And I am so glad now that the truth is out, and I'm very grateful to your network for telling the truth in reporting the truth of what's going to go down in the coming days."

"As it was said earlier today, and because of the systematic racism that we have in our state government, and our state party, and we do not bring the truth to bear, then we will not recover from what we are going on.

In order to demonstrate that to white middle class voters that he was not beholden to Black interests, White Democrat Presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, deliberately picked a fight with rap artist Sistah Souljah.  In doing so, Clinton embarrassed Jesse Jackson at his own Rainbow Coalition convention in 1992.  Clinton calculated, cynically and correctly that Black voters, including Jackson himself, would get over it and fall in line with whomever the Democrats nominated.

To enhance her street cred among minorities and garner special consideration from schools and employers, White Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren falsely asserted that she was of Native American ancestry for years. 

VP & WD Joe Biden:  Explaining why schools in Iowa are performing better than those in Washington, D.C., Biden told the Washington Post, “There’s less than one percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than four of five percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”  What’s up with that?  What’s that supposed to mean?

Modern WDs, Chris Matthews gushed over then candidate Barack Obama as he came off as damn near White in his speech and mannerisms. 

Matthews:  “You know I was trying to think about who he was tonight and it's interesting... he is post-racial by all appearances. You know I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

Reid: a "light skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one"

Frederick Douglass was asked what America should do for its former slaves.  He answer was to do nothing but set them free.  Any additional meddling would only cause them more misery.

What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. You’re doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.

White Democrats ignored Douglass’ advice.  In doing so they have created a patronage class that is beholden to them and dependent upon the state “benevolence” for food, shelter, healthcare, protection, education, etc., etc., etc.

One White Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan broke ranks with his clan, pointing out how state paternalism was destroying Black families, thereby condemning generations to come to lives of fatherlessness, poverty, criminality and despair.  He prophesied that it was a cancer that would only grow worse and more debilitating over time.  He was correct, and for speaking the truth he was pilloried by his peers.

Earlier this year, Wall Street Journal reporter and African American, Jason Riley, called upon America to heed Douglass’ wisdom and to correct that errors that Moynihan saw.  In his new book, Please Stop Helping Us:  How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed, Riley methodically dissects the welfare, exposing how it destroys Black self-determination and poisons the culture.

Be it well-meaning but misguided help or a cruel plot to breed dependency, African Americans need to free themselves from the economic and political patrimony of White Democrats.  This is not a call to vote Republican, not at all.  It is a call to opt for the freedom, liberty and independence that Frederick Douglass demanded over a century and a half ago.

Liberty and reason know no race.  They are the essential condition for lasting peace and prosperity.

Related Posts:

Is The Democrat Party Shifting Bases?
Poking Holes In the “Anti-War” Left

 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."  - Paul Simon

Clinton is no racial healer BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

SALON | CONTACT US | ARCHIVED ARTICLES | TABLE TALK

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Clinton is no racial healer

The president likes to position himself as a model of racial enlightenment. In fact, he's a hypocrite who played the race card to win election -- and has done nothing to help struggling Americans, black or white.

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BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

whatever else Bill Clinton has lacked as president, he has never wanted for calumnies: he's been branded a sex addict, a liar, a creeping socialist on health care, a closet reactionary on welfare.
Through the entire barrage, however, one facet of Clinton's character has enjoyed nearly uniform admiration. As a child of the Jim Crow South who transcended its dogma of segregation, he is perceived as the ideal healer of America's continuing racial rift. The ease and camaraderie he displays in the pulpits of black churches is genuine.

Just days ago in Salon, Clinton's fellow Southerner and former handler James Carville hailed him as "without doubt the wisest and bravest white man I've ever known" on matters of race.

Now, more than halfway through a presidency undefined by any single achievement, Clinton seeks to seal his place in history by reconciling the races through honest, engaged dialogue. This campaign for posterity's favor -- orchestrated out of the White House -- began with Clinton's speech at the Shea Stadium ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game in the major leagues. Noting in his address that "we've been trying to catch up ever since," the president served notice he would be returning to the topic of race frequently.

Sadly, Clinton has shown himself to be just as hypocritical on this issue as on, say, middle-class tax cuts. And the inconsistency owes to the same root cause: the obsession with winning election. That was nowhere more clear than during the 1992 campaign, when Clinton showed he could play the race card with expertise.

It started in the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire primary. Clinton's campaign was reeling from disclosure of his alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers. Paul Tsongas was providing unexpected competition. Yet in the midst of such pressures, Clinton flew back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a convicted murderer named Ricky Lee Rector.

