Tag Archives: Presidential Elections

FBI Investigation Produces No Indictment, But Proves Hillary Clinton’s a Serial Liar

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By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

Hillary Clinton may or may not be a crook. That remains to be proven, though the sheer magnitude of the wealth that she and husband Bill have amassed since leaving the White House, and while she was serving as Secretary of State — nearly a quarter of a billion dollars earned by two people with no known skills capable of producing that kind of income — should raise questions. What can be stated now as fact though, is that Hillary is a serial liar.

If this wasn’t clear already from her long history of distortion and prevarication — like her false claim that she had to “duck to avoid sniper fire” during a state visit to Bosnia — it is clear now from FBI Director James Comey’s 11-page public report on his agency’s year-long investigation into her use of a private server for all her private and official emails during her term as Secretary of State.

That report has exposes her serial lying to both Congress and the public about that illegal use of private email service to handle her public business.

As the Associated Press reports, Clinton lied in March 2015 when she declared in one of her rare news conferences, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

But as Comey reports, she did. Quite often in fact. The FBI in its exhaustive investigation found at least 113 email chains –some of which had to be uncovered after they had been erased by Clinton’s private lawyers — contained material that was classified at the time of sending, including some that were classified Top Secret and that referred to a “highly classified special-access program.”

She lied again at that same press conference when she asserted, “I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work related” to the State Department.

Not true, according to the FBI, and also, of course, to the Inspector General of the State Department, with whose own investigation of her actions, Clinton simply refused to cooperate.

Clinton lied when she said earlier this month, in an NBC interview, “I never received nor sent any material that was market classified.” Comey says that in fact her system did handle emails that bore specific markings indicating they were classified.

Clinton lied when she tried, as she explained more than once, including in that same March 15 news conference addressing the issue, to claim that she had used her own Blackberry phone rather than a State Department secure phone, simply because she “thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for personal emails instead of two.” In fact, Comey said his agents determined that Clinton had “used numerous mobil devices to view and send email,” all using her personal account. So much for wanting to use “just one device”! Comey said she also had used different non-government servers, all of them vulnerable to hacking.

Clinton lied again when she claimed that her private server was on “property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches.” She lied again when she added, “The use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.” Her campaign website adds the equally false assertion that “There is no evidence there was ever a breach.”

In fact, all Comey will say is that the FBI did not uncover a breach, but he adds that because of the sophisticated abilities of “hostile” forces (i.e foreign countries’ intelligence services) that would be engaging in any such hacking, “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.” They would just not leave any “footprints,” he explains.

We also know Clinton was lying when she said, “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.” The falsity of that particular lie was exposed by the State Department Inspector General, who in his own report on her private server scandal, found that she had never “sought or received approval” to operate a private server for her State Department communications, and added that as Secretary of State, she “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with State Department offices.”

Some of these violations that Clinton has objectively lied about may not be crimes. Others clearly are. At a minimum, Clinton deliberately sought to violate the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, which make all but classified documents public records that are supposed to be made available on request to journalists and the public on request (and even many secret documents upon appeal). By conducting her official business on a private server, Clinton was assuring that no FOIA requests could touch her.

The question of Clinton’s “trustworthiness” is a huge issue among the public, with all but her die-hard supporters — a minority within the Democratic Party.

Maybe some people don’t care in these cynical times when it’s simply assumed that “all politicians lie,” but one hopes that those lies will relate to personal foibles and sins, not official business. A nation that celebrates great leaders like George Washington, who at least according to the national mythology once said, “I cannot tell a lie,” and Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln, for their integrity and forthrightness, surely can demand at least a semblance of truthfulness in its top leader.

Clearly Hillary Clinton has failed that test of leadership, and in a big way.

I’m concerned that the FBI and the State Department’s own Office of Inspector General, as well as Republicans in Congress, have missed the real import of Clinton’s lying. It is not that she violated rules and standards that may have led to national security secrets being hacked, serious though that may be. For one thing, powerful intelligence agencies like those of the Russians and Chinese, just like the US’s own National Security Agency, have the capability to hack even the government’s most secure servers.

