Killing Democracy by a Thousand Cuts

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Jim Heddle and Mary Beth Brangan

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 1 https://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.”

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/

Media Worried Too Many Americans Will Question Legitimacy of 2016 Election

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Nick Bernabe

Source: AntiMedia

2016 is the year many, many Americans began to question whether or not our elections, and to a lesser extent, our democracy (insert “it’s a constitutional republic, big difference!” here) are rigged. As I’ve argued many times in the past year, there is plenty of evidence suggesting these skeptical Americans are, indeed, onto something with their suspicions.

But the corporate media has come out in defense of America’s “democracy” — and political elites are defending the system, too. In the wake of Trump’s recent rhetoric regarding the “rigged” system, the ruling class of the United States is peddling the fiction that somehow Trump’s irresponsible sensationalism is solely to blame for the newfound feelings of illegitimacy plaguing our elections.

Take, for example, Monday’s POLITICO piece entitled “What if Trump won’t accept defeat?”:

“Trump’s [rigged election] words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately, and only 49 percent of all registered voters are ‘very confident’ their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.”

You see, according to the corporate media, the only reason Americans think their elections are rigged in one way or another is because Trump said so. It has nothing to do with the explosive DNC email leaks that showed the Democrats manipulated the corporate media in favor of Hillary Clinton. It has nothing to do with superdelegates who get to override the voters. It has nothing to do with the Republican establishment choosing to shut down Colorado’s primary, handing all the delegates to Ted Cruz. It has nothing to do with now-former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz admitting the role of superdelegates is to fend off grassroots political challengers. It also must have nothing to do with an RNC committee member openly wondering why the Republican Party has primary elections to begin with since the party chooses the nominee anyway — not the voters. That makes sense, right?

And while Bernie Sanders fades into the matrix with his endorsement of Hillary Clinton and recent decision to hit the campaign trail for her, many of his supporters feel the same way Trump supporters feel. The Democratic primary was rife with inconsistencies, voter suppression, and suspect voting machines — all of which have culminated into several high-profile lawsuits alleging wrongdoing by the DNC. Coincidentally, Shawn Lucas, the man who was spearheading one of the lawsuits, was recently found dead on his bathroom floor. But this is all Trump’s fault,right? Or maybe Russia’s?

But rest assured, as POLITICO notes, even though voting inconsistencies became famous in the 2000 Bush v. Gore presidential election, Gore was a good boy and didn’t bother questioning the findings. He did the right thing and conceded defeat despite vocal cries from his ardent supporters that he contest the election.

What’s interesting is that according to the Emmy-nominatedHBO documentary Hacking Democracy, which followed the trail of investigators in Florida in an attempt to get to the bottom of the voter inconsistencies, the Gore campaign was made aware of verifiable issues with the vote counts but still encouraged the investigators to drop their cause and shut up. They were silenced by the candidate they were trying to help. This is what Trump should do if there are any questionable results in November, POLITICO suggests.

And boy, does Trump hate the media. He says it all the time. So much so that POLITICO thinks Trump could single-handedly do irreparable damage to the institution of mainstream media this election. This is yet another fiction being peddled by the self-serving corporate media. Instead of owning up to its waning trust among the general public, they would rather play the blame game. You see, long before Trump hit the 2016 political circuit, Americans had already started to lose trust in the corporate media.In September of 2014, Anti-Media reported, Americans’ trust in the media had reached an all-time low. As of October of 2015, only 7 percent of the country had a “great deal” of trust in the mainstream media — but thismust be Trump’s fault. Or maybe we can pin this on Russia, too.

Another recent development that in my opinion doesn’t prove the elections are rigged per se — but rather, that they are illegitimate — is the overwhelmingly small turnout of voters who nominated both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The two of them combined only attracted nine percent of the general public to vote for them in the primaries, meaning less than a tenth of the U.S. population anointed the nominees, one of whom will eventually be ruling over all Americans. Americans are hardly excited to get out and vote in elections nowadays — possibly because after years of believing unrepresentative politicians’ empty promises, they think the whole process has become futile.

