Tag Archives: Election 2016

Democrats can’t unite unless Wasserman Schultz goes!

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The Democratic National Committee chair has thrown fuel on the flames of infighting just as the party faces a critical November election.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Source: Intrepid Report

To paraphrase the words of that Scottish master Robert Burns, the best laid plans of mice, men—and women—go often astray, or “gang aft agley,” as they say in the Highlands. No one knows this better than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Twice now, the flight of her presidential aspirations has been forced to circle the airport as other contenders put up an unexpected fight: In 2008, Barack Obama emerged to grab the Democratic nomination away and this year, although all signs point to her finally grabbing the brass ring, unexpected and powerful progressive resistance came from the mighty wind of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Certainly, Hillary Clinton is angered by all of this, but the one seemingly more aggrieved—if public comments and private actions are any indication—is Democratic National Committee chair and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Hillary surrogate who takes umbrage like ordinary folks pop their vitamins in the morning.

As we recently wrote, “ . . . She embodies the tactics that have eroded the ability of Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As Democratic National Committee chair she has opened the floodgates for Big Money, brought lobbyists into the inner circle and oiled all the moving parts of the revolving door that twirls between government service and cushy jobs in the world of corporate influence.”

And that ain’t all. As a member of Congress, particularly egregious has been her support of the payday loan business, defying new regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would rein in an industry that soaks desperate borrowers. As President Obama said, “While payday loans might seem like easy money, folks often end up trapped in a cycle of debt.”

In fact, according to an article by Bethany McLean in the May issue of The Atlantic, “After studying millions of payday loans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that 67 percent went to borrowers with seven or more transactions a year, and the majority of borrowers paid more in fees than the amount of their initial loan.”

A recent editorial in the Orlando Sentinel notes that 7 percent of Florida’s population “must resort to this predatory form of small-dollar credit—nearly the highest rate in the nation . . .” What’s more, “Based on a 14-day loan term, the typical payday loan . . . had an annual percentage rate of 278 percent. Many lenders advertise rates of more than 300 percent.” Let us repeat that slowly . . . 300 percent!

So why has Wasserman Schultz been so opposed to the CFPB’s proposed rules? She has said, “Payday lending is unfortunately a necessary component of how people get access to capital, [people] that are the working poor.” But maybe it has something more to do with the $2.5 million or so the payday loan industry has donated to Florida politicians from both parties since 2009. That’s according to a new report by the liberal group Allied Progress. More than $50,000 of that cash has gone to Rep. Wasserman Schultz.

But we digress. It’s the skullduggery going on within the Democratic Party establishment that’s our current concern and as we wrote in March, Rep. Wasserman Schultz “has played games with the party’s voter database, been accused of restricting the number of Democratic candidate debates and scheduling them at odd days and times to favor Hillary Clinton, and recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper that superdelegates—strongly establishment and pro-Clinton—are necessary at the party’s convention so deserving incumbent officials and party leaders don’t have to run for delegate slots ‘against grassroots activists.’ Let that sink in, but hold your nose against the aroma of entitlement.

Now Wasserman Schultz has waded into the controversy over what happened or didn’t happen last weekend when Sanders supporters loudly and vehemently objected to the rules at the Nevada State Democratic Convention. In truth, some behaved badly at the event and others made trollish, violent and obscene threats to Democratic state chair Roberta Lange via phone, email and social media. There’s no excuse for such aggressive, creepy conduct, and Sanders was quick and direct in apologizing for the behavior of the rowdies and bullies.

But there is a double standard at play here. Why, pray tell, shouldn’t the peaceful majority of Sanders people be angry at the slow-motion, largely invisible rigging of the political process by Wasserman Schultz and the Clinton machine—all for the benefit of Secretary Clinton?

Wasserman Schultz claims the party rules over which she has presided (and manipulated) are “eminently fair.” She told CNN on Wednesday morning, “It is critical that we as candidates, we as Democratic Party leaders, everyone involved needs to make sure that we can take all the steps that we need to, to ensure that the process is not only run smoothly but that the response from the supporters of both candidates is appropriate and civil.”

In response to the DNC chair’s remarks, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver talked to CNN, too, and said Wasserman Schultz had been “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign since the very beginning . . . Debbie Wasserman Schultz has really been a divider and not really provided the kind of leadership that the Democratic Party needs.”

The Nation’s Joan Walsh, a Clinton supporter critical of the Sanders campaign, concurs: “Once again, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz escalated a conflict that she should have worked to defuse,” she writes. “ . . . Wasserman Schultz is not helping her friend Hillary Clinton with her attacks on Sanders. Just the appearance of fairness can go a long way in assuaging worries about fairness. Wasserman Schultz’s defiant rebuke to the Sanders camp has made it worse.”