Clinton lied again when she claimed that her private server was on “property guarded by the Secret Service and there were no security breaches.” She lied again when she added, “The use of that server, which started with my husband, certainly proved to be effective and secure.” Her campaign website adds the equally false assertion that “There is no evidence there was ever a breach.”

In fact, all Comey will say is that the FBI did not uncover a breach, but he adds that because of the sophisticated abilities of “hostile” forces (i.e foreign countries’ intelligence services) that would be engaging in any such hacking, “We assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email account.” They would just not leave any “footprints,” he explains.

We also know Clinton was lying when she said, “I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department.” The falsity of that particular lie was exposed by the State Department Inspector General, who in his own report on her private server scandal, found that she had never “sought or received approval” to operate a private server for her State Department communications, and added that as Secretary of State, she “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business with State Department offices.”

Some of these violations that Clinton has objectively lied about may not be crimes. Others clearly are. At a minimum, Clinton deliberately sought to violate the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, which make all but classified documents public records that are supposed to be made available on request to journalists and the public on request (and even many secret documents upon appeal). By conducting her official business on a private server, Clinton was assuring that no FOIA requests could touch her.

The question of Clinton’s “trustworthiness” is a huge issue among the public, with all but her die-hard supporters — a minority within the Democratic Party.

Maybe some people don’t care in these cynical times when it’s simply assumed that “all politicians lie,” but one hopes that those lies will relate to personal foibles and sins, not official business. A nation that celebrates great leaders like George Washington, who at least according to the national mythology once said, “I cannot tell a lie,” and Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln, for their integrity and forthrightness, surely can demand at least a semblance of truthfulness in its top leader.

Clearly Hillary Clinton has failed that test of leadership, and in a big way.

I’m concerned that the FBI and the State Department’s own Office of Inspector General, as well as Republicans in Congress, have missed the real import of Clinton’s lying. It is not that she violated rules and standards that may have led to national security secrets being hacked, serious though that may be. For one thing, powerful intelligence agencies like those of the Russians and Chinese, just like the US’s own National Security Agency, have the capability to hack even the government’s most secure servers.

LONDON CALLING! The DNC in England on ‘hols’

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By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCowNews

Primaries polished off, the Democratic National Committee has apparently decided to pop over to swinging London on holiday.  Because what’s happening right now in Great Britain explains how Bernie Sanders somehow “lost” the California Democratic primary to a candidate who couldn’t fill a high school auditorium there without trucking in busloads of middle-aged white women wearing boxy pantsuits and smug smiles.

What’s happening in London puts what happened in California in the context of globalization.

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Voting in the “Brisket” Referendum

They were voting on “Brisket,” the surprisingly highly-contested election about choosing the Best BBQ in the UK.

In the end, newspaper columnists were shocked by the voter’s bad taste. Members of the commentariat were said to be absolutely appalled, especially at a few sneers and dirty looks conflated into a rise in racist and anti-immigrant hate crimes, like the non-existent chairs that weren’t thrown after the Nevada Democratic convention.

Disinformation acknowledges no borders, knows no terrestrial bounds!

“The Brexit vote has precipitated the deepest political crisis in Britain in a generation. The nation is divided and the climate is lurching dangerously towards the far right. At this critical moment for the future of the country, the Blairites have opportunistically mounted an anti-Corbyn coup. They have been incubating this coup from day one despite Corbyn’s overwhelming mandate.”

Some guy Americans have never heard of—or if they’ve heard of him don’t know how to pronounce his name— named Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labor Party (only they spell it “Labour,” like teen-aged girls spelling their names cute: “That Cyndy! She’s special!”

Dozens of Labour Members of Parliament (confusing, don’t they know “MP’” stands for Military Police?) want this Corbyn guy to resign.

It seems they never liked him from the get-go, and would have shrugged him off long before now, except he won a massive victory from the Party’s rank-and-file in an election.