But none of this really matters, anyway, since the U.S. is no longer a democracy or constitutional republic. It’s an oligarchy. In short, as a 2014 Princeton University study concluded, “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”

But again, as POLITICO notes, it’s not the actions of the oligarchy or the corporate media that have led voters to question the legitimacy of the system — it’s Trump’s words.

“…[M]any Republicans [elites] fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and politics itself will have a lasting impact,” POLITICO observes.

“‘The damage this is going to do to various institutions is going to be long term,’ said Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has been one of the country’s most outspoken and consistent anti-Trump voices. ‘How do you restore civil discourse after all of this? He is a postmodern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution — the media, the ballot box — that can be a check on him.’”

But what if it’s the oligarchic political system and the corporate media that have delegitimized themselves, and not some manufactured Trump conspiracy that has suddenly turned half the country into skeptical anti-establishment rebels? Maybe the corporate media’s collusion with the corporate government is the real conspiracy. Or maybe we should stop complaining and just blame Russia and Julian Assange — that seems a lot more convenient to the New York Times.

Was Super Tuesday Rigged?

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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

[1]http://www.politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/2797/FrenchVoting_13.pdf

[2]http://rap.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2053168014547667

[3] http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/05/whos_leading_in_polls_as_nj_primary_approaches.html

[4] http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/05/whos_leading_in_polls_as_nj_primary_approaches.html

[5] https://www.isidewith.com/poll/801555698/9333341

[6] https://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/me/mea/mec03c

Hillary Clinton is an Astrological Plague (Gonzo & Conjure ’16)

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Bones

Source: Disinfo.com

“He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.”- Hunter S. Thompson

There are times when the entire cosmos turns against humanity for whatever reason. Perhaps the gods are fickle or better yet intent on keeping humanity’s collective nose in the dirt. The cosmic explosion of Mars, Mercury, and Pluto joining Saturn and Jupiter in a massive retrograde has devastated nearly everyone I know. People have been murdered, jobs lost, houses caught fire, infectious diseases caught, and my own car took a shit and died an hour outside of where I live.

And Hillary fucking Clinton, the horse-thief and reptilian creature from the swamps of D.C., seems to be soaking in the malignant energy and using it to power her own nefarious schemes.

I had missed a week of reporting, the widespread panic and disasters leading to an uptick in people seeking answers and magical aid. Between peering into the realm of probability and haggling with spirits I had very little time for the National Cataclysm Affairs desk here at Disinfo. I hadn’t just been working but studying, picking up a copy of Hadean Press’ Conjure Codex, a fascinating little journal blending old school grimoires and demonology with New World traditions like my beloved Hoodoo as well as Quimbunda, Vodoun, and many others. Ole’ Bones was adding new techniques and allies to his repertoire(check my facebook for more on that).

I was studying a ~~stolen~~ borrowed copy of Jake Stratton-Kent’s superb edition of The True Grimoire, contemplating how the demon Surgat might help in road opening work when the editors at Disinfo called me.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Bones! It’s XXXXXXXX over at Disinfo. What are you up to?”

“Me?” I peered over to the altar, a jar of graveyard dirt along with 13 different roots and herbs empowering the spirit of a dead soldier I needed for a case. “N-nothing in particular. Just uh….the usual.

Why are you calling me? Are you going to start paying me?”

“Uh….” The man on the line coughed, trying to distract from the question, “….hey, uh, noticed you haven’t posted in awhile. Everything alright?”

“Alright? No, everything is not alright. Between my car fucking blowing up and Mars deciding to take a fucking piss on humanity I would say it’s safe to assume nothing is alright. I’m knee deep in case work here, you know: clients, i.e. people that give me money for my services. D-do you know how much shit I need to get done before the moon starts to wane, let alone before the mansions of Al-Jubana and Iklil Al-Jabhah pass?”

“I uh…”

“Jesus CHRIST, your just walking around in all this aren’t you? Don’t you understand the very HEAVENS are against us?!? You’re letting your KIDS go UNPROTECTED through all this madness??? Y-y-y-you want them to be eaten alive by a pack of wild dingoes, or maybe even shot dead by some shitty cop with a chip on his-”

“BONES!” His shout came tinged with fear. When the wizards of the world start to board up their windows for a storm you can’t see the wise are quick to follow. “Look man, just…just email me whatever you think I should do. But I need another piece.”

