Category Archives: corporate news

Who Lost: A Biased Media, Pundits, Pollsters, Political Parties, Warmongers, the Corporatocracy, Pay-to-Play Grifters, Neoliberals

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Editor’s Note: While the parties mentioned may have lost in the short run, it’s likely they’ll soon regroup for future assaults on humanity and the planet.

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone’s public utterances are politically correct.

Sometimes who lost is more important than who won. Let’s review who lost the election:

1. Let’s start with the Corporatocracy, which expected to once again wield unlimited influence by funding political campaigns with millions of dollars in contributions and speaking fees.

2. A biased mainstream media. My mom-in-law was watching CBS all night, so that’s what we watched. All the pundits/anchors spoke in the hushed tones of a funeral. For two hours, the only images of campaign workers shown were the sad faces of Clinton supporters; not one image of jubilant Trump supporters was broadcast until Trump gave his acceptance speech.

When one of the talking heads noted that Hillary never generated the enthusiasm of the Sanders or Trump campaigns, his comment was followed by a stony silence. That he had given voice to a self-evident truth was not welcome.

3. Mainstream punditry: they got it wrong from the start and remained close-minded and arrogant in their postured superiority.

The punditry applied a double standard to Trump and Hillary. Trump’s speeches and ethically questionable history were judged by moral standards, and he was declared unfit.

Hillary’s actions, on the other hand, were judged by strictly legalistic standards: well, you can’t indict her, so she’s fit for office.

Dear punditry: you can’t use double standards to promote your biases and retain any shred of credibility.

4. Pollsters. Having rigged the polls via over-sampling and under-sampling, they were laughably wrong. Here is a typical headline from election night, from the New York Times: Trump Takes Florida, Closing In on a Stunning Upset.

Only the pollsters and the MSM were stunned.

5. Political parties. As my friend G.F.B. observed, both parties ran 20th century campaigns in the 21st century. Both parties lost for this reason; both are hopelessly out of touch with a rapidly changing America.

Democrats upset with losing should look at their party’s system of Super-Delegates that squelched Bernie Sander’s bid.

6. Warmongers. Many Americans are sick and tired of interventionist, globalist warmongering. The only possible way they could register their opposition to warmongering was to vote for Trump.

7. Pay-to-Play Grifters. Let the investigations, indictments, prosecutions and convictions begin as soon as Trump is sworn in.

8. Neoliberals. Globalization boils down to freeing mobile capital to rove the globe for opportunities to strip-mine cheap resources, assets and labor and then move on, leaving ruined communities behind.

9. Bonus loser: Fake Progressives. Fake Progressives are perfectly fine with soaring inequality and corrupt governance, as long as everyone’s public utterances are politically correct. So the oppressor class is acceptable as long as they speak respectfully while stepping on your neck.

Real Progressives see jobs and community as solutions, not welfare and central planning. Real Progressives see the eradication of warmongering Imperial pretensions and corrupt pay-to-play grifting as the essential projects of liberty and democracy.

How Does Corporate Media Manufacture False Narratives?

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By Nauman Sadiq

Source: RINF

What bothers me is not that we are unable to find the solution to our problems, what bothers me more is the fact that neoliberals are so utterly unaware of the real structural issues that their attempts to sort out the tangential issues will further exacerbate the main issues. Religious extremism, militancy and terrorism are not the cause but the effect of poverty, backwardness and disenfranchisement.

Empirically speaking, if we take all the other aggravating factors out: like poverty, backwardness, illiteracy, social injustice, disenfranchisement, conflict, instability, deliberate training and arming of certain militant groups by the regional and global players, and more importantly grievances against the duplicitous Western foreign policy, I don’t think that Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the likes would get the abundant supply of foot soldiers that they are getting now in the troubled regions of Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

Moreover, I do concede that the rallying cry of “Jihad in the way of God” might have been one reason for the abundant supply of foot soldiers to the jihadists’ cause, but on an emotional level it is the self-serving and hypocritical Western interventionist policy in the energy-rich Middle East that adds fuel to the fire. When Muslims all over the Islamic countries see that their brothers-in-faith are dying in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, on an emotional level they feel outraged and seek vengeance and justice.

