King Leopold of Belgium enslaved the entire African Congo for his personal profits. He never set foot there, he just sent agents, mercenaries, and troops, paying them to send back ivory and rubber, but he didn't give them any money to pay the Africans for bringing ivory and rubber, he just supplied weapons with which to kill Africans who refused to work. At a conservative estimate, half the population of the Congo was killed. Many more were mutilated, as Leopold's mercenaries and agents were particularly fond of cutting off the hands of people who didn't fulfill their quotas, and payments for the murders had to be accompanied by the hands as proof of kills.

The US (this didn't begin under Obama, but is continuing under Obama as we speak) also uses mercenaries and local proxies (the US government calls them warlords) to obtain cobalt, copper, coltan, industrial diamonds, rubber, gum arabic, and many other natural resources from the Congo, and a favorite method used by Obama's proxies (Africans friendly to the US but not to their own people--Africans the US put in power as African leaders after assassinating the elected leaders of those countries), to force people off their lands and make them work in the mines or on plantations as slave labor, is to rape and sodomize women, men, young children, and the elderly with tree branches and rifles--a method not even Leopold's most sadistic agents utilized to obtain resources.

The Belgian people thought, if they thought about it at all, that Leopold was a humanitarian who was helping to civilize the savages. People in the US, if they think about today's Democratic Republic of Congo, think the genocide of more than 6,000,000 Congolese is being perpetrated by local warlords, and never suspect that the US put those warlords in power, armed them, trained them, and then rewarded them for giving concessions to US corporations and killing and enslaving the Congolese so that the corporations can have easy access to the metals necessary for computers, cell phones, iPods, etc.

The death toll is comparable, the atrocities are worse, and the cover story is just as plausible to those who really don't care to investigate.

But that is only one instance of what the US is doing to "globalize" (read: recolonize) the world.

The US government is fully owned by the big multinational private corporations that fund it, and no matter who is in office, will continue to do the bidding of the wealthy global elites intent on continuing to murder millions of innocents and polluting the entire planet for profit. The profits involved are so enormous that they are almost impossible to imagine, but those profits all go to the wealthy elites and their puppets, with ordinary people in Africa never seeing any benefit and ordinary people in the US being taxed to pay for the troops and mercenaries that are committing these genocides on behalf of private corporations.

Yes, we do need a new system. This one isn't just broken, it is killing humanity and destroying the planet.

Many people in the US are afraid of change or afraid of different political parties or candidates because they believe that other systems were worse, so let's compare our system to others:

The old Soviet Union, fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany are good systems for comparison. Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler were all elected, just like US presidents, and their elections were rigged, just as ours are.  They all started or took part in wars of aggression just as the US does under every administration. They all denied basic human rights just as Obama does with his drone bombs and his assassination hit list, as Bush did with torture, and as previous US Presidents did by installing brutal dictators favorable to the US who tortured and murdered their own people with US training and support. They all spent more money on guns than on butter, just as this government does. They all governed for the benefit of private profits just as the US government does. They all made extensive use of prison or slave labor just as Obama does and previous US Presidents have done. None of them allowed public opinion to influence their policy decisions and neither does the US government.

Where the US differed was in providing a higher standard of living and more material goods to some (not generally to Native Americans, people of color, or the poor), however those days are gone forever. In order to comply with the demands of the corporations that fund, own, and control it, the US government has had to outsource jobs, deregulate and then bail out banks, destroy unions and the middle class, and is continuing to turn the US into a banana republic as it has done to so many other countries. Remember, the multinational corporations are multinational. They use the US as long as it is useful, and will squeeze every last drop of blood out of it they can, as they always do, but they don't particularly need the US because they're multinational.

Yes, we need a new system, turtle. Some hope is with the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South African, who have united to try to stop the US from destroying them. Other hopes lie with countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, which, to a greater or larger extent, managed to get out from under the iron heel of the US. But here in the US itself, I see very little hope. Arundhati Roy told Occupy Wall Street in New York City of being happy to see people in the US rising up to join the global struggle, but here in San Diego I see Occupiers waving the imperialist US flag, registering voters, and believing that the government which they think used to respect their rights, might do so again. The US government only appeared to respect their rights when they were useful, and they are no longer useful. They are supporting the most fascist country on the face of the earth now, and it will never respect their rights or anyone else's. It has never cared for anything except profits and power and never will. And many citizens of the empire have never cared for anything except consumer goods and never will.

I was chatting on Twitter with a woman in South Africa last night who told me not to be depressed and to keep educating and informing people. I replied that I'm not depressed and that of course I'll continue to do whatever I can, but I pointed out that anyone who has ever tried it knows that raising the social consciousness of cabbages isn't the easiest task in the world.  ;)

Thanks Folkie.  The comment slid so easily into those low conversational tones that I had to go back and listen and see if I heard what I thought I heard.  That's what he said.  So, already, and have been, beating drums to go to war in Iran.

I just finished Glen Greenwald's article regarding progressives vs Ron Paul on Salon.com. I enjoy reading his articles and sometimes he appears on Democracy Now.  He is very intelligent.  Writes really well. Here's the link. 

