The Death of Electoral Politics in the United States of America - Part V

STOLEN ELECTIONS & OVERALL DEBASEMENT

First of all, the latest era that we've been living through involves the total debasement of whatever principles capitalist pseudo-democracy was ever possessed of. For instance, this blogger is of the opinion that george dubya bush was never elected. Instead, I maintain that he brazenly stole both of his elections. I'm well aware that there are plenty of shit-heads, devotees of a political mindset they glorify with the appellation "conservative" who would disagree with me. But I think that if i were to strap them down to the floor and kick them in the teeth long enough, they would soon see reason and recognize the merits of my case.

I mean, first of all the Repugnicans practice gerrymandering and voter suppression on a massive scale. (The Democrats used to do this as well but began to embrace electoral integrity at some point in the late-1960s. Waitaminnit! Did I just say that?!? Caveat: The Democrats play fair [and lose] against Republicans. But the party leadership cheats shamelessly to defeat progressives and leftists.) In Florida, the Republicans purged thousands of names from the voters list based on often spurious claims that they belonged to convicted felons.

Republican state governments manage the national election process in their own states. Which allows for blatant partisan defecation on the idea of free and fair elections. A case in point is the deliberate confusion deliberately created by the butterfly ballot. The way the ballot was designed it made it unclear which box to check to vote for Democrat Al Gore, and, the proof of this was the large number of votes for Hitler-admirer Pat Buchanan in voting precincts with a high number of Jewish voters.

Obviously, if you took your time and paid attention you would eventually see which box was for Gore and which was for Buchanan. And this prompted shameless Republican partisans to sneer about "stupid Democrats" who don't know how to use the voting booth. But the ballots were deliberately designed to be confusing. And in US elections they vote for entire tickets and on referendum questions. So it can be a lengthier process than in our federal elections where we vote for one MP from a selection that is rarely higher than six people. ANY attempt to throw confusion and roadblocks into the voting process betrays an intellectual failure to appreciate the sanctity of electoral democracy. It betrays an anti-democratic mindset.

In the end, the Republican's voter-suppression and confusing ballots and other shenanigans weren't enough to steal a victory. The results were very close (and would eventually show that Al Gore won). Election officials began to count the ballots manually. This triggered a "riot" from degenerates such as those pictured below. These stupid assholes were Republican operatives, often paid and flown into Florida, to protest this attempt to maintain electoral integrity. In the end, a despicable, shameful, partisan Supreme Court decision finally put the nail in the coffin and the Florida vote determined the 2000 US election for the moronic george dubya bush.

Once bush II was illegally installed by a corrupt Supreme Court, his puppet-master, the career criminal (and not very bright) Dick Cheney, in the guise of Vice-President, began to use the USA's federal executive branch as a means to restore the fortunes of the company (Halliburton) that he had almost destroyed when he was its CEO. You see, dullard Dick Cheney thought he'd be able to show off his "free market" chops in the private sector, but the stupid fuck had his company buy another company in the middle of a huge asbestos damages lawsuit. The company lost the lawsuit and Halliburton was now liable for billions in damages. Cheney's bludgeoning of bush II into the White House allowed him to repair the damage he'd caused by doing what he did best: Blatant corruption and lying. The bush II-Cheney regime launched an illegal war of choice (making them liable for hanging) and gave Halliburton tens of billions in contracts (which contracts Halliburton subcontracted and gouged and cheated on) thereby recovering from the hole Dipshit Dick Cheney had driven them into.

Fuckwad Cheney also brazenly sneered at even the concept of public accountability with his legislative-executive branch bullshit about his energy taskforce talks. You see, Stupid Dick Cheney is a creature of the fossil fuels industry. For that reason he had his energy taskforce talks with numerous fossil fuels executives. Among trading racist jokes and comparing penis sizes, these vermin would also talk about ways that government policy could be steered towards their own personal benefit.