This emotional outrage, in my opinion, is a far more potent factor than the sterile rational argument of God’s supposed command to fight holy wars against the infidels. If we take all the other contributing factors, that I have mentioned in the second paragraph out of the equation, I don’t think that Muslims are some “exceptional” variety of human beings who are hell-bent on killing the heretics all over the world.

Notwithstanding, it’s very easy to distinguish between the victims of structural injustices and the beneficiaries of the existing neocolonial economic order all over the world. But instead of using words that can be interpreted subjectively I’ll let the figures do the talking. Pakistan’s total GDP is only $270 billion and with a population of 200 million it amounts to a per capita income of only $1400. While the US’ GDP is $18 trillion and per capita income is in excess of $50,000. Similarly the per capita income of most countries in the Western Europe is also around $40,000. That’s a difference of 40 to 50 TIMES between the incomes of Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, i.e. the Western powers.

Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $600 billion, which is three times the size of Pakistan’s total GDP. A single multi-national corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world owns assets in excess of $200 billion which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such business conglomerates are: Investment banks – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC, BNP Paribas; Oil majors – Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, RDS, Total, Vitol; Manufacturers – Apple, Microsoft and Google.

On top of that, semi-legit wealth from all over the world flows into the Western commercial and investment banks: last year there was a report that the Russian oligarchs have deposited $800 billion in the Western banks, while the Chinese entrepreneurs have deposited $1.5 trillion in the Western financial institutions.

Moreover, in April this year the Saudi finance minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets if Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. And $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add up Saudi investment in Western Europe, and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in the US and Western Europe.

The first and foremost priority of the Western powers is to save their Corporate Empire, and especially their financial institutions, from collapsing; everything else like eliminating terrorism, promoting democracy and “responsibility to protect” are merely arranged side shows to justify their interventionist foreign policy, especially in the energy-rich Middle East.

Additionally, the irony is that the neoliberal dupes of the mainstream media justify and validate the unfair practices of the neocolonial powers and hold the victims of structural injustices responsible for their misfortunes. If a Third World’s laborer has been forced to live on less than $5 a day and a corporate executive sits in the Wall Street on top of $18 trillion business empire, neoliberals are okay with this travesty.

However, we need to understand that how does a neoliberal mindset is structured? As we know that mass education programs and mass media engender mass ideologies. We like to believe that we are free to think, but we aren’t. Our narratives aren’t really “our” narratives. These narratives of injustice and inequality have been constructed for the public consumption by the corporate media, which is nothing more than the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments and the business interests.

Media is our eyes and ears through which we get all the inputs and it is also our brain through which we interpret raw data. If media keeps mum over some vital structural injustices and blows out of proportion some isolated incidents of injustice and violence, we are likely to forget all about the former and focus all of our energies on the tangential issues which the media portrays as the “real” ones.

Monopoly capitalism and the global neocolonial economic order are the real issues while Islamic radicalism and terrorism are the secondary issues and itself an adverse reaction to the former. That’s how the mainstream media constructs artificial narratives and dupes its audience into believing the absurd: during the Cold War it created the “Red Scare” and told us that communism is an existential threat to the free world and the Western way of life. We bought this narrative.

Then the West and its Saudi and Pakistani collaborators financed, trained and armed the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” and used them as their proxies against the Soviets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union they declared the former “freedom fighters” to be terrorists and another existential threat to the “free world” and the Western way of life. We again bought this narrative.

And finally, during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars the former terrorists once again became freedom fighters – albeit in a more nuanced manner, this time around the corporate media sells them as “moderate rebels.” And the lobotomized neoliberal audience of the mainstream media is once again willing to buy this narrative, how ironic?

 

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, neocolonialism and Petroimperialism.

Distrust of 2016’s Hackable Election Is a Media Landslide With Just One Solution: Hand-counted Paper Ballots

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By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Source: FreePress.org

Finally, the major for-profit media is approaching consensus that it’s easy to hack U.S. political elections. Even candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are raising unprecedented doubts – from very different directions – about the reliability of the upcoming vote count.

Ultimately, there is just one solution: universal hand-counted paper ballots, with carefully protected voter registration rolls, and a transparent chain of custody.

