Lately, it seems thatBF everything everything that is spot on is utterly depressing. Strange times indeed...

Oops! Sorry, Mr. B.F.!

That's great, thanks for the laugh.

I don't get it. Sure, people who vote for Republicans are stupid because the Republican agenda is to help the rich and screw the voters, but people who vote for Democrats are even dumber, because the Democratic agenda is to help the rich more than the Republicans do, and screw the voter worse than the Republicans do. Bigger wars, bigger bailouts, fewer civil rights--if the Republicans torture, the Democrats have to beat them out by not only torturing but also assassinating.

Face it, people who vote in faith-based elections where they know their votes might not even be counted, for candidates they know they won't be able to hold accountable, aren't too bright, whether they vote Coke or Pepsi--I mean Democrat or Republican. Particularly since the outcome of our elections under our two-party system is predetermined: bigger defense budgets, fewer social programs, and continued corporate rule.

The only differences between Republican and Democratic voters is that Republicans want what they're voting for, but Democrats don't want what they're voting for--they have to hold their nose and vote for what they don't want because they considered an expanded Republican agenda under Democrats to be less evil than a reduced Republican agenda under Republicans--and anyway they believe it's the best they can get so they won't let democratic ideals be the enemy of pragmatic tyranny.

And how about the election integrity movement? Are people who say, "We demand election reform and if we don't get it, we'll continue to vote in faith-based elections, so don't bother to take us seriously," supposed to be intelligent and unhypnotized? Are people who don't really care if their vote is actually counted or not the ones who aren't apathetic? Are people who consider Democratic war and bailouts less evil than Republican war and bailouts, informed citizens?

Nobody has to hypnotize voters--they're already hypnotized to think that an uncounted vote for tyrants they can't hold accountable, is actually a voice in government. 't'ain't funny, McGee.

You know how to defeat the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision? Let the corporations spend billions on election campaign ads, and then stay home and don't vote. Boycott the war, boycott the bailouts, and boycott corporate rule by boycotting rigged elections. Without the consent of the governed, the oligarchy has no power. Stop voting to allow rich people to rule you!

Classic!

This one is very good! Keep up the good work!!!

Mark E. Smith said:

You know how to defeat the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision? Let the corporations spend billions on election campaign ads, and then stay home and don't vote. Boycott the war, boycott the bailouts, and boycott corporate rule by boycotting rigged elections. Without the consent of the governed, the oligarchy has no power. Stop voting to allow rich people to rule you!

Jesus, Mark. Are you still choking that same dead, boring, unproductive, self-defeating chicken? Seriously? How many more years do we all have to tolerate your ridiculous, repeated, self-defeating screeds on that topic?

In case you haven't noticed, some 60% of the electorate already doesn't vote. And how has that taken power from the oligarchy? How has that lack of consent of the governed stopped them from doing anything?

If you wish to stay home, and not cast a vote, even in an important ballot measure, or even for a third party (which would benefit from your vote in innumerable ways), that's up to you. I'll even fight for your right to do so, as I'm not one of those "if you don't vote, you have no right to complain" people, as I'm sure you know. You have every right to both not vote and complain as you see fit.

But if you hope to have any effect on the system whatsoever, I promise you that staying home, and encouraging others to do likewise, is a great way to not have such an effect.

As to this ill-informed comment...

And how about the election integrity movement? Are people who say, "We demand election reform and if we don't get it, we'll continue to vote in faith-based elections, so don't bother to take us seriously," supposed to be intelligent and unhypnotized?

...apparently, you are as clueless about election reform as you are about strategies for social change. Those of us who demand election reform do, in fact, "get it". Not as fast as we would like, quite frequently, and not with a silver bullet (which does not exist), but one reform and/or improvement of transparency and citizen oversight at a time.

Those who understand EI, understand that they must fight to cast their vote, fight to assure that vote is counted and counted accurately, and fight for the transparent citizen oversight of all of the above. In each and every battle to that end, there are victories and improvements. Just because you either don't see them and/or have the acuity to understand them, is no reason that anybody should fine any worth your assessments of such things, or your ill-reasoned, years-long campaign to encourage people to not participate in their own democracy.

