Tag Archives: Electoral College

The USA on the brink of civil war

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In this article, the author seeks to draw our attention to a fact that is difficult for Westerners to conceive of: the American people are experiencing a crisis of civilization. They are so deeply divided that the presidential election is not just about electing a leader, but about determining what the country (empire or nation?) should be. Neither side is capable of accepting to lose, so much so that each could resort to violence to impose its point of view.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the country is divided into two camps that suspect each other of preparing a coup d’état. On one side are the Democrats and the non-party Republicans, and on the other are the Jacksonians, who have become the majority in the Republican Party without sharing its ideology.

Remember, already in November 2016, a media manipulation company headed by the master of Agit-Prop, David Brock, raised more than 100 million dollars to destroy the image of the President-elect before he was elected [1]. Since then, before he could do anything about it, the international press has portrayed the U.S. president as incapable and an enemy of the people. Some newspapers have even called for his assassination. For almost four years, his own administration has constantly denounced him as a traitor paid by Russia and the international press has violently criticized him.

Currently, another group, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), is planning scenarios to overthrow him in the 2020 election, whether he loses it or wins it. The case has become national in scope since TIP founder Professor Rosa Brooks leaked a lengthy article in the Washington Post to which she is a regular contributor [2].

The TIP organized four role-playing games last June. It simulated various results to anticipate the reactions of the two candidates. All the participants were Democrats and Republicans (ideologically speaking, not “Republicans” in the sense of party membership), none of them Jacksonian. Unsurprisingly, all of these personalities believe that “the Trump administration has consistently undermined basic standards of democracy and the rule of law. It has adopted many corrupt and authoritarian practices. They therefore concluded that President Trump would attempt a coup d’état and imagined that it was their duty to pre-emptively devise a “democratic” coup d’état [3].

It is a characteristic of contemporary political thought to stand up for democracy, but to reject decisions that run counter to the interests of the ruling class. Indeed, TIP members readily admit that the US electoral system they defend is profoundly “anti-democratic”. The constitution does not attribute the presidential election to citizens, but to an electoral college of 538 people appointed by the governors. The participation of citizens, which was not foreseen at independence, has gradually become the norm in practice, but only as a guide for governors. Thus, in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected, the Florida Supreme Court recalled that it did not have to know the wishes of the citizens of Florida, but only those of the 27 voters appointed by their Florida governor.

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, but only the sovereignty of governors. Moreover, the Electoral College designed by Thomas Jefferson has not functioned properly since 1992: the elected candidate no longer has the majority of the wishes of the citizens in the states that tilt the election [4].

The TIP has highlighted just about everything that could happen in the three months between the election and the nomination. It acknowledges that it will be very difficult to determine the results given the use of absentee voting in times of epidemic. The TIP deliberately did not explore the possibility that the Democratic Party would announce Joe Biden’s election despite an undercount and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would swear him in before Donald Trump could be declared the loser. In such a case, there would be two rival presidents, which would mark the beginning of a Second Civil War.

This eventuality encourages some to consider seceding, to unilaterally proclaim the independence of their state. This is particularly true on the West Coast. To prevent this process of disintegration, some advocate dividing California in order to give more members of the Electoral College to its population. However, this solution is already a stance in the national conflict because it favours popular representation at the expense of the power of the governors.

In addition, last March I mentioned the temptation of a putschist coup by some military personnel, [5] to which several high-ranking officers later referred [6].

These different points of view attest to the deep crisis that the United States is going through. The “American empire” should have disintegrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This did not happen. It should have reinvented itself with financial globalization. It did not. Each time, a conflict (the ethnic division of Yugoslavia, the attacks of September 11) came to rekindle the dying. It will no longer be possible to postpone the deadlines for much longer [7].

 

Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

[1] “The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Zero Hedge (USA) , Voltaire Network, 28 February 2017.

[2] “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis”, The Washington Post, September 3, 2020.

[3] Preventing a disrupted presidential election and transition, Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020.

