Mark E.

Smith Consent to Tyranny

Mark E. Smith Discusses Consent To Tyranny Central Public Library, San Diego
http://electionboycott2012.org/mark-e-smith-discusses-consent-to-tyranny-central-public-library-san-diego/

Posted on October 28, 2012 by WeThePeople Local author Mark E. Smith discusses two essays The Counterrevolutionary Constitution and Youve Got to Stop Voting from his controversial work, Consent to Tyranny: Voting in the USA. Part of San Diego Public Library project: Searching for Democracy: A Public Conversation about the Constitution. The full transcript of Marks library talk follows; to read more about the Election Boycott, visit Marks website http://fubarandgrill.org/ ********* Good afternoon, good people, and thank you for caring enough about our country and our Constitution to attend this series. Im an election boycott advocate, one of those apathetic people who doesnt vote, and Im going to tell you why I dont vote, why I dont think you should either, and why I say that voting in the United States is consent to tyranny. If youve already voted in this election, please dont feel badly youll have another opportunity to make the same mistake again in 2016. Or perhaps, once youve heard what I have to say, and have a few years to think about it, you might not want to make the same mistake again. Before I became an elections boycott advocate, I was first a voter for many years, and then an election integrity activist, joining with others locally and nationally in observing elections, doing research on election codes and laws, filing public records requests, and bringing litigation in attempts to ensure that our votes would be counted. It isnt enough to vote I wanted our votes to be counted, because an uncounted vote isnt really a vote. It took me six years to understand that there is no way we can ensure that our votes are counted because the Constitution of the United States had not ensured our right to have our votes counted, and had even ensured that our votes did not have to be counted and could not influence public policy. The Constitution had vested power in the government, not in the people, and I was not living in a democracy at all. I was living in a tyranny, not in a democratic country where votes had to be counted and could influence policy. Thats when I stopped voting and became an election boycott advocate. Im happy to say that there are now many other election boycott advocates, activists, and organizers, nationwide. The success of an election boycott depends upon a majority of voters understanding the meaning, purpose, and necessity of the boycott, and many will not listen to any message about not voting, so even if you disagree vehemently with everything I say, I hope that youll do me the courtesy of listening. Youll have a chance to voice your differences during the Q&A, but before we go any further, Ill define what I mean by the phrase democratic form of government, and by the word supreme. My dictionary says that supreme means dominant, highest in degree, and ultimate. Both my dictionary and my political science books also tell me that a democratic form of government is
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one where supreme power over government, supreme meaning dominant, highest in degree, and ultimate, is vested in the hands of the people. You cant have a partly democratic form of government, or a somewhat democratic form of government. Either supreme power is vested in the hands of the people or it isnt. If it isnt, you have an undemocratic form of government or tyranny. It may be a benevolent tyranny, but it is still not a democratic form of government. There are two basic types of democratic forms of government, both of which are characterized by supreme power over government being vested in the hands of the people. In a democracy, the people exercise their supreme power directly, and in a republic the people exercise their supreme power indirectly, through their elected representatives. Obviously were not a democracy, but many people seem to think that were a republic where we can exercise our supreme power through our elected representatives. Of course to exercise your supreme power through your elected representatives, you have to have supreme power over them in the first place, and I contend that the Constitution did not give the people of the United States any power over our elected federal representatives at all. None. I can give you a situation in which I do have some power. If my credit card is stolen, all I have to do is report it and the card will be canceled immediately and Ill only be responsible for a small amount, perhaps fifty dollars, of the debts incurred by the thief. But how would you feel if you phoned to report a stolen credit card and were told, Were sorry. The law says that we cannot cancel your credit card for four years from the time you report it, and during those four years, you will be fully and personally responsible for all debts incurred by the thief. Do you think anyone would accept a credit card under those terms? Of course not. But those are the contractual conditions the Constitution sets out between us and our elected federal officials. If they incur debts without consulting us and against our will, we cannot remove them from office to stop them from incurring further debts, and we, and our children and grandchildren, are responsible for any further debts they incur during their remaining time in office. We can ask Congress to impeach them, because the Constitution gave Congress the sole power to remove, through the impeachment process, federal officials, but while they