So, too, has her abolition of the restraints that had been placed on corporate lobbyists and big money—now they can write checks bankrolling what doubtless will be swank and profligate parties during this summer’s Democratic National Convention. At The Intercept, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani report that a number of the members of the Philadelphia host committee “are actively working to undermine progressive policies achieved by President Barack Obama, including health care reform and net neutrality. Some . . . are hardly even Democratic Party stalwarts, given that many have donated and raised thousands of dollars for Republican presidential and congressional candidates this cycle.”

This is a slap in the face to progressives calling for a halt to big money and allowing lobbyists to buy our elected officials. And it’s contrary to what Hillary Clinton herself has said about money and politics on the campaign trail. The Sanders movement has shown that lots of cash can be raised from everyday people making small donations. His supporters and all of us should be outraged that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and convention officials have kowtowed not only to the corporate wing of their own party but also to those high rollers who back the opposition and ideas antithetical to a democracy.

Rep. Wasserman Schultz is facing a primary challenge for the first time this year, her opponent a law professor, activist and progressive Sanders supporter named Tim Canova. But the primary’s not until late August, long after the Democratic National Convention. Unless she steps down now or Hillary Clinton has her removed, Philadelphia will be dominated by someone who represents everything that has gone wrong with the Democratic Party and Washington. At the convention’s opening session, Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be bringing the gavel down squarely on progressive hopes of returning the party to its legacy as champion of working people and the dispossessed.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Time for her to go.

 

Bill Moyers is the managing editor of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com.

Michael Winship is the Emmy Award-winning senior writer of Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, and a former senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos. Follow him on Twitter at @MichaelWinship.

Wikileaks Releases Smoking Gun Email Proving Once and For All Clinton is Lying Through Her Teeth

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By Claire Bernish

Source: The Free Thought Project

Wikileaks appears to have found the smoking-gun email proving almost inarguably Hillary Clinton broke the law — but not necessarily simply because she used the now-infamous private email server.

“Is this the email the FBI’s star exhibit against Hillary Clinton (“H”)?” Wikileaks tweeted Tuesday night.

At issue is an email thread, beginning with a note from Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department, Jake Sullivan, which tellingly states:

“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.”

To which an apparently impatient Hillary replies:

“If they can’t, turn it into nonpaper w no identifying headline and send nonsecure.”

What she’s requesting from Sullivan is that he strip sensitive information of anything marking it as sensitive so it can be sent through without following security protocols. Clinton, in other words, blatantly asked Sullivan to break the law — because she apparently didn’t want to wait.

Though she’s claimed the private email server had been employed for several unbelievable reasons — from a laughable claim of naivete to the ‘everyone’s doing it claim’ that her predecessors had similar arrangements — the truth might have just become clear.

In January, rumors of this email surfaced, however, the state department had it redacted. An actual image of the email hasn’t existed until now which dispells any doubt that Clinton did, in fact, commit a crime.

In the past, Clinton has explicitly denied she ever requested sensitive information be stripped of confidential markings in order to send through the private server. Now, we’ve been shown the truth.

Besides the basic issue of sending classified or sensitive information on an unsecure server, Clinton willfully requested documents be doctored so she could intentionally have them sent to her in that unsecure manner. To be clear, this isn’t a simple case of not knowing any better — or accidentally being on the sending or receiving end of sensitive information.

Interestingly, this email also shows a level of hypocrisy seemingly only possible by Clinton. Nearly a year ago, as The Free Thought Project reported, another batch of the notorious emails showed the then-secretary of state requesting — and receiving — censorship of an unidentified video on YouTube. So potentially-classified information, to Clinton, can justifiably be sent through an unsecure server, but a video she finds unfavorable should be removed from public viewing.

Lacking favorable public opinion, Clinton continues to succeed in primaries around the country — though she seems to garner the best results in places where voting machines have proven susceptible to hackers. In fact, questionable electoral practices seem to follow Clinton wherever primaries are held.

An outside observer might wonder what Hillary Clinton wouldn’t do to win the White House — or, based on today’s Wikileaks revelation — what she would do once there.

This is the deliberate thwarting of protocol and policy in place for reasons of national security. This statement shows Hillary plotting how to receive potentially classified information without having to bother with waiting for proper channels. This is, as Wikileaks suggested, at the very least, one smoking gun.

This is also reason to question why Clinton is running for office — instead of facing charges. Though, perhaps, this email proves that will soon change.

