In no particular order:

• I fear that media exclusion will be endorsed, not challenged, by the Left. After Amy Goodman interviewed Larry Flynt she said she had received a large number of letters asking why she would interview him at all. Keeping Flynt off the air seemed to be more palatable than hearing the mix of progressive (Democrats and Republicans exhibit hypocrisy with sex and money scandals) and regressive (women’s equality movement is nothing but a bunch of ugly women; no woman has ever complained about their photo in Hustler) statements Flynt made.

  FAIR surveyed corporate media (including PBS which takes corporate “underwriters” — ads that don’t mention prices) and concluded that “Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups”. The Left has something to complain about here. This is a significant problem everyone ought to be genuinely concerned about. When Leftists encourage that exclusion, they exhibit hypocrisy.

  The cure for bad speech is more speech. The Left can debunk arguments by including those they object to. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a perfect example of what happens when media exclusion is leveraged: he turned Disney’s unwillingness to distribute the movie into an ad for the movie. Doubly ironic here because his movie wasn’t as good as “The Corporation” or “Super Size Me”.

• The anti-war movement was right but the marches have stopped. Why? The anti-war organizers claim that the marches will pick up after the election; in other words, after one has lost their only leverage to make a candidate move to their agenda.
• A full belly is the enemy of the revolution. Clinton was many times more effective at killing Arabs than Bush yet the Left was largely silent. Clinton’s wars are barely mentioned today. The Left was easily placated with jobs (even jobs which don’t pay a living wage) and at the time there were no big marches against the killings going on overseas.

• Going beyond one’s expertise with bad arguments/Engaging in behavior one criticizes elsewhere: Professor Robert McChesney has written some of the most insightful media analysis. His “Media Matters” show covers issues of interest to media analysts and interviews people who talk about media analysis. People listen to his media analysis for good reason, he backs up his statements up with examples and logical criticism based on what actually happened.

  Yet on Sunday, October 17, 2004 his show offered electoral analysis which was largely flamebait for Nader voters (or anyone who dares challenge the Democrats). Listen as he and his guests discuss why voting for Nader is a mistake. There’s no substantive discussion of voting records, campaign funding, or campaign promises. They claim Nader has none of the arguments he had in 2000 and that he is “right on every issue”. The guests and host didn’t know why people would support Nader, and in a turn reminiscent of Fox News, there was no attempt to bring in a guest who could respond or explain how even if one buys the “safe-state” voting strategy, one can still vote for Nader in the majority of US states (including in Champaign County, Illinois where the show is produced) either on the ballot or as a write-in. One could use this same argument to support any other non-Democrat/non-Republican.

By contrast, listen to Nader’s recent talk in Seattle. His main question — What’s your breaking point? — can be interpreted in a way that has nothing to do with his campaign for US President. If the Left has no breaking point, the Left should admit that they are unquestioning Democrats, willing to go wherever that party leads.

The “anybody but Bush” crowd is encouraging the Left to vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office. Some people I’ve talked to don’t seem to understand that this advice only really applies to voters in contested states.

In Illinois, for instance, the state’s electoral votes will be decided by Chicago and Springfield areas because that’s where the largest populations are in the state, and because Cook county (where Chicago is) is remarkably organized in support of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Illinois does not apportion its electoral votes. If we assume that all 21 of Illinois’ electoral votes will go for Kerry, then voters in most Illinois counties are free to vote for whomever they want.

This means that voters in most Illinois counties can cast a true anti-war vote, not settling for Kerry (who voted for the USA PATRIOT act and the resolution to give the President war-making power, who has committed to adding 40,000 troops in order to continue the US occupation of Iraq).

But some voters I’ve talked to in Champaign county haven’t figured things this far. They buy into the logic of “vote Kerry to get Bush out” and they dwell on the implications no further; they plan to cast a vote for Kerry — essentially throwing their vote away to support policies they either don’t really understand or don’t agree with.

The ABB logic has plenty of problems for voters in contested states, but it holds no water at all in gerrymandered so-called “safe” states. Even if you buy the idea of replacing one pro-corporate war hawk with another, think about your vote and have the courage to vote for the government you want instead of voting against the government you fear.

Notes on how to screw the public, in no particular order.