have removed a few district judges, they have never in the history of the United States, removed a sitting President, Vice-President, or Member of Congress from office by impeachment. Our other alternative is to wait until their terms of office, the only time that they can incur debts for which we are responsible and the only time that they are needed to represent us, are up, and then attempt to elect different representatives whom we also will not be able to hold accountable. While they are in office, they have power over us, but we have no power over them. Of course we can petition, protest, and do all the other things that people do when they are oppressed by tyrants. But we have no power over tyrants so we cant compel them to represent us or to act in our best interests. We can beg, demand, have temper tantrums, and hold our breaths until were blue in the face, but we cannot exercise power over them because we have no power over themthe Constitution didnt give us any. If we had supreme power over them, the minute they violated their oaths of office or betrayed their constituents, we could fire them and replace them with people we hoped would be more responsible, and if they didnt turn out that way, we could fire them also, and keep doing it until we got representatives who would represent us. If theyre running up debts in our name that we

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didnt authorize, we should have that power, because theyre thieves, no different than credit card thieves. How is it that we dont? This situation doesnt appear to be what the writers of the Declaration of Independence intended. They wrote that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever governments became destructive of the unalienable rights, safety, and happiness of the governed, it is the right and the duty of the governed to alter or abolish such governments and institute better ones. Only in the case of a tyranny, an unjust government, would violent revolution be necessary, because in a democratic form of government where all men are equal and supreme power is vested in the hands of the people, the people would have the power to alter or abolish the government nonviolently. In some countries, Im told, they have something called a vote of no confidence, and if the people vote no confidence in a government, that government must step down and be replaced with a different one. We have no such mechanism here. The Constitution of the United States was written by people who were opposed to democracy, which they saw as rule by the mob and rabble. They believed that power should be vested in those who were already the most powerful, the wealthiest people, those who owned the country, because they, being exactly that sort of people themselves, felt themselves best qualified and having the most right to run the country. But if they had asked for the consent of the governed, they wouldnt have gotten it. Many people had come here because they were tired of being ruled by the wealthy tyrants of Europe, and they really didnt want to be ruled by tyrants any more. They wanted freedom and democracy. That was, for many, the reason that theyd fought the revolution for independence from England. So a group of wealthy and powerful people got together, formed a political party called the Federalists, and devised a way to betray the revolution and establish a tyranny where power would be vested in the hands of the government rather than in the hands of the people. Since they knew they couldnt gain the consent of the governed, they didnt ask for it. They intended to govern everyone, including blacks, women, the working class, the poor, and even slaves and indentured servants, but they certainly werent going to ask that mob and rabble for their consent to be governed. What they did instead was to convene a Constitutional Convention to which they invited only 74 rich and powerful people like themselves. There was no mass media in those days, so most people not only werent invited to the Convention, they didnt even know it was happening. Of the 74 white, male, landowning, often slave owning, wealthy elites who were invited to the Convention in Philadelphia by the Federalists, only 55 showed up. Some may have had other commitments, and some may have thought it an unconscionable power grab that they wanted nothing to do with. Of the 55 who attended, only 39 ended up signing the Constitution. And of those 39, some were not representing the people they were supposed to represent. Benjamin Franklin, for example, was sent to the Convention to present an anti-slavery petition, but he saw that if he presented it, it would cause divisiveness, so it never left his pocket. And afterwards, he flat out lied and told a woman that the Constitution had given us a republic, when he knew full well that it had given us neither a democracy nor a republic. Franklin was one of the most intelligent, educated men in the country, and he knew the meaning of the word republic, so he knew that the Constitution hadnt given us one. But he wanted it to be accepted and ratified,
