BIDEN-HARRIS WRITE OFF AMERICANS IN LEBANON, & A LESSON IN U.S. 'DEMOCRACY' & HOW THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TREATS ITS BASE LIKE AN ABUSED SPOUSE

 

 

 

 

Some necessary explanatory notes, and a correction to what the woman panelist said.
Matt Miller is the chief U.S. State Department propagandist ("spokesman"), a completely immoral creature who covers for the U.S.-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people, parrying questions, creating a fog of gaslighting. He's not even a human being, but an ANTI-human being.

Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi who wrote op-ed columns for the Washington Post, a major media organ of the ruling class. Khashoggi occasionally criticized the Saudi dictatorship run by "Prince" Mohammed Salman. Salman found this intolerable, so Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018, where he was murdered, his body sawed into pieces, and the pieces smuggled out and made to vanish. After the Turkish government exposed this crime, there was a period where U.S. politicians waved their arms and waxed indignant, proclaiming the crime to be "unacceptable." Eventually the furor blew over. The Saudi dictator scapegoated some hapless government operatives and that was the end of it.

The woman on the panel attributes the U.S. abandonment of Americans under Israeli bombardment in Lebanon to the Biden regime being  "rudderless." That's not it. The reason is callousness for the victims.

The U.S. government has an ingrained habit of siding with Israel whenever it murders Americans. The reason is that the U.S. political system at the highest levels has been colonized by Israel through its fifth column in the U.S., which includes organizations like AIPAC, the ADL, Christian Zionists, with the establishment media long acting like they are Israeli propaganda mouthpieces.

The callousness of U.S. politicians and government for American victims of Israeli violence has a long history, going back to the attempted sinking of the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967, and even earlier to Israeli secret police bombing U.S. facilities in Egypt in the 1950's under "false flag" operations designed to lay the blame on Egyptians, and forward to the murder of Rachel Corrie, who was run over by an Israeli bulldozer when she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian family's home, the murder of a passenger on a relief convoy in international waters by Israeli commandos to stop it reaching Gaza, and the murder of star Al Jazeera reporter by an Israeli army sniper in May 2022, in Jenin, West Bank, Palestine. And just to show they had total impunity to murder journalists, two weeks later the Israelis murdered another journalist. They didn't have to wait for a scandal to blow over. They wanted to make it clear to reporters who covered their crimes that their lives could be snuffed out at any time with no consequences to Israel.

Here's the link to the episode of Sam Seder's "The Majority Report" from which this is excerpted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvlVFMvN1d0

Here's an interesting example of youtube political interference. I searched on youtube the title of the show, and it only came up with some shit about Israeli terrorist prime minister Menachem Begin. I had to search OUTSIDE of youtube to get the youtube URL link! Not the first time I've had to do that. I knew when Google bought youtube it would spoil it. Google, now under the corporate umbrella of Alphabet, was a joint project of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the NSA and CIA at Stanford University. And it shows.

Republican Supreme Court Rules "Death To Workers!"

  Very predictably, the Republican Supreme Court denied the Biden regime permission to have OSHA [1] require companies employing 100 or more workers to require their employees to  be vaccinated against Covid-19 OR wear masks and get tested weekly. Hardly an onerous requirement, and no one is being forced to get vaccinated. You could see this one coming a mile away. HOWEVER The Supremes aren't taking any chances with their OWN health! They gave the executive branch a permission slip to allow Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to require all health care workers at institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to be vaccinated, unless they get a medical or religious exemption.

After all, one of THEM might wind up in a hospital or clinic or doctor's office sometime!

The vote to emasculate OSHA was 6 to 3. The 6 Republican apparatchiks voted as a bloc. Disingenuously they said it was up to Congress to empower OSHA to mandate this, knowing full well that such a thing is impossible in the U.S. Senate as currently constituted. This is a ploy these cynics have pulled before, for example when they screwed Ledbetter out of a lifetime of stolen wages with an absurd decision. (That time Congress did act, unlike when the Republican Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights act in two decisions and erased the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law from the books, opening the way to the stranglehold that reactionary billionaires currently have over U.S. electoral politics.)

The 3 Democratic appointed justices don't matter, despite media propagandists pretending they do, pretending there's some mystery about how the reactionary bloc will decide issues. The power establishment's propaganda system has made strenuous efforts to maintain the absurd fiction that this court is some kind of neutral judicial body when it is patently purely political, very partisan, and with an extreme rightwing ideology. The 6 reactionaries are mislabeled as "conservatives." The ACTUAL conservatives, that is, those who want to preserve the status quo, are the 3 mislabeled as "liberals."

The U.S. Supreme Court has been a Republican court since the regime of Richard Nixon (1969-1974). Nixon filled four of the nine seats on the court with reactionaries. Reagan in 1986 gave us the extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia, with 100% approval from the Democrats. The Senate voted to confirm Scalia 98-0! I was sick to my stomach when he was nominated, just reading The New York Times whitewashing version of how reactionary he was. (Ironically, then-Senator Al Gore voted to confirm Scalia, who later repaid the favor by cheating Gore out of the presidency in 2000 with four GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) accomplices on the high court. (Reagan had previously put Scalia on the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the most important appeals court in the Federal system. That was 1982, again with no obstruction from Democrats.)

After Reagan, Bush the Elder gifted us with sex offender Clarence Thomas, a black man with the mind of a white bigot. Here again the Democrats made sure to confirm this bitter right-wing fanatic to a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful posts in the U.S. government. The Democrats controlled the Senate, and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee was none other than Senator Joe Biden (the same Joe Biden who is now president of the U.S.). Thomas used to sexually harass the women working for him. (Bush had made him head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for the purpose of sabotaging government anti-racial discrimination efforts- perversely, Thomas despises affirmative action even though he is black.) One of his victims, Anita Hill, testified to this, only to be savagely smeared in hearings by the Republicans, which Chairman Biden allowed. Privately Biden told the Senate Democrats not to believe Hill, and he blocked a number of corroborating witnesses from appearing. This is told in damning detail in the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer. They were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time, and later climbed higher up the media hierarchy ladder. Mayer became a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and Abramson the first female top editor at The New York Times, both publications being at the pinnacle of U.S. media prestige and influence.  Abramson then discovered she was being paid less than her predecessors and confronted her boss, publisher and scion of the Sulzberger family (that owns controlling interest in the corporation) Arthur Ochs "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., about this, it peeved him, so he fired her and trashed her after that.

One other side note: Thomas' video porn viewing habits were revealed during his confirmation process by the simply expedient of getting his video store rental records. This prompted Congress to rush through a law protecting the privacy of such records. Congress can act when it's an emergency!

Then we come to the Obama rollover. In the last year of his presidency, a vacancy occurred on the court. The Senate boss at the time, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (the Gang Of Plunderers held the Senate then) refused to allow confirmation hearings to even occur for Obama's nominee. This went on for eleven months. Then Trump was "elected." (Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.9 million votes total, but the Electoral College, the real electorate, elected Trump. Democracy as practiced only in America. That was the FIFTH time in U.S. history that the winner lost and the loser won.(The previous time was 2000, when the Republican Supreme Court robbed Al Gore of victory.) So the Democrats proceeded to blame Vladimir Putin for the outcome.)

What did Obama and the Democrats do during this outrageous subversion of the Constitutional duty of the president to fill court vacancies? Nothing much. Did you hear any outrage? Imagine if Democrats blocked a Republican president from filling a vacancy! They'd be threatening civil war- or starting one! It wasn't even a campaign issue in that year's presidential election (2020). So much for making sure the Supreme Court doesn't abolish the right to abortion! (Not to mention dozens of other ways the Supreme Court messes with people's lives.)

"Uhhh, you really thought I cared about YOU?"

Next we got the sociopathic, narcissistic con man Trump getting to fill FOUR seats on the court. He openly proclaimed that he would appoint people to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Yet during Senate confirmation hearings for these far-right-wing extremist ghouls, Democratic Senators went along with the pretense that this wasn't necessarily so. And in another example of a Democrat protecting a sex offender nominee, rightwing California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein hid from her colleagues the fact that nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape a teenage girl (as well as having committed sexual offenses in college). His Federalist Society-approved picks included a fundamentalist religious fanatic, Amy Coney Barrett.

"Baby, it's back to coat hanger abortions for YOU!"