[4] Presidential elections and majority rule, Edward B. Foley, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[5] “Putchists in the Shadow of the Coronavirus”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 31 March 2020.

[6] “The Pentagon against President Trump”, Voltaire Network, 12 June 2020. Do we risk a miltary coup?, by Colonel Richard H. Black, August 24, 2020.

[7] “United States – reformation or fracture?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 October 2016.

Russiagate as Organized Distraction

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By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Source: Consortium News

For over two years Russiagate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.

In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

The Russiagate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated  by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.

Free and Open Exchange of Ideas

Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.

The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Russian Contacts Deplored

Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, Russiagate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

Even if we address Russiagate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017. One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

Who Benefits?

Why then does the Russiagate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

Russiagate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.

While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.

The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

 

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University. He is author of “RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media” London and New York (Routledge).

Phantom Democracy in the Age of the Internet

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trumpandflag

By Nozomi Hayase

Source: Dissident Voice

After the Electoral College vote, the Trump presidency is now official. As denial and blame games continue, it becomes clear this was not a foreign government coup d’état. The truth is that democracy in America has been rotten to the core for decades. It is meddled with by corporate lobbyists, Big Pharma, Big Oil and Wall Street –those who are addicted to money and power.

American democracy is hollowed out, veiled with a loud media echo chamber, bringing feigned solidity to its emptiness. Out of this vacuum emerges a madness for power. U.S. politics is a contest of those who are driven by insatiable hunger – the most callous, cunning and manipulative people in society.

In this system, only people who lack empathy and advance self-serving agendas without concerns for others can rise to the top. The results of this year’s presidential election may mean that this person who many saw as ‘unfit to be president’ was better suited to play this dirty game than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Ascent of Trump

Donald Trump, a perceived outsider, seemed to appear out of nowhere. The former producer of the American game show The Apprentice sniffed the vulnerability of disfranchised Americans who are continually betrayed by the establishment. He then quickly moved in for the kill, turning the electoral arena into a new Reality TV show.

With social media as a hunting ground, this new Republican contender made direct connection with his audience, pouring out charm and grooming them with fake promises. By deploying words as weapons of control, he managed to garner favorable reactions from his followers. His language cast a magic spell where contradictory remarks and lies bypassed critical examination. Emotions triumphed over reason and under the grip of irrational logic, facts no longer seemed to matter. With a chameleon-like ability to shape-shift and say whatever voters wanted to hear, he was able to create a mirage and ensnare the populace into a grandiose fantasy.

What was the press, as a supposed watchdog of power doing during this Trump’s uncanny rise in popularity? Mainstream media did nothing to prevent it and instead facilitated this process. His bombastic comments hit jackpot high ratings in the corporate media and rhetoric not bound by facts was not only tolerated, but actively promoted with their shortsighted mentality of profit at any cost.

WikiLeaks and the Democratizing Power of the Internet

This same corporate media also buried a few important facts regarding the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This year’s election was an unprecedented phenomenon. This is not only because the lesser evil game was fought between two of the historically most disliked candidates, but also because of the role played by a new actor from outside of the U.S. electoral arena. Days before the election, a Forbes article acknowledged the significance of WikiLeaks’ DNC emails, calling them a “Holy Grail of understanding of U.S. electoral politics.” It noted how “few understand the importance of WikiLeaks in the eventual writing of the history of presidential politics.”

WikiLeaks has shown how elections in the existence of a truly free press will never be the same as before. U.S. politics sponsored by corporate masters creates a milieu of deception, lies and fraud that is fraught with corruption. These power driven politicians can only thrive in secrecy. When their actions are exposed, like Hillary’s highly paid Goldman Sachs speeches, crafted public images that suck the masses into their illusions of grandeur tend to shatter. Contrary to hysterical rants of ‘Russia hacked the election!’, the defeat of the Clinton dynasty was a testimony to the power of transparency.

WikiLeaks, the world’s first global 4th estate, which operates outside of any government was birthed on the Internet. It showed a potential for emancipation unleashed by this Net. Much of the force of democratization on the Internet is being subverted to create mass surveillance and censorship. Yet at the same time, its effect of empowering ordinary people cannot be denied.