Truth be told I had one bumping around in my head, for just as surely as the fortunes of my clients faded as Mars dropped ever out of sight, so too the American “people” seemed doomed in the truest, most poetic sense of the word.

Hillary is that doom.

It’s should come as no surprise that American elections are rigged. Everybody who isn’t completely braindead (so of course we’re speaking about a minority here) gets that uneasy feeling in the stomach about electoral politics. Like someone trying to sell you a car radio in front of a liquor store it seems shady as all hell.

That’s because it is.

First let’s recall that while you may be free to vote in whoever the hell you want, the actual lawmaking part is out of the hands of both you and your “representative.” Take for example ALEC, the massive corporate lobbying machine, merely one stinky carp in the cesspool that is American politics. They simply offer “ideas” on bills to be submitted to congress that heavily favor corporate interests and they pay their lapdogs well. Most may be voted down, but consider that while a success rate of 9% may not seem like alot, less than 2% of introduced bills passed the 112^th session of the U.S. Congress. That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.

Or, to put it in the vernacular “shit walks, money talks.”

Corrupt is one thing. Hell, even the Vatican Bank launders drug money. Corrupt is no surprise. Even stolen elections are no surprise, but at least they never did it in plain sight.

This Hillary thing is a new beast entirely. Let’s recall that this thing all started less like a campaign and more like a mafia.

“In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving $10,000 a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund. For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

From these large amounts of money being transferred from state coffers to the Hillary Victory Fund in Washington, the Clinton campaign got the first $2,700, the DNC was to get the next $33,400, and the remainder was to be split among the 33 signatory states. With this scheme, the Hillary Victory Fund raised over $26 million for the Clinton Campaign by the end of 2015.”

The classic you-scratch-my-back-and-I-scratch-your’s.

And scratch they have.

In Iowa:

“It’s been reported that Hillary Clinton instructed her staff in Iowa to rig the caucus voting by falsely standing in the O’Malley corner of the room when the final precinct hand counts are tallied…

Mega-giant corporation Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now in charge of counting both the Democratic and Republican votes in this year’s state primary elections…the fact is the Gates Foundation along with Microsoft employees have literally donated millions of dollars to Hillary and the Clinton Foundation…

Both CNN and The Blaze reported that the final tally was missing votes from 90 Iowa precincts…

C-SPAN actually captured on video at the Polk County precinct the caucus chair and the Clinton precinct captain not even bothering to conduct a final count of the caucus voters and then the Clinton precinct captain caught lying to the Sanders precinct captain…

This week in Iowa is that the results were determined by six coin tosses in a row all favoring Hillary to ultimately decide the winner. After six county precincts ended up in dead ties between Clinton and Sanders, by state protocol those six precincts did a coin toss to determine the winner and in all six counties we’re supposed to actually believe that Hillary’s tails won. Though Clinton’s known for telling fish tales, it shouldn’t have overturned the virtually impossible statistical odds of just 1.56%.”

In Arizona:

“The Arizona Democratic Party has officially announced that it will be investigating multiple accusations of election fraud across the state’s Democratic primary vote Tuesday, where voters who claimed to have previously registered as Democrats say their party affiliation was unknowingly changed to independent– and therefore, they weren’t allowed to cast ballots in the closed primary.”

In Nevada:

“The Nevada Democratic Convention…began with a highly debated decision to change the Convention rules despite not getting the needed majority of vocal votes. But at the end of the night, when a motion was made to recount the delegates, the chair of the Convention closed out the meeting without even giving the delegates’ a chance to say “nay”…The Convention is not reconvening tomorrow, it was announced. Instead, protesters will have to pursue legal avenues.”

In New York:

Multiple investigations were launched and a top election official was suspended this week after tens of thousands of registered voters were found to be missing from the rolls during Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York….Entire blocks and buildings of voters in some districts were purged from the voter rolls, de Blasio said.

In Kentucky:

WKYT, a local news station in Kentucky, was told by the Pike County Clerk’s office that there were issues with one of their card readers, which caused a delay in the numbers. AP then erased the votes, pushing Hillary to the lead by over 4,000 votes….It was later reported that 31 counties in Kentucky reported election fraud on Tuesday.

