Corporate money strangles democracy
The 2012 election was a big dilemma. But even a dilemma between two evils can be met with a sigh of relief if the lesser evil wins a victory over the greater one.
The United States may have paved the path toward democracy some 200 years ago. In the strict sense of the word, it has never been a democracy: always only a “democracy for the few” with its racist, sexist and capitalist exclusion of the real majority. It is the genuine significance of this election to have successfully resisted the fascist tradition of the past.
This time, right-wing white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the self-appointed white Christian vigilantes of America, did not manage to steal the election by legal and illegal means.
In 2000, George W. Bush is said to have won Florida with an unbelievably slim margin of 537 votes, although — and precisely because — tens of thousands of ballots of African-Americans remained uncounted. As this fictitious majority began to shrink rather rapidly during the first hours of the recount, the Supreme Court put an end to it in order to protect the “rights” of George W. Bush. One may wonder what “rights” these were that trumped those of Al Gore and the majority of the American electorate.
In 2004, the theft of votes through the targeted manipulation of voting machines, especially in Ohio, proved decisive. Although John Kerry had a comfortable lead in Ohio’s exit polls, he “lost” Ohio rather abruptly and mysteriously during two late hours of the same election night. In unbelievable fashion, computers calculated a majority for Bush and, with Ohio’s electoral votes, the stolen election victory. The media covered up the manufactured mystery.
When Michael Connell, Republican computer specialist and key to the election puzzle of 2004, was to speak finally to court officials about the election events in Ohio, he mysteriously crashed with his private airplane, to the relief of the outgoing Republican administraaction on Dec. 19, 2008.
To reject references to the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004 as crazy conspiracy theories or left-wing propaganda is itself part of a continuous, conscious and unconscious effort to mask the conspiracy of America’s institutionalized election fraud. Only the complacent cowardice of a belligerent America can continue to remain complicit in this political crime.
Obama’s Democrats were warned, and this time Republicans could not complete the theft, although it had been well orchestrated beforehand by the long hands of Republican governors with restrictive voting laws, manufactured long waiting lines and millions of dollars.
Although this time the turnout was about 7 percent lower than in 2008 and comprised only 57.5 percent of eligible voters, it was the nonwhite majority of Latinos and African-American voters together with the majority of women who carried Obama’s election victory. These victims of America’s dollar diplomacy knew what was at stake with a possible Romnification of America.
The inconvenient truth cannot be denied. Today’s United States still suffers from racist divisions. The irrational hatred against President Obama, which can accuse him in one breath of being a “socialist,” “fascist” and a “communist,” is rooted in the fact that a so-called “black man” rules in the White House. The Republican boycott in Congress is just one aspect of this hatred.
Another lies in the fact that more than 70 percent of Latinos, more than 90 percent of African-American voters and a solid majority of women voted for Obama, but 60 percent of white males voted for Romney.
In Europe, Obama’s Realpolitik would make him a right-wing politician, simply because he too is caught in the cage of America’s sacrosanct trinity of nationalism, militarism and capitalism. America’s political establishment does not believe in representative democracy. Such a form of government is a direct threat to the capitalist elite, which routinely bribes and buys its politicians to be puppets made dependent on “donations” for their political survival. A functioning democracy is independent from corporate money.
Based on their principled independence, third-party candidates, such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party, were able to speak the voice of reason in the name of peace through social and environmental justice. The media silenced them with the tacit claim of unelectability. That these candidates are considered “unelectable” in the current political climate is an indictment against a religiously fanatic and patriotic irrationalism that in this country still triumphs over the principles of a fundamental democracy.