The corporate media and the Democrats are obsessed with the “Russians.” Donald Trump rants about a mythological army of voters voting multiple times.

But the real threat to our election system comes from private for-profit corporations that register voters, control voter databases, then count and report the vote with secret proprietary software and zero transparency, accountability, or recourse.

After ignoring or attacking the reportage since Florida 2000 of Bev Harris, Greg Palast, freepress.org and numerous others, the corporate media seems finally to be getting the message: under the current system, any American election – even the one for president – can be stripped and flipped by a tiny handful of electronic hackers working anywhere from the Kremlin to a party HQ to a state governor’s office to a teenager’s garage.

Here is some of what the mainstream media is finally admitting. In an article posted on July 28, 2016, NBC News pointed out that our elections are vulnerable to hacking because they “are not part of the vast ‘critical infrastructure protection’ safety net set up by the Department of Homeland Security.”

CBS News wrote August 10, 2016, about “the hackers at Symantec Security Response” who demonstrated how “Election Day results could be manipulated by an affordable device you can find online.”

Former national coordinator for counter-terrorism Richard Clarke, reporting for ABC News on August 19, 2016, analyzed the particular security problems related to battleground states like Ohio and Florida: “In 2000 and 2004, there were only a handful of battleground states that determined which presidential candidate had enough Electoral College votes to win. A slight alteration of the vote in some swing precincts in swing states might not raise suspicion. Smart malware can be programmed to switch only a small percentage of votes from what the voters intended. That may be all that is needed, and that malware can also be programmed to erase itself after it does its job, so there might be no trace it ever happened.” Clarke was on the White House National Security Council during both Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s administrations.

Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, in his August 12, 2016 New York Times op-ed “The Election Won’t Be Rigged but It Could Be Hacked,” wrote: “The mere existence of this discussion is cause for alarm. The United States needs to return, as soon as possible, to a paper-based, auditable voting system in all jurisdictions that still use electronic-only, unverifiable voting machines.”

On August 30, 2016, the Washington Post wrote: “Deleting or altering data on voter rolls could cause mayhem on Election Day disenfranchising some voters. Many voting machines themselves also are vulnerable, especially touch-screen systems that do not create a paper record as a guard against fraud or manipulation.” The Post also supplied a list of the 15 states with the most vulnerable voting systems.

The list of those now admitting the obvious includes the Boston Globe, The Atlantic, USA Today, The Guardian, Mother Jones, and Politico, some of which have previously mocked those of us reporting on this issue. Most important has been the highly influential The Hill, which weighed in on May 2, 2016 with “Election fraud feared as hackers target voter records.” The lede was straightforward: “A series of data breaches overseas are spurring concerns that hackers could manipulate elections in the United States.”

Trump advisor Roger Stone wrote a column in The Hill with the headline: “Can the 2016 Elections Be Rigged? You Bet.” He also referred to our latest summary volume, “The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft,” as “a must-read book on the strip and flip techniques used to rig these machines.”

But in the 2016 primary election, there are other must-reads as well. Perhaps the most important is Election Justice USA’s report entitled “Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries.” This report cites six major areas of election irregularities in this year’s 26 primary elections:

1) Targeting voter suppression

2) Registration tampering

3) Illegal voter purges

4) Exit poll discrepancies

5) Evidence for voting machine tampering

6) The security (or lack thereof) of various voting machines types.

In their 96-page report, Election Justice researchers documented how Hillary Clinton’s campaign benefited from these “various types of fraud.” Their conclusion: “Based on this work, Election Justice USA has established an upper estimate of 184 pledged delegates lost by Senator Bernie Sanders as a consequence of specific irregularities and instances of fraud.”

Election Justice’s well-documented estimate that Sanders lost 184 delegates means that if the election had been conducted fairly, the Senator from Vermont would now be the Democratic nominee.

Another document essential to understanding election irregularities that allowed Hillary Clinton to capture the Democratic Party nomination is a paper co-authored by Axel Geijsel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of Stanford University. Their analysis found that primary election results in states with the most vulnerable and hackable voting machines and without a paper trail overwhelmingly favored Hillary Clinton 65 percent to 35 percent. Sanders led Clinton 51 percent to 49 percent in states where the vote count could be verified with a paper trail.