So we've got Scalia/Thomas/Kavanaugh/the Obama Rollover, and all the other reactionaries the Federal judiciary has been crammed with on all three levels (District, which try cases, Appeals, and the Supreme Court, which rejects 90% of attempted appeals, agreeing to review only a small number of cases a year so as not to interfere with the four months they're on vacation). You've probably noticed a pattern here. For at least the past 30 years or so, the Democrats have been accomplices to the Republicans in creating an arch-reactionary Supreme Court, indeed a revanchist one that is driving the U.S. back to a 19th century legal regime. Why does the "liberal" Democratic Party keep aiding and abetting the Republican packing of the virtually all-powerful Supreme Court with reactionaries? The fact that they are doing it is undeniable on the evidence. Their motives are two:

First, just as the awful reactionaries the Republicans run for president provide convenient bogeymen for the Democrats to run against, forcing many people to vote for the Democrats while holding their noses  (political extortion), so the specter of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 which finally granted women a limited right to terminate pregnancies, has been a perennial fright campaign the Democrats trot out at every election. I've received years of fund-raising letters from the Democrats, such as from Nancy Pelosi, and their various committees, telling me how the Supreme Court "hangs in the balance" and thus so does "a woman's right to choose"- maybe if they weren't allergic to the word "abortion," the procedure wouldn't still be so stigmatized that most women still refuse to stand up and defend it. But now it looks like the Democrats cut it too close, as the high court they have helped create is about to strip women of the right to control their own bodies. NOW what, Democrats? Fucking assholes!

Second, and more fundamentally, the Democratic Party IS a right-wing party. It is just as imperialist as the Republicans, and just as dedicated to the perpetuation of corporate oligarchy as is the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). It is not "better" than the GOP. It is merely somewhat less awful. Having a rightwing court is a useful backstop for when the Democratic politicians feel compelled to give in to pressure from their voters and actually pass some progressive legislation. They can rely on the reactionary Supreme Court to cancel the legislation by declaring it "Unconstitutional." There is always a slew of corporate and billionaire-funded reactionary dogs to bring legal challenges to such laws. So reactionary rich people pay reactionary anti-social freaks to sue and reactionary judges do the rest. It's a neat system. Reactionaries working hand in hand, in an organized system of repression and economic rapine. Works for the ultra-rich and their neo-fascist attack dogs. For the rest of us, not so much.

"We're one big happy SUPREME court!'

1] OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, part of the Department of Labor. OSHA is a mostly toothless regulatory agency that is deliberately extremely underfunded and understaffed by Congress so it is unable to do its putative task of regulating all the workplaces in the U.S. for health and safety violations. Typically, when it happens to discover a violation (it only discovers a tiny percentage of them, we can safely assume, since it can rarely inspect most workplaces) the company is merely told to correct the violation. Sometimes a small fine is "proposed," which the company typically challenges and gets reduced. If a worker or workers are killed on the job, things are taken a bit more seriously, but the companies and their managers and executives still get away with what in many cases is murder. (For example, criminally negligent homicide, and depraved indifference homicide charges would apply in many cases.)

The sorry history of how U.S. companies are allowed to get away with maiming, killing, and sickening workers has been well documented in numerous books and articles, including in outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation magazines, and even in the rare major media story about a particular company.

Speaking of vicious businessmen, some years back there was a case in New York City, the Pymm Thermometer company. It made glass thermometers which are filled with mercury. It knowingly exposed its uneducated and naive workers to mercury vapors without respiratory protection. The result was a number of them were permanently maimed with holes in their brains. The local district attorney in Brooklyn brought criminal charges against I believe the company owner, and the jury convicted. The trial judge immediately threw out the convictions, and the criminals got away with it. This in "liberal " New York City, where the Democratic Party appoints its party hacks and  wired insiders as judges. (There is a charade of democracy in that the judges are on the ballot in elections but they never have any opposition candidates so like in China or the Soviet Union or Iraq under Saddam Hussein there is only one "choice.") 

The story was reported in The Village Voice weekly newspaper, a publication that reported what the "mainstream" media systematically hid, and it was gradually destroyed. But that's a long story. An internet search on "Pymm Thermometer" turned up a civil suit filed on behalf of Pymm's crippled working class victims, who can no longer earn a living and are reliant on the crumbs that poor unemployed people can squeeze from the government. The victims lost, and their case was dismissed, as the so-called "Workers Compensation" law barred them from suing. The NY state courts ruled that what Pymm did was NOT an "intentional tort"- BULLSHIT!- therefore the victims could only collect crumbs from Workers Comp. Thus do capitalist courts protect criminal businesspeople, in the U.S. version of capitalism.

Joseph Biden Is ACTUALLY Guilty Of What Adam "Shifty" Schiff Accuses Trump Of

The Democratic Party has lost its collective mind.

Again.

First it was the Russiagate hoax they put us all through. Now it's a phone call Trump made asking the Ukrainian president's help in investigating what should be a scandal around the Democratic Party establishment's and corporate media's favorite candidate for president in 2020, the segregationist Joseph R. Biden.

Democratic Party Congressman and chair of the House "Intelligence" Committee Adam Schiff says that Trump is the same as a Mafia boss and he extorted the Ukrainian president, even though the transcript of Trump's phone call to that president shows no such thing. Schiff says it doesn't have to be explicit to be extortion. In fact, there isn't even a veiled threat in the call, as described in notes prepared by the various apparatchiks who monitored it. Trump wanted Ukraine's help in getting to the bottom of how then-vice president Joseph Biden's smarmy son, Hunter, got a plum position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and a cool $3 million payday.

Trump delayed delivering military equipment to Ukraine for a few days. This is something the Dems call "impeachable."

You know how many times U.S. presidents have held up Congressional appropriations?

LOTS.

Or misdirected the monies, as Trump is doing to build his border wall.

Or "abused" presidential power for personal ends, as the current agit-propaganda is screeching is grounds for impeachment. No other president has ever done THAT, RIGHT?

What a crock.

Bill Clinton bombed other countries to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal! He actually KILLED people!

I'll bet EVERY U.S. president has used his powers for personal ends!

And at least some vice presidents.

In 2014, when Joseph Biden was vice president under president Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, Biden ACTUALLY threatened the Ukrainian government with cutting off U.S. aid unless that country's chief prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor was looking into the strange case of Hunter Biden's extraordinary good fortune.

The prosecutor was duly given the axe. Biden says it was because he was corrupt. But EVERYONE in the Ukrainian government was and is corrupt. Including the former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was hand-picked by State Department apparatchik Victoria Nuland and installed following the coup the Obama regime instigated.

Schiff is a completely unethical and dishonest mountebank who distinguished himself during the years-long Russiagate hoax as one of the worst liars and fake conspiracy mongers in the Democratic Party. A stream of false assertions and slanderous innuendoes poured forth from his mouth. Actually facts bounce off his bulletproof exterior. This political cyborg does a poor imitation of a human being.

 

The eminently trustworthy The Honorable Adam Schiff. 

This is the same scam the Democrats pulled when their damning emails were revealed by WikiLeaks in 2016. With the crucial help of their corporate media and Deep State secret police allies, the Democrats suppressed the content of the emails and made the "issue" one of "RUSSIA ATTACKED OUR DEMOCRACY!" (Russia actually wasn't the source of the emails, but never mind.) True information was ignored and replaced by an ongoing hoax claiming Trump was a Russian puppet.

This time, the important facts- that the son of vice president Biden got an incredible favor he could not have possibly gotten on his own merits, which demands an explanation- are once again being ignored in favor of a ginned up fake scandal.

I see nothing wrong with asking a foreign government to investigate such a matter. Foreign governments are enlisted in U.S. investigations all the time. And why is getting information on a candidate from outside U.S. borders an impermissible "interference" in a U.S. election? It makes no difference where facts come from as long as they are true!

Another thing that is being treated as a grave violation of "normal procedures" and impeachable is that the notes of the phone call were stored in a highly classified system. 

So fucking what?

Every year, millions of documents are "classified" just to keep the public from knowing what the government is up to!

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats leader in the House of Representatives, had the nerve to say that Trump did that to hide something.

Unlike Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State setting up a private email server to HIDE ALL HER MESSAGES!

The hypocrisy and double-standards of this latest absurd campaign to oust Trump is mind-bending. And it's being done instead of attacking Trump for the actual horrible things he does.

