Just Vote

There are lots of things I could say about why it’s important to vote.  But since most have been said, ad infinitum, I’ll limit my exhortations to just a few.

            Vote to make sure the Republican money machine doesn’t win—to spit in the eye of American Crossroads (Karl Rove) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Koch brothers and Exxon and Wal-Mart and Monsanto and all the rest of the vultures.

            Vote to let the world know that some of us, at least, are not taken in by Mitt Romney’s indefatigable lying, and find it outrageous and obscene.

            Vote to let the rest of the United States know that global warming is not a hoax (this is the title of a book written by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who, if Romney is elected and the Republicans take control of the Senate, is slated to chair the Committee on the Environment and Public Works—the very one that rules on measures to combat global warming. No joke.)

            Vote to make sure that the entire structure of the New Deal (Social Security), as extended by the Johnson Administration (Medicare, Civil Rights, etc.), is not dismantled by the crazies of the Republican Right who have been frothing at the mouth to reverse FDR’s reforms for seventy years.

            Vote to register your protest about the wild and wildly increasing inequality in what was supposed to be an equal society: the six Wal-Mart heirs have about $92 billion in assets. That’s enough to feed every hungry person on earth (the UN estimates $30 billion/year is enough to eradicate hunger world wide), including those with insufficient food in the U.S. And this: for every dollar the richest 0.1% of Americans earned in 1980, they’ve added three more dollars to their wealth; while the poorest 90% have added one cent to theirs!

            Vote to make sure your elected reps know that you’re pissed about facts like these: that for every dollar of profits earned from 2008-2010 by our great corporations like Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, GE, and Dow Chemical, the public treasury got one cent in taxes (that’s a 1% tax rate). (facts from Paul Buchheit, commondreams.org, July 2, 2012) And Willard (Mitt the Twit) Romney is campaigning on the idea of reducing taxes for precisely these corporations “so they can compete in the global economy!”

            Finally, even if you’re not enthused about Obama (and who is these days), vote anyway, vote your anger, vote your outrage, vote to thumb your nose at all those who think they can continue to hoodwink the people and exploit and ruin the commons, while lining their own pockets with ever more cash and perks, and then get to call it “public service.”

            In short, just vote. Remembering the old Tammany Hall mantra: vote, early and often.

Lawrence DiStasi