[Peace-discuss] Vote for Obamacare

[C. G. Estabrook]

On Nov 4, 2012, at 6:27 PM, "Brussel, Morton K" <brussel at illinois.edu> wrote:

> ...I agree that I pesonally cannot vote for Obama and retain a good conscience; I'll vote for the very good and intelligent Jill Stein. Yet, either Obama or Romney will be our next president, and I hope Romney is not the one. It is conceivable that to right the system, a Romney presidency may ultimately engender the necessary resistance/revulsion that an Obama in office would not. However, my guess is that it is unlikely. The system is grossly corrupt, and I'm not sure it can be fixed. We, most of our population, are in a bad sad way. 

I quite agree with this.  David Swanson, whom you cite, has described what we should be doing after the election:

'...Change comes from broad-based popular movements that impact the entire culture.  This is how we got civil and political rights, how we got workplace rights and environmental protections — such as they are.  Everything worth achieving has been achieved by educating, organizing, inspiring, and pressuring the government, and not by picking the right portion of the government to reelect, cheer for, and withhold all criticism from.  Now, you can say you want to vote for the lesser evil person while simultaneously protesting him, but it doesn’t work that way.  Most people’s minds and most popular organizations devote themselves to lesser evilism on a permanent basis, not just the week of an election.  Obama in 2009 told the big environmentalist groups not to talk about climate change, and most of them haven’t mentioned it since, even in the midst of a hurricane.  One group mentioned it and declared that the tar sands pipeline would be Obama’s test, but the price for failing the test is having that group and its members vote for Obama’s reelection a little less cheerfully.  Obama told the unions and advocacy groups not to say “single-payer healthcare” and they obeyed, forbidding mention of it at their rallies, asking instead for a mysterious “public option” that was then of course denied them.  You’d think it would be hard for people to sell out this way, especially in non-election years, but they help themselves along by the art of selective information consumption.  Most — not all, but most — Obama voters have managed not to know about drone wars or kill lists or the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  And, of course, it’s extra hard to engage in serious activism while unaware what’s going on.  By activism I mean educating, organizing, rallying, marching, lobbying, reporting, editorializing, inspiring, blockading, boycotting, interrupting, mocking, replacing, and nonviolently resisting evil policies in the thousands and thousands of ways available to nonviolent activists.  Someone said to me yesterday: “But Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t start a third party.”  Of course he didn’t.  Neither am I.  I wouldn’t have wanted him to.  I wouldn’t want you to.  But he also didn’t sell out to an existing party.  He didn’t endorse and campaign for candidates.  He didn’t tell anyone that voting was the only tool available, because — of course — voting comes far down the list of tools that have proven effective through history.  And when the voting system is as corrupted as ours is now, the only way to render it even more useless is to promise half the candidates that you will strive to annoy them throughout their terms but never ever vote against them (unless it’s in a non-swing-state and in small enough numbers not to matter), and if they’ll let you come to meetings at the White House you’ll see what you can do about not annoying them either.  Latinos threatened not to vote for Obama and won some immigration reforms.  Labor unions threatened to bend over, and Obama kicked their ass...'



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