Hacker Leaks Secret DNC Master Files on Hillary Clinton & Foundation

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Reid Mukai

Long before Clinton declared candidacy, the DNC researched her “vulnerabilities”—including speaking fees, private jets, and high-rolling Clinton Foundation donors

By Nika Knight

The anonymous hacker calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 released a second trove of internal documents from Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers on Tuesday, including a hefty 113-page file titled “Hillary Clinton Master Doc” that includes research the party performed on behalf of Clinton’s candidacy—months before she declared an intention to run.

The documents reveal that the DNC was particularly worried about Clinton’s speaking fees, her book advance, and her somewhat exacting luxury travel requirements for appearances.

As the Daily Beast summarized:

Several documents leaked […] show that DNC researchers, whose annotated notes can still be seen in the electronic files, looked for the tiniest potential infraction or questionable item in Clinton’s travel expenses, for instance, asking why one trip from New York to Washington, D.C., aboard a Bank of America jet cost just $45.75, an amount that a researcher called “weirdly low.”

A whole section in the “Master Doc” is devoted to questions and criticism about the money Clinton made from her book advance, book tour, and her public speeches, which generally ran around $250,000 per appearance and required the host to provide first-class travel and accommodations. In Clinton’s defense, the DNC cites articles stressing that fees went to the Clinton Foundation, and characterizing the work that the former secretary did in her private life not as an attempt to enrich herself, but to benefit her and her husband’s charitable work.

Also in the dossier were documents gathered by the DNC related to Clinton’s sky-high speaking fees, including an email from her booking agency that contradicts Clinton’s defense that she merely accepted “what they offered” when she was paid over $200,000 per speech—a claim that reporters have previously critiqued.

As journalist Shaun King observed on Twitter:

[tweet https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/745444019556081664 ]

The Smoking Gun notes the other amenities Clinton required in her speaking contracts:

In addition to a “standard” $225,000 fee, Clinton required a “chartered roundtrip private jet” that needed to be a Gulfstream 450 or a larger aircraft. Depending on its outfitting, the Gulfstream jet, which costs upwards of $40 million, can seat 19 passengers and “sleeps up to six.” Clinton’s contract also stipulated that speech hosts had to pay for separate first class or business airfare for three of her aides.

As for lodging, Clinton required “a presidential suite” and up to “three (3) adjoining or contiguous rooms for her travel aides” and up to two extra rooms for advance staff. The host was also responsible for the Clinton travel party’s ground transportation, meals, and “phone charges/cell phones.”

Additionally, the host also had to pay “a flat fee of $1000” for a stenographer to create “an immediate transcript of Secretary Clinton’s remarks.” The contract adds, however, “We will be unable to share a copy of the transcript following the event.”

Moreover, the DNC appeared particularly worried about the “vulnerabilities” of the Clinton Foundation, such as its acceptance of million-dollar plus donations from private corporations and foreign governments, its veiled finances, and its record in Haiti.

One file (pdf) titled “Clinton Foundation Donors $25K+” documents the high-rolling donors to the Clinton Foundation, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (in the $10-$25 million column), the Saudi Arabian construction magnate Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi ($5-$10 million), Barclays Capital ($1-$5 million), ExxonMobil ($1-$5 million), and Chevron ($500,000-$1 million), among many other private corporations—including healthcare, oil and gas, and media giants—and foreign governments.

In a master file called “Clinton Foundation Master Doc,” DNC researchers appear to have gathered reporting spanning years on the “vulnerabilities” of the Clinton Foundation’s record and finances, revealing a particular point of anxiety for the party:

The documents, most of which appear to be dated from the spring of 2015, reveal a party entirely focused on propping up its establishment candidate, critics contend, while failing to support or even predict the success of outsider candidate Bernie Sanders.

Indeed, much of the “opposition research” on other Democratic candidates focused on Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and even Vice President Joe Biden, who never declared an intention to run.

Some argue that these leaks lend more weight to accusations that the primary was “rigged” in favor of the former secretary of state.

And whoever Guccifer 2.0 may be, they appear to be taking a more active role in the leaks—saying they’re now willing to speak to the press via Twitter—supporting whistleblower Edward Snowden’s statement that such hacktivists are “now demonstrating intent—and capability—to influence elections.”

This Is Our Neoliberal Nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Why the Market and the Wealthy Win Every Time

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

The rage driving our politics stems from cruelty of capitalism. So why do we vote for those who worship the market?

By Anis Shivani

Source: AlterNet

Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.

People throw the term around loosely, as they do with “fascism,” with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants, or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton. We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined!

Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?

Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.

I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

From the early 1930s, when the Great Depression threatened the classical liberal consensus (the idea that markets were self-regulating, and the state should play no more than a night-watchman role), until the early 1970s, when global instability including currency chaos unraveled it, the democratic world lived under the Keynesian paradigm: markets were understood to be inherently unstable, and the interventionist hand of government, in the form of countercyclical policy, was necessary to make capitalism work, otherwise the economy had a tendency to get out of whack and crash.

It’s an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the neoliberal revolution, with Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy, or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable.

It should be said that neoliberalism thrives on prompting crisis after crisis, and has proven more adept than previous ideologies at exploiting these crises to its benefit, which then makes the situation worse, so that each succeeding crisis only erodes the power of the working class and makes the wealthy wealthier. There is a certain self-fulfilling aura to neoliberalism, couched in the jargon of economic orthodoxy, that has remained immune from political criticism, because of the dogma that was perpetuated—by Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes—that There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on—one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s—better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim.

It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists—comfortably established in the academy—likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans, but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the market capitalization of the self.

George W. Bush’s useful function was to introduce necessary crisis into a system that had grown too stable for its own good; he injected desirable panic, which served as fuel to the fire of the neoliberal revolution. Trump is an apostate—at least until now—in desiring chaos on terms that do not sound neoliberal, which is unacceptable; hence Jeb Bush’s characterization of him as the “candidate of chaos.” Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control.

To go back to origins, the Great Depression only ended conclusively with the onset of the second world war, after which Keynesianism had the upper hand for thirty-five years. But just as the global institutions of Keynesianism, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, were being founded at the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods in 1944, the founders of the neoliberal revolution, namely Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others were forming the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) at the eponymous Swiss resort in 1947, creating the ideology which eventually defeated Keynesianism and gained the upper hand during the 1970s.

So what exactly is neoliberalism, and how is it different from classical liberalism, whose final manifestation came under Keynesianism?

Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.

When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts—in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance—that we have to abide by “the rule of law,” this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.

One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything—everything—is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange—which isnot, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.

Neoliberalism is often described—and this creates a lot of confusion—as “market fundamentalism,” and while this may be true for neoliberal’s self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies.

The neoliberal state—actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum—is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.

There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.

Of course the word hasn’t gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism—i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self—has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.

I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe—unlike Hillary Clinton—that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton’s impending “victory” (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism, as the force that couldn’t be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders’s. Although Sanders doesn’t specify “neoliberalism” as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes it.

Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort with the logic of the market is as pervasive as the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement’s loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred “politically incorrect” fight with all others: they want to be “winners,” even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn’t acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace.

In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercialso overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.

This is the dark side of neoliberalism’s ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics neoliberalism promotes.

And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person should be able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities, all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).

The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable. The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary “crime bill” pushed by the Clintons, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market.

I believe that the generation of people—in their forties or older—supporting Hillary have already internalized neoliberal subjectivity, which they like to frame as realism or pragmatism, refusing for instance to accept that free college or health care are even theoretical possibilities. After all, they have maintained a measure of success in the past three or four decades after conceptualizing themselves as marketplace agents. Just as the Tea Party supporters found it intolerable that government should help irresponsible homeowners by bailing them out of unsustainable debt, the Clinton supporters hold essentially the same set of beliefs toward those who dare to think of themselves outside the discipline of the market.

I spoke of the myth of the market, as something that has no existence in reality, because none of the elements that would have to exist for a market to work are actually in place; this is even more true for neoliberalism than it was for the self-conscious annihilation of the market by communism, because at least in that system the market, surreptitiously, as in various Eastern European countries, kept making an appearance. But when the market takes neoliberal shape, i.e., the classical conceptions of the buyer and seller as free agents are gone, then radical inequality is the natural outcome. And inequality in the last four decades, as statistics for the U.S. and everywhere neoliberalism has made inroads prove beyond a doubt, has exploded, thereby invalidating neoliberalism’s greatest claim to legitimacy, that it brings about a general increase in welfare. So neoliberalism, to the extent that the inequality discourse has made itself manifest recently, must insist all the more vocally on forms of social recognition, what Clinton, for example, likes to call the “fall of barriers.”