And now he won’t go!

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I thought, OMG! He’s just like Bernie!

And that’s when everything began to make sense.

The ‘objective correlative’ 

Remember how just after the California primary everything looked very “Through the Looking Glass? Remember? Bernie Sanders drawing monster crowds all up and down California… and then going on to “defeat” in the Democratic Presidential primary?

Losing to a candidate who couldn’t fill a third-grade classroom without sprinkling the crowd with California Democratic officials?

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Sure ya do, mate.

 

“Mister Peabody Almost Goes to Washington”

We’ve all seen the movie. A candidate barnstorms across the state. Draws multitudes. Enthusiastic slogans chanted all around.

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Election night is always the next scene in the montage. Basking in the approval of an excited crowd at a victory party roaring in celebration. The candidate waves for quiet (who are they kidding? Everyone knows they don’t mean it.)

But not this time. Not in California. Lucy picked up the football, took it home. It was DEFLATE-GATE  writ large.

 

Romeo wakes up, sees Juliet dead, tears all around. 

Many thought, “I must be dreamin’. This can’t be real.” Because there was no “objective correlative” to help bring sense to the experience. No recognizable human moment, as in “Romeo wakes up, sees Juliet dead, tears all around.”

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On Youtube, a baby struggles to stand; we all smile. Watch a toddler stumble across a room, swaying side to side like a drunk on a gambling cruise unexpectedly caught in high seas.

We silently urge the drooling little thing on. “Trust your tiny gyroscope, diapered one. In your forehead. Behind your Third Eye.”

There was no recognizable human moment in California, nor many of the other Democratic primaries.

Just a sinking feeling that—once again—we’ve been had.

 

Hey! That sinking feeling! Stay outta London 

But the jury’s still out on London.

“A massive show of support for Jeremy Corbyn has left the coup coalition of media pundits and disgruntled MPs with their jaws to the floor. With only 24 hours notice, over 10,000 people marched on parliament square to reinforce the Labour leader’s unprecedented democratic mandate.”

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Being Britain, things quickly got snarky.

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We wish them well. They’re a plucky bunch. Some have even had their lips surgically removed, which must be a pretty painful procedure.

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Stein: Prosecute Clinton for Reckless Abuses of National Security

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Jill Stein made the following statement about the FBI decision regarding Hillary Clinton’s violations of national security laws as Secretary of State.

By Jill Stein

Source: Jill2016

Today FBI Director James Comey described Hillary Clinton’s email communications as Secretary of State as “extremely careless.” His statement undermined the defenses Clinton put forward, stating the FBI found 110 emails on Clinton’s server that were classified at the time they were sent or received; eight contained information classified at the highest level, “top secret,” at the time they were sent. That stands in direct contradiction to Clinton’s repeated insistence she never sent or received any classified emails.

All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation, specifically of Title 18 Section 793(f) of the federal penal code, a law ensuring proper protection of highly classified information. Director Comey said that Clinton was “extremely careless” in handling such information. Contrary to the implications of the FBI statement, the law does not require showing that Clinton intended to harm the United States, but that she acted with gross negligence.

The recent State Department Inspector General (IG) report was clear that Clinton blithely disregarded safeguards to protect the most highly classified national security information and that she included on her unprotected email server the names of covert CIA officers. The disclosure of such information is a felony under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

While the FBI is giving Clinton a pass for not “intending” to betray state secrets, her staff has said Secretary Clinton stated she used her private email system because she did not want her personal emails to become accessible under FOI laws. This is damning on two counts – that she intended to disregard the protection of security information, and that she had personal business to conceal.

This is not the end of the Clinton email issues. Department of Justice officials filed a motion in federal court on June 29th requesting a 27-month delay in producing correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch.

Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000 emails claiming they were ‘personal’. This is equal to the volume of her emails designated as department business. If half of an employee’s email volume is for their personal business, they are not using their time for their job.

