 |
| Jill Stein at Occupy Wall Street's One Year Anniversary in New York. |
Yes, I know she will not win the election. She will
come away with a mere two percent of the vote, at best. But that is not my
fault. It is the fault of the dozens of so-called “progressives” I encounter on
a regular basis who tell me they agree with “everything Stein stands for,” but
refuse to take that ideological agreement to its next logical step and cast a
vote for her. They are scared to death doing so could cost Obama the election.
I did not vote for Obama in 2008 and have no
intention of doing so this time.
Don’t get me wrong: Obama is an intelligent,
informed politician, and his efforts to carefully review all of the options in
order to make an informed decision are a welcome change from the arrogant, “I’m
the Decider!” bullishness of his predecessor. At the very least, it is
refreshing to have an eloquent, oratorically sophisticated president who can
correctly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
But while contemporary political discourse often confuses the two, public persona and personality
characteristics are not the same as policy and legislative proposals. To that
end, Obama may be, to paraphrase Neil Young, a kinder, gentler machine-gun president,
but a machine-gun president, nonetheless.
Barack Obama has continued the most grievous aspects
of George W. Bush’s militaristic foreign policy. He has expanded the war in
Afghanistan, a conflict that, by all accounts, cannot be won.
Along with our troop
presence in Libya, Yemen and Syria, we still maintain some 30,000 “noncombat”
forces, including private contractors in Iraq. And Obama has further eroded the
nation’s beleaguered relationship with Pakistan through the use of unmanned
military drone attacks. Contrary to White House statements, these so-called
precision drone strikes routinely kill innocent Pakistani bystanders, including
women and children. In fact, the Obama administration’s official policy, as
reported earlier this year in The New York
Times, is to consider every military-age male within the general vicinity
of a drone-strike to be a terrorist.
Worse and most troubling is the president’s use of a
terrorist “kill list,” which includes American citizens who have joined
al-Qaeda. (The U.S.-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki was one such casualty of
Obama’s kill list.) As the Times
reported back in May (5/29/2012), the files contain the names of individuals
designated for “capture or kill,” in which the “capture part is mostly
theoretical.” Here at home, Obama signed into law the draconian National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which grants him the power to detain anyone designated a terrorist, including American citizens, indefinitely without warrant, evidence or trial. A federal judge recently deemed the law unconstitutional, but the Obama administration is now fighting to appeal the ruling. And let’s not forget the Patriot Act, and FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), holdovers from the Bush-era which Obama has refused to repeal. Finally, despite claims to the contrary, Obama has not abandoned the practice of torture and extraordinary rendition, which justifiably caused so much uproar during the Bush administration.
Beyond the tired, “lesser evil” rationale, liberals
who stand behind Obama argue they are making the “practical” choice. They say
we Greens are “too idealistic,” and, as a result, unable to accept the “political
reality” of our country. They are right: We do not accept it. Given that the “political
reality” (read: “power structure”) primarily benefits corporate power, greedy
Wall Street bankers, and outrageously wealthy oligarchs, why the hell should we?
“I can’t join the practical,” journalist Chris
Hedges wrote four years ago in an article titled, “Only Nader is Right on the
Issues” (Truthdig.com, 11/03/2008).
I spent two decades of
my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American
power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children,
butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the
mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I
have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted
by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.
He adds, “Practical men and women do not stand up
against injustice. The practical remain silent.”
Or, as a friend and fellow Green puts it, “Liberals
make it their mission to save the Democratic Party. But Greens’ mission is to
save the world.”
The Left today is epitomized by establishment
professionals like Eric Alterman, who serve as perpetual apologists for
President Obama and the Democrats. In the Ralph Nader documentary film, An Unreasonable Man, no other interviewee
spews more venom and pure hatred at the former Green's alleged
role in skewing the 2000 election results than Alterman. (His anger,
incidentally, is completely misdirected. The Supreme Court stole the election
from Al Gore—not Nader.)
In one scene of the film, Alterman calls Nader
supporters “stupid,” insisting they “do not know anything about politics.” As a
distinguished college professor, one would think Alterman would be capable of
expressing himself in a more mature, sophisticated manner. But then his
juvenile name-calling is often the extent of liberals’ anti-third-party
argument. Here in Maine, the Democratic Party sued Nader back in 2004 in order
to keep him off the state’s presidential ballot. And here you thought only the
Republicans engage in such cravenly anti-democratic behavior.
“Cast your whole vote,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in
Civil Disobedience, “not a strip of
paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it
conforms to the majority… but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole
weight.”
It is bad enough about 60 percent of eligible
American voters will not even bother to go to the polls on Election Day. But in
some ways I find the timidity of liberals to actually vote for the platform
they want, rather than hedging their bets on the one they believe will cause the
least amount of harm, even worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment