The Media Can’t Get Its Story Straight on Election Hacking

Posted on October 28, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Dan Engelke

In August, the corporate media was falling all over itself with breathless coverage on how Russia is interfering in the US election. Back then, stories citing experts suggested that voting machines were vulnerable to tampering that could change the outcome of the vote. A month later, something curious happened.

By September, government officials were doing all they could to tamp down those concerns, and the media duly reported their reassurances.

Should the public be comforted that election mischief will be homegrown?

The articles, usually citing active government officials, serve a dual purpose in reassuring the public: First, there is no way Russia can hack the election, despite cyber hacks in the Illinois and Arizona voter registration banks. Meanwhile, the message is also to insist Russian President Vladimir Putin is still giving orders to disrupt US cyberspace. This latter message culminated in the Obama administration publicly blaming the Russian government for trying to influence the election in early October.

Voter System vs Election System

The Washington Post began the trend on August 31 with the definitive headline “There’s Almost No Chance Our Elections Can Be Hacked by the Russians. Here’s why.”

The Post cites two major obstacles for potential (Russian) disruption of our election. One is the difference between the “voter system” and the “election system.” The voter system involves registered voter databases throughout the country, while the election system refers to voting machines and paper ballots.

According to executive director Merle King of the state-funded Center for Election Systems in Georgia, the public conflates these two issues about the election, and that leads to a lot of confusion.

The second hindrance for potential hackers is the decentralized voting process, the Post reported. A major positive for vote security, according to the Post, is that local jurisdictions set their own rules for how votes will be counted.

This claim is buttressed by a letter sent by state election officials to Florida voters which notes the public safeguards already in place for our voting process — including (1) layers of encryption for voting machines, (2) thumb drive backups of votes, (3) lack of internet connection to voting machines, and (4) a review of votes after an election.

The Los Angeles Times followed on September 8 with a report titled “Could Russia n Hackers Mess with the US Election Results? It Wouldn’t Be Easy; Here’s Why.”

The Times also highlights the decentralized nature of the voting system as a safeguard against tampering. However, while the Post viewed the system as sophisticated, the Times saw the state-run and community-monitored systems as too cumbersome to be susceptible to any hacking.

Quoted again is Merle King, along with Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, and FBI Director James Comey. Pamela Smith of Verified Voting — an organization that highlights the susceptibility to election rigging — is also sourced to reassure readers that the upcoming election is safe, thanks to an uptick in paper ballot usage.

Russia’s Goal Not Hacking — But Scandal

On September 10, Washington, D.C.-based political newspaper The Hill worked the same dual agenda with “Hacking the Election is Nearly Impossible. But that’s not Russia’s Goal.”

Like the previous articles in the Washington Post and LA Times, The Hill presents the decentralized process of US elections as an impenetrable obstacle to Russian hacking. Bolstering the claims of election security in the piece are Florida’s Secretary of State Ken Detzner, Colorado’s Secretary of Wayne Williams, Pennsylvania Department of State spokesperson Wanda Murren, and Wisconsin’s Administrator of State Elections Division Michael Hass. The only non-governmental official quoted is Chris Porter, an administrator of strategic intelligence at cybersecurity firm FireEye Horizons.

Porter cited examples of Russian election tampering in the Ukraine and efforts to “create scandal,” despite their inability to hack the election.

The Chicago Tribune got its turn on September 14, quoting Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa Monaco, who reiterated the safety of the election thanks to the decentralization of the voting process.

These assertions of election security and passive blame on Russia culminated in early October with the Obama administration publicly accusing “senior-most officials in Russia” of tampering with the election, despite their claimed inability to do so.

Taking a Screwdriver to the Election

Let’s go back to August to see why certain experts said that elections could indeed be tampered with.

Princeton professor Andrew Appel made headlines in August after hacking the Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine in seven minutes. Such machines are used in Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

“[Appel] summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds. Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips — they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate — making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.”

Former government officials working in the cyber sphere have also warned of election tampering. Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke asserted: “Yes, It’s Possible to Hack the Election” on August 18.

“I have had three jobs that together [under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama] taught me at least one thing: If it’s a computer, it can be hacked.”

Special Interests and the Machines

Clarke sees the decentralized election system as the access point for potential tampering —rather than a potential safeguard. While there are safeguards, such as the voter tabulation through paper ballots, almost no state exclusively uses paper ballots. Instead, voting machines — even allowing votes from home — produce no paper ballot record and thus no way to ensure the “correct” vote was cast.

Furthermore, Clark argues paper ballot receipts from the voting machines are only used in the case of a recount — something today’s sophisticated hackers are aware of and would seek to avoid.

“My first reaction to all this government reassurance was ‘are you kidding me?’” Dr. Jonathan Simon of the Election Defense Alliance told WhoWhatWhy. “There is all this concern about outside hacking, but absolutely no talk of internal rigging.”

While Simon points out that there are many election safeguards, connections to special interests by those that control voting machines provides easy access to election rigging.

“Anyone who could stand to profit off certain policies — the Koch brothers, for example — have a better chance of rigging the election due to their connections to voting systems like Dominion, SES and their satellite companies,” Simon explained. “Russia, China, nor any terrorist group in the Middle East have a connection like that.”

Despite encryption and the lack of an Internet connection, Simon claims that there are other ways to change voting results.

“In a memory card, which is used in optical scanner-verified voting, three lines of code to flip votes one way or another can be entered into 7,000 or 8,000 lines of code virtually without detection. Multiple memory cards can be manipulated like this at the push of a button.”

Why Overlook Potential Domestic Hacking?

With articles by outside experts in August claiming the election could be hacked, followed in September with articles by government officials claiming it could not be — by Russia — it raises the question: why overlook domestic tampering?

“These are relatively unsophisticated and simple ways to rig the election,” Simon concluded.

Washington moves to silence WikiLeaks

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Van Auken

Source: WSWS.org

The cutting off of Internet access for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is one more ugly episode in a US presidential election campaign that has plumbed the depths of political degradation.

Effectively imprisoned in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over four years, Assange now is faced with a further limitation on his contact with the outside world.

On Tuesday, the Foreign Ministry of Ecuador confirmed WikiLeaks’ charge that Ecuador itself had ordered the severing of Assange’s Internet connection under pressure from the US government. In a statement, the ministry said that WikiLeaks had “published a wealth of documents impacting on the US election campaign,” adding that the government of Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and “does not interfere in external electoral processes.” On that grounds, the statement claimed, the Ecuadorian government decided to “restrict access” to the communications network at its London embassy.

This statement from the bourgeois government of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is a study in hypocrisy and cowardice. By abetting the US government’s suppression of WikiLeaks, Quito has intervened in the US elections on the side of the ruling establishment and against the rights of the American people. If Correa expects that his professed sensitivity toward the “principle of non-intervention” will be reciprocated, he should recall the fate of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a coup orchestrated by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009.

WikiLeaks cited reports that Secretary of State John Kerry had demanded that the government of Ecuador carry out the action “on the sidelines of the negotiations” surrounding the abortive Colombian peace accord last month in Bogota. The US government intervened to prevent any further exposures that could damage the campaign of Clinton, who has emerged as the clear favorite of the US military and intelligence complex as well as the Wall Street banks.

Whether the State Department was the only entity placing pressure on Ecuador on behalf of the Clinton campaign, or whether Wall Street also intervened directly, is unclear. The timing of the Internet cutoff, in the immediate aftermath of the release of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches, may be more than coincidental.

In the spring of 2014, the government of Ecuador agreed to transfer more than half of its gold reserves to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for three years, in an attempt to raise cash to cover a growing deficit brought on by the collapse in oil prices. It reportedly sent 466,000 ounces of gold to Goldman Sachs, worth about $580 million at the time, in return for “high security” financial instruments and an anticipated profit on its investment. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe that such a relationship would give Goldman Sachs considerable leverage in relation to the Ecuadorian government.

In any case, it is evident that the US ruling establishment is growing increasingly desperate to stanch the flow of previously secret emails and documents that are exposing the real character not only of Clinton, but of capitalist politics as a whole. While WikiLeaks has released over 17,000 emails from the account of Clinton campaign manager and top establishment Democrat John Podesta, it is believed that there are more than 33,000 still to come.

The transcripts of Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs and other top banks and employers’ groups, for which she was paid on average $200,000 per appearance, are the most incriminating. They expose the workings of the oligarchy that rules America and the thinking and actions of a politician prepared to do anything to advance the interests of this ruling stratum, while simultaneously accruing ever greater riches and power for herself.

While on the campaign trail, Clinton has postured as a “progressive,” determined to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire. But in her speeches to Goldman Sachs, she made clear her unconditional defense of the banks and financial houses. Under conditions of popular outrage against the bankers and their role in dragging millions into crisis in the financial meltdown of 2008, Clinton gave speeches praising the Wall Street financiers and insisting that they were best equipped to regulate themselves. She apologized to them for supporting the toothless Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, saying that it had to be enacted for “political reasons.”

In front of her Wall Street audiences, Clinton made clear she had no inhibitions about ordering mass slaughter abroad. While telling her public audiences that she supports a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a humanitarian measure to save lives, she confidentially acknowledged to her Goldman Sachs audience that such an action is “going to kill a lot of Syrians” and become “an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.” In the same speech she declared her willingness to bomb Iran.

The emails have laid bare the nexus of corrupt connections between the State Department, the Clinton Foundation, her various campaigns and her network of financial and corporate donors, which together constitute a quasi-criminal influence-peddling enterprise that could best be described as “Clinton, Inc.”

The revelations contained in the WikiLeaks material have been ignored or downplayed by the corporate media, which instead has focused unrelentingly on the charges of sexual misconduct leveled against Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump.

The Clinton camp itself has sought to deflect any questions regarding what the candidate said in her speeches or the corrupt operations of her campaign by claiming, with no evidence whatsoever, that the material released by WikiLeaks had been hacked by the Russian government and therefore cannot be trusted.

This line of argumentation serves not only to divert attention from the WikiLeaks material, but also to further the Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyite claims of Kremlin intervention on behalf of Trump and advance a propaganda campaign aimed at preparing popular opinion for a direct military confrontation with Russia.

There is an air of desperation in the attempt to quash the WikiLeaks material. CNN news anchor Chris Cuomo, an open supporter of Clinton, went so far as to lie to his audience, claiming it was illegal for them to access the emails and insisting they could obtain any information on them only through the filter of the corporate media.

Well before the release of documents related to the Democratic Party, the determination of ruling circles to suppress WikiLeaks had found repeated and violent expression. State Department officials have come forward with a report that in 2010, in the midst of WikiLeaks’ mass release of State Department cables exposing US imperialist operations around the world, Clinton, then secretary of state, asked subordinates, “Can’t we just drone this guy?” She recently said she could not remember the remark, but if she made it, it was a joke.

During the same period, however, Clinton supporter and longtime Democratic campaign operative Bob Beckel declared in a television interview in relation to Assange: “A dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

To this point, the American ruling class has limited itself to judicial frame-ups and character assassination, counting on the help of its servants within both the media and the pseudo-left, large sections of which have either joined the witch-hunt against Assange or downplayed his victimization.

The principal vehicle for this campaign of persecution had been fabricated allegations of sexual misconduct pursued by Swedish authorities acting in league with the US and British governments. Earlier this year, the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued findings that Assange had been “deprived of his liberty in an arbitrary manner,” meaning the body had reached the conclusion that the Swedish case constituted a politically motivated frame-up.

In the midst of the current attempt to silence Assange, an even more bizarre and filthy frame-up has been concocted, attempting to smear the WikiLeaks founder with charges of taking Russian money as well as pedophilia.

At the center of these allegations is a little known online dating service, Toddandclare.com, which first attempted to lure Assange into a supposed deal to film an ad for the site, for which he supposedly would be paid $1 million, to be provided by the Russian government. When WikiLeaks rejected this preposterous provocation, the same site claimed that Assange had been charged with inappropriate contact through the site with an eight-year-old Canadian child visiting the Bahamas. This accusation was then invoked in an attempt to pressure the UN to drop its demand for an end to the persecution of Assange.

Even a cursory investigation makes clear that these allegations constitute a grotesque fabrication. Bahamian police have stated that there are no charges or any case whatsoever against Assange. The dating service has no business address, working phone number or corporate presence anywhere in the US, having all the earmarks of a dummy company created by US intelligence for the purpose of hounding Assange.

The use of such tactics is a measure of how terrified the US ruling class has become in the face of growing mass hostility to both major political parties and their two abhorrent candidates. Their fear is that the relentless exposure of the inner workings of a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich is robbing the existing political setup of what little legitimacy it had left within the population, and creating the conditions for a political radicalization within the working class and social upheavals, whoever is elected on November 8.

Related Article:

Real Reason Trump’s Being Treated Like He’s Crazy for Refusing to Accept Election Results by Rob Kall

The Lid is Off

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Eisenstein

Source: CharlesEisenstein.net

It is getting harder to keep a secret these days. The collective shadow of our society, once safely relegated to the dark basement of the unmentionable, is now exposed to daylight, forcing us to face our contradictions. I’ll offer three examples: Donald Trump’s leaked recordings, Hillary Clinton’s emails and Wall Street speeches, and the endless procession of videos of police brutality.

Once upon a time, “locker room talk” like Donald Trump’s lewd and degrading remarks leaked to the media would have stayed safely sequestered from public view. Misogynistic locker room banter existed, as it were, in an alternate universe. What was said on the golf course or the barroom didn’t register as part of a man’s public reputation; in those places, men were free to say things that would be unforgivable in public. The coexistence of these two realms was seldom questioned. As a high school and college athlete, I remember hearing the kinds of things Trump has said, and they were quite unremarkable in that context. A boy could say the most brutish, repellent things in the locker room without damage to his reputation outside it. Respectable society would never find out. Likewise, when reporters and politicians mingled outside the public performances of their roles, an unwritten understanding kept their conversations safely off the record. I imagine Donald Trump feeling a sense of betrayal at the revelation of his remarks, as if a boy reported to another boy’s girlfriend what he said about her in the locker room.

I think this division into two realms extended to internal, psychological divisions in the individuals making the degrading boasts and comments about women. In polite company, they became people who did not harbor such thoughts. The locker room alter-ego was safely contained in a different psychic compartment. I can imagine a Donald Trump being sincerely – sincerely! – scandalized to hear in polite company the very things he himself said in the safety of the mens’-only field of misogyny. I can imagine him condemning what was said in all earnestness, with zero awareness of hypocrisy.

So it is that rape culture is allowed to persist. It needs a shadow zone. The locker room conversations that objectify and degrade women and contribute to rape culture need a “locker room” in which to happen, a wall of separation between it and the larger realm of general social acceptability.

This wall of separation is breaking down, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of recording technology and the impossibility of stopping the distribution of the recordings on the Internet. Contradictions, whether personal or social, that could once remain hidden are coming unstoppably to light. It is getting harder to uphold a divided self.

As with sex, so with money. Hillary Clinton is having a hard time maintaining a wall of separation between her public posture of economic populism and her decades-long ministration to the needs of Wall Street. In former times a politician’s speeches to elite insiders would exist in an inviolably separate realm from his or her public image. In inside circles of power, the politician would be free to express himself directly. No concealment of his allegiances was necessary, because no one outside the political and corporate elite was listening. So of course, Hillary Clinton was loathe to release the transcripts of her speeches to Wall Street banks. Those speeches were the equivalent of locker room talk, which is supposed to stay in the locker room. Here, though, the context is financial domination rather than sexual domination.

Something similar applies to Clinton’s infamous deleted emails. There is nothing new about the contrast between the public presentation of governance and its ugly inner workings. The exercise of political power has never been pretty. The backroom deals, the threats and coercion, the buying of favors… all the nastiness that the email scandal hints at is characteristic of politics as we know it. The difference today is that it can no longer be confined to the back room. In other words, it is getting harder to maintain the appearance of democracy in a reality of oligopoly.

It is perhaps necessary that Clinton and Trump are both such extreme expressions of the suppressed shadow of our culture, presenting itself in unambiguous form for clearing. Liberal pundits have repeatedly observed that the bigoted sentiments Donald Trump expresses are merely the undisguised version of what Republicans have been saying in code for a long time. The hidden erupts into view. Clinton, meanwhile, is no ordinary establishment politician; she is the very epitome of the establishment, embodying its insincerity, lack of imagination, normalized corruption, and narrow technocratic commitment to preserving the status quo.

This is not meant as a personal criticism. My purpose here is not to condemn Hillary or the Donald; it is to illuminate the dissolving of the insulating compartments that allow contradictions and hypocrisy to exist. Probably in person, each of them is a complex individual like you and me, a mixture of beauty and pain, playing the roles laid out for them. I imagine that in their most private moments neither fully identifies with those roles nor believes in the game into which they have been thrust, any more than you or I believe in it. The elites usually precede the people into cynicism. In any event, our current moment of social evolution is calling each of them, in their public roles, to be an avatar of a cultural shadow archetype, presented to us in extreme form so that it cannot be ignored.

Clinton and Trump are a product of their conditions, playing the “game of thrones” according to the secret rules of the insiders, in a system that has long allowed, encouraged, and in some ways nearly required hypocrisy. That system is coming to an end. We are entering by fits and starts an era of transparency in which, we may someday hope, secret rules and hypocrisy will have no purchase.

Another arena with a longstanding division between sanitized public presentation and gritty reality is law enforcement. As with misogyny and political corruption, there is nothing new about police brutality and nothing new about its disproportionate application to brown-skinned people. For a long time though, it was sequestered in the realm of the unmentionable, relegated to the left-wing margins of political discourse or the statistics of academic papers. No longer. The advent of ubiquitous cell phone video cameras and other video surveillance has lifted the lid off the dark political unconscious and exposed its contents to light.

Here again, this exposure is making the two contradictory functions of the police – serving and protecting, and bullying and abusing – impossible to maintain simultaneously. It is only possible if the latter function is well hidden in the shadows.

I could go on to make similar points about drone strikes, refugee camps, clearcuts, and all the other injury and injustice that technology and social media are bringing into view. For a long time, propriety and ideology have buffered normalcy from the ugly inner workings of its maintenance. For example, the ideology of development has buffered us from the horrors of Third World sweatshops, strip mines, dispossession of land, and so forth. Lurid caricatures of violent criminals hides the grinding injustice of the legal system. The triumphal narrative of exploration and progress obscures the genocide of indigenous cultures. These various buffers, which allow contradictions to stand, have been necessary to operate a civilization built on exploitation and ecocide. Open up any social institution – politics, finance, business, education, medicine, academia, and even philanthropy – and you will find within it the same ugly machinations of power.

Today these buffers are disintegrating, despite the best efforts of established power to maintain secrecy, prosecute whistle-blowers, and control information. We might thank technology for bringing the dark underbelly of our system to light, but I think something larger is afoot. The trend toward transparency that is happening on the systems level is also happening in our personal relationships and within ourselves. Invisible inconsistencies, hiding, pretense, and self-deception show themselves as the light of attention turns inward. The tools of self-examination are proliferating on every level, from the personal to the collective. Herein is a link between the political developments I’ve described and the world of self-help, spirituality, or consciousness. At its best, these comprise ways of shedding light onto our internal contradictions and blockages in order to create a kind of inner transparency. On the interpersonal level too, a lot of work around partnership and community also aims for transparency, for example to expose hidden resentments, repressed desires, and unconscious conflicts. Illuminating the contradictions between the story and the actuality of a relationship brings the possibility of healing.

