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by Frank Lindorff
When you go into the voting booth tomorrow, here are a few things you need to think about.
First of all, this is not a local election, whatever your candidates for Congress and even for statehouse have been telling you. We have just lived through six years of one-party government, and we've seen the damage that can do. Congress under Republican leadership has ceased to function as an independent branch challenging and investigating the actions of the president, and has instead become an enabler of presidential abuse of power and of the undermining of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That means we have to restore at least some measure of opposition in the Congress for the sake of saving the country from a slide into one-party dictatorship, and that means voting for the Democrats, even Democrats who are worse than their Republican opponent. I'd say different if your district had a third-party candidate with a chance of winning, since that person could be expected to vote against Republican rule too, once in office, but aside from Vermont's Bernie Sanders, I don't know of any such cases, such is the sad condition of third party politics in America.
It's equally important to vote Democratic for state legislative candidates and for governor, because the legislatures, in almost all states, are where congressional district lines get drawn up. We saw last year how the Republicans have used their power in state legislatures, particularly in Texas, to eliminate Democratic districts and replace them with Republican ones. In that state, such gerrymandering gave the Republicans five extra House seats before an election was even held.
Second, think about the big issues: human survival on the earth, mass
murder in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, the bankrupting and
deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, the destruction of American
constitutional democracy and the reversal of a 230-year history of
expanding liberty.
Human Survival: It is increasingly clear that the earth is facing a
catastrophe because of rampant use of fossil fuels, and the prime
offender is the United States. There is only a narrow window of
opportunity to at least moderate this threat to humanity and to life on
the planet, yet the Bush administration and the Republican Congress
have refused to even acknowledge the threat, and have squandered six
years that could have made a huge difference. (Isn't it kind of
ludicrous to worry about aborted fetuses and stem cells when government
policies are currently threatening the survival of the human race?)
Mass Murder: Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq--a nation that clearly
posed no immediate threat to the U.S. or its own neighbors in 2003--was
the worst of war crimes, a "Crime against Peace" under the Nuremburg
Charter, and a crime under US law because it was based upon lies, fraud
and deception. It has led to the unnecessary and criminal deaths of
nearly 2900 American troops, the maiming of another 25,000, and the
deaths of as many as 650,000 innocent Iraqi civilians--largely at the
hands of U.S. weapons. Many of those weapons, like the illegal white
phosphorus and napalm bombs used in Fallujah and elsewhere, The
thousands of tons of depleted uranium shells and bombs, the millions of
rounds of anti-personnel bombs and shells, and the helicopter and
fixed-wing gunships that spray wide areas indiscriminately with
saturation fire, are the very "weapons of mass destruction" which we
claimed we were going to war to prevent. The same weapons have been
widely used in Afghanistan against the people of one of the most
primitive societies in the world. These are massive crimes, and they
won't stop until the Congress brings them to a halt--and calls the
criminal in the White House who initiated them to account. (Remember,
neither one of these wars is doing a thing to challenge or defend
against terrorism.)
Economy: In six short years, this president has turned the national
budget from a surplus into six years of record deficits, by ramming
through the Republican Congress tax breaks that primarily benefit oil
companies and the richest 1 percent of Americans. As for trade policy,
thanks to Bush and the Republican-led Congress, which has made
exporting jobs and boosting imports the centerpiece of its economic
policy, the U.S. now owes more than $1 trillion to our rival, China,
and is shipping more than that annually to Middle Eastern dictatorships
like Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iran to buy oil for vehicles that get 12
miles per gallon or less. Sure there are plenty of Democrats sucking at
the corporate teat who are voting for those same policies, but with
Republicans in total control, the issues aren’t even being raised. We
need only to look at the unprecedented corruption that has swept over
the Republican Congress, and seeped under the doors of the White House,
into the Oval office, the Vice President’s office, and the office of
Karl Rove, the president’s closest adviser, to see why this is
happening, and what needs to be done. (Any token tax break you got from
Bush and the Republicans was long ago eaten up by the higher gas prices
caused by the Iraq War and by higher interest rates caused by their
budget and trade deficits.)
Freedom and Democracy: President Bush has claimed for himself the right
to ignore laws passed by Congress, which he erases with the stroke of a
pen in what he calls "signing statements" saying that as commander in
chief he is above the law and the courts. He has used his rubber-stamp
Republican Congress to ram through laws eliminating the right to trial
and the right to a lawyer, has given himself the power to declare any
American to be a unlawful combatant" and supporter of terrorism, with
no rights whatsoever, has approved the use of torture and immunized
himself and his gang of conspirators from prosecution for past torture.
He has even slipped through a measure making it easy for him to declare
martial law anywhere in the nation he deems there to be "public
disorder." With these laws and these crimes unchallenged, we no longer
live in a democracy--only the hollow husk of a former democracy, which
could be crushed in a moment. Only a revived Congress, led by a
revitalized opposition party, can challenge this dire threat to our
freedoms and traditional tripartite government. (The country you
learned about in your junior high civics class barely exists anymore,
and won't if you don’t stand up for liberty and democracy now, and stop
buying the scare stories about fighting terrorism. Remember Ben
Franklin, who warned that those who surrender liberty to seek security
“will end up with neither.â€)
This election is a turning point.
If we turn out Republicans from the leadership of the Congress, there
is at least a chance that, with a strong public campaign of pressure,
we can rouse timid and somnolent Democrats to protect liberty, restore
Democracy, impeach the president, take back the government, start
rescuing the economy, end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and start
seriously confronting global warming. If we don't, we may not get
another chance. Republicans, having brought us this close to fascism
and ruin, are not going to let the public get this close to unhorsing
them again if they manage to hang on to power.
None of this is to suggest that having Democrats win this election,
even by a significant margin, will fix things. Too many Democrats over
the last six years, or even the last 14 years, have been fully
complicit in too many of the above crimes and atrocities and attacks on
freedom and the Constitution. It's going to take constant struggle and
constant pressure to make them act like a true party of opposition, and
like the party of the people that the Democrats once claimed to be.
But we can't even begin that difficult struggle unless we toss out the Republicans from Congress.
So think about all this when you vote Tuesday.
And make sure you know how to vote on the new computer screen systems that are being foisted on most of us.
Don't let the bastards steal this one!
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