True, Clinton had always favored capital punishment. And true, Rector had slain two men 11 years earlier. But after shooting them, he had turned the weapon on himself. As political reporter John Wordock of Bloomberg Business News recounted in his masterful study of race, poverty, and the 1992 campaign, "Where The Trail Didn't Go," the bungled suicide had doctors scraping bullet fragments from Rector's brain, leaving him essentially "lobotomized." One of Rector's lawyers, Wordock noted, personally informed Clinton of the convict's condition to try to stave off execution.
Too late. Rector, dispatched by lethal injection, could not be exploited against Clinton's campaign as the black felon Willie Horton had been against Michael Dukakis by George Bush in 1988. Clinton, the New Democrat, would not let himself look similarly soft on crime.

Clinton's 1992 campaign was largely guided by Stanley Greenberg's polls and focus groups of working-class white ethnics in Macomb County, Mich. Those studies revealed that such swing voters saw the Democratic Party as beholden to blacks, and saw blacks, in turn, as the embodiment of social chaos. And Willie Horton had first been turned into a political symbol not by Bush but by the 1988 Democratic presidential contender who became Clinton's running mate in 1992 -- Al Gore.
A few months after Rector's execution, and only six weeks after the devastating Los Angeles riot, Clinton again performed a brilliant bit of political theater to demonstrate his independence from black interests. During an appearance before the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Clinton made a startling rebuke of Jackson for having included the controversial rapper Sistah Souljah in a coalition panel.

"Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight," Clinton said. "Just listen to this, what she said. She told the Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, 'If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? ... So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person.'"

But Clinton took the quote totally -- and one must assume deliberately -- out of context. In the offending interview, Sistah Souljah had been asked to speculate as to why feuding black gangs in South Central had struck a truce during and after the riot. Her answer reflected her surmise as to what the Bloods and the Crips were thinking. Such a nicety was lost on the president and all those who applauded his apparently spontaneous outburst.

In fact, there was nothing spontaneous about it. The Clinton campaign had planned the confrontation to show Clinton's independence -- not from an obscure rap singer but from Jesse Jackson, the latter-day incarnation of what in the 1960s was routinely referred to as a "black militant."

The strategy worked. Jackson's profile in the 1992 convention and the fall campaign was the lowest in a decade. Clinton captured enough votes from places like Macomb County to triumph in a three-way race. And once in office, with Ricky Lee Rector and Sistah Souljah consigned to the footnotes of history, Clinton flourished his bona fides as a racial mediator. Few commentators doubted them, even as he was signing the punitive welfare bill during the 1996 campaign.

But it was Jackson, released from political quarantine one night during the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago, who offered a real vision of transracial politics. He spoke of the class-based economic issues he had propounded in his own bids for the presidency. He reminded the self-satisfied audience that it was dancing the Macarena on the edge of the vast, largely black West Side slums, which not so long ago had throbbed with tens of thousands of jobs at Sears, Western Electric and other businesses -- all of them by now relocated or closed.

These people, too, along with the white "Reagan Democrats" of Macomb County, were supposed to have benefited from Bill Clinton's pledge in 1992 to restore "good jobs at good wages" for the American working and lower classes. But as any informed American knows -- and the recent books by Dick Morris and Robert Reich confirm in grim detail -- Clinton has turned his back on the poor and blue-collar families who have been suffering from America's hidden Depression for the past quarter-century.

It is dispiriting enough to recognize the chasm between the soothing rhetoric on race Clinton now offers and the cunning use of polarization he practiced to first gain the presidency. Worse still is the realization that the issues he should tackle in order to heal Americans of all races have by all available evidence been abandoned.

April 25, 1997
Samuel G. Freedman is the author of "The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond" (Simon & Schuster), a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of "Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church" (HarperCollins, 1994). He is a frequent contributor to Salon.

Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/newsreal.html

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SALON | NEWSREAL ARCHIVES | TABLE TALK

Liberty Uber Alles

“A man’s home is his castle”.  In today’s politically correct and gender inclusive society we might say “A person’s home is his/her castle”. Whatever.

The formal name for this axiom is the Castle Doctrine.  It derives from English Common Law and is the basis for both the Third and Fourth Amendments in the Bill of Rights.   These protect Americans in their places of residence.  The British honored and respected the inviolability private living spaces.

"The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England cannot enter - all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!"

William Pitt 1st Earl of Chatham

Speech in Parliament against an excise tax on perry and cider – 1763

Our Constitution and the ancient legal traditions that precede it acknowledged the sanctity of the home so much so that the world’s most powerful man cannot enter uninvited.  If that be so, then it should also stand the householder should be able to invite whomever he so chooses into his home and to determine the conditions of entry.