In fact, Bernie Sander’s campaign was built on social media’s grassroots organizing. With independent campaign funding, this virtually unknown senator from Vermont successfully sparked the idea of socialism and raised issues of Wall Street corruption, economic injustice and poverty at a national level. Sander’s largest support came from millennials. It was these natives of the Internet that galvanized his political revolution.

Fake News and Fake Authority

Democrats appear to be disconnected with this new reality of the Internet’s bottom up spontaneous crowd gathering or even worse were adversaries to it. This was shown in their reaction to the corruption revealed in the DNC email database and Trump’s winning of the election.

On the second day of the Democratic National Convention, hundreds of Sanders delegates who learned about DNC’s rigging of the primary walked out in protest. Chanting “This is what Democracy looks like!”, they vowed not to go with Hillary. This crisis of the American political system opened up an opportunity for real democracy. But then, Bernie turned away, urging his supporters to nominate Hillary and sided with the corrupted Democratic Party. His failure to seize this historical moment helped throw the election to Trump, who the Clinton campaign had portrayed as a ‘pied piper candidate’.

After all this came the Fake News explosion. Some established liberal media, freaked out by the country quickly turning red in this Republican takeover, created a new red scare. On November 24, an article in The Washington Postmade wild accusations that Russia was engaging in propaganda during the election to spread ‘fake news’ in favor of Trump. The anonymous site that claimed to have identified these fake news sites that the author cited in the article, was shown to be nothing but a black list that labels anyone who challenges the official narrative as untrustworthy or even insinuating them to be Russian agents, spies or traitors.

Despite U.S. Intelligence Chief James Clapper’s claim that intelligence agencies lacked strong evidence for WikiLeaks’ connection with an alleged Russian cyberattack, it was way easier for progressives to ignore facts and spread paranoia, blaming the loss of Clinton on anyone but themselves.

In the age of the Internet, fake news can easily be manufactured and spread. Yet, at the same time it can also be shut down with countering views that surround them. Also, in this new environment, traditional media is losing its monopolizing power to disseminate information. They no longer can claim to be the sole purveyor of truth. In the case of the Washington Post‘s fake news scandal, The Intercept and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone quickly denounced and challenged its claim, halting this report on ‘fake news’. Social media networks also countered the gatekeepers who tried to dictate what is real through filtering views that challenge the official narrative. In the end, this fake news article was debunked, with Wapo issuing a correction on that story shortly after its publication. What this has shown is the publisher’s false authority and the establishment’s desperate attempt to reassert their shrinking legitimacy to keep people under their sphere of influence.

From Regime Change to Game Changer

The election is over and liberals’ hope to stop the rise of demagoguery is fading. The president elect began recruiting his rich buddies into his cabinet. Recently, he convened a group of Silicon Valley tech leaders to invite them into his new ‘construction project to rebuild America’. As this void of American democracy is being filled with more blatant patronage networks, new insurgencies of civic power are also arising. The potent and creative power of the Internet is already here. Those who have experienced it will not easily succumb to the reality being handed down to them from the teetering Trump Tower.

Just as the power of the Internet can be used by the oligarchic class to corral the masses, it can also be used to empower the people, through its open network. When the liberating force of a free net is claimed by citizens to create movements across borders, linking diverse struggles, it can give all a chance to not only change a regime, but to change the game altogether.

One game changer is WikiLeaks. With the creative use of technology, this Internet of the media built a robust network that is resistant to censorship, making it possible for the organization to be free from state and corporate influence, allowing it to truly serve the interests of the people. It has gained its own credibility through a perfect record of authentication of documents and rigorous scientific journalism that publishes full and verifiable archives. Despite corporate media’s smearing of the organization, public opinion polls indicate that Americans strongly approve WikiLeaks’ Podesta leaks.