Neoliberalism likes to focus on public debt—in the Clinton years debt reduction became a mania, though George W. Bush promptly spent all the accumulated surpluses on tax cuts for the wealthy and on wars of choice—rather than inequality, because the only way to address inequality is through a different understanding of public debt; inequality can only be addressed through higher taxation, which has by now been excluded from the realm of acceptable discourse—except when Sanders, Trump, or Jeremy Corbyn in England go off script.

So to recapitulate neoliberalism’s comprehensive success, let us note that we have gone from a liberal, Keynesian, welfare state to a neoliberal, market-compliant, disciplinary state.

Neoliberalism expects—and education at every level has been redesigned to promote this—that economic decision-making will be applied to all areas of life (parenthood, intimacy, sexuality, and identity in any of its forms), and that those who do not do so will be subject to discipline. Everyone must invest in their own future, and not pose a burden to the state or anyone else, otherwise they will be refused recognition as human beings.

This supposed economic “rationality” (though it is the greatest form of irrationality) applies to civil society as much as the state, so that none of the ideals of classical liberalism, or previous ideologies rooted in humanism, are valid any longer, the only value is the iteration of the market (as myth, not reality); in other words, neoliberalism, unlike the elevation of the individual in classical liberalism or the state in fascism or the collectivity in communism, has erected something, the market, that has no real existence, as the only god to serve! And it is just like a god, with an ethereal, unchallengeable, irrefutable, ubiquitous presence. Whatever in state policy does not serve market-conformity is to be banned and banished from memory (the secular scriptures are to be rewritten), which explains neoliberalism’s radical narrowing of public discourse, including the severance of identity politics from any class foundation.

Neoliberalism will continue to perpetuate reduced opportunity, because one of its characteristics—as in any system that wants to thrive on the world stage—is to constantly refine the field upon which the human subject can operate.

As such, those displaced workers who have suffered the most from the erosion of the old industries in the former manufacturing centers of the world are not even factors to contend with, they are invisible and cannot be part of the policy equation. To the extent that their actual presence is reckoned with, the economy can be said to have crashed; but the problem doesn’t arise because of the management of unemployment or underemployment statistics, unlike a housing crash which is palpable and cannot escape statistical definition.

The danger for neoliberalism—as is clear from the support of millions of displaced human beings for Trump—is that with each crisis neoliberalism sheds more workers, makes individuals and firms more “disciplined,” narrows the scope of opportunity even further. At times, the disciplining of the non-neoliberal other—as with the killing of Michael Brown or Eric Garner—explodes to surface consciousness in an unsavory way, so an expert manager like Clinton or Obama is required to tamp down the emotions of such unruly entities as Black Lives Matter which arise in response. If climate change, according to Clinton and her cohort, can and should have market solutions, then surely racial disparity, or police violence, should also have market solutions and no others; it is here that neoliberal multiculturalism, operating in the academy, is so insidious, because at the elite level it functions to validate market discourse, it does not step outside it.

The present breakdown of both major political parties can be explained by the frustration that has built up in the body politic over the past decade, because after the crash there was no sustained intellectual movement to question the myth of the market. The substitution of economic justice with identity politics is something Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and now Bernie Sanders have contested in a humane manner, while the same process is at work, admittedly in an inhumane way, in the Trump phenomenon.

Thus, also, Hillary Clinton’s animus against free college education; that form of expansion of opportunity, which was a reality from the 1950s to the 1980s, cannot be allowed to return, human beings are supposed to invest in their own future earnings potential, they are not entitled to a transcendent experience without barriers manifesting in discipline and self-correction. Education, like everything else, including one’s own health, becomes an expensive consumer good, not a right, no longer an experience that might lead to a consciousness beyond the market but something that should be fully encapsulated by the market. If one is a capable market player, education as we have classically understood it becomes redundant.

Unlike the interregnum between 1945-1973, the rising tide—no matter the befuddlements Arthur Laffer and his fellow Reaganite ideologues proffered—does not lift all boats today, it is outside the logic of neoliberalism that it do so, so the idea of reforming neoliberalism, or what is often called “globalization with a human face,” is a rhetorical distraction. All of the policy innovations—interpreted as “socialism” by the Tea Partiers—offered by Barack Obama fall within the purview of neoliberalism, above all the Affordable Care Act, whose genesis was hatched in neoliberal think tanks decades ago.

It is important to note that neoliberal economic restructuring necessarily means social restructuring, i.e., a movement toward disciplinarity and away from liberalism; the disciplinarity can take a Bushian, Clintonian, or Trumpian form, but these are manifestations of the same tendency.

When wage growth is decoupled from economic growth (as it has been since Friedman and others inaugurated the revolution in the early 1970s), this means that the human subject is ripe for discipline. Furthermore, wage fairness cannot be rationally discussed (hence the obfuscation surrounding the $15 minimum wage orchestrated by Clinton and others) because the concept of the market has been disembedded from society; the market as abstraction, not a concrete reality, makes any notion of reform or restructuring impossible. Like the minimum wage, something like free child care also remains outside the bounds of discourse, because public policy cannot accommodate discussions that do not take the self-regulating market as unassailable myth.

What neoliberalism can accommodate is relentless tax cuts (Trump has already offered his huge tax cut plan, as Bush did as his first order of business), which only exacerbate the problem, leading to increasing concentrations of wealth. It has to be said, though, that Ted Cruz more comfortably fit the neoliberal paradigm, with his familiar calls for lower taxes along with reduced regulation and further limits on social welfare, whereas Trump shows, for now, some elements of apostasy. If neoliberalism were to get a Cruz, it would have no problem working with him, or rather, Cruz would have had no problem executing neoliberalism, beyond the surface dissimilarities from Hillary Clinton.

As Sanders has consistently noted, economic inequality leads to political inequality, which means that democracy, after a certain point, becomes only theoretical (viz. Citizens United and the electoral influence of such powerful entities as the Koch brothers). Both processes—economic inequality and political inequality—have accelerated after each downturn in the forty-five-year history of neoliberalism, therefore a downturn is always exciting, and even preordained, for a Bush, a Trump, or a Clinton. Again, economic inequality and political polarity (polarity is simply a manifestation of democracy having become dysfunctional) strongly correlate, and both have come to a head in this election.

Neoliberalism’s task, from this point on, is to mask and manage the increasing inequalities that are likely to befall humanity, especially as the planet reaches a crisis point in its health. In a way, George W. Bush threw a wrench—he was a perverted Keynesian in a way, believing in war to prime the pump, or inflating unsustainable bubbles, or spending exorbitantly on grandiose gestures—into the process of neoliberal globalization that was going very smoothly indeed under Bill Clinton and would likely have flourished under Al Gore as well. With Hillary Clinton, the movement will be toward further privatization of social welfare, “reforming” it along market principles, as has been true of every neoliberal avatar, whether it was Bill Clinton’s incentives to work in the performance management makeover of welfare, George Bush’s proposed private social security accounts, Mitt Romney’s proposed private health care accounts, or the school vouchers that tempt all of them from time to time.

What remains to be seen is the extent to which the millennial generation might be capable of thinking outside the neoliberal paradigm, i.e., they don’t just want more of what neoliberal promises to give them yet fails to deliver, but want things that neoliberalism does not or cannot promise. On this rests the near-term future of the neoliberal project.

Beyond Sanders himself, the key question is the ability of the millennial generation to conceive of themselves outside the neoliberal subjectivity they have been pushed to internalize. They have been encouraged to think of themselves as capital producers, turning their intellectuality into social media popularity for the benefit of capital, in the service of the same abstract market that has no place, no role, no definition beyond the fallen liberal calculus. Does the millennial generation believe, even about its most intimate core, that everything has been privatized?

I am not necessarily making a pessimistic prediction. I am merely outlining the strength of an opponent that has refused to be named for forty-five years, although it has been the ruling ideology that long! In defining neoliberalism, I have sought to distance myself from the distraction of personalities, and tried to expose the dark side of our politics which we can only see when we name and understand the ideology as such. We are up against a system that is so strong that it has survived, for the most part, the last crash, as citizens couldn’t get their heads around the idea of nationalizing banks or health care.

