Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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© 2009 Created by Mark on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
© 2009 Created by Mark on Ning. Create a Ning Network!
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No problem, I shall not argue for a third party vote on your forum. I have slightly modified the following "Westerm Wall" observation to best state my position.
A female CNN journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out.
She went to the Western Wall and there he was walking slowly up to the holy site. She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane in a very slow fashion, she approached him for an interview.
“I’m Rebecca Smith from CNN. Sir, how long have you been coming to the Western Wall and praying?”
“For about 60 years.”
“60 years! That’s amazing! What do you pray for?”
“I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews, and the Muslims. I pray for the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship. As an émigré from America I pray that they have honest elections with paper ballots; that they finally obtain a democracy that is representative of the people.”
“How do you feel after doing this for 60 years?”
“Like I’m talking to a fuckin’ wall.”
I've been following his career ever since and done what I could to support him. I joined or donated to many of the organizations that he founded and took part in their campaigns. When he finally got around to running for President, I joined the Greens and voted for him, and it did make me feel good. In fact it made me feel proud to be able to vote for somebody who cared about consumers instead of corporations.
But after the 2000 selection, like many people, I began to wonder how something like that could happen in a republic. Isn't a republic a form of democracy? Aren't we the people supposed to elect our leaders, not have them selected by a bunch of appointed cronies without our votes even being counted?
So I started paying more attention and I started learning things. I learned that our votes are merely symbolic and never really did count. Not only does the Constitution not grant us a right to vote, it prohibits us from voting directly for President or Vice-President. The names of those candidates appear on the ballot fraudulently, as the votes actually go to the slate of Electors of their political party (whose names are NOT on the ballot), not to the person whose name is on the ballot.
I learned that even if our votes are counted, they can be overruled by the Electoral College, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
I learned that the reason that tyrannical governments hold elections is so that they can claim to have been democratically elected and to have the support of the people, and the reason that they manipulate or rig the elections is because tyrannical governments never really do have the support of the people they are tyrannizing.
I read the books that a cited at the end of my essay, Consensual Political Intercourse, and I learned that not only have our elections always been fraudulent, but that there is nothing we can do about it even if we can prove it.
Have you read Consensual Political Intercourse, Harold? It is the top featured article in the forum on the left side of the main page here. It's a very short essay, but very important, and I'd be interested in hearing your response.
Nader was one of the candidates who sued after the stolen 2004 election. It didn't help improve the situation. He was also one of the many third party and independent candidates who got more votes than expected in areas where he had little support, and fewer votes than expected in areas where he had a lot of support.
Will it make you feel good to vote for Nader if you find out later that your vote was flipped to one of the major party candidates and there's nothing you can do about it? You know as well as Nader does that he can't win. Why are you and he willing to commit the American public to being responsible for the debts of whichever major party candidate becomes president? He used to be more responsible than that.
I've heard Nader speak recently and he's still a great guy, but almost everything his life's work accomplished in the way of federal regulations, has subsequently been deregulated. I assume that he enters the races in order to get his message out to more people, as he knows that our government and the political parties are just bureaucracies and couldn't care less.
Don't you think it would be nice if we had a democratic form of government, Harold, where the people actually had a voice? We can't get there by continuing to give our mandate and delegate our power to a tyrannical form of government, and we won't ever get honest elections if we are willing to continue to vote in rigged elections.
Is knowing that you voted for Nader enough for you, even if you know that your vote can be COUNTED for Obama or McCain? If you don't really care if or how your vote is counted and are just making a symbolic gesture to make yourself feel good, please realize that by doing so you are legitimizing a government that will continue to spend a million dollars every two minutes on wars of aggression (crimes against humanity) and that you are authorizing those expenditures and accepting responsibility for them.
I assume that you may be retired, as I am, so perhaps this doesn't concern you, however if the dollar collapses or we have a total economic collapse, it will hurt everyone, and I have grandchildren. I cannot in good conscience vote to legitimize a government that is destroying my grandkids' hopes for the future.
Harold, if you're not interested in anything this website has to offer, and are only here to tout Nader, please be aware that as much as I respect Nader, this forum is about the reasons for not voting in faith-based elections for an unaccountable, undemocratic government, not about which corporate pawn or CIA assassination target to hope you might be voting for, when our Constitution doesn't even allow you to vote for them and their names are only fraudulently on the ballot anyway.
If our votes counted.....
If our votes counted, it would be a great idea to vote third party for all the reasons you give, Harold.
But if you look at the results from elections since 2000, you'll find that third party and independent candidates often got many votes in areas where they had no registered voters and no known supporters, and few or no votes in areas where they had many registered voters and many known supporters.
The reason for that is because when the central tabulators tally the votes, they often use third party and independent votes to smooth the spread.
For example in elections where a popular candidate got a landslide and the tabulators were programmed to give the election to an unpopular candidate, not all the popular candidate's votes would be flipped to the unpopular candidate, only enough to ensure that they won, and the rest of the popular candidate's votes would be distributed among third party and independent candidates. That's why they'd find themselves getting many votes in some areas where they had little or no support.
Conversely, in areas where there were no really popular candidates and the race was too close for the tabulators to alter the results by simply flipping votes from one major party candidate to the other, they would take votes away from third party and independent candidates to smooth the spread, so the results would show third parties getting few or no votes in areas where they had exceptionally strong support.
Voting in faith-based elections where votes are tallied by computers that can undetectably alter the results, isn't really a good idea no matter who you vote for.
In our system of government, where candidates can be sworn into office even BEFORE the votes are counted, and then cannot be removed from office unless Congress feels like it (they usually do not), the act of voting just says that you give your permission to install a candidate in office, whether you voted for them or not, and you accept the responsibility for any debts that they may run up during their term in office. Is that the message that you want to send by voting third party?
Don't vote -- the money they spend will be your own!