But the Democrats actually agree with almost all of those things. If not all of them. Backing Saudi Arabia and Israel to the hilt, trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government (both Pelosi and Charles "Upchuck" Schumer, the Senate Democrats leader, have publicly cheerleaded for that subversion), giant tax cuts for the rich and big corporations, and more.

The Democrats haven't even defended abortion rights or Planned Parenthood. Trump cut off their Federal funds without a peep from the Democrats.

Despite the fact that most of the propaganda system and the secret police Deep State is arrayed against him, Trump is going to win this one. So if he gets reelected, as seems more probable than ever, the blame should go to the Democrats and their enablers.

FBI Caught Spying On Trump Presidential Campaign- and Trump Attacked for Objecting!

We're in an era of total supremacy of the secret police state when they are caught infiltrating a presidential campaign of one of two political cartel parties (of course they do it to the Greens, Socialists, Communists, etc.) and the president's demand for an investigation is met with howls of outrage from politicians (Democrats) and the corporate media chorus.

You'd think the FBI would have to run for cover. Instead we're being hysterically ranted at that Trump is "threatening national security" (!) and "endangering lives" (!!) by ordering the Department of "Justice" to investigate, and wanting to know who the spy was. (Turns out he was some shitheel retired professor.)

Sure, Trump is loathsome, but this is yet another example of how the Democratic Party and corporate media have put the secret police agencies on a pedestal and demand that we worship them. It's disgusting.

These are the same agencies that daily commit perjury, burglaries, stealing personal property, issuing 50,000 bogus "national security" letters a year demanding personal bank, medical, and every kind of record under the pretense of "investigating terrorism," and oftentimes assassinations.

They are no one to glorify.

Today's Attack Propaganda Against Trump Only Works On People With Amnesia

And those who are ignorant of basic legal concepts.

Today's attack mode: Donald Trump Jr,. an obnoxious character, son of the U.S. president, who is a chip off the old block, has been exposed by the U.S. secret police, using the New York Times as their megaphone, as having met with a Russian lawyer. The lawyer claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton- turned out she didn't.

Initially, moron Donald Jr. said the meeting was about adopting Russian children- an obvious, ludicrous lie. The Trumps seem adept at digging themselves in deeper and deeper in the political hole they're in.

So today we're being treated to the word "treason." Treason? The U.S. isn't at war with Russia. So there is no treason in an actual criminal law sense. The idea of "treason" is straight out of the McCarthy-Nixon-GOP playbook of 1947-1960, which the Democrats have latched onto as their strategy to try and topple Trump.

"Treason" having been so very loosely defined as being in cahoots with an enemy (Russia), what about the multimillion dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for allowing Russian interests to buy uranium mines, approved by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? [1]

We're also getting "experts," from the secret police fraternity, no less, (like on NPR), saying this is a violation of campaign finance law, because information has value, and receiving such a "contribution" from a foreign source is illegal.

Well then, if "information" equals an illegal donation, what about that dodgy dossier compiled by BRITISH CITIZEN and former MI6 secret policeman Christopher Steele? He offered it to Trump's GOP rivals and to the Clinton campaign, and finally the U.S. secret police in the person of James "Mr. Upright" Comey, then-FBI Director, briefed Trump about it. Or for that matter, the numerous foreign contributions received by Bill Clinton back when, and the donors fled overseas to avoid investigators? No mention of THAT of course.

The hypocrisy and double-standards are breathtaking. As is the total obsession of U.S. media blatherers with every new arrow they can fire at Trump. (While barely covering the viciousness of his domestic policies. No surprise there. The entire power structure is fundamentally reactionary and thus objectively enemies of the overwhelming majority of the American population.) These propagandists and political hacks are apparently unaware that they are in a bubble, and that most people most probably could care less about all this nitpicking. Every day, a new molehill is blown up into a mountain by the propaganda system. Amazing.

I certainly agree that Trump is a rotten choice for president. But EVERY U.S. president has been rotten, only some more than others, because the U.S. has always been an evil empire. There are principled ways to oppose Trump. Unsurprisingly, the ruling elites and their minions have chosen an unprincipled way. True to their character.

One more point. One of the day's big propaganda talking points is that Donald Jr. should have immediately ran to the FBI and reported the approach to him! This is how far into a police state mentality the "liberals" of the media and Democratic Party are dragging us! It's thoroughly despicable. They are empowering the most evil part of the power structure more than ever, namely the secret police agencies, primarily the FBI, CIA, and NSA. They are treated as demigods now, and they are some of the most vile and malicious organs on the earth.

1]  The New York Times has amnesia for its own reporting. But you don't have to. See "Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover," April 23, 2015, and "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal," April 23, 2015.

Slow-Motion Coup Against Trump Takes The Obvious Next Step

Well, who couldn't have seen this one coming?

"Special Counsel" Robert Mueller, who was head of the dreaded secret police agency, the FBI, for 12 years, has expanded his criminal investigation to include obstruction of justice charges against the president of the U.S., Donald Trump. Ostensibly he was appointed to "investigate" possible collusion between Russian "meddling in Our Election" and the Trump campaign. In short order, the "investigation" has been "expanded" and the true target has been made manifest.  [1]

We learned this not through any official announcement, but by the usual method, the surreptitious planting of "news" in complicit media organs.

This latest step in the campaign to neutralize/remove Trump follows the pattern of so many of the previous steps. Elements of the Deep State illicitly "leak" (plant) a story with cooperative media of choice, this time the Washington Post, the hometown newspaper of the power elite of the capital city of the U.S. empire,  with damaging information aimed at Trump. (The other favorite receptacle of the secret police for their excretions is the New York Times. The media pack of running dogs then take the stories from those papers and run with them.)  Next, the Trump camp, often Trump himself, futilely issues an ineffectual verbal counterattack, which is always brushed off by the media.  In this case, Trump's lawyer shrieked his outrage about the leak. (Many of the leaks have been criminal acts under U.S. law, namely the providing of classified information to people not authorized to receive it- namely "journalists. The criminals are either secret policemen of the FBI, CIA, or NSA, or polticians with security clearances.)

So now, for the first time, Trump is a target of a criminal probe. This shortly after Trump finally got public acknowledgement that he hadn't been under investigation all along, before now. (He could never get the FBI boss he recently fired, James Comey, to public state that Trump wasn't under investigation, even though he wasn't. Comey speciously justified keeping a black cloud like this over the head of the president of the U.S., in his recent orchestrated testimony before the Senate "Intelligence" Committee.)

While Mueller, the designated hatchetman du jour, violates ethical an legal standards by sneakily planting a story in the complicit press, we are simultaneously subjected to a propaganda campaign extolling the same Mueller as a paragon of virtue and uprightness, a man of sterling integrity. J. Edgar Hoover himself didn't have a more fawning press.

The upshot of the campaign to get rid of Trump is that the secret police are made ever more supreme in the hierarchy of U.S. power. This is latest contribution of the Democratic Party to constructing the U.S. police state. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, the man who initiated the modern U.S. police state, imprisoned anyone who dared voice oppostion to World War I or the draft and gave us the hated Espionage Act, through FDR, then Truman, who created the CIA and NSA, then LBJ, who unleashed every element of the secret police state on the anti-war and black power movements, to Obama, who perfected NSA total domestic electronic surveillance and used the Espionage Act bequeathed to him by Wilson to terrorize and persecute whistleblowers, the Democratic Party, far from being "liberal," has proven itself a politically repressive menace.

But it must be noted in passing that Donald Trump is one of the most monumental assholes that has ever existed.

1]  The list of crimes against human rights committed by Mueller when he was boss of the FBI is way too extensive and detailed to adequately summarize here. There was a systematic campaign of entrapment operations to create fake "terror plots" which the FBI then "smashed." Books and articles have been written exposing this fraudulent political theater. And the FBI of course continued  the practices it has throughout its existence, of warrantless burglaries, planting of spy devices, harassment, sabotage, theft, and overall persecution of all manner of political dissidents of a progressive persuasion and people the FBI just doesn't like. The use of illegal NSA intercepts to bring criminal cases became institutionalized under Mueller. See "Robert Mueller Arrogated To Himself Sweeping Power To Ignore U.S. Constitution."

Memo To Trump Impeachment Pushers: Be Careful What You Wish For

Who do you imagine will succeed "The Donald" if you succeed?