If Secretary Clinton was conducting personal business for her family Foundation through the Secretary of State’s Office, this is a matter the American public deserves to know about. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton routinely granted lucrative special contracts, weapons deals and government partnerships to Clinton Foundation donors. The Secretary of State’s office should not be a place to conduct private back room business deals.

The blurring of the lines between Clinton family private business and national security matters in the Secretary of State Office underscores evidence on many other fronts that Hillary Clinton is serving the 1%, not we the people.

Hillary Clinton’s failure to protect critical security information is not the only thing in her tenure as Secretary that deserves the term reckless, including her decision to pursue catastrophic regime change in Libya, and to support the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Ukraine and Honduras.

 

Here’s Why Hillary Won’t Allow Her Corporate Speeches to be Published

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: RINF

In a previous report, I indicated “Why Hillary Clinton’s Paid Speeches Are Relevant”, but not what they contained. The present report indicates what they contained. 

One speech in particular will be cited and quoted from as an example here, to show the type of thing that all of her corporate speeches contained, which she doesn’t want the general public to know about. 

This is the day’s keynote speech, which she gave on Wednesday, 25 June 2014, to the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a lobbying organization in DC, at their annual convention, which in 2014 was held in San Diego. The announcement for attendees said: “Wednesday’s Keynote session is sponsored by Genentech, and is open to Convention registrants with Convention Access and Convention Access & Partnering badges only. Seating is limited.” Somehow, a reporter from a local newspaper, the Times of San Diego, managed to get in. Also, somehow, an attendee happened to phone-video the 50-minute interview that the BIO’s CEO did of Clinton, which took place during the hour-and-a-half period, 12-1:30, which was allotted to Clinton.

The Times of San Diego headlined that day, “Hillary Clinton Cheers Biotechers, Backing GMOs and Federal Help”, and gave an excellent summary of her statements, including of the interview. Here are highlights:

—

It was red meat for the biotech base. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a 65-minute appearance at the BIO International Convention on Wednesday, voiced support for genetically modified organisms and possible federal subsidies. … 

“Maybe there’s a way of getting a representative group of actors at the table” to discuss how the federal government could help biotechs with “insurance against risk,” she said.

Without such subsidies, she said, “this is going to be an increasing challenge.” …

She said the debate about GMOs might be turned toward the biotech side if the benefits were better explained, noting that the “Frankensteinish” depictions could be fought with more positive spin.

“I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record,” she said [at 29:00 in the video next posted here], citing drought-resistant seeds she backed as secretary of state. “There’s a big gap between the facts and what the perceptions are.” [that too at 29:00] …

Minutes earlier, Gov. Jerry Brown made a rousing 3-minute pitch for companies to see California as biotech-friendly.

“You’ve come to the right place.” …

Brown had some competition for biotech boosterism in the form of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the longtime Clinton ally who pitched his own state as best for biotech. …

[Clinton was] Given a standing ovation at the start and end of her appearance.

—

In other words: As President, she would aim to sign into law a program to provide subsidies from U.S. taxpayers to Monsanto and other biotech firms, to assist their PR and lobbying organizations to eliminate what she says is “a big gap between the facts and what the perceptions are” concerning genetically modified seeds and other GMOs. In other words: she ignores the evidence that started to be published in scientific journals in 2012 showing that Monsanto and other GMO firms were selectively publishing studies that alleged to show their products to be safe, while selectively blocking publication of studies that — on the basis of better methodology — showed them to be unsafe. She wants U.S. taxpayers to assist GMO firms in their propaganda that’s based on their own flawed published studies, financed by the GMO industry, and that ignores the studies that they refuse to have published. She wants America’s consumers to help to finance their own being poisoning by lying companies, who rake in profits from poisoning them.