The correlation between the increased Clinton vote and the increased vulnerability of the voting machines has been avoided like the plague by the corporate media.

Equally important to read is mathematician Richard Charnin’s blog. Charnin is a man the mainstream media often attacks – but not with mathematical formulas to rebut Charnin’s detailed analysis. Rather they attack him because, like the vast majority of Americans, he believes that John F. Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman. In 2016, official Democratic primary vote counts compared to exit poll results were significantly outside the margin of error in 12 of 26 states. Charnin concluded that the probability of those official vote tallies being correct are one in 78 billion. There were no such discrepancies in this year’s Republican primaries.

Now 16 years after the theft of the presidency in Florida 2000, and a dozen since it was done again in Ohio 2004, the corporate media are approaching consensus that it is indeed very easy to strip millions of legitimate citizens from the voting rolls, and then to hack electronic voting machines and computerized central tabulators to flip the official final outcome.

The threat to this year’s election does not come from non-existent armies of mythological hordes voting multiple times. It comes from the private partisan companies with their secret proprietary software that control the voter rolls, the electronic machines, and ultimately the final outcome at all levels of government. The mega-corporations are the ones that flipped George W. Bush into the White House and Hillary Clinton into the Democratic nomination, not to mention manipulating countless Senate, House, and state and local elections along the way.

For a hopelessly vulnerable electronic election system which is flawed, hackable and riggable from top to bottom, there is just one solution: transparent unhackable voter rolls, and universal hand-counted paper ballots open to public scrutiny from the precinct level to the final official tallies, as dutifully reported by our slowly awakening corporate media.

 

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, available at www.freepress.org and www.solartopia.org, where Bob’s Fitrakis Files and Harvey’s Solartopia! can also be found.

Rigged

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By David Swanson

Source: Let’s Try Democracy

The 2016 Republican presidential primary was rigged. It wasn’t rigged by the Republicans, the Democrats, Russians, space aliens, or voters. It was rigged by the owners of television networks who believed that giving one candidate far more coverage than others was good for their ratings. The CEO of CBS Leslie Moonves said of this decision: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Justifying that choice based on polling gets the chronology backwards, ignores Moonves’ actual motivation, and avoids the problem, which is that there ought to be fair coverage for all qualified candidates (and a democratic way to determine who is qualified).

The 2016 Democratic presidential primary was rigged. It wasn’t rigged by bankers, misogynists, Russians, Republicans, or computer hackers. It was rigged by the Democratic National Committee and its co-conspirators in the media, many of whom have helpfully confessed (in case it wasn’t obvious) in emails leaked from the DNC and from John Podesta. The DNC chose Hillary Clinton and worked hard to make sure that she “won.” Nobody has produced a hint of evidence as to who leaked the emails that added unnecessary confirmation of this rigging, but they should be thanked for informing us, whoever they are.

The FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s misuse of email was as rigged as the non-prosecution of the CEO of Wells Fargo. The U.S. political system is bought and paid for. Without millions of dollars to funnel to television networks for advertising, any candidate is rigged right out of participating. This rigging of the system is not fixed by someone like Donald Trump pretending for a while that he won’t take bribes, that he’ll spend only his own money, because most people don’t have that kind of money to spend. This rigging is not fixed by making someone like Hillary Clinton take her bribes through her family foundation or requiring that her political action committees remain theoretically separate from the campaign they are collaborating hand-in-glove with, because money buys power.

The debates are rigged by a private entity with no official status that calls itself the Commission on Presidential Debates and transforms open debates among multiple candidates into exclusively bipartisan joint appearances with many large and fine points negotiated beforehand.

Actual governance of the United States is rigged. Congress plans to attempt to ram through a number of intensely unpopular measures just after the election, including a supplemental spending bill for more wars and including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The hope is that most people will have tuned out after the election circus, and that most of them will forget what happened 2 or 4 years later.