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so he lied, just as he had failed to present the anti-slavery petition with which he had been entrusted. He may have had good intentions, but I think we all know where that road often leads. After the Convention, the delegates were supposed to return to their states and report back, but the Conveners knew that no state legislature would ratify a Constitution that took supreme power away from the people and the states, and vested it in a federal government. So they devised their own means of ratification and wrote it into the Constitution as Article Seven. They convened their own state conventions, invited their own people, and bypassed the state legislatures. It then appeared to each of the states that several other states were banding together to impose power over them, so they felt they had no choices other than to join the union or be subordinated to it. They apparently failed to understand that by joining the union, they would, due to the way in which the Constitution vested power in the federal government rather than in the people or the states, be subordinating themselves to it anyway. It is likely that very few actually read the Constitution, since it was being promoted by some of the wealthiest, most respected, and most powerful people in the country, people upon whom state officials relied for financial support and political advice. It was an easy sell. There were even six men, George Read, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, George Clymer, and James Wilson, who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, so people had no reason to suspect that rather than the government envisioned by the Declaration of Independence, where all men are created equal and no man can have the Divine Right of Kings, the Constitution was a counterrevolutionary document, a betrayal of the revolutions values and principles, a bloodless coup against our fledgling democracy, and a return to tyranny. Few realize it today. But to some who refused to sign the Constitution, its nature was obvious. Rather than recognizing the self-evident truth of the Declaration, that all men are created equal, the Constitution declared some men, to be 3/5 persons. Who would say that a 3/5 person is equal to a full person? Who would say that a Black man is not a man? The Federalists knew how to find people who would, and to give them the power to enforce their will on everyone else. Instead of vesting supreme power in the hands of the people, who might not be stupid enough to give up their hard-won equality, they vested supreme power in something they brazenly called a Supreme Court. To this unelected body, they gave something that the colonists had shed blood to rid us of, something called the Divine Right of Kings. As colonists, subjects of a king, theyd had no appeal from his edicts. They could and did petition and protest injustice, but the King had supreme power, that is to say, dominant, highest in degree, and ultimate power, and his subjects did not. By giving the Divine Right of Kings, the right to issue edicts which would be the highest law of the land and which could not be appealed, to an unelected Supreme Court, the Federalists betrayed the most important accomplishment of our revolution against England, and restored a tyranny without shedding a drop of blood. Yes, Congress can try to legislate around Supreme Court rulings, but since the Supreme Court has the sole power to interpret the Constitution, it can strike down such legislation as unconstitutional. Yes, it might be possible to get an Amendment ratified, but the Supreme Court can interpret that Amendment to mean the exact opposite of what it clearly says, and theres no appeal from that judgment. This was treason. We had no power to elect Supreme Court justices, no power to remove them from office, and no power to appeal their edicts. The destruction of democracy was complete.

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Of course, some will say, we have at least some power over the Supreme Court because we can vote for the Presidents who can appoint them. Never mind that the Constitution prohibits us from voting for President and gives that power only to the Electoral College, if people see the name of a Presidential candidate on the ballot, they believe that theyre voting for President. In fact, theyre voting for the slate of Electors of that candidates political party, who are not bound to abide by the popular vote, which doesnt even have to be counted anyway. Try putting a name on any other contract and then substituting somebody other than that name. That would be fraud, but with Presidential elections theres no way to compel the Supreme Court to recognize it as such and they have the final say. If you voted for President, youd be doing something the Constitution specifically prohibits you from doing, so you cant, but by fraudulently putting those names on the ballot, the government allows many people to innocently believe that theyre voting for President. Theyre not. Ask people who they voted, or are voting for, and nobody will tell you that they cast their vote for the slate of Electors of a Presidential candidates political party, theyll say that they cast their ballot for that candidate, because thats the name that was on their ballot. But is it true that we really have no power over our elected federal officials? Im sure youve often heard people bemoan the apathy of the electorate. It isnt enough to just vote, they insist, once you elect somebody you have to actively force them to represent you, and they cite Franklin D. Roosevelt who said, I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it. The problem, they claim, isnt with the system or with our representatives, but with us for not being organized and active enough to make our representatives represent us. Many elected representatives claim that they would like to represent their constituents, but, like FDR, they cant unless they are made to. If true, this would reflect poorly on us as a people. We have a basically good system, and some good representatives, but we are just too lazy and apathetic to