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/singleton/#comments

 The comments after the article got pretty involved in the morass of whether or not he is one way or the other. Greenwald summarizes really well the "fruit" that Obama's Presidency has stood for.  He says it very well. But really.....I can't believe that no matter what he, Paul, stands for now would not change once in office.  Once in office, I believe the same war mongering agenda will be carried forward.   And that's any candidate right now.  It's the system.  And its so broken.  I don't think we can fix it.  I think we simply need a new one.  

With one stipulation however.  Not sure how I meandered into this website, but here's a link.

http://lewrockwell.com/peters-e/peters-e130.html

From my email:

 This (former) Canadian Senate Page, 21 year old Brigette DePape, earlier this year stood up in the Senate chambers on the day Prime Minister Harper was sworn into office and whipped out a red stop sign for the cameras that read "Stop Harper." She was immediately hauled away by security and fired from her 'service' job with the Canadian government.

She spoke to an audience in Vancouver this past Saturday afternoon on the topic of "Thinking Outside the Ballot Box." Thanks to Working TV for making it available on the internet!

She's a inspiring youthful voice for change and hope.

Running time - 12 min 27 sec

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwfhMRxMCjI&sns=em

See Ms Depape's wikipedia page here:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigette_DePape

Somebody Tweeted about a voter registration drive at Occupy Wall Street, so I Tweeted back that was the opposite of what they should be doing--they should be organizing election boycotts.

Immediately six Obomba-bots jumped all over me, calling me names, saying I was helping Karl Rove, and the usual shit.

By the time I'd first responded to them and then blocked them for spam, I found myself with four very hip and very cool new followers and this discussion had gotten 50 more hits.

Way to go Obomba-bots! Couldn't have done that without you if I'd tried. ;)

This is really long, but anyone who isn't already familiar with this stuff and wants to see the sort of discussions I've been having with political party operatives for the past five years should check it out: 

http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1190

Probably more than a million watch him on TV. But I don't think he's going to say a word about not voting. 

I also forwarded a link to this topic along with Ann's comment. Best not to hold my breath about someone logging in and discussing something that probably makes them feel uncomfortable, even if their identity isn't known. I ended my email with this paragraph (community gardens are something this person and many others worked tirelessly for over many years and were eventually successful in getting local government to approve):

I guess that the actions deemed appropriate by those who support the status quo, i.e., the current power structure, are actions which are allowed by the current power structure. While such actions may improve things for many, they do not actually change the status quo. Personally, while I will support such things, such as the community gardens, I believe that unless we change the power structure, we'll end up with things like radioactive organic gardens with inedible produce when San Onofre and other nuclear power plants do a Fukushima, as they inevitably will unless they are shut down first. But with a corporate power structure, the fact that unsafe nuclear power plants bring in profits as long as they are kept running, but would cost a lot of money to decommission, very few are likely to be shut down before they melt down. That is just one of many reasons I believe that the system itself must be changed.

Bravo, Ann & folkie!

You've said it all in what you've both written here. Anyone unable to understand this is in denial.

By the way, this exact subject was what brought folkie and I together a long long time ago, way back when we were still trying to educate Dems on the subject. The issue of legitimacy is the most obvious part. No wonder zillions of dollars are spent on the process ...by BIGcorp. At one smaller crossroad in my quest for knowledge, I was wondering why the company I was working for at the time had donated monies to both major fascist parties. We can all now say "now we know".

r

I've never seen such a startling admission before either--the person who wrote it happens to be uncommonly honest and insightful. That's why I made the attempt to ask.

The fear of loss of power must be extreme indeed, as I don't know of any other issue that can't get a public forum. I regularly encounter groups both online and in real life where they pride themselves on addressing controversial issues--except this one. ;) 

Way to go (again) Mark. In five years of following this "conversation" with election boycott advocacy naysayers, I don't recall anyone so blandly confessing to be incapable of acting from reason. Truly astonishing. The Fleetwood Mac song "Hypnotized" comes to mind. ("Seems like a dream, they got me hypnotized...") And then there's the Orwell description of (self-) deception: "The process of deception has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary." George Orwell, 1984. The person in question is engaged in self-deception in this manner. Hypnotized by Big Brother, perhaps.

In any case, I've noted before, so I'll note again, what the essential difference is between the elections boycott advocate and the political engaged naysayer:

In general, the election boycott advocate's position might be described as sociological, rather than political. That is, the arguments for election boycotts proceed from a sociological understanding of political power, while the objections generally arise from conventional attitudes associated with various modes of participation in the electoral process. In other words, the election boycott advocate believes (to paraphrase Upton Sinclair's thesis regarding journalism in America) that elections are among "the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy... Not hyperbolically and contemptuously, but literally and with scientific precision," the elections boycott advocate defines The Electoral Process in America as the business and practice of engineering political consent in the interest of economic privilege.

From this perspective it should be easy to see why the objections to elections boycott advocacy, and objections to the rebuttals to those objections, always fall short: They systematically fail to address the sociological perspective on political consent and its relation to political legitimacy - the sociological fact that political power requires consent to be legitimate. That's not to say that political power requires legitimacy to exist, but political power will be maintained more easily as more claims to legitimacy can be secured. Conversely, as those in power lose legitimacy, so do they then face increasing threats of loss of power. This is the reason for elections boycott advocacy. To participate in elections is, ipso facto, to legitimize and perpetuate the status quo; to boycott elections is to delegitimize and politically starve the status quo.

You wrote this well.  And said it right.