Obviously, Cretinous Cheney couldn't have these corruption parties made public so he refused to release records of the meetings to the National Archives under the claim that as Vice-President of the Senate he was part of the legislative branch of government, while simultaneously arguing that the legislative branch's General Accounting Office could not get the records because that would be an intrusion on the privilege of the executive branch.

This was briefly a controversy. Then briefly a scandal. Then a moment for cynical laughter on late-night political talk shows. Then it was forgotten. Which seems to be the problem with human beings. We can't seem to grasp anything other than the obvious. And even then, we fail to grasp the significance. Take, for instance, all the idiots who talk shit about COVID-19. The virus is microscopic and the deaths happen inside hospital IC wards. So the fact that over 100,000 US-Americans have been killed by it can't register with these morons. They bray like donkeys in the streets about the "tyranny" of being asked to wear masks because the danger isn't literally an enormous, hairy creature with huge fangs and bloody claws snarling at them from a meter away. They can't process Global Heating either. Because of the same stupidity. And all of those in the USA, who failed to grasp the significance of Dick Cheney, whether it was his stolen election, his war based on lies, or his brazen disembowelment of public accountability, ... all of them fatal to the idea of "democracy" ... they failed to rally behind the flawed pseudo-democracy they had and the world has become as we see it today.

And we in Canada failed in exactly the same way, when the pathetic imbecile stephen harper imported the same contempt for the spirit and the letter of the laws to Canada. Our elite media supported him during his crimes. Liberals and parliamentary NDP members, all tolerated him as just an extreme form of "conservative" rather than the total menace and complete degenerate that he was. And thereby set a precedent of tolerating total contempt for our supposed foundational political values. (I wrote TONS of stuff detailing all of harper's contempt for our system of government. Search the blog if you so desire.) The point is that our pseudo-democracies were the best tools we had available to control these monsters. But, a combination of liberal complacency and complicity with neo-liberalism, and social democratic delusion, and the childish contempt of "super-radical" activists, led to the withering of the legal checks and balances of democratic oversight.

911

My survey of the ups and downs of capitalist pseudo-democracy has taken us to the 21st Century. And I suppose that, aside from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the real way to introduce the new millennium is with the terrorist attacks on 9-11-2001. Personally, having read about the lackadaisical behaviour of the george w. bush administration in the months leading up to the attack it's my belief that while it wasn't an "inside job" it certainly seems that they were hoping for something to happen. They wanted something akin to "a new Pearl Harbour" to allow them to go nuts with police-state legislation and openly imperialist foreign policy.

Anyway, these anti-democratic scum (bush II and Cheney) were on duty when the massive security failure of 911 2001 occurred. And they used that incident to pass The Patriot Act. (And Canada passed The Anti-Terrorism Act.) Pieces of legislation which ramped-up state surveillance powers and weakened citizens' rights. Because now that capitalism doesn't have to compete with socialist ideas anymore, there's no point in sharing the wealth with the plebians. Matter of fact (and as I've demonstrated in this series of posts) their own selfish policies harm the economy and make it necessary for elite parasites to TAKE from the majority and lower their standards of living. This is going to make people angry. It's therefore in their interest to spy on people and take away their rights so as to control them easier as they fleece and abuse them.

The Patriot Act itself was based on a draft for an anti-terrorism bill crafted in 1994 by the Democratic Party's current great white hope for 2020, Joe Biden.

You see, Noam Chomsky (of whom [who?] I am a fan) has come out as a defender of "lesser-evil" voting both now and in 2016. He has actually advocated voting for the lesser evil in close contests since forever. At the same time he has said that the act of voting every 2 years (Congress and some Senators) and four years (the same plus the Presidency) shouldn't be seen as the main form of democratic participation. Protest and other forms of activism are more important. However, given the fact that protest, as it is practiced by the deluded child-minds of progressives, has shown itself to be useless, and given the fact that lesser-evilism has only allowed the Democratic Party to move farther and farther to the right, ... it is therefore well past time for Chomsky to reevaluate his position. Chomsky is right to be concerned with the fascist proclivities of Donald J. Trump. The danger though is that the USA is not Nazi Germany. After Hitler was made Chancellor, the Reichstag burned and the Nazis passed "The Enabling Acts" that increased state power and eviscerated citizens' rights. But in the USA, they've already had their Reichstag Fire, and their version of the "Enabling Acts" are already passed and they were a bipartisan accomplishment.