 

Related Video:

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

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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

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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.

state-by-state-10-year-old-voting-machines

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.

Wake Up Humanity: The Divide Of The Uninformed

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By Ryan Cristian

Source: Collective Evolution

As the American people begin to closely examine the shroud that has been pulled over their eyes–seeing the veneer of misinformation that has been cast over the country’s exponential and perpetual profiteering and war-mongering–the people slowly awaken to the prospect that, in its simplest terms, they have been lied to.

The Choice To Follow Their Lead

This country is in the midst of a massive awakening, and the average person is being confronted with a choice: address the looming dark realization that their reality is not what it seems, or double down on the comforting lie and brace for the consequences. With the level of information being thrown at the public in today’s battle for the American mind, it is no wonder many have chosen the latter.

It is a far easier path to stick with what’s familiar, however sinister it might be. As Aldous Huxley predicted, people are being overwhelmed with so many conflicting narratives that most are choosing to stick with what they knew. Despite the pressing feeling that they are being misinformed, at least they can feel good about themselves, or so they are told to believe. It has almost become another form of religion: memorize these talking points, spread the talking points, and have faith that you are on the right side.

What this has produced is an entire class of Americans who have been convinced that they are “informed”; who’s attention, prior to this election cycle, was scarcely directed at much other than the latest reality TV scandal. In essence, that is what this election has been turned into, a crazy reality show. This was wildly ingenious, as those caught by the similarities of the two are slowly being turned on to the new reality show: American Politics. This has awakened a dumb sleeping giant, waiting to be pointed in the right direction. These are the very same individuals screaming at rallies and speaking about how we need to “Make America Great Again,” as if those that have been politically active, prior to the new shiny political show, have been just sitting on their hands waiting for this amazing slogan to come along and give Americans the insight they have been waiting for!

In reality they are simply parroting what they saw on their chosen pulpit and aggressively defending these falsehoods with no real understanding of the surrounding dynamics, or why they have the position they are claiming to hold. When confronted with contrasting information, even while attempting to have a civil discussion, these are the individuals who quickly get agitated and lash out, throwing out terms like “un-American” or a “conspiracy theorist” — the preconditioned responses to any idea that even slightly contradicts their treasured gospel of Truth.

The Divide

The current election cycle, with its supposed “anti-establishment candidates,” has completely changed what was previously a political insider’s game. With the increasing support for candidates such as Trump and Sanders, the country has witnessed a rise of the previously voiceless and currently uninformed. What is being witnessed is not only the sudden arrival of the silent 40%, who chose not to grace the nation with their opinions in previous years (by opting out of the voting process), but the staunch divide between who they have risen in defense of.

Whether these anti-establishment presidential potentials are genuine in their intentions or just more Manchurian candidates with designs to continue business as usual, a clear divide has arisen. This has invigorated a previously nonexistent “middle-class” (if there is still such a thing) to come out in droves to cast their vote for whoever their favorite show told them they were smart for already thinking about picking; nothing more than intentional validation of preexisting, preconceived ideas; no real critical thinking involved. This is by design.

Some feel that the intention is to syphon enough votes away from the other potential candidates, using Trump and Sanders, to allow for the clear establishment hopeful, Hillary Clinton, to easily fall into office as the obvious lesser of two evils. Yet, despite the legitimacy of that claim, no one actually informed can call Clinton the lesser of any evil, let alone the best choice. That can no doubt be argued, but all hinges on whether one feels the scandals surrounding Clinton are political hype, or legitimate crime.

It would seem the laughable idea of literally choosing the lesser of two evils to represent the American people and stand as commander-in-chief of the largest military force on the planet has become this country’s only option. As supposed free individuals, it is hard to address this fact and not come away feeling cheated. So, most ignore it, taking solace in the fact that at least they get to choose between the two; but do they?

Time and time again it has been shown in this country that the electoral college (the system that is used to dole out votes after they have been cast) is anything but democratic. Currently in 24 states, the electoral college does not even have to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote; they can literally vote for whoever they want, despite what the people have chosen. Take that into account with gerrymandering and super delegates, and it becomes clear that this system is cleverly disguised as a democracy, but quite far from being one.

Some feel that this invigoration and divide of the previously uninvolved was created in order to garner the type of violence and unrest being witnessed in all political arenas at the current stage. The end goal being a push into “an obvious need for more control, more government, more more more,” and ultimately, the big aversion for most of the uninformed, the New World Order, or a one world government; which has been openly discussed and is a genuine agenda.