Another democratic tool that is available to people everywhere is cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. With this new invention, ordinary people now have power to create their own money and peer-to-peer networks that are not intermediated by any governments, banks or corporations. Just as WikiLeaks distributes free speech beyond borders and lets truth be discovered through each individual’s participation, with Bitcoin, free speech becomes an app that can be downloaded from anywhere by anyone and values are created through people transacting freely, verified by a consensus of equal peers.

In Their Nothingness, We Find Our Power

On January, 20 2017, Trump will be sworn in with the Oath of Office. The White House will become his new executive boardroom. With this United States Incorporated, the Constitution may be slowly shredded off from his business contract. With the president elect’s proposal on Twitter to give penalties, including jail time or loss of citizenship for burning the American flag, coupled with his recent call for the expansion of nuclear weapons, many are rightfully fearful of the future.

Yet, wars and destruction of civil society are already happening around the world. Crackdowns on cash and schemes of demonetization are taking place in countries like Venezuela and India. When faced with the reality of their national currencies quickly disappearing or losing value, people are waking up to the fact that these claimed values are fake and that they are not backed by real economic activity or anything of true value. More and more people are seeing bubbles pumped up by toxic assets and fraud of financial engineering that rent-seeks earnings of hard working people and creates money out of thin air.

In his speech “Currency Wars and Bitcoin’s Neutrality”, technologist and author Andreas Antonopoulos spoke of how “cash is being eradicated around the world as a scourge.” He then pointed out how governments are waging currency wars against other countries and their own people in order to benefit from a crisis they artificially created. He emphasized how governments and central banks can’t win this game, because “cash is something that we can create, electronic cash, self sovereign cash, digital cash – Bitcoin.” He then noted how this math-based ‘Internet of money’ offers an exit from this old world of currency wars. He alerted the Bitcoin community that as the battle intensifies, those who create a new infrastructure as an exit from nation-state gated economies, and those who point to this exit will be called traitors, criminals, thug and terrorists.

This war on cash and censorship with Fake News memes are attacks on our fundamental freedoms. It is a battle for truth, involving the question of who will define our human reality. This war is now full on, yet mostly brewing beneath the radar. Just before Christmas, President Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. This included the ‘Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act’, which was presented to help counter foreign enemy propaganda, yet is actually a McCarthy era-style censorship law.

We live in a time when traditional authority and leaders have failed us and there is vacuousness in this space where a center used to hold. In the story of Faust, Goethe wrote about a universal man following his thirst for knowledge. In this journey, Dr. Faust meets Mephisto (the devil) who tried to trick and tempt him to come under his control. In the scene A Dark Gallery, Faust told Mephisto, “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All”. He then took the key and entered into this mysterious unknown.

Our quest for real democracy invokes this thirst for knowledge. It invites us all to enter into the realm of Nothingness. We no longer want to believe; we want to know. We no longer blindly accept a world conceived by a few elites. Now, in this chaos and abyss we are descending into, we may be able to find the real source of our own legitimacy. With knowledge that springs from deep within, we are able to penetrate the deception of those who seek to control us and recognize their actual emptiness. In their nothingness, we can find the creative power that has always been there, power that can bring life back to this phantom of democracy.

 

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is a writer who has been covering issues of freedom of speech, transparency, and decentralized movements. Her work is featured in many publications. Find her on twitter @nozomimagine. Read other articles by Nozomi.

Killing Democracy by a Thousand Cuts

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illusionofvote

By Jim Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan

Source: FreePress.org

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

Electoral Proctology

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

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

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

Not a Pretty Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it gets worse.

Strip & Flip

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

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

Election Theft, as American as Apple Pie

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

“Not every conspiracy is a theory.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Five Jim Crows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engineering Vote Fraud Abroad Comes Home to Roost

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

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

The New Jim Crow – “Interstate Crosscheck”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-1/

Adjusted Exit Polls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citizen Exit Polls

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

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

Already the site reports:

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

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

A System Designed for Cheating

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

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

STD – Software Transmitted Disease

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

The Ohio Plan, ‘How to Nix the Fix’

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

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

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

The Ohio Plan:

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

2.      A four-day national voting holiday.

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

4.      Universal use of hand-counted paper ballots.

5.      A universal automatic recount.

May it be so.