The demonization of Vladimir Putin is rigged. Nobody has seen evidence that he or his government did us the favor of informing us of the DNC’s corruption. He proposed a ban on cyber “war” that was rejected by the United States, for goodness sake. There’s no evidence that Russia shot down an airplane in Ukraine or invaded Ukraine or seized Crimea or plotted attacks on the United States. The United States pulled out of the ABM treaty, expanded NATO to Russia’s border, built missile bases, arranged military “exercises,” facilitated a Ukrainian coup, and pushed a string of hostile lies. Russia has shown even more restraint than your typical U.S. voter (who usually sits home and does not vote, especially in primaries).

Military spending is rigged. Nobody knows it amounts to over half of U.S. discretionary spending.  Nobody knows it’s as much in the U.S. as in the rest of the world (allies and otherwise) combined. Nobody pays attention to the bribes from war profiteers, or to the threats held over Congress members to pull weapons jobs out of districts or states. Supporters of both big candidates claim their candidate plans to cut military spending. Both candidates have said the exact opposite. The debates and interviews steer clear of the whole topic.

The shapes of the districts are blatantly rigged by gerrymandering. The existence of the Senate, in which Rhode Island and Wyoming each have as much say as California is rigged against the popular will. The electoral college is rigged against the popular will and in favor of concentrating national campaigns in a handful of “swing states.”

Voter registration is rigged. A handful of states have now made it automatic, as most states have long-since done for military draft registration. In the rest of the country, thousands of young people run around registering voters, imagining they are engaged in “activism.” Meanwhile, the right to vote can be denied to anyone by claiming they aren’t registered.

People’s names are stripped from voting rolls through a so-called justice system that brands them as felons, and through the careful rigging of those rolls by corrupt and partisan state governments that intentionally strip out people likely to vote for a particular party. This includes racial profiling. Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Greg Palast and others have reported extensively on these practices.

Election day is rigged as well. It’s not a holiday. Most people have to work. Poor districts and racial minority districts tend to have fewer machines and longer lines. ID requirements are used to deny people the right to vote. Intimidation and racial profiling by partisan activists serve the same function of rigging the election. The myths and lies about the virtually nonexistent phenomenon of “voter fraud” also serve to rig the election.

The election machines are also rigged. That is to say: instead of verifiable paper ballots publicly hand-counted in front of observers from all interested parties in each polling place, we have a faith-based system of voting on black-box machines that can never, even in theory, be checked for accuracy. These machines have been very easily hacked in demonstrations. These machines have visibly flipped votes before the eyes (and cameras) of countless voters. These machines have almost certainly played a key role in flipping the results of numerous elections.

Now, the wider the margin of victory, the less likely an electronic flipping. And the fact that machines can easily be used to steal an election does not mean that they always will be. But it was very odd during the late summer of 2016 to watch the U.S. media announce that these machines were totally unreliable — just what many of us had been saying for years. But the media said this in order to accuse Russia of planning to sabotage the coming U.S. election, or in order to accuse Russia of exactly what these media reports themselves did: plant seeds of doubt in U.S. minds.

Those doubts should be there. People should watch for visible problems with machines and with partisan and racist intimidators, and report all such to 1-866-OUR-VOTE, to county clerks, to secretaries of state, and to corporate and independent media. Then we should work for necessary reforms, including a respectful cessation of the U.S. government’s routine practice of interfering in elections and overthrowing governments in other people’s countries — a practice that has clearly resulted in the U.S. media projecting such behavior on others.

Ultimately, an unrigging of the U.S. system might take the form of amending the U.S. Constitution to slip in words like these:

The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.

Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law. The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

All elections for President and members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate shall be entirely publicly financed. No political contributions shall be permitted to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. No political expenditures shall be permitted in support of any federal candidate, or in opposition to any federal candidate, from any other source, including the candidate. The Congress shall, by statute, provide limitations on the amounts and timing of the expenditures of such public funds and provide criminal penalties for any violation of this section.

State and local governments shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for state or local public office or any state or local ballot measure.

The right of the individual U.S. citizen to vote and to directly elect all candidates by popular vote in all pertinent local, state, and federal elections shall not be violated. Citizens will be automatically registered to vote upon reaching the age of 18 or upon becoming citizens at an age above 18, and the right to vote shall not be taken away from them. Votes shall be recorded on paper ballots, which shall be publicly counted at the polling place. Election day shall be a national holiday.

