Working people sold out by the Bankers’ DNC aren’t coming back

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” ~ Amschel Rothschild

During the primaries in 2008 the DNC overturned the will of the voters and installed the half-term flimflam man from Illinois, Barack Obama as their candidate for President.  After 8 horrific years of the Republican George W. Bush Administration, a ham sandwich could have won the election on the Democratic ticket.  A much different Hillary Clinton from the one you see today, ran her campaign garnering support from the working class and investors’ class against the DNC’s preselected candidate winning primaries across the nation by double digits.

An angry DNC viciously attacked the Clintons for daring to run against their preselected candidate calling them racists.  Hillary soldiered on winning primaries from Massachusetts to Puerto Rico but in the end the DNC, irate that their sham primaries were exposed as a fraud, made the decision not to count the votes of Florida and Michigan as well as award delegates won by Hillary into the column of Barack Obama. 

The Super Delegates, completely owned by the banking industry, overruled the voters of their states awarded the Democratic nomination to Obama.  The unregulated banking industry had brought the world’s economy to the edge of a cliff and was about to implode and needed a pliable president to protect them and their ill-gotten gains and they got that in spades from Obama.

Many Democrats left the party after the betrayal and are never going to return to the un-Democratic Democrat Party.  In 2016 Hillary had a sensible plan to restore stability to the American banking system.  From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Excerpt:

Why It’s a Big Deal Hillary Clinton Plans to Shake Up the Fed

Clinton has a chance to achieve radical, lasting financial reform

Hillary Clinton is taking on the United States Federal Reserve System, but in a wonky, bottom’s-up way that shows her understanding of a complex and widely misunderstood organization. This is not “End the Fed” or even “audit the Fed” — she wants to rebuild it from its fundamentals at the regional level…

Generally, the public pays attention to little more than the face of the organization — the Fed’s chairperson, currently Janet Yellen — who announces and explains the Fed’s decisions. But beneath Yellen functions an intricate and influential bureaucracy that’s dominated by interests from the financial sector, the vast majority of them white men, and may well be blind to the reality of a vast majority of Americans.

The Federal Reserve was set up in 1917, in the wake of a financial crisis, as a private national bank that could serve as lender of last resort to other banks. If a bank needed money to make good on deposits, it could go to the Fed for a short-term loan. It was, since its inception, a bankers’ institution, run for banks, by banks…

The Fed is run by a seven-member board in Washington, D.C., and a dozen regional bank presidents based in financial centers throughout the country (New York, St. Louis, Kansas City and Cleveland, among others). While the crew in D.C. is selected by the president and vetted by Congress, the regional bank presidents are chosen by the financial industry and tend to be either bankers or career Fed employees...

New York’s regional president is Willian C. Dudley, previously a Goldman Sachs managing director. Robert S. Kaplan of Dallas was a former vice chairman at Goldman. Neel Kashkari, a known financial reformer, is nonetheless a former employee of PIMCO, one of the world’s largest asset managers and a subsidiary of German financial behemoth Allianz. Dennis P. Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is a former Citigroup executive.

Clinton’s proposal would remove bankers from the regional boards of directors. Those boards choose the regional presidents and generate most of the information and perspective that the Federal Reserve governors use to set monetary policy. Clinton clearly understands how the Fed functions.

Donald Trump has said he would not reappoint Janet Yellen as chair. Fine. But appointing the Fed chair is merely the most high-profile action a president can take in this regard. It doesn’t change the system, and the Fed is known as the Federal Reserve System for a reason.

This is Clinton at her best – she knows how the government works. The region Federal Reserve boards do not get a lot of press. Most people do not know that they are staffed with chief executives from Morgan Stanley, Comerica, KeyCorp and private-equity firms like Silver Lake, and if they do know it, they do not understand its importance…

Clinton is digging deeper. Changing the roster of the regional boards will hopefully help more accurate economic information trickle up to the chairperson and the federal governors. Perhaps, even, a labor representative or somebody with closer ties to the common American experience could become a regional bank president.

In her quiet way, tinkering with the inner workings of a near-century old quasi-government institution that is arcane to most, Clinton has a chance to achieve radical, lasting financial reform.

The Obama Administration recognized the threat Hillary posed to the out-of-control Federal Reserve Banking system so they began sabotaging her campaign way before the 2016 election.  The preferred candidate for Obama and the DNC was Joe Biden, the bankers’ bagman.  The Obama Administration sent out Susan Rice to lie to the American people about what happened in Benghazi, Libya then blamed Hillary Clinton for the lies. 

It was the Obama Administration that opened up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails knowing that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had done the same thing.  In October of 2016 it was the Obama Administration that had James Comey re-open the email investigation of Hillary to cast doubt on her trustworthiness and ensure her loss.

The true Democratic voters were revolted by the Obama Administration’s subservience to the Wall Street Banks and left the party long ago.  Hillary’s muddled message in the 2016 campaign along with her propping up Obama’s shameful legacy of abandoning the American people and bailing out the corrupt banks, drove those voters into the open arms of Donald Trump. 

Those voters remain in the Donald Trump camp today because they know that the Democratic Party no longer exists.  The Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the neocon Republican Party.  From Michael Hudson at Information Clearing House:

Excerpt:

Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy

November 02, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  You can’t bail out the banks, leave the debts in place, and rescue the economy. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody has to lose. That’s what happened in 2009 when President Obama came in. He invited the bankers to the White House and he said, “I’m the only guy standing between you and the mob with pitchforks,” by which he meant the voters that he was bamboozling. He reassured the bankers. He said, “Look, my loyalty is to my campaign donors not to the voters. Don’t worry; my loyalty is with you.”

I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: Rescuing the Banks Instead of the Economy. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

His 1972 book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank. His latest books are  Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage to Ensure the Global Economy and J is for Junk Economics.. Today we discuss how the bank bailouts, not the crash, are killing the economy. Also, the concept of debt deflation, the magic of compound interest, the growth of the financial extraction FIRE sector, quantitative easing, tariffs, economic sanctions and isolationism.

BONNIE FAULKNER: Dr. Michael Hudson, welcome.

MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be back after a few years.

