I’ve been seeing desperate Democrats working to “get the vote out” lately on Facebook and on a handful of liberal online magazines that I occasionally read. Here’s a “cute” example of a graphic used to promote the idea of voting for Democrats on November 2.

So we should “Vote Democratic” to save our asses?

Why?

Obama has continued and in some cases made worse the policies of Bush. The Democrats controlled Congress and never truly fought for anything worth a damn. They have been all sound and fury with generous capitulation to special interests on Wall Street and in the Health Insurance industry. Then, once they have sold out any progressive legislation, they either try to make it sound like it’s more than it really is or blame Republicans for obstructing it instead of taking responsibility for their own lack of meaningful action.

Voting is a form of control. When you vote for a Democrat or a Republican you are simply legitimizing the control of the ruling class. You are not changing anything. Your voice is not being heard.

A small elite group of the population actually has a voice in government – those wealthy and powerful people who fund campaigns, sit on boards of powerful corporations and prestigious universities, and run giant corporations. These people and their sycophants get to rub elbows with politicians and sometimes even get to write the legislation.

Voting allows these elites to control the state while appeasing the rest of us through offering the illusion of power. But it is just an illusion. You are just a number. A voting statistic.

Put your X here next to Coke or Pepsi. Having a say in the recipe of the beverage that you are forced to consume be damned!

Don’t play their silly game. Don’t vote this November. Organize! That’s the only way your voice will ever be heard.

Many Christians in America align themselves with the Republican party. Once upon a time, I was among their number, but after a renewed commitment to my faith, I found that the more I studied and understood my faith, the more my old conservative ideology crumbled away. Today, I am convinced that the Republican party and its values are far from the values that God would have us embrace and that Republicans and many Christian leaders in America today have more in common with the Pharisees than with Jesus.

90 percent of the time, when you ask a Christian why he or she votes Republican you will find that a big factor is that he or she finds voting for a politician who supports abortion unconscionable. I’ve been there myself as a fellow pro-life Christian and know that the intentions are honorable, but the sad truth is that the issue of abortion is simply a political football in American politics. While Christian voters pat themselves on the back for pulling the Republican lever election after election, nothing has changed to stop the deaths of millions of unborn children every year and nothing will if Christians keep allowing themselves to be manipulated by politicians.

Consider that it has been over 30 years since Roe v. Wade, and we are no closer to overturning that decision today. More importantly, Republicans have had control of all three branches of government for six of the last eight years. From 2000 to 2006, we had a Republican majority in Congress, a Republican President, and 7 Republican appointed judges out of the 9 justices on the Supreme Court. And yet, no legislation was ever passed to challenge Roe v. Wade.

Instead of making excuses for the Republicans, we need to call a spade a spade: the abortion issue is a wonderful carrot to dangle in front of Christians to get their vote every election cycle, and the Republican party sees no reason to take that carrot off the table any time soon. Keeping things the way they are is a win-win because it keeps the Christian vote coming in while preventing the Republicans from experiencing the serious political damage that they should expect from any serious attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. A majority of Americans support Roe v. Wade and have supported it ever since 1973 with little fluctuation. While sad, it is the reality that we face, and the Republican party is not going to risk turning off so many voters for the benefit of a voting block that they can evidently keep in their pocket with little more than lip service.

So where does that leave us if we admit that Christian voters are being manipulated for political gain?

Well, for starters, we need to realistically look at the limites of electoral politics. As indicated above, no political party is going to have the political capital to legislate the overturning of Roe v. Wade any time soon. When it comes to government actions, we are left with embracing policies that can reduce the number of abortions performed.

It so happens that policies that fight poverty supported by the Democratic party (and other left-leaning parties such as the Green Party and independents like Ralph Nader) and opposed by the Republican party can reduce the number of abortions because many woman get abortions out of a sense that they will not be able to financially support a child. Easing the economic strain of low-wage earners, making child-care accessible to single mothers for work and for school, and ensuring that all people can receive decent health care – these moral and Biblical issues of standing up for the poor while fully worthy as issues in their own right have the virtue of reducing the conditions that tempt people into getting abortions.

So if you are a Christian, consider voting next time for a candidate whose policies will better honor God’s concern for the poor and thereby better combat abortions, instead of voting for an empty promise.

Recently, my mother and aunt were discussing the bailout bill and the elections. They are both Obama supporters although my mother traditionally supports Republicans. My aunt asked my mother for whom I was going to vote come November. When my mom told her that I would be voting for Ralph Nader, my aunt said: “Oh. So he’s going to waste his vote.”

I’m really sick of hearing this silly talk of wasted votes! Let’s settle this thing.

In order to have any meaningful discussion about what it means for a vote to be “wasted”, we have to understand what we intend to accomplish by voting. We are constantly told by the media that voting is our chance to express ourselves – our chance to stand up and be counted and heard. While I submit that voting is a pretty sad excuse for political expression, let’s run with this common notion about what voting means.