When previously hidden contradictions rise to consciousness and collide, the result is first denial and rage, followed by cognitive dissonance and the breakdown of normalcy. We see that happening today in the public sphere. That process can be disorienting, even paralyzing, as familiar orienting certitudes turn false. Who are we as a people? What is reliable? What is possible? What is real? We aren’t what we thought we were, and it isn’t what we thought it was. This confusion is a good thing. It is a sign of liberation from the old story that confined us. The exposure and clearing of hidden contradictions brings us to a higher degree of integrity, and frees up prodigious amounts of energy that had been consumed in the maintenance of illusions. What will our society be capable of, when we are no longer wallowing in pretense?

A Redditor Just Proved Clinton Proxies Tried to Frame Julian Assange

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: While the case presented by the research isn’t hard evidence, it it highly suspicious and deserving of further investigation. But don’t expect any investigation from corporate media, many members of which have been outed by Wikileaks as shills for Hillary Clinton.)

By Gary Barnes

Source: TruthKings.com

Redditor account Bopbopi posted an image this morning which follows the deceitful tale of the website, ToddandClare.com.

What you should know about the website:

This website is a supposed dating site whereas Julian Assange was allegedly offered $1 million to help create a video. It is supposedly owned by an Indiana couple, but has ties to the Bahamas. The UN opened a case on Assange and it is suspected this specific case is the fuel behind getting him extradited, possibly to the United States. But when you have a look at the site (which I encourage you to do), you will notice it is an extremely amateur website (search dating sites on Google and compare). How did an unknown dating site suddenly come up with $1 million dollars and why did they happen to choose Julian Assange as their desired contract worker?

Assange is now being accused of having cybersex with an 8-year old on the website. To be honest, most of the profiles appear to be fake (again, compare with other dating sites and draw your own conclusions).

Now check out the timeline posted on the previously cited Reddit account:

Update:

As of 10/21/16, ToddAndClare.com has posted the following message on their landing page:

Company Statement 10/21/2016

Following a serious hack of our website, to protect our members we’ve taken the decision to close the network until further notice. If you are a member of Todd and Clare requiring support, please contact us.

Further updates will be published on our blog.

We thank all our members, business partners, and associates for your support.

The Todd and Clare team

Roaming Charges: a Wikileak is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jeffrey St. Clair

Source: CounterPunch

+ I’ve spent the week greedily consuming the treats offered up by Wikileaks’s excavation of John Podesta’s inbox. Each day presents juicy new revelations of the venality of the Clinton campaign. In total, the Podesta files provide the most intimate and unadulterated look at how politics really works in late-capitalist America since the release of the Nixon tapes.

+ There’s a big difference, though. With Nixon, the stakes seemed greater, the banter more Machiavellian, the plots and counter-plots darker and more cynical.

+ The Podesta email tranches show the inner mechanics of a much more mundane, petty and banal political machine. Instead of shaping a campaign around an ideological movement, the Clinton operation resembles the packaging of a political mutual fund, a balanced, low-risk portfolio of financial interests, captive NGOs and dependent demographic sectors.

+ The red meat in the emails can be found in the disclosures of the internal rivalries, self-aggrandizement and sycophancy of hired guns and consultants, especially as they gravitate toward Podesta, whose chilly presence looms behind the scenes like the ghost of Thomas Cromwell.

+ The three prevailing obsessions of the Podesta emails: raising money, containing the contamination of the Clinton Foundation and screwing Bernie Sanders. There’s barely any hint of anxiety over Trump. In fact, they relish his every false move, almost as if each faltering step had been pre-visualized, if not orchestrated.

+ If possible, the press corps comes off worse than Team Clinton. Almost every reporter is revealed as pliable, servile and so lazy that they basically beg the Clinton PR shop to write their stories for them.

+ The press has reiterated this obsequiousness over the course of the last seven days with what can only be described as an orgy of coverage of the Trump sex tapes and assorted scandals. By all accounts, the Trump campaign is dead and has been for weeks. The 24/7 obsession now amounts to a kind of political corpse abuse. Forsaken in this feeding frenzy has been any serious attention at all to the Wikileaks email dump, except to echo Clinton camp assertions that they were the victims of a Russian plot to tilt the election to Trump. If so, the Russians have proved even more incompetent than we thought them to be.

+ Of course, the Russian diversion is a convenient excuse for the lapdog press having missed one major scandal after another that has been staring them in the face for months, if not years.

+ Significantly, the email dump also proves what many of us have long suspected: that there are no walls separating the Clinton campaign, its foundation and Super Pacs and the DNC itself. Those supposedly distinct entities are, in fact, all part of one vast, interconnected organization–a syndicate, if you will, that has deftly evaded campaign finance laws (created by Democrats) and rigged its own primary process to ensure a pre-ordained winner.

+ The key thing to remember about the DNC is that it has been under the complete control of the Clintons and their operatives since the 1990s. Obama never cleaned house and installed his own people, a lapse that proved fatal to his own political and legislative agenda. The Clintons’ loyalty to Obama was always paper-thin and conditioned on whether it would advance their own interests: Hillary’s pursuit of the presidency and Bill’s maniacal quest for lucrative speaking fees.

+ It was no surprise that Bill unloaded on ObamaCare a few days ago, calling it the “craziest thing in the world.” The Clintons want to efface Obama’s legacy and replace it with their own, the same way the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt smashed the images of the previous ruler and replaced it with their own visage.

+ So what follows are a few of my favorite revelations from Podesta’s inbox, starting with an email where Podesta is joking about a fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard. John Podesta: “I didn’t think wet works meant pool parties at the Vineyard.” Another Clinton murder? Check the drain for trace evidence?

+ I can picture the invitation: “HRC Pool Party: Donate or Drown!”

+ Rightwing websites, of course, are taking this as proof, HRC, murdered Scalia.

+ Peter Berlios reminded me of the global outrage when Trump’s special friend, Vladimir Putin, used a similar expression in regard to the Chechens: “We will wet them even in the shit house.”

+ By the way, John Podesta owned 75,000 shares in Leonidio LLC, a firm linked to who? Yes, Vladimir Putin.

+ Podesta’s correspondent in this exchange is Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Democratic powerbroker who was Dick Gephardt’s chief of staff. Over the years, Elmendorf has perfected the art, crucial to any Democratic candidate, of seducing progressive sectors of the party to dutifully line up behind a neoliberal candidate. A few years ago, he explained his strategic thinking this way:

“The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections. The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left.”

+ Bill Richardson is the famously irascible former Governor of New Mexico, who served as Energy Secretary and UN ambassador during Bill Clinton’s second term. The relationship soured when the governor broke ranks and endorsed Barack Obama in 2008. Richardson and the Clintons have been feuding ever since. Indeed, Bill once described the antagonism as a “permanent” state of hostilities.

In August of 2015, Podesta took it on his own initiative to negotiate a detente between the two men. Apparently, Hillary was furious at Podesta’s impertinence. She doesn’t forgive. Podesta writes back urging her to consider the political consequences, especially with Hispanics in must-win western states like Colorado and New Mexico, where Richardson still has pull.

“I had heard that you were upset that I encouraged a call between [Bill Clinton] and Richardson to bury the hatchet. I did that at the request of Jose Villarreal who pushed me and made the point that Richardson is still on TV a lot, especially on Univision and Telemundo and not withstanding the fact that he can be a dick, it was worth getting him in a good place. Probably worth a quick call to ask him to stay stout and publicly endorse, but if it’s too galling, don’t bother.”

+ Even someone as close to the Clintons as Podesta keeps running into the couple’s aversion to apologizing for anything. After issuing a non-apology apology on her email server scandal, Podesta gripes to his number two, Neera Tanden: “No good deed goes unpunished. Press takeaway was the whine of but ‘she really didn’t apologize to the American people. I am beginning to think Trump is on to something.”

Tanden notes: “Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles heel…This apology thing has become like a pathology. I can only imagine what’s happening in the campaign. Is there some way I can be helpful here? I know if I just email her she will dismiss it out of hand.”

Podesta replies tersely: “You should email her. She can say she’s sorry without apologizing to the American people. Tell her to say it and move on, why get hung on this.”

+ Few figures in the Podesta emails come off as more appalling than Neera Tanden, whose primary mission, perhaps the only thing she is really competent at, is detecting even minor deviations from obedience to Clintonian orthodoxy. No one agitates her more than Bernie and his Sandernistas, who she seems ready to dial up a drone strike against at a moment’s notice. She’s the Lee Atwater of neoliberalism, without Atwater’s malign intelligence and sense of humor.

+ Here’s Neera in panic mode over a Wall Street Journal piece on Hillary’s email server quoting an anonymous White House as saying Clinton may have “screwed up” on the matter. Tanden gets so worked up that she seems ready to target Obama: “WH crapping on her is going to send this into orbit.”

+ During one of her speeches-for-hire, Hillary promised Wall Street tycoons that she would block marijuana legalization (don’t want to cut into those tobacco stocks). Here’s her archly worded back and forth with Xerox’s CEO, Ursula Burns, following March 2014 speech. Clinton used Wall Street lingo to express her opposition to ending pot prohibition “in all senses of the word.” Who says she doesn’t have a sense of humor?

URSULA BURNS: So long means thumbs up, short means thumbs down; or long means I support, short means I don’t. I’m going to start with — I’m going to give you about ten long-shorts.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Even if you could make money on a short, you can’t answer short.

URSULA BURNS: You can answer short, but you got to be careful about letting anybody else know that. They will bet against you. So legalization of pot?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Short in all senses of the word.

+ When served with subpoena for records on Benghazi, a seriously agitated Robbie Mook asks, “We’re not releasing EVERYTHING, right?”

+ Among the things the Clinton damage control team must deal with: “Tony Rodham hustling gold mining deals in Haiti.”