Her argument on this, at 27:00 to 30:00 in the video of the 50-minute interview of Clinton, starts by her citing the actual disinformation (that’s propagandized by the fossil-fuels industries, which actually back her Presidential campaign) that causes the American public to reject the view that humans have caused global warming. At 27:38 in the video, she said “98% of scientists in the world agree that man has caused the problem” of global warming, and she alleged that the reason why there is substantial public resistance to GMOs is the same as the reason why there’s substantial public resistance to the reality that global warming exists and must be actively addressed: Americans don’t know the science of the matter. She received several applauses from this pro-GMO audience, for making that false analogy. The reality, that it’s false, is that on 15 May 2013, the definitive meta-study, which examined the 11,944 published studies that had been done relating to the question of global warming and its causes, reported that “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” The meta-study was titled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature”. So, Clinton’s statement “98%” was only 0.9% off regarding the size of the scientific consensus. However, her implication that the public’s rejection of that actual 97.1% of experts’ findings on global warming, is at all analogous to the public’s rejection of the actually bogus finding by GMO industry ‘experts’ that GMOs are safe, is pure deception by her. The reality is the exact contrary: The fossil-fuels industries have financed the propaganda ‘discrediting’ the scientists’ consensus about global warming, much like the GMO industries have financed the deception of the public to think that ‘scientists’ ‘find’ that GMOs are safe. In fact, as was reported in Scientific American, on 23 December 2013, “’Dark Money’ Funds Climate Change Denial Effort”, and the study they were summarizing, from the journal Climate Change, was titled “Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations”. It found that:

“From 2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily involved in funding CCCM [climate change counter-movement] organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer making publicly traceable contributions to CCCM organizations. Instead, funding has shifted to pass through [two] untraceable sources [both of which had been set up by the Kochs: Donors Trust, and Donors Capital Fund].“

On 23 April 2016, Politico headlined “Charles Koch: ‘It’s possible’ Clinton is preferable to a Republican for president”, but this isn’t the only indication that Hillary is merely pretending to be their enemy. On 24 February 2016, I headlined “Hillary Clinton’s Global-Burning Record” and summarized and linked to news reports such as the opening there: “On 17 July 2015, Paul Blumenthal and Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post bannered, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Biggest Campaign Bundlers Are Fossil Fuel Lobbyists’ and the sub-head was ‘Clinton’s top campaign financiers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas and the Keystone pipeline.’”

In other words: the same pro-GMO lobbyists who applaud Hillary for verbally endorsing the science that affirms global warming, applaud her for endorsing their own fake ‘science’ which asserts that GMOs have been proven safe. They just love her lie, which analogizes them to the authentic scientists who (97.1%) say that global warming exists and is caused by humans’ emissions of global-warming gases.

Also, she expressed the wish that: “the federal government could help biotechs with ‘insurance against risk,’ she said. Without such subsidies, she said, this is going to be an increasing challenge,” because otherwise, biotech companies might get bankrupted by lawsuits from consumers who might have become poisoned by their products. She wants the consuming public to bear the risk from those products — not the manufacturers of them to bear any of the risks that could result from those manufacturers’ rigged ‘safety’ ‘studies’ (a.k.a.: their propaganda).

In other words: the reason why Hillary Clinton won’t allow her 91 corporate speeches, for which she was paid $21,667,000, to be published, is the lying political cravenness of her pandering to those corporations there. Each group of lobbyists is happy to applaud her lying, regardless of whether her lies include insults against another group of lobbyists, to whom she might be delivering similar lies to butter them up at a different annual convention or etc.

In other words: she’s telling all of them collectively: You’re my type of people, and the public who despise you are merely misguided, but as President I’ll set them straight and they’ll even end up paying part of the bill to be ‘educated’ about these matters, by my Administration, and even part of the bill to pay corporations’ product-liability suits.

The reason why Clinton doesn’t want those speeches to be made public is that she doesn’t want the voters to know that she intends to use their money to propagandize to them for the benefit of those corporations, and also to protect those corporations from liability for harms their products cause the public.

