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Don’t Vote for Evil
- Back during the
George W. Bush neocon regime, President Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W. Bush for the
world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim.
“Yesterday standing at this same podium was Satan himself,
speaking as if he owned the world. You can still smell the
sulfur.”
Chavez is one
of the American right-wing’s favorite bogyman, because
Chavez helps the people instead of bleeding them for the
rich, which is Washington’s way. While
Washington has
driven all but the one percent into the ground, Chavez cut
poverty in half, doubled university enrollment, and provided
health care and old age pensions to millions of Venezuelans
for the first time.
Little wonder
he was elected to a fourth term as president despite the
many millions of dollars Washington poured into the election
campaign of Chavez’s opponent.
While
Washington and the EU preach neoliberalism–the supremacy of
capital over labor–South American politicians who reject
Washington’s way are being elected and reelected in
Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia.
It was the
Ecuadoran government, not Washington, that had the moral
integrity to grant political asylum to WikiLeaks’ Julian
Assange. The only time Washington grants asylum is when it
can be used to embarrass an opponent.
In contrast to
the leadership that is emerging in South America as more
governments there reject the traditional hegemony of
Washington, the US political elite, whether Republican or
Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American
people.
The Republican
candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the
rich, taxes which are already rock bottom, to block any
regulation of the gangsters in the financial arena, and to
privatize Social Security and Medicare.
Privatizing
Social Security and Medicare means to divert the people’s
tax dollars to the profits of private corporations. In
Republican hands, privatization means only one thing: to cut
the people’s benefits and to use the people’s tax dollars to
increase the profits in the private sector. Romney’s policy
is just another policy that sacrifices the people to the one
percent.
Unfortunately,
the Democrats, if a lesser evil, are still an evil. There is
no reason to vote for the reelection of a president who
codified into law the Bush regime’s destruction of the US
Constitution, who went one step further and asserted the
power to murder US citizens without due process of law, and
who has done nothing to stop the exploitation of the
American people by the one percent.
As Gerald
Celente says in the Autumn Issue of the Trends Journal,
when confronted with the choice between two evils, you don’t
vote for the lesser evil. You boycott the election and do
not vote. “Lessor or greater, evil is evil.”
If Americans
had any sense, no one would vote in the November election.
Whoever wins the November election, it will be a defeat for
the American people.
An Obama or
Romney win stands in stark contract with Chavez’s win. Here
is how Lula da Silva, the popular former president of Brazil
summed it up: “Chavez’s victory is a victory for all the
peoples of Latin America. It is another blow against
imperialism.” Washington, making full use of the almighty
dollar, was unable to buy the Venezuelan election.
How will a
Romney or Obama win be summed up? The answer will be in
terms of which candidate is best for Israel’s interest;
which is best for Wall Street’s interest, which is best for
agribusiness; which is most likely to attack Iran; which is
most likely to subject economic and war protesters to
indefinite detention as domestic extremists.
The only people
who will benefit from the election of either Romney or Obama
are those associated with the private oligarchies that rule
America.
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This article was originally posted at
Counterpunch
Paul Craig Roberts is
a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His
latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In
Collapse) has just been published.
