[Peace] A message from Rich Whitney

[Karen Aram]

John Pilger’s article yet to come
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‎Rich Whitney<https://www.facebook.com/richwhitneyIL?fref=nf><https://www.facebook.com/richwhitneyIL?fref=nf>‎ to Paula Densnow<https://www.facebook.com/paula.whowantstoknow?fref=nf><https://www.facebook.com/paula.whowantstoknow?fref=nf>
November 1 at 9:50pm<https://www.facebook.com/paula.whowantstoknow/posts/1372993919391364> ·

Some of you may have seen the latest hit piece from the Daily Kos, entitled, "Yes, the "Green" Party has Endorsed Trump Over Clinton." Here is my response; please share as you see fit:
First, the headline is a flat-out lie: The Green Party has endorsed its candidate, Jill Stein. It has not ever suggested, nor has its candidates ever suggested, that anyone vote for Donald Trump.

The entire article is predicated on the premise that if Greens and their supporters stay true to their convictions and vote for their chosen candidate, this will be tantamount to a vote for Donald Trump.

What is the foundation for this? That if the Green Party just disappeared, or abandoned the field, its supporters and voters would flock to Hillary Clinton. But since we refuse to go away, we don’t flock to Hillary Clinton. Therefore, according to this argument, we are “helping” Trump to win – and we are in effect “endorsing” Trump, even though we are not.

The premise is false. I, for one, have not voted Democratic OR Republican since 1980 except in lower-level races where there was no acceptable third-party choice – typically judicial races and the like. If the Green Party did not exist, it would be necessary to create it, or something just like it – and Hillary Clinton STILL would not get my vote, nor that of all or most Greens.

The Democratic Party and its candidates are not serving the interests of the people. They are serving the same corporatist/Wall Street/Big Oil/Big Pharma/Big Agra/Military-Industrial Complex interests as the Republicans. They are only doing it with a different veneer. Yes, some of them are better on a few social issues. They usually give better speeches. They don’t CHANT, “Drill, Baby Drill” – they just continue supporting Big Oil in FACT, including fracking, more pipelines and more offshore oil leases, all of which have proliferated under Obama and were championed by Clinton as Secretary of State.

Under the Obama administration, frequently pushed by Hillary, the U.S. has not championed peace but war. From Afghanistan and Iraq and the first few strikes in Pakistan under Bush, we have now flagrantly violated international law and murdered thousands of people from the sky in those three countries plus Somalia, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Clinton also supported the coup in Honduras that has led to the murder of environmentalists, arming the misogynistic, terror-supporting dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, and supporting the armed insurrection in Syria that has now brought death and destruction to that country, contributed to the rise of ISIS and created millions of refugees, creating a massive humanitarian crisis racking all of Europe and the Middle East. She has also supported policies of dangerous brinksmanship with Russia and China, including support for the fascistic post-coup government in Ukraine (engineered by her appointee Victoria Nuland, a protégée of Dick Cheney), and I presume that she supports the Obama administration’s plan to spend a trillion dollars on a new generation of nuclear weapons.

That last point deserves some context. In 1990, then-Secretary of State James Baker promised Mikhail Gorbachev, as part of the agreement to end the Soviet Union and the Cold War, that NATO would expand not “one inch to the east.” He even promised that “we were going to make them a member [of NATO], we were–observer first and then a member.” In other words: the U.S. promised that NATO would not extend up to the borders of Russia and so become a mortal threat to the national security of the Russian people — now isolated and separated from its former military allies. Russia kept its part of the bargain. The United States did not; from Clinton I, through Bush II and then Obama, both Dem and Republican presidents instead broke the promise and expanded NATO to absorb former member-nations of the Warsaw Pact, turning it into an anti-Russian military alliance — exactly what the U.S. had promised would never happen.

Under Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, this included expending $5 billion to foment the coup in Ukraine, tightening the noose. The administration has engaged in similar military brinksmanship against China. Now Clinton proposes the insane idea of a “no-fly zone” in Syria, ignoring the fact that Russia is there at the invitation of a sovereign government, while the U.S. has no legal authority to be in Syria at all, and is violating the U.N. Charter by fomenting an insurrection with fighters who are essentially (and some literally) Al-Quaeda.

Clinton is to the right of Obama on war issues. She pushed for the illegal attack on Libya, which morphed from the blatant lie of “preventing a bloodbath” into a push for regime change, with no one in the Obama administration blinking an eye as they just carried out another illegal war, paving the way for the rise of ISIS.

In sum, the Democrats put up a cold-blooded killer, a tool of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex willing to risk nuclear Armageddon in order to continue to dominate supplies of oil and other wealth, while the Republicans put up a crazy, racist and sexist capitalist huckster and con artist for president.

So, of course, many people who really care about the future of humankind and the eco-system, and find aggressive war to be morally unacceptable, make the rational choice not to vote for either of them but to stick to voting for someone who represents a genuine choice for peace, environmental restoration and progress.

And they get attacked for it. Not by Republicans but by Democratic operatives, in institutions like the Daily Kos or the Daily Beast, et al., who continue to insist on some sort of “loyalty” to a party that many of us never embraced in the first place, and that, in any event, has failed to earn it.

The only real case that they have for supporting Clinton is to try to persuade us that Trump is scarier. But that is incapable of proof one way or the other. What’s worse, a loose cannon or a cannon pointed squarely at the people of the Middle East, Africa, Russia and China? What’s worse, a climate denier, or someone who acknowledges the climate crisis but promotes policies that continue to promote the combustion of more fossil fuels? One can debate it either way but the only certainty is that BOTH ARE UNACCEPTABLE.

So in response to that, of course Stein and Baraka are going to emphasize the scariness of Clinton – because it’s the Clintonites who are doing the attacking. In that context, they make a valid point: When Republicans are in power, some Democrats tend to get motivated. They push back on environmental and peace issues. But when their own get in power, they go to sleep. In 2002 - 2007, we had a militant peace movement in this country. After Obama got elected in 2008, where have all the mass protests gone? Yes, die-hards like me are still at it, but armchair liberals all went home because one of their “own” was in the Oval Office.

And then he went about attacking four more countries, illegally, with virtually no resistance.

The author of this article doesn’t even get her facts straight. The article entitled “ “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump,” was not written by Baraka but by John Pilger. It’s worth a read:https://newmatilda.com/…/john-pilger-why-hillary-clinton-…/…<https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/23/john-pilger-why-hillary-clinton-is-more-dangerous-than-donald-trump/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork>

But the author doesn’t want people to read and analyze. The author wants to take a few quotes and tweets out of context and spin it into a fairy tale that Greens are “endorsing” Trump.

It’s rubbish – another hit piece based on a lie.

Our current situation DEMANDS political revolution. Bernie started one, and if enough Sanderistas come on board with Jill Stein, we can make something happen. The 2016 race has already defied the usual expectations. Support for third-party and independent candidates is at an historic high. There is still time for more dramatic change to occur. We are not prisoners of history; we can make our own.

The world can't afford to wait. We can't afford once again, to be herded into the camp of a destructive Democratic leadership out of fear that the Republican buffoon will be worse. We can’t keep bankrupting ourselves funding a war on terrorism that both sows and reaps ever more terror. We can’t afford another nuclear arms race, coupled with a dangerous policy of strangling Russia. The global ecosystem is not going to wait for us to make a gradual shift in the political temperature. This is the time for American voters to stand up and demand real change. We're out of time to do anything less.
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