Carolyn Baker: How Progressives Gave The Election

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAK411B.html

Only one week after the 2004 Presidential election in the U.S., alternative media is buzzing with appalling statistics regarding glaring voting irregularities and blatant corruption of the electoral process. Yet it is unlikely that so-called progressives who voted for Kerry will re-evaluate the paradigm which compelled them to do so.

In Twelve-Step language, the definition of insanity is doing something which has not worked a thousand times, but expecting that next time, one will have different results. Meanwhile, progressives displace responsibility for their mind-boggling failure onto the ignorant masses in "red states" who voted for Bush and against abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. Even now, after three stolen elections in four years, they look wistfully to 2008 with delusions of electing a "silver bullet" candidate who will miraculously redeem their putrid political system. Larry Chin, in his article "The Stolen Election of 2004: Welcome Back To Hell," said it best: "Criminals do not 'permit' elections."

Like children in an abusive family system, traumatized progressive Americans have been desperately willing to "settle for" a less odious parent who will beat them only once a month instead of once a day. Uninformed and relying largely on corporate media or ostensibly progressive journalists who towed the "anybody but Bush" line with pit bull tenacity, they were willing to sell their souls to Kerry rather than face the excruciating reality of living in a country where clean, democratic elections no longer exist (if they ever did), where corrupted electronic voting or a Supreme Court can, did, and will install a President. Rather than own that their government committed the pre-meditated murder of 3000 human beings on September 11, 2001 and used that homicide as justification for world domination, or face up to the realities of Peak Oil which will create a global energy crisis unprecedented in the history of the human race, progressives and their intellectual gurus have screamed in unison, "Conspiracy theory! Paranoia!"

Rather than confront the full implications of a USA Patriot Act, which has effectively nullified their Constitution and Bill of Rights or call their present government what it actually is, a fascist empire, progressives sentimentally proclaim that they are living in a democracy where they still hold a sacrosanct right to vote. Their reward for their implacable denial? The candidate they have "settled for" virtually bestowed the election on his Bonesman brother, and one more time, they were handed over to the wolves, but not before being toyed with and bled dry in the name of making a better America.

Progressives in their "adult children of dysfunctional families" syndrome, have failed to comprehend the authentic nature of the New World Order, that is, the corporate-sponsored, free trade global hegemony of the ruling elite, whether packaged in the blatant neoconservative agenda of the Bush Administration or the "Progressive Internationalism" of the Kerry camp. In their compulsion to choose "the lesser evil," their ability to decode the doublespeak of either one of the two faces of empire has been gravely impaired. As Richard Moore notes in his excellent article, "Doublespeak And The New World Order,"

Progressives must wake up to the attack, and somehow find a way to fight back. The Achilles heel of the NWO lies in its runaway successes: its high-handed treatment of nearly everyone has created an awesome potential counter-reaction -- if people can be made to see who the real perpetrators are, those who are engineering the decline of democratic civilization. Even its doublespeak successes can be turned against it, if people can learn to read the NWO agenda by learning to decode the propaganda it dishes out. The NWO crowd actually reveals allbin their propaganda, so arrogantly confident are they that their doublespeak enigma device won't be seen through by the people.

( http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/ND/mar96NWODoublespeak.shtml )

Had Kerry won, we would have seen a continuation of the war on terror myth played out with serial invasions of petro-strategic areas of the globe, possibly a "softening" of the Patriot Act at home, and the appointment of a few Supreme Court judges who remained friendly to Roe V. Wade. We would have also witnessed more NAFTA-like "free trade" agreements and the further corporatization of the globe through the IMF and the World Bank. However, because progressives did not comprehend the new paradigm into which the hijacked 2000 election had catapulted the country, their ambivalence and willingness to "settle for" essentially locked in an interminable totalitarian regime. And as Webster Tarpley wrote prior to November 2, 2004:

". if Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road." ( http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAR410A.html )

On Wednesday, November 10, demonstrators protesting the Iraq War in front of the Federal Building in Westwood, California were greeted with tanks in the street. Although the tanks shortly went away and left them alone, the chilling reality of their presence sent an unmistakable message: Protest in America will no longer be tolerated and will be met with lethal force. (h ttp://inn.globalfreepress.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1014 )

[SCOOP EDITOR'S NOTE: Subsequent reports of this incident indicate that it was a coincidence and the National Guardsmen involved were there inadvertently. That said the irony of the timing of this incident is remarkable.]