Seriously, Mark, if you can offer any new and/or interesting and/or well-informed and/or viable strategies to improve this world, I hope you'll share them. Until then, I hope you'll consider letting that other chicken die, decompose, and go away for ever. It's really really dull and really really stinks by now, as do most dead, choked chickens.

Brad.

There is a very interesting article in the August 2010 Scientific American, about the inevitable appearance of hardware based trojan horses built into large scale integrated circuits such as microprocessors. It is titled "The Hacker in your Hardware" and starts at page 68.

One could always do this by designing it in at the printed circuit board level, but the Scientific American article postulates it being designed into a major line of microprocessors made by a major firm like Intel or AMD. Imagine if criminals could take control of any ATM or secure computer running on commodity chips by sending a signal that only they know.

For example if I were an agent of a political party that wanted to use electronic voting machines to steal elections, this is the way I would go about it. Get some design engineers working for the company that makes the voting machines to design a trojan back door into the hardware. This backdoor would remain hidden until after the pre-election integrity checks on the software have been run, it only be opened once the real election started to replace the valid code with an election stealing replacement.

I suggest you get your associates interested in election integrity to read it. The following quote gives you the idea of how such a trojan would be activated

"In addition to internal triggers such as a date based trigger described in the mobile phone example, hackers could employ external triggers such as the reception of a text or e-mail message containing a specific set of characters"

I think what Mark is getting at is that there ain't nothin' left to vote for, BF.
Are you still choking that same dead, boring, unproductive, self-defeating chicken? Seriously? This Blog SUCKS.
We see the world as we are, not as it is.
99 is kicking your fucking ass

Great Solution! Stay at home; don't vote, "ain't nothin' left to vote for."

So says, Mark Smith and Off The Grid.

An example of what happens when you adopt the Timothy Leary school of politics ("turn on, tune out and let your mind float down stream") can be found in the tiny working class CA city of Bell.

In 2005 the scam artists inside the Bell City Hall cooked up a special election that would make Bell a "charter city." 99% of Bell's electorate didn't vote.

The measure passed 336 to 54. 239 votes were absentee and the CA AG is investigating whether these were illegally collected by Bell City Council members.

As a result the salaries of the part time City Council soared to $100,000 and Bell's City Manager Robert "Ratso" Rizzo ended up with a $787,000 annual salary that, with added benefits exceeded $1.6 million. Bell, whose residents earn on average $40,000/year wound up with the highest property tax rates in CA.

So tell me, Mr. Smith, just what did Bell's residents accomplish by staying home in 2005?

"Ain't nothin' left to vote for?" If you can't find a progressive somewhere on your ballot--say Green Party etc., surely you can find something to vote against?

Consider this November's Prop 23 in CA.

"The Big-Oil-funded Proposition 23 seeks to repeal California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, a landmark bipartisan achievement that is already creating jobs and reducing pollution in California. Repeal would devastate California’s burgeoning clean tech sector and make it harder to get federal legislation."

Stay home! Yeah, now there's a real effective strategy.

There plainly IS NOBODY to vote for. I can understand their frustration perfectly when they go to a voting booth and get the wonderful, meaningful (sarcasm) opportunity to pick between an obvious conservative and a barely-closeted conservative. Because conservatives of one stripe or another is all that the ruling elite will fund. Wow, what a choice! Maybe if the voter is lucky they will let him next time choose if he wants his "elected" officials to screw him in the ass using vaseline or a store brand petroleum jelly. Seriously folks, you're accomplishing absolutely NOTHING by voting in the U.S. You're participating in a dog and pony show, nothing more. By voting you're doing nothing but lending false credibility and legitimacy to an utterly fake, corrupt, thoroughly controlled process. You're tacitly saying that you believe in the fantasy. It's sad really that anyone still does. Those 60% that don't vote already know that their votes don't amount to a pile of shit. The only way that America will EVER have meaningful elections is to remove all private money from political campaigns and instead publicly fund them. Since the only ones who can legislate on that would be biting the hand that feeds them you can guarantee that they won't touch the issue. The system is not set up to allow itself to be changed so we can't depend on anything that involves working within the existing framework.