+ I wonder if they considered setting up a special squad to deal with Clinton Hustler Eruptions?

+ Mark Siegel, the former executive director of the DNC, emailed Podesta on the eve of the Convention outlining strategies to entice the “self-righteous (Bernie) ideologues” to “work their asses off for Hillary.”

+ “Let’s throw Bernie a bone,” Siegel recommends, in the form of reducing the number of super delegates in 2020 primary campaign. Perhaps “Bernie Bones” could be come a new treat at Ben & Jerry’s?

+ Hillary’s closest advisor and most intimate confident is Huma Abedin. No one more aggressively enforces Hillary’s own wishes or guards her privacy. Abedin, who we must assume is speaking directly for Hillary, is adamant that Hillary continue with her strategy of avoiding press conferences. Each time Hillary answers a few questions at one of her events, the message gets lost, Huma frets. “Can we survive not answering questions from press at message events?”

Podesta swats down this notion emphatically.

“If she thinks we can get to Labor Day without taking press questions, I think that’s suicidal. We have to find some mechanism to let the stream [sic] out of the pressure cooker.”

Not a huge deal, Huma. If HRC is compelled to answer, she can just lie the way she usually does. Hillary’s a natural.

+ One email to Podesta from Hillary’s account in August of 2014 provides confirmation for what we’ve long suspected: Clinton was well aware that Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the principle funders of ISIS in Iraq and Syria:

“While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

+ There’s a reason I started calling MSNBC MSDNC. Here we have an email from a producer of “All In with Chris Hayes” slobbering all over Hillary Clinton in an attempt to secure an appearance on Hayes’ tendentious show:

“Hey Adrienne,

Thanks for your help in getting Karen on with Chris the other night. I have a question for you. As you guys have probably seen, we’ve been airing a ‘Hillary Clinton for Millennials’ segment on our program every night this past week.”

“The point of the segment is basically to inform young people about all of the crap and nonsense that Sec. Clinton and President Clinton (but mostly Sec. Clinton) had to face back in the 90s when President Clinton was running for office…everything from cookie-gate to stand-by-your-man-gate to Hillarycare.”

“The point isn’t to dwell on the past but the point is to talk about this amazing, intelligent woman who probably faced more nonsense back in the day because she is a woman…and she continues to have to face it. She is smarter than most men and more qualified than most men to be president.”

This kind of shameless groveling makes Sean Hannity seem like an objective reporter.

+ How to deal with the Sanders phenomenon haunted even veteran political operators on Team Clinton. Here’s an exchange from January 6, 2016 between Mandy Grunwald and Jennifer Palmieri:

Palmieri: “I liked messing with Bernie on wall street at a staff level for the purposes of muddying the waters and throwing them off their game a bit. But don’t know that it is most effective contrast for her. Seems like we are picking the fight he wants to have.”

Grunwald: “Bernie wants a fight on Wall Street. We should not give him one.”

+ Here’s an excerpt from the Clinton campaing’s press policy, cautioning against allowing coverage of the anemic turnouts at Hillary rallies: “‘Less than a 100 people at a rally? No cell phones! No press!”

+ The emails in 2015 show increasing fear that Elizabeth Warren’s freelance attacks on the big banks and investment houses will alienate the tycoons and moguls who fund the DNC. Nancy Pelosi (Net Worth: $58 million) & Co. scurry to reassure Wall Street: “Elizabeth Warren doesn’t speak for Dem Party!”

+ HRC HQ knew she needed to run against a candidate like Trump. It was her only hope of winning the election & they went to work to make it so. It unnerved some her allies, one of whom wrote Podesta: “Right now I am petrified that Hillary is almost totally dependent on Republicans nominating Trump.”

As the World Burns

+ When there’s no opposition to a war, it will go on forever. See Afghanistan, 15 years and counting. Barbara Lee was the lone vote against it then and one of the few who remember it now. The Authorization for Unilateral Military Force, which launched the Afghan War, has been involved 30 times now for other interventions. Lee should get some kind of peace prize, though not the one awarded to Kissinger, Peres and Obama.

+ Russian meddling in US elections? Yet to be proven. US role in trying to overthrow more than 50 governments worldwide in last 65 years? Fact.

+ Twelve Bush officials sign letter denouncing Trump. Get ready for the Fourth Bush Term!

+ Obama announced this week that Russia will pay a price for hacking into the DNC’s computers, implying that some kind of cyber-attack will be launched on the Kremlin. What’s Obama going to do to the person who leaked the Trump tape or Trump’s tax return? Drone them?

+ Chris Christie, now a wanted man, calls Trump’s comments on kissing and grouping unsuspecting women “completely indefensible “. This is rich coming from a man who publicly humiliates women at his press conferences and then mocked, demonized and locked up a nurse named Kaci Hickox, who had shown the humanity to actually treat Ebola victims.

+ Instead of being subjected to condescending Western philanthropy, Haiti desperately needs to be allowed to chart the course of their own reconstruction. Be sure to read Mark Schuller’s important piece in this week’s CounterPunch.

+ Where’s the feminist outrage over the noxious Jeffrey Goldberg being tapped as the new editor-in-chief of The Atlantic? Judy Miller got run out of the reporting biz for her yellow journalism. Goldberg gets promoted for his! Sexism?

+ With Jeffrey Goldberg helming the Atlantic and Hillary heading for White House, everything is aligning for next big bang war. Good morning, Teheran!

+ Glenn Beck is tortured by a simple question: should he or shouldn’t he vote for Hillary Clinton? When he comes to a resolution perhaps can make his announcement live on Rachel Maddow Show? All together now, follow the bouncing bombs…

+ It took Nixon to go to China, and Donald J. Trump to destroy the GOP from the inside-out. Credit where credit is due. The Donald is fragging the entire GOP establishment, from Paul Ryan to John McCain, as his campaign goes down in flames.

+ Those freaking out over Trump’s joke about jailing Hillary have never shown the slightest angst about her policy of assassinating people, including American citizens, by drone without trial, hearing or indictment.

+ Trump didn’t rise from the swamps of the GOP. He is a monster created, promoted and advertised by the media. Even now they feast on him.

+ Of course, if Trump didn’t exist, the Clintons would have had to invent him. In a way, they did, elevating Trump as the “pied-piper candidate.”

+ Here’s the revolting Curt Schilling, another Pervert for Jesus.

+ Bernie Sanders took off enough time this week from campaigning for Hillary to broadcast this platitude: “When the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution, I’m pretty sure they weren’t thinking ‘Let’s make sure billionaires can buy elections.’”

But Bernie your old buddy Howard Zinn would have told you that is exactly what the Founding “Fathers” were thinking, which is why they only permitted white land-owning men to enjoy the franchise and doubled down by allowing the southern land barons to keep, breed and sell their slaves to buy elections.

+ The Democrats’ decision to reduce the entire closing chapter of the campaign to a rather prudish emphasis on sexual politics represents a retreat from the party’s frail commitment to tolerance and sexual liberation. Of course, it also protects Hillary from having to grapple with her entangled record on trade, economics, criminal justice and militarism. Just wait for the renewed attacks on rap music, heavy metal, and “Game of Thrones.” Will Tipper Gore be named Culture Czar?

+ Few people know where more of the Clintons’ skeletons are buried than Ken Silverstein, the founder of CounterPunch and one of the best investigative journalists around. As pre-Halloween treat, he unearths a few here regarding the Clinton foundation’s deplorable escapades in Colombia. Silverstein quotes a Colombian union organizer as saying:

“They are doing nothing for workers. I don’t even know what they are doing in this country other than exploiting poverty and extracting money.”

+ Every President needs an Axis of Evil to justify their existence (and those all important defense contracts). Here’s Hillary’s. Read it and bleed.

+ Still, people see through her. Latest WSJ/NBC poll from Ohio, taken after the Trump sex tape and the St. Louis debate, shows HRC still below 50%…with WOMEN voters!

+ Someone sent me a link to a story claiming nervously that while Russia Prepares for War, the US Sleeps. Sleeps? Making Russia prepare for war (and sink billions it doesn’t have into a weapons production that will never come close to rivaling the Pentagon’s armory of mass destruction) has been the point of US foreign policy toward Russia for the last 60 years. Putin is walking blindly into same quagmire that doomed the Soviet Union. (See Andrew Cockburn’s indispensable The Threat. The book may be out of print, but it’s central thesis isn’t.)

+ When Human Rights Watch isn’t clamoring for a humanitarian cruise missile intervention or sabotaging the peace deal in Colombia, it can actually produce some compelling documents, such as this important report on the human toll of the war on drugs. The gist of the report is that every 25 seconds someone is the United States is arrested on simple possession of drugs for their own personal use, totaling more than 1.5 million arrests every year. Each day, there are more than 137,000 people in the US in prison or jail on possession charges, with tens of thousands of others under detention, house arrest or some form of probation.

+ The truly deplorable Joy Behar slimes Bill Clinton’s accusers as “tramps.” I guess that means they should feel grateful that Bill mauled them.

+ Perhaps Trump was just besotted with too much Fitzgerald. After all, he does live in a penthouse as big as the Ritz: “Hard to sit here and be close to you and not kiss you.” (Tender is the Night). Nah…

+ The Washington Post frantically conspired to kill off Nate Parker’s incandescent new film on the Nat Turner slave revolt, Birth of a Nation. After weeks of unrelenting negative publicity, the box office results were meager. The Post couldn’t help but gloat, publishing a stupid little piece by Caitlin Gibson titled: “The Big Debate Over ‘Birth of a Nation’ is Over: Audiences Just weren’t that Interested.”