Nothing contained in this amendment shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press. During a designated campaign period of no longer than six months, free air time shall be provided in equal measure to all candidates for federal office on national, state, or district television and radio stations, provided that each candidate has, during the previous year, received the supporting signatures of at least five percent of their potential voting-age constituents. The same supporting signatures shall also place the candidate’s name on the ballot and require their invitation to participate in any public debate among the candidates for the same office.

American Psycho: Sex, Lies and Politics Add Up to a Terrifying Election Season

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don’t know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.”—Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

When it comes to sexual predators, there should be no political bright line test to determine who gets a free pass and who goes to jail based on which candidate is better suited for office.

Yet almost 20 years after Bill Clinton became the first and only sitting president to be sued for sexual harassment and impeached for lying under oath about his sexual escapades while in office, the Left and the Right are still playing politics with women’s rights.

I should know.

As one of Paula Jones’ lawyers in her sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton (Hillary Clinton infamously and erroneously accused me of being part of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”), I saw first-hand how quickly Hillary Clinton and the nation’s leading women’s rights groups demonized any woman who dared to accuse Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct while turning a blind eye to a long list of incidents involving groping, propositioning, and pressuring women for sexual favors.

Trust me, it was a very long list.

As journalist Marjorie Williams documented in “Clinton and Women” for Vanity Fair:

“The man in question [Bill Clinton] has been sued for sexual harassment over an episode that allegedly included dropping his trousers to waggle his erect penis at a woman who held a $6.35-an-hour clerical job in the state government over which he presided. Another woman has charged that when she asked him for a job he invited her into his private office, fondled her breasts, and placed her hand on his crotch. A third woman confided to friends that when she was a 21-year-old intern she began an affair with the man… Actually, it was less an affair than a service contract, in which she allegedly dashed into his office, when summoned, to perform oral sex on him… Let us not even mention the former lover who was steered to a state job; or the law-enforcement officers who say the man used them to solicit sexual partners for him; or his routine use of staff members, lawyers, and private investigators to tar the reputation of any woman who tries to call him to account for his actions.”

I also witnessed first-hand the hypocrisy of the Religious Right, which was eager to stand in judgment over Clinton for his marital infidelity, while at the same time turning a blind eye to the indiscretions of other conservative politicians in their midst.

Fast forward 20 years, and the women’s rights groups that were silent when Bill Clinton was being outed as a sexual predator have suddenly found their voice and their outrage in the face of accusations that Donald Trump groped and kissed women without their consent. Likewise, the religious groups that were aghast over Clinton’s sexual immorality have somehow created a sliding scale of sin that allows them to absolve Trump of his own indiscretions.

It’s like being in the Twilight Zone.

Only instead of Rod Serling’s imaginary “land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas,” we’re trapped in an all-too-real land of politics and lies, where freedom and integrity play second fiddle to ambition and greed.

Nothing is real.

This year’s presidential contest and its candidates have, through their double-talking and lies, pulled back the curtain to reveal that what we see is all part of an elaborate hoax, a cruel game where “we the people” are just pawns to be used, abused, discarded and demonized when convenient.

Consider if you will: Bill Clinton was accused of using various and sundry women for sex. For years, he lied about his affairs and accused his accusers of smear campaigns. Only when caught red-handed, did he finally admit—sort of—to having sexual relations with certain women. At no time did he ever apologize for abusing his authority and disrespecting women.

Trump not only is accused of making sexual advances on various women, but he also used Clinton’s sexual victims to score points off Hillary.

And Hillary, in turn, has used and abused both Clinton and Trump’s sexual victims in order to advance her own political ambitions.

As Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate back in 2008:

Hillary Clinton the candidate has largely benefited from her husband’s extracurricular activities… Sure, her husband’s behavior has humiliated her. But she has also helped him humiliate the women he’s been involved with… One of the most troubling things about Hillary Clinton is that she is never above cashing in on [the politics of victimization].

Are you starting to get it yet?

All this talk about sexual predators is just so much political maneuvering to score points off one another. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump care one whit about the victims of sexual harassment.

Frankly, they don’t seem to care much about the rest of the populace, either.