Whether one chooses to listen to the obviously biased mainstream media or an independent source, not following up that observance with research of one’s own is equal to not truly being informed. It is just taking another’s word for it. Should one really bank their future and the future of this country on the thoughts and potential ulterior motives of another?

The only way to truly be informed is for one to take it upon themselves to not only research a topic they wish to understand, but to actually understand the topic, and not just repeat what was last heard as one’s personal opinion.

Do not be another manufactured tool of those pulling the strings. Do not allow yourself to be distracted and beguiled by the proverbial bells and whistles of the current political theatre. Take it upon yourself to understand the true inner workings of the US government and know when action must be taken and when it is in the best interest of the American people for that action to be avoided.

 

SOURCES

http://www.thenation.com/article/figuring-out-why-93-million-people-didnt-vote/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/antidemocratic-electoral-college_b_1744138.html

Welcome to 1984

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1984

By Chris Hedges

Source: truthdig

The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.

“Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”

This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.

This vision will only be obtained through mass acts of civic mobilization and civil disobedience across the country. Nader, who sees this period in American history as crucial, perhaps the last opportunity to save us from tyranny, is planning to rally the left for three days, from May 23 to May 26 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in what he is calling “Breaking Through Power” or “Citizen’s Revolutionary Week.” He is bringing to the capital scores of activists and community leaders to speak, organize and attempt to mobilize to halt our slide into despotism.

“The two parties can implode politically,” Nader said. “They can be divided by different candidates and super PACs. But this doesn’t implode their paymasters.”

“Elections have become off-limits to democracy,” he went on. “They have become off-limits to democracy’s fundamental civil community or civil society. When that happens, the very roots shrivel and dry up. Politics is now a sideshow. Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

Donald Trump, like Hillary Clinton, has no plans to disrupt the corporate machinery, although Wall Street has rallied around Clinton because of her predictability and long service to the financial and military elites. What Trump has done, Nader points out, is channel “the racist, right-wing militants” within the electorate, embodied in large part by the white working poor, into the election process, perhaps for one last time.

Much of the left, Nader argues, especially with the Democratic Party’s blatant rigging of the primaries to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, grasps that change will come only by building mass movements. This gives the left, at least until these protofascist forces also give up on the political process, a window of opportunity. If we do not seize it, he warns, we may be doomed.

He despairs over the collapse of the commercial media, now governed by the primacy of corporate profit.

“Trump’s campaign has enormous appeal to the commercial mass media,” Nader said. “He brought huge ratings during the debates. He taunted the networks. He said, ‘I’m boycotting this debate. It’s going to cost you profit.’ Has this ever happened before in American history? It shows you the decay, the commercialization of public elections.”

The impoverished national discourse, fostered by a commercial mass media that does not see serious political debate as profitable and focuses on the trivial, the salacious and the inane, has empowered showmen and con artists such as Trump.

“Trump speaks in a very plain language, at the third-grade level, according to some linguists,” Nader said. “He speaks like a father figure. He says, ‘I’ll get you jobs. I’ll bring back industry. I’ll bring back manufacturing. I’ll protect you from immigrants.’ The media never challenges him. He is not asked, ‘How are we going do all of this? What is step one? Step two? Is the White House going to ignore the Congress and the courts?’ He astonishes his audience. He amazes them with his bullying, his lying, his insults, like ‘Little Marco,’ the wall Mexico is going to pay for, no more entry in the country by Muslims—a quarter of the human race—until we figure it out. The media never catches up with him. He is always on the offensive. He is always news. The commercial media wants the circus. It gives them high ratings and high profit.”

The focus on info-entertainment has left not only left the public uninformed and easily manipulated but has locked out the voices that advocate genuine reform and change.

“The commercial media does not have time for citizen groups and citizen leaders who are really trying to make America great, whether by advancing health safety or economic well-being,” Nader bemoaned. “These groups are overwhelmed. They’re marginalized. They’re kept from nourishing the contents of national, state and local elections. Look at the Sunday news shows. No one can get on to demonstrate that the majority of the people want full Medicare for all with the free choice of doctors and hospitals, not only more efficient but more life-saving. There was a major press conference a few days ago at the National Press Club. The leading advocates of full Medicare for all, or single-payer, were there, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the heads of Physicians for a National Health Program. This is a group with about 15,000 physicians on board. Nobody came. There was a stringer for an indie media outlet and the corporate crime reporter. There are all kinds of major demonstrations, 1,300 arrests outside the Congress protesting the corruption of money in politics. Again no coverage, except a little on NPR and on ‘Democracy Now!’ ”

“The system is gamed,” he said. “The only way out of it is to mobilize the civil society.