It is existentially imperative to ponder what happens beyond Sanders, because neoliberalism has its end-game in sight, letting inequality continue to escalate past the crash point (meaning the point where the economy works for most people), past any tolerable degradation of the planet (which is being reconceptualized in the shape of the market).

What, indeed, does happen beyond Sanders, because as we have seen Hillary Clinton is one of the founders of neoliberal globalization, one of its central historical figures (having accelerated the warehousing of the poor, the attack on trade unions, and the end of welfare and of regulatory prowess), while Trump is an authoritarian figure whose conceptions of the state and of human beings within the state are inconsistent with the surface frictionlessness neoliberalism desires? To go back to Hillary Clinton’s opening campaign commercial, to what extent will Americans continue to believe that the self must be entrepreneurially leveraged toward maximum market gains, molded into mobile human capital ever ready to serve the highest bidder?

As to whether a non-neoliberal globalization is possible and what that might look like on the international stage after a quarter-century of Clinton, Bush, and Obama—which is essentially the frustration Trump is tapping into—I’ll take that up in a follow-up essay, which will further clarify the differences between Sanders versus Clinton, and Trump versus Clinton.

I would suggest that it is not that globalization causes or has caused neoliberalism, but that neoliberalism has pushed a certain form of globalization that suits its interests. This is a crucial distinction, on which everything else hinges. The neoliberal market doesn’t actually exist; at the moment it is pure abstraction; what is actually filling up economic and political space can only be discussed when we step away from this abstraction, as Sanders has so ably done, and as the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements tentatively set in motion.

Anis Shivani is the author of several books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including, most recently, My Tranquil War and Other Poems. His novel Karachi Raj (HarperCollins/Fourth Estate) was released this summer. His next book is the poetry collection Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish, out in October.

Sanders Supporters Vindicated: Proof DNC Used Media to Rig Election for Hillary

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Claire Bernish

(AntiMedia)

While Bernie Sanders’ supporters and independent media outlets have exhaustively pointed out that corporate media’s fatuous prattling over Hillary Clinton likely tipped the elections in her favor, we now have solid proof — leaked emails show the DNC colluded with mainstream outlets to heavily favor Clinton.

“Our goals in the coming months will be to frame the Republican field and the eventual nominee early and to provide a contrast between the GOP field and HRC,” reads an email dated May 26, 2015, referencing the former secretary of state by her initials, posted by “Guccifer 2.0” — after the Romanian hacker who allegedly accessed Clinton’s private email server multiple times.

One of the strategies listed for “positioning and public messaging” states, “Use specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.”

https://twitter.com/MatthewKick/status/743418063937220608

As the mainstream largely directed attention to the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s strategy to oppose Donald Trump, this collusion to steer the narrative in Hillary’s favor appears to have gone unnoticed, as US Uncut reported. But this series of leaked emails show a meticulously plotted coordination between DNC narratives touting Clinton, rather than Sanders, as if she had been the presumptive nominee from the outset — precisely as activists and fair elections advocates had suspected.

Under the heading “Tactics,” the document states, “Working with the DNC and allied groups, we will use several different methods to land these attacks” — including, under the subheading, “Reporter Outreach”:

“Working through the DNC and others, we should use background briefings, prep with reporters for interviews with GOP candidates, off-the-record conversations and oppo pitches to help pitch stories with no fingerprints and utilize reporters to drive a message.” And under “Bracketing Events,” the email states: “Both the DNC and outside groups are looking to do events and press surrounding Republican events to insert our messaging into their press and to force them to answer questions around key issues.”

https://twitter.com/WNC4Bernie/status/743420416295763968

Most revealing in this particular document is its conclusion, which reads, in part, “Our goal is to use this conversation to answer the questions who do we want to run against and how best to leverage other candidates to maneuver them into the right place.”

Guccifer 2.0 also leaked a two-page list titled “HRC election plans,” which, as US Uncut noted, includes a talking point that later appeared word for word in Clinton’s video announcement of her bid to run for president:

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times but the deck is still stacked for those at the top.”

Not only does this show a carefully-orchestrated spoonfeeding of vapid Clinton-isms to the ostensibly unsuspecting public, the irony of the former First Lady pontificating on ‘stacked decks’ for the elite bears a startling degree of hypocrisy in this context.

Prior to the release of these hacked documents, an analysis of election coverage by Neal Gabler, published in Truthout, evidenced startling favoritism for Clinton by the mainstream media throughout the 2016 election season thus far. While not entirely overt, the media’s fondness for Hillary often comprised propagandic semantic gymnastics to avoid showing Sanders in a rosy light.

Even as Sanders experienced growing success, the media downplayed its extent through comparisons with Trump — characterizing the two as ‘outsider’ candidates — thus creating a psychological parallel between the Vermont senator’s popularity and the demagoguery of the contentious billionaire.

Eventually, as Sanders continued to experience success despite a veritable media blackout, a few mainstream outlets resorted to outright hostility to achieve a pro-Clinton message. As Anti-Media previously reported, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald published a scathing hit piece on not only Sanders, but his supporters, titled “Get Control, Senator Sanders, or Get Out.”

“So, Senator Sanders,” Eichenwald patronizingly penned, “either get control of what is becoming your increasingly unhinged cult, or get out of the race.”

To say the corporate, mainstream media has been complicit in a coordinated effort to grant Hillary the nomination would be an egregious understatement of reality. Though irate voters and journalists with actual integrity across the country immediately called out the Associated Press’ premature announcement Clinton had won the nomination as farce, it’s clear — particularly with these leaked emails — that had been the end game from the outset.

US Uncut reported neither the DNC nor the Clinton campaign returned request for comment.

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ even rebuffed claims Sanders had not received fair treatment in the press during an April interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah:

“You know, as powerful as that makes me feel, I’m not doing a very good job of rigging the outcome, or … blocking anyone from being able to get their message out.”

Evidence, however, would beg to differ.

Leaked list of Clinton Donors (h/t to Zero Hedge):

CIA: The Corrupt and Ignorant Agency

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

CIA-corruption-300x227

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column, «I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment… and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere».

During a presidential election year, two of the three remaining major candidates – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have given no indication that they will heed the words of President Truman. For example, Trump has indicated he will give the CIA authority to torture that even the CIA considers illegal.

As for Mrs Clinton, her zeal in supporting the violent overthrow and assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 only gives added impetus to the out-of-control players inside the CIA to commit similar actions in a Clinton administration. Only Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders appears to channel the beliefs of Truman when it comes to reining in the CIA.

It is not known whether Trump, who has made favorable noises to interventionist neo-conservatives within the Republican Party, will stand by his comments that the war in Libya was a mistake. But Trump was one of the cheerleaders urging US intervention in 2011. He said, «Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around. We have soldiers all over the Middle East and not bringing them to stop this horrible carnage… We don’t want to get involved and you’re going to end up with something like you’ve never seen before».

Trump, Mrs Clinton, and Obama were wrong about Libya and Gaddafi on all counts. Gaddafi was not killing «thousands of people». That was being done by the jihadist rebels supported by the CIA. The late US ambassador/weapons smuggler in Libya, Christopher Stevens, who was ironically killed by the very same jihadists with whom he was brokering deals to ship Libyan weapons to Syria, ensured that the latest NATO weaponry ended up in radical Islamist hands in Libya. It was these weapons that killed «thousands of people» – Libyan and African guest workers and their families – in a country wracked by a civil war manufactured by Mrs Clinton and CIA director General David Petraeus.

The CIA, in particular, had for decades, fantasized about overthrowing Gaddafi. Never did this most incompetent of US government agencies contemplate the effects of Gaddafi’s ouster: the spread of Saudi-financed jihadist terrorism across the Sahel region of Africa. The CIA’s fanciful notions that Gaddafi’s days were numbered were highlighted in a formerly Secret CIA report titled, «Libya: Will the Revolution Outlast Gaddafi?» Issued in June 1988, the report was obviously intended to bolster those within the Reagan administration who argued for a US military attack on Libya by taking advantage of what the CIA perceived was a weakened Gaddafi government at the end of the 1980s. The CIA, as usual, was extremely off-base in its assessment of Gaddafi’s staying power.

