To Vote or Not to Vote

[crusader1492]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

OBAMA REAFFIRMS PLEDGE TO RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE


ANCA Welcomes latest Obama-Biden Statement Calling for Strong U.S.-Armenia Relationship


WASHINGTON, DC – With just days left to the crucial November 4th presidential elections, the Obama-Biden campaign reaffirmed its commitment to Armenian Genocide recognition and a strong U.S.-Armenia relationship, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

A statement titled “Barack Obama: Supporting U.S.-Armenia Relations,” relayed to Armenians for Obama Chairman Areen Ibranossian earlier today as well as the ANCA, affirms that “The Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923, resulted in the deportation of nearly 2 million Armenians, and approximately 1.5 million of those deported were killed. Barack Obama believes we must recognize this tragic reality and strongly supports a U.S.-Armenian relationship that advances our common security and strengthens Armenian democracy.” The statement goes on to note “Barack Obama strongly supports passage of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H.Res.106 and S.Res.106) and will recognize the Armenian Genocide.”

“The ANCA welcomes further reaffirmation of Barack Obama’s strong commitment to issues of concern to the Armenian American community, including proper recognition of the Armenian Genocide and fostering a strong U.S.-Armenia relationship,” stated ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. “ANCA chapters and activists across the U.S. will continue, in these last days, to work hard for the Obama-Biden ticket and the candidacies of the large number of Senators and Representatives who have supported Armenian American concerns.”

The Obama-Biden statement comes amid a flurry of reports in the Turkish press regarding a meeting that supposedly took place over the last several days between a senior Turkish official, Ahmet Davutoğlu, and a representative of the Obama-Biden Campaign, after which Davutoglu called into question Obama’s commitment to this core human rights issue.
Last week, the ANCA formalized its longstanding support for Barack Obama with an official endorsement of the Obama-Biden campaign for the Presidency of the United States. The ANCA had first endorsed Sen. Obama in January, 2008, leading up to the critical super-Tuesday primary elections.

Click here to read the ANCA endorsement of the Obama-Biden ticket and review all supporting documents of his candidacy.

As always, the ANCA welcomes feedback on its service to the Armenian American community. Please forward your thoughts and suggestions about the 2008 Presidential election by email to [email protected].

The complete text of the latest Obama-Biden campaign statement is provided below.

[yerazhishda]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Crusader, did you know that Obama is very pro-union?

[crusader1492]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Crusader, did you know that Obama is very pro-union?

[yerazhishda]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

This makes me want to vote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVRmsLAvVzQ

Great video, it really shows what we Armenians can do when we are united!

