Do Not Allow The Poor to Vote!

According to a politically conservative columnist and author named Matthew Vadum, allowing the poor to vote is like "handing out burglary tools to criminals."

He goes on: "It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. ... Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money."

Of course, the conservatives are already doing their best to disenfranchise the poor - whom they believe, often correctly, to be predominantly Democratic or Democratic-leaning. Now that directly racist disenfranchisement is ostensibly illegal, they're doing it in other ways.

Registration processes are deliberately made complex so people without higher education, or a strong command of the English language, find it difficult to register successfully. There are fewer voting booths in poor urban districts, and they are generally older and more subject to breakdowns (real, intended, or imagined), creating long lines that discourage would-be voters. More often it is in precincts such as these that recounts are demanded, processes in which Republicans have gotten good at challenging every Democratic vote such that it is thrown out and, lo and behold, the Democratic candidate eventually is deemed to have lost.

Of course, the very sanctity of voting - that supposedly the people decided, that supposedly the outcome was unknown until the people had spoken - is long gone. It's such a science now that they know how you're going to vote even before you pull the curtain - no, not you specifically as an individual, but there are experts who can predict with appalling accuracy the results of every voting bloc: by district, by racial makeup, by educational level achieved, by religion, they have you pegged.

More than that, there are experts who manipulate - who pull certain strings in order to produce the election results that those who pay for their services require.

Thus it doesn't matter whether the poor, whether Democrats, vote or not: the Powers have set up mechanisms that engineer the desired outcomes to elections, notwithstanding what might have happened had the process of voting remained what it was intended to be. This is because the trained lapdogs of the ultra-rich in the Congress and state legislatures, put there by means of fooling the poor into voting for them, have destroyed any meaningfulness to the voting process.

The mechanism of this destruction includes gerrymandering, lobbying, no-bid contracting, PACs, corporations as persons, fit-the-desired-results pollstering, media blitzing, and of course owning the news outlets that tell people how to vote under the pretense of objective journalism.

Most appalling, these people use the emotional appeal of out-of-context religious phraseology and a flag-waving patriotic fervor to gain the support of millions of woefully uninformed citizens (thanks to financially undersupported schools that have been turned into menial-work-preparation mills and empty political platitudes in the guise of news but packaged as entertainment) - even as these people rip away from these people their civil rights, their jobs, their health, their clean environment, and dump heavy regressive taxes on their shoulders.

I'm reminded how, decades ago, I saw the manuscript for a fellow pastor's sermon. At one point in the margin his wife had noted, "Your argument's weak here. Be sure to raise your voice in emphasis." This, to me, is a metaphor for what these lunatics are doing - they have not weak arguments; rather, they have none at all. So they raise their voices into a din of outrage against those who try calmly to explain the complicated, boring facts.

Remember:

Those who do not set the bulwarks of their positions on the foundation of fact and raise them up on the girders of logic, but rather on the emotional appeal of flag and scripture, don't want you to realize that their rhetoric entirely lacks both fact and logic.

This Matthew Vadum fails to comprehend an essential feature to the whole idea of every citizen, rich or poor, white or minority, Christian or Jewish or Muslim, liberal or conservative, being able to vote. If every citizen is able to vote, it is much more difficult for a self-governed country to be taken over by an oligarchy.

We have seen in history what it's like when only whites can vote - blacks are kept as slaves. We have seen in history what it's like when only men can vote - women cannot inherit or hold meaningful jobs or get a decent education.

If only Christians get to vote, for instance, other faiths will soon be tightly regulated, or heavily taxed, or even outlawed. If only Republicans get to vote, there will be no "loyal opposition" to their maddening excesses. (The Democrats are no band of saints; they too have their idiots and their monsters. But they're all we've got in opposition to these tea party Republican lunatics!) And if only people who do not receive public assistance get to vote, then laws will soon be put in place denying those on public assistance (including the poor and the elderly) their essential civil rights.

It is only because those on public assistance (and those who agree to the necessity of providing it) still can vote that the poor and the minorities still have a few rights. It is only because they can still vote that the United States hasn't yet quite fully become an oligarchy of the wealthy. The country is already dangerously close to that, with lawmakers in state and federal legislative bodies doing everything they can to eliminate taxes on the wealthy, to create corporations as legal persons, to take away all public assistance (including health, housing, food, and other essentials), to eliminate environmental and safety standards, and safeguards against monopolies, and reduce all but the ultra-wealthy to slaves, working several jobs and still struggling to pay their taxes and their exorbitantly priced necessities.

And, if those on public assistance are denied the vote - even though the United States Constitution enshrines the vote for all citizens - then I warn you: You Are Next. Are you of a faith other than conservative Christian, or (shudder) of no faith at all? Is your racial heritage something other than Northern European? Do you have more than a high school education? Once they start that snowball rolling down the hill, there will soon be an avalanche of widespread disenfranchisement.

I'm a left-handed left-leaning scholar-writer, ordained in a liberal Protestant denomination and someone who practices (shudder) other faiths as well (Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Native American spirituality) who lives abroad because he can't afford life in the United States and is angry about that reality. I expect them not only to take away my vote, but to take away my pension and my Social Security that I paid for by working for forty-five years. You should be concerned that you, too, will lose certain essentials.

Vadum also fails to understand that voting isn't a "right" anyway.

It's a responsibility.

A right is something that is permanently yours. You can't lose it. A responsibility is something that, if you don't use it, you lose it. If you don't vote - and vote for people who will protect your rights and your responsibilities - both of them - you will lose at least your responsibilities, and very likely some day your rights, too.

Allow me to explain:

Every citizen has as her or his responsibility participation in self-government. If one fails that responsibility, one tacitly is allowing others - whoever those "others" may be, including the ultra-rich and the ultra-conservatives who toady up to them - to govern them instead. If a citizen doesn't vote, then a citizen has no right - this is where rights fit in - to exercise free speech to criticize the government.

That, at least, is what I used to say. But now that elections are so carefully managed that their outcomes are designed by the super-wealthy, the opportunity to exercise that responsibility has been taken away from us. I'm no longer sure whether it is worth the effort to vote, when the outcome is already been bought and paid for.

Vadum is only verbalizing what is increasingly a reality: that the United States is no longer a self-governed country, but an oligarchy of the super-rich.