Oregon alone seems untouched, mainly due to the automatic registration of all it’s citizens to vote, but that doesn’t stop the corporate owned media from howling about how “vulnerable” THAT system is; it’s quite telling that the one state possibly impervious to the Hillary Mafia is the only one they seem so concerned about, everybody else simply getting a shrug of the shoulders and almost no airtime.

The sheer audacity, the open contempt for the electoral system so plain for all to see not only hints that Hillary has been chosen as the next heir to the Imperium but that the Powers That Be couldn’t even bother to hide it from you.

That’s how little power you have, that’s how much “democracy” exists in the United States: Uncle Sam is literally ignoring your pleas and if he does hear you he spits in your face and simply says “what the fuck you going to do about it?”

All this during the election! She doesn’t even wear the drone-encrusted crown yet! What kind of madness might we expect when she sits upon the Throne of Skulls?

Ask our friends in Haiti.

“In June 2009, the Haitian Parliament unanimously passed a law requiring that the minimum wage be raised to $0.61 an hour, or $5 a day. (The average cost of living is estimated to be the equivalent of about $23 a day.) This pay raise was staunchly opposed by foreign manufacturers who had set up shop in the country, and the United States Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development backed those manufacturers. After Haiti’s government mandated the raise, the United States aggressively (and successfully) pushed Haiti’s president to lower the minimum wage for garment workers to what factory owners were willing to pay: the equivalent of about $0.31 an hour (or $2.50 per eight-hour day).

In 2011, WikiLeaks released a set of previously-secret diplomatic cables. The American publication The Nation partnered with Haitian news organization Haïti Liberté to cover them, finding (among other things) how strongly the United States had opposed the minimum wage hike”

Haiti, a nation that has been harassed and abused by the criminal Imperium of the United States since day-fucking-1, has become the playground for wealthy capitalists looking for a captive population to exploit. And the one leading the way for all the plunder is none other than the Clinton Foundation.

“Less than 1% of this amount(the $10 billion in aid) made it to the Haitian government. Bill Clinton had total control of the balance,” Dantò claimed.

She added, “Hillary and Bill Clinton ‘opened Haiti’ as their private asset to liquidate. They used the resources of the World Bank, the State Department, USAID, the UN, the private military security contractors, the US military, and the Fed’s passport and visa issuance capabilities. They got kickbacks called ‘donations’ from anyone who wished to buy from them a piece of Haiti lands, oil, iridium, uranium or gold. The Clintons have used governmental power to conduct their private business and called it ‘helping poor Haitians.’”

How much of a scum-sucking, evil, predatory reptile do you have to be to profit off of the earthquake that devastated Haiti? The Clinton Foundation not only sent toxic trailers to the homeless but mysteriously “misplaced” millions in aid and awarded building contracts to mostly non-Haitian companies.

It’s fucking Batista’s Cuba all over again, expect this time we made sure to import an Imperium-style police state, regardless if it was “needed:”

“The U.S. moved aggressively to beef up the Haitian police (PNH), giving police chief Mario Andrésol“command and control advice and mentoring” from Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and FBI agents while trying to ensure that Haitian police officers were paid and well-equipped. The DEA advisor was Darrel Paskett, whose first post-quake priority was directing his “well-armed” bulletproof-vested DEA agents to guard the U.S. Embassy from “huge crowds” of desperate Haitians that might overrun it, FOX News reported. The crowds never materialized.”

Taken all together what does Hillary mean for the American electorate?

It means that the gods themselves have conspired against us, that the United States has finally taken it’s dark turn from Empire to barbaric Thralldom; it means an openly criminal “government” that exists on a network of dirty money, whispered memos, secret handshakes, and backroom deals; it means human beings demoted to mere walking sources of profit, expendable livestock for Capitalists to fund million-dollar vacations and mansions in countries where the common folk eat on less than a dollar a day.

Hillary IS the wrath of heaven, a plague upon a nation of sinners that made it possible for such an invertebrate to even come into being; the Kingdom of Mole Rats has birthed a bloodthirsty creature hellbent on devouring as many souls as possible while she reshapes the face of the planet for her Neo-Liberal masters.