BONNIE FAULKNER: Boy I’ll say. I’ve just read your article “The Lehman 10th Anniversary Spin as a Teachable Moment.” Obviously, 2018 is the tenth anniversary of the 2008 stock market crash. You immediately point out that today’s financial malaise is a result of the bank bailout not the crash. I think people might find this statement surprising since the claim is that the bailout saved the economy.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think what the newspapers said was that the bailout saved the banks. To bankers, their banks are the economy. The problem is, you can’t save the banks and the economy. If you save the banks, you’re saving all the debt that people owe to the banks. And if you save all the debt that the people owe to the banks – and you foreclose on the millions of families that forfeited their homes in the mortgage crisis – if you leave the debts growing at compound interest, raise the debt equity ratios and the debt-to-income ratios, then the economy is going to shrink and shrink, and we’re in a slow crash. So in a sense the celebration over “Yes, we saved the banks” was correct last week, but people don’t realize that the economy cannot be saved unless there’s a bank crash.

That’s what Sheila Bair wrote in her memoir about her experience as the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She pointed out that Citibank was insolvent from losing all its net worth on bad gambles. She said it was the worst managed bank in America – as distinct from the just plain crooked banks and criminal banks like Countrywide, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

She said that there was plenty of theft by Citibank, but that all the insured depositors could have been reimbursed. No insured depositor would have lost money. But the stockholders and the bondholders that ran this gambling institution would have been wiped out. She said that Obama and Geithner really represented Citibank. Geithner was a protégé of Robert Rubin, the Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. She wrote that she found out, she was told, “It’s all about the bondholders.”

The problem is that Republican free-enterprise bankers discussing what happened ten years ago are saying, “Nothing to see here folks. Everything’s fixed now. We don’t have to do any regulation. Let the banks be free again.” Or, you have Democrats like Paul Krugman who cannot bring themselves to criticize what Obama did.   A week ago, on September 14, Krugman showed himself to be a flack for the banks and for the Democrats’ donor class by writing that the Washington Beltway was crazy to believe that America had a debt problem.

As I wrote in my article, he said that all you need is Keynesian policy to run a large enough budget deficit to spend enough money into the economy so that wage earners will have enough to pay the banks what they owe. I think this is the Democratic Party’s position: The role of wage earners is to make enough money so that all of their income over and above survival needs has to be paid for the banks. More and more income is needed to pay carrying charges as their debts keep rising…

There’s no feeling at all within the Democratic Party that somehow the banks should have been subordinate to saving the economy. I think that is a major reason why Hillary lost the 2016 election. She kept saying, “Aren’t you better off today than you were eight years ago when Mr. Obama was elected?”

Well, most people, especially in the Midwest, said, “No, we’re not better off. Are you kidding? We’ve lost our homes, employment’s down, our wages are lower, our pension funds are being seized. Of course we’re not better.” So more and more voters stayed home. Just today I was reading a survey that 55% to 85% of Americans say if there was a rerun of the 2016 election between Trump and Hillary they just wouldn’t vote, because both candidates were so bad.

So what you really have seen in this anniversary is not the discussion that you need to have: How are we going to deal with the next crisis to avoid bailing out the banks all over again? If we don’t bail out the banks, what’s the policy? How are we going to take over the insolvent banks – that means, take them public. Sheila Bair pointed out that if Citibank would have been taken over by FDIC it wouldn’t have made crooked loans, it wouldn’t have made junk mortgages. It wouldn’t have made corporate takeover loans, it wouldn’t have made loans to payday lenders, it wouldn’t have made derivative gambles. That’s not what public banks do.

That discussion somehow isn’t occurring. It’s not occurring because people don’t realize that in any economy – not only in America; you’re having the same thing in Europe – the volume of debt expands exponentially, by compound interest. All the debt that people owe keeps mounting up more and more arrears. And if you miss a payment on your credit card, or even if you miss a payment to the electric utility or any other monthly bills, your credit card’s interest rate goes up from 11 or 12% to 29%.

All this accumulates up and up and up. And the result is that personal debt service relative to income is going up. Corporate debt service relative to income is going way up, and the share of government budgets that must be paid to bondholders is going up. That means that people don’t have enough money to go and buy the goods and services they produce.

Here in New York, where I live there are whole blocks down 8th Street or Broadway or 5th Avenue or Madison Avenue with more and more stores empty and for rent, because the stores are going out of business. Restaurants especially are going out of business.

The big chains that have been going out of business, as you’ve seen—not only Toys R Us but the whole slew of the big global and American chains are going out. People do not have enough money to buy goods and services anymore. All of this is celebrated as “Saving the banks” instead of “Destroying the economy.” This is Orwellian Doublethink.

It’s as if keeping the debts in place instead of writing them down was a victory for the economy. The reality is that it was only a victory of the banks and their bondholders… 

The first debts to be wiped out are going to be what companies and states owe for pension payments. You’ll see pensions wiped out, and you’ll see Social Security scaled back. The vice is going to be tightening financially on people. That should be what people are talking about when they talk about the disaster of 2008

The first thing Obama did when he was elected was to send a list of recommended cabinet positions to Rubin at Citicorp. So Citicorp got to name the cabinet. Of course, it wasn’t going to accept anyone who would regulate it, or any people in Justice who would throw a banker in jail. That’s the crisis. IT’S A POLITICAL CRISIS NOW THAT IS TEARING AMERICA APART. But it’s not a crisis that’s being talked about in the press.

Why would anyone vote for a Democrat or a Republican that espouses continuing the status quo?  These politicians are not the people’s representatives they are government sanctioned predators bought out by special interests.   Our representatives are financial terrorists working against the American people.  From The Intercept:

Excerpt:

GOP REP. TOM REED FOUNDED MEDICAL DEBT COLLECTION FIRM THAT HARASSES HIS OWN CONSTITUENTS

OVER THE LAST two years, Michael Enslow, a resident of Waterloo, New York, has been in a back-and-forth with a debt collector. The exchanges, familiar to many Americans, ended up in federal court, claiming that the debt collection company repeatedly refused to remove medical debt he long ago resolved from his credit report. Their error prevented him from getting preapproved for a mortgage.

Such chicanery is par for the course in the debt collection industry, which is known for abusive practices, including bullying consumers into paying debts they do not owe. What’s unusual about Enslow’s case is that he was mistreated by a company that his own representative in Congress, western New York’s Republican Rep. Tom Reed, founded.

More than a dozen other consumers, including other New York residents, have filed complaints about Reed’s company, according to a docket maintained by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the agencies that oversees consumer lending companies. Several of the complaints claim that Reed’s firm harassed them for medical debt they never incurred or had already resolved.

For nearly two decades, Reed reaped financial rewards from the debt collection industry, managing a law firm that specialized in the trade. After his election to Congress in 2010, Reed resisted congressional rules that prohibited him from practicing law and required him to remove his name from his law firm.