Mike Pence, the religious fanatic and extreme reactionary, becomes president.

Pence's domestic policies will be every bit as bad, and probably worse in some areas (such as the war against abortion rights) than Trump's.

On foreign policy, at least Trump is internally divided. He has "isolationist" (noninterventionist) impulses, so part of the time you get that, while at other times you get a violent lashing out, as the attack on the Assad regime airfield in Syria after the sarin attack by that regime- my only complaint about that Trump attack is that it was ineffectual. Plus, Trump isn't particularly interested in foreign policy. Therefore U.S. imperialism under Trump would probably be less focuses, less intense, and less assiduously imposed everywhere possible at all times than is the norm. Which is a MAJOR REASON the power establishment (political, media, and Deep State, which includes the military and secret police organizations) is so intent on hamstringing or, if possible, ousting Trump.

Pence can be expected to be much like Reagan and the Bushes on foreign policy; aggressively violent, employing the military and CIA very extensively.

Even worse, is that Pence projects a low-key, non-threatening, friendly and placid demeanor. In a word, he comes across as amiable. Thus he will be the more effective evil. Just as Obama was the more effective evil than Bush II, or than McCain or Romney would have been. Simply put, the "nice guy" personas of state criminals like Obama and Pence simply don't arouse the public opposition that Republicans generally and especially politicians who come across as intense do.

So Trump is a horror, but Pence would be worse.

By the way, Obama was a horror, Bush the Younger was a horror, Clinton was a horror, Bush the Elder was a horror, Reagan the fascist was a horror, Ford helped Indonesia invade East Timor and exterminate a third of the population (with Kissinger at his side, a policy continued by Clinton), Nixon (enough said), Johnson sent a 550,000 invasion force into Vietnam, and invaded the Dominican Republic to reverse an election he didn't like, and arranged for military dictatorship in Brazil, a U.S. plot begun by Kennedy, who created a U.S. torturer-training program in Latin America under the rubric of the "Alliance for Progress," and Eisenhower was responsible for the CIA coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) which ushered in two of the world's most murderous dictatorship, a quarter million people murdered in each case, and the consequences still being suffered by the peoples of those countries to this day. Truman, the man who atomic-bombed two cities, enough said- and I could go back and back, indeed all the way to Washington, but there are too many, and the crimes are literally in the tens of thousands. because imperialism is a criminal enterprise, and  the U.S. was imperialist from the beginning, when white colonizers "discovered" the Western Hemisphere, and  eliminated in North American over 90% of the people whose ancestors predated the Europeans' arrival by 15,000 years, in order to seize the land and resources.

The point is, Trump is not uniquely bad. That's the establishment line, because he's unpredictable and not anchored to their ideology. That means there are possibilities for cracks in the system to open. That is one reason people instinctively voted for him- on the hope he would "shake things up." Of course he won't deliver on his promises, but he IS a destabilizing presence in the White House. If nothing else, the attention of the criminal rulers is somewhat diverted by their obsession with demonizing, "investigating," undermining, neutralizing, and ultimately ousting him. That gives the world's population a bit of breathing space, or a lessening in the intensity of U.S. attacks (including perhaps domestic dissidents, with the FBI and CIA and NSA prioritizing their conspiracies against Trump).

The U.S. is a nation founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery, which has, with the immense power it has amassed, a world-historic opportunity to change the nature of civilization, but instead is simply repeating the same millenia-old game of domination, exploitation, and oppression. (By the way, committing genocide has been a very good way to get to the White House. For example, Andrew Jackson, exterminator of the Creek Indians, got to be President, as did William Henry Harrison, who destroyed the Confederacy of Northwest Tribes and oversaw the elimination of the charismatic native leader Tecumseh.)


In America now, we see a colossal waste of power and the squandering of a world-historic opportunity to change the world for the better.  And what a lack of ambition this bespeaks. The ambition to do something truly great and world-changing. With its unparalleled power, the U.S. could put humanity on a truly civilized path. Instead Americans prefer to delude themselves that their nation-state (and by extension, themselves) are "great" simply because they are powerful. But since the power is largely (not entirely) used for evil, their "greatness" is of a piece with the "greatness" of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. It may be awesome, but it is not admirable. It is anti-human, as we see even today, yet again, with President Trump and his Secretary of State, Rex "Gusher" Tillerson, praising the Saudi oppressors, among the very worst in the world, while simultaneously, with the maximal hypocrisy typical of the U.S. government, slamming Iran for its repression and "terrorism." (Trump and his gang talk as if IRAN is behind ISIS and Al-Qaeda, not Saudi Arabia!)

The blather and bullshit sure gets repetitive after awhile.

Too bad so many of the fellow travelers of the Democratic Party, who should know better, are mindlessly parroting the propaganda lines of that Party and its secret police temporary allies-of-convenience. (Rather stunning to hear Democracy Now boss Amy Goodman repeatedly saying the phrase "Russian meddling" in the U.S. election!)

Maybe putting things in historical and political perspective would help them think more clearly. No need to take sides in a battle between Godzilla and Mothra.  (Trump and his establishment enemies.) The proper response is to illuminate what is happening, including the real causes of the conflict, to report objectively and demystify the show that is being presented in the Bourgeois Media Theater.

Typical victims of U.S. "Defense of Freedom"

American Heroes with captive Woman

 

Trump, Imitating U.S. "Intelligence" Agency Method, Claims Secret Knowledge Refuting Russian "Election Hacking" Charges

Oh, the irony!

One of the long-standing modus operandi of U.S. secret police agencies (euphemistically referred to as "intelligence" or "law enforcement" outfits) is the claim to secret information, which means if you knew what they know, you'd see that their propaganda and ideological assertions were true! Of course, they can't tell you what the alleged information is, because it's "classified," that is, "secret," and revealing it would risk exposing their "sources and methods," and even RISK PEOPLE'S LIVES!, but you should just trust these righteously upstanding, loyal and True-Blue Patriots. (The same "patriots" who daily urinate on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, systematically violating the alleged "rights" of Americans they don't like, as they have done since their inception. Of course their have to break U.S. law by persecuting people whose beliefs or activities they don't like, to "protect our freedoms." How's that for an Orwellian mind-bender!)

This tawdry, dishonest trick of bluffing was analyzed decades ago in a book co-authored by a former CIA officer and a former State Department official, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. [1]

Well, it turns out that others can play the same mystique of intelligence game.

Namely Donald Trump.

Starting months ago with anonymous secret policemen whispering in the ears of their media enablers, there has been a propaganda campaign (and the propaganda could be partially or wholly true, keep in mind- propaganda sometimes is) tarring Russia for allegedly sneaking into email accounts of Democratic Party apparatchiks, including that of John Podesta, a sort of eminense grise behind the Clintons. These communications then surfaced on WikiLeaks, the hated information-exposing operation headed by Julian Assange. (The U.S. government has had WikiLeaks and Assange under siege for over five years now, trying mightily to destroy the organization. The first WikiLeaks "crime" that sparked U.S. outrage was the online publication of "classified" U.S. State Department cables and military reports and, most notoriously, the infamous collateral murder video showing the murderers' eyes view from a U.S. Army helicopter in Iraq murdering journalists and civilians on the ground in Baghdad, and attempting to murder children in a van. U.S. Army Specialist Chelsea- formerly Bradley- Manning was persecuted for sending this data to WikiLeaks.) [2]

The emails from Podesta and Democratic National Committee apparatchiks revealed a concerted campaign to destroy the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton rival Senator Bernie Sanders, including various nasty subterfuges. Pulling up this rock also gave a general view of the smarmy interior of the Democratic Party, usually kept carefully hidden from public view. (If they'd wanted to, the establishment media could have revealed the truth about the Democratic Party decades ago, but the two-party political cartel of the Democrats and the Republican Party, aka the GOP- Gang Of Plunderers, is a key pillar of corporate oligarchy, and "the" media is fundamentally the mouthpiece of that oligarchic power structure. The two-party political cartel and the corporate media are pillars of the power structure and are fundamentally allied, no matter their conflicts and disagreements which lie on a more superficial level.)

We also got to see the text of the Secret Speech that Hillary Clinton was paid a cool quarter million dollars to read to a Goldman Sachs audience, those wizards of financial chicanery, which confirmed what should have already been obvious- that the Clintons are handmaidens of the top echelons of U.S. capital, and Clinton's campaign rhetoric to the contrary was just the standard Democratic Party mendacity. (Her rhetoric was pulled to the "left" by the competition from Sanders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.)