This is called (by the propagandists) ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. Mussolini, with pride, called it sometimes “fascism,” and sometimes “corporationism.” But whatever it’s called, it’s what she supports, and what she represents, to the people who are paying her. And even most of her own voters would find it repulsive, if they knew about it. So: she can’t let them know about it. And she doesn’t.

FBI Whitewashes Serious Hillary Criminality

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After President Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret meeting, Lynch's Justuce Department announced that it would not indict Hillary Clinton for her private email server and destruction of public dcuments, because she had no obvious intent to break the law, just extreme carelessness for it. Whatever happened to "ignorance of the law is no excuse"?

After President Bill Clinton met with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret meeting, Lynch’s Justice Department announced that it would not indict Hillary Clinton for her private email server and destruction of public documents, because she had no obvious intent to break the law, just extreme carelessness for it. Whatever happened to “ignorance of the law is no excuse”?

By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

Reacting to FBI director James Comey whitewashing Hillary’s criminality serious enough to send ordinary people to prison, Trump was right calling the system “rigged.”

In a Tuesday afternoon statement, he said she “compromised the safety of the American people by storing highly classified information on a private email server with no security.”

“Our adversaries almost certainly have a blackmail file on (her), and this fact alone disqualified her from service.”

She lied saying she didn’t use her home server to maintain or send classified information. Comey confirmed over 100 emails classified when sent, including top secret ones.

Deleting thousands of emails compounded her criminality, ordinary Americans held to one standard, figures like Hillary and husband Bill another.

The system isn’t just rigged. It’s too debauched to fix. So far, Bernie Sanders remains noticeably silent on Comey’s whitewash. He acknowledged support for Clinton earlier, saying through a spokesperson the FBI’s decision won’t affect his campaign.

House Speaker Paul Ryan indicated Comey may be called before Congress to testify, saying “(w)e’re going to have hearings. There are a lot of unanswered questions here…”

“What really just mystifies me is the case he makes and then the conclusion he draws. This certainly does underscore the belief that the Clintons live above the law.”

“He shredded the case she had been making all year long. I think we need to know more…” She should be “block(ed) from access to classified material” as a tainted candidate.

“Based on (Comey’s) own statement…damage (was) done to the rule of law.” On the same day, Obama campaigned with Hillary in North Carolina, stumping for her for the first time – leading the crowd in chanting “Hill-a-ry,” adding he’s “fired up! Ready to go for her!”

“I’m here today because I believe in Hillary Clinton, and I want you to help elect her to be the next president of the United States of America,” he ranted, ignoring Comey’s whitewash.

Instead he lied, saying “there has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office than Hillary Clinton. Ever.”

One unindicted war criminal endorsed another. As secretary of state, she orchestrated naked aggression on Libya and Syria, raping and destroying both countries – responsible for mass slaughter, destruction and unspeakable human misery.

Her deplorable rap sheet includes numerous other high crimes, including involvement in toppling foreign leaders, rigging Haiti’s election to install a US-controlled puppet, and racketeering – the Clinton Foundation a self-enrichment, influence peddling, money-laundering scheme masquerading as a charitable NGO.

Her record in office and since leaving government shows support for imperial lawlessness, indifference to human suffering, and addiction to self-aggrandizement, along with using her high office to accumulate great wealth.

She’s the only presidential aspirant in US history responsible for multiple high crimes demanding prosecution, yet favored to succeed Obama, things likely rigged to assure it.

With Democrats meeting later in July to nominate her their standard bearer, there was virtually no chance of Comey throwing party politics into disarray by recommending she be charged and prosecuted.

A loyal soldier, he’ll likely be asked to remain FBI director in a Clinton administration if she’s elected. Reportedly so will ethics-challenged Attorney General Loretta Lynch, longtime close Bill and Hillary ally – virtually certain not to indict her on other major charges.

Her non-recusal recusal gives her final say, Bill and Hillary free from prosecution despite committing high crimes too serious to ignore.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

 

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Your Awakening Counts More Than Your Vote

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

We live in a world where illusions are held in higher esteem than verifiable truth. This is no accident, as the individual has for decades now been on the receiving end of social engineering programs, advanced political and corporate propaganda, fear programming and outright mind control.