make our representatives represent us. This is all a lie. Let me give you an example. Back during the Bush administration a lot of people wanted to see Bush and Cheney impeached. In one district the desire for impeachment was so high that activists were able to collect signatures from more than 80% of the residents asking their representative, John Oliver, to support impeachment. But when he was formally presented with the petition, his response was, Spare me! Im well aware that the overwhelming majority of my constituents want me to support impeachment. I will not. His response would have been the same if the petition had signatures from 100% of his constituents. He wasnt concerned about whether or not people would vote to reelect him. It wasnt that people were too apathetic to care, or too lazy to try to make him represent them, it was that our Constitution never gave people the power to exercise their will through their elected representatives. As both the Bush and Obama administrations made clear, our government does not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions. We are not a democracy or a republic. In the United States power is vested in the hands of the government, not in the hands of the people. In a democracy, sometimes called a direct or participatory democracy, the people exercise their power directly by voting on budgets, policy issues, and other matters of import. Some remnants of that form of government still remain in the old Town Hall Meetings of New England. In a republic the people exercise their power indirectly through their elected officials but in the United States we have no such power. We can ask our representatives to
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represent us, we can protest if they dont, but we have no way to make them do our will because we have no power over them. Once they are elected, they are free to represent us, if they wish, or they can, if they choose, represent their big campaign donors, their personal ideologies, the interests of a foreign country, or anything else they want. We can petition until we turn blue and protest until we get ourselves shot, but we have no way to sway them. Sure we can wait until their terms of office, the only time theyre supposed to represent us, are over, and then try to elect somebody else who cant be held accountable, but while our representatives are in office, while they are supposed to be representing us, we cannot make them do so. If your representatives appear to be representing you, it is because they chose to or their big donors told them to, not because you made them do it. You have no power to make them do anything. When you vote, you are not voting for representatives, you are voting for petty tyrants who may or may not represent you and over whom you have no power whatsoever. Once their term of office is over and they are no longer representing you, you cannot bring back to life the dead from the wars they funded with your taxpayer dollars or renounce the debts they incurred that your grandchildren will still be paying. The damage they do while in office can be irreparable and you have no control over them while theyre in office. Once their terms are up, after the damage is done and cannot be undone, you can try to elect somebody else, but you will have no real power over them either. Of course with corporate money even in local politics, gerrymandered districts, the Electoral College, and with easily hacked and totally unverifiable central tabulators counting the votes, you can never know for sure that your vote for a new representative was counted at all, no less counted for the candidate you tried to vote for. How can we possibly imagine that we have supreme power over government when we dont even have the power to ensure that our votes are counted? In 2000 the Supreme Court stopped the vote count. In 2004 Kerry conceded before the votes could be counted. We dont even have the power to force the government to count our votes, no less exercise our power through those who are supposedly elected by those votes. Yet approximately 50% of the electorate vote anyway, hoping against hope that their vote might be counted and that they might be represented. The other half of us know better. So dont berate yourself and your neighbors for not making your representatives do their jobs. You cant. The 39 plutocrats who wrote the Constitution, the wealthy elite 1% of their time, made sure that you wouldnt have that power, as they didnt trust the mob and rabble of democracy and wanted those who owned the country, people like themselves, to always rule the country. What the Constitution gave us was a plutocracy, government by the rich. A plutocracy is not a democracy. The government vested power in the hands of the rich, not in the hands of the people. People can petition, protest, and complain, but you can do the same thing with any king, emperor, dictator or tyrant. Like the current and previous administrations, theyll just say that they do not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions, and youre welcome to get yourself arrested trying. What about NDAA? How can it be Constitutional for the government to be able to indefinitely detain or assassinate you without due process? But thats the law right now. Is there anything