If I am to have any chance of expressing myself politically and supporting those political ideals and practices which I hold dear, then rationally speaking I need to vote for the candidate whose ideals and actions line up most completely with my own. I have thoroughly examined the positions and political history of John McCain and Barack Obama and find both candidates quite disappointing. On the other hand, I find Ralph Nader matches up quite well with me on issue after issue. Thus, given our established criteria for the meaning of voting, I would be wasting my vote if I did not vote for Ralph Nader.

The way supporters of Barack Obama talk sometimes you would think the most important thing about voting is to make sure you vote for the side that is going to win! Now that’s what I call a wasted and meaningless vote.

Voting for the lesser of two evils gets you nothing but an endless circle of evil.

Vote for the candidate who best reflects your ideals or don’t vote at all.

I ran across this cartoon today on ZNet that nicely captures the essence of U.S. “democracy”:

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Ralph Nader announced that he is running for President in 2008 again as an independent candidate, and I couldn’t be more excited!

Ever since Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards dropped out of the Presidential race, I have found myself unable to vote for any candidate in the Presidential elections nor any hope that someone with any media visibility would be challenging the status quo candidates on substantive issues like the war in Iraq, the bloated and wasteful military budget, corporate welfare, and true single-payer universal healthcare for every American.

That has now changed with Nader’s entry into the race. Not only is it exciting to actually have a voice again this election season, but also Nader’s campaign isn’t simply about giving voice to millions of Americans whose issues are ignored by the corporate candidates – it’s also about building a citizen’s movement around the country to put pressure on our elected politicians and to break through the trappings of the two-party system that make our dearly bought voter rights nearly meaningless.

Nader can’t do it alone. His campaign will need active and informed citizens in every State to volunteer and dedicate themselves to fighting against corporate control in our lives. One of the first big issues the campaign faces is the struggle for ballot access in all 50 states.

Visit the Nader campaign today and find out what you can do to help!

So today is “Super Tuesday” and I can think of nothing super about it.

Today Americans around the country who actually realize that Presidential primary elections are being held will be heading out to their polling stations to “pull the lever” for one of what has been effectively whittled down to a pool of four candidates among whom the solid differences are so minor as to be a joke. All four candidates offer nothing to change the status quo when judged by their records and their words rather than campaign slogans. All four candidates seem likely to get us involved in more imperialist wars while continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All four will leave our health care system firmly in the hands of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries instead of yanking these parasites out of the system, publicly funding health care, and putting medical decisions back into the hands of the public and their privately chosen doctors.

I was reading the “issues” section of the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday where there was an entire article devoted to comparing the musical selections of the candidates to see what exciting insights this exercise might provide. The same article also subtly observed the importance of selecting a candidate who seems likely to win in November, effectively reducing elections down to the horse race terms in which it is often framed in the corporate media.

These elections are a sham and an obscene circus.

Every four years the American public gets to select its master-in-chief from a narrow field of candidates who fiercely compete and debate within a very narrow range so as to give the illusion of choice and dialog while keeping the true options fixed to those acceptable and profitable to corporate America.

Where is the voice for peace? Where is an opponent of American empire? Where is the defender of civil liberties? Who is the champion for the workers in America living from paycheck to paycheck? Who will put an end to corporate welfare? Who will check the obscene excesses of the military-industrial-complex that President Eisenhower knew so intimately and warned the public about so many years ago?

Don’t look for these voices in an American politician because if you do see such a rare bird, you will get to witness its systematic silencing and the elimination of its chances to fly.

We cannot look to leaders to solve the problems in America anymore than a slave might look to his master for freedom.

Sheesh. You’d think this Ad on Facebook was confusing the primary elections with the Super Bowl:

Readers of my blog probably recall that I have been a vocal supporter of Dennis Kucinich because of his strong stance for genuinely progressive values and his commitments to peace and universal healthcare. I continued to support Kucinich both by talking about him to people and financially supporting his campaign despite the fact that his virtual silencing by the mainstream media made him all but a lost cause.

Today that changes.

Here are the relevant news articles:

• Goodbye Dennis
• Edwards Reconsidered
• Kucinich Urges Supporters to Back Obama On Second Iowa Ballot

Kucinich has called upon his supporters in Iowa to back Barack Obama as their second choice candidate. Obama’s campaign is high on hopeful sounding language with little meaningful content and close examination of his record gives the lie to his image as a candidate for any real change. While by no means perfect, John Edwards is a much better choice than Obama in that he is raising class issues and talking about fighting corporate power while Obama talks about compromising with it.

Obama and Clinton are more of the same old corporate Democrats who dominated the Clinton era and who currently dominate this utter disappointment of a Congress (whose approval rating is even lower than the President’s abysmal rating). Edwards is the one chance for real change in a “mainstream” candidate if not quite the change that Kucinich would represent.