+ Imagine the Post’s verdict on the greatest American novel: “The big debate over Moby-Dick is over. Only sold 500 copies upon release. Likely never hear from that author again…”

+ The concerted effort to destroy Parker and his film reminds me of the sabotaging of Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons (where a third of the footage was actually dumped in the Pacific Ocean) and John Huston’s fiercely anti-war film of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, which MGM studios mutilated, cutting the film from its original 2-hour length and adding maudlin voice over narration (See Lillian Ross’s Picture for the gory details.)

+ The announcement that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature induced much carping from uptight academics about the alleged degeneration of the award. How dare they honor a rock singer? My question is what took them so long? The crusty Nobel committee should have recognized the role of popular music at least 35 years ago and given the prize to Bob Marley. Even Dylan would probably admit that Smokey Robinson should have been in line ahead of him.

+ Still Dylan deserves the recognition. He’s the greatest white blues singer and probably the best songwriter of the rock era. My favorites from across the decades: Masters of War, Highway 61 Revisited, Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, I Want You, All Along the Watchtower, The Man in Me, Forever Young, I Shall be Released, If You See Her Say Hello, This Wheel’s on Fire, Tears of Rage, Hurricane, Precious Angel, Blind Willie McTell, Julius & Ethyl, Heart of Mine, Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, Dark Eyes, Everything is Broken, Love Sick, Not Dark Yet.

+ But I hope he tells the committee to shove it, as did Jean-Paul Sartre. If not, I trust he will stay in character and mumble Dylanesque obscurities to a mystified audience.

+ Wikileaks reports that Keith Richards was on the short list for Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Robbed!

2016 Elevating Trump

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Richard Moser

Source: CounterPunch

The new evidence provided by Wikileaks’s Podesta files makes a convincing case that the Clinton team wanted extreme Republicans as the best possible opponents. They wanted not rational discourse but exactly the kind of mean-spirited bigotry that Trump has delivered so well.

The Wikileaks documents are a window into the soul of power. We can see how the Clinton machine played the strategy of triangulation on the level of action and tactic.

The Motive

For the Clinton machine to maintain power, it needs the likes of Donald Trump. It’s a package deal. The Clinton’s lesser of two evils campaign can corral voters most efficiently if their Republicans competitors are extreme, scary and incoherent. Trump is so frightening and potentially disruptive that even powerful Republican elites turn to Clinton for refuge.

So essential is the extreme right-wing to the Democrats strategy that the right-wing must be encouraged and promoted! Apparently Clinton wants and needs Trump.

The Intent

Here are excerpts from an email (click on attachments) outlining strategy and goals to the DNC dated 4/7/2015. Well before Trump officially declared his candidacy.

Force all Republican Candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election…

The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Ben Carson

We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.

Here it is: a premeditated, purposeful and extremely reckless design to bring Trump into the national spotlight. If doing so sabotages the informed public discourse that democracy depends on, so be it.

The strategy of triangulation has been moving Democrats, Republicans and public discourse to the right for three decades but rarely do we see this kind of direct evidence of intent.

The sad, truly tragic, truth is that without Trump, or his kind, the Democrats would lose one of their main forms of control over voters. Without Trump they might be forced to have a message, offer a positive program, or mobilize the millions of occasional voters and non-voters. But to do so would be to serve the people and that is incompatible with endless war and the rule of the corporations.

The Means

We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.

Given the already “cozy relationship” between political elites and the corporate media the means to do the deed was right at hand.

And indeed the press did follow orders and took Trump seriously.

For months mass media was quite comfortable broadcasting Trumps bigotry.

I always wondered why media giants, so deeply committed to the Clinton machine — big donors to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton campaign alike — lavished so much attention and so many resources on Trump.

They are driven by the same desire to maximize profit as other corporations, true, but it still seemed like there were other stories that could sell soap. The candidacy of a Jewish socialist from Brooklyn was such a story but, well, never mind. And it’s true that Trump fit the entertainment model of what we still think of as mainstream news.

The New York Times estimates that two billion dollars worth of free media coverage was given to Trump. Half that would be astounding. The Trump campaign is a study in corporate welfare.

Well, disasters like the election of 2016 have an overabundance of causes. But the Democrats desire to elevate Trump was part of the potion. And the media followed direction with gusto.

The Clinton’s were owed a favor and refusal was out of the question. After all it’s just a little payback to the Clinton’s for the Telecommunication Act of 1996 that paved the way for the consolidation of mass media into the hands of a few corporations and a few hundred executives. The corporate media knows their class interests.

The Verdict

The racism, sexism and trash-talking commentary from Trump, and its effect on public discourse, is acceptable collateral damage, a toxic side effect of the Clinton’s will to power.

This is the crime: premeditated Trump love. The Democrats had the motive, intent and means to make Trump great.

The verdict: a vote for Clinton is a vote for Trump.

Such is the twisted two-party system. A system that, unless disrupted, will continue to produce Trumps and Clintons and worse.

Sorry Clinton fans, but this kind of mass manipulation is deeply destructive of what little remains of democratic culture in the US.

I am afraid that millions will stay home on election day. Withdrawal is a predictable outcome when politics are so debased, but so is resistance. It’s to build a new civil rights, anti-war and environmental moments and get real political issues back on the front burner.

Richard Moser writes at befreedom.co where this article first appeared.

Killing Democracy by a Thousand Cuts

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jim Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan

Source: FreePress.org

How are our votes being stolen? Let us count the ways…

Electoral Proctology

As the fateful June 7 primary election day approached in 6 states, including California, a stellar group of election protection luminaries gathered on Memorial Day weekend in a private home in Santa Monica with about 100 of their closest friends. Their purpose, as that great American philosopher W.C. Fields once advised, was ‘to seize the bull by the tail and stare the situation squarely in the face.’

[ See videos of the meeting: Don’t Let Them Steal Your Vote – Part 1 https://youtu.be/Pax4z8AuGTU

Part 2 https://youtu.be/jF0Eab9wKQc ]

Not a Pretty Picture

Chaired by movie star and long-time political activist Mimi Kennedy, a panel including Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis, Greg Palast, Bev Harris and John Blakey compared notes on the myriad methods their investigations have uncovered that are destroying the validity of U.S. elections. Facing these facts is the first step in the daunting task of restoring election integrity in America’s very broken electoral system.

In this year’s primary season alone we have seen:

· Massive disenfranchisement caused by arbitrarily changing voters’ assigned precincts and then giving incorrect information on the changes.

· Chaos caused in predominately minority districts by reducing the number of precincts – and the number of machines per precinct – causing long lines and hours-long waits which turned away many voters with jobs or other time commitments.

· Arcane regulations which instructed poll workers to give unprecedented numbers of voters ‘provisional ballots,’ which are rarely counted.

· For example, in California, voters who registered ‘NPP’ for No Party Preference and were mailed a ballot, were not permitted to vote in the Democratic primary unless they took both the ballot and its envelope to a polling place and said the magic words, “I surrender this ballot and request a cross-over ballot.” Without those exact words, poll workers were instructed not to supply a ‘cross-over’ ballot AND not to inform the voter of the rule.

· Media outlets prematurely calling elections before all ballots are counted – or, in some cases, even cast.

· As of this writing, 2.6 million ballots yet to be counted for the California primary

But it gets worse.

Strip & Flip

The theme of the Santa Monica panel was set by a hot-off-the-press book just published by Fitrakis and Wasserman titled ‘The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: The Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft.’ [ Get it here: http://freepress.org/store.php ] This is the latest in a string of books the team has written in the last decade. They have had a ringside seat to both observe – and also fight against – the increasing corruption of the U.S. electoral system, based, as they are in Columbus, Ohio, capitol of a key swing state. In 2012, Fitrakis’s threatened lawsuit in Ohio state court prevented the planned electronic theft of the election and saved Obama’s election victory.

[See “Swing State: How the Fix Was Nixed in Ohio 2012” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qwtBlHeTY ]

Election Theft, as American as Apple Pie

Intentional disenfranchisement of potential voters in order to favor selected demographic sectors is simple in concept, if complex in means. It has been a part of the American electoral landscape from the git-go. Eliminating legitimate voters from the voter rolls by various tactics – that’s the ‘strip’ part. Skewing the ballot count in order to produce desired outcome percentages – that’s the ‘flip’ part – also achieved by multiple mechanisms, as we shall see.

“Not every conspiracy is a theory.”

The ad slogan for the current thriller ‘Money Monsters’ actually gets it right. Though poo-pooed as ‘conspiracy theory’ by pundits and vote fraud denialists across the political spectrum, Bob & Harvey’s work – in combination with the work of many other investigator/activists including co-panel members Bev Harris, Greg Palast,, Mimi Kennedy and John Blakey – has incontrovertibly revealed the plethora of means by which America’s electoral system has now been stripped of the last vestiges of whatever trustworthiness it may have ever actually possessed.

A short run down follows – to be expanded upon below – of issues discussed by the panel.

But, keep in mind that, for brevity, the list does not include additional key related issues, such as: unlimited campaign spending by anonymous persons and non-voting corporate entities and their surrogates – even from foreign states or agents; mainstream media’s biased reporting; manipulations by party officials; ‘super delegate’ and ‘contested convention’ schemes; the counter-democracy Electoral College; or the ‘gerrymandering-on-steroids’ REDMAP redistricting process carried out by Republicans following the 2010 election, which left them in control of the House of Representatives and many key state legislatures until at least 2020, when the next census-based re-districting is scheduled. The latter major ploy is well documented in David Daley’s recent book “Rat F**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy.”)

Here’s the short list from the Santa Monica panel presentations:

· Massive electronic purging of legitimate voters from voter rolls across the country

· Massive vote suppression and disenfranchisement by myriad means on a national scale

· Virtually decisive control of voter rolls without detection; vote counting and reporting by privately owned, secret, electronic devices and computer programs specifically designed to steal elections through cyber chicanery.

