Heart's in the right place, head's up the ass

Sheese, boys and girls can the elistist left, or whatever Alexander Cockburn and his merry band of cryptoanarchists-cum-libertarians wish to call themselves these days, get any nuttier? Take a gander at professional golfer turned polemicist James Rothenberg's, solution for saving the republic posted at counterPunch.com:

If only 1 million people vote each major party will have ulcers at the prospect of their vulnerability to the maverick. The fewer people who vote, the fewer needed to upset the power balance. Is this a partial explanation of why the establishment frets about low voter turnout?

So the message is if you really want to see things shaken up, stay away from the polls. This will take some discipline considering how it counters the prevailing advice. Your vote may be personal to you, but to those in control it is a commodity. It is bought and paid for in accordance with a formula (dollar/vote correspondence) well known to those in the field (applied electioneering), only you're not supposed to know this, even though you really know this.

You may feel that you vote freely, but ask yourself why you don't feel free to vote for a minor party candidate. Ask yourself why you don't want to "waste" your vote, yet instead reward with it the very parties responsible for this state of futility.

Tsk,tsk, tsk. Mr. Rothenberg, even though he is offering the seemingly radical solution of shaking up the American electoral process, really still believes in "the system." To think the two major political parties really cared if only one million souls out of a total population of 300,000,000 cast votes for the next president is, on the face of it, patently absurd. Yeah, yeah, there'd be the usual tut-tutting, and hand-wringing over voter apathy by the mainstream media but we'd all still have to live with the results.

And, anyway, the vast majority of non-voting morons would just go on eating, breathing, farting and bitching about their shitty kids, shitty spouses, shitty bosses and the "illegal" Mexicans threatening to take their shitty jobs.

I agree with Rothenberg that more poltical parties would spice things up and get more people into the voting booth but not voting isn't going to scare the corpocracy one bit. The only thing that really scares the corpocracy is getting its money out of the process way before one ballot is ever cast.

And as far as throwing my vote away by voting for a third party candidate, I plan on doing just that, should Hillary Clinton be the Democratic Party nominee.

Of course Rothenberg's not-voting idea could be intended to hasten the great armed revolution which will cleanse the land of our corrupt capitalist-oligarchy masquerading as a democracy. Naw! A professional golfer as revolutionary? Please!

I think it is time we update the definition of lumpenproletarian.