The irony of the political spectrum that you give is its inaccuracy. Americans are willing to move to the Left, they just lack leadership.
I swear, I'm to the point that I've thought that maybe it's time to get to work organizing local chapters of something like Die Linke here. I'm not voting for Obama, I'm going to be writing in my vote for Nader, mostly to express my dissatisfaction with what the Democratic party has deemed to offer up this time around. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
There are two choices available. That's it. If you didn't like Obama, the time to work against him was in the primaries. I did. The 'heightening the contradictions' strategy is both morally questionable and very unlikely to work. For one thing, it's more likely to push the Dems to the right rather than the left. Nader ain't leadership, he's a Repub funded concern troll working on their behalf, just like the PUMA's. Take a good look at how Dem legislators from swing areas voted after 2000 - did they move left? Eight years after 2000, with all that happened, you'd have to be a fool to think that electing Republicans will make things better.
If you've got the energy for it, organize where you are on a local level to try to move the Democrats leftwards. City council, education boards, county dem committees, etc.
Marek, how many people do you know who've been told that the reason that their job was sent overseas was for the better good?
How many people do you personally know who have worked in a factory that has been offshored?
In you own community, what percent of the population knows someone who's suffering hardship because we've been told that there is no alternative (TINA) to voting for the lesser of two evils for the past 20 years?
How many empty lots are there where you live that were once factories that supported thousands of jobs that allowed your friends and family to enter the middle class?
I will not be told to how to vote out of some vague sense that there is no alternative, because when we are held to that standard, there is in fact no alternative. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
As far as poverty and lost industrial jobs go - guess what, in my area they're long, long gone - they were exported in the fifties to all those places which have been losing factories for the past thirty years.
In any case, traditional industrial labour is not the solution. Productivity keeps going up. Even if we cut our manufactured products imports by half, that would be what - a couple percentage points of GDP, a couple million jobs, at ever decreasing real wages? What we need to do is transform the service sector the way the industrial sector was transformed from the New Deal through the fifties, from poorly paid, crappy jobs, to well paid ones that provided a decent life. We can't go back to the sixties economy.
But not in a million years would I have considered abstention, even though the result was clear. I was not going to have been among those who let Sarkozy happen. Not if you had paid me for it.
With McCain, it's far worse. You may hate Obama (I sure wanted Edwards), but he won't take you to Iran, nor appoint another lunatic fringe extreme right of a Supreme Court judge, who will then deliver the election to the Rightist candidate everytime forever. Please, don't let him happen. Then I will join you in your vocal complaints that Democrats are way too far to the right. Democrats are not even centrist, and Obama is campaigning as in between the parties, yes, that is awful. But McCain-Palin??? Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
The problem is this is the real world, not academia! This is not a test, this is survival, ManfM. This is not just the, perhaps, last...... chance to turn the US around, but to stop the destruction that it causes worldwide! It´s not a game to be taken lightly or used as a fancy intellectual vendetta on a whim.
I truly, sincerely, hope you are not serious, or that you will very seriously reconsider. Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.
This is not just the, perhaps, last...... chance to turn the US around, but to stop the destruction that it causes worldwide!
And you really believe that electing Obama will do that?
I'm sorry, I don't.
I've been in this game called politics long enough to know when I'm being played, and that, I believe, is precisely the case here.
Electing Obama will change nothing.
And as for the "moral" obligation to vote for Senator Obama, does electoral relevance also mean that Germans should be forbidden from voting for Die Linke?
Or is the United States the only country who's internal politics should be subject to international condemnation?
I have seen the damage that neo-liberal policies have done to my country, and the only people in the United States who think that this is something new are those who live in protected shells on the coasts who have been largely immune to the consequences of their actions.
Why is it that America is supposed to vote in a milquetoast neo-liberal who may, or may not, oppose further military adventures in order to atone for the world's sins?
As I remember it, there where Spanish troops in those columns that took Baghdad? Did the Spanish people want that?
Why is it that the Spanish and Italians are exempted from this need for public flagellation while the United States is not?
Because our government demanded it? Because there were those who did not fight back?
So we're into collective punishment, now? And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
Germany is a PR system with multiple parties. Here we have a choice between two candidates. In European terms what you're doing is the equivalent of writing in the Postman's name in the second round of the French presidential election.