Sadly the only solution is to smash the current political set-up into a million pieces and start over. Tear it down to the foundation because even that is rotten. This can only be accomplished outside the political framework that has been constructed by and for the elites. It's a two-part process really.
1.Widespread political education so that the masses realize just how far gone the system is and how it is like a car that has been totaled, no sense in trying to repair it, instead we need another system.
2.Well-organized (e.g. via the internet) campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience like the Bolivians did. Hundreds of thousands of people coming together to block off highways, railroads and airports, shut down ports and whole cities at a time. Hit the bourgeoisie in the pocketbook because that's the only place we can hurt them. Shut the whole rotten country down and refuse to be moved until our demands are met. Sorry, but nothing short of that has a ghost of a chance at changing anything in America in any meaningful way.

Continuing to vote in meaningless, staged, controlled "elections", each time hoping for a legitimate result is the definition of insanity, in other words doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Brutal Truth @11 said:

There plainly IS NOBODY to vote for.

If you're unhappy with the choices (and don't care to register your opinion about vital ballot measures), then by all means, don't vote.

I've been quite happy with all of the folks I've been able to vote for, otherwise I wouldn't have voted for them (and no, I did not vote for either of the two major party candidates in the last Presidential election, as I wasn't happy with either of them.)

Brad, unfortunately we don't all live in California. Most states it seems don't even ALLOW any candidates on the ballot if they aren't from the Republican/Democratic conservative party. Issues voting, like certain referendums, that's sometimes worthwhile even in the current artificial set-up. Sometimes. Though some matters have no business being held up for the majority to decide for example the civil rights of a minority group. If 51% of voters think gay people should have to walk around on their hands instead of feet then it still wouldn't make it right. Candidate voting however from everything I've ever seen (and continue to see) is an exercise in futility.

I still say none of this will change until the economy gets bad enough that the masses realize how badly they're being screwed and decide to take their chances with the batons and tear gas. You know what they say, "Anybody is just three good meals away from a revolution".

Brutal Truth @14

Be careful what you wish for. Taking it to the streets is always an option...but it should never be a pre-mature option. Taking it to the streets requires undying commitment...a commitment that Americans are years away from possessing. If the electorate isn't motivated enough to show up at the polls, or party meetings or paralyze the system by general striking (no work, no spending) then no way can they maintain a street battle...no way. I've been tear gassed, it's no joke...this aint the movies. It takes rock solid damn the batons, bullets and gas; fuck the government commitment...

It sounds cool and all doing the 'take it to the streets" talk...but saying and doing are two totally different things.

Have you ever been caught up in a mob panic ?

That's not anything you would ever forget...I've seen grown otherwise strong men turned into individuals who would trample their mothers to get away...I've seen that.

Then there's the new crowd control techniques; they may not even need boots on the ground to squash a street action. Americans are too soft at this time for meaningful street action that would bring change...

And don't think your firearms will save you either...Oligarchs laugh at your primitive firearms.

BlueHawk,
I couldn't agree more that it will be a lengthy process. The first stage alone, bringing to political consciousness the vast majority of the non-wealthy population, is itself going to take quite a while. Sort of like the Civil Rights movement coming to a head in the 1960s, it took a long time to build. I'm not talking about a campaign of street demonstrations but a movement for genuine, but radical, social change. Yes, obviously, America isn't there yet. Tens of millions of people think variously that Obama was born in Kenya or is actually a progressive and I can't decide which is more far-fetched. Tens of millions of Americans still think the "nineteen hijackers with boxcutters" myth is plausible. So this country has a long way to go before it has become conscious.