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you can do about it? If you lived in a democracy or a republic you could. But you dont, so there isnt. Obama isnt going to give up that power if hes reelected, Romney wont give up that power if hes elected, and nobody else has any realistic chance of being elected. So when you vote, even if you vote for a third party, youre voluntarily granting your consent of the governed to a government that you know is undemocratic. When you sign your name at the polls or on your mail-in ballot, you are authorizing the government to do whatever it wants in your name, the name that you signed. Recently Jimmy Carter, who has observed elections all over the world, said that the United States has the worst electoral system. He was right, but he should have stopped there. Instead he went on to say that it is mostly due to the influx of money into politics. That, unfortunately is only a small part of the problem. The problem with our election system isnt with corporate money in politics, unverifiable vote counts, gerrymandered districts, the Electoral College, or any of the hundred or so other critical problems with our electoral system. The problem is with the way that the Constitution set it up. When I stopped voting and started posting on public forums that I didnt vote, many people were aghast. They tried to tell me that I was apathetic, I, who had spent decades voting in every election, carefully researching the candidates and issues, studiously reading every single line of every piece of legislation no matter how fine the print, and then spent years diligently trying to find a way that we could ensure that our votes were counted. Because I no longer wanted to vote for people who funded or commanded things I could not condone, such as wars of aggression and crimes against humanity, I was suddenly seen as apathetic, and those who cast ballots that didnt have to be counted, for candidates they couldnt hold accountable, were people who cared. That was absurd. So I started keeping track of all the myths that political party operatives use to get out the vote, and made a list of them along with why they were wrong. Lets look at some of the most common reasons that people give for voting: 1. Not voting is doing nothing. I think that if youre doing something wrong, or something that is self-destructive or hurting others, stopping might be a good idea, even if you have no alternative course of action and it means doing nothing. If delegating your power to people you cant hold accountable has resulted in the devastation of your economy, do you really want to keep doing it? If granting your authority to people you cant hold accountable has resulted in wars based on lies that have killed over a million innocent people, do you really want to keep doing it? If granting your consent of the governed to people you cant hold accountable has resulted in government operating on behalf of big corporations and the wealthy instead of on behalf of the people, do you really want to keep doing it? Wouldnt you be better off not doing anything at all? Election boycotts have been successful in delegitimizing governments in other countries, so theres no reason it couldnt work here too. An election boycott cannot oust a government, but it can show that it no longer has the consent of the governed and no longer represents the will of the people it claims to represent. 2. If we dont vote the bad guys will win.
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Weve been voting. When did the good guys win? Isnt that a matter of opinion? Isnt the nation almost equally divided on the question of which candidate is the good guy? Besides, it is often hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Suppose Al Gore had won, and then died of a heart attack. Do you think the Democrats who voted for him would have been happy with Joe Lieberman as President? Besides, Gore actually did win the popular vote. The Supreme Court stopped the vote count and put Bush in office. So just because the good guys you think youre voting for win, doesnt mean that they get to take office. Kerry also won the popular vote, but before anyone could finish counting the votes, he had to break both his promises, that he wouldnt concede early and that he would ensure that every vote was counted, in order to get the bad guy back in office again. Our Constitution was written to ensure that those who owned the country would always rule it, so the popular vote can be overruled by the Electoral College, Congress, the Supreme Court, or by the winning candidate conceding, and is not the final say. Even if we had accurate, verifiable vote counts, and everyone who voted, voted for a good guy, it doesnt mean that good guy could take office unless the Electoral College, Congress, and the Supreme Court allowed it. Even then, the good guy might fear that the Security State might assassinate him they way they killed JFK, and either concede, or stop being a good guy in order to survive. The Supreme Court, of course, has the Constitutional power to intervene on any pretext, and its decisions, no matter how unconstitutional, irrational, unprecedented, or even downright insane, can not be appealed, so they do have the final say, and they might not have the same opinion as to whos the good guy that the majority of voters do. 3. If you dont vote, you cant complain. What good does complaining do? When successive administrations of both parties tell you that they will not allow public opinion to influence policy decisions, you can complain all you want and it wont do you any good. But you dont need to vote to have the right to complain. The Declaration of Independence is a long list of complaints against a king by colonists who were not allowed to vote. The right to gripe is one of those unalienable rights that is not granted by governments or kings. If youre treated unjustly, you have the right to complain. A lot of people