"Information Clearing
House" - Back during the George W. Bush neocon
regime, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W.
Bush for the world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim. “Yesterday
standing at this same podium was Satan himself, speaking as if he owned the
world. You can still smell the sulfur.”
Chavez is one of the
American right-wing’s favorite bogyman, because Chavez helps the people instead
of bleeding them for the rich, which is Washington’s way. While Washington has
driven all but the one percent into the ground, Chavez cut poverty in half,
doubled university enrollment, and provided health care and old age pensions to
millions of Venezuelans for the first time.
Little wonder he was
elected to a third term as president despite the many millions of dollars
Washington poured into the election campaign of Chavez’s opponent.
While Washington and
the EU preach neoliberalism–the supremacy of capital over labor–South American
politicians who reject Washington’s way are being elected and reelected in
Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia.
It was the Ecuadoran
government, not Washington, that had the moral integrity to grant political
asylum to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. The only time Washington grants asylum is
when it can be used to embarrass an opponent.
In contrast to the
leadership that is emerging in South America as more governments there reject
the traditional hegemony of Washington, the US political elite, whether
Republican or Democrat, are aligned with the rich against the American
people.
The Republican
candidate, Mitt Romney, has promised to cut taxes on the rich, taxes which are
already rock bottom, to block any regulation of the gangsters in the financial
arena, and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.
Privatizing Social
Security and Medicare means to divert the people’s tax dollars to the profits of
private corporations. In Republican hands, privatization means only one thing:
to cut the people’s benefits and to use the people’s tax dollars to increase the
profits in the private sector. Romney’s policy is just another policy that
sacrifices the people to the one percent.
Unfortunately, the
Democrats, if a lesser evil, are still an evil. There is no reason to vote for
the reelection of a president who codified into law the Bush regime’s
destruction of the US Constitution, who went one step further and asserted the
power to murder US citizens without due process of law, and who has done nothing
to stop the exploitation of the American people by the one percent.
As Gerald Celente
says in the Autumn Issue of the Trends Journal, when confronted with
the choice between two evils, you don’t vote for the lesser evil. You boycott
the election and do not vote. “Lessor or greater, evil is evil.”
If Americans had any
sense, no one would vote in the November election. Whoever wins the November
election, it will be a defeat for the American people.
An Obama or Romney
win stands in stark contract with Chavez’s win. Here is how Lula da Silva, the
popular former president of Brazil summed it up: “Chavez’s victory is a victory
for all the peoples of Latin America. It is another blow against imperialism.”
Washington, making full use of the almighty dollar, was unable to buy the
Venezuelan election.
How will a Romney or
Obama win be summed up? The answer will be in terms of which candidate is best
for Israel’s interest; which is best for Wall Street’s interest, which is best
for agribusiness; which is most likely to attack Iran; which is most likely to
subject economic and war protesters to indefinite detention as domestic
extremists.
The only people who
will benefit from the election of either Romney or Obama are those associated
with the private oligarchies that rule America.
Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant
Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In
Collapse) has just been published.
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