• Don’t give the voter a voter-verifiable paper ballot. Make them trust that the voting machine will store their vote accurately and count it according to the will of the voter.
• Make blind, paraplegic, and illiterate voters take someone in the voting booth with them. Blind and illiterate voters describe two groups of voters that share one thing in common — they can’t read by moving their eyes across the printed ballot. Braille ballots are uncommon and reading a ballot to someone in a voting booth means announcing to the neighboring booths who the illiterate voter chose. Computers can remedy this by reading the ballot to them over headphones, raising areas of a braille display, or allowing the use of alternative input devices like a sip and puff interface (where air is drawn or expelled to move a cursor around a screen and make selections).
• Give the voter a receipt. Receipts are pieces of paper that describe a transaction in detail. Receipts are given to customers to take with them. Voting is not a purchasing decision and taking a receipt with you is a way to deny people anonymous voting and enable vote trading/buying/bullying. Imagine if a bully knew you were routinely issued a receipt after voting; they would wait outside the polling place and threaten you for proof of your vote.
• Count the ballots by machine instead of by hand. Machine counting is fast but completely unverifiable. Even if one has free software voting machines scanning errors can turn a winning candidate into a losing candidate. Bev Harris’ BlackBoxVoting.org reveals Diebold’s tabulator secret: a two-digit code can be typed into a Diebold tabulator machine (the machine that counts the votes from all the other machines) to make a modifiable copy of the vote count. This copy will serve as the source of the reported vote totals. The tabulator operator can easily and quickly shift votes from one candidate to another. The audit trail can be erased, removing all evidence that this occurred. Diebold has already sold a lot of these tabulator machines to counties across America.
  The solution: hand count all ballots, even in large districts.
• Keep the voting age high This way kids, who can be drafted into the military or imprisoned as though they were an adult, cannot choose the leaders that would overturn such policy. And to think that taxation without representation was once viewed as offensive (not anymore, though, right D.C. residents? Oh, wait.).

Kerry and Bush chase the same audience — businesses. Kerry already has the votes of those who are so desperate to get rid of Bush that they’ll support the same pro-war, pro-corporate, anti-universal health care, anti-equality for homosexuals policies which Bush favors.

Abortion

Kerry says he’s for a woman’s right to choose but few on the Left know that he voted to confirm Antonin Scalia. Some say Scalia is favored to become the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The pro-choice crowd says Scalia poses a real threat to abortion rights. Kerry joined the other senators to confirm Scalia even though he didn’t have to. Scalia would have been confirmed without Kerry’s support, but Kerry would have been able to tell his pro-choice voters that he worked to preserve the power which Roe v Wade grants. Kerry doesn’t chastise his party, eleven members of whom voted to confirm Clarence Thomas, another Supreme Court Justice who doesn’t like abortion. Thomas was confirmed 52-48, so those 11 votes to confirm made the difference. The issue here is not about my views on abortion. The issue is how much the Left will give up on to support a policy many on the Left disagree with.

Health care

Kerry has a health care plan that gives nothing to the unemployed and ostensibly will encourage businesses to help their employees pay for health care. He relies on the mythical power of freedom of choice to encourage people to support his plan. Bush wants more privatization of health care. Neither candidate wants to challenge their corporate HMO campaign contributors. Multiple alternative (or third-party) and independent candidate for US President supports universal single-payer health care. We can’t afford to placate HMOs any further and I don’t see how it’s beneficial to vote for a health care plan most people don’t want.

Killing Arabs

Kerry tells us that he would fight the war better than Bush. The debate centers on how many tens of thousands of troops to add, not ending a war based on lies. But ABB supporters will vote for Kerry even in safe states (the letter many anti-war intellectuals on the Left signed makes no mention of voting anti-war in safe states). I look forward to seeing the anti-war marches pick up again, but if they restart only after the election is over their legitimacy may vanish — how to explain challenging the legitimacy of the war by voting pro-war? How to reconcile the Democratic Party’s history on killing Arabs — Clinton’s sanctions killed over 500,000 Arabs and Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright went on “60 Minutes” and said that killing 500,000 children with the sanctions was a tough decision but ultimately worth it. By comparison, Bush’s invasion and occupation have not yet killed half as many Arabs (Iraq Body Count.net, which tracks “civilian deaths in the Iraq war and occupation”, puts the total at 15,357 as I type this). So is it fair to conclude that withholding chemicals to clean water is a far more effective way to kill Arabs than invasion and occupation? If so, we really should take Kerry at his word when he repeatedly tells us in the so-called “debates” that he will fight the “war on terror” more effectively; he doesn’t object to the “war on terror”, but he will govern the empire better than Bush. Is that the crux of the bipartisan choice so many millions are faced with?

Debating others

The Republicans and Democrats share a desire to keep alternative policies out of the public view. The third-party debates which ran on C-SPAN late night this week (featuring Socialist, Green, Libertarian, and Constitution Party candidates) are more instructive and have twice as many candidates than the bipartisan press conferences run by the Commission on Presidential Debates. The third-party debates were moderated well and they offered the viewers interesting explications of real differences between the candidates on issues that matter. Most people won’t see this debate. Most people will continue to buy into the circular argument telling voters that third parties and independents don’t count because they’re not popular.

2004-10-14 Update: Listen to Howard Zinn simultaneously support voting for Kerry in the swing states and maintain that who’s in the White House matters less than who is outside the White House (almost a quote). Listen to Zinn explain how giving Kerry his support without a demand is appropriate, yet quote Frederick Douglass (one of America’s best writers) in his famous letter to an associate:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

–Frederick Douglass, 1857

Also, the three so-called “debates” are over and Kerry is being celebrated for doing well. If he did so well, why is he now neck-and-neck with Bush in the polls? How should I reconcile the way the Left paints Bush as intellectually stunted yet Kerry can’t do better than halfsies in a rigged debate format which excluded any real competition on the issues from alternative parties?