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

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

Was Super Tuesday Rigged?

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By Jerry Kroth

Source: The Hampton Institute

Social scientists have long known that releasing poll information early, before polls have closed, has two effects: first it decreases voter turnout by about 12 percent,[1] and it increases the bandwagon effect, where people hop on and vote for the winner, by about 8 percent. [2]

On the morning of Super Tuesday, before anyone had voted, the Associated Press released a story that Hillary Clinton had already won. She was the “presumptive presidential nominee” and the victor. AP had made that announcement because of a super delegate count and decided she already beat Sanders.

Other media outlets then piggy-backed on this story, and virtually every American woke up that morning to headlines that Hillary had won-and remember, that is before anyone voted on Super Tuesday.

What a surprise! By the time you had your morning coffee and went off to the polls, you already knew Mrs. Clinton was the winner. Did that bias the election? Did it discourage people from voting? Did it create a “bandwagon effect?”

If one looks carefully at the percentage totals for Clinton versus Sanders totals for those primary states, it is clear the so-called “landslide” victory of Clinton on that day was fully within this margin of bias created by the bandwagon and voter turnout effects.

In other words, the AP story determined the outcome of this election.

Strong words? Well, let’s look at the data.

Three days before the election, a Yougov poll showed Clinton leading Sanders by two points in California. But after the Associated Press released its story, Clinton beat Sanders not by two points but by 13! Hillary got an 11 point “bump.”

From somewhere.

The same effect happened in New Mexico. Sanders was ahead of Clinton by a wide margin 54 to 40 percent. [3] By Super Tuesday, the situation reversed and Clinton beat Sanders 51.5 to 48.5. That surprising result gave Hillary an additional 13 points. Surprise! A 13 point “bump.”

In New Jersey, poll results just before Super Tuesday showed Clinton leading sanders 54 to 40 percent [4] but on election day she beat him 63 to 36, another unexpected 9 point “bump” in Hillary’s favor.

In South Dakota, a poll showed Sanders ahead of Clinton by 6 percentage points [5] just a few weeks before the primary, but on Super Tuesday Hillary pulled another rabbit out of her hat and beat Sanders by two points; an 8 point “bump” for Clinton.

Those are the only states where we can calculate pre-post results. Hillary got an unexpected 9 points in New Jersey, 8 points in South Dakota, 13 points in New Mexico, and 11 points in California. All unexpected. All unpredicted. All quite different from polls held just days before Super Tuesday.

And all very suspicious!

If one tries to rebut these findings alleging they all are within the margin of error for polls, then Sanders should have had just as many spurious bumps as Clinton. Didn’t happen! All went to Hillary. The skewing is not random! The statistical anomalies are consistently prejudiced toward Hillary.

Sixteen European countries ban reporting election results before voting occurs, and in the UK, reporting poll data on the day of the election is forbidden. [6]

All for good reason.

Serious attention should be paid to declaring these primaries invalid. Furthermore, the possibility of investigating media entities, in particular Gary Pruitt, CEO of the Associated Press, for any alleged collusion with the Clinton campaign should be aggressively pursued. Even if there is no corporate media complicity, it can still be argued that the AP’s desire for an early morning scoop determined, biased and corrupted this entire election.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is Associate Professor Emeritus Santa Clara University. He may be contacted through his website, collectivepsych.com

Notes

 

Related Videos:

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.”

2016: The Year the Americans Found out Our Elections Are Rigged

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“Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. senators and congress members.” – Former President Jimmy Carter

By Nick Bernabe

Source: AntiMedia

The 2016 election has been a wild ride, with two insurgent grassroots campaigns literally giving the political establishment a run for its money. But as the events of this presidential primary season play out, it’s becoming clear the U.S. election — and even more so, the presidential race — is a big scam being perpetrated on the American people.

Events from the last week have exposed the system as an illusion of choice and a farce. They have reinforced at least one study showing the U.S. is an oligarchy rather than a democratic republic.

