My original point was a serious popular movement supporting a person completely ignored and perhaps reviled in the media need not be precluded from the process.

Let’s say you and me and a couple hundred thousand of our friends decide that Dennis Kucinich is our guy.

As long as we’re not registered in one of the eight states listed above we can all vote for him. It may very well be an excerise in futility and may be purely symbolic, but nevertheless I’m casting my vote for the candidate I like. My other option is to vote for the Establishment Party official nominee who is someone I like less than Kucinich. That’s not sufficient motivation to get me up off the couch and into the car to go vote. Many millions of eligible voters do not vote precisely for that reason. Why bother with the fair amount of inconvenience to drive down to the voting place and cast a vote for the “lesser of two evils.” I’d rather stay home and practice my Classical Persian or play cards or something with my wife.

Of course there will be numbskulls who write-in ridiculous names, but I can’t imagine there would be many people who would go to all the trouble. The write-in option is legally recogonized in most states and we we pay taxes to fund the election process. If the authorities need to hire extra people to count the write-in votes, so be it. That’s part of the cost of doing business as they say in the private sector. If the state government represents that write-in votes are legal then I’ll take advantage of that option whether it may inconvenience them or not.

My point was that the system is so fowl that it goes beyond superdelegates or even the voting machines, those they are all pieces of the problem.

Write in voting is fine, and many do, but you do not build an alternative by people writing in everybody from Santa Claus to Alfred E. Neumann.

And while the machines and counting are certainly problematic it has little to do with fundamental choice and more to do with the ultra right vs the right winning the election - aka on of two halves of the war-imperialist-party.

There are structural and systemic issues, not least of which is money and the powers that have been running the show for the better part of a century. Our foreign policy is not an American (as in citizen) policy. It has a continuity that runs through administrations regardless of party labels.

We do not reside in a nation that has true represenative government. Whether its the outsider (Nader, et al) or inside/outsider (Kucinich or Paul), they are marginalized into comic figures, reviled by the corporate press in the same way as see only Israeli deaths, when literally thousands of Palestinians suffer and are brutally bombed daily and never shown on the tube. That propaganda machine is the enemy, not superdelegates. Who really cares whether its Hillary or Obama (other than those who see only the most superficial in their “political leaders”). Put another way, Obama, Hillary, McCain are all true blue imperialists; everything else is splitting personality hairs.

So, what’s the answer, Jerry? Collapse. The laws of nature will rule and create a dust and rubble outcome. The real question is will we be ready to provide progressive solutions that are beyond the pale of today’s political party games?

Here’s two other rock-bottom, solid examples: When Righties and “Conservatives” say they “HATE BIG GOVERNMENT SPENDING” they are lying through their teeth. PUBLIC ROADS and highways - SOCIALIZED big government spending - are not only essential to our American way of life, they DEFINE our American automotive culture! ENTIRE conservative industries are ENTIRELY DEPENDENT on the SOCIALIZED government spending of our roads and highways, from the trucking industry to the oil industry to the ag industry, to real-estate, construction, highway construction, and even home industry. These are extremely “conservative”, hate regulation industries, but without SOCIALIZED roads and highways, our suburban communities (and city consumption) would be quite impossible.
To distill all the above to one sentence, Ronald Reagan said “Government is not part of the solution.. government IS the problem!”
This was sheer bunk! Not only was Reagan’s TV employer (GE Theater) a beneficiary of an entire industry CREATED by BIG GOVERNMENT SPENDING which developed the jet engine,
but as Harry Truman pointed out in the movie “Truman”, rural farmers needed federal and state roads to get their crops to markets.
Reagan said “government is not part of the solution, it IS THE PROBLEM?”
- Mr. Reagan, try telling that to a Missouri farmer who was going bankrupt, crops rotting in the fields, because the dirt roads were too muddy to get them to market!
ALL Democrats have to do to overcome the inherent inequality in the US Constitution and other state and local governments, and the inherent advantage of big money over “the little people” is challenge the “CW” narrative, and COMMUNICATE with voters that it is in their best interest to oppose the big money interests.
IF Tom Paine and the patriots could launch a revolution in 1776 with little more than pamphlets, passion, and a declaration of rebellion, against the dominant empire of the day, it shouldn’t be too hard for today’s American voters and leaders given all the advantages of 200 yearsof (mostly increasing) democratic government ?