“We are organizing the greatest gathering of accomplished citizen advocacy groups on the greatest number of redirections and reforms ever brought together in American history under one roof,” he said of his upcoming event. “The first day is called Breaking Through Power, How it Happens. We have 18 groups who have demonstrated it with tiny budgets for over three decades on issues such as road safety, removing hundreds of hazardous or ineffective pharmaceuticals from the market, changing food habits from junk food to nutrition and rescuing people from death row who were falsely convicted of homicides. What if we tripled the budgets and the staffs of these groups? Eighteen of these groups have a total budget that is less than what one of dozens of CEOs make in a year.”

Nader called on Sanders to join in the building of a nationwide civic mobilization. He said that while Clinton may borrow some of his rhetoric, she and the Democratic Party establishment would not incorporate Sander’s populist appeals against Wall Street into the party platform. If Sanders does not join a civic mobilization, Nader warned, there would be “a complete disintegration of his movement.”

Nader also said he was worried that Clinton’s high negativity ratings, along with potential scandals, including the possible release of her highly paid speeches to corporations such as Goldman Sachs, could see Trump win the presidency.

“I have her lecture contract with the Harry Walker lecture agency,” he said. “She had a clause in the contract with these business sponsors, which basically said the doors will be closed. There will be no press. You will pay $1,000 for a stenographer to give me, for my exclusive use, a stenographic record of what I said. You will pay me $5,000 a minute. She has it all. She can’t say, ‘We will look into it or we’ll see if we can find it.’ She has been dissembling. And her latest rant is, ‘I’ll release the transcripts if everyone else does.’ ‘Who is everybody else?’ as Bernie Sanders rebutted. He doesn’t give highly paid speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street firms, business executives or business trade groups. Trump doesn’t give quarter-of-a-million-dollar speeches behind closed doors to business. So by saying ‘I will release all of my transcripts if everyone else does,’ she makes a null and void assertion. This is characteristic of the Clintons’ dissembling and slipperiness. It’s transcripts for Hillary. It’s tax returns for Trump.”

While Nader supports the building of third parties, he cautions that these parties—he singles out the Green Party and the Libertarian Party—will go nowhere without mass mobilization to pressure the centers of power. He called on the left to reach out to the right in a joint campaign to dismantle the corporate state. Sanders could play a large role in this mobilization, Nader said, because “he is in the eye of the mass media. He is building this rumble from the people.”

“What does he have to lose?” Nader asked of Sanders. “He’s 74. He can lead this massive movement. I don’t think he wants to let go. His campaign has exceeded his expectations. He is enormously energized. If he leads the civic mobilization before the election, whom is he going to help? He’s going to help the Democratic Party, without having to go around being a one-line toady expressing his loyalty to Hillary. He is going to be undermining the Republican Party. He is going to be saying to the Democratic Party, ‘You better face up to the majoritarian crowds and their agenda, or you’re going to continue losing in these gerrymandered districts to the Republicans in Congress.’ These gerrymandered districts can be overcome with a shift of 10 percent of the vote. Once the rumble from the people gets underway, nothing can stop it. No one person can, of course, lead this. There has to be a groundswell, although Sanders can provide a focal point”

Nader said that a Clinton presidency would further enflame the right wing and push larger segments of the country toward extremism.

“We will get more quagmires abroad, more blowback, more slaughter around the world and more training of fighters against us who will be more skilled to bring their fight here,” he said of a Clinton presidency. “Budgets will be more screwed against civilian necessities. There will be more Wall Street speculation. She will be a handmaiden of the corporatists and the military industrial complex. There comes a time, in any society, where the rubber band snaps, where society can’t take it anymore.”

Neocons and Neolibs: How Dead Ideas Kill

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hillary-aipac

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

For centuries hereditary monarchy was the dominant way to select national leaders, evolving into an intricate system that sustained itself through power and propaganda even as its ideological roots shriveled amid the Age of Reason. Yet, as monarchy became a dead idea, it still killed millions in its death throes.

Today, the dangerous “dead ideas” are neoconservatism and its close ally, neoliberalism. These are concepts that have organized American foreign policy and economics, respectively, over the past several decades – and they have failed miserably, at least from the perspective of average Americans and people of the nations on the receiving end of these ideologies.

Neither approach has benefited mankind; both have led to untold death and destruction; yet the twin “neos” have built such a powerful propaganda and political apparatus, especially in Official Washington, that they will surely continue to wreak havoc for years to come. They are zombie ideas and they kill.

Yet, the Democratic Party is poised to nominate an adherent to both “neos” in the person of Hillary Clinton. Rather than move forward from President Barack Obama’s unease with what he calls the Washington “playbook,” the Democrats are retreating into its perceived safety.