who voted for Obama are now angry with his policies and are complaining loudly. He couldnt care less. 4. It is a citizens responsibility and civic duty to vote. Only if the government holding the election has secured your civil and human rights. If it has not, if it has instead become destructive of your civil and human rights, the Declaration of Independence says, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 5. Your vote is your voice in government. In a democratic form of government it would be. In a democratic form of government, such as a direct or participatory democracy, people can vote on things like budgets, wars, and other important issues, and have a voice in government. In our so-called representative government, people can only vote for representatives who may or may not listen to them or act in their interests, and who cannot be held accountable during their terms of office, which
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is the only time they hold power and are needed to represent the interests of their constituents. Waiting until somebody has killed a million people in a war based on lies, destroyed the economy, and taken away your civil rights, and then trying to elect somebody else, is much too late because by then much of the damage cannot be undone and your grandchildren will still be paying for it. 6. Just because things didnt work out the way we wanted last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, doesnt mean that they wont this time. Some say that Einstein defined insanity as repeating the same experiment over and over and expecting different results. 7. If we dont vote, our opponents will, and theyll run the country. Of the approximately 50% of our electorate that votes, fewer than 10% approve of what our government is doing. If only those who approve of our government, voted for it, wed have a successful election boycott. The Apartheid regime in South Africa seated the winning candidates after a successful election boycott where there was only a 7% turnout, but nobody thought they were legitimate or took them seriously. 8. You dont have the numbers to pull off an election boycott. There are already more people who dont vote, who either dont think our government is relevant to them, dont think their vote matters, or dont think that anyone on the ballot would represent them or could, since anyone who represented the people would be a small minority with no seniority in government, than there are registered Democrats or Republicans. We have greater numbers than either major party, but they havent given up so why should we? 9. People who dont vote are apathetic. When you vote, you are either exercising your power, if you happen to have a democratic form of government, or granting your consent of the governed, to be governed, by an undemocratic form of government. Thats what voting is all about. If you knowingly vote for people you cant hold accountable, it means that you dont really care what they do once theyre in office. All you care about is your right to vote, not whether or not you will actually be represented or if the government will secure your rights. Prior to the 08 election, when Obama had already joined McCain in supporting the bailouts that most people opposed, and had expressed his intention to expand the war in Afghanistan, I begged every progressive peace activist I knew not to vote for bailouts and war. They didnt care and they voted for Obama anyway. Thats apathy. But its worse than that. Once I had learned how rigged our elections are, I started asking other election integrity activists if they would still vote if the only federally approved voting mechanism was a flush toilet. About half just laughed and said that of course they wouldnt. But the other half got indignant and accused me of trying to take away their precious right to vote. When I finished asking everyone I could, I ran an online poll and got the same results. Half of all voters really are so apathetic that they dont care if their vote is flushed down a toilet, as long as they can vote. They really dont know the difference between a voice in government, and an uncounted or miscounted, unverifiable vote for somebody they cant hold accountable. They never bothered to find out what voting is supposed to be about
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and yet they think that theyre not apathetic because they belong to a political party and vote. It takes a lot of apathy to stop cherishing what is good in life, stop loving democracy, resign yourself to corruption and evil, and vote for what you hope might be the lesser evil. 10. If you dont vote, youre helping the other party. No, you are. By voting for your party, an opposition party, a third party, an independent, casting a blank ballot, or even writing in None of the Above, Nobody, Mickey Mouse, your own name, or yo mama, you are granting your consent of the governed to be governed by whoever wins, not by the candidate you voted for. If there is a 50% turnout, the winning candidate can claim that 50% of the electorate had enough faith in the system to consent to their governance, even though fewer than 25% actually voted for them. When you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the result of the election will be more wars and more bailouts, no matter who wins and no matter which party, candidate, or issue you vote for, what youre really voting for is war and bailouts. 