When you move on to your discussion of a hoped-for remedy for the situation, you seem to lapse into a rather forlorn hope that the Democratic party might turn into the “democratic” party to challenge the rural dominance. You might think so, given the close association of the party with an urban constituency but, as you say the “belt way” Democrats are too insulated from their grassroots constituents by layers of their K street lobbyists to undertake a role that would might shake up the existing political system. That will happen when pigs fly (to mix your pig metaphor) or until Dennis Kucinich becomes President and I’m betting on the pigs right now. Isn’t it obvious that no one within our one party with two heads is going to undertake this reform? One more in a sea of indications that if we truly “hope” for “change” we are going to have to find it in an EFFECTIVE independent challenge to that entrenched and encrusted party?

Beloved progressive (”liberal”) cartoonist Herblock wrote an amazing cartoon in 1961 with the caption “Some are more equal than others” and “1 rural area vote = 100 city votes.”
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/animal.html
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/images/s03534u.jpg

Actually, those aren’t captions… the cartoon is titled “Animal Farm” and shows a PIG as a taskmaster/overseer, sitting on a ballot box with a whip and holding a sign that reads “some are more equal than others.” The ballot box has the inscription, “1 rural vote = 100 city votes” as the pig sits facing an urban scene (row house building) and dozens of sorry looking voters penned in behind a chain link fence!

It is an amazing graphic, truly an icon of the age, the age of Orwell’s Animal House, segregation, ballot-fixing, the cold-war, and other assorted “old time” sins.

The point is that RURAL OVER-REPRESENTATION is established in, fixed into the US Constitution. All the tiny rural states get TWO senators, even though California, New York, Texas, and Florida have only two senators, as well.

This is a HUGE imbalance in voter influence, which is exactly how it was set up to be by the Constitution. This setup probably has its merits, too, because if gives those established in America (those whose families have worked to establish the nation) an advantage over newcomers (immigrants). The movie “Gangs of New York” showed how quickly shiploads of immigrants could overwhelm an existing political order, with Tammany Hall literally buying the votes of Irish immigrants as they stepped off the boats. No one wants to be politically conquered by waves of immigrants, especially with the government using your tax dollars to subsidize those immigrants.
(Ironic, isn’t it, that that precisely describes white America’s own Manifest Destiny, with the US calvary helping pioneers and settlers take land from the natives?)

Back to the point, IT IS UP TO THE _democratic_ Party (the “Democratic” party) to WORK to EVEN THIS IMBALANCE OUT.
Unfortunately, somewhere over the past 3 decades, the inside-beltway Democrat’s club, has forgotten how to defend 100 years of democratic ideals and progressive progress!

How many American voters today know that UAW founding president Walter Reuther survived not one, but TWO ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS by FoMoCo hired goons? That legacy of SACRIFICE from the ’20s, ’30s, ’40’s, and 1950s is how Americans came to have an 8 hour workday, job safety standards, retirement, pensions, and health-care, federal protection of our savings accounts, and all the other benefits we take for granted today. How many Democrats today do we see or hear standing up for those hard-fought standards? (Besides Dennis Kucinich… crickets chirping!)

In the 2002 election, no less than Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle allowed the Republican Rove media machine to trash Georgia Senator (and Vietnam war triple-amputee) Max Cleland with NO Democratic push-back.. Cleland lost his seat (to Max Chambliss, almost certainly by thousands of stolen-and-trashed Democratic votes, the vote tally was way off from the exit polls)… and so to0 did the soft-spoken Tom Daschle go down to the Bush-Rove sneering Republican attack ads in that electoin.

Although being the Senator from South Dakota is SUPPOSED to give ACTUAL VOTERS an opportunity to defy the big city political, big-money machine, that possibility depends on having FIGHTING CANDIDATES who spell out to their voters the NEED to vote for one’s own economic interests!

The book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas” also highlights this newfound tendency for rural, urban, usually lower income, net-tax RECIPIENT voters, to vote for the big city elites who run the power machine. How many Americans today realize that “solid red Heartland states” like KANSAS and MINNESOTA and MICHIGAN…. once led the PROGRESSIVE political wave? Actually, that “Solid Red Heartland” map of Bush-Republican voters in 2004 is sheer propaganda, because Bush did not win New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada, and probably Florida, had all the votes been counted, DESPITE John Kerry’s incredibly lame, throw-no-punches, take-a-fall for fellow Skull&Bones brother campaign. WHICH IS EXACTLY THE POINT: WHEN Democrat “leaders” DON’T FIGHT for rural votes, the Political Machine power becomes EVEN MORE CONCENTRATED!