After all, the Washington Establishment remains enthralled to both “neos,” favoring the “regime change” interventionism of neoconservatism and the “free trade” globalism of neoliberalism. So, Clinton has emerged as the clear favorite of the elites, at least since the field of alternatives has narrowed to populist billionaire Donald Trump and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

Democratic Party insiders appear to be counting on the mainstream news media and prominent opinion-leaders to marginalize Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and to finish off Sanders, who faces long odds against Clinton’s delegate lead for the Democratic nomination, especially among the party regulars known as “super-delegates.”

But the Democratic hierarchy is placing this bet on Clinton in a year when much of the American electorate has risen up against the twin “neos,” exhausted by the perpetual wars demanded by the neoconservatives and impoverished by the export of decent-paying manufacturing jobs driven by the neoliberals.

Though much of the popular resistance to the “neos” remains poorly defined in the minds of rebellious voters, the common denominator of the contrasting appeals of Trump and Sanders is that millions of Americans are rejecting the “neos” and repudiating the establishment institutions that insist on sustaining these ideologies.

The Pressing Question

Thus, the pressing question for Campaign 2016 is whether America will escape from the zombies of the twin “neos” or spend the next four years surrounded by these undead ideas as the world lurches closer to an existential crisis.

The main thing that the zombie “neos” have going for them is that the vast majority of Very Important People in Official Washington have embraced these concepts and have achieved money and fame as a result. These VIPs are no more likely to renounce their fat salaries and overblown influence than the favored courtiers of a King or Queen would side with the unwashed rabble.

The “neo” adherents are also very skilled at framing issues to their benefit, made easier by the fact that they face almost no opposition or resistance from the mainstream media or the major think tanks.

The neoconservatives have become Washington’s foreign policy establishment, driving the old-time “realists” who favored more judicious use of American power to the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the neoliberals dominate economic policy debates, treating the “markets” as some new-age god and “privatization” of public assets as scripture. They have pushed aside the old New Dealers who called for a robust government role to protect the people from the excesses of capitalism and to build public infrastructure to benefit the nation as a whole.

The absence of any strong resistance to the now dominant “neo” ideologies is why we saw the catastrophic “group think” over Iraq’s WMD in 2003 and why for many years no one of great significance dared question the benefits of “free trade.”

After all, both strategies benefited the elites. Neoconservative warmongering diverted trillions of dollars into the Military-Industrial Complex and neoliberal job outsourcing has made billions of dollars for individual corporate executives and stock investors on Wall Street.

Those interests have, in turn, kicked back a share of the proceeds to fund Washington think tanks, to finance news outlets, and to lavish campaign donations and speaking fees on friendly politicians. So, for the insiders, this game has been a case of win-win.

The Losers

Not so much for the “losers,” those average citizens who have seen the Great American Middle Class hollowed out over the past few decades, watched America’s public infrastructure decay, and worried about their sons and daughters being sent off to fight unnecessary, perpetual and futile wars.

But inundated with clever propaganda – and scrambling to make ends meet – most Americans see the reality as if through a glass darkly. Many of them, as Barack Obama indelicately said during the 2008 campaign, “cling to guns or religion.” They have little else – and many are killing themselves with opiates that dull their pain or with those guns that they see as their last link to “freedom.”

What is clear, however, is that large numbers don’t trust – and don’t want – Hillary Clinton, who had a net 24-point unfavorable rating in one recent poll. It turns out that another indelicate Obama comment from Campaign 2008 may not have been true, when he vouched that “you’re likable enough, Hillary.” For many Americans, that’s not the case (although Trump trumped Clinton with a 41-point net negative).

If the Democrats do nominate Hillary Clinton, they will be hoping that the neocon/neolib establishment can so demonize Donald Trump that a plurality of Americans will vote for the former Secretary of State out of abject fear over what crazy things the narcissistic billionaire might do in the White House.

Trump’s policy prescriptions have been all over the place – and it is hard to know what reflects his actual thinking (or his genuine ignorance) as opposed to what constitutes his skillful showmanship that made him the “survivor” in the real-life reality TV competition for the Republican nomination.

Does Trump really believe that global warming is a hoax or is he just pandering to the know-nothing element of the Republican Party? Does he actually consider Obama’s Iran nuclear deal to be a disaster or is he just playing to the hate-Obama crowd on the Right?