By lending his support to Obama, Kucinich has betrayed his progressive base and lost my support. I pray Edwards can carry the day in Iowa today. If not, it’s looking more and more likely that I will have to abstain on principle from the election in November.

As an anarchist, I have extremely mixed feelings about participation in bourgeoisie elections. Reading the excellent A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, one gets a deep sense that real political change almost always occurs through direct action taken by the people rather than through participating in elections and appealing to politicians in hopes that they will listen to the people instead of their backers in big business.

That is why historically many if not most anarchists have been opposed to voting. The argument is that participating in the election rat race with sacrifices of time, energy, and money in the hopes of getting a candidate elected who will then bring about change once in office is usually a doomed effort that ultimately results in little more than draining people of energy and enthusiasm that they could have instead devoted to organizing and direct action. I can understand this position, and I have felt some of the effects that it predicts first hand.

Despite these experiences and despite the risks of losing sight of the true battlefield within our hearts and out in the streets and halls of society, we cannot completely shun elections, for they can sometimes (though not often) prove beneficial to the cause of human freedom and progress. Participating in local elections and seeking to get others to participate brings us closer to a society that consists of decentralized communities governing themselves. As we move further up the ladder towards the federal government and ultimately the Presidency, the utility of voting diminishes and the potential for merely wasting one’s time in an ultimately discouraging and draining exercise in futility becomes all the more likely. The reality is that the Presidential race is a contest between corporate sponsored elites whose differences are mostly skin deep. The voting ritual then only serves to reinforce the top-down authoritarian system by offering the illusion that the people have a say in their government.

So, given all these reservations about voting, why then am I supporting Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his 2008 Presidential campaign?

I do so because once in a while the system breaks. Once in a while a true statesman gets involved in government out of a sense of idealism and a commitment to principles and makes it through to a position of power without bowing to elite interests. Once in a while such a person even makes it through the process without being corrupted. And sometimes such a person can truly fight for the people and be an asset in the struggle for a just and truly democratic society.

I believe that Dennis Kucinich is such an individual. Studying his life and his record in politics, you will find a good and honest man who consistently fights for progressive principles as a champion of the people. Where other politicians reveal a widespread pattern of compromise for the sake of political gain, Dennis demonstrates an unbending character and a tenacious courage to stand alone where his party cowers.

I think we can trust Dennis Kucinich. Instead of dancing around issues and trying to appeal to some imaginary creature known as the swing voter, Dennis addresses the great issues that face our society with bold plans of action instead of hollow rhetoric. We can trust that Dennis will give his everything as President to consistently fight for the progressive values that so many Americans care about but never find expressed by any of the candidates offered to us on a narrow slate every election season.

Dennis has a detailed plan for universal health care that will actually work and get to the root of the problem instead of ill-conceived attempts to plug up holes in a sinking ship. This issue is very important to me both as a passionate Christian and anarchist who is concerned for the poor and the sick and the oppressed, and as a strategist who recognizes that without universal health care, the workers of this country simply cannot afford to take the risks of strikes and direct action against oppressive employers because their lives and the lives of their families literally depend upon their continued employment.

Dennis has always opposed the illegal, immoral, destructive, and highly expensive Iraq War. Besides the honorable Republican Congressman Ron Paul, Dennis is the only consistent antiwar member of Congress and is the only antiwar progressive candidate for President. Dennis Kucinich opposes the Iraq War as well as the ominously likely war on Iran, but he is so much more than just a critic of the immoral wars of the day: he a true devotee to the causes of peace and social justice.

Dennis is a champion for the working class. He seeks to achieve a balance of power between labor and corporations – a balance that is severely lacking. And if that falls short of the revolutionary changes that most anarchists have in mind, then I say so what! It would be a big step in the right direction. Instead of focusing narrowly on ideological purity, we must work to improve lives now as well as fight for the future that we wish to see and build. We need short term goals within the system and long term goals that transcend the system.

I could go on and on about Dennis Kucinich and describe how he stands on each of the important issues that face America today. I could detail for you how in each case – incredibly enough – I have found in Kucinich a candidate who shares my concerns and is willing taking a stand for the good fight. I can share all of this with you, but in truth it wouldn’t fully communicate to you why I support Dennis Kucinich for President and why I strongly encourage everyone who reads these words to become better acquainted with the man via his campaign website.

At the root of it, I support Dennis for President because he has breathed new life into a very discouraging situation. I support Dennis Kucinich because quite frankly he inspires me. He cares about the same things that I do, and he speaks out and points to the hope that is always there but that is sometimes so hard to see. By taking action himself and running for President again, he reminds us that we can all take action together and that we are not alone. It’s an encouraging reminder that everyone needs once in a while.

If you care about progressive values for America or even if you’re simply fed up with the same old uninspiring politicians paraded before us by the media every election, then please visit Kucinich for President 2008 and find out more about the vision that Dennis has for our country and how you can help him.