He may throw a pot-luck party and require all who enter to bring a dish.  He may throw a masquerade ball and insist that all guests come in costume.  He may permit his adult children to live in his home but demand that they pay rent or contribute to the payment of bills.  He may allow his kids’ boy/girl-friends to sleep over but not in the same room.  He may forbid alcohol consumption or indoor smoking.  He may respectfully ask those with whom he disagrees to leave.  He may in engage in any sort of erotic escapades that float his boat with one or more consenting adults.

To a limited extent, the protections that an American enjoys in his home are also extended to his motor vehicle.  He is protected from unreasonable search and seizures.  He may allow any consenting adult whom he so chooses to ride as a passenger in his conveyance.

It would seems as plain as day that an owner may invite whomever he pleases to stay in his home or to ride in his car.  One would think.   However, songstress Cyndi Lauper, was dead on in singing that money changes everything.

The emergent sharing economy is under fierce attack from local monopolists and the politicians that protect and profit from them.

The sharing economy empowers everyday people to make a buck from assets that they own that are just lying there doing nothing – things like empty bedrooms and the car sitting in the driveway.  However, rather than posting a handmade sign on community bulletin boards, mobile apps have created and coordinated a marketplace of millions of buyers and sellers.  Airbnb is the leader in the residential space, Uber in ridesharing.

In city after city, cabbies, limo drivers and hoteliers are turning their friends in government to squelch the average guy and gal in the street from competing with them.  The main claim of established licensed operators is that they are subject to regulations and taxes that ride and room sharers bypass.

On the surface this seems like an unfair advantage that the sharing economy players have over their traditional rivals.  However, it is essential to understand that regulation, licenses and fees are only barriers to keep small, underfunded and under-lawyered startups on the sidelines.  They only masquerade as “consumer protection”.

America’s Founding Fathers were students of John Locke who taught that sole purpose of government was to uphold individual liberty by protecting private property.  He wrote:

“The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent: for the preservation of property being the end of government, and that for which men enter into society.”

By barring average citizens from disposing of the spare rooms in their homes and empty seats in their cars as they see fit, the government nullifies its raison d’etre of defending property rights in order squelch competition for its A-List clientele.

Uber and its drivers, Airbnb and its innkeepers are doing more than making money on underemployed assets.  They are fighting for the essential liberty that America was founded to preserve.  They are defending our little castles from being overrun by crony kings and two-bit tyrants.

Liberty before all!  Liberty above all!  Liberty Uber Alles!

Related Posts:

The Hook Up Truck
Burgers and Bullets 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."  - Paul Simon

Decision 2014 - Cosmetic Surgery

Following the Republican route in the recent election, a liberal friend in New Mexico posted on Facebook that voters have short memories. 

Indeed he is correct.  Every six to ten years Americans throw Democrat bums out for Republican bums only to sweep the joint clean of Republicans to replace them with Democrats.

This brings me to the November-December issue of The American Conservative which features a cover story by Bruce Bartlett entitled “Obama is a Republican”.  Bartlett makes the compelling case that our President is the intellectual and policy heir of Richard Nixon and details how chillingly similar mainstream Republican and Democratic policies really are. 

For starters, the individual mandate, which is the lynchpin of The Affordable Healthcare Act was a conservative and Republican endorsed invention until the Democrats got ahold of it.  Bruce traces the mandate’s lineage from its inception at the supposedly free market Heritage Foundation. Washington, DC’s premier conservative think tank recommended a coercive, top down, centrally imposed remedy to America’s healthcare ills.  In 1989 they wrote:

“Under this arrangement, all households would be required to protect themselves from major medical costs by purchasing health insurance or enrolling in a prepaid health plan. The degree of financial protection can be debated, but the principle of mandatory family protection is central to a universal health care system in America.”

Over the following two decades the mandate was embraced by numerous prominent Republicans and was the cornerstone Governor Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts. 

Republicans and Democrats alike backed bailouts for reckless and irresponsible Wall Street cronies.  Both Bush and Obama put forward their own brand of Keynesian stimulus plans. 

Two consecutive Republican appointed Fed Chairman (Greenspan and Bernanke) inflated currency and economic bubbles at unprecedented rates.   And prior to Obama, the Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush 2 ran up record deficits.  Of course this was shrugged off by Dick Cheney when he remarked in 2004 that “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”.

On the topic of war and foreign intervention, the peace candidate Obama continued the Bush policies in the Middle East and grew more bellicose as time passed.  He was pushed hard by his own Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, whose hawkishness has won the admiration of prominent neo-cons.   