The CIA report states: «Gaddafi’s revolution has largely run its course, and he must rely on coercion to perpetuate his revolutionary vision». In fact, Libyans had the highest standard of living on the African continent with oil revenues being shared with the entire population. The CIA’s erroneous assessment of Libya in 1988 continued: «Just as Libya in 1969 was ripe for a change to a more nationalistic and activist regime, we believe it now ripe for a return to normality». The call for «regime change» by the CIA in 1988 was, in fact, a call for the return to the status quo ante of 1968: a Libya governed by a corrupt oligarchy led by a feeble monarch. Today, a motley crew of United Nations-selected Libyan gangsters governs the country as a «paper tiger» entity called the «Government of National Accord». Meanwhile, jihadists of Ansar al-Sharia govern Benghazi while the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) governs Sirte, Derna, and a swath of territory southeast of Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

Just as the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party and military infrastructures in Iraq following the US invasion and occupation led to the complete collapse of the Iraqi nation-state, the destruction of the four key institutions that united Libya under Gaddafi led to «failed state» status for the country. The CIA cited these key institutions in its 1988 report but no effort was made to preserve them after Gaddafi’s assassination by CIA-supported forces.

The four key institutions in Libya were, according to the CIA, the tribally-based security battalions, the regular Armed Forces, the Military Intelligence service, and the revolutionary committees. These institutions were wiped out in order that the CIA’s wish in 1988 could be realized: that Libya would return to the «normality» of 1968: government by a restored monarchy led by a pretender to the al-Senussi family’s throne once occupied by King Idris I. However, Libya became a polyglot of warring tribes and jihadists, many of the latter imported from conflict zones abroad.

Whether governed by a restored monarchy or a military-dominated successor regime, the CIA saw a post-Gaddafi government desiring «a more constructive relationship with the United States and the West». The CIA added, «Libyan successors probably would turn first to Western Europe for better economic relations and some arms. They also would be likely to seek greater US participation in the Libyan economy». However, after Gaddafi agreed to abandon his so-called «weapons of mass destruction» chemical and nuclear programs, the United States and Western Europe had a more constructive relationship with Libya and the country was wide open for Western economic investment. After Mrs Clinton, Petraeus, Obama, Britain’s David Cameron, and other Western leaders had their way with Libya, it is now a wasteland. The infrastructures of irrigation, road and air transport, social welfare, public education, health care, and employment for African guest workers lie in ruins. The clearly demented Mrs Clinton’s private e-mails show that she and her cabal of interventionists were clearly overjoyed by the misery that befell Libya and its people. When she was informed of Gaddafi’s brutal assassination, one that involved his sodomization, Clinton uttered the preamble to what may be called the «Hillary Doctrine» – «We came, we saw, he died!» She followed her declaration with her signature hideous cackling laughter.

The 1988 CIA report does not seem to care much for Gaddafi’s style of governance through some 2000 local «people’s congresses», described by the CIA as «a hybrid of a New England town meeting and a Bedouin tribal gathering». This demonstration of the «people’s will» in the Libyan «Jamahiriya» was anathema to the CIA’s goals for Libya, even Libya’s emulation of New England-style direct democracy.

A system of direct democracy in an Arab Muslim nation defied the CIA’s wish for the region, which was and remains an alliance of pro-US theocratic states governed by corrupt elites that wield power through US-equipped armed forces. The CIA report on Libya admits that initially, Gaddafi’s system of direct democracy and the exercising of the people’s will «actually worked». Only in the jaundiced view of the United States was such a system of government a threat, not only to US interests and goals, but to those of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Morocco, and other corrupt and theocratic US client states in the region.

The Electoral Farce: an Interview with John Stauber

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Mohsen Abdelmoumen/John Stauber

Source: Algérie Résistance

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: In your book coauthored with Sheldon Rampton “Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry”, you make a statement without concession on lobbying and democracy. In your opinion, can we evoke a democracy with a hegemony of lobbies? Do you not think that it is rather about a plutocracy?

John Stauber: That book, my first of six for the Center for Media and Democracy, is my tour de force. It exposes how modern propaganda is conducted in the United States by public relations (PR) professionals whose job is to protect the powerful and their corporate wealth from democracy.

The USA is indeed an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and the situation is much worse today than when I wrote my book in 1995. The super-rich whose interests lie with Wall Street, the global corporations, and what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, own and control both the Democrat and the Republican parties and their candidates. This shared monopoly prevents any anti-oligarchy party from emerging effectively to compete, under their rigged laws at the state level for establishing and funding national political parties.

The richest dump billions into both major Parties, their candidates and the election process, so if you are not a millionaire yourself or clearly supporting the policies of the wealthy, you have very little chance of success or of even being heard politically in the US. The corporate media is the recipient of the lions share of this money which they get for selling the TV ads that the candidates and the special interest groups run; they are not interested in deeply criticizing or reforming a lucrative process that fills their own corporate coffers. It’s a hell of a system, a total fraud on democracy, painted up to look like democracy.

In your opinion, is not the American presidential election a joke, when we know that the favourite candidate from the beginning is supported by Wall Street, Neocons, industrialists, AIPAC, etc.?

Indeed the system that chooses and elects the American president is a farce, bought and paid for by the wealthy and the interests you mention. This is why even in an election year as controversial as this one, most Americans will not vote. The majority of Americans have lost faith in what has become a charade that betrays their interests. The rise of both progressive populism via Bernie Sanders, and a nativist fascism via Trump and his takeover of the Republicans, screams loudly about just how foul and corrupt and simply weird the USA’s political system has become. There is a great, angry frustration with the political establishment, and many white voters especially are willing to cast a nihilistic vote for a racist, misogynist, narcissist who inherited his wealth and gained notoriety as a reality TV star.

Does not the election to the presidency of a militarist as Hillary Clinton constitute a threat to the world?

The election of either Clinton or Trump threatens the world simply because of the dominance of the American empire and their commitment to it. Hillary is a proven militarist, which is why so many of the GOP neocons, who led what I call the Weapons of Mass Deception campaign that lied America into attacking Iraq, are choosing her over Trump. They know she will fully fund and expand the American empire at all costs to the American taxpayers and people of the world who suffer under America’s militarism. Hillary played an important role in the Iraq propaganda campaign led by Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Before naming her Secretary of State, Obama made it clear he would not investigate or hold anyone responsible for that grand and worsening bipartisan disaster.

Those who wrote the scenario of this presidential election are they not inspired by the French election of 2002, with Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, both coming from the same system, where we saw the crushing victory of Chirac? Are we going to witness Clinton’s same landslide victory against Trump?

I don’t think that the nationalists who control the USA’s two party oligarchy are looking abroad for inspiration. They are believers in American exceptionalism and empire, and write their own scripts as they go along, as the neocons did with their Project for the New American Century. The rise of Trump within the Republican Party is a shocking phenomenon, because he defeated 15 others and the entire GOP establishment to seize the party for himself and his rabid reactionary grassroots voters. No one in either party or the news media gave Trump any chance to win the nomination, but he did, while breaking about every rule thought to exist in American politics except one – have lots of money. It is very possible that the smug attitude of the Democrats and the corporate media will backfire and that Clinton, who like Trump is disliked by a majority of voters, will lose to him. It is certainly possible this year, when Trump has already accomplished the impossible.

Won’t Clinton’s victory in the presidential election be a victory of the oligarchy, the coronation of the plutocracy by democratic tools?

The oligarchy is already crowned, already firmly in control. If Trump wins, they will begrudgingly accommodate one of their own class, however ignorant, narcissistic and offensive they find him. But much of the Republican oligarchy, such as the neocons, the Koch brothers and the Bush family, have indicated they prefer Hillary. In essence, the oligarchy wins no matter which party holds office, because the super rich own both parties. That is the brilliance of the bogus two-party system, it is really one oligarchy party with two wings, and both the Democrat and Republican wings support the military empire and the expansion of corporate power.

Doesn’t Bernie Sanders serve just as a kind of “trial horse” for Hillary Clinton?

I have said since he announced as a Democrat that this is a movie we have seen many times before, where a Jesse Jackson, or a Jerry Brown, or a Howard Dean, excite the liberal base, borrow the rhetoric of revolutionary change, create a populist left momentum, and then capitulate to embrace the winning mainstream Democrat at their convention, appealing to followers to do the same. Perhaps if Bernie Sanders had understood a year ago the level of excitement and support he would generate, he would have done things differently. But ultimately he will prove a shepherd for the Democrats, a pied piper, rounding up the lost leftist sheep, and it should be especially easy this year with Trump as the Republican nominee opposed by everyone from him to the Kochs to the neocons to the Bush family. But yes, soon the Feel The Bern movement will morph into the anti-fascist Anybody But Trump coalition.