The Five Jim Crows

It all started with the constitution, Wasserman explained, a document drafted in secret, behind closed doors by a tiny elite of propertied white men, and rammed through to ratification by the states through electoral manipulation. It denied voting rights to women and to males without property, but contained the “3/5ths clause” that gave slave owners congressional representation for their slaves despite the fact that the slaves themselves couldn’t vote.

The so-called Three-Fifths Compromise is in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

The effect, according to Wikipedia, “was to give the southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free persons had been counted equally, allowing the slaveholder interests to largely dominate the government of the United States until 1861.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

It was also a divide-and-conquer strategy to make sure black and white laborers would never again unite in revolting as they did in Virginia in 1675 in what’s called Bacon’s Rebellion.

Fitrakis and Wasserman call that ‘the First Jim Crow.’ After the Civil War and emancipation, they explain, Supreme Court rulings, KuKluxKlan terror, black lynchings, literacy tests and other apartheid strategies established the ‘Second Jim Crow,’ that “again guaranteed that blacks in the South (and parts of the North) would not be allowed to vote, and that they would be carefully divided from whites by caste as well as class.”

The Third Jim Crow was/is the ‘War on Drugs’ initiated by Richard Nixon to combat the liberalization of the southern Democratic Party, the anti-war movement and the rise of the Black Power movement. As Nixon administration official John Erlichman recently explained to Harper’s interviewer Dan Blum,

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

Young, left-leaning Latinos were also caught up in the Drug War dragnet. Now, 45 years later, 41 million (mostly people of color) have been jailed for pot and other controlled substances, making private corporate prisons a growth industry, and giving the U.S. the highest prison population in the world. Though having no significant impact on drug use, the Drug War has disenfranchised millions of potential voters, and continues to do so today. Michelle Alexander’s recent book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnessshows how one system of race-based disenfranchisement has been replaced by another. http://newjimcrow.com/

The Fourth Jim Crow, explain the authors, was born of America’s push to establish what they call “a race-based global empire” with a long series of foreign interventions – also continuing today – which “involved the white-ruled US interfering with the political systems of non-white nations.”

The impact of these interventions on our own political system, say Wasserman and Fitrakis, has been catastrophic. “They’ve established the US as a corporate-ruled race-based empire, fueling the growth of a military whose intrinsic power overshadows our entire electoral process…and set the stage for…the Fifth Jim Crow – the electronic flipping of our elections.”

Engineering Vote Fraud Abroad Comes Home to Roost

Manipulation of election outcomes in other countries has been developed into a high art by such US agencies as the CIA, USAID and other so-called ‘democracy promotion’ projects fielded abroad by both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Note the authors, “Overseas, the CIA began to apply advanced electronics to the art and science of election theft. By the 1970’s, in front of the Church Committee, the Agency admitted to already having manipulated countless Third World elections to protect America’s corporate and ‘national security’ interests.” They trace the subsequent development of electronic voting technology techniques, corporations and institutions up to the present day, when up to 80% of US votes in the coming presidential election will be electronically mediated. In line with the adage that ‘what goes around, comes around,’ American expertise in foreign nations’ electronic vote rigging has now come home to compromise the integrity and validity of our own system, big time.

The New Jim Crow – “Interstate Crosscheck”

Panel member investigative journalist Greg Palast has been researching and reporting on this process for going on two decades for such outlets abroad as the BBC and the Guardian news paper. Still, like the proverbial ‘prophet without honor in his own country,’ Palast states with deep frustration that he still has a hell of a time getting American so-called ‘mainstream’ media to pay any attention to his explosive exposes. http://www.gregpalast.com/

Now reporting for Rolling Stone, he is also using crowd funding to produce a forth-coming documentary titled, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2gCgFMBOg

In his presentation in Santa Monica Palast debunked claims by Donald Trump and others that ‘millions of people’ are committing ‘voter fraud’ by ‘voting more than once.’ Describing what he calls ‘the next, or Sixth Jim Crow,’ he reported that 29 state election officials across the country have announced the creation of what they call ‘The Interstate Crosscheck.’ Touted as a defense against mythical individual ‘voter fraud’ the system purports to identify people who are voting more than once, sometimes in multiple states, and purge them from polling lists.

In actuality, in violation of the Voting Rights Act, says Palast, the program uses census data to identify African American voters – tagged ‘BLA’ for black– with similar common names and fraudulently remove them from voter lists.

In the history of the South, when slaves were finally freed, they were often registered by their masters’ surnames. As a result, to this day, many black persons carry the same or similar names, thus facilitating the “Interstate Crosscheck” scam.

Based on his findings, Palast says, “We expect 1 million voters – almost all of them voters of color – to lose their right to vote in 29 Republican-controlled states before the November election.”

But, he is quick to point out, it isn’t just Republicans who regularly mess with elections. As questionable outcomes in this primary suggest, “the Democrats are dirty,” Palast says, pointing out that Democrats invented Jim Crow, which Nixon just adopted for his so-called ‘southern strategy.’

Palast admits to being tired of being a ‘reporter in exile,’ and hopes that, now that he is reporting for Rolling Stone, he can finally come home and report his investigative findings to his own countrymen “who need to know this stuff!”

“Fraction Magic” – A Digital Thumb on the Scale: Fractionalization & Decimalization of Votes

Harking back to the infamous “3/5ths clause” described above, what if you were hired to write a vote-counting program that could assign various arbitrary decimal or fractional values to each and all of the votes counted and come up with desired percentages for every candidate and contest?

To use a simple-minded butcher’s scale analogy: What if your program assigned a vote for Hillary the arbitrary ‘weight’ of 2 pounds, and assigned a Bernie vote just a weight of 1 pound?

Then, in a given race, Bernie got 200 votes and Hillary got 150 votes.

If you just added up the total votes for each candidate, you would call the election for Bernie with a 50-vote lead.

But, if your private, proprietary, secret counting program totaled their votes by the artificial ‘weights’ it arbitrarily assigned to them, you would announce Hillary the winner with a 300 to 200-vote lead.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the intentionally programed ‘glitch’ that BlackBoxVoting.org founder Bev Harris and her colleague, IT expert Bennie Smith have discovered in a significant number of America’s vote counting systems. It is achieved via ‘fractionalization’ or ‘decimalization.’

They explain that it works like this: “Instead of “1” the vote is allowed to be 1/2, or 1+7/8, or any other value that is not a whole number.”

That allows ‘weighting’ of selected electoral contests. “Weighting a race removes the principle of ‘one person-one vote’ to allow some votes to be counted as less than one or more than one. Regardless of what the real votes are, candidates can receive a set percentage of votes. Results can be controlled. For example, Candidate A can be assigned 44% of the votes, Candidate B 51%, and Candidate C the rest.”

On her excellent webite BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris and Smith report,

…the results of our review of the GEMS election management system, which counts approximately 25 percent of all votes in the United States. The results of this study demonstrate that a fractional vote feature is embedded in each GEMS application which can be used to invisibly, yet radically, alter election outcomes by pre-setting desired vote percentages to redistribute votes. This tampering is not visible to election observers, even if they are standing in the room and watching the computer. Use of the decimalized vote feature is unlikely to be detected by auditing or canvass procedures, and can be applied across large jurisdictions in less than 60 seconds. http://blackboxvoting.org/

“GEMS vote-counting systems are and have been operated under five trade names: Global Election Systems, Diebold Election Systems, Premier Election Systems, Dominion Voting Systems, and Election Systems & Software, in addition to a number of private regional subcontractors. At the time of this writing, this system is used statewide in Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Utah and Vermont, and for counties in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It is also used in Canada.”

Adjusted Exit Polls

Around the world, so-called exit polls – which ask a sampling of exiting voters how they voted – are viewed as the Gold Standard for checking the accuracy of the ballot count. In most countries, if the ballot count and the exit poll numbers don’t match, there is either a recount or the election is declared ‘not free and fair.’

Not so in America. Here, as Jonathan Simon documents in his book Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century, the exit poll numbers are instead adjusted to match the official vote count.

In the US, the exit pollster of record has been Edison/Mitofsky http://www.edisonresearch.com/election-polling/ working for a consortium of news organizations that comprise the National Election Pool (NEP): ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press. As Wasserman relates, when election researcher and statistician Dr. Steve Freeman called the late Warren Mitofsky personally to request the raw data from the 2004 exit polls, the response was “Go f**k yourself.”

[ See also: Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/Exit_Polls_2004_Edison-Mitofsky.pdf

Maybe that’s why respected international election observer Former President Jimmy Carter can say the USA “is not a functioning democracy.” Maybe that’s why, as Fitrakis and Wasserman point out:

In March 2015, the Harvard Electoral Integrity Project reported that over fourteen hundred international election experts gathered data the year before and pronounced the United States was 45th in election integrity among the world’s long-standing democracies. The Project reported that on a 100-point scale, the U.S. received an integrity rating of 69.3% – one notch ahead of the narco-drug state Columbia….

What this means in practice is revealed in a recent study of three decades of data by liberal mainstream political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. Their analysis confirmed that the U.S. political system has become “an oligarchy” – as Carter himself has said – where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule,” regardless of which party is in Congress and the White House.

“The central point that emerges from our research,” Gilens and Page wrote, “is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

As Gilens explained in an interview, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”

Citizen Exit Polls

Edison Research was scheduled to do exit polling for the NEP media consortium in the California primary. But when Ohio election protection attorney Cliff Arnebeck gave notice that he intended to sue for the raw data, the California exit poll was canceled.

Into the breach jumped California activist/funder Lori Grace and her Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity (www.trustvote.org), engaging professional pollsters to sample selected districts in Northern and Southern California. The results will be forthcoming at TrustVote.org. http://trustvote.org/

Already the site reports:

In other eleven states besides California, there has been noted a significant difference between the Edison Research exit polls and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the primaries. These totals do not include anything from California. These differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in these eleven states….