Buckle in comrades: a darkness not thus seen is slowly spreading across the savannah, propelled onwards by international finance and warmongers hungry for profit. The stars have aligned against the free-spirits; I write this from a Florida ER room, my wife having slipped into toxic shock mid-article. Like I said: bad shit is happening everywhere. Hillary is just a symptom. The stars and unseen hands toy with humanity and invisible currents shift the tides of the luck plane.

In this age of scavengers the jackals seek to capture the rotting throne for no other reason than to keep the tides of blood flowing, vampires seeking to drain us down to the very last drop. The stars smile upon the senseless bloodletting and those that would bring us holocaust are going to get what they can while the getting is good.

But, as we know, their best efforts are all for naught. Mars will return to it’s proper place, and the forces of death will in turn be feasted upon. The stars are never set, and even the moon must change in her courses; nothing can withstand the forces of entropy, even entropy itself. After the offending appendix is torn out of my wife her body will heal; just as the “body politic” is eaten and polluted by Hillary and her reptiles so too shall the time come when even her tyrannical efforts shall fail and she in turn is feasted on. This we have foreseen. Welcome to the motherfucking jungle that is modern living.

Hillary’s desperation only hints that things are far worse off then we can even imagine, and her crimes, though blatant, can only slow the inevitable. We Hyenas shall wait with bared fangs for the inevitable collapse.

The stars may not be right today, but they drift ever further in our favor.

Democrats can’t unite unless Wasserman Schultz goes!

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Source: Intrepid Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to 1984

Posted on May 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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.”

Hillary’s Neocon Problem

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Gerald Sussman

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Hillary Clinton has a dark history in foreign policy. Indeed, if the Nuremberg principles were applied evenly, her name would certainly be on the docket, along with her former boss in the White House, who is actually less of a hawk than she. When Donald Trump publicly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Russia over international conflicts, she referred to such an idea as putting “Christmas in the Kremlin.” She’s red-baited Bernie Sanders for his support for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions back in the 1980s. Clinton basically backs not “political realism,” but the more imperial tradition of neoconservative “American exceptionalism,” a chauvinist mindset by which the US sets the political, economic, and military priorities of the world and the places and times of its interventions, sometimes with allied support, sometimes without, at its own discretion.

Hillary is a product of her husband’s alignment with Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the right wing shift of the party, which moved the Democrats away from its moorings in organized labor, the New Deal, civil rights, and the Great Society. Bill Clinton’s successful election undoubtedly inspired the formation of “New” Labour in Britain, which likewise broke with its party history in the labor movement. In the 1990s, then MP Tony Blair, his shadow government chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown, and his chief pollster Philip Gould came to America as apprentices of the Clinton presidential campaigns to study their public relations and other electioneering tactics. This became part of New Labour’s successful “Third Way” victorious strategy in 1997. Back then, Anthony Howard, writing in the Times of London, said that Clinton’s New Democrats “lighted the path” for Blair’s New Labour. Blair partnered with Clinton and the DLC in taking a more militarist stance toward Saddam Hussein, which paved the way for Bush’s and Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton’s and the DLC’s legacy candidate is Hillary. And what better way to prove her cojones, in case anyone thought a woman president might turn out to be a negotiator and peacenik, than to pick on Russia and reignite the Cold War. Despite the Russians’ brilliant mix of negotiation – warding off a US invasion of Iran, getting the US off Assad’s back with the disposal of his chemical weapons stash – and their effective military intervention against ISIS, Obama, Clinton, and now Kerry will not relent in their hostility. The US neocon inner circle cannot countenance a balance of power arrangement with the Kremlin, disregarding Russia’s status as the second most militarily powerful country in the world. Clinton has called Putin a dictator, the favorite term of disgrace in American ruling circles, except when it comes to America’s allies in the Gulf states, Erdogan, and the long list of authoritarian friends the US has backed over the entire course of the postwar era. Indeed, Putin may be a strongman of sorts, and an extremely popular one in his own country, but is far less of an authoritarian than his predecessor, ” Boris Yeltsin, who ruled by decree and whom Hillary’s husband lauded and financed as a genuine, if quite inebriated, democrat.

