A Vote That Counts

I wrote this in September of 04 and edited it slightly. Watching Clinton throw back a whiskey shot and brag about duck hunting makes me sick - the people who love their guns ain't voting for Democrats so Hillary can stop being an embarrassment. Nader did not cause the Republican victory in 2000, the Clinton backlash did and I wish she would get the hell off the stage.
Every four years or so, the big time politicians pretend they care about the common man. They hang up their $1000 suit jackets and show up in casual clothes riding on buses to let us know that they are “One of Us”. And of course, there are plenty of flags in the background. They are not only not one of us, their actions show they may just dislike us – the average working person – and they care very little about the will of the people. By and large, they are beholding to the folks that made them millionaires, not the folks that pay their wages. They cannot relate to folks who earn in a week what they spend at a meal.

Are we too late to tell them that it is obvious to the working man that something is wrong with our democracy - that it is obvious that government is by and for the super rich: who don’t care that the worker cannot afford health care as long as the pharmaceutical companies show record profits and rich doctors get caps on lawsuit awards; who don’t care that full time work is rare these days as companies who cannot send their companies overseas only hire part time workers; who act like a cost of living raise in minimum wage will bankrupt the country; who have convinced us that government is bad and greed is good.

The following was written about the Republican Party, but both have similar agendas:

In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale—money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak…..An opinion poll taken in 1964 showed 62 percent of the respondents trusting the government to do the right thing; by 1994 the number had dwindled to 19 percent. The measure can be taken as a tribute to the success of the Republican propaganda mill that for the last forty years has been grinding out the news that all government is bad, and that the word "public," in all its uses and declensions (public service, citizenship, public health, community, public park, commonwealth, public school, etc.), connotes inefficiency and waste. http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm

Schopenhauer said that “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” We are fed the crap that our vote really counts and somehow we are responsible for the government we have. Majority does not rule when the man who wins the popular election is not president so obviously their claptrap that our vote counts is bullshit. The only vote that really counts is the one that reflects a conscience rather than a tradition. For me, that is Ralph Nader. He is against the war and so am I. He is a moral person and so am I. He thinks buying legislation to benefit corporations that pay no taxes or operate from offshore havens is wrong and so do I. He believes the minimum wage should be tied to inflation and so do I. He thinks NAFTA and GATT are a mess and so do I. I think he is a reasonable man who cannot be bought and so he is ridiculed and violently opposed. In time, we will all see that what he says is self evident. Many social improvements came about because third parties were formed around ideas that were then co-opted by the major parties after enough people supported the idea. Whether Bush or Kerry get in, things will pretty much stay the same. I think either the Republicans or the Democrats can adopt Nader’s ideals and have my vote.