Chris Hedges: How Do You Take Your Poison?

[marmar]

from truthdig:


How Do You Take Your Poison?

Posted on Sep 24, 2012
By Chris Hedges


We will all swallow our cup of corporate poison. We can take it from nurse Romney, who will tell us not to whine and play the victim, or we can take it from nurse Obama, who will assure us that this hurts him even more than it hurts us, but one way or another the corporate hemlock will be shoved down our throats. The choice before us is how it will be administered. Corporate power, no matter who is running the ward after January 2013, is poised to carry out U.S. history’s most savage assault against the poor and the working class, not to mention the Earth’s ecosystem. And no one in power, no matter what the bedside manner, has any intention or ability to stop it.

If you insist on participating in the cash-drenched charade of a two-party democratic election at least be clear about what you are doing. You are, by playing your assigned role as the Democratic or Republican voter in this political theater, giving legitimacy to a corporate agenda that means your own impoverishment and disempowerment. All the things that stand between us and utter destitution—Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, Head Start, Social Security, public education, federal grants-in-aid to America’s states and cities, the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and home-delivered meals for seniors—are about to be shredded by the corporate state. Our corporate oligarchs are harvesting the nation, grabbing as much as they can, as fast as they can, in the inevitable descent.

We will be assaulted this January when automatic spending reductions, referred to as “the fiscal cliff,” begin to dismantle and defund some of our most important government programs. Mitt Romney will not stop it. Barack Obama will not stop it.

And while Romney has been, courtesy of the magazine Mother Jones, exposed as a shallow hypocrite, Obama is in a class by himself. There is hardly a campaign promise from 2008 that Obama has not broken. This list includes his pledges to support the public option in health care, close Guantanamo, raise the minimum wage, regulate Wall Street, support labor unions in their struggles with employers, reform the Patriot Act, negotiate an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, curb our imperial expansion in the Middle East, stop torture, protect reproductive rights, carry out a comprehensive immigration reform, cut the deficit by half, create 5 million new energy jobs and halt home foreclosures. Obama, campaigning in South Carolina in 2007, said that as president he would fight for the right of collective bargaining. “I’d put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll … walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America,” he said. But when he got his chance to put on those “comfortable pair of shoes” during labor disputes in Madison, Wis., and Chicago he turned his back on working men and women. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_do_you_take_your_poison_20120924/

[newfie11]

1. Sad but all true

I will vote for Obama with fingers crossed he will do the right thing, now that he does not have another term coming. I would love to vote for the green party but alas there are not enough people that even know about it to make a dent in this election.

[tama]

2. In the comment section

it is said that D is the more effective of two evils. That is very important to understand. When R administration tries to push neoliberal policies and class war against 99%, people of "left" get on streets and actively oppose those policies. When D administration does it, progressives whine a bit and/or invent narratives to support it and swallow the corporate pill without rebelling.

[newfie11]

3. Yes that is true

And some of Obama decisions concern me greatly. I can only hope he did the things he did was to get a second term. What else can we do?

[tama]

4. What else?

Lot of political activism outside partisan system in various forms. What are people doing? Also not-doing can be and is effective form of resistance, "slacker-revolution".

[Fantastic Anarchist]

6. Exactly.

[BOG PERSON]

5. i like your sig line