Was Hillary in on Bill’s political choices? Recently speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Clinton’s secretary of labor Robert Reich said that Bill never made an important decision without consulting the first lady. What are the programs to which Hillary can claim advisory credit during her husband tenure? NAFTA, welfare reform (“ending welfare as we know it,” said Bill), balancing the budget (inflicting austerity measures), the 1994 crime bill (“three strikes and you’re out”), bank deregulation (a sonata for the Great Recession). All of these projects, says author Thomas Frank, were for working Americans and people of color absolute disasters. And one might add to his list the expansion of NATO and the assault on Yugoslavia.

As secretary of state, Hillary backed CIA director Petraeus’ plan to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, from which Obama eventually backed away, thanks to Russia’s intervention and defense of Syria’s sovereignty. As a good neocon soldier for American exceptionalism, Clinton aligns herself with whatever appears at the moment to be the “national interest” center of political gravity (promoting the oil industry, arms sales, the pro-Zionist alliance, divide and rule aid to opponents of secular nationalism, right-to-protect military and economic interventions). The distraction over her emailgate and the Benghazi investigation hides the real crimes of her active support for the bombing of Libya, the overthrow of the government, and the resulting chaos and ISIS organizing in the country, not to mention her backing for the Honduran coup d’etat. Former secretary of defense Robert Gates says that it was Hillary who pushed Obama into the decision on Libya, for which the president now publicly expresses regret, calling the present condition of the country (his words) “a shit show.”

Her champions who cheer her work with women and children ignore the thousands of women and children in Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East, who were slaughtered under her leadership in the State Department. Speaking on regime change, even a right-wing former Pentagon analyst, Michael Maloof, didn’t believe it was appropriate to attack Iraq. “Now with Libya,” he says, “it’s the same. And Hillary Clinton was very much responsible for that.”

If she becomes president, what can be expected of her on domestic policy? She’ll be a good team player – that is, the neocon team – and may even get something accomplished, such as privatizing part of social security and medicare, which was always part of the DLC agenda, and working more closely with the oil companies. Among her other achievements during her years in the State Department, according to investigative journalist, Lee Fang, was her creation of a separate bureau, with more than 60 staff, whose focus was on energy resources. Traveling the world, Clinton used her position, partnered with Chevron, to promote the practice of fracking in developing countries.

With the power couple in the White House, their assets already worth well over $100 million, and with a Congress being mostly a millionaires’ club, no serious tax increase on the rich can be expected. Indeed, the White House will be more of a revolving door for government officials and staff moving back and forth between the corporate world and “public service.” Open Secrets.org found 84 revolving door personnel working for Hillary, more than on any other politician’s staff: “the greatest number of staffers who either came to Capitol Hill after representing private interests or left the member’s staff for a lobbying position.”

Her march to the White House relies on over 400 superdelegates pledged to her – a number of them also wearing the hat of corporate lobbyist – rather than to the democratic voice of the people, Even if nominated and then elected, Hillary, lacking credibility about her authenticity, will not be a popular president. Nearly half of Democrats don’t trust her (56% express trust vs. 81% for Bernie). And a new AP-GfK poll reveals that 55% of all Americans hold a negative opinion of her. Under her presidency, and with the return of the first man, American politics will continue to be business as usual.

Gerald Sussman is a Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University

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MEET HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN CHAIR: “Moneyman” John Podesta and his Revolving Door

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Gustav Wynn

Source: OpEdNews.com

If you haven’t heard yet about John Podesta, don’t be surprised – the major media’s radio silence belies his power and influence, working both inside and outside the US government to bundle campaign money and influence policy. Outside the US, his family’s lobbying firm is a magnet for gobs of cash coming from Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Qatar and many others hoping to curry favor on the inside track.

The above video demonstrates the bluntness of Mr. Podesta, one time chief of staff to Bill Clinton, as he lay out his ill-fated scheme for public education, raining aggressive standardized testing policies, Common Core and charter schools onto the states through an avalanche of money. Buddied up with Jeb Bush, this 42 minute conference unpacked in 2012 how the Race to the Top initiative would transform every 3rd-8th grade public school into testing factories built on unproven, secret logarithmic formulas to rank students, teachers and schools.