The Buffalo News reported that 194 court documents continued to carry his law firm’s name after he was elected. But his name remained until 2014, when Reed said he had sold his stake in the company to his brother. In response to an inquiry from The Intercept, Abbey Daugherty, a spokesperson for Reed’s campaign, said, “Tom is not involved in this business.”

Yet records show that the Reed household did not fully divest from the company, though the company was rebranded from the “Law Office of Thomas W. Reed,” to “RR Resource Recovery.” An ownership stake in the firm is now controlled by Jean Reed, the wife of Tom Reed. And the newly incorporated firm lists Tom Reed’s brother John as the registration agent.

Reed makes little effort to distance himself from the company. Records show that he owns a property company called Reed & Reed Properties that houses RR Resource Recovery. And his personal ethics disclosure shows that Reed’s household continues to own a stake in both firms and collect an income of up to $100,000 a year from the two companies…

From his perch in Congress, Reed has participated in several Republican-led attempts to unravel the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the primary federal agency that polices debt collection practices. The attacks would defang the very agency that has collected consumer complaints about Reed’s company.

Last year, Reed voted for the Financial CHOICE Act, a sprawling financial deregulation bill that rolls back CFPB’s mandate to regulate “unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices,” and weakens the agency’s independence by making the director an at-will employee of the president…

Unfair Targeting for Debt Collection

Enslow is not the only person to lodge a complaint against the company Reed founded. The Intercept spoke to others and reviewed records, from as far back as 15 years ago, of residents in Reed’s district who said they were unfairly targeted by his company.

Over the last year, local activists raised Reed’s financial interest in medical debt collection, claiming that he profits from the current patchwork of policies, and that he would personally benefit further from his vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act…

Reed did not directly respond to the allegation that his household benefits from medical debt. “Even if we went to single-payer health care, who do you think is going to pay for that?” Reed retorted…

Tracy Mitrano, Reed’s Democratic opponent for the 23rd Congressional District, has campaigned for “Medicare for All,” making the issue front and center in her campaign, along with bringing broadband to rural New York and tackling student debt. Reed, however, has largely sidestepped the issue of health care, instead campaigning on his support for President Donald Trump and deploying the catch-all insult he uses against every Democratic opponent, labeling Mitrano an “extreme Ithaca liberal.”

Yes, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been a thorn in the side of our “representatives” since its inception and they want to get rid of it.  Obama’s healthcare law was written by special interests to maintain Wall Street profits.  Who are you going to vote for in the midterms?  Who gives a rip about the American people?  And it’s not just banking and healthcare, it’s the military industrial complex too.  From The Intercept:

Excerpt:

WEAPONS MAKERS RUSHING CAMPAIGN CASH TO DEMOCRAT IN LINE TO CHAIR DEFENSE INDUSTRY’S KEY HOUSE COMMITTEE

WEAPONS MAKERS ARE moving last-minute money to the Democratic congressman in line to chair the defense industry’s key House committee, as he is under assault from a fellow Democrat, who is attacking his pro-war record just ahead of a rare intra-party general election.

If Democrats take the House of Representatives, the next chair of the Armed Services Committee, which oversees military affairs and defense spending, will likely be Rep. Adam Smith, a hawkish Democrat from Washington state who represents a district in the Seattle-area, where important elements of the military-industrial complex are concentrated.

But standing in his way is Sarah Smith, a working-class activist and democratic socialist, hoping to channel progressive momentum to dislodge the incumbent lawmaker in an unusual Democrat versus Democrat general election matchup. 

In a year that has seen several high-profile incumbent Democrats challenged, this race stands out for its focus on foreign policy and the pernicious influence of the weapons industry.

Sarah Smith has mounted a surprisingly spirited bid, attacking the “corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex” and demanding that the country shift “away from our economy of violence toward an economy of peace.” She has singled out Adam Smith’s votes in favor of war and against restrictions on cluster munitions, as well as his support for bills that have expanded the reach of the sprawling homeland security and surveillance state. 

Sensing an opportunity to influence the race and the potential future committee chair, major weapons contractors have given the lawmaker last-minute campaign support. Lobbyists and executives associated with General Dynamics, one of the largest weapons makers in the world, have given over $10,000 in recent weeks, in addition to the $9,500 from the company over the last quarter…

Adam Smith has served in Congress since 1997 and has compiled a relatively interventionist voting record. He cast a vote in favor of the Iraq War during George W. Bush’s administration and initially warned against winding down the war in Afghanistan during Barack Obama’s administration.

In 2016, in one of the first major floor votes to prevent the transfer of American arms to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, Adam Smith was one of only 16 Democrats to join Republicans in voting the measure down. The bill explicitly restricted the use of cluster munitions, which often kill and injure civilians because the ordinance is designed to detonate and spread miniature explosives over a wide area.

Textron, the Rhode Island-based defense contractor that has long served as a leading producer of cluster bombs, has given Adam Smith $24,500 in campaign contributions over the last decade. The company announced two years ago that it would end the production of the weapon…

Adam Smith’s campaign has massively out-raised his progressive challenger by an 11 to 1 margin, giving the incumbent a significant advantage, as he’s been able to air campaign commercials to get his message out. The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as several local activist groups, have volunteered for Sarah Smith’s campaign, giving the young challenger a boost of enthusiasm despite the moneyed gap in political resources.

Political prognosticators are giving Sarah Smith little chance: FiveThirtyEight projects Adam Smith has a better than 99 percent chance of winning the race.

The incumbent has a 99 percent chance of winning because he has been engorged with campaign contributions from the defense industry, particularly the leading producer of cluster bombs.  That is what the DNC has to offer, foreign policy formed by campaign contributions.  The DNC is un-Democratic and has become an extension of the Republican Party.  Who would vote for that?  From James Howard Kunstler at Lew Rockwell:

Excerpt:

Midterm Endgame

Back in the last century, when this was a different country, the Democrats were the “smart” party and the Republicans were the “stupid” party. How did that work? Well, back then the Democrats represented a broad middle class, with a base of factory workers, many of them unionized, and the party had to be smart, especially in the courts, to overcome the natural advantages of the owner class. In contrast, the Republicans looked like a claque of country club drunks who staggered home at night to sleep on their moneybags. Bad optics, as we say nowadays.