We are witnessing a very poor debate whose only stake seems to be the replacement of a black president by a woman. Is this not one more manipulation?

You are rather certain that Hillary will follow Obama, and while that is a good bet, the bizarre, unprecedented rise of Donald Trump might surprise everyone and land him in the White House. Obama succeeded because he was anti-Bush and he was not in the Senate when Clinton cast her damaging vote to help Bush attack Iraq. That gave him his greatest electoral edge, he could campaign as having been against the war on Iraq. The fact that he was African American inspired many who were, as I was, quite happy to see that someone other than a rich white man could actually be elected president. However, Obama has proved to be a massive fraud and a disappointment. Even before his taking the oath of office, he made it clear that there would be no investigation of the propaganda and lies that led America to attack Iraq. Biden, Kerry and Clinton, key players in his Administration, helped lead America into war. Blame the neocons for it, but blame those Democrats too.

Hillary will certainly parlay being the first woman president into millions of votes, and she will be running against a misogynist. But again, most American don’t even vote, and those that do are voting against the candidate they dislike most. So all bets are off at this early stage as to whether a Black president will now give way to America’s first female president, or whether Trump will be America’s first Billionaire TV Star president.

As a writer and progressive journalist, what is the reason, in your opinion, for the powerlessness of the progressive movement in the US and in the world?

Here in the United States the progressive movement has never been able to see that the Democratic Party is the enemy and the grand co-opter and destroyer of fundamental change. Bernie Sanders says he is fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party, but it has no soul, it sold out to the super rich long ago. Bill and Hillary Clinton put the final nail into its remnant of progressivism when in the 1980s they and their pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council made their Party a model of Republicanism, opening it to corporate donations, serving corporate interests blatantly, and making it almost impossible for a candidate like Sanders to beat a rigged system and win the Democratic nomination.

I wrote a piece for CounterPunch in March, 2013, explaining how after the failure of Al Gore in 2000, a group of super rich Democrats called the Democracy Alliance arose to fund the sort of liberal front groups, lobbies and think tanks that the Republicans had developed over the previous two decades. Hillary supporter George Soros and others in the DA, including some big unions, poured money into these organizations, and they collaborated with liberal lobbyists in DC as well as with the new « netroots » online force for the Democrats, MoveOn. MoveOn played a crucial role in transforming the anti-war movement that arose during the Bush years into a movement to elect Democrats in 2006 – 2008, completely co-opting that energy and leaving the US peace movement impotent and irrelevant today.

The professional progressive movement is now wholly owned by the liberal oligarchs; its leaders are bright, young and well rewarded, and there is absolutely no real desire to do anything but co-opt grassroots progressives into choosing Democrats over Republicans every two years. The Feel The Bern movement shows that if Bernie Sanders had the courage to break with the Democrats and form a new party or run as a Green, 2016 is a rare year when he could have great success. But instead he and the rest of these professional progressives stay within the Democratic Party, thinking that one day they will control it. It’s a delusion and a failure of vision, but their own rewards and salaries are nice, and they live within their own echo chamber of liberal propaganda from The Nation to The New York Times that reinforces their failure to confront the liberal oligarchy in the name of being realistic.

You do not call for violent revolution. Do you think that it is possible to defeat the big capital, the Neocons, the military-industrial complex, with a peaceful revolution?

Nothing would please the US establishment more, or lead more quickly to a full police state supported by a majority of Americans, than some sort of left wing political violence. We saw in the 1960s and 1970s how the FBI under Nixon and Hoover encouraged violent protests, planted provocateurs, infiltrated the anti-war, Black Power and other movements with thousands of paid FBI informers, and destroyed it. The American Left never recovered and what was called the New Left died. The American people are easily frightened and quick to give up liberties if it appears that armed extremists are threatening their safety. Anyone advocating violent revolution for the United States is a lunatic or worse.

Your writings call for an awakening against lobbies and other capitalist and imperialist domination forces and we notice a derision and despair that call for a better world where all hopes are allowed. How do you explain this Gramscian dialectic?

I am not a hopeful person, I do not believe that revolution is likely, nor that a revolution would necessarily produce and sustain something better. Humanity is deeply flawed, self-destructive, and seems doomed in this century by greed to poison itself and destroy the Earth’s biosphere with its love of corporate consumerism and the resulting toxins and wastes. People everywhere show their willingness to follow nationalist or religious leaders into horrific wars with catastrophic results. The likelihood of nuclear war stays high; it’s a large miracle there has not been a nuclear attack since Nagasaki, but the access to weapons of mass destruction continues to spread. Under Obama, the US and NATO are pursuing a New Cold War against Russia and China that is insanely dangerous.

Can typical people organize together around the world from the ground up to create and sustain a revolutionary society that is just, democratic and peaceful, given the control that corporate capitalism has over our lives and minds and governments? We are completely enveloped by the corporate propaganda system from the moment of our birth on, and it allows the oligarchy to control our minds and lives from cradle to grave, in seamless invisible fashion, via marketing, advertising and public relations, reinforced by the news media. Few are able to admit and see this, which is why I organized PRWatch and CMD in 1993 and co-authored my six books.

The word “lie” often comes up in your writing. Do you think that the United States will survive to their lies, such as the war in Iraq?

The Cold War journalist Izzy Stone said, “All governments are run by liars, nothing they say should be believed.” This is also true of corporate government, the few hundred global companies that dominate the world’s economy and dictate to and through the world’s governments. The United States is very adept at failing to admit, much less confront, its lies. The myth of American Exceptionalism is embraced and promoted by the bipartisan oligarchy and the media, and so we see that there is no real examination of the horrendous crimes and blunders of the government, from the war of genocide waged on Vietnam, to the illegal and devastating attack on Iraq that has led to ISIS, to the massive economic failure of 2008 where no one was held accountable and the fundamental problems never repaired. So, no, in both the short term and certainly the longer term, these lies and self-deceptions undermine and destroy the fabric of American society. The rise of Trumpism is very much a result of the deceptions that have been foisted on Americans, but it is a reactionary and destructive response, of course, that again is based on this myth of exceptionalism and aims to make America again « great ».

You are the founder of the Center for Media and Democracy. What is the role of this center?

I founded CMD in 1993 to publish my news magazine PRWatch revealing how the business of public relations functions to thwart democracy and maintain the power and control of the rich and their corporations. I also wanted to show how western governments use PR to control their citizens, and how corporate media is an echo chamber for both corporate and government propaganda. I ran CMD until 2009, but then stepped down, feeling that I had taken its mission as far as I could after co-authoring six books through the Center. I am now pursuing more personal interests neglected for all my decades as an activist and author. I am no longer writing books or running an organization, and glad of it. CMD continues under new leadership, but it has become much like other US progressive think tanks, part of the Democratic Party’s liberal echo chamber. It has done some important work since I left in confronting and exposing ALEC, a brilliant rightwing operation that allows corporations to draft and write laws at the state level in the United States. CMD’s web address is www.PRWatch.org.

Placebo Ballots: Stealing California from Bernie Using an old GOP vote-snatching trick

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein

Source: GregPalast.com

Woop! Woop! Alert! Some California poll workers have been told to give “provisional” ballots to all independent voters in Tuesday’s Democratic Party.

That’s wrong. That’s evil. That’s sick and illegal.

Here’s the 411. If you’re registered as an independent voter in California, you have the right to vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary. Just ask for the ballot.

But look out! Reports out of Orange County are that some poll workers have been told to give “No Party Preference” (NPP), that is, an independent voter, a PROVISIONAL ballot, as opposed to a regular ballot.

Do NOT accept a provisional ballot. As one poll worker told me, “They simply don’t get counted.”

Who would benefit from this switcheroo from legal ballot to “provisional” ballot? It’s just a stone cold fact that independent voters favor Senator Bernie Sanders. Among voters who describe themselves as having “no party preference,” Sanders leads Sec. Hillary Clinton by a humongous 40 points—though Hillary is hugely ahead among registered Democrats.

So one way to steal the election is to make sure those independent voters’ ballots end up in the garbage, uncounted.

Two million “Placebo Ballots” not counted

And for our readers in the other 49 states: you can bet that the GOP will be shunting voters to these placebo provisional ballots in November. In the last presidential election, over two MILLION voters, overwhelmingly voters of color, were shifted to these rarely-counted ballots. Two million voters could have justwritten their votes on bubbles. That’s how they steal elections.

