Letter to Editor

Why Don’t We Vote?

by Viola Ransel, Earlville, NY

Because it makes no difference which of the two available parties are in office. And even if one candidate was a little bit better than the other, you could elect him and he still wouldn’t win – Election 2000. In that same election, third party candidates were barred from the corporate sponsored debates and threatened with arrest if they even stepped on to the premises.

It’s open season on The People. Republicans cut taxes for the rich and programs that benefit the rest of us. Democrats give us GATT and NAFTA. Neither party really cares that the majority of The People are being downsized and outsourced to the poverty level and below at an alarming rate. All is well as long as Wall Street and its shareholders continue to profit. The Republican and Democratic candidates are merely one from Column A and one from Column B, near identical corporate shields for the powers that be who actually run the US “economocracy.”

Political ad campaigns themselves are designed to get us NOT to vote. In addition to being poorly written and produced, the mind-numbing number of them and childish name-calling as opposed to issue exposition, gets the remote clicked back to what’s really important to corporate America, the selling of shoddy merchandise which nobody needs, bookended by swill masquerading as news and entertainment. And any political coverage you see, corporate-owned of course, will cover only who’s winning, where they’re campaigning and what do the polls say, NOT an explanation of where the candidates stand and their differences. (There are no differences, except in degree. And they both stand for the same thing, corporate rights over citizens rights.)

We all should be voting for a third party candidate, but both major parties, and their corporate backers, like the Crips and the Bloods, have colluded to prevent any third party invasion of the corporate turf. However, if all the negativity generated by well-meaning (?) Greens, the Hollywood elite, the liberal media pundits, Progressives, et al could be mobilized for the support, rather than the quashing of a third party candidate, perhaps The People would have the actual equal opportunity to elect a government in all our names. Until then each of us will continue to believe “one man, one vote” is just and only that – one vote. But if we do not hang together, we will all hang separately. Read. Think. Vote.