Why I'm not voting for Barack Obama again

I think American liberals are now divided into two groups — those who have retained their faith in the future, and those who have lost it. I’m one of the latter. The last two years has stripped me of all faith I had in the American government, or its ability to change or impact anything whatsoever. No way in hell am I voting for Barack Obama again. I do feel a little bad about this. I don’t want the fascists to win (and at this point that's exactly what Republicans are, I will debate you on this). But Obama and the Democrats seem to be strutting a “What choice do you have?” attitude, which I find to be extremely undemocratic, and I don’t appreciate it at all. I’m not settling for either/or when my only “choice” is between Obama the conservative, and whichever fascistic cutout the corporations decide to strap a pin on. Those in power are deliberately skewing the debate in their own direction to give us the illusion of choice. I won’t allow myself to be forced into voting for a conservative. I’m not a tool, and I’m not going to play.

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, AIG, and all those assholes who caused the global economic meltdown weren’t even pursued. They're doing better than ever. In response to BP raping an entire ecosystem, Obama called for more drilling. When the European Parliament enacted strict regulations on bank compensations, and called for the United States to do the same, the president did nothing. Obama is currently holding Bradley Manning as a political prisoner. They’re trying to plant false evidence on Julian Assange. The president has extended warrantless wiretapping in direct violation of the Constitution. He’s going to hold military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay. He's done nothing about Afghanistan, and it looks like our soldiers will be needlessly dying in the desert for at least another decade. No fucking way am I voting for this guy again. These are the exact reasons why we as liberals despised George W. Bush so much, and we shouldn’t forget that. I’m not abandoning my principles for a political party I never associated myself with to begin with.

I really do feel that Barack Obama is doing the best he can, and that’s exactly the problem. This is the best we can do. At the exact moment when it’s most vital to come together and solve our problems, the government has become stagnant. It’s not necessarily Obama I’m most angry with, it’s the system. I just don’t see the point in taking part in a system that is so utterly useless and broken. There’s no longer a reason to hold any amount of faith in it. We are fucked. The Pentagon has consistently worked against the president to keep the military industrial complex rolling. The economic meltdown was not an accident, and Congress, the Supreme Court, and half of Obama’s White House are all in on it. The founders rebelled for less.

I really am starting to see parallels of Rome losing its republic (and I’ve fought that comparison until now). And I don't mean that America is going to completely collapse and we'll become an apocalyptic wasteland. We're just going to stagnate as the rest of the world overtakes us. With how little our government thinks of the Patriot Act, and seeing how little the rest of us care about it, there's nothing stopping them from enacting further "emergency measures" in the future. Since no one in the Bush Administration ever went to prison for the war crimes they committed, there's nothing stopping us from continuing to commit them in the future. It doesn’t matter who’s president. I’ve given up. You can’t bring change using the system that is designed to resist change. I have half a mind to write-in the socialist candidate next year just for shits and giggles. I don't even consider myself a socialist. It’s not like elections even matter anymore, 2000 proved that. These corporate fascists are rigging our elections, they have taken over our government, and they have us by the fucking balls. They are going to get their way and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

The only comparison I can make to our own history to the amount of corruption in our government right now could possibly be Reconstruction, or maybe the time shortly before the Great Depression. But I'm not hopeful that we can crawl our way out of it this time. This is uncharted territory, for the sole reason that we now have a mass media. There's never been a more effective propaganda tool in the history of the world. And it fucking works. When the mass deregulation of these corporations was directly responsible for what's happening right now, half the country is convinced that even less regulation is going to fix everything. Nothing short of another revolution is going to change a damn thing, and corporate media has the American people so fucking brainwashed that we’re going welcome the destruction of our rights with open arms. If you want freedom, move somewhere outside the United States, because the American experiment has failed. We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.