By and by, government officials were forced to reveal their faces to sell the "Russia Hacking Sacred U.S. Democracy" story. So first we got James "Pinocchio" Clapper, he of the false Senate Intelligence Commitee testimony, Obama's "Director of National Intelligence," pointing the finger at Russia. Then came the CIA, an agency of professional liars and deceivers, avowing that Russia Was Guilty. The FBI hedged a bit, apparently to allow it to wiggle out later if the whole thing was exposed as false.

Finally Obama demanded conclusionary reports from the CIA and FBI by the time he finally exits the White House on January 20. Congresspeople of both parties waxed wroth at the Russian "interference" in "our election" and "subversion of our democracy." Obama then imposed sanctions on Russia as punishment, expelling 35 Russian diplomats and closing two Russian facilities in the U.S., announcing more attacks on Russian assets, and threatening unspecified covert acts of retaliation. (Putin cleverly parried Obama's hostile attack by refusing to retaliate in kind, even inviting the children of U.S. diplomats in Russia to attend Kremlin Christmas and New Year's celebrations! Stuffed, Obama!)

Trump has adamantly refused to conform to this campaign, despite daily brickbats hurled at him by numerous branches of the media (including the "comedy" show "Saturday Night Live" on NBC, which portrayed Trump as a "Manchurian Candidate" of Putin [3]).

Then Trump played the "I know things you don't know" card, the card the secret police habitually play. Trump said he knew “things that other people don’t know” that would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.” (Don't hold your breath.)

A few salient points about the bad faith and fraudulence of this entire "Russia Tried To Damage Our Democracy" propaganda campaign, which U.S. media mostly refuse to breathe a word about:

-Clinton got 2.9 million more votes than Trump. She "lost" because of the idiotic, archaic Electoral College, a political straitjacket that the Democrats refuse to blame, much less reform or abolish, even though the same thing happened to them in 2000. They prefer to be slaves to the dead hand of the past, apparently. Thus do U.S. "Founding Fathers," in their graves for two centuries, impose their will on the present. Sick. [4]

-Clinton led Trump in polls by 14% until FBI secret police chief James Comey reignited the issue of her private server State Department emails just before the election, causing her lead to vanish.

-We have the right to the information provided by WikiLeaks, allegedly via Russia. (Assange denies it came from Russia.)

-The feckless, cowardly Democrats habitually scapegoat others for their losses, instead of making an honest accounting and taking positive, constructive action. In 2000 Ralph Nader was their designated scapegoat. Today it's Russia.  They are cowardly punks who never challenge GOP election stealing, in 2000, 2004 (Ohio stolen), and this year, with massive voter disenfranchisement and invalidation of valid ballots. (See Greg Palast's work.)

-Finally, and most importantly, just how hypocritical can the U.S. get with all this screeching about "foreign interference"? No nation on earth has done more interfering in other countries than the U.S.! From massive CIA intervention in European politics after World War II (funding politicians, parties, newspapers, paying gangsters to beat up leftists, etc.) to COMPLETELY DESTROYING DEMOCRACIES in places like Iran (1953) Guatemala (1954) Brazil (1965) Chile (1973), and various other military coups. The U.S. INVADED the Dominican Republic in 1965 when it didn't like who won an election there.

So now U.S. elites are screeching about Russia letting the American public in on some Democratic Party poohbahs' dirty secrets? BOO-HOO! Get over it.

"I got special secret information stored right in here! I'll gladly tell you about it tomorrow if you'll give me a headline today."

1] The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, 1974. But nothing changed, the populace remains ignorant and willfully naive, and the same old tricks of mass manipulation work. With the cooperation of a venal media, of course, without which the secret police couldn't get over with their shit.

Marchetti was a CIA officer and assistant to the CIA deputy director,  Marks a former Foreign Service Officer.

2] "Collateral Murder" videos on youtube.com. You must watch this if you never have yet.

3]  Posted on youtube.com by "Saturday Night Live" [NBC]. "Donald Trump Christmas Cold Open - SNL," published December 18, 2016. The SNL opening skit was crude and obvious, apparently to make sure that even the politically unsophisticated would get the message. I found it funny anyway, and grossly distorted. But then, satire is based on exaggeration. "Rex Tillerson" (Trump's designated Secretary of State who just resigned as head of ExxonMobil) also appeared in the skit.

A "Manchurian Candidate," which comes from a novel by that name, refers to a programmed assassin whose mind is under external control. That's beyond being a stooge, beyond being a puppet. It's being a hypnotized zombie.

4] The Democrats won't even back the movement among states to agree to give their Electoral College votes to whoever wins the "popular" vote. The plan is that when states with a total number of Electoral Votes equalling a majority of Electoral College votes (270 or more ) agree to join, the plan becomes effective. So far state legislatures controlling around 160 Electoral College votes have passed the necessary legislation.

For details on the Electoral College, and how the U.S. has historically been anti-democratic, see "In the Self-Proclaimed 'World's Greatest Democracy,' the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost," November 14, 2016.

In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost

Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than Republican Donald Trump, but Trump won because of one of the U.S.' peculiar institutions, the "Electoral College." Presidents are actually elected by "electors," as per the U.S. Constitution. There are 538 of these electors, apparatchiks of the two ruling political parties. Clinton may end up with 2 million more votes than Trump after California is fully counted. (Clinton currently is ahead by 1 million.) But the so-called "popular vote" isn't what elects a U.S. president. The Electoral College vote does, and Trump won there, because he won enough of the 50 states to win a majority of the "Electors." [Later in this essay I explain the system in detail.]

This is the FIFTH U.S. presidential election in which the winner lost. It happened previously in 2000, 1888, 1876, and 1824. In fact, in 1824, the "winner," John Quincy Adams, didn't win the popular vote OR the Electoral College vote.

You would think the need to change this anti-democratic system would be obvious. Apparently it's not obvious to the elites who wield power.  The Democratic Party, having lost in 2000 and 2016, you'd think would be calling for change. But it isn't. Instead its two current leader, Obama and Clinton, immediately called for all citizens to fall in line behind Trump, to respect the "democratic process" and genuflect before the nobility of "our democracy." Obama immediately rushed to invite Trump to the White House and pledged to do his upmost to achieve a smooth transition of power and help Trump have a "successful" presidency.

Needless to say, their rivals, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) doesn't return the favor. Trump repeatedly announced his intention to claim he was cheated if he lost the election. ("The system is rigged, Folks!" was one of his repeated lines in the weeks before November 8.) And when Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, announced at the outset that his number one priority was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. (The U.S. corporate media doesn't want anyone to remember these things, so they don't mention them.) Newt Gingrich, a smarmy opportunist who has attached himself like a barnacle to the Trump ship, practiced the same sort of "politics of destruction," trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party. But it goes back even further, to the post World War II GOP strategy of redbaiting Democrats, which is how Richard Nixon got elected to Congress and to the U.S. Senate, before Eisenhower elevated him to the vice presidency. Even earlier, in the 1930s, reactionary Republicans acted as ideological police against Democrats.

Those who genuinely oppose not just the racist, reactionary, deformed narcissist Trump and the horrible anti-human policies of the GOP, but those of the Democrats and this entire oppressive system cannot look to the Democratic Party to lead an opposition. The top Democrats have already announced their intention not to oppose Trump and the GOP agenda! (Harry Reid doesn't count as he is retiring.) They won't even block the arch-reactionaries Trump has vowed to elevate to the Supreme Court, even though the Republican Senators blocked Obama from filling the Antonin Scalia vacancy for almost a year. The Democrats in general knuckle under to every GOP power play. Plus, the Democrats are a corporate imperialist party that fundamentally opposes real changes in the U.S. system.

Why some people have a hard time seeing this is baffling. The history of the Democratic Party since the extreme racist Woodrow Wilson, who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act and the Palmer raids, makes it crystal clear that Democrats are no allies of true progressives. [In fact the Democratic Party was the party of white racism from the 19th century until the 1960s.]

I'm sure almost no non-Americans, and probably most Americans, don't understand the Electoral College. Therefore, here is an explanation.

