I speak my heart and mind on this. In 2008, Ezili's HLLN supported a vote for Obama, not because we entirely believed the Obama fairytale (See, The America I Know, 2008.)
We supported a vote for Obama in 2008 for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons. But more so because eight years of Bush and the application of the Wall Street deregulation excesses left over from Bill Clinton and others had reached a crescendo point that was shockingly, brutally horrible and demoralizing for the entire world. But we also campaigned and urged a vote for Obama, despite his apparent selection by one-percenter forces, because the symbolic victory and metaphoric narrative of "The Whitehouse: From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama" was a powerful and compelling vision we wished to participate in bringing to a reality for the human race. (That sentiment was expressed in this essay - I Don't Know this America But I'm Most Happy to Meet It .)
So, Ezili's HLLN actively campaigned for getting rid of the Republicans that had presided over the 1991 and 2004 unconstitutional regime changes in Haiti. We campaigned so that Obama would give Haiti temporary protected status (TPS), end deportations, stop unfair trade, promote democratic elections in Haiti, value and invest in the Diaspora remittances for reform in Haiti instead of tied-aid to NGOs, end the US occupation of Haiti behind UN guns, provide relief to Main Street in America, universal health care, social justice, stop torture, end the resource wars abroad. (See, Towards A New US-Haiti Partnership: What Haitian Americans Ask of the New US President and Congress.)
Instead, for instance, it took the earthquake which ended the lives
of 310,000 Haitians before front man, Barack Obama, deigned to give
limited TPS and stop deportations. Then less than a year later he
re-started deportations even with UN-imported cholera ravages and
failed aid to the earthquake victims. But
Obama would soon destroy even the tiny scraps of good he brought with TPS by unleashing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton on Haiti's head for the duration, not to mention the Bush-Clinton partnership for earthquake "relief". (Corruption uninterrupted and Haiti's Hotel Boom: Only for the Rich.)
We wrote then our dissent. "Give us a 100 hard right-wing Republicans to face any day. Keep the namby pamby Democrats or progressive left selling their constituents out in the name of some mythical, so-called bipartisanship. They are the worst and most dangerous enablers of neoliberal globalization masturbating on the poor's imposed pain, poverty and suffering." (See Obama's offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery ; Since before the fall of the US-supported Duvalier dictatorships in 1986, the US has been bringing "hope" to Haiti. The newest, profit-over-people sweatshop hoax is Caracol, a sweatshop project masking the foreign appropriation of fertile Haiti lands and deep water ports.)
Today, any politician who uses the word "hope" and "change" -- as in, "I am the change you're looking for" -- is unable to waste our time with US perverted elections whatsoever. The whole system is corrupt. Integrating with injustice is no longer an option. Obama was the straw that broke the camel's back for us. Truly, his tenure has hurt our hearts in so many ways. Not least of which is the fact that a Black man has become number one superpower overseer of the profit-over-people paradigm.
Ezili's HLLN will not be supporting Obama's reelection. We suggest conscious folks nix the political theater of the Republicans and Democrats, concentrate on local self-reliance, local community building, local people empowerment, local building of relevant educational, health care, local food sovereignty, local production, local work and local communication self-sufficiency infrastructures. Don't count on any government to "save you". Not happening folks, not with perverted electoral politics, whether you're in the US or Haiti.
The corporations have bought out the politicians and they're about servicing Wall Street, giving corporate welfare, maintaining their jobs at ALL cost.
Obama's betrayal of core justice values, cuddling Wall Street instead of making it accountable, just to get re-elected cannot sufficiently be offset by general fear of the Republican's Supreme Court nominations. We must speak truth to power, live without fear. And the Supreme Court has presided over a judiciary that disproportionately favors the wealthy, puts more Black men into the prison system than anywhere else in the world for nonviolent crimes such as being addicted to "inhaling."
Moreover, what has the Supreme Court done for Main Street lately anyhow? Or, to preserve its objectivity, its reputed sacredness? Like the Democratic and Republican members of Congress, the folks at the Supreme Court are a reflection of the times. They have simply become an arm of the global corporatocracy, giving more human rights to corporations than to human beings. Supreme Court appointments are simply not a sufficiently important issue to vote Democrat.
The old dog -- "vote-for-the-lesser-of-the-two-evils" argument no longer has traction -- won't hunt. People, of all ethnicities, are tired of dealing with evil. Period.
If being a "pragmatist" or a "realist" means choosing only amongst evil, count us OUT.
The US-Euro pragmatic philosophy has a place, brings lots of comfort, but it is also responsible for the myopic resource wars and prevalent loss of the human soul amongst the schooled peoples worldwide, not to mention the rut and perennial impasse we're in with perverted US electoral politics. Fact is, the US voting rights our Ancestors fought and died for, are redistricted out of legitimacy at the whim of the more wealthy and more powerful. And that's LEGAL!
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