PEARSON PAYDAY: The clip shows Bush and Podesta laughing about how strongly they agreed that billionaire philanthropists, corporations, hedge fund managers and political action committees should pump money into “infrastructure” for education reform. The plot would succeed, farming out major education functions to testing firms and consultants as schools lost student funding, precious learning time, arts, sports and counseling services.

Part of the plan was to generate PR and “communications” through advocacy organizations, but the heavy lifting came as hedge funders flooded statehouses with campaign cash. Once elected, Podesta’s revolving door came into use, dispatching staffers to write the policy for busy politicians. He founded Center for American Progress, the think tank Politico calls Hillary’s “policy shop” and hired a slew of former Dept of Education officials to write articles.

The implementation of Common Core has been roundly panned, with Hillary Clinton herself deeming it a botch-job after it led to explosive test refusals across the states, led in striking fashion by New York. Podesta noted in the video that education “reform” would go through ups and downs, insisting the donors anticipate fierce, sustained resistance.

He accurately described how teachers would reject his corporatization, but he left out how parents and students would opt-out of exams en masse, turning the resultant data into “swiss cheese” and thereby, making expectations of standardization pointless. Yet Hillary doubled down just last week, saying she would encourage her granddaughter to take the Common Core exams. This signals to education reformers to keep funding candidates and keep promoting the “valuable data” claim.

DEEDS, NOT WORDS: Hillary promised last month to end the revolving door onstage in televised debates, but her closest advisers took funding from the Gates, Waltons and Wall Street to promote privatization. Her current staff includes lobbyists for Keystone XL, private prisons and big finance firms.

The idea that she takes Wall Street money yet would still be tough on them defies common sense, as did the claim Obama was tough on banks after he took their millions. Like David Dayen, those following the issue know Obama went exceedingly soft on banks, failing to prosecute securities fraud, robosigning and granting backdoor immunity deals that only cut in the government on the heist.

Hillary says she needs corporate cash to compete with Republicans, but this was proven wrong by Bernie, raising record-breaking amounts at the same time making PAC money a liability. Hillary’s lack of vision shows how little faith she had in working class Americans.

THE ESTABLISHMENT HELPS IT’S OWN: But it also shows how entrenched Hillary is in the money-fueled status quo. Podesta has been running SuperPACs since the Obama years, but was also given powerful advisory positions in the White House, picking Obama’s cabinet members and advising on education and environmental issues.

Podesta’s family lobbies for a variety of corporate interests, foreign governments and fossil fuel producers, including Sberbank, the biggest state-influenced bank in Russia, who was looking to avoid sanctions following the occupation of Crimea. The same bank was just found to have shell corporations in the Panama Papers.

The major media won’t report this, but here, Salon exposes how foreign entities ply The Podesta Group with rich lobbying fees, notably Saudi royalty, the governments of Iraq and Kuwait, Qatari liquid natural gas producers and many US corporations including Walmart, Monsanto and Lockheed Martin.

The Podesta Group was founded by John Podesta but is now run by Tony Podesta, also a large bundler for Hillary. The firm was instrumental in brokering unconscionable deals as Clinton administration officials like Madeline Albright and Wesley Clark actually acquired major telecoms in Kosovo, capitalizing on their diplomatic contacts. The revolving door is still in full swing today. Dubbing John Podesta the “Hillary moneyman”, reporter Michael Isikoff listed a number of foreign lobbyists who also bundle big bucks for Hillary including some who served with her at the State Dept.

ABOVE REPROACH: The Podestas maintain that the millions the firm receives do not affect John’s work on policy matters. John also told Politico that speeches the Clintons gave to Wall Street and overseas conglomerates don’t affect their decisions. Podesta himself advised Bill Clinton to repeal Glass-Steagall, in a hasty 3-day decision that is today seen as a contributing cause of the 2008 fiscal crisis, only to lobby for Bank of America and others after leaving office.

Writing for The Nation in 2013, Ken Silverstein described CAP as an uncommonly secretive revolving door to the Obama White House, basically an unregistered lobby shop promising access to important officials for large contributions. CAP took exception, yet refused to disclose donors or basic financial statements.

