First, to the McCain supporters: quit your whining. Most of you don’t realize how the man would not be good for you.
Economically, he supports policies that are detrimental to most of you – from tax cuts to the super-wealthy to BS views on social security to Reagonomic policies in general. McCain hasn’t addressed the issues of soaring healthcare costs, the bloated military budget or deregulation policies that amount to little more than extortion schemes. He is doing his part channeling funding from the bottom to the top and leaving the burden of paying for this on those he just robbed. Which means you, the average McCain supporter who naively thought he was looking out for you.
And all this nationalism and warmongering rhetoric is sickening. If any of you people took seriously the domestic and international laws that govern the use of force (which were created out of the ashes of WW2), or a soldier’s enlistment oath you would be outraged by our naked aggression. From the comments of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson to the Nuremberg Principles (which became the Uniform Code of Military Justice) to the Geneva Conventions to the UN Charter to Article Six of the United States Constitution, if you only knew the extent to which McCain has been a part of violating these laws you would not be so supportive. You are not supporting your troops by sending them off to foreign lands to be imperial cannon fodder for some aggressive war packaged to you with a bunch of lies but whose real goals are obvious enough to warrant questioning your gullibility. And the soldiers are not serving us by violating their own oaths. They took an oath to defend the constitution and to obey their superiors so long as the orders were legal. The Iraq and Afghanistan orders are blatantly illegal and therefore the soldiers who participate are in violation of their own oaths.
Also, I cannot begin to express my concerns for the religious right who allow their beliefs to be exploited for political capital. Here, I am talking about abortion and the so-called “pro-life” movement. If any of you were really pro-life you would not be voting for candidates who enthusiastically support wars that are not pro-life, capital punishment which is anything but pro-life, or economic policies (i.e. Capitalism) that breed suffering and death. For example, look at Africa as a shining example of what our economic policies do to people. Not to mention the people of Detroit! The candidates you vote for are about as pro-life as I am a billionaire named Warren Buffett.
It has not even been 24 hours and already you folks are depressed but it’s all based on delusions. I don’t doubt many of you are decent people but I do strongly doubt you understand what it is that you are actually supporting or what it means for the other guy to win.
Which brings me to Obama supporters: Most of you, like McCain supporters, equally don’t realize how he is not good for you. You have allowed yourselves to get swept up in the color of his skin and his empty rhetorical flourishes. Yes, it is historical that a black man was elected president, but that is superficial.
Economically, he has admitted to being a market lover – the NYT reports that he is reading Adam Smith – and admires how people can get extremely rich in this country. But what he is not acknowledging and many of you are not considering is the catch. To get enormously wealthy, especially in a market system, it is always at the expense of countless others. He may throw us some milk bones but they won’t change the substance very much, and considering the depth of the economic crises that lie ahead, unless we change the substance those milk bones may very well be useless.
He too expresses extreme amounts of nationalism and warmongering rhetoric that is sickening. He has echoed threats to Iran, which is astonishing for anyone that has an iota of what is going on in Iran or how the US has been operating geo-politically and economically. He is already making some very cynical comments to Cuba. Obama has also had some obscene comments about Afghanistan (that we “dropped the ball”). He is also surrounding himself with warmongering Hawks that ought to piss us off. Folks like Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Samantha Power, Zbiginew Bzrenzski and others. The war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, is illegal. It is aggression and to say we “dropped the ball” is not a reference to playing soccer with the kiddies but a threat to escalate!
I am also concerned about his views on healthcare and social security. Though marginally better than McCain they don’t get to the root and no proper solution is proposed.
Let’s start with healthcare. Private insurance is abhorrent. We have some 50 million uninsured and already we spend twice as much per capita as the rest of the developed world. Most of what we pay for healthcare goes to administrative costs. That is, executive pay and profits for shareholders. What Obama has proposed would not insure everyone or address the elephant in the room: healthcare costs.
Social Security is the soundest program we have. It is paid up through 2049 yet it is taxed very regressively. There is a cap for income taxation at barely over $100,000 so that means those millionaires see no more than 1/10 of their income taxed for Social Security. Social Security needs to either be taxed at a flat rate for all incomes or progressively. Doing this would not only strengthen the program even further but would allow room for benefits to be greatly increased so that our retiree’s and disabled citizens don’t have to struggle from month to month. As it stands well over half of all recipients rely on the program as their main or sole source of income. It is a tragedy that so much of it goes to the former problem of healthcare costs (insurance and prescriptions). Obama’s only solution is to marginally increase the cap, but not at enough to really amount to anything.
So let’s get things straight. This election was largely meaningless. The two candidates only differed slightly so McCain supporters need to realize that so they can get over their undue disappointment and Obama supporters need to realize this so that they will be able to quickly deal with the fact that they were hoodwinked by empty electoral promises. Get ready for disappointment. And by ready, I mean prepared to put enormous pressure on him to fulfill his promises. Tens of millions of people supported him and WHEN he flakes it would be helpful if those same tens of millions of people put pressure on him to get his ass back in line and follow through.
PS: The real meaningful voting was local and some of the propositions were meaningful too (it’s too bad so many Americans sought to change the constitution to deny equal rights to gays and lesbians. Shame on you all for your callous bigotry and hatred.) The next time we pat ourselves on the back for being awesome people let’s not forget how we blatantly discriminate against homosexuals.
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