[Occupymendocino] (no subject)

[Ad Ross]

DAN ELLSBERG on the 2012 Presidential Elections

t is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration  
under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.
The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose  
values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially  
activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this  
period.

An activist colleague recently said to me: "I hear you're supporting  
Obama."

I was startled, and took offense. "Supporting Obama? Me?!"

"I lose no opportunity publicly," I told him angrily, to identify  
Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's decriminalized torture  
and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who's  
launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite  
detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like  
myself than all previous presidents put together. "Would you call  
that support?"

My friend said, "But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing  
states to vote for him! How could you say that? I don't live in a  
swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any  
circumstances."

My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no  
different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or  
anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically  
worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme  
Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health  
coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.

I told him: "I don't 'support Obama.' I oppose the current Republican  
Party. This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive  
candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing  
states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are  
going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or  
not."

As Noam Chomsky said recently, "The Republican organization today is  
extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It's  
worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without  
sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives."

Following that logic, he's said to an interviewer what my friend  
heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I were a person in a swing state,  
I'd vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because  
there is no other choice."

The election is at this moment a toss-up. That means this is one of  
the uncommon occasions when we progressives -- a small minority of  
the electorate -- could actually have a significant influence on the  
outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.

The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from  
office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to  
vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else. And that has  
to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals  
who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a  
third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just  
disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done  
in the last four years and will probably keep doing).

They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground  
state for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the  
less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I see it,  
that's precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending  
right now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take  
progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that  
effort of persuasion effectively.

It will take someone these disheartened progressives and liberals  
will listen to. Someone manifestly without illusions about the  
Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they look at the  
president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney  
or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies  
in focus.

It's true that the differences between the major parties are not  
nearly as large as they and their candidates claim, let alone what we  
would want. It's even fair to use Gore Vidal's metaphor that they  
form two wings ("two right wings," as some have put it) of a single  
party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says,  
the War Party.

Still, the political reality is that there are two distinguishable  
wings, and one is reliably even worse than the other, currently much  
worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of that reality  
serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory  
of the worse.

The traditional third-party mantra, "There's no significant  
difference between the major parties" amounts to saying: "The  
Republicans are no worse, overall." And that's absurd. It constitutes  
shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It's  
crazily divorced from present reality.

And it's not at all harmless to be propagating that absurd falsehood.  
It has the effect of encouraging progressives even in battleground  
states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close election for  
someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others  
to act likewise.That's an effect that serves no one but the  
Republicans, and ultimately the 1 percent.

It's not merely understandable, it's entirely appropriate to be  
enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often acted outrageously,  
not merely timidly or "disappointingly." If impeachment were  
politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it  
(like George W. Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely  
human to want to punish him, not to "reward" him with another term or  
a vote that might be taken to express trust, hope or approval.

But rage is not generally conducive to clear thinking. And it often  
gets worked out against innocent victims, as would be the case here  
domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in Romney's taking  
key battleground states that decide the outcome of this election.

To punish Obama in this particular way, on Election Day -- by  
depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of office in favor  
of Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and marginal  
in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the  
U.S. but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans  
could still convert this recession to a Great Depression), the  
environment and climate change. It could well lead to war with Iran  
(which Obama has been creditably resisting, against pressure from  
within his own party). And it would spell, via Supreme Court  
appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to  
four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring  
serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the  
Constitution and the rule of law. That's for us and the rest of the  
people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our  
lives -- through organizing, building movements and agitating.

In the eight to twelve close-fought states -- especially Florida,  
Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New  
Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin --  
for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in  
those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to  
be complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with  
all its consequences.

To think of that as urging people in swing states to "vote their  
conscience" is, I believe, dangerously misleading advice. I would say  
to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on Election Day to  
vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you need a  
second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.

I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: "Cast  
your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole  
influence." He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience,  
or as he titled it himself, "Resistance to Civil Authority."

It still means that to me. But this is a year when for people who  
think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in battleground states --  
casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your whole  
influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is  
even more important.

That means for progressives in the next couple of weeks -- in  
addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying (largely  
against policies or prospective policies of President Obama,  
including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and  
civil disobedience that are needed all year round and every year --  
using one's voice and one's e-mails and op-eds and social media to  
encourage citizens in swing states to vote against a Romney victory  
by voting for the only real alternative, Barack Obama.

Daniel Ellsberg is a former State and Defense Department official who  
has been arrested for acts of non-violent civil disobedience over  
eighty times, initially for copying and releasing the top secret  
Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in prison. Living in a  
non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President Obama.




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Sent from my obsolete desktop.

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