Intent and motive
In my recent post about the capture of the Obama Administration by the financial services lobby, I said it was irrelevant whether they were deliberately looking to line the pockets of the banking industry. This is an important point as you decide whether to donate campaign money, how or whether to vote, and who to elect to office in all the upcoming elections.
In our democracy, the ballot box is where you get to act as jury. Campaign contributions is where you get to be the judge. You can convict any incumbent politician of misusing public trust and yielding to monied special interests by withholding your money and voting the individual out of office.
So when you make these decisions, always keep this in mind:
To convict, you don’t need to prove intent, you just need to prove motive.
Oh come on , Ed. What good does it do to withhold money and vote an individual out of office. You know darn well he’ll simply be replaced by someone else equally debased and septic. Best to boycott elections altogether out of self respect and to seek redress through mass demonstrations and strikes where possible. The system as it has now evolved is utterly unresponsive to attempts at parliamentary remediation. It is rank silliness to imagine otherwise. In a real way, to participate at all is to act insanely.
You’re not reading the post accurately: “how or whether to vote” covers
what you are saying.
With respect, a bit facile, I’m afraid, Ed. My comment was directed specifically at what was asserted in the statement below and that without referrence to non-participation:
“In our democracy, the ballot box is where you get to act as jury. Campaign contributions is where you get to be the judge. You can convict any incumbent politician of misusing public trust and yielding to monied special interests by withholding your money and voting the individual out of office.”
Is this statement palpably true? Let’s see. What’s presupposed here is that (1) we are, in fact, in a democracy, (2) can by voting make a judgment about guilt and innocence as to misuse of public monies and, (3) can actually and meaningfully change the moral environment by expelling an adjudged miscreant. While it may be true that one can make a judgment about guilt or innocence by voting (#2 above), because special interest contributors own both incumbent and non-incumbent candidates, we have neither a democracy (#1 above) nor a capacity meaningfully to punish an adjudged miscreant and cleanse public service (#3 above). Its not so much whether one decides “whether or how to vote” but rather whether voting carries any import at all.
Voting in the United States today is little different than voting in Bulgaria cerca 1952. If you know going in that AIPAC, for example, has privately coerced the candidates of both parties into agreeing that a pre-emptive military strike on Iran is the good policy, that banking interests will contribute only to candidates favoring more stringent debt collection laws and that the candidates themselves eagerly accept these strictures, voting on such questions is, at best, somnambulistic. Yet these are our realities. Yesterday’s vote on the UN’s Goldstone report is a case in point. The vote not to support the Goldstone conclusions, 344 to 36. Ask yourself if a vote like that was arrived at without coercion. Josef Stalin in his finest moments couldn’t have done much better. In such circumstances is one really free to cast a vote that hasn’t already been stolen. I don’t think so. Non-participation, then, is simply a kind of grudging acceptance, the very form of powerlessness.