Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
There’s been a lot of talk in pro-Palestine circles about withholding votes for Biden in protest of his genocide in Gaza, which is of course fine, but the discourse around doing so often misses an important point. A lot of US voters erroneously think they’d be punishing the Democrats for Gaza by costing them the election, mistakenly assuming Democrats care about winning. They don’t.
Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those win or lose. And obviously Biden himself doesn’t care; he’ll have a comfortable retirement regardless of the outcome in November, and on some level he’s surely aware that it’s nuts for a dementia patient to be in the White House anyway.
If the Democrats cared about getting your vote they’d be trying hard to earn it. They’re not trying because they don’t care.
The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.
And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say. It’s that humanity is dominated by a murderous globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington whose actual movements and behavior have effectively zero responsiveness to the will of the electorate.
You’re never going to be able to vote your way out of this mess, and you’re never going to be able to not-vote your way out of this mess, because the power of your vote has been undermined to a value of zero. That doesn’t mean there’s no way out of this mess, it just means there’s no way to get out of this mess using the fake plastic diversion toy they handed you to shut you up and trick you into thinking you have a say.
There are still plenty of other tools in the toolbox for forcing an evil power structure to stop doing evil things, but they require a whole lot of hands to bring about, and right now we don’t have them. Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.
Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.
The good news is it’s entirely possible to help get those eyes open. Everything you do to help share the truth with your fellow citizens and spread awareness of what’s really going on pushes this possibility toward reality. The more people open their eyes, the more people there are to help open others, so this could snowball from impossible to probable to inevitable quite quickly.
An entire globe-spanning empire rests on a closed pair of eyelids. Once they snap open, the whole thing will crumble. And from there we can begin building a healthy world together.
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The sociopaths who run things are unimpressed by our cleverness, our word games, our tightly reasoned arguments and close readings of texts, unmoved by facts, logic, evidence or morality, as long as they have force on their side, as long as the cops and army will shoot when ordered to do so.
It's like trying to reason with a schoolyard bully. Truly, this never grows old:
"A WOLF, meeting with a lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea, which should justify to the lamb himself, his right to eat him.
He then addressed him: Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me.
Indeed, bleated the lamb in a mournful tone of voice: I was not then born.
Then said the wolf: You feed in my pasture.
No, good sir, replied the lamb: I have not yet tasted grass.
Again said the wolf: You drink of my well.
No, exclaimed the lamb: I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me.
Upon which the wolf seized him and ate him up, saying: Well! I won't remain supper-less, even though you refute every one of my imputations.
Moral: The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny, and it is useless for the innocent to try by reasoning to get justice, when the oppressor intends to be unjust."
Democracy, as a practical matter, is basically an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility.
Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to "the people" who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don't even want to stand for election because they don't want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
Note how western politicians and their policies are all incredibly unpopular, but they claim to be acting on a popular mandate.