firm & correct with Martin V.

I’ve been dismissed by many Democrats and regular folks for my perceived pessimism following the election of Barack Obama. You are a malcontent, Martin V., you are falling into a right wing trap. ‘They’ want you to believe that Obama is a cult o’ personality and not a fresh and new politician.

Let me say this, Barack Obama’s election points to many positive cultural trends. We are becoming ‘less’ obsessed with race. We are electing a black centrist democrat. So, I do not argue that Barack Obama will be a better steward of our economy. I do not argue that Barack Obama will be a more shrewd and tactical commander and chief.  

Here’s the rub: Our economy cannot continue in current fashion. It is destroying our world. Managing the well oiled internal parts of it, keeping the flow of investment, production and crass consumption up and exporting this lifestyle isn’t good for anybody, my family or Obama’s daughters. Do we really want a green revolution or do we just want the 401k’s to stop tanking?

Rub part 2: Our economy is predicated on war. Our gross military budget funds better than five hundred bases, installations, and carrier groups. We maintain a presence in every part of the world and every ocean. Global capitalism is predatory. The U.S. made the playing field and is the biggest piece, the queen. This game is not only infeasible and ecocide, but the military exists in current form today to keep the rest of the world playing along. Third world labor and resources cannot fund the wealth of the first world indefinitely. Period. As if a moral argument for a more pacifist U.S.A. didn’t hold enough water. Being a shrewder Machiavellian and arguing for more military spending in the U.S. isn’t a positive trait. Obama deserves no credit on this issue.  

Plus Obama won by 17 percent, not 7 percent. From Democracy Now:

“The fact that Obama won so handily has caused a lot of us to sit back and relax. There’s been a lot of popping of champagne corks and people drawing the conclusion that the system must work, because our guy won. Well, this is not a sports event. This is self-government. 

In fact, the evidence strongly suggests—and we haven’t had a chance to talk about this since Election Day—that Obama probably won by twice as many votes as we think. Probably a good seven million votes for Obama were undone through vote suppression and fraud, because the stuff was extensive and pervasive, in places where you wouldn’t expect it. 

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama’s, you know, backyard, Cook County. And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw with their own eyes 350 voters show up, only to be turned away, told, “You’re not registered,” people who were registered, who voted in the primary. All but one of these people was black. That’s in Illinois. 

People at the Election Defense Alliance have discovered, from sifting through the numbers, an eleven-point red shift in New Hampshire. That means that there’s a discrepancy in Obama’s disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans’ favor, OK? 

You start to combine this with all the vote suppression, all the disenfranchisement, all the vote machine flipping that went on in this election, you realize, OK, Obama won, but millions of Americans, most of them African American and students, you know, were not able to participate in any civic sense, ironically, a lot of the same people, you know, who would have been disenfranchised and were disenfranchised before the civil rights movement. So the fact that a black president was elected, while cause for jubilation, see, ought not to take place at the expense of a whole lot of our fellow citizens who seem to have been disenfranchised on racial grounds. My point is very simply this: We’ve got to get past the victory of Obama and look seriously at what our election system is like, or else, I promise you, see, the setup that was put in place in this last election, in 2004 and in 2000, OK, will still be there in 2010, still be there in 2012. So we’ve got to take steps to do something about it now. ”

The “self described” Republican smear/rob/kill machine isn’t gone and will be back. Do the ’self styled’ democrats have the fucking spine to line these contemptible bastards up in court? I’m not betting on it. It’ll divide the country. We won’t fix the economy if we’re prosecuting the Bushies. All of us would be too divided to buy.

funny money,

Martin V.