As for firearms, I was suggesting nothing of the sort. Non-violence is the way to go. Breaking windows and hurting or killing people is both morally wrong and discrediting to whatever cause employs these tactics. Nobody who wants to see a movement succeed resorts to terrorism as it creates sympathy for the victim of it, it's self-defeating and discrediting. Aside from creating a pretext for other actions these are the reasons why various intelligence agencies the world over use false flag terrorism. So no, don't worry, I'm not suggesting anything violent. That would be precisely what the ruling elite wants. What they absolutely do not want is for a non-violent movement for real social change to take root. That is literally their worst nightmare.

Only at the end of the political enlightenment process when a critical mass of people has been developed and when it becomes clear to them that the avenues of effecting genuine change are still as closed off as they currently are, comes the part with the organized (non-violent) civil disobedience. I am talking about hundreds of thousands or millions of people in the street, not a few hundred, and everyone sitting down and refusing to be moved. No system is designed to be able to cope with widespread civil disobedience. All societies are built on a tacit understanding between citizen and government that accepts the authority of the government's rules and when a citizen violates that agreement individually he or she is punished and they make an example out of them. If millions of people all around the same time decide to together reject the government's authority because it is corrupt and unrepresentative the machine wouldn't be able to cope.

In any case that would be years away, after the American people become less like beasts of burden and more aware of their surroundings and refuse to be taken advantage of anymore by the billionaires.

Brutal Truth..

I love your 'critical mass' concept. But so far the Oligarchs are way ahead of us. They're playing wedge issues like trump cards.

At this time the left and the right have plenty of common cause to band together for change... with Wall Street, The Federal Reserve and international bankers/corporations running America. But the Oligarchs owned media keeps pumping out the fear and hate filled wedge issues so that the population won't get together and realize we're all being fucked like drunk prom queens.

BlueHawk,
Exactly. And thanks. Yes it's going to take a while and the elite is adept at keeping people divided who have vastly more in common with each other than they do with the elite. I'm thinking about down the road, the future of humanity looks good, people evolve and grow and we've seen the evidence of it in that there are comparatively few feudal countries anymore and in the industrialized world it is uncommon for women to be denied suffrage and for people's kids to have to work astride a chute in a coal tipple.

The key I think for each person is realizing that the way things are now, the bourgeois epoch, the capitalist economic model, is not the highest form of human development but is rather the intermediate stage between feudal absolutism and democratic proletarian socialism. Surely the end goal of humanity must be a society in which nobody is born into poverty and nobody is born into wealth but instead everyone gets the same good opportunity from birth and everyone is truly paid what their labor is worth because the workers own their workplaces. That kind of egalatarian society is definitely humanity's future, and it looks bright. The present? Not so much.

Remember the quote by Buenaventura Durruti:
"The bourgeoisie may blast and burn its own world before it finally leaves the stage of history. No matter. We who ploughed the praries and built the cities will build again, only better this time. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. And that world is growing this minute."

Brutal Truth...yes sir...and great quote.

Keep the faith...

BlueHawk,
Thanks, and you too.

Actually, it is the Democratic Congress, in power since 2007, that created the abyssmal budget deficits of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010,2011(starts September 1ST!), and 2012!

President Bush held back the floodgates of theft of our future, against that Dem Congress! Blame the real culprits, Pelosi, Reid, all of the Dems, for America's poverty!

Read your history! Don't be ignorant voters!

Duz2600 -

Um, you're serious in that comment? Or you're being satirical? Surely you didn't write that with a straight face, did you???

On the presumption that you're *not* joking, um, you're aware of Bush's trillion dollar unpaid-for tax-cuts, his $800 billion unpaid-for Medicare Part D bill, his two trillion dollar unpaid-for wars and, of course his $700 billion unpaid-for TARP bailout, right?

And, of course you realize that it was the Dems, once they regained majorities, who re-instituted PAYGO, right?

So what exactly are the "floodgates of theft of our future" that Bush "held back"? Or were you just trying to help bring the cartoon above to life, by demonstrating what an actual hypnotized Republican voter looks like?

Brad...you're keeping those right wing blog boiler rooms really, really busy.

LOL! Duz2600's comment whether satirical or not is a howler...