The sum total of all this mass conditioning has been to convince otherwise good-natured and hard-working people to participate in their own enslavement and to willingly acquiesce to the ever-increasing rules, invasions of privacy, taxations, permissions and control schemes of a government and world elite who have long since left public interest in the dust.

The American dream is a mythic idea that was supposedly founded on the principle that public oversight of government is possible thanks to an electoral process which would give an informed citizenry the opportunity to replace undesirable politicians with better ones. Government itself, though, is a brutish and violent force that has time and again proven absolutely wild, reckless and untamable. It has never has obeyed its own laws, policies or regulations, and world history is a bloodstained chronicle of man’s failure to control himself when given power in the form of government.

Just as you cannot stop the tides from rising and falling, you cannot stop government from decaying into tyranny, especially so by following its very own rules and by participating in its token rituals.

This is truth, yet the illusion of so-called ‘democracy’ persists, seeming to grip people ever more feverishly with each passing election season. Even in the face of overt election fraud, party infighting, delegate rigging and widespread disenfranchisement. And so here we are again, facing the embarrassing spectacle of choosing between two undesirables when we all know the game is rigged.

For the powers the be, though, the repeating four-year cycle of presidential politics is the most effective device for keeping the masses high on the illusion of self-governance. It force feeds us on a regular schedule the false narrative that we the people can vote to reign in the power and corruption of the oligarchy of deep state, private and corporate influences that truly control the direction of this nation.

In this light, the purpose of national politics is not to perpetuate self-governance for the benefit of the common person, but rather to eat up personal energy and resources in order to suck the individual into a quagmire of false hope and endless patience with outrage after outrage. It is to make ineffectual action feel like action to the people being most screwed over by the corruption of the elite.

Sure, this may sound negative, cynical or apathetic to those who are over-invested emotionally in this game, but in order to move beyond the insanity of doing the same thing again and again while expecting different results, it’s imperative to be deadly honest about how this program works to enslave us, not to free us. Once we can think beyond the peer pressure, neighbor-hating, and mindless outrage that marks each election cycle, we make ourselves available to the possibility of real change. And real change always begins from within, and never forced from without.

There is no political leader who can make you stand fearlessly in this complex and dangerous world.There is no candidate that can give you the freedom that comes with a healthy mind and body. There is no political ruler who can manifest true and lasting happiness for you. There is no politician who can ensure that you enjoy the experience of your life everyday, under any and all circumstances. And there is no president that can empower you to be the best possible version of yourself so that you may give your best to others.

All of these qualities are vastly more critical to personal, community and planetary renewal than whichever new figurehead is selected to be the perceived front man of a morbidly corrupt American government.

The most effective way to change the world around you is to first focus on and create more value in yourself. This is why your awakening counts far more than your vote does. 

What is the Big Lesson of the UK ‘Brexit’ Vote for Americans? It Was Done With Paper Ballots

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Voting in the UK is done on paper ballots, as her in the ‘Brexit’ referendum. In the US many vote on easily hacked computers that leave no paper trail.

By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

The decision by a majority of UK voters to reject membership in the European Union in Wednesday’s hotly-contested referendum has been a devastating defeat for the corporatist domination of the European political and economic scene. It throws the corporate duopoly in the UK into turmoil, and also has the EU bureaucrats and the banking elite in Brussels and the financial capitals of Europe in a panic, lest other countries’ voters, as in Spain and Italy, or even France and the Netherlands, decide to follow suit. (Spain has a national election tomorrow which could be heavily influenced by the British referendum outcome, since if the united left wins, it could eventually lead to Spain’s exit from the EU.)

But for the US, which is not a party to the EU, there is also a huge lesson: ‘Brexit,’ despite being opposed by the political establishment — Conservative and Labor — and by the corporate elite of London’s City, the financial capital of Europe, won this vote. And the reason the opponents of UK membership in the EU were able to win against all that powerful opposition, has, in no small part, to do with the fact that all the voting was done on paper ballots.

