http://dissidentvoice.org/

November 17th, 2015

 

U.S. Elections: Corruption on a Massive Scale

by Jack Balkwill

activist in Virginia

 

Did I hear you say that there must be a catch?

Will you walk away from a fool and his money?

If you want it, here it is, come and get it,

But you better hurry cause it’s going fast

Paul McCartney, “Come and Get it” recorded by Badfinger for the movie The Magic Christian, 1969

 

Data from the last Democratic Party “debate,” suggests that the strategy of the Democratic National Committee to suppress viewership is working.  Democratic debates are only drawing about half the viewers as are the Republican debates.

This strategy is obviously to help Hillary Clinton, as her Democratic rivals complain.  If most Democrats had a clue about Hillary’s political history or what she stands for or who’s funding her campaign, she would lose any election by a landslide.

We have heard echoes of the inevitability of the Hillary campaign for years blasted by the corporate media, long before she officially declared her candidacy– an important part of the establishment strategy.

Those at the top of the Democratic Party hierarchy are aware that Hillary must be a stealth candidate if she is to win.  Her 2008 campaign failed, despite mountains of cash from the powerful banksters, defense cheats, polluters and other influential corporate criminals, because she got too much exposure.  Barrack Obama sneaked past her under the radar, with many Democratic voters not understanding what he stood for until after he was elected, their not having examined his Senate voting record.  Voters believed his stated positions, which he universally betrayed after the election.

The primary elections are important to the establishment in ensuring that only controlled candidates will make it to the general elections so that voters have no meaningful choice.  The Democratic and Republican general election candidates will have the same policies when it comes to supporting the ruling oligarchs and plutocrats, who don’t care about abortion, gun or gay policies (these are employed to distract the masses and make it appear there are significant differences in the corporate political parties).

For example, some of the first things Obama did after being elected was to continue the bailout of Wall Street and increase the troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000 (Bush’s popularity at the end of his presidency was so low he couldn’t have gotten away with this, so it took Obama’s fresh face for the policies to continue on behalf of the establishment, which always wins).

To accomplish this, it is important that any candidate actually representing the public interest be censored out of the debates.  A peace candidate option for the public’s choice, for example, would undermine the entire scam.  Polling shows that Americans overwhelmingly favor ending the wars and bringing the troops home, a thing the establishment’s candidates will not allow.

Monday morning I watched as CNN invited John McCain and Lindsey Graham on to tell us the Paris bombings could have been prevented if only we’d created more war and followed their advice on unleashing even more terrorists on the Syrian people (my words, shorthand for what they actually have been saying for years).

Of course, President Obama has been training terrorists to attack the Syrian government for years, just not enough to satisfy McCain and Graham, whose excuse for any failure is that we didn’t wage enough war.  The consequences have been disastrous, with these “Syrian rebels,” as corporate media call them, having gone on to join ISIS, taking the US-supplied weapons and equipment with them.

CNN has moved their coverage to Paris, announcing how terrible is the disaster there from ISIS-inspired mayhem.  But they didn’t do the same when ISIS brought down a Russian passenger plane recently, with 100 more deaths than occurred in Paris.  The propaganda is selective, and corporate media are currently demonizing Russians, so prefer to gain war support by choosing the Paris killings as reason for outrage.

One should ask why McCain and Graham are invited onto CNN to spout their warmongering advice, year after year.  Their advice is always to create more war by expanding current wars and adding new ones.  CNN and the other networks have retired military officers speak year after year about the Pentagon side of things.  No peace activists are ever seen (that would represent the popular public sentiment, not allowed in what absurdly passes for a “democracy”).

And so it is the mainstream press reflect the same policies as do the corporate-sponsored two-party candidates, so that the public do not see a second opinion in their corporate-viewpoint mass media.

There actually is a peace candidate in the current national election, Jill Stein of the Green Party, but the public are not allowed to hear about her through their TVs, where most Americans get their news.  This has become the norm for American elections, although those running as a Democrat or Republican are each given at least hundreds, if not thousands of hours of free mass media coverage by ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, FOX and the others.

One does not get the TV coverage nor the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions if one actually represents (except in rhetorical fashion) the desires of the public.

When Ralph Nader, a well-known public figure with an impeccable reputation for integrity, ran as the Green Party nominee in 2000, corporate media disparaged him in what little coverage he got.  They could not completely avoid covering such a well-known person, but did what they could to turn the public against him, and to this day many partisan Democrats despise him for the lies they’ve accepted about his campaign, including the lie that it was Nader’s fault that Gore lost.

Still, Nader had millions of followers, so the establishment became fearful of his being seen by the public.  When a college student gave Nader his ticket to the Presidential debate on 3 October, 2000, Nader attempted to enter the debate room at the University of Massachusetts, and was stopped by police, who escorted him away.  What he was doing was entirely legal, following all of the rules, but the establishment had a massive fear that a TV camera might catch a glimpse of Nader sitting in the audience, unable to participate in the debates, showing what a sham is the presidential debates.  When 5,000 supporters began to demonstrate for Nader’s inclusion, outside of the debates, police charged them beating many and spraying them with chemicals.

When such a thing happens in countries not on the State Department friendly list, corporate media go ballistic, decrying a lack of democracy.  Here in the Land of the Free it is standard practice.

When Jill Stein attempted to similarly enter the grounds of Hofstra University for the presidential candidate debates in October of 2012, she was dragged off by police to a remote warehouse where she was shackled for eight hours, apparently to keep her from being seen by the public, who are not allowed to know there are candidates who actually represent their interest.  It would be impossible to maintain the wars, environmental pollution, banking scams and other criminal activity of those who run USA, Inc., if an iota of democracy were allowed.

Democrats and Republicans run the presidential debates and do all that they can to prevent democracy from breaking out in the land by denying competition from those not corporate-controlled.  Their candidates are funded by roughly the same corporate interests in return for selling out the public interest.

Nothing will change until the public are informed that their election system is more corrupt than they imagine it to be, and most citizens are aware that it is at least somewhat corrupt despite the best efforts of corporate media to make it appear that elections are fair and democratic.  Even the Republican electorate appear to be aware it is a rigged game to select politicians from the system, by currently choosing the bizarre front-running candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson, neither of whom has ever held public office.

The Republican leadership now depend on the votes of religious extremists to put them over the top, while Democrats make appeals to people of color.  Both groups are sold out after the elections, but the formula has proven to be successful.  Most vote Democrat or Republican because they believe the lies they are told.  About half the registered voters don’t bother even showing up at the polls, convinced there is no there, there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.

The American people will be controlled until they have a public interest mass media of their own.  The Nazis had to use storm troops and Gestapo to achieve a similar economic system based on perpetual war.