The U.S. Constitution as originally written set up this crazy system, part of the conscious design to maintain elite class control over political power. In other words, the U.S. was created as a oligarchy, not a democracy. Originally only white male property owners could vote in the U.S.- not even all white men! Women could not vote until 1920, which means as of today they could vote during less than half of U.S. history, and Southern blacks not until the 1960s, with the exception of a few years immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution set up the Electoral College. The Xii Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, tweaked the College a bit. The Constitution calls for state legislatures to choose the Electors who in turn would vote for U.S. President and Vice President. But problems, such as deadlocked legislatures that couldn't decide on Electors, caused all the states except South Carolina to allow white men generally to vote for the Electors by 1832. South Carolina finally threw in the towel on state legislators having sole voting power for president in 1860, the same year that state became the first state to secede from the U.S., in December.

By the way, for 125 years state legislators picked their states' U.S. Senators, until 1913, when the XVII Amendment switched to "popular" election of U.S. Senators.

Today there are a total of 538 Electors. The Democratic Party and Republican Party choose the Electors. The American people are actually voting for these rival slates of Electors, unbeknownst to them.

These 538 party loyalists actually elect the president. Each state is apportioned a minimum of 3 electors. The number of electors per state corresponds to the number of a state's U.S. Congress people. As each state has two Senators and at least one Representative in the House, each has at least 3 electors. California, the most populous state and thus the state with the most House Representatives in the U.S. Congress, has 55 Electors. With 435 Representatives and 100 Senators (2 per state), that equals 535 Electors. The 3 remaining Electors were granted to the District of Columbia in 1964, 188 years after the United States was declared, when the residents of the capital city of the "World's Greatest Democracy" were finally allowed to vote.

The reason the "popular" vote and the Electoral College votes can differ is quite simple. All but two states gives 100% of their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in the state. They don't have to do this, they could apportion the electoral votes according to the popular vote percentages, as this is entirely up to the individual states. But that is what they do. So say one candidate gets 55% in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes, but only 35%, say, in states he/she loses. They would have fewer "popular" votes nationwide, but a majority in the Electoral College.

The actual election by the Electoral College will occur this December, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitals and in the District of Columbia to vote. Not all of themn are legally bound to vote according to their state's popular vote, but since they are disciplined party hacks, they will. Trump is expected to receive 290 votes (270 required to win) and Clinton 228. The over 7 million votes that went to other candidates (including write-ins not on the ballots) get zero Electoral Votes, as if they don't exist. (The establishment media never mentions these votes, contributing to their invisibility.)

The U.S. territories Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands, get no votes from the Electoral College because they aren’t states and they don’t have a special Constitutional amendment to recognize them. 4.4 million U.S. citizens live in the territories, a population almost equal to the total of 6 states.  (There are 4.5 million combined in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and Delaware.)

Other people who can't vote are millions of people convicted of felonies in states that strip such people (mostly blacks) of the right to vote permanently.

If no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives votes for the next president, and the U.S. Senate for the vice-president. Which in practice would mean the controlling party in each chamber would pick its own party's candidate, barring some weird political deal. This happened just once, in 1824.

In the very first U.S. presidential election in 1789, there was only one candidate- George Washington. See how "democratic" the U.S. was even at the very beginning? I found an interesting article that describes how U.S. presidential politics has really been a battle between competing elites from the very start- and indeed is still today. [1] Rival gangs of rich people and corporate interests cluster around the two oligarchic parties and compete with each other for state power. They use demagoguery and dishonest propaganda slogans and
"ideas" to psychologically manipulate various sectors of the populace to vote for them.

Here is the breakdown of the "popular" vote and the prospective Electoral College tally. Notice that over 7 million voters who voted for someone other than the two candidates of the two-party dictatorship don't count at all, as they get zero Electoral College votes.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php

Here is a useful historical timeline from Wikipedia.org ["Voting rights in the United States." Footnotes at Wikipedia.]

                                            Milestones of national franchise extension

Abolition of property qualifications for white men, from 1792 (Kentucky) to 1856 (North Carolina) — see: Jacksonian democracy.[5]

Citizenship in both the United States and U.S. States by birth or naturalization, 1868 — see: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Non-white men, 1870 — see: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Direct election of Senators, 1913 — see: Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave voters rather than state legislatures the right to elect senators.[11]

Women, 1920 — see: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Native Americans (for all who did not already have the vote, which nearly two-thirds did[12]), 1924 — see: Indian Citizenship Act.[13]

Residents of Washington, D.C. for U.S. Presidential Elections, 1961 — see: Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Poll tax, 1964 — see: Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting imposition of poll tax in federal elections.

Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, 1965 — see Voting Rights Act of 1965; this has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting.

Poll Tax, 1966 — see: Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), prohibiting imposition of poll tax or property requirements in all U.S. elections.

Adults between 18 and 21, 1971 — see: Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[14] were granted the vote in response to Vietnam War protests which argued that soldiers who were old enough to fight for their country should be granted the right to vote.[11]

Requirement that a person reside in a jurisdiction for an extended period — 14th Amendment; Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330  (1972).[15][16][16]

Washington, D.C., for restoring local elections such as Mayor and Councilmen, after a 100-year gap in Georgetown, and 190-year gap in the wider city, ending Congress's policy of local election disfranchisement started in 1801 in this former portion of Maryland, 1973, — see: D.C. Home rule.

United States Military and Uniformed Services, Merchant Marine, other citizens overseas, living on bases in the United States, abroad, or aboard ship, 1986 — see: Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.[17]
Finally, here's an interesting paragraph from the Federal Government's National Archives and Records Administration webpage on the Electoral College:

Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981.

Well, so much for democracy and the "will of the people."

For more details on the Electoral College, see the following:

"U.S. Electoral College: Frequently Asked Questions," National Archives and Records Administration.

"Electoral College, (United States)," Wikipedia.org.

"Breaking down the US elections: Your biggest questions answered," RT, November 8, 2016


1] "Presidential Elections," History.com, website of the History Channel cable TV channel. Oddly for a corporate entity, I've found the articles there mostly pretty objective.

Trump Is Destabilizing the U.S.- Should Progressives Worry?

Donald Trump is aggravating the fissures in U.S. society. A narcissist running a demagogic campaign for president of the U.S., his aim is his own self-aggrandizement.

He is rabble-rousing elements of the broad, discontented, white working class and anxious "middle" classes which the establishment power system seeks to keep passive as the system of corporate oligarchy slowly and relentlessly grinds them down economically. In classic fascist/reactionary fashion, he diverts attention from understanding the actual structure and nature of society and instead scapegoats "outsiders," in his case "illegal" immigrants and would-be refugees seeking asylum from war zones. He has also identified the various trade treaties as a cause of the economic squeeze on workers, which is valid as a factor.

Trump has made a frontal assault on these so-called "free trade" deals, violating an establishment ideological taboo observed by Democrats and other Republicans alike. Trump has done more to incite opposition to these treaties than labor unions, which supposedly represent the interests of workers, and certainly more than the Democratic Party, whose dominant figures largely support these corporate-power-enhancing treaties.

And while pressing the same hot button "culture war" issues that "respectable" "conservatives" do, being a political vulgarian he doesn't do it in a muted fashion as standard-issue reactionary Republicans do but does it very sharply, as was on display in the third and last "presidential debate" last night between him and Hillary Clinton, the Democrat. (This sort of crudeness is referred to by Republican operatives themselves as tossing "red meat" to "the base." Apparently GOP voters are like pet ocelots. Trump threatens to take them off their leashes.) These issues are guns, abortion, and immigrants. (The immigrant issue of course is tied to the economic insecurity felt by millions, with racism and xenophobia in the mix.)

Trump laid down his marker on immigrants early on when he branded virtually all Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers- a trope others have picked up, some implying that all murders in the U.S. are the work of illegal immigrants, an absurdity that goes unchallenged. Instead we get from Democrats and "liberals" heartstring-plucking stories of hardworking immigrant families (it always has to be families) and children caught in a legal bind not of their own making. Which is fine, but insufficient, as it leaves the murderer-immigrant theme unrefuted.