Compare that to the US, where voting, for the vast majority of people, is done on machines, in many cases electronic machines that leave no paper trail of individual votes, or even of vote totals per machine. We are always hearing reports of faulty — or hacked — machines that are “flipping” votes, so that someone can cast a vote for a Democratic candidate or party slate and see it switched to Republican, reports of entire tallies for a day’s voting being simply lost, machines that don’t work, forcing would be voters to wait for hours to vote on a limited number of machines that supposedly are working, limited polling places because county or city governments claim they can’s afford to buy an adequate number of machines, a shortage of paper ballots when machines fail, etc.

The list of excuses goes on and on. And why, one might ask, does America vote by electronic machines instead of on readily verifiable paper ballots? The only possible reason is pressure from the corporate media, whose sole interest in our elections is the “horse race” leading to a meaningless competition to get the results out first. Why should it matter though, if you think about it, whether we learn the results of an election an hour or two after the voting ends, or the next day, or even several days after the voting? Why, in fact, do we allow news organizations like AP or the New York Times to “call” elections based on faulty algorithms that are based on extrapolations of early counts in specific targeted voting districts?

Most recently, we witnessed the outrage of AP calling the Democratic national presidential primary for Hillary Clinton the morning that California and six other states totaling 15% of the total delegate count in the nation were holding primaries and then announcing the victory in California that evening when less than half of the votes cast had actually been counted (the rest were paper ballots — both mailed-in ones, and over a million “provisional” ballots that were given to voters who had registered close to election day, and whose registrations had not been provided in time to local voting district officials. As those votes are counted — and they are still being counted today, some two and a half weeks after the voting! — it is becoming clear that far from a rout by Hillary Clinton, the vote between Clinton and Sanders was very close, as will be the delegate count for each candidate.

A number of analysts have pointed out that there is serious evidence of vote rigging in the Democratic primary in favor of Clinton, with most of the states that she won outside of the deep South which had electronic voting machines having exit polls that showed Sanders should have won. There is no way to check those votes, however, because the machines don’t have a paper trail.

And that’s not all. The primary, like elections in prior years, has been rife with other examples of interfering with the right of Americans to cast their votes. There was massive voter suppression in New York’s Democratic primary, for example, with entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn and other jurisdictions — all of them likely to have favored Bernie Sanders — finding that their voter registration records had been wiped, making them ineligible to vote. Other venues, in New York and other states, found that people who had registered as Democrats were recorded as “independents,” making them, in closed-primary states, ineligible to vote in the primaries.

The list of such abuses and frauds goes on and on and, like the many examples of voter suppression by both Republican and Democratic governments in the past, make it clear that voting in the US is as corrupted as it is in many third-world countries where elections are understood to be only for show.

The lesson of Britain’s ‘Brexit’ referendum, like the hotly contested presidential election I witnessed and covered in Taiwan in 2004, both of which contests were conducted using paper ballots, and the latter which was subjected to a recount that returned an almost identical result after tons of paper and millions of ballots were painstakingly inspected and hand-counted all over again, is that democracy can only work if voting is scrupulously honest and absolutely verifiable. On both those counts the US fails miserably, meaning that besides all the other problems that make American democracy a joke — the grotesquely biased (and inane) media coverage, the widespread voter apathy and ignorance, a stultifying two-party political system that limits candidate choices to two virtually identical candidates and to two political positions that only differ in meaningless, but emotionally powerful ways, and a campaign-funding system that in reality is nothing but legalized bribery — American voters cannot really expect their votes to be honestly counted in the end.

If a referendum like ‘Brexit’ were to be held in a US-type electoral system, involving a major issue affecting powerful economic interests, it would have predictably failed. Of this there is little or no doubt. What in the ’60s we called “The System” would simply not have allowed opponents of EU membership to win.

 

Related Article: Freedom Rider: The Good News of Brexit