Opposing the ‘Neos’

But Trump is not a fan of the “neos.” He forthrightly takes on the neocons over the Iraq War and excoriates ex-Secretary of State Clinton for her key role in another “regime change” disaster in Libya. Further, Trump calls for cooperation with Russia and China rather than the neocon-preferred escalation of tensions.

In his April 27 foreign policy speech, Trump called for “a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace. …It’s time to invite new voices and new visions into the fold. …

“My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people, and American security, above all else. That will be the foundation of every decision that I will make. America First will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Such comments – suggesting that “new voices” are needed and that “ideology” should be cast aside – were fighting words for the neocons, since it is their voices that have drowned out all others and their ideology that has dominated U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

To make matters worse, Trump outlined an “America First” strategy in contrast to neocon demands that the U.S. military be dispatched abroad to advance the interests of Israel and other “allies.” Trump is not interested in staging “regime changes” to eliminate leaders who are deemed troublesome to Israel.

The real estate tycoon also has made criticism of “free trade” deals a centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that those agreements have sold out American workers by forcing them to compete with foreign workers receiving a fraction of the pay.

Sen. Sanders has struck similar themes in his insurgent Democratic campaign, criticizing Hillary Clinton’s longtime support for “free trade” and her enthusiasm for “regime change” wars, such as those in Iraq and Libya.

Examining her long record in public life, there can be little doubt that Clinton is a neocon on foreign policy and a neolib on economic strategies. She stands firmly with the consensus of Official Washington’s establishment, which is why she has enjoyed its warm embrace.

She has followed Wall Street’s beloved neoliberal attitude toward “free trade,” which has been very good for multinational corporations as they shipped millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries. (She has only cooled her ardor for trade deals to stanch the flow of Democratic voters to Bernie Sanders.)

Wars and More Wars

On foreign policy, Clinton has consistently supported neoconservative wars, although she might shy from the neocon label per se, preferring its less noxious synonym “liberal interventionist.”

But as arch-neocon Robert Kagan, who has recast himself as a “liberal interventionist,” told The New York Times in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Summing up the feeling of thinkers like Kagan, the Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes.”

In February 2016, distraught over the rise of Trump, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush’s Iraq War, openly threw his support to Clinton, announcing his decision in a Washington Post op-ed.

And Kagan is not mistaken when he views Hillary Clinton as a fellow-traveler. She has often marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented their aggressive “regime change” schemes against governments and political movements that don’t toe Washington’s line or that deviate from Israel’s goals in the Middle East.

She has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon” and “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?”]

Seeking ‘Coercion’

A glimpse of what a Clinton-45 presidency might do could be seen in a recent Politico commentary by Dennis Ross, a former special adviser to Secretary of State Clinton now working at the staunchly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In the article, Ross painted a surreal world in which the problems of the Middle East have been caused by President Obama’s hesitancy to engage militarily more aggressively across the region, not by the neocon-driven decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the similar schemes to overthrow secular governments in Libya and Syria in 2011, leaving those two countries in ruin.

Channeling the desires of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ross called for the United States to yoke itself to the regional interests of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in their rivalry against Shiite-led Iran.

Ross wrote: “Obama believes in the use of force only in circumstances where our security and homeland might be directly threatened. His mindset justifies pre-emptive action against terrorists and doing more to fight the Islamic State. But it frames U.S. interests and the use of force to support them in very narrow terms. …

“The Saudis acted in [invading] Yemen in no small part because they feared the United States would impose no limits on Iranian expansion in the area, and they felt the need to draw their own lines.”

To counter Obama’s hesitancy to apply military force, Ross calls for a reassertion of a muscular U.S. policy in the Middle East, much along the lines that the neocon establishment and Hillary Clinton also favor, including:

–Threatening Iran with “blunt, explicit language on employing force, not sanctions” if Iran deviates from the Obama-negotiated agreement to constrain its nuclear program (the bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran zombie lives!);

–“Contingency planning with GCC states and Israel … to generate specific options for countering Iran’s growing use of Shiite militias to undermine regimes in the region”;

–A readiness to arm Sunni tribes in Iraq if Iraq’s prime minister doesn’t;

–Establish “safe havens with no-fly zones” inside Syria if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not force Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down.

Employing the classic tough talk of the neocons, Ross concludes, “Putin and Middle Eastern leaders understand the logic of coercion. It is time for us to reapply it.”

One might note the many logical inconsistencies of Ross’s arguments, including his failure to note that much of Iran’s supposed meddling in the Middle East has involved aiding the Syrian and Iraqi governments in their battle against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Or that Russia’s intervention in Syria also has been to support the internationally recognized government in its fight against Sunni extremists and terrorists.