And before we leave the topics of war and finance, let’s not forget that when the Cold War ended, President Bush 1 did use the opportunity to scale back federal spending.  Instead, he mused about “reinvesting the peace dividend”.  He did so by going to war in Iraq and raising taxes despite his pledge not to do so.

The truth is that over the years, the Republican Party has done little to live up to its marketing position as the party of small, unobtrusive and limited government.

Beginning with their first term in power under President Lincoln, Republicans destroyed the concept of federalism and states’ rights by waging war on Southern secessionists. 

The next great Republican icon, Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive activist who had little regard for constitutional restraints.   Republican Herbert Hoover introduced an array of economic interventions that his successor, Franklin Roosevelt simply continued and rebranded as the New Deal   Like the individual mandate, many New Deal ideas were Republican inventions.

For sure there have been some outstanding individual small government Republicans over the years including Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Senator Robert Taft and Congressman Ron Paul to name a few.  Sadly, that wing of the party was overcome in the Sixties by the progressive Rockefeller wing which has been supplanted by a cadre of Trotskyite former Democrats deceptively called Neoconservatives

Neoconservative Republicans have no real interest in conserving the Founder’s ideals of individual liberty, free markets, limited government, federalism and foreign non-interventionism.

So my liberal friend is correct.  American voters will not get change that they can believe in this time around just as they didn't in 2008.  There was no heart transplant in D.C., only a face lift.

What Pete Townsend wrote 40 years ago holds true today:

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

Sadly, we did.

Related Posts:

Consent Withheld – Election Day 2014
Losing Faith In Politics?

 

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."  - Paul Simon

No Farms, No Food, No Logic

I don’t know about where you live, but here in the Garden State, I see this misleading bumper sticker everywhere: No Farms, No Food.

For the purpose of this discussion let’s define a farm an enterprise in which one or more human beings plants, cultivates and harvests food crops primarily for consumption by others beyond his household, friends and family.

On the face of it, the bumper sticker is true enough.  If no one grew food for others, most people in post-industrial America would starve.  The question is are these human beings who produce food crops for others going to vanish from American society?  They won’t.  However, their numbers have diminished and may continue to do so.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.

The flaw in the bumper sticker’s logic is that it treats farmers, that is, human beings, as a fixed single purpose resource.  I would accept the logic of saying “no apple trees, no apples” or “no pigs, no bacon”.  If blight were to wipe out all apple trees, there would be no apples as nothing but an apple tree can produce apples.  Likewise a world without pigs must by definition be a world without bacon.  And not a world worth living in, by the way.

Human beings, on the other hand, are most flexible of economic resources.  Chances are that the guy playing guitar at your Friday watering hole night is a CPA or computer programmer during the workday.  He may get up the next morning and coach his kids’ ball teams, then go home to refinish his basement.  Being a modern guy, he might also help cook dinner and clean up afterwards.

The point is that humans can do a lot of things.  They can repurpose themselves to different occupations if the spirit so moves them.  The spirit will so move them if food is scarce, other people are willing pay to have something to eat and a reasonable living can be made by farming, which it can.

Agricultural science and technology have progressed exponentially since this nation was founded.  As of 1790 the U.S. population was only 5% Urban with all others classified as Rural.  This aligned with the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian nation comprised of largely self-sufficient and self-governing freeholders.  Improvements in agricultural technology and distribution have made it unnecessary for the preponderance of people to produce their own food. 

As you can see from the chart below, a single acre of ground could produce nearly 8X more corn by the year 2000 than when our constitution was ratified.

Globally crop yields throughout the world, measured in kilograms per hectare*, continue to improve at a steady rate.

Improved efficiency in food production fires up the division of labor and exchange.   This frees up the majority of workers to produce the cornucopia of consumer goods that modern civilization takes for granted.  Although few if any middle class Americans self-produce enough to food to live on, the wealth of devices and conveniences in their homes and on their persons was unimaginable in Jefferson’s agrarian utopia.

Stepping aside from mere increased production efficiency, culinary trends are driving a new generation of Americans back to the soil.  The Farm to Table and Locally Grown movements have enticed professional urbanites to try their hands at growing fruits, vegetables and livestock in an earth-friendly way for local green grocers, farmers’ markets and restaurateurs  Theirs is an entrepreneurial and Free enterprise ethic that Jefferson would surely love.   The explosion of local vineyards and wineries in my home state is visible evidence of this trend.

A good number of existing farmers are also catching onto this trend.  They are turning away from “commodity farming”, that is corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. for industry.  They are turning to boutique crops – fresh vegetables and fruits – for local table tops.