For all intents and purposes, we’re all victims of a perverse, perverted, psychotic mindset that views the citizenry as lesser beings: lacking in value, unworthy of respect, and completely undeserving of the legal rights and protections that should be afforded to all Americans.

In the eyes of Bill, Hillary, Donald and the powers-that-be, we’re all little more than “bimbos,” “trailer trash,” “nuts and sluts,” “loony toons,” “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

In other words, we’re all Paula Jones. And Gennifer Flowers. And Juanita Broaddrick.  And Kathleen Willey. And Eileen Wellstone. And Cristy Zercher. And Connie Hamzy. And Monica Lewinsky. For that matter, we’re all Jill Harth. And Cassandra Searles. And Jessica Leeds. And Kristin Anderson, too

This is what happens when politics is allowed to trump principle: “we the people” lose.

The women’s movement lost when it chose politics over principle, then and now.

Women have been suffering because of that choice ever since. As feminist Jessica Valenti acknowledged in the Washington Post, “For women in America, equality is still an illusion. We’re basking in a ‘girl power’ moment that doesn’t exist—it’s a mirage of equality that we’ve been duped into believing is the real thing. Because despite the indisputable gains over the years, women are still being raped, trafficked, violated and discriminated against—not just in the rest of the world, but here in the United States… It’s time to stop fooling ourselves. For all our ‘empowered’ rhetoric, women in this country aren’t doing nearly as well as we’d like to think.”

The Religious Right lost when it chose politics over principle, then and now.

By compromising their values, they have made themselves completely irrelevant in matters of public policy. “As an organized and potent force in national politics, the Christian right has faded into nothingness,” policy analyst Paul Waldman concluded for the Washington Post. “It now exists for nothing more than to be patted on the head and sent on its way with an encouragement to vote in November.”

The media—through its careful crafting of news stories to advance one politician over another—chose politics over principle, then and now. Barring a few exceptions, they have become little more than mouthpieces for the corporate elite.

The citizenry is faced with a choice right now: to be distracted by mudslinging and circus politics or to forge a new path for the nation that rejects politics in favor of locally-based, transformative grassroots activism.

“Perhaps you think that by voting at least you’re doing your small part, making your small contribution. But contributing toward what?” asks commentator Dan Sanchez.

Sanchez continues:

Candidates are package deals. Any candidate will violate the rights of some, even if they respect or defend the rights of others. Objectors say it’s about going in the general right direction, making choices out of which the good outweighs the bad, that do a net amount of good, that is good “on balance.” But that is collectivist speak. There is no “good on balance” for the people whose lives are run over by the candidate you empowered: for the child who is bombed by Hillary’s foreign policy, for the man who is shot by Trump’s police state, or the people Gary Johnson and Bill Weld kept in cages when they were governors.

Sanchez is right: the act of voting is indeed futile.

Voting in this political climate merely advances the agenda of the police state and affirms the government’s pillaging, raping, killing, bombing, stealing, shooting and many acts of tyranny and injustice.

Mark my words: no matter who wins this election, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

After all, police officers are still shooting unarmed citizens. Government agents—including local police—are still being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are still fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are still spying on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors are still making a killing by jailing Americans for profit and waging endless wars abroad.

Are any of these issues being discussed right now? Not a single one.

It boggles the mind.

How is it possible that out of 318 million Americans in this country, we have been saddled with two candidates whose personal baggage and troubled histories make them utterly unfit for office anywhere but in the American police state?

We need to stop being victimized by these political predators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, I’m not just talking about the ones running for office, but the ones who are running the show behind the scenes—the shadow government—comprised of unelected government bureaucrats whose powers are unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and beyond the reach of the law.

Stop voting for their puppet candidates. Stop tolerating their long list of abuses. Stop making excuses for a system that long ago ceased to be legitimate. Most of all, stop playing by their rules and make them start playing by ours.

My fear is that we are nearing the point of no return.

“We the people”—men and women alike— have been victims of the police state for so long that not many Americans even remember what it is to be truly free anymore. Worse, few want to shoulder the responsibility that goes along with maintaining freedom.