Trump lately has also been destabilizing the legitimacy of U.S. elections by claiming they are "rigged," to cheat him of his victory. He continued this tact last night. This is very cynical on his part, as he is doing it because he is apparently going to lose. [1]

But the irony is, U.S. elections ARE corrupt, only not in the ways Trump means. [2] For example, the last two times a Republican "won" the presidency, it was by stealing it. Bush  the Younger stole Florida in  2000, aided and abetted by his brother Jeb, the then-governor of Florida, Jeb's GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) minions there who disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters, and most importantly by five Republican Supreme Court justices, who illegally blocked a recount in Florida. In 2004 Ohio was stolen, with the connivance of GOP officials there, led by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.  Since 2000, the Republican-owned corporations that make the crooked voting machines have connived to steal numerous elections by programming them to switch votes from Democrats to Republicans. (The Democrats refuse to make an issue out of any of this. As for 2000, they blame it all on Ralph Nader. Talk about scapegoating!)

But the Republicans (or elements of the secret police state acting on their behalf) are more ruthless than that.
Both Paul Wellstone and Mel Carnahan were murdered by plane sabotage to help the GOP control the U.S. Senate. And a devout Christian computer programmer, who helped the Republicans steal elections, had an attack of conscience and spoke out. While flying to testify in a civil case against Karl Rove, the top Republican electoral operative, his plane too was downed, and the evidence he was carrying to the trial was removed from the crash site, never to be seen again.

We can add mass disenfranchisement by various chicanery of Democratic voters, which the Democratic Party barely objected to until very recently.

Nor does it help that the Republicans who constituted a majority on the Supreme Court before the death of arch-reactionary Antonin Scalia last year gutted the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to even more ruthless disenfranchisement of "black" citizens in the erstwhile Confederacy.

Trump has even damaged the Republican Party, which he has hijacked for his ego trip. Contrary to universal handwringing by the establishment blatherariat, this is a good thing. It is to be fervently desired to see that evil, noxious weed break up into two or more parties. (That would also have the salutary effect of weakening the extortionist power of the Democratic Party to force people to vote for them as "the lesser of two evils" to avoid a Republican victory.)

You would think that progressives would welcome things that weakens the stability of the current oppressive, imperialist, and incorrigible U.S. structure. That assumes that they understand the problems they complain about are structural in nature and deeply rooted in the nature of U.S. society. Many apparently don't understand that, but they should.

But instead, as happens every time there is the one-day-every-two-years when some actual democracy has to be allowed- democracy to the very limited extent that some people (not millions of disenfranchised people, mostly blacks) are allowed to vote from a menu of two choices presented to them- Democratic Party politicians or Republican Party politicians- what progressives and special interest "leftists"* virtually all do is line up like obedient ducklings behind the Democrats. [3] Because "the Republicans are worse." They are exhorted by Democratic Party political auxiliaries like Robert Reich (a Bill Clinton cabinet member) that "now is not the time" to seek an alternative, not even a Senator Bernard Sanders, who ran as a Democrat for president against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries and then supported her when he was blocked from victory. But there will never be a "right time" as long as the Republican Party exists.

Preserving the faux "unity" of the American populace under the current political and economic power structure is precisely what those in power want! Why would anyone who struggles against this system want to help do that?

The media created Donald Trump, making news stories out of even his random idiotic tweets. Now they are trying desperately to destroy his drive to the White House with sex scandalizing. To be sure, he is loathsome, and a probable rapist, as I will explain in a separate essay. (Bill Clinton is a confirmed rapist- cf. Juanita Broaddrick- and that IS relevant because he will have immense power if/when his wife achieve her goal of the presidency, her compensation for setting aside her own ambitions in Arkansas and when her husband got to be president. It's a family affair, you see.  Now it's her turn. The other relevance is that Hillary was a driving force in the character assassinations of her husband's various paramours. And it went into actual terrorism. When Kathleen Willey reported a rebuffed sexual advance on her by Bill C. in the White House, her cat was killed, after which a man jogged up to her outside when she was along and mentioned the dead cat. A scary threat indeed, the implication being that he could kill her right then and there.)

Here's a good reason to look forward to the end of the election: the media obsession with Donald Trump will abate. (If we're very lucky, it will even end.) But the barbaric soul of the Republican Party has had its genteel veil torn off by Donald Trump.


1] Trump also has broken new ground, at least in the past century, by openly attacking the legitimacy of his two-party opponent. Trump at the previous debate said he would jail Hillary Clinton if elected. Last night he said she shouldn't even be allowed to run because of her "many crimes." If he had meant crimes against humanity, he would have been onto something. He just meant her private email server, destroying 30,000 emails, an allegedly lying to the FBI.

This attack on the legitimacy of the official opposition can be seen as rooted in the GOP attacks on Obama's legitimacy, including the claims that he was born in Kenya and thus Constitutionally ineligible to be president. The GOP didn't overtly push that line, but its auxiliaries in "talk" radio promoted it. Trump took that "issue" and ran with it in the years when he was preparing the ground for his attempt to grab the presidency.
Nor are fraudulent claims of election-stealing by the Democrats new. The myth has long been nurtured that JFK stole the 1960 election from Nixon by stealing Illinois. That myth is easily refuted by simple arithmetic. Just subtract the Illinois electoral votes from Kennedy's total and add them to Nixon's. Kennedy still wins. But as Reagan said, "facts are stupid things."

In fact, the Republican Party, by pushing relentlessly to the right (with the help of almost the entire U.S. media) over the last almost 50 years, a campaign of reaction and rollback that was a response to the upsurges of the 1960s, has really opened the door to a demagogue like Trump. The years of rightwing extremism have validated the derangement and inculcated the rightwing segment of the populace in irrational beliefs an animosities.

2] Trump claims illegal immigrants are voting, "dead people" are voting, illegal immigrants are not just voting once, but "fifteen times," etc. etc. This is of a piece with his general cynical demagoguery designed to rabble-rouse the racists and xenophobes, who number in the millions.

3] I use "leftists" for want of a better single word, and also because that is how the power structure thinks of them, especially the secret police agencies, "talk" radio, hard-rightwing media, and rightists generally, even though that is a stupid way to think of them. I am referring to single-issue people such as those categorized as environmentalists, gay rights activists, "civil" i.e. black rights people, and so on, dozens of such splinter groups with no unity, each applying a modicum of pressure on the system to achieve its own ends within the current system without changing its basic imperialist, corporate oligarchic nature one whit.

The truth is, the vast majority of progressives are frightened of pulling down the temple of power. That's why their distress at Trump's refusal to validate the fairness of the election has them in a tizzy as much as it has the establishment media the the Democrats. Even as I'm writing this, one Kristen Clarke is talking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (the first segment of the day's show) and prattling on about U.S. "democracy" being the "model for the world" and how "distressing" it is that Trump would question the legitimacy of a U,S. election. Then she segued into a total non sequitur about voter suppression against blacks! Which would seem to undercut her boilerplate propaganda about legitimacy and a Model for the World. She keeps referring to "conspiracy theories," and brushes aside a question about Gore v. Bush in 2000 ("We're not going to relitigate [that]" i.e. not going to discuss, remember, or learn from) and denies U.S. elections can possibly be rigged. "Rigged elections, pure mythology, pure fiction..."! [What, 2000 wasn't? 2004 wasn't?]

Clarke is also bent out of shape that Obama's nominee for the "broken" Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a conservative former prosecutor, hasn't been given a Senate confirmation hearing. "A Constitutional Crisis" she calls it. "I am deeply concerned about this era of political obstruction we are in," she says, parroting Democratic Party rhetoric.

Clarke is President and Executive Director of the "Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law," founded in 1963 at the request of president John F. Kennedy. That political pedigree maybe tells you all you need to know about where Clarke is coming from.

Taboo Ironies In Clinton's VP Choice

Hillary Clinton bestowed the Democratic Party's vice presidential nomination on Tim Kaine, a Democratic U.S. Senator from Virginia. This political product launch had three themes, which campaign operatives put on their communications transmission belt to "the" media in the form of talking points. These were duly pointed out to the public by said media. The themes were Kaine's alleged devotion to what in the U.S. are called "civil rights," meaning equal "rights" for citizens designated as "black;" his "missionary" work in Honduras in 1980 (less than a year), and the fact that he speaks fluent Spanish. (All Hispanics must now vote for him, I suppose.)

I say "black" because I don't like classifying people by color. People aren't jellybeans or M & M's.