We can expect similar and more dramatic displays of force against protest given the drastic militarization of urban police forces in the U.S., superbly revealed in the must-see documentary, "Urban Warrior." (www.etspictures.com ) Furthermore, just this week, USA Today reported that the CIA has assigned dozens of case officers to work inside police departments of major U.S. cities. The report states that this "represents the CIA's broadest association with federal law enforcement since the CIA was created after World War II. ( http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-11-07-cia-us_x.htm )

The "need" for a police state agenda becomes all the more urgent when we consider Peak Oil. In April, 2001, The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and James Baker, former Secretary of State for George Bush, Sr., published a study of world energy issues. The report can be read at: www.rice.edu/projects/baker/Pubs/workingpapers/cfbipp_energy/energytf.htm

Analysts from The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Asia Times have understood and written that recessions can be used and managed to reduce oil consumption. In recessions people use less petroleum than during economically prosperous times. Furthermore, one month after the CFR report, Vice-President Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group stated that "America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970s." (www.whitehouse.gov/energy/Overview.pdf ) It is absurd to believe that John Kerry, long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, would not also be aware of Peak Oil and its implications.

The Bush neocon police state is superbly prepared to meet both protest and massive civil unrest and disobedience stemming from a global oil crisis with military force, incarceration, and biowarfare. As is always true of an empire, it devours not only its external "enemies," but its own citizens as well.

In addition, it is irrefutably the direct intent of neocon advisors such as Grover Norquist to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury and destroy all public services in order to privatize as much of the infrastructure as possible so as to shrink the size of government in half over the next 25 years, in Norquist's words, "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." ( http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_402.html )

Upon leaving her position as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the first Bush Administration, Catherine Austin Fitts stated and continues to state unequivocally, that "the United States government is being run as a criminal enterprise." This criminal enterprise transcends party lines or loyalties, and no candidate can even be nominated for President unless he is well within the good graces of the godfathers. How effective are U.S. Presidential elections in the twenty-first century? About as effective as municipal elections in Chicago during the reign of Al Capone. To progressives I say: Think "mafia", and stop thinking that you have a shred of hope for change by pushing buttons on a hacked voting machine. Again, criminals do not permit elections.

The criminal enterprise of both political parties MUST continue to make war for oil in every part of the world where the last drops remain, and it MUST make war on its own citizens by increasingly suppressing domestic civil liberties.

America's enormous trade and domestic deficit can only result in economic catastrophe-a reality of which the ruling elite of both parties is profoundly aware. An unemployed, impoverished, population at the end of its tether with protracted wars and ravaged by a global energy crisis is an unruly, volatile population that must be "managed" by any means necessary. Yet progressives continue to chant their mindless mantra: "Maybe in 2008."

Mark Scaramella in his article, "Kerry's Enablers" concludes that:

Democrats can blame Ralph Nader, moral-issue-Republicans, Karl Rove, black box voting and unpunched Ohio punch cards all they want. Certainly these were factors. But until the Democrats abandon their slavish devotion to candidates who are vacillating funhouse mirror reflections of Republicans, they're likely to keep losing, and risk irrelevancy. ( http://www.counterpunch.org/scaramella11112004.html )

Most assuredly, I will be asked: "What can be done?"

My answer is first, stop giving any credence or energy to the thoroughly deceitful American electoral process.

Secondly, I submit that we are finding ourselves in a situation similar to that of an earlier era in U.S. history-an era considered no less dangerous and hopeless by its citizens than the one we currently face-an era when an obscure writer and entrepreneurial loser named Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet that changed an entire society. No one stood up boldly and said "Do this" or "Elect so-and-so." Rather, people-ordinary citizens of all classes, out of their own pain, when their situation was sufficiently severe and agonizing, found their own way and created a movement that transformed their world. British troops and taxes were their "police state" and their "peak oil," yet they produced, over and above the opposition of white, ruling elite landowners, a Bill of Rights. Yes, I know only too well the subsequent unfolding of U.S. history-Native Americans were genocided in the name of Manifest Destiny, and it took a Civil War to force the country to deal with slavery. But any and all subsequent gains on behalf of justice-the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movements for decades after the Bill of Rights was forged, were created and empowered by it, and without it, no further strides on behalf of social justice could have been made.

The American Revolution only erupted and succeeded because citizens were experiencing the anguish needed to make it happen. I believe that, tragically, the courage and clarity necessary to transform our political and social landscape in order to generate the kind of justice embodied in the Bill of Rights will only evolve as a result of the kind of misery a neocon, totalitarian regime will most certainly produce.

Although the neocon mind only understands "revolution" in terms of bombs and bullets, Jefferson spoke incessantly of a revolution of ideas and that he hoped to see one every twenty years. Most importantly, he, along with a number of other founding fathers, was adamant that revolution in the face of tyranny is our divine right. How a long-overdue revolution in the U.S. might unfold, I have no idea. What I do know is that it will never occur as a result of "manufacturing dissent."

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© Copyright CAROLYN BAKER, CRG 2004.

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