The Democrats also occupied the moral high ground as the champion of the little guy. If not for the Dems, factory workers would be laboring twelve hours a day and children would still be maimed in the machinery. Once the relationship between business and labor was settled in the 1950s, the party moved on to a new crusade on even loftier moral high ground: civil rights, aiming to correct arrant and long-lived injustices against downtrodden black Americans. That was a natural move, considering America’s self-proclaimed post-war status as the world’s Beacon of Liberty. It had to be done and a political consensus that included Republicans got it done. Consensus was still possible.

The Dems built their fortress on that high ground and fifty years later they find themselves prisoners in it. The factory jobs all vamoosed overseas. The middle class has been pounded into penury and addiction. The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the permanent bureaucracy looking to always expand itself, and the various ethnic and sexual minorities whose needs and grievances are serviced by that bureaucracy. It’s the last group that has become the party’s most public face while the party’s other activities – many of them sinister — remain at least partially concealed.

The Republican Party has, at least, sobered up some after getting blindsided by Trump and Trumpism. Like a drunk out of rehab, it’s attempting to get a life. Two years in, the party marvels at Mr. Trump’s audacity, despite his obvious lack of savoir faire. And despite a longstanding lack of political will to face the country’s problems, the Republicans are being forced to engage on some real issues, such as the need for a coherent and effective immigration policy and the need to redefine formal trade relations. (Other issues like the insane system of medical racketeering and the deadly racket of the college loan industry just skate along on thin ice. And then, of course, there’s the national debt and all its grotesque outgrowths.)

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has become the party of bad ideas and bad faith, starting with the position that “diversity and inclusion” means shutting down free speech, an unforgivable transgression against common sense and common decency…  And it is deeply corrupt, with good old-fashioned grift, new-fashioned gross political misconduct in federal law enforcement, and utter intellectual depravity in higher education.

I hope that Democrats lose as many congressional and senate seats as possible. I hope that the party is shoved into an existential crisis and is forced to confront its astounding dishonesty. I hope that the process prompts them to purge their leadership across the board.

If there is anything to salvage in this organization, I hope it discovers aims and principles that are unrecognizable from its current agenda of perpetual hysteria. But if the party actually blows up and disappears, as the Whigs did a hundred and fifty years ago, I will be content. Out of the terrible turbulence, maybe something better will be born.

Or, there’s the possibility that the dregs of a defeated Democratic Party will just go batshit crazy and use the last of its mojo to incite actual sedition. Of course, there’s also a distinct possibility that the Dems will take over congress, in which case they’ll ramp up an even more horrific three-ring-circus of political hysteria and persecution that will make the Spanish Inquisition look like a backyard barbeque. That will happen as the US enters the most punishing financial train wreck in our history, an interesting recipe for epic political upheaval.

How true, if the Dems take over congress “they’ll ramp up an even more horrific three-ring circus of political hysteria” rather than concentrate on fixing our out of control banking system that has continued to terrorize the American people.  There are hardly any Democrats in the Democratic Party anymore because they were purged by the Obama Administration. 

The people don’t want Donald Trump to be impeached, they want a Democratic Party to work with him to end these fruitless wars and repair our infrastructure.  The bobble heads from the Democratic Party that populate the political talk shows are indicative of the “new” Democratic Party of relentless war-mongers hell-bent on destroying America for financial and political gain.  From Geopolitics:

Excerpt:

Panic Among Oligarchs, Trump May Turn the Election

President Donald Trump is fully deployed to assure that the “Impeachment Party” — once known as the Democratic Party — is denied their effort to take over the Congress and launch an impeachment. He has held 12 rallies across the country in support of Republican candidates, repeating everywhere that a vote for Democrats this year is a vote against himself.

He plans to hold 10 more rallies in the final days preceding the election on Nov. 6. Although he seldom engaged the press in his first two years, in the past three weeks he has held numerous press conferences and interviews, fully confident and determined in his role as President.

The LaRouche PAC-sponsored Independent Congressional candidacies in Texas and South Dakota of Kesha Rogers and Ron Wieczorek are rallying people around the country, regardless of party affiliation, to defend the nation against the British-orchestrated coup attempt, and organizing Americans to back Trump’s intention to establish peace and friendship with Russia and China, restore American System economic policies in the U.S., while calling on Trump to join in the new paradigm for global development represented by the Belt and Road Initiative.

The British and their assets in the U.S. are not pleased. In the past week we have seen the “caravan” of people from Honduras and Guatemala, openly mobilized and financed by George Soros’s NGOs, being driven toward the U.S. border, trying to force a showdown that they believe will undermine Trump’s resolve and public support.

Even the Presidents of the these two impoverished nations have denounced the operation as a destabilization of their own countries, and created a “Safe Return” fund to entice the marchers back to their homelands. Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has offered jobs and work visas to the marchers if they would stay in Mexico.

And now we have the mail-bomb operation, with primitive pipe-bombs mailed to Obama, Hillary Clinton, CNN and others — even George Soros himself — although they may have been so poorly constructed that they could not explode. CNN President Jeff Zucker immediately blamed Trump and his press spokesperson Sarah Sanders, claiming that their attacks on the press constitute an invitation for terrorist assassinations!

Trump, in fact, strongly denounced the criminal acts and swore to catch the perpetrators. The {Washington Post} headlined an article: “Amid Incendiary Remarks, Targets of Trump’s Words Become Targets of Bombs.” They also denounced those who questioned the bombs as a possible “false-flag” operation, of the sort now widely recognized due to the fake chemical weapons attacks in Syria by the terrorist White Helmets.

The New York Times went so far as to publish a short story by a British pulp novelist about a Russian hit-man, with help from the U.S. Secret Service, assassinating President Trump.

These actions have a destabilizing purpose, but there is a process underway in humanity at large which cannot easily be stopped. The British people have rejected the EU dictatorship, and now the same sentiment has led to a new government in Italy which is putting the health and livelihood of their citizens ahead of the unelected Brussels oligarchs. The elections of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Donald Trump in the U.S.A. demonstrate the old Abe Lincoln saying: You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Most importantly, there is now more than one choice facing the citizens of the world. The “one game in town” era of IMF dictates, the “Washington Consensus,” is dead, although the dinosaurs have so far failed to concede their demise. The Belt and Road is being embraced across Asia, Africa and Ibero-America, and increasingly in both Eastern and Western Europe.

This is what the Lords of the City of London and Wall Street fear most. When they heard this past week that Trump plans to meet Vladimir Putin in Paris immediately after the election, and that he is also to meet with Xi Jinping at the end of November in Argentina, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men have been deployed to prevent this affront to the British Empire’s division of the world by the upstart President of the breakaway colony across the Atlantic. But Humpty Dumpty is about to take a great fall.