No, I’m not promoting Bernie nor my uncle Ernie, nor anyone. I’m promoting democracy. Let’s make sure your vote counts.
What is a “Provisional” ballot? “Provisional” ballots were created by George Bush and Karl Rove as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after they swiped Florida in 2000.

The original idea of provisional balloting was sound: The Congressional Black Caucus was very upset that African-Americans were not able to vote in 2000 in Florida because they were falsely removed from the voter roles for all kinds of cockamamie reasons. So the Black Caucus proposed that, if your name is not on the voter roles, you should still be able to vote provisionally. The state can then check the records and count your vote later.

The Black Caucus won the right to a provisional ballot, but didn’t win the right to have them counted. They rarely are.

Say you are tagged an “inactive” voter, you CANNOT get your provisional ballot counted even if you were wrongly listed as “inactive.” You’ve been removed from the register. So, it’s a Catch-22. You get a provisional ballot because you were wrongly left off the voter roll, but it can’t be counted because, well, you’re not on the voter roll.

And that’s why I call provisional ballots “Placebo” ballots. They let you feel like you voted, but you haven’t. It’s ridiculously easy to challenge a provisional ballot – so in a tight race, it’s just tossed out.

California Reamin’
I am currently reporting from Southern California, and I got a tip from Ashley Beck, a poll worker in conservative Orange County . Listen to her story. She was being trained with other poll workers, and they were given some very strange information.

“I was told that all NPP [independent] voters are to be given provisional ballots. I was bothered by that, because I was always told that NPP voters in California can vote for Democrats and their vote would be counted. I was a little worried that he was telling all 18 of us poll workers to give all NPP voters provisional ballots. We all know what happens most of the time with provisional ballots. They are not being counted.”

Provisionally Black

Who gets these placebo ballots?

I was on a book tour in Palm Springs—with an audience of about 200. I asked, “Has anyone here ever gotten a provisional ballot?” The only two Black people in the room both raised their hands, and that was it.

Black people know what provisional ballots are, and they probably know that if they fill one out, the chance of it getting counted is slim.

With the attempt to steal votes by giving independent voters provisional ballots; a lot of white people are being treated as if they turned Black. So to Bernie voters experiencing vote suppression for the first, welcome to the United States of Apartheid voting.

Related Podcast:

Greg Palast on the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show

Mad About Rigged Elections? Mainstream Media Says YOU Are the Problem

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Claire Bernish

Source: AntiMedia

Mainstream headlines constantly decry Bernie Sanders supporters for disrupting events in outrage, as if their protests and demonstrations somehow illustrate the devolution of the elections. But that focus by the corporate media utterly negates the consistent and continual reports of fraud and disenfranchisement fueling their ire.

And it’s getting ridiculous.

Newsweek, though far from alone, offered a prime example of the obfuscation of the election fraud and questionable campaign tactics by Hillary Clinton in its skewering of Sanders’ supporters.

“Get Control, Senator Sanders, or Get Out,” Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald titled his op-ed — which thoroughly blasts the Vermont senator — as if he were somehow responsible for both the electoral chaos and the actions of an irate voting public.

“So, Senator Sanders,” Eichenwald writes [with emphasis added], “either get control of what is becoming your increasingly unhinged cult, or get out of the race. Whatever respect sane liberals had for you is rapidly dwindling, and the damage being inflicted on your reputation may be unfixable. If you can’t even manage the vicious thugs who act in your name, you can’t be trusted to run a convenience store, much less the country.”

Really?

Because what Eichenwald obviates most readily in his attack is the inability to understand why those protests might be occurring in the first place. Judging by the timing of his article, it’s likely Eichenwald wrote it after chaos broke out at the Nevada Democratic Convention on Saturday — chaos that transpired after the party took it upon itself to ignore thousands who rightly believed Sanders delegates had been excluded unfairly from the caucus proceedings.

Despite the call for a recount, party officials refused to follow necessary procedure and abruptly adjourned the convention, leaving thousands of voters in the lurch — and hotel security and local law enforcement to deal with the aftermath. When things seem suspicious, apparently Eichenwald feels voters should not only have no recourse, they should be happy about it.

“Sanders has increasingly signaled that he is in this race for Sanders,” he continues, “and day after day shows himself to be a whining crybaby with little interest in a broader movement.”

It would be nice if Eichenwald’s hit piece were as much a joke as it comes across, but clearly he’s missed the point — and the vast movement supporting not only Sanders, but electoral justice. Worse, he didn’t stop there:

“Signs are emerging that the Sanders campaign is transmogrifying into the type of movement through which tyrants are born.

“The ugly was on display” at the aforementioned Nevada convention, Eichenwald adds, “where Hillary Clinton won more delegates than Sanders.”

No kidding. That would be precisely the issue that “cult” expressed fury about — Clinton managed to put yet another state under her belt under highly questionable circumstances. In fact, suspect happenings at nearly every primary and caucus so far oddly favor the former secretary of state — and Nevada stood as further testament to why voters are practically up in arms over what appears to be electoral favoritism.

But Eichenwald wasn’t alone in overlooking those concerns — or in blatantly mischaracterizing both that bias and its consequential thwarting of the wishes of a hefty segment of the voting public.

In the New York Times, Alan Rappeport also took the chance to strike at Sanders’ followers by citing Roberta Lange, Nevada State Democratic Party Chairwoman, who adjourned the convention early — earning the wrath of Nevada’s voters.

“‘It’s been vile,’ said Ms. Lange, who riled Sanders supporters by refusing their requests for rule changes at the event in Las Vegas,” Rappeport notes, adding, “The vicious response comes as millions of new voters, many of whom felt excluded by establishment politicians, have flocked to the insurgent campaigns of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump.”

Though he at least presented that aspect of the elections fairly, his description of what Lange actually did in Nevada misses the mark — that rules change had originally occurred prior to the convention, and Lange’s hasty and subjective decision on a contentious voice vote to permanently install the change arguably created the eruption of anger. But a number of Times staff have contributed sizeable amounts to Hillary’s campaign — and a Clinton family organization also donated $100,000 to the Times’ charitable organization the same year it endorsed her. Funny how bias thus peppers its reporting.

But the media roasting of Sanders and his supporters also appeared in the Sacramento Bee — where the editorial board also called the senator to task for the Nevada incident in lieu of calling out the controversial elections. According to the Bee,

“The episode had the reek of Trump rallies, where threats, insults, and sucker punches to defend the presumptive Republican nominee have been common. Yet looking back at the hundreds of Sanders supporters who descended on a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles earlier this month to intimidate her supporters, making one little girl cry, it now seems inevitable that the same kind of violent eruption would afflict those ‘feeling the Bern.’”

Seriously?

While the protest in L.A. certainly rattled Clinton supporters, violence didn’t pepper the event. One Sanders supporter — sporting a Free Hugs tee-shirt, no less — even assisted Clinton-supporting families with teary-eyed children in tow navigate through the crowd. While reports that someone ripped apart a young girl’s pro-Hillary sign might be valid, it would stand as the exception to what amounted to a boisterous demonstration over justifiable grievances. And, again, this obfuscation forgets entirely the need for demonstrations, which Hillary Clinton — in repeated lies, controversial policy proposals, and a campaign replete with fraud complaints — has clearly helped create.

Perhaps corporate, mainstream media — instead of targeting the symptom — should attempt to report its root cause.

Perhaps enormous swaths of voters being dropped from the rolls in New York; Clinton’s inexplicably astronomical luck in coin tosses in Iowa; inexcusably untrained elections volunteers and their equally inexcusable tendency allowing Clinton supporters to participate in caucuses without first being registered; or any number of other examples from the mountain of ever-growing evidence the elections are, indeed, rigged, are infinitely more deserving of headlines than hit pieces against those protesting such affronts to the American electoral process.

Or perhaps we should all just do as Eichenwald suggests — swallow our pride and our desire for a less corrupt and fairer system — and turn tail.

Or not. Because this system is rigged — and the corporate media helps pull the strings. But as long as independent media reports what the mainstream refuses, and as long as fraud inundates the 2016 election, there will be protests — regardless of whether or not Newsweek and the Times and the rest of their ilk ever grasp accuracy in reporting.

Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Tests: Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders Election Fraud Allegations

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Doug Johnson Hatlem

Source: CounterPunch

At the end of the climactic scene (8 minutes) in HBO’s Emmy nominated Hacking Democracy (2006), a Leon County, Florida Election official breaks down in tears. “There are people out there who are giving their lives just to try to make our elections secure,” she says. “And these vendors are lying and saying everything is alright.” Hundreds of jurisdictions throughout the United States are using voting machines or vote tabulators that have flunked security tests. Those jurisdictions by and large are where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is substantially outperforming the first full wave of exit polling in her contest against Senator Bernie Sanders.

CounterPunch has interviewed hackers, academics, exit pollsters, and elections officials and workers in multiple states for this series taking election fraud allegations seriously. The tearful breakdown in Hacking Democracy is not surprising. There is a well-beyond remarkable gap between what security experts and academics say about the vulnerability of voting machines and the confidence elections experts and academics, media outlets, and elections officials place in those same machines.

In Leon County, Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting team had just demonstrated a simple hack of an AccuVote tabulator for bubble-marked paper ballots. Ion Sancho, Leon County’s Supervisor of Elections, also fights back tears in the Hacking Democracy clip: “I would have certified this election as a true and accurate result of a vote.” Sancho adds, “The vendors are driving the process of voting technology in the United States.”

In 2010, and this reminder will pain those of you who can remember when Nate Silver’s outfit did real data journalism rather than primarily yay-Clinton boo-Trump punditry, a FiveThirtyEight column argued that hacking was one of two possibilities for statistical anomalies in a Democratic Senate primary in South Carolina: “B. Somebody with access to software and machines engineered a very devious manipulation of the vote returns.”

Joshua Holland’s column in The Nation “debunking” claims of election fraud benefiting Clinton rests its case on a simple proposition: why would Clinton need to cheat when she was winning anyway? Apparently, Mr. Holland has never heard of an obscure American politician named Richard Nixon.

More importantly, entering the South Carolina primary, the pledged delegate count was 52-51. CNN’s poll two weeks out projected an 18 point Clinton win. Ann Selzer, the best pollster in the United States, projected a 22 point Clinton win. RealClearPolitics’ polling average projected a 27.5% win. FiveThirtyEight was much bolder in projecting a 38.3% Clinton win. The early full exit poll said Clinton had won by 36%, pretty close to FiveThirtyEight’s call. Tellingly, white people in that exit poll went for Sanders 58-42. But the final results said Clinton won by 47.5%, an 11.5% exit polling miss. And the exit polls had to adjust their initial figures to a 53-47 Clinton win with white Democrats in South Carolina.

Three days after South Carolina’s primary, Clinton seriously outperformed her exit polling projections again in a bunch of states on Super Tuesday, including Massachusetts where she went from a projected 6.6% loss to a 1.4% win. Super Tuesday set the narrative that Sanders had no chance of beating Clinton in pledged delegates.

Correlating Exit Polling Misses and Bad Machines

Let’s be clear: yes, correlation does not equal causality. What strong correlation does do, however, is set the agenda for reasonable investigation. Mocking fraud claims where there is a strong correlative case and actual evidence of potential vote tampering in places like Arizona, New York, and Chicago is precisely the kind of thing that has seen confidence in media outlets plummet to an all-time low. Just 6% of people in the U.S., about the same number as for Congress, have high confidence that media are unbiased and accurate.

Meanwhile, according to a September 2015 study (.pdf) by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law, South Carolina uses all machines more than ten years old. In fact, drawing on the source of the Brennan Center report over at Verified Voting, South Carolina uses provably hackable voting machines without a verified paper trail. Virtually all counties in South Carolina use two machines in particular – Electronic Systems and Software’s (ES&S) iVotronic, a touch screen voting machine without a paper trail, and ES&S’s Model 100, used to tabulate absentee and provisional ballots.

Kim Zetter, the best reporter on hacking and computer security at Wired Magazine, delved into the Brennan Center report with an article entitled “The Dismal State of America’s Decade-Old Voting Machines.” Zetter noted that in 2002, after the Bush v. Gore disaster, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) with billions of dollars available for counties throughout the U.S. to upgrade to new voting machines. Zetter then hits the critical point for discussion of election fraud allegations in the Democratic presidential primary:

But many of the machines installed then, which are still in use today, were never properly vetted—the initial voting standards and testing processes turned out to be highly flawed—and ultimately introduced new problems in the form of insecure software code and design.

Things are dismal, yes, but they are not evenly so. As this map from the Brennan Center report shows, there are just a few states that are as bad off as South Carolina (all machines ten years old or greater). But there are also just as few states that are relatively well off with all machines newer than ten years old.

Of the nine places where the exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York), two-thirds are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For these six states the average initial exit polling miss is a whopping 9.98%. From my column on exit polling misses last week, the average exit polling miss in Clinton’s favor is 5.1%. For the three states (Oklahoma, New York, Maryland) for which there is polling and for which all election jurisdictions use machines less than ten years old (gray in the map), the average is just a 1.67% miss in Clinton’s favor. Now take note, this 1.67% average includes New York with its huge miss in Clinton’s favor. Alabama is also worth looking at, with a minority of jurisdictions having machines more than ten years old, because I have been using an “Alabama Test” to see whether theories for the exit polling misses make sense.

I put figures like this to exit pollster and Executive Vice President of Edison Research Joe Lenski for question 10, which I’d previously left out of the published version of the interview I completed with him. I wanted to know whether the gap in exit polling misses raised any red flags. Here was Lenski’s reply:

The reliability of vote equipment is a true concern but I don’t see any evidence how the concentration of older voting machines in certain states would have affected either candidate more than the other. There are many examples of vote count errors. Here is a link reporting a recent vote count error in the Michigan primary that inflated Ted Cruz’s vote by 3000 votes http://uselectionatlas.org/WEBLOGS/dave/ . These types of errors are discovered all the time but there is no evidence that these are anything more than mistakes by local election officials – not a systematic attempt to affect a single candidate’s vote totals. This reminds me of theories after the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary based upon the fact that Hillary Clinton did better in towns with voting machines while Barack Obama did better in towns that voted on paper. That was simply an artifact of the demographics in New Hampshire of the towns that had voting machines versus those that voted on paper. Again the states with older voting machines in 2016 may just be the same states with demographics that favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

But again, as I argued last Wednesday, the demographics by state and other proposed reasons for exit polling misses do not actually add up. Big misses have happened in the South, in Massachusetts, and also in Ohio where Sanders otherwise did quite well in the Midwest. Nor do age or early voting patterns predict exit polling misses. Still, what is most remarkable about Lenski’s statement is that he is one of the few non-tech experts we spoke with who recognized that the “reliability of voting equipment is a true concern.”

None of the three elections academics I spoke with for last Wednesday’s piece appeared to be familiar with the Brennan Center report on aging and vulnerable machines, and Antonio Gonzalez, an exit polling expert and Latino voter registration guru who called for parties not to seat Arizona’s delegations in last Thursday’s piece, seemed a bit floored when I presented him with question ten from my interview with Lenski. “Oh,” he said, “I thought Congress was supposed to have taken care of that with HAVA.” HAVA, as noted earlier, offered money from 2002 to 2006 for states to upgrade to the then latest and greatest voting technology.

At this point we should take a look at the proven flaws in four very old and hackable machines in particular. These machines or similar elderly and vulnerable machines are in use in almost all places where Clinton outperforms exit polling most substantially. Because I am taking evidence and counter-evidence seriously, we will also look at the machines used in New York City, which are not quite so old (about six or seven years). While those machines, ES&S’s DS200, have had several problems over the years of the type suggested by Lenski, they also have not verifiably flunked independent security tests, so far as I know.

AccuVote (TS, OS, TSX models)

AccuVote technology is among the worst of the worst. This is the Diebold technology hacked in the Hacking Democracy clip. It is more than ten years old, can be hacked in such a way that even those models (OS, TSX) with a paper trail can be tricked, and it is in use throughout Georgia (12.2% miss) and in more than 300 counties or other election jurisdictions in more than 20 states.

AVC Edge and Edge II (from my column on Chicago Friday)

The AVC Edge and Edge II (with paper trail) were provably hacked by a “Red Team” from UC Santa Barbara hired by the State of California in 2008. Jim Allen, spokesman for the Chicago Board of Elections, called and emailed to complain after my article last Friday. He dismissed the suggestion that Edge II could be hacked because of the paper trail. Not only is this laughable since his team engaged in a wildly inaccurate audit of the paper trail from the Chicago Democratic primary, but Allen apparently failed to click on the linkregarding the UCSB Red Team test that I included in the article. The first paragraph of that article notes that Edge machines, “even those with a so-called Voter Verified Paper Trail” can be successfully hacked by a single person. AVC Edge machines are in use without a paper trail throughout Louisiana (where there were no exit polls but where Clinton seriously outperformed her pre-election day polling average) and in more than 130 counties in various other states.