…In addition, some people may have concerns that [private election system or voting machine] companies like Scytl/SOE and ES&S which managed the votes in Kentucky, New York and Arizona, have directors who are also on the boards of other companies involved in wire-tapping, the defense industry and military interrogations.

A System Designed for Cheating

Corroborating the findings of the other Santa Monica presenters with his own recent experience, John Blakey of Audit Arizona reported that, in this very primary, in Maricopa County, domain of infamous Sherrif Joe Arpaio, 150,000 voters appear to have been ‘suppressed.’ Possibly that’s because 85% of Arizona voters use vote-by-mail ballots, which, extensive evidence shows, rarely get counted.

Blakey is suing the State of Arizona for access to records. “We have the right language for it now,” Blakey says, thanks to the work of the other panel members. “It’s not ‘voter fraud,’ it’s vote fraud. It is a system designed for cheating.”

STD – Software Transmitted Disease

Well-known actor Mimi Kennedy is a fierce, long-term election protection activist in private life. In this election she received poll worker training that has taken her into the heart of California’s election system. She says her friend Bev Harris’ ‘fraction magic’ findings show how deeply what she calls “STD, Software Transmitted Disease” has infected our electoral system. She explains, “There are seven thousand small voting jurisdictions all over America. State law controls elections. Seven thousand jurisdictions within and among those states can have some say in process, procedure, choice of private contractors, common servicer software and hardware. Outside IT ‘experts’ are hired who may or may not be honest or bright. That means that fraud capacity is there. People ask me ‘Who are the ‘them’ that may be stealing our votes?’ I tell them, ‘someone in any of those jurisdictions who can.’”

The Ohio Plan, ‘How to Nix the Fix’

Wasserman and Fitrakis admit that, “as we approach the 2016 election, the prospects for a truly democratic outcome are grim.”

However, lest we despair in the face of all these discouraging revelations, they insist that the fixes in our badly compromised electoral system CAN be nixed.

“The only cure,” they conclude, “is a bottom-up revolution in human consciousness and action.” They hope their work “will help inform and motivate an energized grassroots uprising” based on what they call The Ohio Plan.

The Ohio Plan:

1. Universal, automatic, same-day voter registration.

2. A four-day national voting holiday.

3. Votes counted by students & elders, paid the minimum wage.

4. Universal use of hand-counted paper ballots.

5. A universal automatic recount.

May it be so.

============

Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON, The Ecological Options Network. Since 2004, they have produced many video reports in cooperation with FreePress.org and the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism which can be viewed on the EON’s YouTube channel Election Protection & Deep Democracy playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF06C90E53E4D6919 They are currently at work on a new documentary SHUTDOWN: The California-Fukushima Connection. http://www.shutdowndoc.tv/

Thinking Dangerously in the Age of Normalized Ignorance

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Henry Giroux

Source: CounterPunch

What happens to a society when thinking is eviscerated and is disdained in favor of raw emotion? [1] What happens when political discourse functions as a bunker rather than a bridge? What happens when the spheres of morality and spirituality give way to the naked instrumentalism of a savage market rationality? What happens when time becomes a burden for most people and surviving becomes more crucial than trying to lead a life with dignity? What happens when domestic terrorism, disposability, and social death become the new signposts and defining features of a society? What happens to a social order ruled by an “economics of contempt” that blames the poor for their condition and wallows in a culture of shaming?[2] What happens when loneliness and isolation become the preferred modes of sociality? What happens to a polity when it retreats into private silos and is no longer able to connect personal suffering with larger social issues? What happens to thinking when a society is addicted to speed and over-stimulation? What happens to a country when the presiding principles of a society are violence and ignorance? What happens is that democracy withers not just as an ideal but also as a reality, and individual and social agency become weaponized as part of the larger spectacle and matrix of violence?[3]

The forces normalizing and contributing to such violence are too expansive to cite, but surely they would include: the absurdity of celebrity culture; the blight of rampant consumerism; state-legitimated pedagogies of repression that kill the imagination of students; a culture of immediacy in which accelerated time leaves no room for reflection; the reduction of education to training; the transformation of mainstream media into a mix of advertisements, propaganda, and entertainment; the emergence of an economic system which argues that only the market can provide remedies for the endless problems it produces, extending from massive poverty and unemployment to decaying schools and a war on poor minority youth; the expanding use of state secrecy and the fear-producing surveillance state; and a Hollywood fluff machine that rarely relies on anything but an endless spectacle of mind-numbing violence. Historical memory has been reduced to the likes of a Disney theme park and a culture of instant gratification has a lock on producing new levels of social amnesia.

As we learned in the recent debate between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton (a billionaire and millionaire), ignorance is the DNA of authoritarianism, serving to subvert the truth and obscure the workings of power. Willful ignorance has become a normalized political tool and form of public pedagogy that both provides the foundation for what Noam Chomsky labels as the rise of the “stupid party” and which works incessantly to create a “stupid nation.”[4]Trump, of course, proves that stupidity is in fashion and deeply entrenched within the larger culture while Hilary capitalizes on her penchant for disingenuousness by claiming support for policies she really disdains, i.e., stating she will raise taxes on her buddies from Goldman Sachs and other members of the financial elite. Hardly believable from a woman who “has earned millions of dollars from speeches to Wall Street banks and investment firms (and) was paid $675,000 for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs.”[5] No hints of the radical imagination here, or the truth for that matter. Only the politics of stupidity and evasion and a media spectacle supporting the celebration of corrupted and limited and pathologized political horizons.

Manufactured ignorance also makes invisible the corruption of the financial elite, allowing them to plunder resources and define the accumulation of capital as a divine blessing. It gets worse. Manufactured ignorance aided by the voracious seductions of commodified corporate-driven disimagination machine that promotes a culture of empty pleasures through and endless regime of consuming and discarding. American society is now dominated by a pervasive commodified landscape of disimagination machines that extends from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, magazines, news, and the social media. These mind-numbing desiring machines which thrive on speed and sensation function mostly as workstations of ignorance to create a fog of distractions that promote forms of social amnesia that erase from memory and public discourse the structural, systemic and social forces that reinforce what can be called organized powerlessness and massive human suffering. This is the stuff of a politics of disappearance that erases the presence of the poor, unemployed, the “approximately 11 million Americans cycle[d] through jails and prisons each year,” black youth, immigrants, ecological disasters, class warfare, acts of state sponsored terrorism, the rise of the police state, and the rise of the warfare state.[6] As the machinery of social death accelerates, America’s most precious investment, youth, also disappear. As neoliberal disimagination machines such as Fox News make clear youth as a social investment no longer count in a society that disdains long term investments and their messy calls for being included in the script of democracy. As such, the current war on youth is about erasing the future, at least any alternative future and any notion of imagination that might summon one into view.

When coupled with an age of precarity and endless uncertainty in which young people have few decent jobs, are strangulated by debt, face a future of career-less jobs, and isolation, young people have little room for politics because they are more concerned with trying to survive rather than engaging in political struggles, or imagining a different future. At the same time, armies of the unemployed or underemployed are caught in a spiral of receding wages, diminished social provisions, and increasingly find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and free-floating anger. In such situations, thinking and informed action become more difficult while a politics wedded to economic and social justice is eviscerated. Moreover, politics becomes toxic when dominated by unapologetic discourses of racism and hatred and is on full display in the Trump campaign. Tapping into such anger and redirecting away from the real problems that produce it has become the central script in the rise of the new authoritarians. This poisonous discourse gains momentum and accelerates as it moves between white supremacist incantations of Trump and his zealots and the deceptive vocabulary of Hillary Clinton and her financial elite backers who embrace a savage neoliberalism with its false claims to freedom, choice, and the virtues of militarization. Civic death is on full display as the ideals of democracy disappear in an election in which authoritarianism in its various forms rules without apology. As thinking dangerously and acting with civic courage wanes, state violence, disposability and voicelessness become the dominant registers of an authoritarian politics that has intensified in American life producing neo-fascist movements in American society that have moved from the fringes to the center of political life.

Tragedy looms large in American society as the forces that promote powerlessness and voicelessness intensify among those elements of the population struggling just to survive the symbolic violence of a culture of cruelty and the material violence of a punishing state. The issue of losing one’s voice either to the forces of imposed silencing or state repression weaken dissent and open the door to the seductions of a dogmatism that speaks in the language of decline, making America great again, while touting the coded vocabulary of white nationalism and racial purity. How else to explain Trump’s call for imposing racial profiling as a way to boost the notion of law and order.

Thinking undangerously is the first step in the triumph of formalism over substance, theater over politics, and the transformation of politics into a form of celebrity culture. The refusal to think works in the service of a form of voicelessness, which is another marker of what it means to be powerless. Within this moral and political vacuum, the codes, rhetoric, and language of white supremacy is on the rise wrapped in the spectacle of fear-mongering and implied threats of state repression. In this instance, emotion become more important than reason, ideas lose their grip on reality, and fashion becomes a rationale for discarding historical memory, informed arguments, and critical thought. Reflection no longer challenges the demands of commonsense. In the mainstream media, the endless and unapologetic proliferation of lies become fodder for higher ratings, informed by suffocating pastiche of talking heads, all of whom surrender to “the incontestable demands of quiet acceptance.”[7]Within such an environment, the truth of an event is not open to public discussion or informed judgment at least in the official media apparatuses producing, distributing and circulating ideas that parade as commonsense. As a result, all that remains is the fog of ignorance and the haze of political and moral indifference.

