i am an anarchist and i vote [repost]

[This blog post was written back in April, and is re-posted here without images because of Reddit restrictions.]

i often use the word propaganda and it makes many people uncomfortable.  When they hear this term they think i am trying to influence them, which of course i am, which is why i use it.

This poster is running around the internet.  From my perspective it is clearly designed to influence liberal/progressive voters to give up on Obama.  The only items i see on this list which might improve if Mitt Romney were elected president are the rate of raise of the CPI and the prices of gasoline.  Gas is largely untouchable by the president (as Bush 2 found out as he tried hard to influence it).

But from a progressive/liberal perspective Romney will make all of these things worse.

Mitt Romney wants to double Guantanamo, Obama shrank the number of inmates at Guantanamo and ultimately his efforts to close it were thwarted by congress which ironically was controlled by his own party.

As for military conflicts, Obama ran on the “right war/wrong war” platform, in which he was advocating conflict in Afghanistan and we elected him in part, based on that promise.  Except for contractors, we are out of Iraq (again not for completely the right reasons, the Iraqi’s would not grant our troops legal immunity, so we had to go).  Mitt Romney has made it clear he will bomb Iran over their nuclear ambitions. Obama is more diplomatic.  Obama unnecessarily went into Libya with NATO, Mitt would have too.

Government accountability is one of my biggest disappointments with Obama.  One of his three big platform planks was transparency in government and he has maintained all the Bush 2 secrecy policies and in some cases made them worse..  Mitt Romney is not even willing to release his old tax forms.  This might be a wash, but Mitt does not even make transparency noises.

Wall Street and big Pharma would be happy with a Romney presidency, clearly.

i have been watching politics in the US long enuf to have known that when Obama was elected he would disappoint those who put him in power.  I have to confess i have been even more disappointed in Obama than i thought i would be.   Specifically on transparency, not prosecuting political and corporate criminals from Bush 2, Not closing Gitmo and continuing Bush 2 extra-legal nonsense, and contrary to the implication of the above poster continuing the war on drugs and especially marijuana.

If i had more time, i would go through the Obama appreciations and point out the many false representations in it.  But i want to take a nap.

One anarchist orthodoxy (as odd as that sounds) is that you should not vote.  There are lots of strong reasons for it, as well as the stunningly low probability of actually influencing the campaign results.  And all orthodoxies are targets to be considered upending.  I will likely vote again this year and if VA is not close in the polls i might select a more radical candidate than Obama (this radical choice presumably has no chance of winning).

i believe all tools should be considered, tho not necessarily all deployed.