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A Vote For Jill Stein Is A Vote For A Beautiful Life

By Caitlin Johnstone
Published on: 15:39 PST, Aug 17, 2016

The phrase goes “A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump.” We all know that one.

What about if you could make sure your vote didn’t take anything away from Hillary? Check out this brilliant strategy by Fantasy Football whizz kid Josh Moore. What you do is, you find a disenfranchised Republican voter who doesn’t want to vote for Trump, and wants to vote third party too but is being howled down by his or her friends and family. Social media makes that easy enough. And what if you agree that you’ll both vote third party. You’ve taken your vote for Trump out of the equation, and s/he’s taken her vote for Hillary.

Anytime the shame police come calling, you can just point to him and say “See? My vote’s not going to Trump.”

Then you could actually vote for what you wanted. Imagine! Voting for a world that you actually want to create.

You could say to your friends and family, “Well actually, in my case, a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Jill Stein. It’s a vote for all she stands for. Like…”

1. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for returning democracy to America.

A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for the woman I want to run the country. It’s saying loud and clear that this is my choice. A choice between poo soup and a poo sandwich is not a democratic choice. It’s saying my vote goes to the woman who best outlines the future America I want to live in.

This election has made it painfully clear that we are run by corporate money. Whether that’s corporate money buying the election in Hillary Clinton, or standing for election in Donald Trump, the pay-to-play government is in full flight. So a vote for either of those two is a vote for the corporate vision for the planet. And that vision is simply the combined business plans of the world’s richest corporations.

2. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for a beautiful future.

The corporate vision for America and the world includes “endless, stupid war” so they can make a fortune out of selling munitions for it, oil to keep their petrodollars afloat, Wall Street installing usury banking in Muslim countries, taking global control of food and water for Nestle and Monsanto, grinding down wages to under subsistence level for Wal-Mart et al, and exorbitant health care price gouging for all those big pharmaceutical companies.

That’s their grand plan for us. That’s their utopia. That’s their promised land. Oh, what fun!

Isn’t it revolting? I’m sorry, but someone has got to let these guys know they are terrible visionaries. By the time they’re through with us, this planet will be an apocalyptic dustbowl. They clearly have no idea what comprises a beautiful life. Imagine thinking all that was something to reach for? Wars and poverty. They think that’s a fun time for Earth. A vote for Trump or Hillary is a vote for that vision.

No thanks. I want Jill’s vision.

3. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for the 99 percent.

When I was growing up, my mother was studying for her Masters in education, and she told me something at the time that got me so excited about the future. She said that teaching children how to enjoy their free time was going to become an important part of education, because technology was quickly taking over jobs, and many of my generation would not need to work, or work only part time, because everything was being handled.

That made total sense. And she was right, and it came to pass. But as I grew up, to my dismay, every time a corporation fired humans and installed cheaper technology, the money they were saving did not go to the people who lost the jobs, because at the same time, taxes on big business went way down. So although they were making more money, that extra tax money didn’t flow to support the people who lost their jobs.

So there are now fewer jobs to go around, but way more poverty, because our system was hijacked by business at the exact wrong time so none of that surplus wealth flowed into supporting the newly workless.

Having fewer jobs should be something to be celebrated! But we have this bizarre philosophical idea that everyone needs to be slaving away all the time in order to justify their existence. “Earn a living.” What a strange phrase. No other animal on the planet has to “earn” their daily bread. We treat dogs better than we treat ourselves.

It’s the wage-slave’s nightmarish version of pay-to-play, where otherwise good people take an evil secret joy in seeing their friends, family, and countrymen lose their jobs and therefore risk losing their lives because in Ayn Rand’s terms, keeping hold of a job means they are inherently better people than their friends. Not lucky. Just better. Because Ayn said so.

This weird psychopathy snakes through the comments on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit as people take gleeful potshots at “losers” who are literally losing their life because technology made jobs redundant and their government was taken over by corporations who reduced taxes on themselves, and diverted our tax money into wars and corporate welfare.

And the “losers” buy into it too. The shame of being bankrupted by illness neatly swallows up what should be unholy outrage.

Well, I don’t want that. I imagine a utopian future for my children, I imagine no poverty, people enjoying looking after each other, lots of time for play and fun as technology takes over jobs and we all get to reduce our work hours. More time for volunteering and making beautiful things together just for the fun of it. People going to work because they love it. If you can’t imagine that, then I bet you’re in a job you hate. Some of the richest people in the world still work at something because happy, healthy people enjoy doing things, helping people, and making stuff with others. We don’t need some punitive system for that to be so. The Earl of Spencer spends his days farming. Bill Gates does all sorts of interesting, creative things that help others. Happy, unstressed, un-overworked people enjoy helping each other. The spectacularly successful viral Pay It Forward movement is proof of that.

4. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for a habitable planet.

I want a sparkling environment with clean oceans to swim in, and the fresh air of the forests to breathe into my lungs. I want to improve our environment through technology, not destroy it. I want to improve where we get energy from, I want to improve how we re-use materials, I want to improve the lives of those less fortunate than myself by decreasing our impact on the planet’s resources and getting smarter about how we use what we already have.

A new study says that we could phase out fossil fuels in a decade. Yes to that please! I want that. Big yes to that please.

A vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is a vote for the one percent. It is a vote for their vision for us — of corporate-run government with no input from you and me, of endless, stupid wars for profit, for more oil and more fracking, totally ignoring the death-cries of our planet, of splitting families apart and tearing children limb-from-limb in drone strikes. It is a vote for oceans of garbage, poisoned water, prison instead of college, desiccated forests, and more and more threats of terrorism as the children who were brought up in Hillary’s Libya and Hillary’s Syria come of age.

I want to say to my friends and family — if that’s what you want to vote for, please go ahead. But do know that that’s what you’re voting for. The one percent are not going to read anything more into your vote other than affirmation of your consent.

I do not consent. I do not want their dystopian disaster. That is not my will. Do not want.

So friends, family — please just understand that I want to vote for a beautiful future. I want to vote for Jill Stein’s vision. You do you, and I will do me. Thank you for your understanding.

[Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]

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