Time and again, the Podesta’s controversial deeds never seem to reflect back on Hillary. For example, John co-hosted this recent fundraiser with an NRA lobbyist, another with a big pharma lobbyist, and nuclear power producers. Tony’s wife Heather, also a major bundler, lobbies for the health insurance industry.

PRO-UNION, THIS WEEK: In NY, Hillary visited the picket line of striking Verizon workers but she has taken major campaign cash from Verizon. She also took over $330k from the Waltons, the largest anti-union employer in the US. But Hillary’s union support is decidedly top-down. Here the NY Post, Fox News, Jacobin, the LA Times, Slate, and union teachers themselves disapprove of the extremely early endorsement of Clinton by the AFT, followed later by the NEA.

MEDIA MALPRACTICE: The fix will not be televised. CNN’s parent corp is a top donor to Hillary’s campaign which is hard to ignore seeing their “Bernie Blackout”. Here a CNN anchor actually tells Amy Goodman that Bernie’s speech was censored because he didn’t win more states than Hillary.

In order to paint Hillary’s win as a foregone conclusion, media regularly reports delegate totals including superdelegates which are subject to change. But the media didn’t cover Bernie at all for 2-3 months until Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes started reporting his large crowds. The NY Times was caught stealth-editing a positive Bernie article after it was shared widely. The WaPo’s bias was evident as they publushed 16 anti-Bernie articles right before Super Tuesday.

THANKS HILLARY: Since the first Citizens United ruling in January 2012, media firms have enjoyed over $5 billion per year in expanded ad spending. Ironically, the case began as a lawsuit pitting Citiens United, a right wing organization against Hillary Clinton who wanted to block them from distributing DVDs called Hillary The Movie. The Supreme Court however greatly expanded the scope of the case to categorize almost all political spending in national races as “free speech”.

Later that year, a second Citizens United ruling made unlimited, anonymous spending legal in all political races, including state and local contests. So what started as a bitter vendetta against Hillary became a key ruling greenlighting uncontrollable money orgies during elections, particularly encouraging negative ads as “independent” expenditures are less controversial. The prohibition against coordination between PACs and campaigns has become something of an open joke, but the greater irony is the way Hillary now harnesses the PAC money and unlimited spending as the frontrunner.

THE SUPERDELEGATE FIX: Leaving little to chance, Hillary “bought” hundreds of superdelegates in 2015 before Bernie was even running. The Hillary Victory Fund is a PAC run by her campaign and the DNC which uses the campaign finance loophole created by the awful McKutcheon SCOTUS decision.

Hillary’s wealthy supporters max out contributions to 33 different state parties who then transfer the money to Hillary. It’s legal but this is money laundering. Then, the fund distributes less than a third of the donations to local candidates, securing the votes of superdelegates long before a single primary vote was cast.

They double the money by maxing out spouses, and then double it again by doing it in calendar years 2015 and 2016. So even though we have limits, Hillary found a way to get $25 million from her core contributors and hundred of superdelegates committed. This is how the game was rigged before votes were cast. Wyoming showed us that people’s votes don’t matter, Bernie won by 12% but got 7 delegates to Hillary’s 11.

As the primary progresses, many voters are realizing how byzantine and unfair party primaries are, with many controls on the idea of one person-one vote, not the least of which has been voting improprieties such as the hours-long lines in Arizona, reports of unrequested party affiliation switching in NY, PA and elsewhere.

The bottom line here is class war, with the 1% doing their all to secure a win for the most corporatist candidate they can. An anti-establishment Republican voter backlash has led to unimaginable success by Donald Trump, but so too have Democratic voters flocked to Bernie Sanders as 2016 increasingly becomes an election about rejecting money-in-politics. We can only hope the truth somehow gets out to the largest voting block in the country – the non-voter – to motivate them to get active and defend the middle class.

About the Author:

(OpEdNews Contributing Editor since October 2006) Inner city schoolteacher from New York, mostly covering media manipulation. I put election/finance reform ahead of all issues but also advocate for fiscal conservatism, ethics in journalism and curbing overpopulation. I enjoy open debate, history, the arts and hope to adopt a third child. Gustav Wynn is a pseudonym, but you knew that.

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