Want to know who is going to win this year’s presidential election? I can tell you. In fact, I am so confident that I am correct, I would stake everything I own on this prediction.
It will be the man funded, bankrolled, owned by big corporations, the financial sector and Wall Street. It will be the man receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, General Electric, and Morgan Stanley or some other slew of corporate backers.
It will be the man who bends to Big Oil. The man who wins the White House in this election is the man who will continue subsidies to oil companies. It is the man who will push forward on the Keystone XL Pipeline, a pipeline being built as an export for Canada to sell its dirty, tar sands oil. A pipeline that experts say isn’t a matter of if it will spill, but when. A pipeline that will cross almost 2,000 waterways in the U.S. including major aquifers used for farmland irrigation. And when this pipeline does spill, it will contaminate the water sources instantly with a slew of toxic chemicals. According to Chris Hedges on Truthdig, the Keystone I pipeline (both belong to the company TransCanada) built in 2010 had 12 spills in the first 12 months of operation. In the article, climate scientist James Hensen says that if this pipeline is built, that would mean “game over for the climate.”
Furthermore, the man who wins the White House is the man who will further push our planet toward the brink of ecological disaster. It is the man who will, despite any rhetorical nods he may or may not give to those concerned about climate change, will do little or nothing to curb man’s effect on the natural world. That man will not ratify the Kyoto protocol, thus not binding the U.S. to any of the measures that would cap emissions and consequentially move us toward greener emissions standards. As it stands, 191 countries who are members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have signed and ratified the protocol. One country has not: The United States. I can tell you with full confidence that the man who will win the White House will do nothing to change this.
Who will win the White House? It is the guy who will keep us in Afghanistan, continue drone wars in Pakistan, drone wars in Somalia, drone wars in Guatemala (yes, Guatemala – read it on Truthdig here), strikes in Somalia, special troops in the Philippines, in Central Africa, in Mexico fighting the drug war. This man will be the guy who keeps U.S. Special Operations involved, according to Tom Dispatch, in what is estimated to be 120 countries (about 60% of the world’s nations). The man who is going to win the election will keep Iran on the table for another possible intervention. The man who wins the White House will continue to keep our defense budget at astronomical rates, meanwhile pushing for austerity measures at home.
And while we’re on the subject of policies “at home,” let’s discuss what the winner of the White House will do. He will most certainly uphold the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA. NDAA – which authorizes the U.S. government to carry out “counter-terrorism” domestically and detain INDEFINITELY and WITHOUT TRIAL any U.S. citizen who is suspected of any sort of suspicious activity that could be deemed terrorism or supporting terrorism. And what’s more, these U.S. citizens could be shipped to one of our extraordinary rendition sites across the globe – sites like Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo Bay. The man who will take the White House will most certainly keep this torture prison open as well as quietly condone the goings on there.
This man will extend the Patriot Act and spying on U.S. citizens, will fill up his cabinet with Big Oil cronies and old Wall Street execs, will do nothing to push a federal law that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, and will generally continue the status quo of this country, which basically consists of padding the pockets of the already rich at the expense of our environment, our civil liberties, and the lives of people at home and abroad.
The guy that will win the Presidential Election this year is not the 99% dude, but the 1% dude. Not the guy that will fight for you or I, but the guy that will fight for Wall Street, the Big Banks, the corporate cronies, and the vulture capitalists. Basically, after this year’s election, things will remain pretty much exactly as they are. Have you figured it out yet? That it doesn’t matter if you cast your vote for Obama or Romney. That no change can happen within this circular system controlled by corporate money. We cannot expect change if we continue to vote for the same man, over and over and over, election year after election year. That change that we are hoping for cannot happen if we are not willing to change our own habits first. We are addicted to the duopoly. It is time to cut it off at the source. It is time to demand change and put an end to our misguided party loyalties.
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Alyssa Röhricht blogs at Crash Culture: Political Train Wrecks for Political Junkies