Responding to this sea change, cities such as Seattle are beginning to set aside urban agricultural zones.  Forward thinkers are designing urban farm towers and other structures that will redefine “farming”.

The reality is that food is always priority #1 for human beings.  No matter what technical gizmos, luxury items or fashions we may crave, we will need to feed ourselves before we can enjoy any of the other frills of 21^st Century living.  Consciously or unconsciously, rational people will make food procurement the top item on their value list.  In turn, market forces will profitably satisfy this need.

“No Farms, No Food” is propaganda on behalf of sustained and increased government intervention on behalf of agriculture.  Intervention distorts markets and leads to malinvestment.   It stifles innovation and is a slush bucket for political cronyism.  Agricultural price supports helped to accelerate, aggravate and prolong America’s Great Depression.  Federal agricultural spending is an annual $156 billion income transfer from taxpayers to agribusiness, farmers and welfare recipients.   This includes Food Stamps which are an indirect subsidy to farmers by helping lower income people meet artificially inflated food prices.  This must stop now!

 

*10,000 square meters

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Green Takers
Bunker Hill 2- The Bundy Ranch

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."  - Paul Simon

Consent Withheld – Election Day 2014

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Philadelphia, July 4, 1776

The secret ballot be damned.  Here's just what I am going to do when I step into the booth on Tuesday morning.

1.       I will pull the lever for Joe Baratelli, the Libertarian Party for U.S. Senate.

2.       I will write in my Tea Party pal, Conni Hare Murray for  the House Seat that John Runyon is vacating

3.       I will flip the switch to register my votes leaving all other offices blank - unvoted for - in effect voting "none of the above".

Joe is a committed libertarian, an opponent of all things statist.  He was a tireless campaigner on behalf of Ron Paul.  Conni is not so much libertarian but she is a passionate believer in constitutional limited government, the Bill of Rights and the Enumerated Powers.  She is smart, honest and good hearted.  We could do much worse.

As for the rest, I, the governed, am withholding my consent.

I am withholding consent from the one Party that masquerades as two.  I am writhing consent from those campaigning under the Democrat and Republican brand names that:

·         Are wholly owned subsidiaries of Goldman-Sachs

·         Endorse a Federal Reserve System that creates currency out of thin air - enriching elite Wall Streeters robbing regular guy and gal on Main Street.

·         Support the Federal income tax and its thug squad, the IRS who violate our privacy, hold taxpayers guilty until proven innocent, destroy lives and serve as a harassment tool for the entrenched powers.  The best that our D&R pols will do is debate what is the most just percentage to steal and which friends deserve the family and friends discount.

·         Kowtow to the empire's war machine, rubber stamping violations of other nations' sovereignty and condoning the murder of innocents by droning and strategic bombing.  Occasionally they feign to object when the other Party Brand occupies the White House.

·         Continually raise the size, scope and expense of government.  Wasn't it the great neocon Republican, Dick Cheney, who told us that "deficits don't matter"?  So what are they bitching about now?

·         Created and sustained a criminal class and shadow economy with their War on Drugs. 

·         Drive up the price of the food we eat with agricultural price supports. Isn't raising food prices criminal in world where people are going hungry?

·         Agree that citizens can be indefinitely imprisoned without trial or recourse to habeas corpus if the executive arbitrarily declares them a security threat.

For these reasons and more, I am withholding my consent from being governed by elected officials of the either the Democrat or Republican wing of the One Party.

Consider this, in the United States less than half of the eligible population votes.  In presidential years that percentage is higher and in midterm years lower.  If the Rs and Ds are essentially neck and neck, this means that 25% - 30% percent chose our government.

 It also means that about half of all voters chose no one.  If a given Presidential candidate were to win 60% of the vote when only 60% of the eligible voters voted, he would claim a landslide.  A mandate – “the people have spoken”. 

Not true.  Even in that extreme case only 36% of voters would have chosen him.  The winner is None Of The Above with 40%.  However, neither the ruling oligarchs nor the media mouthpieces report it that way.  They unfailingly assure us that this minority endorsement legitimizes the junta.  That’s a shame.

That is why I am calling on those who are fed up with rubber stamp one party rule to show up at the polls, choose none of losers on the ballot and then register that you withheld consent by picking none of them.

Could you imagine reading in your morning paper that in Any District, USA the following totals were reported?

·         Voter Turnout:       1,000,000

·         Voted Democrat:      240,000

·         Voted Republican:    230,000

·         Voted No One:          530,000

That would be true reflection of the legitimacy of our government.  It would send the message that “we are mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore”!

Related Posts:

Fighting For Democracy? For Real?
Losing Faith in Politics?

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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."  - Paul Simon