Why I Won't Vote

Why I Won't Vote

Jim Kavanagh

I will not vote in this presidential election.

It’s not just because I consider genocide a deal-breaker and refuse to choose between the clowns and criminals offered up by the duopoly. It’s because the whole electoral system is thoroughly rigged and corrupt. It’s not a matter of withholding my vote because there’s no acceptable candidate.  It’s a matter of a prior, prerequisite problem: whether, as a citizen, to withhold a vote because the lack of integrity of the electoral process makes a mockery of casting it.

I’ve written about my thoughts on voting in presidential elections in previous electoral cycles, and I’m going to draw on those previous essays here. Please go to the links below to see a fuller version of my position, with many more references.

As I said in my last essay on this election:

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College. It is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

There’s a fundamental fact of our election system that undermines all the standard ways we consider electoral strategies. With the proliferation of electronic voting machines and computerized tabulation systems, the electoral process is not only corrupted by all the influences leftists consistently criticize—the financial control of the plutocracy, media bias, unfair ballot laws, voter caging and suppression tactics, the two-party duopoly, etc.—it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense: it gives the voter no reasonable assurance, and no way of ever knowing, that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought s/he did. 

I can certainly understand the desire to vote for Jill Stein in this election, both in order to advance the third-party possibility by reaching the 5% threshold and to make Kamala and the Democrats lose—and know they lost—because of their support of the Gaza genocide. But that only works if your vote for Jill Stein is counted for Jill Stein.

It is foolish to ignore how electronic voting systems affect what third-party voting might actually accomplish. Third-party votes are no longer just brave markers of political dissidence; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 5% to 2%, and Kamala or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory.

Presidential Catastrophe

Presidential Catastrophe

Jim Kavanagh

The United States of America is on the verge of World War III in three different theaters. Its social economy and infrastructure are in tatters. It’s actively engaged in genocidal ethnic cleansing—killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of mainly children and women and spitting on every precept of humanitarian and international law—on behalf of an atavistic settler-colonial project. It is more than ever despised and less than ever feared in a world escaping its control. And in this catastrophic conjuncture, our political and media culture throws up two of the most ridiculous and incompetent figures imaginable to vie for the role of leading us into the abyss.

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College, it is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

But no one seems interested in exiting the Big Top, so let’s bring in the clowns.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better, more radical, exposition of who runs the country than this gem:

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don't. Trump said this week that he "gave" the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House "almost more than anybody." Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

 Just as I promised I recognized Israel's eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem, Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House, probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there, and they were always after... And as soon as I'd give them something, always for Israel, as soon as I'd give them something, they'd want something else. I said, give me a couple of weeks, will you please?

But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it. You know, for 72 years, they've been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn't have the nerve. But I said: You know what? I said to David Friedman, give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less. on the Golan Heights. And he did. And I said: Let's do it. We got it done in about 15 minutes, right? 

Yup. Even more radical than his notorious answer as a candidate at the Republican debate in 2015:

BRICS And The Fundamental Paradigm Shift in the Political Economy of the World

"one of the biggest stories in the world and nobody is talking about it"

As a marxist, I’ve always known that an indispensable resource for understanding what is happening in the political economy of the country and the world is the business press. It’s the place where capitalists are required to rigorously and honestly take stock of the present state of, and ongoing developments in, what we call the infrastructure.

Thus, I came across this video from a channel called Inside China Business, by a guy named Kevin Walmsley, who has lived and worked in China since 2012 for a company called Direct Equipment. The video is entitled, bluntly, “The BRICS trading system is already wiping out US farmers, as global price discovery is destroyed” and it gives a concrete analysis, which surprised me, of how the BRICS system has already upended the global commodities trading system that was “for a hundred years” based on the U.S. dollar and essentially managed from Chicago. As he says, “This is one of the biggest stories in the world, and nobody is talking about it”—because few people know how. He knows how.

He talks about how the BRICS are developing

a new global trading system, which is completely independent of the U.S.-led system based on U.S. dollar trading and the SWIFT bank system. the system that we use in western countries … that has obvious advantages to us and obvious disadvantages to everyone else. If we're honest with ourselves there is no logical reason why a farmer in Brazil who's selling soybeans to China should use an American bank or the exchange in Chicago to make the deal happen, or need U.S. dollars to do so….Now, China, Brazil, and the other BRICS have the technology to build their own system, buying and selling directly without U.S. dollars, without Western banks, and without going through commodities traders and going through exchanges in Chicago.

Bobby's Bounce: RFK Jr’s Lesser-Evilism

 

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1656323009139953667

Oops. I didn’t see that one coming.

So, let’s talk about RFK Jr.’s decision to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.

Because, to be clear, Bobby is not just—excuse me, not even dropping out of the race. He could have done that, correctly denouncing the Democratic party’s anti-democratic legal and electoral tactics that made it impossible for his campaign to compete within the party or as a third party, and, indeed, denouncing the whole duopoly-enforced structure of American electoral politics that makes it impossible for any non-duopoly candidate to succeed. If he were really interested in building the possibility of a progressive third party, he could have stuck with his very recent critique of how  “President Biden[/Harris], President Trump offer no solutions” and ended his campaign without transferring allegiance to either of the duopoly parties or candidates. He could have approached Jill Stein—as he apparently did both Kamala and Trump—and tried to negotiate agreements on highlighting issues that were important to him in return for urging his supporters to vote for her.

Instead, he is re-positioning himself and his campaign as supporting elements of the campaign of one of the extant duopoly parties—the Trump-Republican Party campaign. He will take himself off the ballot in battleground states, in order not to “likely hand the election to the Democrats,” and he’ll stay on the ballot in “safe” red or blue states where it won’t make any difference. This mirrors the “safe states” strategy of previous “left” third-party candidates, and it defines him as an auxiliary Republican, just as it defined those candidates as auxiliary Democrats. Whether he or they want to admit it, it’s an abdication of any effective third-party building, and a capitulation to one of the two duopoly parties and to duopoly politics tout court.

So, why is RFK Jr. doing this? Why is he abandoning a third-party building effort and any pretense of duopoly non-partisanship, and instead—in an astounding turn for a Kennedy—dedicating himself to the defeat of Kamala and the Democrats, and the victory of Trump and the Republicans? Here’s his campaign-suspending address, with his three reasons highlighted:

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

Jim Kavanagh

So, it looks like we’re heading into a major war. With its assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief “ceasefire/hostage release” negotiator, topping off its incessant, deliberate slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza and its accelerated evictions and home demolitions in the West Bank, Israel has erased any scintilla of pretense that it is doing anything else but trying to “finish ’48”—-achieve the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine via extermination and expulsion.

Israel has crossed all and everybody’s red lines. Israel is telling the world it will kill anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at anytime of its choosing, and it does not give a damn about what anyone in the world thinks of it. It is acting with complete, insouciant, contemptuous disregard of international law, conventions, and common morality, certainly of the people and nations it considers its adversaries and of the countries on whose support it depends.