Anyway, anti-terrorism was now the great cause of our era. Just like defeating fascism was supposedly the fight of the 1940s, and defeating communist tyranny was the cause of the Cold War. Now it was THE WAR ON TERROR!!! Which was, and is, total bullshit. I call it the GBWOT (Great Bullshit War On Terror). Because the USA not only engages in terrorism itself. Amazingly, the Washington foreign policy elites have been caught, and admitted to, arming and training the same Jihaadists they say we have to fight! That's a pretty amazing accomplishment don't you agree? And (don't forget!) we humans should stop and consider the significance of that fact. Saudi Arabia (and the other feudal regimes on the Arabian Peninsula) are the biggest sources of cash and manpower for the Islamic fundamentalist organizations. The USA armed and funded and assisted fundamentalist terrorists to topple Libya's Qaddafi and bring ruin to Libya. The USA armed Jihaadists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. They are still arming and training these maniacs in Syria. The whole goddamned thing is a sham, a con-job. It is being used to justify military spending and police-state legislation. And most of us have fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

Just like Francis Fukuyma's discredited "End of History" at the end of the Cold War, this GBWOT era produced it's own tome of pseudo-scholarship, Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations." But, as I said, the War on Terror is bullshit and therefore Huntington's book is bullshit. The GBWOT justifies Keynesian subsidies for war. Terrorism "justifies" assaults on civil liberties thereby making it easier to implement austerity. Racism gives people scapegoats for miseries of austerity. The GBWOT adds Muslims and Arabs to Blacks, Latinos, Indigenous Peoples, and immigrants, to the list of the hated. (And, recently, Russians and Chinese have been added in a bipartisan effort.)

I had intended to write more about bush II's criminality. But it would be redundant. Suffice to say that the duration of his time in office, including the also stolen second term, was just used to inflict more literal torture on innocent people, continued Pentagon-MIA-GBWOT corruption, continued shredding of civil liberties, and continued wage stagnation and worker insecurity. Without even trying to acknowledge the humour of it, the shit-head, coke-addled, lazy-assed, silver-spooned, legacy student, george dubya bush, played at also being the "Education President" with his "No Child Left Behind" policies, which were mainly used to force schools to pay for private-sector provided standardized tests, which were mainly useless, but which did provide for excuses to cut funding for public sector schools (when they failed due to reasons beyond their control) and to shift funding to private charter schools, which would fail even more but then go out of business and take the money and run. Which was the whole fucking point of the exercise. So that corporate criminals could get rich on public monies and to hell with the people.

The only other "engine of growth" during the bush II years was financial speculation, which resulted in the gigantic explosion of fraud and misery of 2008. Deliberate, massive, world-economy destabilizing fraud, for which no bankster went to prison. Instead, bush II and Cheney put together a public bail-out of these criminal parasites and Democrat Barack Obama oversaw its implementation as one of his first acts as President. (After filling his cabinet from a list of candidates provided by the same Wall Street thieves he'd help to rescue.)

CHINA

Just to be clear, it was western capitalists sent who sent jobs to China. China didn't compel our governments to close our factories and re-open them in China. As Naomi Klein wrote long ago in 2008, China became a testing ground for surveillance technology. The Chinese Communist Party (CPP) wanted this technology for their own authoritarian reasons, and western oligarchs took advantage of the absence of democracy there to see how it worked. China is also helpful as a scapegoat and as a military rival to use as a bogeyman.