But the significance of Ross’s prescription to “reapply” U.S. “coercion” across the region is that he is outlining what the world can expect from a Clinton-45 presidency.

Clinton made many of the same points in her speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and in debates with Bernie Sanders. If she stays on that track as president, there would be at least a partial U.S. military invasion of Syria, a very strong likelihood of war with Iran, and an escalation of tensions (and possible war) with nuclear-armed Russia.

The logic of how all that is supposed to improve matters is lost amid the classic neocon growling about showing toughness or reapplying “coercion.”

So, the Democratic Party seems to be betting that Hillary Clinton’s flood of ugly TV ads against Trump can frighten the American people enough to give the neocons and the neolibs one more lease on the White House – and four more years to wreak their zombie havoc on the world.

 

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

There Will Be No Lesser Evil

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By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

Damned by a corrupt system, it appears voters will be given a choice between Hillary Clinton and her friend Donald Trump this year, with no realistic alternative allowed by corporate media and their establishment patrons.

I say “friend” because the Clintons and Trumps have a relationship going back for years.

Seeing Trump as their enemy, many liberals are opining that Hillary is the lesser evil, saying they will vote for her.

I am not so sure Hilary’s the lesser evil.  I told friends years ago that I thought she would be the next president.  Long before she announced she would run again, corporate media repeatedly suggested her inevitability, tipping off that the establishment is firmly behind her by pushing her candidacy.

The establishment wants her badly, as she may be counted on to sell out the environment, enrich defense cheats and give the banksters direct access to the treasury among other corrupt things indicated by the Clinton past.  After her husband sold out the poor and working classes during his presidency, Bill and Hillary got rich from corporate speeches, the preferred delayed bribe for official corruption in The Land of the Free, in this case amounting to over a hundred million dollars for the pair.

Even Republicans are saying they will vote for her instead of Trump.  Because she is to the right of Richard Nixon, this will not be difficult for them (compare what Bill Clinton signed into law to Nixon’s bills, and there is no contest – all the while Hillary claiming the American people got two for the price of one).

As for The Donald, he’s often boasted that he rented Hillary’s vote when she was a New York senator, through several campaign donations (his son also contributed).  Trump also donated to her 2008 presidential campaign when she ran against Obama.  He calls her “Crooked Hillary,” and you can bet he will campaign hard against her with that slogan.

Not that they’ve been enemies.

On the Daily Show last year, Bill Clinton said of Trump, “He thought Hillary was a good senator for New York after 9/11 and he has actually, he’s one of the many Republicans who supported our foundation before they got the memo.”

A picture search shows Bill Clinton with his golf buddy Trump, Bill and Hillary posing beside Donald and his wife Melania, and even daughters Chelsea and Ivanka as close friends, although, like their parents, they are not socializing during the campaign, as part of the insider scam to convince voters that the Democrats and Republicans are somehow not connected.

National archives released last month show that when President, Bill Clinton posed with Trump at Trump Towers for a photo shoot, and Trump made several visits to the White House though we may never know what was on the table.  Trump would perform a magnificent public service if he disclosed what deals were made, but one wonders if he’d go to prison with the Clintons were such disclosures made.

One is reminded that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, thinking his wife was going to win the Democratic nomination, remarked that he didn’t know how she was going to run against her close friend John McCain.  It’s happening again, with corporate media playing their usual role of not noticing that both candidates are vying to see who gets to sell out the working class on behalf of a stifling plutocratic oligarchy.

Corporate media pretends like the Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats, but it should be obvious to anyone who digs a bit beyond the propaganda, that they are in bed with each other and represent the same interests – selling out the American people, primarily for money.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post has endorsed Trump, but the right wing billionaire gave a big fundraiser for Hillary Clinton when she ran in 2008, so it’s all one happy family.  The billionaires and transnational corporations make sure both sides are obligated in what corporate media play up as “free and fair elections.”

The polls reveal that Hillary and The Donald are two of the most unpopular candidates imaginable, with most Americans despising both. The two have appeared on television more than all other candidates combined, so they’ve been largely catapulted to the top by the corporate media, who pretend to be objective journalists.

Has anyone seen Jill Stein at all on television?  Polling shows she is for bringing the troops home and shutting down the wars, just like what the American people say they want in polling.  Corporate media is making certain she is hidden behind the curtain, as they whine that they just don’t understand how such unpopular candidates as Clinton and Trump have become finalists.

Will Trumps and Clintons go back to being friends after the election?  Probably not, as it looks like this battle will be the biggest mud fight in US presidential history, the only certainty that someone extremely unpopular will win the right to sell us out.

 

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.