Americans occupy a historical moment in which it is crucial to think dangerously, particularly since such thinking has the power to shift the questions, provide the tools for offering historical and relational contexts, and “push at the frontiers…of the human imagination.”[8]Stuart Hall is right in insisting that thinking dangerously is crucial “to change the scale of magnification. … to break into the confusing fabric that ‘the real’ apparently presents, and find another way in. So it’s like a microscope and until you look at the evidence through the microscope, you can’t see the hidden relations.”[9] In this instance, the critical capacity for thinking becomes dangerous when it can intervene in the “continuity of commonsense, unsettle strategies of domination,” and work to promote strategies of transformation.[10]

As Adorno observes, such thinking “speaks for what is not narrow-minded—and commonsense most certainly is.”[11] As such, dangerous thinking is not only analytical in its search for understanding and truth, it is also critical and subversive, always employing modes of self and social critique necessary to examine its own grounds and those poisonous fundamentalisms in the larger society haunting the body politic. As Michael Payne observes, thinking dangerously (or critical theory in this instance) should be cast in the language of hints, dialogue, and an openness to other positions, rather than be “cast in the language of orders.”[12] Of course, this is not to suggest that thinking dangerously guarantees action, but at the same time, any action that distances itself from such thinking is bound to fail.

In an age when shouting, rage, and unchecked emotions shape public discourse, self-reflection becomes a liability and suppresses the axiom that critical thought should function to “lift…human beings above the evidence of our senses and sets appearances apart from the truth.”[13] Salmon Rushdie is right in viewing thinking dangerously as a type of political necessity whose purpose is to “push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world.”[14] As Hannah Arendt noted, thoughtfulness, the ability to think reflectively and critically is fundamental to radical change and a necessity in a functioning democracy. Put differently, formative cultures that make such thinking possible along with the spaces in which dialogue, debate, and dissent can flourish are essential to producing critically literate and actively engaged citizens.

Unfortunately, thinking undangerously cuts across ideological and political divides. For instance, there is a new kind of historical and social amnesia overtaking some elements of resistance in the United States. Many progressives have forgotten the lessons of earlier movements for real change extending from the anti-Vietnam War and Black Freedom movements to the radical feminist and gay rights movements of the sixties. History as a repository of learning with vast resources to enable people to build on historical legacies, develop mass movements, and take seriously the pedagogical task of consciousness raising, is in decline. Too much of contemporary politics has become more personal, often reducing agency to the discourses and highly charged emotions of trauma. These historical legacies of resistance did not limit their politics to a call recognition and security within the confines of isolated political issues. Instead, they called for a radical transformation of capitalist and other authoritarian societies. Moroever, they understood that the truth of domination lie in understanding the totality of a society and how various issues were connected to each other. George Monbiot exemplifies this issue in arguing against responding to the varied crisis associated with neoliberalism as if they emerged in isolation—a response that contributes to neoliberalism’s anonymity. He writes:

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalyzed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?[15]

This politics of the disconnect is exacerbated by the fact that mass social movements run the risk of undermining by a politics that has collapsed into the personal. For example, for too many progressives personal pain represents a retreat into an interiority that focuses on trauma. Robin Kelley provides a caveat here in pointing out that all too often “managing trauma does not require dismantling structural racism” and the larger issues of “oppression, repression, and subjugation” get replaced with “words such as PTSD, micro-aggressions, and triggers.” [16] Kelley is not suggesting that the pain of personal suffering be ignored. Instead, he warns “against … the consequences of framing all grievances in the ‘language of personaltrauma.’”[17]

Personal trauma in this case can begin with legitimate calls for spaces free of racism, sexual harassment, and various other forms of hidden but morally and politically unacceptable assaults. And at its best, such a politics functions as an entry into political activism; but when it becomes less a justifiable starting point than an endpoint it begins to sabotage any viable notion of radical politics. Kelley is right in insisting that “trauma can easily slip into thinking of ourselves as victims and objects rather than agents.”[18] Moreover, the language of safe spaces, personal trauma, and triggers can easily become a topsy-turvy discursive universe of trick mirrors and trapdoors that end up reproducing a politics of intimidation and conformity, while forgetting that pedagogical practices and a corresponding politics in the service of dramatic transformation are always unsettling and discomforting.

Progressives must avoid at all cost is the rebirth of a politics in which how we think and act is guaranteed by the discourses of origins, personal experience, and biology. When individuals become trapped within their own experiences, the political imagination weakens, and a politics emerges that runs the risk of inhabiting a culture of exclusion and hardness that shuts down dialogue, undermines compassion, kills empathy, makes it more difficult to listen to and learn from others. A politics that puts an emphasis on personal pain can become blind to its own limitations and can offer falsely a guaranteed access to the truth and a comforting embrace of a discourse of political certainty.

In such cases, the walls go up again as the discourses of biology and exclusion merge to guard the frontiers of moral righteousness and political absolutism. Put differently, the registers of militarization are on full display in such alleged sites of resistance such as higher education where a growing culture of political purity marks out a space in which the personal becomes the only politics there is housed within a discourse of “weaponized sensitivity” and “armed ignorance.”[19] The first causality of armed ignorance is a kind of thoughtfulness that embraces empathy for the other, a willingness to enter into public discussion, and dialogue with those who exist outside of the bunkers of imagined communities of exclusion. Leon Wieseltier is right in arguing that “grievance is sometimes the author of blindness, or worse.”[20]

Under such conditions, empathy wanes and only extends as far as recognizing those who mirror the self, one that endlessly narrates itself on the high ground of an unassailable moralism and stultifying orbits of self-interests. In addition, politics collapses into the privatized orbits of a crude essentialism that disdains forms of public discourse in which boundaries break down and the exercise of public deliberation is viewed as fundamental to a substantive democracy. Of course, there is more at work here than what might be called the atrophy of critical thought, self-reflection, and theory, there is also the degeneration of agency itself.

What does thinking look like when it is transformed into a pedagogical parasite on the body of democracy? At one level, it becomes toxic, blinding the ideological warriors to their own militant ignorance and anti-democratic rhetoric. At the same time, it shuts down any attempt to develop public spheres that connect rather than separate advocates of a politics walled in by suffocating notions of essentialism dressed up in the appeal to orthodoxy parading as revolutionary zeal. What must be remembered is that thinking undangerously mimics a pedagogy of repression that falsely assumes a revolutionary stance when in fact everything about it is counter-revolutionary. In the end this suggests a kind of theoretical helplessness, a replacing of the courage to think dangerously with the discourse of denunciation and a language overflowing with the comforting binary of good and evil.

There is more at risk here than legitimating the worse forms of thoughtlessness, there is also the intolerable potential for both the moral collapse of politics and the undermining of any vestige of democracy. Thinking dangerously as a critical enterprise is about both a search for the truth and a commitment to the recognition that no society is ever just enough and hence is fundamental to the always unfinished struggle, making the impossible all the more possible. Not one or the other but both. Such thinking should be used to both understand and engage the major upheavals people face and to connect such problems to larger political, structural, and economic issues.

Thinking dangerously can make the pedagogical more political by mapping the full range of how power is used and how it can be made accountable in all of its uses. Thinking dangerously is about more than doing a critical reading of screen culture and other texts, it is also about how knowledge, desire, and values become invaluable tools in the service of economic and political justice, how language provides the framework for dealing with power and what it means to develop a sense of compassion for others and the planet. Dangerous thinking is more than a mode of resistance, it is the basis for a formative and pedagogical culture of questioning and politics that takes seriously how the imagination can become central to the practice of freedom, justice, and democratic change.

Notes.

[1] This essay draws upon a number of ideas in Henry A. Giroux,Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[2] I have borrowed this term from Jeffrey St. Clair, “The Economics of Contempt,” Counterpunch (May 23, 2014).

[3] Brad Evans and I have taken up the issue of violence in its various valences in Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015). Also, see Henry A. Giroux, America’s Addiction to Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).

[4] Noam Chomsky, “Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose the Common good,” Alternet (Sep9tember 29, 2014). Online: http://www.alternet.org/visions/chomsky-corporations-and-richest-americans-viscerally-oppose-common-good

[5] Chris Cillizza , “The New York Times just perfectly explained Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speech problem,” The WashingtonPost (February 26, 2016). Online:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/26/the-new-york-times-just-perfectly-explained-why-hillary-clintons-answers-on-her-paid-speeches-dont-work/

[6] Rebecca Gordon, “There Oughta Be a Law…Should Prison Really Be the American Way?,” TomDispatch.com (September 25, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176190/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_arresting_our_way_to_%22justice%22/

[7] Brad Evans and Julien Reid, “The Promise of Violence in the Age of Catastrophe,” Truthout (January 5, 2014. Online: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20977-the-promise-of-violence-in-the-age-of-catastrophe

[8] Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, Ma: South End Press, 2001), P. 1

[9] Stuart Hall and Les Back, “In Conversation: At Home and Not at Home”, Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, (July 2009), pp. 664-665.

[10] I have taken this phrases from an interview with Homi Bhaba in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy JAC ((1999), p. 9.

[11] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (London: Polity Press, 2005), p.139.

[12] Michael Payne, “What Difference Has Theory Mad? From Freud to Adam Phillips,” College Literature 32:2 (Spring 2005), p. 7.

[13] Ibid., Bauman, Liquid Life, 151.

[14] Salman Rushdie, “Whither Moral Courage?” The New York Times, (April 28, 2013)

[15] George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” The Guardian, (April 15, 2016) Online: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

[16] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,”Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response

[17] Ibid., Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response.” Boston Review.,

[18] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle,” Boston Review,(March 7, 2016) Online: https://bostonreview.net/forum/robin-d-g-kelley-black-study-black-struggle

[19] The notion of weaponized sensitivity is from Lionel Shriver, “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” New York Times (September 23, 2016). Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/opinion/will-the-left-survive-the-millennials.html. Armed ignorance was coined by my colleague Brad Evans in a personal correspondence.

[20] Leon Wieseltier, “How voters’ personal suffering overtook reason – and brought us Donald Trump,” Washington Post, (June 22, 2016). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/22/how-voters-personal-suffering-overtook-reason-and-brought-us-donald-trump/

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Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014). His web site is www.henryagiroux.com.

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