I say "the" media, because it is not the one-and-only media, nor is it this objective thing, like the earth or sun, that just exists and has immutable properties. It is a particular media. In the U.S. that media called "the" media are the megaphones and mouthpieces of a corporate oligarchy that indoctrinates the populace with the values and ideology of corporate capitalism (misleadingly called "free enterprise"). It is completely a bourgeois class interest (although it masquerades in some instances as working class or "middle" class, the better to gain the trust of and to dupe "target audiences," a very telling term in itself).

Now, as to Kaine being presented as some great civil rights activist years ago. Of course he never was. But that is a good distraction from Hillary's anti-civil rights activities at the same time. She was a Goldwater Girl in college, head of the campus GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) students' group at Wesleyan University. Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, was an ardent foe of civil rights, opposed legislation to allow blacks to vote in the South, and so on.

Then there's that "missionary work" by Kaine in Honduras. Honduras. The country where a U.S.-backed coup destroyed democracy and has instituted a regime of chaotic death-squads, murdering hundreds of activists. Clinton boasted in her most recent book, a sort of autohagiography, about how she protected and legitimized the coup, running interference against objections by other nations.

The third Honduran grassroots environmental activist opposing a hydroelectric project murdered in the last few months, Lesbia Janeth Urquia, was savagely hacked to death with a machete at the beginning of August. She was a 49-year old mother of three.

Another mother, Berta Cáceres, the first of those victims, avowed that Clinton and the U.S. bore responsibility for the existence of the current Honduran state terrorist regime, The regime has cynically tried to pin the murders on family members and fellow activists.

The three activists, extremely brave, poor people, were all members of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, indicating a systematic, murderous targeting of the group.

This is the regime, and policy of gangster-style repression, that Obama-Clinton-Democratic Party imposes on Honduras.

"Lesser evil" my ass.

Kaine, apparently a very clever politician, uses the scant nine months he spent in Honduras 36 years
ago as a three-way political bank shot. In the words of The Nation magazine, "Kaine, who has been talking about his time in Honduras at least since the early 2000s, when he was mayor of Richmond, uses his nine-month stay as a kind of platitudinous catch-all, to prove he is a true Christian to Virginia conservatives, to court the Latino vote, and, now, to convince rank-and-file Democrats he’s a progressive." [1]

Religious "missionaries" have for centuries been the pilot fish and advance guard of European and U.S. Imperialists. Starting with the Spanish empire, and right through to the current use of religious front men and women by the CIA, the missionary is the recon scout of imperialism.

As it turns out, the Selfless Missionary Timothy Michael Kaine, a Good Catholic, isn't as pure as the driven snow. When he was Governor of the state of Virginia, he took a number of bribes (called "gifts" in U.S. political parlance) from corporations in return for his official acts on their behalf. But in yet another example of the extremely arbitrary and capricious nature of U.S. "justice," he hasn't been prosecuted, while other politicians have been prosecuted and even convicted in much more attenuated cases of alleged bribery (U.S. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who is being prosecuted for vacationing with a longtime friend he helped out, and whose case is currently in process; and former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell and his wife, whose convictions were just overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the actions McDonnell took in return for gifts were not official acts and thus did not come under bribery laws- why his wife got convicted in the first place is a mystery- as an accessory?) or outright frame-ups, like the case of former Democratic Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, outrageously railroaded by the local GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) power establishment and sentenced to a draconian seven years in prison, for appointing a contributor to a ballot initiative to an unpaid post on some planning board. (So why isn't every U.S. president guilty of bribery for appointing their campaign contributors to plum ambassadorships, which are paid, prestigious jobs and should go to experience State Department veterans? [2]

And Kaine speaks Spanish. He speaks Spanish. He proved it in his convention speech. Kaine speaks Spanish.

He speaks Spanish.

The Kaines were happy in Honduras. Too bad Hondurans can't be.

Berta Cáceres

Lesbia Janeth Urquia

Just two more victims (of millions) of U.S. "policies."

The perfect VP pick: Doglike Kaine trots closely behind his political master.

1]  "Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn’t Learn During His Time in Honduras," The Nation, July 27, 2016. A must-read article summarizing the situation Kaine was immersed in in Honduras, with an overview of the Reagan-Bush atrocities in the region. Although keep in mind that their predecessor Carter initiated the "policy" of multi-state terrorism, and their successor Clinton transferred it to Colombia.

The Nation is the left boundary of Establishment media. It's the border between being part of the system and resistance/opposition to the power structure. The Nation is reformist, but not too reformist. Its idea of reform is jawboning the Democratic Party to do things that Party has proven it will never do. And every four years, the magazine puts on its cowboy hats and rounds up progressives to herd them into the Democratic Party corral. Their assaults on Ralph Nader for daring to run for president (and "stealing" Democratic votes) was relentless, nasty, and revealing of the bankruptcy of their politics. Anyone who really wants pro-human change has to realize that the two-party corporate capitalist imperialist dictatorship is the enemy, Instead The Nation and its ilk aids and abets the Democratic Party's politics of extortion, forcing people to vote for the allegedly "lesser evil." 

Which has brought us to our current state of greater repression and greater grotesque concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority (euphemised as "inequality,") with institutionalized global assassinations and a Perfect Surveillance State brought to you by Barack Obama, Democrat.

Expect more of the same poison under a second Clinton reign.

2]  "As Pick for No. 2, Tim Kaine Sees Gifts Come Under Scrutiny," New York Times, July 24, 2016.

On Don Siegelman, a concise summary of the outrageous facts of the case is at "Why Obama Should Pardon Don Siegelman," New Yorker, January 14, 2015, by former Federal prosecutor and Edward Snowden hater Jeffrey Toobin. (Even reactionary establishment barnacle George Will thinks Siegelman got a raw deal.)

In another example of what a coward Barack Obama is, that even after over 100 former state attorneys general [!] sent a letter to Obama seeking a pardon for Siegelman, Obama ignored them. 

["Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman seeks pardon from President Obama," Alabama Media Group website of Alabama newspapers, April 13, 2016.]

In fact, after the Washington Post quoted Siegelman in an article on the Supreme Court exoneration of Bob McDonnell, Obama's Bureau of Prisons transferred Siegelman to solitary confinement in a Louisiana Federal prison, obviously to silence him and as punishment. It's the second time Siegelman has been thrown into the hole after giving a media interview. ["Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman sent to solitary confinement," Washington Post, April 29, 2016.]

To be "fair" and "balanced," I'll mention that the Bureau of Prisons denied that they threw Siegelman into solitary as a punishment. (I hear solitary is actually great fun.) The 70-year-old Siegelman, a Kung Fu Master and trained ninja, has escaped from some of the world's most escape-proof prisons, and thus is a high-security-risk prisoner.... Um, well, that's partly true. He is 70.

This is a Democratic president doing this to a framed-up Democrat. What kind of amoral creeps are Democrats that they accept this kind of party "leadership"? 

The big puzzle is why even the Democrats in the power structure are insistent on heaping injustice upon Siegelman. The Federal appeals court has upheld his conviction, and the Supreme Court refused to even allow him a hearing, completely blowing off a brief signed by 116 former attorneys general in support of Siegelman's exoneration.. ["More than 100 former attorneys general ask US Supreme Court to review Siegelman sentence," Alabama Media Group website of Alabama newspapers, October 22, 2015.

(One of Obama's Supreme Court appointees, Elena Kagan, was Obama's solicitor general, in which role she participated in the persecution of Siegelman. ["Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman seeks pardon from President Obama," Alabama Media Group, op cit.])

The Obama regime has been playing a shell game with Siegelman, moving him from prison to prison in states far away from his family and friends,such as Oklahoma, to try and isolate him, break his spirit, and punish his supporters by stealing their time and money when they attempt to visit him in prison. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated his streak of cruelty, as in the murder of 16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his teenage cousin, and five other civilians while they were dining, blown up by an Obama drone; arranging the breaking of Medea Benjamin's arm by Egyptian secret police goons to punish her for heckling him during one of his unctuous, oleaginous, sanctimonious, speeches; and the persecution of whistleblowers, activists and dissidents under his rule. A coward and a bully- not an attractive combination. One thing you can say about the likes of Putin and Erdogan: they're bullies but no cowards. Somehow that makes them less contemptible than Obama.

The treatment of Siegelman reminds one that the U.S. power establishment is a dangerous nest of vipers, a collection of scorpions that are even dangerous to one another, not just to all the rest of us on this planet. There is no guarantee of personal security as a member of a criminal gang.

Of course, Siegelman got off easy compared to two of the Kennedys.