Model 100 (from ES&S)

Model 100 also badly flunked (.pdf) the California “Red Team” test in 2008. Like the other machines in this list, it is hackable in a way that spreads virally to other machines in the same network. Hundreds of jurisdictions still use Model 100 to tabulate votes, including especially Wayne County (Detroit), 27 counties in Ohio, 9 counties in Tennessee, 78 counties in Texas, and many more that match very well with where Clinton has outperformed exit polls.

iVotronic (ES&S)

iVotronic machines are touchscreen voting machines, many without a paper trail. iVotronic machines flunked a University of Pennsylvania test in 2007 and are the precise machines in question in the previous suspicious Democratic primary results in South Carolina in 2010. They continue to be used throughout South Carolina (no paper trail) and in hundreds of counties in states where Clinton has suspiciously overperformed exit polling.

DS200

DS200 machines have had a wide variety of malfunctioning problems, particularly in New York City, but those problems can and mostly have been addressed in places like New York City by retraining poll workers to check immediately whether each voters’ vote was counted and then offering a new chance to vote if necessary. As stated, the DS200 has not been provably hacked so far as I know. Newer machines of this sort were put into use just this year in Maryland where the overall exit polling missed in Sanders favor, for once, but by just 0.6 points. Still, the votes in Baltimore County have now been decertifiedbecause, among other things, there were more votes than voters who checked in at the polls. In Maryland, the DS200 machines are all networked to a statewide system for tabulating votes quickly. Networking, however, is not required, and my best information suggests that networking is not how the DS200 is used in New York City. Instead, precinct workers pull the results off the machine at the end of the voting day and relay them to county headquarters, according to my discussions with a poll worker from Brooklyn.

What About the Exceptions to This Correlation?

But we also would have to deal with where there are exceptions to this strong correlation between hackable machines and Clinton beating the exit polling badly. Here’s where my conversation with a particular veteran hacker comes into play. I chatted securely with a long-time member of Anonymous whom I’ll call the King of SciAm (not the handle they use publicly or privately). The King of SciAm has long worked with the Telecommix branch of Anonymous. Telecommix rose to fame when Hosni Mubarak cut off internet access in Egypt during the Arab Spring uprising. Telecommix found work-arounds via dial-up internet to keep information from activists on the ground flowing out of Egypt. As a general rule, Telecommix does not take part in Anonymous leaks or website shutdowns and defacements, but they made an exception to that rule early in this campaign cycle. Telecommix members defaced Donald Trump’s website with a tribute to Jon Stewart upon his retirement. The New Yorker’s Alex Koppleman called it the “classiest website hack ever,” a compliment the King of SciAm relishes.

The King of SciAm emphasized to me that, if hired to hack an election (which they would never do), the first thing they would do would be to figure out the best way to leave no trace: “we’d target the network packets or their headwater.” The key idea being for “a hack to survive the security audit trail after the vote is certified.” Furthermore, “we would likely try to target the thing most likely to get it’s logs wiped first – so – whatever it plugs into to move the data. Are the voting machines in use network connected?”

The King of SciAm told me that targeting old, provably hackable machines is “not an unfair theory,” but “you asked how (if we did these sort of things) we would do them.” The problem, they noted, “is that any change to the voting machine operating system or driver stack will likely be found in the security auditor’s rotation pretty quickly. This is because once the machines are down (end of election day) – they are no longer accessible to revert any source code changes or wipe any logs that said you were there, unless you’ve written STUXnet – in which case you wouldn’t be targeting the booth machines either.”

The King of SciAm was not at all surprised that sloppy hackers may be targeting older machines in places like South Carolina and Chicago, nor that elections officials were cluelessly trusting those machines and not even properly following procedures that could catch a less sophisticated hack.

So if, instead of targeting the DS200 in New York, hackers had targeted further upstream in the voting ecosystem, how would you catch it? The King of SciAm noted that you would have to use some procedure to “match 100% of the data, not 5%,” as in Chicago.

To do this, you would need to use a methodology much more like that used in the FiveThirtyEight article on irregularities in the South Carolina 2010 primary election. There, FiveThirtyEight referred to a Benford’s law test on precinct level results. That test showed an “unusual, non-random pattern in the precinct-level results suggest[ing] tampering, or at least machine malfunction, perhaps at the highest level.”

Intriguingly, after I began this series on election fraud allegations, a reader who would like to remain anonymous, emailed to point out similar irregularities in New York’s Democratic primary this year:

Results for Kings County and Bronx county [show] deviation from perfect 60-40 and 70-30 results was the same 0.035% The increase in votes in Kings (Brooklyn) from 2008 is incredible, almost a perfect 10%. Not only that but that’s where over a 100,000 voters lost their right to vote. Another 20,000 votes in Kings would mean almost a 20% increase which would be amazing compared to other counties that experienced decreases or mild increases.

Furthermore, the overall results in New York, as announced on election night, deviated from a perfect 58-42 split “by 0.005345%. That’s 97 votes out of over 1.8 million.” Will FiveThirtyEight apply a Benford’s law test to 2016 primary results? Not a chance. They have boosted Clinton throughout and are already quite embarrassed by how badly they missed on the GOP side with Donald Trump.

But what about our test? The “Alabama Test.” What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Alabama only has a minority of jurisdictions using old, provably hackable machines. Is that a weak correlation for the theory that in most places sloppy hackers targeted old, provably vulnerable machines while apparently more sophisticated hackers would have had to have been involved with targeting New York’s results as well as registration switching operations in a wide variety of states?

Taking a look at Alabama on a county level gives us a fairly strong answer. Most of Alabama’s counties also use hand cast ballots tabulated by the DS200, but a minority use Model 100, one of our flunked election machines. Three of the flunked Model 100 counties, however, are three of the four biggest counties in Alabama (Jefferson, Mobile, and Montgomery) and accounted for around 40% of the vote for Democrats in Alabama. Clinton won by a 64.2% spread in Jefferson, by 66.5% in Mobile, and by a stunning 73.4% in Montgomery. What happened in Madison, the one county of the top four by population that votes using the DS200 model? Clinton won by just a 38.5% spread! In fact, Clinton did not make it to 80% of the vote in any of the top twelve counties by population except for those three counties using Model 100 to tabulate votes.

And controlling for factors like African American voters or wealth does not account for this phenomenon. Take for instance Mobile where the population is 35.3% black versus a 24.6% black population in Madison County. A 10% difference in black population does not account for a 28% difference in the Clinton-Sanders spread. What’s more, if you compare Mobile to a very similar county in North Carolina (where the exit polls did not really miss), you see something similarly telling.

Cumberland County, NC is very comparative to Mobile, Alabama. They have similar populations, similar numbers of black residents (with Cumberland slightly higher at 37.6% African American), very similar per capita income figures, and both counties had about 35,000 Democratic voters. Clinton won Cumberland by 32.8%, very close to the Madison County (DS200 model) results and about half the percentage spread Clinton saw in Mobile (Model 100).

Of the theories we have so far for why exit polling missed in Alabama by a huge 14%, the only theory that provides a reasonable explanation is vote tabulating machine tampering. Now, perhaps someone else will come up with a non-fraudulent exit polling miss theory that passes the Alabama Test and explains other states as well. Such a theory cannot be about early voting (Alabama had none) and over-projecting young voters (there were very few according to exit polls of Alabama).

Until someone comes up with such a workable theory, election fraud benefiting Hillary Clinton to the tune of a 120 to 150 pledged delegate difference, is the best explanation we have. People wanting to prove this theory should be suing for a technologically sophisticated and independent review of results and the voting results’ entire computer ecosystems in places like Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Boston, Chicago, New York, and many others.

Part 1: Taking Election Fraud Allegations Seriously
Part 2: Debunking Some Election Fraud Allegations
Part 3: In-depth Report on Exit Polling and Election Fraud Allegations
An Interview With Lead Edison Exit Pollster Joe Lenski
Part 4: Purged, Hacked, Switched
Part 5: Chicago Election Official Admits “Numbers Didn’t Match”

Doug Johnson Hatlem is best known for his work as a street pastor and advocate with Toronto’s homeless population from 2005-2013. He is now a film producer and free-lance writer based in Chicago.

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