The Dems have a long history of cheating, but in this election my expectation is of preeminent Republican malfeasance. Not so much with the traditional Dem, mob-like stuffing of ballot boxes, but more like tinkering with the process, and maybe slowing the process. Do you expect to see liberals intimidating suburban moms? How about Tea Partiers and various paid operatives stirring up trouble in Latino and black neighborhoods? Remember too, people have been voting for awhile. Every day a vote sits around, that's one more day for somebody to do what people will do.
Which is mostly, treat the electoral process, the nuts and bolts at the local level, with integrity. It is run remarkably well, for a thing primarily volunteer. Really, as corrupt as the Republican and Democratic Machine is, I don't worry about cheating changing the course of this election. The political, financial, corporate, military machine that is Amerika, will continue to do what it was created to do, achieve global hegemony, regardless this election. Which is to say, the presidential vote in this election will do nothing to alter the course of empirical overshoot, and the general trend toward total State surveillance. The only thing that will prevent that, is collapse, or some kind of awakening, the American people seem ill-equpped and certainly not well enough informed to make.
"Superstorm"* Sandy I think has the potential to weaken New York in a way that 9/11 could not. There are now estimates into the hundreds of thousands, people who have been made homeless. Living so close to the sea, I think we can safely assume most of them had jobs, which they are presumably no longer doing, which is lost economic activity. It seems clear to me the estimates of the cost are grossly under-estimated. They reflect a gross estimate of rebuilding as it was. Every time I look at pics, I think, who thought it was a good idea to build all those houses on a fucking sand bar? Shall we talk about a gross misapplication of resources? I think if I were God and I heard Right-wing "Conservatives" yammering on about the great hand of God that is the Market, I'd be pissed. Any market that builds houses on a sand bar on the ocean or a river, has it's head up its ass. Or rather, it is run by scoundrels. But don't-ya-know, it's gay peoples fault?
Good God the Whole Country needs to get STONED; And of course I mean, smoke pot, not throw rocks at each other.
Really, Benghazi? At this point, when there are men of think-tank level influence speaking openly about killing Americans to incite Americans to war against Iran, because they know the MSM won't report it, which they haven't, it is impossible to say anymore whether or not that attack in Libya was somehow facilitated directly or indirectly by the CIA, not when we know al Qaida practically is the Syria Free Army funded by America, directly or indirectly. That's during an Obama Admin, BTW, and your an idiot or worse if you think a Repub Admin isn't MORE likely of it. LOL. Notice, the only country where we are engaged, the mainstream media isn't whore enough to associate with al Qaida? An American ambassador died by ambush and they don't say it was al Qaida! After 9/11, it was like 24 hours. Ad infini-dumb-dumb/ad nauseum for a fucking decade.
The great tragedy of this election for me, is the failure of Americans to recognize, that growth, as our economy has come to depend on it, is at an end. And that is having profound ramifications, and we are pointing our fingers at everything but reality. We are not having an adult conversation about what seven billion people adding 80 Billion people every year, MEANS on a finite planet. GOOD GOD, how infantile the message, lower taxes to generate growth/tax the rich. What has the message given us? Sandy! Billionaire Hedge Fund managers who don't pay taxes, indistinguishability between Treasury/FED/Wall Street, a grotesquely inflated people physically and economically dependent on a grotesquely inflated State, a hundred million yearly prescriptions for anti-depressants, kids drugged with pharmaceuticals by their parents and people in jail and disenfranchised for smoking the flower of the most useful plant on the planet.
It's likely to be a contested election, one way or the other. How contested depends on many other factors, not least the progress on the east coast. That nor-easter portends ill. It might be a thing for the nation to rally around beforehand, but it's almost election day as I write this, and I assume the storm will have begun to hit by then. Consider the rest of November, a languishing relief effort in the east as the nation rages about a contested election. I admit I hesitate to imagine a republican controlled Congress and the presidency (much because the so-called Republicans are controlled by maniacs,) though I console myself that the party would probably be faced with the choice of preventing the 2014 election from happening, and being destroyed politically as a Party forever, but of course that is not really a choice. More, it looks like a Dem Senate, Repub Congress and maybe, eventually, a Repub Prez. Or Obama. Which means more gridlock, as we muddle our way along the seemingly spiral path of industrial dissolution.
(It's useful I think, to think about the spiral, when faced with the anxiety inevitable, contemplating TEOTWAWKI. The square, rigid world we have built won't withstand THAT spiral. Best to think about flow.)
Who am I voting for? Mostly I'm voting against my state Minnesota tending toward control, against the marriage and ID-Voter red herrings. For Prez, I'm going to vote for Jill Stein. Partly because I don't expect the office of the President will ever be inflicted upon her, but mostly because she was arrested bringing sustenance, treats and attention to the sitters, protecting the earth and the land, preventing the dozing of the Keystone II pipeline right-of-way that isn't yet supposedly a done deal.
Because this election should be about a choice. And really that isn't so much about a choice, as a conversation, about the fact that any further thrust of the current economic paradigm, of the kind of progress we have grown accustomed to, depends on destroying much of what remains of the vitality of the earth and the biosphere, and only seems to feed the attitude of CONTROL.
* If Spiral Theory is correct, then one might expect to think of Sandy as a pale precursor of what is to be come, climate-wise.
incoherent tripe!
ReplyDelete@'Anonymous': If you think so why do you come here - especially with no name?
ReplyDeleteOtherwise; I share your outrage, William and I too voted Green (Dem where they were worthy and no Greens running).
Dude, voting is a fucking joke now. One word...Diebold. Who owns it? Apparently the machines are easy to hack. I don't believe for one second that an electronic voting machine is transparent or fair. Therefore voting is pointless.
ReplyDeleteCarlin said it best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIraCchPDhk
rest in peace Carlin...you were the man
I've been predicting Romney all summer based on yard signs and bumper stickers. I think Sandy is going to help him, poor people get the worst and last attention of returning things to service, so their polling stations are going to have issues and voters are going be busy dealing with other things. A second factor will be the evangelicals, who I'd guess will project some biblical meaning unto the storms as God's disapproval of that Muslim in the white house and turn out in spite of their inclinations not to. Least thats my Dewey Truman theory.
ReplyDeleteA,
ReplyDeleteI think my coherence was a bit too much for you :)
Martin,
It's not so much outrage anymore, as awe.
Luciddreams,
Did you hear, one of Romney's Sons bought the company that manages the ballots in Ohio? If you wrote that into a novel, the critics would say it was preposterous and therefore not very good writing. In America, BAU apparently.
Justin,
Hypocrites. Two years ago 70%+ of Christians would have said Mormonism is a cult. Now they are practically investing him with messianic furor. My mother told my nine year old niece if Obama was elected he was going to round up all the Christians, put them in camps and kill them. I wonder where she got that idea?
Jim Quinn over at The Burning Platform basically called him a Prophet today. Compared him to Linclon, FDR, Ben Franklin and Washington, I think. Basically apologized ahead of time for the security state.