by Luke Hiken
I Don’t Remember:
1. Voting to wage war against every Muslim nation that is not a pawn of U.S. capital.
2. Voting to support the use of unmanned drones as murder weapons against civilian populations.
3. Voting to characterize corporations as “people” for purposes of buying elections, and destroying whatever vestiges of democracy that might have existed in the U.S.
4. Voting to bail out Wall Street gangsters who destroyed the U.S. economy. I know I did not vote to immunize these crooks from prosecution for their theft of the wages and earnings of the American people.
5. Voting to destroy our educational system by indenturing students with impossibly burdensome loans and creating annual tuitions that only the super rich can afford.
6. Voting to construct the largest prison system in the world, imprisoning African-American and Latino/Chicano prisoners at five times their number in the U.S. population.
7. Voting to deport more than ½ million non-immigrants from this country during Obama’s term of office alone, in spite of the fact that nobody else will perform the services they provide to the American people. The cultural and social losses created by our endless detainments and deportations are as destructive as the economic considerations of our policies.
8. Voting to allow oil companies and their cohorts to reap unimaginable profits to the detriment of the U.S. people, while destroying the natural resources of the earth.
9. Voting to permit corporations to export our jobs oversees, while paying no taxes on their obscene profits earned by paying slave wages to poor people throughout the world.
10. Voting to immunize police departments and hired mercenaries for their ongoing repression and violence against poor people and minorities.
11. Voting to legalize torture and renditions as national policy and practice.
12. Voting to allow the Pentagon to decide who is a criminal and who is not, and to imprison anybody anywhere, without probable cause, according to their militaristic worldview.
13. Voting to demand “austerity” from poor people, while allowing the greediest monsters that have ever lived to rule this nation and to thrive economically.
14. Voting to allow vulture banks to steal people’s homes and profit from their newly created homelessness.
15. Voting to allow 1 percent of the population to control more than 40 percent of the wealth of the nation.
BUT, I will certainly remember these things when either the Democrats or the Republicans ask me to vote for them in November.
(Luke Hiken is an attorney who has engaged in the practice of criminal, military, immigration, and appellate law.
