Global Warming vs. Election Integrity

Recently MoveOn.org announced their new priorities, with health care in first place and election reform tied for third. At about the same time I was involved in a discussion about peak oil with someone who was absolutely frantic about this impending disaster. And of course there has been a lot of attention given to Al Gore’s new film about global warming. If we are going to effect change, we need to focus our energies, so how can we know what our top priority really should be?

My friend with the peak oil obsession insisted that the current politicians had to be brought onboard because there wasn’t time enough for election reform. I replied that the current politicians with any policy-making power at all, were put in place BY the oil and energy people, so they’re not going to get onboard. Here’s the rest of my response to my friend:

So long as there is a short term profit to be made, you cannot get corporate-sponsored politicians to stop the torture, the war, globalization, global warming, or anything else that causes human suffering and endangers the entire planet. Do you think that if Hitler had only understood that people were suffering he would have stopped the death camps and forbidden corporations to use slave labor? Those politicians with policy-making power at the present time knew the levees would be breached in New Orleans. If they let it happen, there was money to be made from reconstruction contracts and a political advantage from displacing minority voters. It they had acted to prevent it, or to quickly limit and control the damage and assist survivors, they would have lost millions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, or their corporate sponsors would have, which is the same thing. The current politicians with policy-making power in the U.S. don’t care about peak oil, or about anything else other than short term profits and their long term investments.

Election reform would take a long time, true. But nobody with half a brain expects those corrupt, illegitimate politicians with policy-making power today, to vote for election reform. People are angry about many things these days, including high gas prices, corruption, torture, the war, 9/11, New Orleans, depleted uranium, etc. Unfortunately the Democratic and Republican party leadership, and the media, are still spreading the big lie that Bush was elected and that our votes count. And people are just starting to see through the lies.

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