Yet as John Adams warned, “A government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

There is no way to erase the scars left by the government’s greed for money and power, its disregard for human life, its corruption and graft, its pollution of the environment, its reliance on excessive force in order to ensure compliance, its covert activities, its illegal surveillance, and its blatant disdain for the rule of law.

Still, we can forge a new path.

There is so much work to be done in order to right what is wrong with our nation, and there is so little time to fix what has been broken.

Let’s not waste any more time on predator politics. Let’s get to work.

WikiLeaks’ 10 Most Damning Clinton Emails that Prove Mainstream Media is Scripted and Controlled

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By Jay Syrmopoulos

Source: The Free Thought Project

Washington, D.C. – With information coming out of WikiLeaks at a fast and furious pace, it’s difficult for the average person to keep up with the many bombshell revelations being exposed.  This is happening so much that the most damning evidence is ending up as background noise in the 24-hour election news cycle without ever making it into the mainstream news.

On October 7th, 2016, WikiLeaks publish thousands of emails belonging to John Podesta’s private email archives. More emails have been released in the days that followed. Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign Chairman. He previously served as Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton and Counselor to President Barack Obama.

The Podesta emails give insight into why there has been such little fanfare in the mainstream media regarding many of the most damning allegations against Clinton.

The fact that most of the newsworthy information contained in the emails is not being reported by the corporate media is indicative of the incestuous relationship between the mainstream media and the Clinton campaign – and is on full display in the Podesta emails.

While there are dozens of bombshell revelations contained within the emails –including transcripts of speeches to Wall St. banks that Clinton had refused to release, hidden policy positions, and evidence of collusion with brutal regimes – the most damning is the collusion and control of the U.S. media on display in the emails.

Essentially, the media has been weaponized as a means of controlling public opinion by propagandizing the American people. World renowned academic Noam Chomsky, in his book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” detailed how U.S. media frequently serve as an errand boy for U.S. corporate, military and imperial interests.

Chomsky forwarded the idea of what he called a “propaganda model.” Although the book was written in 1988, it speaks precisely to what is currently taking place and clearly revealed  in the Podesta emails.

“The media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy.” -Chomsky

With knowledge of what is currently transpiring, here are the ten most damning Clinton emails regarding the media’s collusion with her presidential campaign, with hotlinks to the original WikiLeaks release.

1. Clinton Staff hosts private “off-the-record cocktail party” with 38 “influential” reporters, journalists, editors, and anchors (from 16 different mainstream media outlets including CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, MSNBC, & more) with the stated goal of “framing the race.”

2. Donna Brazile (CNN contributor at the time, and current DNC Chairman now) leaked CNN town hall questions to Hillary Clinton’s staff prior to the debate.

3. Clinton campaign and the New York Times coordinating attack strategy against Trump.

4. Glen Thrush, POLITICO’s chief political correspondent and senior staff writer for POLITICO Magazine, sends John Podesta an article for his approval. Writes: “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this. Tell me if I fucked up anything.”

5. Huffington Post contributor Frank Islam writes to John Podesta in an email titled “My blogs in the Huffington Post”, says “I am committed to make sure she is elected the next president.” “Please let me know if I can be of any service to you.”

6. Clinton staffer “Placing a story” with Politico / New York Times: “place a story with a friendly journalist” “we have a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico” “we should shape likely leaks in the best light for HRC.”

7. John Podesta receiving drafts of New York Times articles before they’re published.

Clinton staff “placing a story with a friendly at the AP (Matt Lee or Bradley Klapper).”

More media collusion: NYT and AP “helpful” to Clinton campaign.

8. Clinton staff colluding with New York Times and Wall Street Journal to paint Hillary’s economic policies in a “progressive” light.

9. CNBC panelist colluding with John Podesta on what to ask Trump when he calls in for an interview.

10. Clinton staff appearing to control the release times of Associated Press articles.

The reality revealed in these emails is one of media collusion with powerful interests, which only serve to keep the American people in the dark about what is actually transpiring. The exact opposite of transparency.

Please share this article to wake people up to the fact that their news is scripted by powerful entities as a means of influencing people’s perceptions!

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

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By Dan Engelke

Source: Who.What.Why.

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 Russian 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

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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.

 

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