democrats: abstain!
by Andrew Bosworth
Published: February 25, 2008
In normal times, it would make sense to support the candidacy of the Democratic Party. But we are not in normal times.
What happened in 2000 was no less than revolutionary - a party was radicalized, a state was captured, a bureaucracy was purged, courts were stuffed and a cultural decency crusade was launched. It was the Glorious Bushevik Revolution.
Since 2000, the United States has witnessed a broad assault on its democratic traditions. Scholars have focused on the USA Patriot Act of 2001, child’s play compared to changes in the law during Bush’s second term.
The tipping point came in 2006, when the Military Commissions Act terminated habeas corpus, which had previously forced authorities to account for a person’s detention. This political right dated to the 1215 Magna Carta.
A year later, in 2007, the Military Commissions Act allowed the Secretary of Defense to determine that any person, even an American citizen, can be an unlawful enemy combatant. This legalized the Jose Padilla treatment. Padilla was a US citizen held for four years without a trial on a combination of false and trumped-up charges.
Then came the John Warner Defense Authorization Act. It nullified the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act(1878), which had prohibited the President from deploying troops for domestic purposes. The new Act allowed the President to declare a “public emergency” and to seize control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of governors in order to “suppress public disorder.”
An even less-publicized move towards martial law is found in Presidential Decision Directive 51. It established procedures for “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the case of a “Catastrophic Emergency.” More specifically, Directive 51 can lead to the militarization of law enforcement.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not talking about any of this. Nor are they talking about mass incarceration - about United States having the world’s highest incarceration rate, higher than Russia or China. Well over two million Americans are behind bars, and over one million of them are in prison for non-violent and petty offenses: small-time drug dealing, street hustling, prostitution, bouncing checks and even writing graffiti. One reason for the jailing of the lumpenproletariat, the flotsam of society, is that a new “prison-industrial complex” has emerged to siphon money from government on a per-prisoner, per-day basis.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not objecting to virtual voting - and privatized voting at that. Corporations now obtain no-bid contracts and run paperless elections on secret software, using private servers. Then, these companies, like Diebold, are also in charge of retrieving the votes from cyberspace and counting them.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not talking about Orwellian mass surveillance. After decades of implementation, the federal government finally stores all digital information on a routine basis (or has immediate access to it by telecommunications companies, now under immunity from prosecution): banking data; consumer purchases; telephone records; emails; utility bills; educational and medical records (even the purchases of prescription medicine); and library records - all without search warrants, and all in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against”unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are not exposing what Benazir Bhutto asserted in November of 2007: that Osama bin Laden is dead, murdered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. Will a Democratic president keep the cardboard bogeyman alive?
In other words, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would only bring change at the margins of American politics. Apart from taking on health care (which some Republicans flirt with anyway), a new Democratic president would talk about “green-collar” jobs for an ethanol industry (which probably makes no business sense). Oh yes, they would make sure that toys from China had no lead. Basically, a Democratic administration would put a happy-sticker on neo-fascism. For this reason, Democratic voters should stay home in November and let the Republicans take the fall for what is about to come.
If neither democratic candidate is willing to reverse the direction tyranny and empire, why not proceed with some Republican? The ideal Republican candidate would have been a Giuliani-Huckabee hybrid. Giuliani would have invented a reason to invade a Middle Eastern nation and to perpetuate the Gilded Age. He could have carried the torch for Halliburton and Exxon. Huckabee, who as Governor denied an abortion to a victim of rape (by her stepfather no less), would have maintained the Bush war on science.
But the mayor-warlord and the Rapture-Ready, backwoods preacher are not being fused into a dream candidate. Instead, the Republicans are about to nominate John McCain, who is decent but clearly lacks the glamour of either Democrat. Apparently, the Republican National Committee (the Inner Party) is eager to have the Democrats inherit the White House. What does the Party know that we proles don’t?
Right now, the emperor wears no clothes. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would just put them back on.
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