(There is another, even more dismal legacy of stolen and hijacked elections 2002 that the Democrats, press, media, and public ignore: Not only was Alabama Democrat Governor DON SIEGELMAN _robbed_ of his re-election win by Rove’s gutter-ball election-stealing tactics, but Rove, Bush, and Cheney sicked hand-picked Ken Starr-esque prosecutors on Siegelman, who now ROTS in an American prison, denied the right to communicate with press or media… and the cowardly Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pretend not to notice!)
(Harpers, “More Prosecutorial Misconduct in Seigelman conviction”)
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002487

Well, there you have it. UNREPRESENTIVE voting, and disproportionate political powers, are built right into the US Constitution, especially with regards to the Senate. IT is up to the Democratic Party “leadership” to work to overcome these inherent, undemocratic tendencies…. but the inside-the-beltway “Democratic” ‘leadership’ has taken to WALLOWING in insider influence, K.-street lobbyists, and big-donor kickbacks (for billion-dollar contracts, tax-cuts, and other favors), well, like a pig in slop.
Amazing, isn’t it, that Herblock could put all that into one little cartoon, with, what, a dozen words?
Today, Herblock’s employer, the WASHINGTON POST, is most certainly on the side of that PIG sitting on a STUFFED BALLOT BOX with WHIP in hand… as are most of the corporate press/media, and a good number of “Democrat” elected officials as well.

I don’t want, however, to remove a write-in strategy from the “table” of options that need to be considered by people seeking political expression outside the two-party (which is in fact a one-party) system. In fact I’m trying to start up a “committee of correspondence” among people concerned about this question, not just for the presidential election but for more effective dissident involvement in elections at all levels. If any readers are interested in joining this dialogue, please contact me at (to save you looking it up at the end of the article): jerrydrose11@yahoo.com.

benevolence is a myth when it comes to people we are allowed to hear of

I enjoyed your piece, and I agree with most of what you have to say along with the comments from your readers. I’ll state up front that I have zero faith in the honesty of the election process in the United States. However, for those who do choose to participate here is an issue I’ve been trying to make more widely known and more visible for years with seeming little success:

Many or most American voters are under the mistaken impression that when they enter the voting booth their choice is limited to the “official party nominee” candidates whose names are pre-printed or pre-posted on the voting machine ballots.

That is not the case. Forty-two out of the fifty states permit “write-in” votes to be cast in federal elections. By “write-in” I don’t mean vote at home and mail it in. I mean it’s perfectly legal in most states to”write-in” the name of whomever one pleases for a particular office. It can be the name of one of the “celebrity” candidates who wasn’t officially nominated by the party, or it can be your cousin, your neighbor or a guy or girl you work with. Or whomever.

The Establishment parties would prefer to keep that information as quiet as possible. The last thing they want to do is advertise the fact that voters are not limited to voting for the “official party nominees” in most states.

Listed below are the eight states that do not permit write-in votes for President. All other states DO allow write-in votes.

Write-in votes NOT permitted in

1.) Hawaii
2.) Louisiana
3.) Nebraska
4.) Nevada
5.) New Mexico
6.) Oklahoma
7.) South Carolina
8.) South Dakota

Ref: Here

If more American were fully cognizant of the fact that they can “write-in” the name of whomever they please for office, in this case for President, they wouldn’t need to agonize over who is officially nominated by the Establishment Political Parties.

I’m a Ron Paul supporter myself. In my opinion Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Ralph Nader and other lesser-known candidates should display the above information prominently at their websites. They should be promoting this information during their campaign appearances. There are (unfortunately) many registered voters who are not aware of the fact that they can write-in a vote for someone other than the officially nominated candidates.

Thanks Again for your excellent piece,

Best Regards,

Mark Konrad
Las Vegas, NV

P.S. Max, Michele, and Tim, as you know you can vote for whomever you please if you live in Florida or in any state not on the list above. Unfortunately hp is quite right, and he or she echoes my sentiments exactly — the vote COUNTERS are the people with the real power. However I would like to see members of the American public get it into their collective consciousness that they’re not limited to voting for the official nominee of any party.

Cheers, Mark

At this stage does it really matter? I mean superdelegates. The choices that have left didn’t leave because of the delegate set up but because of money, corporate media and a basic disdain by the powers in the power in honest talk.

The real rigging comes when people like Nader, Kucinch (and even Paul) are shut out of the debates and kept off ballots. That’s Party tyranny!

Nader’s looking better all the time. I’d like to see the Green’s endorse him and build a coalition with his independent run…

Further more in 14 states it is actually ILLEGAL to hold public office as an avowed atheist or agnostic. This is of course blatantly unconstitutional but will anybody notice or care in a country in which 80% identify as christian.