Tough to summon energy necessary to take part in a system you don't believe in, one comprised of entrenched, corrupt public officials who deliberately fail to serve the public good -- and whom you hold in contempt
Excerpt, minor edits by Carolyn Bennett
“T
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| Joseph Kishore |
he
character of the American political system is an expression of
underlying social relations,” Joseph Kishore writes. And the waning state of “the
state and its agents is, above all, a product of” a pervasive, deepening “social
inequality presided over by a parasitic oligarchy intent on war abroad and
plunder at home.”
People
“Tens of millions of people in the United States have drawn
the conclusion that the electoral process is a sham and no amount of
participation will [correct or undo] the stranglehold of the financial
aristocracy.” In the most recent mid-term election less than one-third of eligible
voters – in 13 US states – went to the polls. Among these low-voting states
were the three largest US states:
California
(31.8 percent), Texas (28.5 percent) and New York (28.8 percent)—along with
Indiana, Utah, Tennessee, Mississippi, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, New
Jersey, West Virginia, Nevada, and Missouri.
US youth participation or lack of participation in the
process was particularly illustrative of “the widespread alienation” among the
citizenry: Among eligible voters aged 18-29, “only 21.3 percent voted” in the
2014 election.
Regime
Media organizations, trade unions and pseudo-left supporters
of the Democratic Party in 2008 pushed for a Barack Obama presidency “as an
agent of ‘change’ and a ‘transformative’ candidate.” Candidate Obama “made a
series of promises signaling a sharp departure from the policies of the
immediately preceding president, George W. Bush, who had left office the most
hated president in American history.”
However, not only were none of these promises fulfilled “but
there was never any intention of doing so.”
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he “change”
candidate’s performance was a “campaign of lies, reflecting the arrogant
belief within the American ruling class that it can simply fool the American
people through a combination of chicanery and slick marketing.” And the
president in six years “has … presided over the most rapid growth of social
inequality in American history, a systematic assault on jobs, wages and social
programs, endless and expanding wars, and the strengthening of a police-state
apparatus of spying and repression.”
Result
The low turnout figures mean that many—perhaps the
majority—of those elected received the votes of less than one fifth of eligible
voters. And a cumulative effect of all data pertaining to the recent elections show
“a political system facing a crisis of legitimacy.”
Those who populate the White House, Capitol Hill and the
various Governor’s mansions and state capitols have all the trappings of power,
but any broad support for this power has eroded beneath their feet.
Approval rating of the combined bodies of the federal
legislature (House and Senate) stays around “13 percent,” yet “more than 95
percent of all incumbents were reelected” in 2014. This means, Joseph Kishore
concludes, that “despite the nearly universal contempt for the supposed
representatives of the people, there is, in practice, no mechanism within the
system for getting rid of them.”
Forward
“A qualitative turning point has been reached,” he says. “Millions
of workers and youth unable to find any solutions within the established system
will —and have already begun to—seek other means to defend their interests,
e.g., with strikes, demonstrations, other forms of social struggle. They will
increasingly search for political alternatives outside bourgeois politics.”
And “the responsibility of socialists,” he says, “is to
actively intervene, prior to and in the midst of these struggles; to develop
within the working class an understanding of the inextricable connection
between the character of American politics and the nature of capitalism.
“T
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he seething
discontent that is building up in the United States in relation to both
domestic and foreign policy must be given an ever-more conscious
anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, internationalist, socialist, and
revolutionary orientation.”
Sources and notes
“The illegitimate US election,” Joseph Kishore, World
Socialist Web Site, wsws.org,
November 13, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/11/13/pers-n13.html
Writer Joseph Kishore is National Secretary of the Socialist
Equality Party (United States) and contributor to World Socialist Website
(WSWS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kishore
A lifelong American writer and writer/activist (former academic and staffer with the U.S. government in Washington), Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is credentialed in education and print journalism and public affairs (PhD, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; MA, The American University, Washington, DC). Her work concerns itself with news and current affairs, historical contexts, and ideas particularly related to acts and consequences of U.S. foreign relations, geopolitics, human rights, war and peace, and violence and nonviolence. Dr. Bennett is an internationalist and nonpartisan progressive personally concerned with society and the common good. An educator at heart, her career began with the U.S. Peace Corps, teaching in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Since then, she has authored several books and numerous current-affairs articles; her latest book: UNCONSCIONABLE: How The World Sees Us: World News, Alternative Views, Commentary on U.S. Foreign Relations; most thoughts, articles, edited work are posted at Bennett’s Study: http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/ and on her Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/08UNCONSCIONABLE/prweb12131656.htm http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000757788/UNCONSCIONABLE.aspx Her books are also available at independent bookstores in New York State: Lift Bridge in Brockport; Sundance in Geneseo; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center in Buffalo; Burlingham Books in Perry; The Bookworm in East Aurora
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