by PHIL JONES
As you read this on Nov. 8 or 9, we probably won’t know who won the presidential election.
Remember 2000? On election night, there were three states – New Mexico, Oregon and Florida – in which the vote was too close to call. But because of the mathematics of the electoral college, Oregon and New Mexico didn’t matter. The election came down to who won Florida.
That question went all the way to the Supreme Court and back and, after several weeks, a winner was finally declared. In the meantime, however, there was a ton of bickering, and attempts by both sides to falsify the vote. Neither side trusted the other to be honest in the recounting process, and their distrust of each other was well justified by the facts. It was nasty, and it dragged on until Dec. 12, when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling along party lines, awarded the election to George W. Bush.
Now, in 2012, there are precisely seven states in which the front-runner leads in the Real Clear Politics polling average by less than 3 percent, which is the margin of error for most polls. The seven in question are Florida (29 electoral votes), Ohio (18), Virginia (13), Colorado (9), Iowa (6), Nevada (6) and New Hampshire (4).
That means that on election night 2012, instead of three states too close to call at midnight, there could easily be seven. And because of the arithmetic of the electoral college, it probably won’t boil down to just one state, as it did in 2000.
Imagine the ugly scene of Florida 2000 played out simultaneously in seven states, flung all across the country from New England to the desert. Not a pretty picture, is it? Can they get through this without resorting to violence? Will our nation survive this election?
Regardless of who emerges as President from the disgusting spectacle of 21st century American politics, there are some things that will not change. We will not get the things we need most from either party.
Campaign finance will continue to be desperately corrupt and largely secret. Politicians on both sides of the aisle will continue to be guided, not by the will of the people, or by the greater good, but by the corporate and big-money interests that control their re-election chances. Neither candidate seems to oppose this.
The national debt will continue to skyrocket. Even the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, which presents itself as far more fiscally responsible than the Democrats (despite massive evidence to the contrary), proposes a plan that takes 10 years just to balance the budget. He will be in office eight years at most. The continued piling up of annual deficits can only mean further increases in the national debt, which many analysts say is already choking the economy.
The concentration of wealth into the hands of the few will continue unabated, forcing more and more children into poverty, stifling upward mobility and opening the door wider and wider to real corporate fascism, as political power is also concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The United States will look more and more like El Salvador with each passing day. Death squads, anyone?
For-profit prisons will continue to lobby for a high-crime society with longer and longer prison sentences, in order to fill the beds in their units, and exploit the labor of the prisoners for further profit, in what amounts to nothing but a new form of slavery.
About 4 million abortions per year will continue to be performed, as the Democrats continue to slavishly serve the gender feminist agenda that equates abortion on demand with women’s equality, and the Republicans continue to block bipartisan efforts to reduce the number of abortions, in order to keep the evangelical Christians outraged and voting against their own financial best interest.
That’s what’s not at stake in this election. Thelma Romney and Louise Obama are just competing for the privilege of driving the country over the cliff. Happy landing, America!