[gmd]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Mock the Vote

Daily Article by David Heleniak | Posted on 11/3/2008

Jesse Ventura, when he's not talking about 9-11, makes a lot of sense. Describing the two party system to Larry King, he said,
[W]hat you have today is like walking into the grocery store and you go to the soft drink department, and there is only Pepsi and Coke. Those are the two you get to choose from. There is no Mountain Dew, no Root Beer, no Orange. They're both Colas; one is slightly sweeter than the other, depending on which side of the aisle you are on.
In an interview with Newsmax, he described politicians in the two party system as pro wrestlers.
In pro wrestling, out in front of the people, we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out of each other, and that's how we get your money, [and get you to] come down and buy tickets. They're the same thing. Out in front of the public and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of each other, but behind the scenes they're all going to dinner, cutting deals. And [they're] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today's political world, with these two parties.
Jesse's right. Our political system is a farce. This year, we have running for president a warmonger who's a reluctant socialist versus a socialist who's a reluctant warmonger. We have two parties that claim they're different, but when the Establishment, the Complex, our shadowy overlords, whatever you want to call them, really want something, they get it. When the Establishment wanted the Bailout in the face of almost universal grassroots opposition, they got it. When the Complex wanted immunity to the telecoms who knowingly spied on Americans, they got it. When our shadowy overlords wanted stormtroopers to brutally stifle protesters during the party conventions, they got it.
But even if voters had a real choice — and even if the politicians followed the majority will on issues that matter — the system would still most likely be a farce. As Augustine observed, without justice, a government is nothing but a band of thieves. Augustine was writing about kingdoms, but his insight applies to democracies as well. Without justice, the ability of the subjects of a government to vote on the laws and rulers that govern them doesn't make a government any more legitimate than an unjust monarchy. And the founders of this country did not believe democracies were likely to be just.
As Walter Williams points out,
We often hear the claim that our nation is a democracy. That wasn't the vision of the founders. They saw democracy as another form of tyranny.
In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes that
it is difficult to find many proponents of democracy in the history of political theory. Almost all major thinkers had nothing but contempt for democracy. Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S., nowadays considered the model of democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule.
In order to create a just government, the founders established a constitutionally limited republic, in which the popular vote was to be just one check among many. Notably, the word "democracy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. Yet today, the word is sacred. As election day approaches, Americans dutifully watch inane debates, respectfully watch commercials in which celebrities harangue them to "rock the vote" or other such nonsense, and compulsively ask each other who they're going to vote for.
On election day, they go to the polls as if they were receiving Holy Communion and then go through the rest of the day wearing "I Voted" stickers as if these stickers were ashes on Ash Wednesday. Pat Buchanan calls the blind reverence to and awe of the seemingly divine force of democracy "democracy worship." He notes it was the prospect of spreading democracy to the Middle East that ultimately convinced The Decider to decide on war in Iraq. So how did we get from the founder's deep suspicion of majority rule to the deification of democracy?
Once, humans lived in small bands and were free. True, life was dangerous, but no one told you what to do. As Philip Jackson explains,
Men might hunt individually or in groups. But when they cooperated, leadership was not based on official rank, but rather on one hunter proposing a group hunt and recruiting others to follow him. None were compelled to follow, however, and different hunts might have different leaders based on the relative charisma of different individuals at different times. Women needed even less coordination. With them leadership would be more a matter of the wiser or more skilled giving advice as the need arose.
Then came the great collusion, followed by the long oppression. As humans increased in number and food became harder to come by, bands became tribes and tribes became chiefdoms. Big Chief, hungry for power, convinced the high priest to delude the people to his consent. Big Chief was divinely appointed, they were told, and maybe even divine himself. Therefore, the people must do what he says.
Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), economist, historian, and political theorist, was one of the greatest minds of the 20th centuries. Perhaps Rothbard's greatest achievement was his identification of the "court intellectual." In contrast to the masses, who "do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently," intellectuals are society's opinion shapers. The court intellectual is the intellectual who, "in return for a share of, a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule with which to convince a misguided public."
Until recently, the propaganda put out by the court intellectuals was linked to traditional religion. To quote Rothbard again,
particularly potent among the intellectual handmaidens of the State was the priestly caste, cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar. The State "established" the Church and conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects. In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction and inculcated this sanction into the populace.
In the West, the myth of the divine right of kings held sway until the Enlightenment.
According to Keith Preston, "A principal achievement of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries was the demolition of the notion of the divine right of kings." The word "enlightenment" may conjure up images of a man sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop, at one with the universe, but in regard to the time period, enlightenment refers not to mystical insight but to the realization that much of the received wisdom — including the myth of the divine right of kings — was a pack of lies. With the courage to question the lies and disseminate their conclusions, the writers of the Enlightenment began a revolution in thought that culminated in the Declaration of Independence.
Unfortunately, at the same time they were knocking down one pillar of the old order, another writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was planting the seeds of democracy worship. In Rousseau's mystical vision of a society governed by what he called the "general will," each of us would put "his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we [would] receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." The resulting sovereign, "being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither [would have] … nor … [could] have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power [would] need give no guarantee to its subjects. In his imagined world, "[t]he Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, [would] … always [be] what it should be."
James Bovard, who calls Rousseau the "modern state's evil prophet," contends that in promoting his concept of the "general will," Rousseau "unleashed the genie of absolute power in the name of popular sovereignty, which had hitherto been unknown."
Rousseau's concept of the general will proved irresistible to future court intellectuals, as it perfectly conflated society and state — a useful trick indeed. Rothbard wrote,
With the [subsequent] rise of democracy, it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense: such as "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and tyrannical; it is also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must he paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and therefore nothing untoward has occurred.
Observing the power of "the myth that says we are governing ourselves," Lew Rockwell notes that whereas "[k]ings of old would have been overthrown in short order if they had tried to grab 40 percent of people's earnings, or told them how big to make their toilet tanks, or determined how schools taught every subject," modern Americans "turn a blind eye to petty tyrannies in our midst."
As Bovard comments, it is as if "[b]eing permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom."
"It is difficult to find many proponents of democracy in the history of political theory."
Wise up, America. There's nothing special about 50% plus one. Truth and justice cannot be determined by a show of hands. We are not the government. Voting is not a sacrament. And as it stands today, when we're only given a choice between two Establishment-approved candidates, voting is a joke.
Voltaire, the undisputed leader of the Enlightenment, used humor and wit as two of his primary weapons, and, as Robert Ingersoll remarked, "In the presence of absurdity he laughed…" It was largely by making the divine right of kings a laughing stock that the Enlightenment writers destroyed it. It is time for us to do the same thing to the divine right of the majority.
This year, vote laughing or stay home.