In 2008 the working people were abandoned by the Obama Democrats in favor of Wall Street Banks and now the working people have abandoned the Democratic Party and they are not coming back.  The Democrats may take back the house and if they do, they will neuter the populists and revert back to their same, failed policies of coddling banks ensuring a Trump victory in 2020.  The Democrats care only about money and cannot be relied upon to save Social Security or Medicare.  There is no Democratic Party, just a neocon war party.  For the DNC nothing will change after the midterms no matter the outcome.

Time to dump the evil, corrupt 2-Party System in America

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.

― John Adams, The Second President Of The United States

The two party system of government in the United States of America has become so corrupted by money and power that they no longer have the ability to govern.  They have become multi-millionaires in their service to the special interests they serve and America cannot heal until the evil is excised.  They, not the people choose who is to govern through corrupt primaries, redistricting and onerous voter I.D. laws that subvert the will of the people and subjugate the populous to financial slavery. 

Through their fealty to big pharma a generation of children have been reared on psychotropic drugs, mercury laced inoculations and school to prison pipelines through for-profit charter schools.  Another generation has been condemned to a lifetime of servitude to their government protected highly profitable bankers who provide loans just to acquire a higher education to fill nonexistent jobs. 

Those who cannot attend college become cannon fodder for endless wars of aggression in cash poor, resource rich countries to pursue the goals of an insatiable empire.  Others are gunned down in their classrooms and at concerts by semi-automatic rifles fully sanctioned by the politicians.  It is time to dump the corrupt and evil 2-party system in America but doing so will be almost impossible as the parties control the entire voting process.  From The Free Thought Project:

Excerpt:

Powerful Poll Shows Most Americans Now Realize Gov’t is Owned by Lobbyists—Not the People

Transcending party lines, a new poll published by the Associated Press-NORC Center reveals both the right and the left distrust Congress and understand that they are beholden lobbyists and not the people.

Washington, D.C. — (RT) The overwhelming majority of Americans, irrespective of party allegiance, holds a dismal opinion of Congress, a fresh poll shows. It found 89 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans disapprove of the legislature’s work.

The new poll, published by the Associated Press-NORC Center on Monday, revealed that a total of 85 percent of Americans believe the Congress’s job is below par…

Only 44 percent of Americans approve of the work their own Congressman or Congresswoman is doing on Capitol Hill, 41 percent of Democrats and half of Republicans…  Fewer than 20 percent of Americans believe there is merit to the lawmakers’ legislative work, while over a third of all respondents think it is mostly bad…

The plunging ratings aren’t a product of the Trump era and its partisan skirmishes. Americans have long been disenchanted with Congressional politics. A glance at the Gallup Congress approval chart through the years will show that it rarely climbed over the 20 percent threshold since 2010…

“Large majorities in both parties report lawmakers should pay attention to the majority of Americans but believe lawmakers actually pay attention to donors and elites…  The part of the population most catered-for by the lawmakers are the lobbyists that “gave money to last election campaign,” according to the survey.

Yeah pretty shitty statistics but congress doesn't fear the people, the people fear congress and what they'll do next.  It's not as if we can vote them out, we can only hope that they will resign and they don’t resign until they have become extremely wealthy through insider trading.  It’s sad but true.  That is life in the American Empire and the world knows it.  From Information Clearing House:

Excerpt:

Don't Bother... They're Here

February 27, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  When empires begin to die, their public acts--in sharp contrast to the ponderous, stately sobriety of their behavior while ascendant--tend to be marked by queer and pathetic eruptions of idiocy, bathos, and mania.

Though it can’t be known when our last Imperial Clown will douse the last lights of The Exceptional Empire and drop the keys in the mailbox for the last failed bank--America is showing clear signs of approaching meltdown…

The American Empire, enmeshed and floundering in a smothering net of contradictions, deceptions, and disastrous choices, is now playing out a pathetic absurdist farce before a fascinated and astonished world.

The essence of it is this. Due to prolonged betrayal of working people by the Democratic Party over many decades, the blatantly falsity and obvious deception it peddled so hard and so long to keep them in thrall have at last lost their grip. The result was loss of the Presidential election in 2016.

Stunned and unable to swallow the undeniable reason for it, the desperate party leadership concocted a preposterous, threadbare fantasy narrative to deny responsibility and direct shame, blame and disgrace away from itself.

The obvious best target was Trump…  It would not suffice, though, to attack him as a legitimate opponent because that would mean the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice… No, there had to be a nefarious agent that hoodwinked naive voters and diabolically stage-managed this vile and treasonous outcome.

Since the entrenched, master apparatus of America--the Deep State--has, as its main object, the care and feeding of its Militarist, Imperialist agenda, and since the Democratic Party has become its official voice, it was clear long before the election that Russia and Putin were the enemy of choice…

Putting aside the fact that America has no democracy, and never has had, the DNC honchos finessed their treachery while raging at their putative hijacking by enemies of America. In other words, the crime was not the fact of gross DNC misfeasance, but the horror that it was exposed by evildoers.

Yes in 2016 the unthinkable happened “the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice” and dumped the career politicians in both parties and chose Donald Trump.  The Democratic Party after “prolonged betrayal of working people over many decades” was dumped by those working people who flocked to Donald Trump.  Instead of learning from their mistakes, they exhibited insane hubris in fabricating the Russian collusion witch hunt to justify an out of control Special Investigator with a dubious past of service to the Deep State.

But I digress.  The DNC devised a fool proof way of denying the Democratic voters a say in their primaries by awarding “super delegates” a veto over the American people.  In 2008 Hillary Clinton won the primary but was denied the nomination by the “super delegates.”  For instance Hillary won Massachusetts by 15 percentage points yet, Massachusetts delegates went to Obama.  In Michigan and Florida Hillary won the primaries and the delegates were awarded to Obama, who by the way wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.  Has the party learned their lesson?  From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

Lawyers For The DNC Argue That 'Primary Rigging' Is Protected By The First Amendment

The ongoing litigation of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit and the appeal regarding its dismissal took a stunning turn yesterday. The defendants in the case, including the DNC and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, filed a response brief that left many observers of the case at a loss for words.

The document, provided by the law offices of the Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment…

The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: “…Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs’ process server in an attempt to bolster attention for this lawsuit…”  The DNC defense lawyers then argued that: “There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign.”

