Politics & Power Quote by Geezer Butler

“It doesn’t matter who you vote for” lands like a bass note you feel in your ribs: blunt, heavy, built for crowds who’ve learned to distrust the stagecraft. Coming from Geezer Butler, a writer who helped soundtrack late-20th-century dread, the line isn’t a civics lecture so much as a mood report from inside a rigged-feeling economy. The point isn’t that ballots are literally meaningless; it’s that the lived experience of many voters makes politics look like brand warfare with the same owners.

The specific intent is deflationary. Butler punctures the promise that electoral choice automatically translates into material change, insisting that power sits upstream of the vote in concentrated wealth. “Same billionaires” is doing the work here: not a conspiracy-board roster of villains, but a shorthand for structural capture, lobbying, media ownership, regulatory revolving doors, and the way campaign finance turns candidates into dependent contractors. The subtext is rage, but also exhaustion: when outcomes feel prewritten, participation starts to feel like consent.

Context matters. Butler’s worldview was forged in the shadow of deindustrialization, austerity politics, and the long hangover of the postwar social contract. Metal’s classic move is to translate abstract systems into visceral threat, and this quote follows that tradition by making inequality sound like fate. It’s fatalism with a hook: it dares you to argue back, or to prove him wrong. The cultural power of the line is that it names a suspicion people often whisper, then says it at full volume.