I have a colleague at my workplace who believes in voting for the candidate he thinks will produce the fewest body bags. But people are going to die under the current political system either way. It just depends or whether they die in a war,15 or whether they die anonymously on the street,16 or kill themselves and their families before they can be turned out of their homes.17 So the candidate you think will produce the fewest body bags may only be producing the fewest that can be more easily counted. Think about that.
Fifth, abandon identity politics, now and forever. The fact that a candidate has your skin color, your genitals, or is someone you would be comfortable having a beer with, is not a reason to vote for that person. Likewise, things like genitalia, skin color or ability to socialize with the working class, should not disqualify a candidate from getting your vote. It is the candidate's job to empathize with our needs and problems; we don't have to identify with the candidate. Part of why we are where we are is that we have voted ID politics. How many people felt that George W. Bush was one of them, or that Sarah Palin is one of them. (For all the election theft that took place in 2000 and 2004, tens of millions of people actually did vote for George W. Bush). Martin Luther King, Jr. was right, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Expand that to include all the other identifiers as well.
Last but not least when it comes to elections, think about ways our electoral system needs to be improved for future elections. Elections are too costly. What could this nation do with the money that is going into the Presidential and Congressional races? Add your state races and ballot measures. It's like asking how much health care we could buy with money that is currently going for insurance company overhead. The expenditure is obscene. This also limits public office to the wealthy and those who can get the financial help of people of extreme wealth.
As I mentioned in the first part of this series, Obama's national fundraiser is Penny Pritzker, of the family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. She is a billionairess and a sub-prime mortgage queen.18 As President, how can Obama seriously tackle the issue of sub-prime mortgages and mortgage backed securities with such a person so prominently on his team? Yet how could he stand on the threshold of the White House without Pritzker, Warren Buffett, George Soros, and other lower profile billionaires backing him?
The media are another problem. We have to demand to hear all the voices in a campaign season, not just the ones that the big networks present to us as viable. The decision on viability is OURS to make,not the punditocracy's. Debates must be returned to a neutral group such as the League of Women Voters, and not subject to the bargaining of the major party favorites or to rules that exclude candidates. Elections belong to the people, not the candidates or parties. Things will change when we realize that what is ours has been taken and we step up to take it back.
Reforming how we vote is critical. Electronic voting must be abolished. Yes, older methods were open to fraud as well, but a vote was not so easily subverted as it can be with computers. To see just how easy it can be, go to my blog at http://kelliasworld.wordpress.com/, click on the big tag called Electronic Voting, and scroll down to the videos on how to hack an electronic voting machine. Paper ballots counted publicly by hand is the way to go.
What then?
Of course, voting is just the first step. There is much to be done after an election day, and various ways to do it. You may not have the time or inclination to be politically active in the conventional sense. But you can at least educate yourself about what kind of politics and economics you would like to see in this country and the world.
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