The brief continued: “…To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party’s nominee for public office...”

If all that weren’t enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty “to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent.”

It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any “fiduciary duty” to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

Like I stated earlier, this is what the DNC did to Hillary in 2008.  The Democratic Party of Florida sued the DNC for nullifying the Florida Primary and the Court ruled in favor of the DNC and awarded Obama the Florida delegates.  From Political Ticker:

Excerpt:

A Florida court threw out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Democratic Party's decision not to seat delegates from Florida.

(CNN) - A Florida court threw out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Democratic Party's decision not to seat delegates from Florida - as litigants prepared to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court…

"This is nuts. This is not right. How can they remove Florida after all the things that Florida has suffered through– hanging chads, through Bush v Gore, and they're sticking it to us again," DiMaio said before the hearing. 

Judge Richard Lazarra sided with the party, saying political parties have the right to make their own rules.  DiMaio's is the second Florida lawsuit protesting the Democratic Party's decision to be thrown out of court. An earlier one filed by Sen. Bill Nelson and Rep. Alcee Hastings, both Florida Democrats, was also dismissed.

Yep, nothing new happened in 2016 same chicanery different primary.  Bernie Sanders voters need to blame themselves for Bernie not winning the primary because they were too lazy to research the different rules in different states.  In some states you must be a registered Democrat or Republican to vote and there is a deadline to register.  Diamond and Silk, the North Carolina ladies who supported Trump did their research and notified voters in each state of what they would have to do to vote for Trump in plenty of time to be in compliance.  By the way, St. Bernard would not have been much different than Hillary on anything.  From Anti-War:

Excerpt:

Et Tu, Bernie?

Sanders signs on to Russia-gate conspiracy theory

One by one, the plaster gods fall, cracked and crumbled on the ground: the latest is Bernie Sanders, the Great Pinko Hope of the (very few) remaining Democrats with a modicum of sense who reject the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” paranoia of Rep. Adam Schiff and what I call the party’s California Crazies.

The official Democratic leadership seems to have no real commitment to anything other than fealty to a few well-known oligarchs, who provide the party with needed cash, a burning hatred of Russia – an issue no ordinary voter outside of the Sunshine State loony bin and Washington, D.C. cares about – and exotic issues of interest only to the upper class virtue-signalers who are now their main constituency (e.g., where will trans people go to the bathroom?).

Overlaying this potpourri of nothingness, the glue holding it all together, is pure unadulterated hatred: of President Trump, of Trump voters, of Middle America in general, and, of course, fear and loathing of Russia and all things Russian.

And now the one supposedly bright spot in this pit of abysmal darkness has flickered out, with Bernie Sanders, the Ron Paul of the Reds, jumping on the Russia-did-it bandwagon and cowering in the wake of Robert Mueller’s laughable “indictment,” in which the special prosecutor avers that $100,000 in Facebook ads were designed to throw the election to Trump – and to help Bernie!

Oh no, says Bernie, from his place of exile in the wilds of Vermont, where the Russians did not take over the electrical grid: It wasn’t me!  Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but hot air and fantasy, he’s kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian agent…

Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing – nearly two years later and there’s still no evidence of “collusion” – but he’s calling for a full-fledged witch-hunt…

The Deep State’s bid for power has hit several roadblocks recently, but it could yet succeed. First, Mueller could indict the President for “obstruction of justice” – a charge derived not from any real criminal activity, but from the investigation itself. I think this is the most probable outcome of all this.

Barring that, however, there is one road they could and probably would go down, given the intensity of their hatred for this President and their overweening power lust. Having gone this far in an attempt to overthrow a sitting President, they can’t just stop halfway to their goal. They have to go all the way, or else suffer the consequences – public exposure, and possible criminal charges. In short, if they fail to get Trump on some semi-legal basis, I think they’d welcome his assassination.

The Deep State cannot allow the Trump administration to stand for a number of reasons, the chief one being that the coup is already in progress and there’s no stopping it now. The President’s enemies are legion, they are powerful, and they are abroad as well as here on American shores.

They cannot allow his brand of “America First” nationalism to succeed, or seem to succeed: it conflicts too violently with their globalist vision of a borderless America-centric empire ruled by a coalition of oligarchs, technocrats, and Deep State operatives who’ve been shaping world events from the shadows for generations…

Will they oust a sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people?  That’s the issue at hand and that’s why I spend so much time writing about Trump and his enemies’ efforts to destroy him. Because if the Deep State succeeds, the America we knew and loved will be no more. Something else will take its place – and believe me, it won’t be pretty.

Yes, St. Bernard is no different than Hillary.  He supports the illegal war the U.S. is waging in Syria and stands by every criminal act of Benjamin Netanyahu.  St. Bernard has supported the U.S. Empire time and again.  That is why the corrupt, evil 2-Party System must go.  From Covert  Geopolitics:

Excerpt:

US Collapse – the Spectacle of Our Time

May you live in interesting times, goes the Chinese proverb. Few can doubt that we are indeed living in such an interesting time. Big changes are afoot in the world, it seems.  None more so than the collapsing of the American Empire.

The US is going through an historic “correction” in the same way that the Soviet Union did some 30 years ago when the latter was confronted with the reality of its unsustainable political and economic system...

In any case, all empires come to an end eventually. History is littered with the debris of countless empires. Why should the American Empire be any different? It’s not. Only arrogant “American exceptionalism” deludes itself from the reality.  The notable thing is just how in denial the political class and the US news media are about the unfolding American crisis.

This is partly where the whole “Russiagate” narrative comes into play. Blaming Russia for allegedly destabilizing US politics and society is a cover for denial over the internal rot facing the US…

For seven decades since the Second World War, “Pax Americana” was the grandiose name given to US imperial design for the global order. The period was far from peaceful as the vainglorious name suggests. Dozens of wars, proxy conflicts and violent subversions were carried by the US on every continent in order to maintain its empire. The so-called “global policeman” was more often a “global thug”…

Rather than accepting the fate of demise, the US is aggressively resisting by denigrating China and Russia’s power as somehow illegitimate. It’s the classic denial reaction of a sore loser.  So, what are the telltale signs that the US is indeed undergoing a seminal “correction” — or collapse?

The heyday of American capitalism is well passed. The once awesome productive system is a skeleton of its former self. The rise of massive social poverty alongside obscene wealth among a tiny elite is a sure sign that the once mighty American economy is chronically moribund. The country’s soaring $20 trillion national debt is another symptom of chronic atrophy. 