The Wyoming democratic caucus took place on Saturday, purportedly to allow voters to have their voices heard in the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders lost the Wyoming caucus by winning it with a 12 percent margin.

Wait, what?

How does one lose by winning 56 percent of the votes? This happens when the political process is, according to the New York Post, “rigged” by superdelegates. The Post summed up this “strange” phenomenon:

“[U]nder the Democratic Party’s oddball delegate system, Sanders’ winning streak — he has won seven out of the past eight contests — counts for little.

“In fact, despite his win, he splits Wyoming’s 14 pledged delegates 7 to 7 under the caucus calculus.

“Clinton, meanwhile, also gets the state’s four superdelegates — who had already pledged their allegiance to her in January. So despite ‘losing,’ she triumphs 11-7 in the delegate tally.”

Even media pundits on MSNBC openly called the process rigged:

The superdelegate process is complicated, as we’ve noted before, but they have one essential function: to prevent candidates like Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a video of Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz explaining superdelegates:

Adding insult to injury, even when Sanders does win states (despite Hillary’s advantage in superdelegates), the media can be reliably counted on to discount Sanders’s wins as nothing more than prolonging the electoral process, which will inevitably elect the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. This pervasive commentary continues despite the fact Sanders only trails her by several hundred pledged delegates.

Meanwhile, according to the same media, the non-establishment Trump campaign is threatened every time Ted Cruz beats him — even though Trump leads by a larger percentage of pledged delegates than Clinton does. When Clinton loses, it doesn’t matter because she already has the nomination locked up. When Trump loses, his campaign is in big trouble. Starting to see the problem with the media coverage?

When you examine these media narratives, a troubling pattern emerges that goes beyond the political establishment’s self-interest. You begin to see that American corporate media also functions as an arm of the political machine, protecting establishment candidates while attacking — or dismissing — candidates who seem non-establishment.

This brings us to the events that transpired during the Republican nomination process in Colorado on Saturday. The Republican Party of Colorado didn’t even bother letting people vote before using arcane rules to strip the democratic process of its democracy. According to the Denver Post:

“Colorado GOP leaders canceled the party’s presidential straw poll in August to avoid binding its delegates to a candidate who may not survive until the Republican National Convention in July.

“Instead, Republicans selected national delegates through the caucus process, a move that put the election of national delegates in the hands of party insiders and activists — leaving roughly 90 percent of the more than 1 million Republican voters on the sidelines.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s non-establishment campaign walked away with zero delegates. They were all “awarded” to Ted Cruz.

“How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger — totally unfair!” Trump said on Twitter. “The people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!”

In an interview on Monday, Trump was even more frank. “The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” he said.

The Colorado GOP didn’t even bother hiding its intentions, tweeting — then quickly removing — what was possibly the most honest insight into the back-door dealing so far this election season:

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The Republican party chooses the nominee, not the voting public. Still in disbelief? Watch a Republican National Committee member explain it better than I can:

What we are witnessing — for the first time on a large scale — is the political establishment’s true role in selecting the president of the United States. The illusion of choice has become apparent. The establishment anoints their two picks for president, and the country proceeds to argue vehemently over the two candidates they are spoon-fed. This dynamic is reminiscent of a prophetic 1998 quote from philosopher Noam Chomsky:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

Ahh, the illusion of choice. Sure, in reality there are third party candidates who should be given a fair shake, but in our mainstream media-augmented reality, third parties do not exist. They aren’t mentioned. They aren’t even included in presidential debates. This is another way the media stifles healthy debate, stamps out dissenting opinions, and preserves the status-quo.

“We The People” don’t choose our presidents; they are hand-picked by a powerful group of political party insiders — parties that have long since sold out to the highest bidders. What we have on our hands in America is a rigged oligarchy, and that’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s fact. Now, however, millions of Americans are becoming aware of it thanks to the populist campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. America’s elections are controlled by a big club, but unfortunately, “you ain’t in it!”