If you want a corporate takeover of our democracy, vote for Republican candidates.
If you want an absolute breakdown of society and total chaos, vote for Tea Party candidates.
If you want to see the long, painful, glacier-slow recovery process continue, vote for Democratic candidates (but prepare to keep successful candidates on a short leash).
If you want to build sustainable communities and societies in which sanity and reason and new national commitments to unity and prosperity prevail, vote for Progressive/Green Party candidates and get to work.
The privilege of living in a corporatocracy democracy comes with the responsibility of being somewhat engaged in the political process throughout all its stages. Register to vote. Vote the candidates and issues of your choice. But please, I beg of you, make informed, intelligent choices. Fox News and the myriads of televised campaign ads are not reliable sources of accurate information on political candidates and issues, and the sad reality is that others in the media mainstream aren’t much better; certainly, none of these provide the information you need to cast your vote wisely.
Political savvy comes from doing your homework, and it’s not entirely without effort. Everything you need to know is online, accessible via Google Search and a series of mouse-clicks. Research the issues first, so that you understand all of the effects a particular outcome will have, then research each candidate’s position on each issue. If you research the candidates first, all you’ll get are a lot of pretty, high-sounding words; what you won’t get is relevant or accurate information to help you cast an intelligent vote.
Knowing who funds particular candidates and issues is important, too. Don’t get suckered into voting against your own best interests by special interest groups whose agents and representatives say one thing and do another. The interests they serve are theirs, not yours.
Unless you make upwards of a million dollars a year, voting the Republican ticket is probably not in your best interests. If you want to see job growth and an expanding economy, you’ve got to support labor, and that almost always means voting for candidates who are not Republican. It goes without saying that voting for Tea Party candidates (about which I’ll write more in a future post) serves no one’s interest.
Insist on better government, not smaller government (if you want smaller government, stop having babies). Vote for fair elections and election reform. Vote for education. Vote for infrastructure renewal projects that take into account society’s future needs. Vote for renewable energy projects that lessen demand for fossil fuels from any source. Vote for corporate reform, healthcare reform, economic reform and tax reform. Vote for anything that puts people ahead of corporations. Always vote for long-term benefits rather than short-term gains because short-term solutions always bear the higher costs.
As you prepare to mark your ballot for Election 2010, keep in mind that it was the Republican administrations of Reagan/Bush, with passive help from spineless Democrats who were too afraid to act, that caused a huge spike in the national debt, and it was they who failed to pay down the debt when they had the chance; instead, they cut taxes and continued their deregulation binge. Clinton paid down the debt; Bush the Younger ran it up, again. Now, Obama has to run the debt even higher in order to clean up Bush’s mess. Look at the state the country’s in today and connect the dots.
Don’t be fooled by Republican campaign slogans; precious few of them contain a shred of truth. Despite their claims that Democrats are destroying the country, it is the Republicans—along with their corporate sponsors—who were, are and want to continue to be the architects and engineers of social, economic and environmental mayhem in the US and around the world.
Smart voters will deny them that chance.
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