Pahls, Anderson represent fresh hope for beleaguered NM voters

Bob Anderson, a political science instructor at CNM

Community College, and Jeanne Pahls, an Albuquerque

public school teacher, are write-in candidates in the November

federal elections. He is running for the U.S. Senate and she

seeks New Mexico's 1st Congressional District seat.

Albuquerque, N.M.—Stumbling, we approach the end of Pres. Obama’s first term and the state of U.S. democracy and the economy, and the horizon of possibilities for progressive change, are worse today than they were eight years ago when the sulfurous pall descended at the inauguration of George W. Bush’s second term. The trajectory of American decline, manipulated to serve to the insatiable self-interests of the corporate elite, has proceeded without interruption for more than 30 years, regardless of which political party occupies the White House or controls the House or Senate.

It is news to no one, except the mainstream news media, that the two political parties are morally and ideologically bankrupt. Neither has any solution to the myriad troubles facing a nation in freefall, appalling economic inequality, wars without end, and looming ecological Armageddon. In the upcoming presidential election, the spineless incumbent who proclaimed sweeping justice but delivered business as usual, often with his tail between his legs, faces a vulture capitalist, fattened from global plundering, who promises to fix the tanking economy with more of the same policies that engorged his peers but generated economic disaster for the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Here in River City, voters are fortunate to have two write-in candidates for the U.S. House and the Senate, Jeanne Pahls and Bob Anderson, both educators, who represent a genuine alternative to the capitalist apologetics of the Democrats and Republicans. Their policies and programs, listed on their web sites, would cease the plundering of commons and rebuild society for the benefit of the many, not the few.

Neither Jeanne nor Bob will win their race. They cannot win because the landscape of electoral politics is too dominated by funding from the wealthy few to permit that to happen. Federal electoral campaigns, as they are constituted today, have been distorted into a formidable obstacle to democratic participation and will only become meaningful when they are ripped from the parties that have degraded them beyond recognition. A vote for a Democrat or a Republican in a federal election today is a wasted exercise that legitimizes a broken political system, but a vote for a platform that places people and peace before profits is a gesture of hope for the future, an insistence on something better than the hollow bromides from the failed parties of the past.

Postscript: Under New Mexico law, official write-in candidates must first register with the state.