http://mises.org/story/3170

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Very good article gmd.

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Don't Vote

by David Ker Thomson

Believing that each person has an equal vote in a democracy is like believing that banks will check each mortgage to make sure it’s not a subprime risk. In fact banksters have been bundling mortgages – tossing subprimes in with primes and selling them as an aggregate – for long enough that we had been starting to believe there weren’t any subprimes anymore but merely ascension, something like what Evangelicals call The Rapture. Well, there’s been a lot of downward rapture lately. My brother is losing his house right now to the repo man, though he has an email in his inbox from two years ago – from me – telling him not to buy his crap house in Nashville, that the market would drop. Now the house will return to its original owners, the raccoons, who may have mixed feelings about his departure, because Clive, a gentle soul, had allowed them to remain in the attic and would play his mandolin for them.

The electoral landscape has as many rotten boroughs as the mortgage or "real" estate one. If your vote is for one of the two approved parties (sometimes three in non-U.S. parliamentary democracies), it’s bundled and counted, and if not, it’s tallied in a cluster of votes which are given only nominal status. Usually this is performed as some kind of musical chairs routine, where your vote bundle gets something called a "seat" if your team has played the game correctly. If you want to dissent, your vote bundle is not given a seat, but your group can tell each other with grave faces that you’ve "done" something to "change" things. Let’s be clear about this. Most votes for change are bundled and thrown away. From this fact you might guess that voting is merely useless, but that isn’t the case. Your vote for alternative candidates is useless but not your vote for the system. Your vote is useless for change but powerful for stasis – it ratifies the system and sends a strong message that you think it’s okay to have a dynamic where any vote for change is tossed out. Don’t kid yourself. Your deed in the voting booth isn’t merely useless, it’s pernicious.

How has voting, the mechanism for ceding authority to surrogates, come to seem like the means of actually reclaiming that authority? Voting is highly esoteric, even if you don’t include certain anomalies in Western parliamentary procedure that stand out for their freak value, like the American electoral "college." But voting presents and re-presents itself as simple. Even those who have the most to lose from impenetrable and arcane electoralist procedural shufflings will routinely tell you that each person has a vote (I’ve even heard 17-year-olds tell me this!), though "each" and "person" and "has" and "vote" are highly contested categories with a level of complexity that does not lend itself to the glib integer of the "cast." Everyone used to "know" that a person was a man and not a woman and not a black man. Now we "know" that each person gets a vote. In such a system, could "I" "have" "a" "negative vote"? If you think the word "a" isn’t contested, you may have forgotten Ohio and Florida. How have we come to this appalling state, where the vehicle that has made the greatest inroads on the self living authentically in the world, a vehicle which has thrust its tendrils into our most private parts, pierced our flesh, and dragged us off to Washington like so many interchangeable Mr. Smiths, can continue to appear not only as our savior but as our very self? Even lovers of big trees clamor to have a part in the general calamity, to comfort themselves with a color in the electoralist spectrum that is everywhere stolen from them in nature itself. Here in Toronto the number of seats the greens (who according to their signs were "voting for the future") garnered in the recent election was zero, which is a nice symbol because you can make a zero with your fingers and use it to view trees, which tend to look bigger this way. I write here as an environmentalist, by the way. I mention this because you might not be able to see my tears from where you’re sitting.