11. If we dont vote, our votes will never be counted and well have no leverage. True, if we dont vote, our votes will never be counted. But how does hoping that our votes might sometimes be counted, provide leverage? The election just held in the UK had only a 32% turnout. Where people did vote at all, since UK votes actually have to be counted, they threw out major party candidates and voted for third parties (George Galloways Respect Party for one, the Pirate Party for another) and in Edinburgh, a guy who ran dressed as a penguin, calling himself Professor Pongoo, got more votes than leading major party candidates. Thats leverage, but it is only possible when the votes have to be counted and are verifiable. Those conditions do not apply in the US. If you are willing to vote in elections where your vote doesnt have to be counted, what incentive does the government have to count your votes? The only possible leverage we have is to refuse to vote until we can be sure that our votes will be counted. 12. The choice is bullets or ballots, so its a no-brainer. The Department of Homeland Security has recently used the authority that you delegated to the government when you voted, to purchase 450 million rounds of hollow-point ammunition that cannot be used in combat by law and therefore can only be used against US citizens. Your ballots authorized those bullets, just as it authorized all the bullets used in foreign wars. In this country, ballots are bullets. There is a third option: not voting, simply withholding our consent. That has the result of delegitimizing a government that doesnt represent us and demonstrating that it does not have the consent of the governed. It is a legal, nonviolent, effective option called noncompliance. Noncompliance can take other forms, such as not paying taxes or creating alternative systems, but these cannot delegitimize a government. Since governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, withholding our consent is the only way to nonviolently delegitimize a government that fails to represent us. 13. Evil people are spending millions of dollars on voter suppression to deny minorities the vote, and people have fought and died for the right to vote, so the vote must be valuable.

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Mark E. Smith Consent to Tyranny

Nobody fought and died for an uncounted vote. While corporations do spend millions of dollars pushing through Voter ID laws and other voter suppression legislation, they spend billions of dollars funding election campaigns to get out the vote for the major parties so that they can claim the consent of the governed for their wholly-owned political puppets. If they didnt want people to vote, those proportions would be reversed and theyd be spending more suppressing the vote than getting out the vote. Voter suppression efforts are aimed at trying to fool the ignorant into thinking that just because somebody is trying to take their vote away from them, their uncounted, unverifiable votes for oligarchs who wont represent them, must be valuable. 14. We may not be able to do anything about the bailouts or the wars, but we might, by voting, be able to obtain some personal benefits for ourselves, like GMO labeling. I cant argue with that one that ones true. If youre willing to consent to allow the government to continue to murder innocent people in wars of aggression, the worst crimes against humanity known, in return for GMO labeling, you might be able to get your labeling. Youre not paying the price, innocent people in other countries are, so why not get what you can for yourself? GMO labeling could save your life, and what does it matter if it is at the cost of millions of other lives? There are many other benefits that could be gained from voting, like better local officials, less discrimination, or legalization of victimless crimes, but they all come at the expense of other peoples lives. They are very persuasive reasons to vote, but they are not moral reasons to vote. Oh, and by the way, if you have any peanuts, peanut butter, or products containing peanuts, labeled USDA organic or 100% USDA organic from Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Peoples, or from supermarkets or other stores, such as brand names Justins, Larry & Lunas, Newman-Os, etc., theyre been recalled by the FDA for salmonella. After you get your labeling, dont trust it, because it could kill you anyway. In a democratic system of government, where supreme power is vested in the hands of the people, voting is the most precious right of all, because it is the way that the people exercise their power. In an undemocratic form of government where the people have no power, voting has no value. It is nothing more than consent to tyranny. There was a time in England when the King, having the Divine Right of Kings, could have anyone thrown into a dungeon or killed, just because he was the King and could do that. Then a group of Noblemen forced the king to sign something called the Magna Carta. It said that the king could no longer cage or kill anyone he wanted, that everyone was entitled to something called due process. If the king wanted to imprison or murder somebody, he had to bring them to court and the court had to find them guilty. That happened back in the 13th Century and it lasted until the 21st Century. No country that did not have at least a semblance of due process, however biased, flawed, or corrupt, dared to call itself a democratic country. Now we have the NDAA that gives the President the right to detain or kill anyone he wants, without due process. We are now officially back in the Dark Ages of the 12th Century, and that is tyranny. I will not consent to tyranny, and I hope that you wont either. Thank you.

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