What the champagne bubbles can’t disguise is the structural failing of US capitalism to reverse exploding inequality and endemic poverty across America. The national prowess of US capitalism has been superseded by global capitalism where American corporations among others scour the planet for cheap labor and tax havens. There is no going back to a supposed golden age, no matter how much Trump crows about “America First”.

The other side of the coin from historic US economic demise is the concomitant rise in its militarism as a way to compensate for its overall loss of power.  It is no coincidence that since the end of the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US military interventions around the world have erupted with increased frequency and duration. The US is in a veritable permanent state of war actively deploying its forces simultaneously in several countries, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East.

Washington of course gives itself a fig leaf cover by calling its surge in militarism a “war on terror” or “defending allies”. But, increasingly, US war conduct is seen for what it plainly is — violation of international law and the sovereignty of nations for the pursuit of American imperial interests.  In short, the US is patently lashing out as a rogue regime. There’s no disguising that fiendish fact…

The American Empire is failing and flailing. This is the spectacle of our time. The Western mainstream news media are either blind, ignorant or complicit in denying the historic collapse… Casting around for scapegoats to “explain” the deep inherent problems, the political class are using Russia and alleged Russian “interference” as a pretext.

World history has reached a foreboding cross-roads due to the collapsing of the American Empire. Can we navigate a safe path forward avoiding catastrophic war that often accompanies the demise of empires?

A lot, it seems, depends on ordinary American people becoming politically organized to challenge their dysfunctional system run by and for the elites. If the American people cannot hold their elites to account and break their corrupt rule, overhauling it with something more equitable and democratic, then the world is in peril of being plunged into total war. We can only but wish our American brothers and sisters solidarity and success.

There is another price to pay for the evil corrupt 2-party system of hegemony.  The mass shootings taking place in our schools and communities by untreated mentally ill people.  From Gregory Palast:

Excerpt:

Florida = Honduras: Inequality kills.  Want to end the American shooting epidemic?

Guns vs Homicides by Nation

A crucial factor about the Florida killer: his family had to move out of the school district because they couldn’t afford the rent. Resentment yields anger. Not every poor kid becomes a killer — think Bill Clinton — but there will be one. Inequality kills.

A student of statistics — my son — was surprised by his regression analysis of gun ownership per capita in each nation versus homicides.  He wrote, "The result of my scatter plot came as quite the surprise to me: there was just about no correlation between number of guns and number of gun homicides."  In fact, "the correlation coefficient was -0.105871699." That is, by a small amount, more guns meant fewer homicides.

So what DID prove a strong correlation? Homicides versus the "GINI" coefficient. GINI is the measure of income inequality in a nation.  I've just returned from the nation with the widest gun ownership in the world, Switzerland, which has vanishingly few homicides — although almost all men 18-35, due to ancient military tradition, must keep weapons in their home (many fully automatic).

The nation with the same population as Switzerland, Honduras, has the world’s highest homicide rate — yet Honduras outlaws personal gun ownership.  David Hemenway, of the Harvard School of Public Health notes, "Switzerland and Honduras are not even close to being the same in many aspects of their society that will influence the levels of violence and homicide."

Exactly. Want to end gun violence? End violent inequality…

Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany Austria, Iceland — all nations with tiny small homicide rates — and very low GINI scores. Iceland, where a huge one-third of households have guns, is the most economically equal society on the planet — with a homicide rate of ZERO.

There will be no equity in America for as long as we have an evil, corrupt 2-party system answerable to no one.  They do not care about the American people, they only care about the special interests that they serve.  This cannot be tweaked, this cannot be incrementally changed. From Lew Rockwell:

Financial Tyranny: ‘We the People’ Are the New Permanent Underclass in America

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.  That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.  This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.  They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

To be clear, my definition of “affordable healthcare” is different from the government’s. To the government, you can “afford” to pay for healthcare if your income falls above the poverty line. That takes no account of rising taxes, the cost of living, the cost to clothe and feed a household, the cost of transportation and communication and education, or any of the other line items that add up to a life worth living...

Indeed, Americans currently pay $3.4 trillion a year for medical care. We spent more than $10,000 per person on health care in 2016…  As Bloomberg reports, “Rising health-care costs are eating up the wage gains won by American workers, who are being asked by their employers to pick up more of the heftier tab… The cost of buying health coverage at work has increased faster than wages and inflation for years, pressuring household budgets.”

Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. We don’t live as long, we have higher infant mortality rates, we have fewer hospital and physician visits, and the quality of our healthcare is generally worse. We also pay astronomical amounts for prescription drugs, compared to other countries…

While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.  

One investigative journalist spent seven months analyzing hundreds of bills from hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical equipment manufacturers. His findings confirmed what we’ve known all along: health care in America is just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.  This is clearly not a problem that can be remedied by partisan politics.

The so-called Affordable Care Act pushed through by the Obama administration is proving to be anything but affordable for anyone over the poverty line... Indeed, for too many Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle just to get by, the tax penalty for not having health insurance will actually be cheaper than trying to find affordable coverage that actually pays for care.

This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.  When almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement, and yet they are being forced to pay for government programs that do little to enhance their lives, we’re not living the American dream.  We’re living a financial nightmare.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls…

In other words, in the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than indentured servants and sources of revenue.  If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It is time to dump the evil, corrupt 2-party system that has ravished America.  The entire system is corrupt from corrupt big media, to corrupt big pharma, to corrupt military industrial complex, to corrupt intelligence agencies, to corrupt politicians.  It is time, America cannot wait.  We must vote out every incumbent that is financed by the Deep State.  It is time to excise the evil.

By Patricia Baeten

The consequences of “accepting the outcome” of a fraudulent election

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.   Abraham Lincoln

On Friday I stopped at a local pizza parlor to grab a quick, late lunch and as I waited I saw a full-page newspaper story on the 2000 election.  In the article it said that “Al Gore accepted the outcome of the election and stepped aside for the good of the Nation.”  The first thought that came to my mind was, is this an episode of “Fractured Fairy Tales?”  “Fractured Fairy Tales” was a segment on the cartoon show “Rocky and Bullwinkle” where well-known fairy tales were re-written in order to change the moral of the story.  It occurred to me that the 2000 election is being rewritten to change the actual sequence of events and the real consequences of “accepting the outcome” of a rigged election.

