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An Open Letter to America's Voters
by John Spritzler
November 7, 2012
Perhaps not intentionally, but you who voted in the U.S. election yesterday, no matter who you voted for, have contributed to the legitimacy of the American government. This government can now, once again, point to your willingness to participate in its elections to claim it has the consent of the governed. Few will know, and even fewer will remember, that only about 60% of registered voters voted, and that many others chose not to even to register to vote.
When the government does what We the People object to, then We the People will have a very hard time taking action to stop it, because too many of us will feel hopeless to go against a government that, we will be told over and over, "was voted in by the majority of people." When the real rulers of the nation--the Billionaire Class--hold these elections, they know in advance who will win it. They will! The elections are what make it possible for the government to do what it does. And what might this be?
The President of the United States, and the Congress, will now continue to do as before. They will carry out policies that most Americans do not support. They will refuse to provide good health care to all with a single-payer system, as most Americans have wanted for decades. Instead, Americans will be forced to pay premiums to private for-profit insurance companies for health insurance that will not guarantee good health care.
The government will wage a war in Afghanistan that most Americans think should not be waged. The President will appoint agents of the Billionaire Class to high level positions to use the government as a means of enriching that class. We know from the recent past exactly how they will do it. They'll do it with, among many other things, the following:
- trillion dollar bank bailouts
- debt payments to the rich owed only because the government borrows from them instead of taxing them
- a billionaire-friendly tax code
- a "defense" department that exists to let weapons corporations enrich their owners with taxpayer dollars
- a "homeland security" department that exists to let "security" corporations do the same thing
- an "education" department to force schools to subject our children to high stakes standardized tests designed to make many of them fail and thus believe they are not worthy of having a decent-paying job
- a pro-Israel foreign policy that supports ethnic cleansing of non-Jews so that whatever Palestinians do to fight back can be portrayed as frightful terrorism, thus strengthening the credibility of the Orwellian "War on Terror" to control Americans who object to any of the above
These are all things that most Americans either already oppose, or certainly would oppose if there were mass media that promoted honest discussion of these things instead of what we have, which is coporate-owned and controlled media that exclude such discussion.
When the next election comes around, I want you to do this. Think about what would happen if you didn't vote. Think about what would happen if the word got out that only, say, 10% of the people who were eligible to register to vote actually voted? If voter turnout was that low, the word would spread. People would be talking about it. That would be a powerful statement that would get everybody's attention. Not only would the President not have a "mandate" for this or that policy, the President would not have a legitimate claim to any authority whatsoever. Ditto the Congress.
None of their horrible policies designed to serve the Billionaire Class would be seen by anybody as "the will of the people" anymore. We the People would know--all of us--that the government and the Billionaire Class it serves rule without the consent of We the People. We would no longer feel like the minority that lost the election or the majority who could only be a majority by voting for, and thus endorsing, a "lesser evil." We'd feel like the majority who lives under a dictatorship. We'd start asking why aren't things the way most Americans want them to be. We'd start Thinking about Revolution.
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