This democratic dissatisfaction with the self, the urge to enlist it in some tawdry ventriloquist act, to keep it at a distance, is as old as philosophy, and could make you want to drink hemlock. As for me, I’m named after the second king of the xxxs, a guy who liked to spy on women while they were bathing, murder their husbands, kill Palestinians for sport, and keep a sexy virgin in bed even after he was impotent. "Now this is a man after my own heart," said the Semitic storm god who installed him, and I have to say I’ve always liked David, because he was a big man who could weep, repent, and also write excellent prose. Of course, he wasn’t as big as the first king, who’d been installed on the basis of his height and movie-star good looks, despite major provisos and warnings in triplicate from the storm god that this whole idea of a leadership structure wasn’t going to do anyone any good. Well, it all came to a bad end, of course.

Why are we so sure we need leaders at all? Much of what passes for an answer to this is a highly complex set of insecurities but which appears to be as simple as citing pavlovian cue words and phrases like "Hitler" or "intruder in wife’s bedroom." Here is our condition, then, to mistake the complex for the simple and the simple for the complex. The pre-utopian condition comes "after" modernism and post-modernism with their pretensions of naming our historical moment, but pre-utopia only appears to be something separate from our heart, here, now. It is the utopian condition with a cloud. I speak here as a five-year street person who knows a thing or two about intruders. Still I say, even when I am in the street: here. Not there. On the street, I learned to wake in strange places. The point is less about where you wake up, than that you do.

It’s funny that in the system of elsewhere, of capital and statist abstractions, utopia is spoken of as distant in space and time. But really it is no where, in the same way that one’s heart is not a where, unless it is everywhere. Eat, drink, sleep, be here now.

When people ask me what I have against democracy, I assume they mean other than its long history of bloody foreign adventures or other than the fact that its best forms are always complicit with totalitarian regimes, or other than the fact that it arises in slave states like 18th-century America or ancient Greece, or other than that it pretends to authenticate the self by sending it as a degraded proxy elsewhere to cede authority to people who are usually dumber than oneself and always less scrupulous, or that its rituals of affirmation and allegiance are too embarrassing to watch on TV even with the sound turned off, or that it’s too embarrassing to contemplate the image of one’s otherwise intelligent friends watching things called "debates" as if their irony somehow buffers them from the idiocy. So maybe they mean, other than the obvious. Do the Made in China stickers all over their apartments count as something other than the obvious? Do we need Hannah Arendt to tell us that democracy is merely a stage on the way to totalitarianism? Here’s what you get in a democracy: until December 31st of this year, the label "Made in Canada" can legally be affixed to apple juice grown in China by Chinese people using Chinese apples and reduced to concentrate in China, on the basis of its having water and a container added to it at the Canadian end [Clark Hoskin, Edible Toronto, Fall, 2008]. You can learn everything you need to know about democracy’s self-deceptions from that word "Made." Statist self-deception is constitutive, not incidental.

We’re nickled and dimed in this way, lied to and cheated upon in fractions too numerous to tabulate, and it is no consolation that we in turn murder in decimal bits, suck Iraqi baby blood in subtle calculations reckoned to the right of the decimal point when we fill up our automobiles, and then slap ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that at least we’re not like people with "regimes."

From the midst of this welter of micro-deceptions, the state exacts your tribute as a gesture of excess, and your submission comes not as a response to a request for the small change of your self, not merely for bits of you as the micro-fractured political subject you feel yourself to be. Rather the state wants all of you, and calls you to duty beneath the shining upright of the integer, the neat compression of the self into a single upright one (1), yourself squished sideways into the vertical submission of supportive citizen, like a soldier at attention, a sideways and non-committal smile, a single digit indistinguishable from the next, and your superiors can then mobilize you – now as an it – at will.

A sign on my neighbor’s lawn urges us to vote, to "Stand Up For Canada." The sign keeps tipping over. Someone writes to tell me that the way to fix democracy is a new invention, The Fourth Party. As if the name doesn’t hint at its likelihood of success. Voting for something called The Fourth Party is like hoping for a long line at the bank. Don’t get me started.

I haven’t had the heart to call Clive. In my mind’s eye, he’s sitting in the empty house, playing one last round for the animals. Then he gathers himself to leave. If I squint, I might see what comes next.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/thomson2.html

[One-Way]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

I'm not voting.

[MrHyeSev]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

This is my first year of voting.

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

I'm not voting.

Wise choice sir.