Accepting the outcome

The Florida coup d’état was well-planned by Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of the GOP candidate, his secretary of State Katherine Harris and Theresa LaPore.  First there were bogus felon lists that contained a list of names of individuals that were convicted of felonies in Florida as well as neighboring states.  Any person with a similar name was listed as a felon and denied the right to vote, especially minorities with similar surnames such as Jackson.  It is estimated that 173,000 names were purged from the Florida voter registry by the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.  Florida was the only state that payed a private company that promised to “cleanse” voter rolls.

Then there was the butterfly ballot.  In America by legal statute the Republican candidate is listed first on the ballot and the Democrat is listed second.  On the butterfly ballot, on the left side where the presidential candidates were listed, first was Bush and second was Gore.  However if you punched the second hole you were voting for Patrick Buchanan since the butterfly ballot placed Buchanan on the right side of the ballot which made a punch in the second hole a Buchanan vote.  According to the Green Party:

Excerpt:

Butterfly ballots are the most prone to voter confusion as it is not clear which hole goes with which candidate. Palm Beach County, the one county in Florida that used this system, is a predominantly Democratic-leaning county yet extreme conservative candidate Pat Buchanan had a phenomenal showing there…

Pat Buchanan himself has admitted that most of his votes in Palm Beach County were meant for Al Gore, saying he "did not campaign and bought no advertising there."  He added, "I would say 95 to 98 percent of [the votes] were for Gore.”

An investigation by the Civil Rights Commission also found that Governor Bush had a multi-pronged voter purge on November 7^th, 2000.  

Excerpt:

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Jeb Bush told a panel hearing complaints of voting irregularities in Florida that he had no plans to order his own investigation into the Nov. 7 election although he has the authority to do so.

Bush answered questions from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission looking at allegations of voting problems, including complaints that registered voters were turned away from the polls, election equipment in poor precincts was outdated, state police put up roadblocks near polling sites and non-English speaking voters weren't helped to cast their votes…

By day's end, commission members appeared frustrated by state officials -- including Bush -- claiming that local authorities have control over Florida elections…

Peaceful transition of power?

Even with all the election tampering on the part of the Jeb Bush Administration and the GOP, Al Gore still won Florida.  In spite of a media collectively claiming that Bush had won along with Gore’s DNC hand-picked war hawk Vice Presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman calling for Gore to concede the election, the allegations of widespread corruption in Florida reached Al Gore who requested a recount of the votes.

The Florida Supreme Court, who had sole jurisdiction over the election ordered a recount of the votes in Florida.  As the recount began the GOP organized what was called the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that would violently attack the people counting the votes, threatening their lives, shutting down the recount operation.”

Excerpt:

After the Miami “Brooks Brothers Riot” – named after the protesters’ preppie clothing – no government action was taken beyond the police rescuing several Democrats who were surrounded and roughed up by the rioters. While no legal charges were filed against the Republicans, newly released documents show that at least a half dozen of the publicly identified rioters were paid by Bush’s recount committee.

The payments to the Republican activists are documented in hundreds of pages of Bush committee records – released grudgingly to the Internal Revenue Service last month, 19 months after the 36-day recount battle ended. Overall, the records provide a road map of how the Bush recount team brought its operatives across state lines to stop then-Vice President Al Gore’s recount efforts.  The records show that the Bush committee spent a total of $13.8 million to frustrate the recount of Florida’s votes and secure the state's crucial electoral votes for Bush.

In addition, as the “Brooks Brothers Riot” was taking place, paid goons were bussed into Washington to surround Vice President Gore’s residence at the Naval Observatory and scream “get out of Cheney’s House.”  Due to the escalating violence, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, even though they had no statutory authority to do so, and five Republican justices overturned the will of the voters and installed George W. Bush as POTUS.

Al Gore steps aside for the “good of the nation.”

Al Gore is credited with stepping aside and allowing the loser of the election to assume the office of the presidency.  But was it for “the good of the nation?”  Hardly, within nine months of assuming office the 911 attacks took place.  Could the attacks have been avoided under a President Gore?  Yes.  The first action of the Bush Administration was to throw out the recommendations of the Gore Commission on aviation safety and the Hart-Rudman Commission’s recommendations to protect the country from terror attacks.  Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to conduct his own study.  Sadly after the 911 attacks Jake Tapper wrote about the deep remorse felt by the Hart-Rudman Commission co-chairs:

Excerpt:

Sept. 12, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- They went to great pains not to sound as though they were telling the president "We told you so."

But on Wednesday, two former senators, the bipartisan co-chairs of a Defense Department-chartered commission on national security, spoke with something between frustration and regret about how White House officials failed to embrace any of the recommendations to prevent acts of domestic terrorism delivered earlier this year.

Bush administration officials told former Sens. Gary Hart, D-Colo., and Warren Rudman, R-N.H., that they preferred instead to put aside the recommendations issued in the January report by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century. Instead, the White House announced in May that it would have Vice President Dick Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism -- which the bipartisan group had already spent two and a half years studying -- while assigning responsibility for dealing with the issue to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by former Bush campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

Before the White House decided to go in its own direction, Congress seemed to be taking the commission's suggestions seriously, according to Hart and Rudman. "Frankly, the White House shut it down," Hart says…  "We predicted it," Hart says of Tuesday's horrific events. "We said Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers -- that's a quote (from the commission's Phase One Report) from the fall of 1999."

On Tuesday, Hart says, as he sat watching TV coverage of the attacks, he experienced not just feelings of shock and horror, but also frustration. "I sat tearing my hair out," says the former two-term senator. "And still am."  Hart says he spent 90 minutes with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and an hour with Secretary of State Colin Powell lobbying for the White House to devote more attention to the imminent dangers of terrorism and their specific, detailed recommendations for a major change in the way the federal government approaches terrorism. He and Rudman briefed National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the commission's findings… 

Back to the Future

Once again we have a candidate that is a threat to the military industrial complex.  Presidential candidate Donald Trump is being pilloried by the press for refusing to accept the outcome of the 2016 election before it has even occurred.  Trump has called the election “rigged” and refuses to accept the preordained conclusion of the vote count.  In 2000 Al Gore stepped aside when he couldn’t garner the support of his party.  Should Donald Trump for “the good of the nation” pledge to accept the corrupt election results that are in before the first vote is cast? 

We, as Americans can only look back at history and decide, what will be the consequences if we decide to accept the outcome of another fraudulent election?  Will another Fractured Fairy Tale be written in four or eight years to explain why America went to war with Russia?  Only we hold the answers.

By Patricia Baeten