These people are idiots sure. But they're all (in their own ways) individual idiots. There are multiple plot-lines, actors, and therefore, interpretations. The Democrats fixate on Russia because Putin (who is a nasty fellow) thwarts the insane ambitions of Hillary Clinton in the Middle East and (like the spit-spraying lunatic that she is) she has made him a scapegoat for her own miserable failure to defeat Donald Trump, in her ludicrously concocted, shit-for-brains conspiracy theory of "Russiagate." With Donald Trump, it's the Chinese. (Also, FWIW, with has-been shithead stephen j. harper.)

No good guys or bad guys. (We're not even good. Things just are.)

IMMIGRATION AND RISE OF RIGHT-WING PARTIES

The right-wing brain is afraid. And things that are different are a category that causes the right-wing brain to be even more afraid. And immigrants have things that are different (language, culture, etc.,) and so they make right-wing people afraid. And when the world is threatening (because of economic stresses caused by neoliberalism) right-wing people want to lash-out. Being cowards and morons they are constitutionally incapable of fighting back against the powerful interests who are the true source of their sufferings. That would take both proper analysis (which escapes them because they're morons) and courage (which eludes them because they're fearful cowards). So they lash out at immigrants, and "races" of people in other lands, and fellow citizens who have a different skin colour from them.

These idiots respond to oligarchic austerity policies by stupidly joining together in extremist racist political movements. In part, this process is encouraged by right-wing traditional elites. Failed fake prime minister stephen harper's stupid book is used to argue that the reason that "ordinary Canadian households" have suffered under both Liberal and Conservative governments (in spite of his always using sophisticated fact-finding and cost-benefit analysis to have carefully arrived at the very best public policies that anyone could ever have arrived it) is because of fucking goddamned immigrants and the Chinese. (Again, deliberately bringing in immigrant labour to displace Canadian workers as indentured servants and deliberately signing trade deals that allowed Canadian companies to manufacture in China and which allowed China to buy-up our resources were harper's policies, his own current racist conspiracy theories notwithstanding.)

To a degree, traditional elites genuinely fear and despise these racist extremists. They take support away from traditional right-wing parties, interfere with the exploitation of undocumented immigrants, and challenge (even if only verbally) globalization. And sometimes they're just plain ugly. But then, these elites have always been disgusted by poor people. And if the main thing is that right-wing chumps are fighting immigrants and people of colour, well, that's the main thing.

And, when the right-wing chumps realize that election time has come 'round again and they see that the Conservatives or the Republicans are offering them candidates who seem to hate immigrants and people of colour, then they [stupidly] support those parties. And in Europe, it's refugees. Millions of Arabs and Africans have fled to Europe as a result of the devastations caused by US-American wars in their home countries. As a result, stupid, fearful, right-wing people feel that "boo-hoo-hoo!" they're under attack. This is one of the many factors behind the rise of bona fide fascist parties in Europe.

SOARING INEQUALITY

Statistics don't seem to capture the reality, but they do provide some indication of the vast chasm of income and wealth inequality in the 21st Century. Average CEO compensation has soared from 20x that of the average worker in the 1960s to over 300x an average worker's annual income today. 40% of workers in the Anglo-American economies are one missed paycheque away from homelessness. Over 60% of US-American households couldn't find $1,000 for an emergency. (If those sources attempt to say that this is due to "economic illiteracy" or anything like that, ... ignore them. This was the intended consequence of neoliberal economic policies.)

INDIFFERENCE TO ILLEGAL TAX AVOIDANCE

Slash incomes for the majority and lower taxes on the wealthy and the corporations. Allow for the continued financialization of the economy. Allow money to flow in and out of the nation's borders at will. Create a craven political class and cut them in on some of the action. This creates a world where elites get to hide their fortunes in ILLEGAL offshore accounts. A few years back the amount of hot money sitting in these accounts (looking for interest-generating "investments") was $22 TRILLION. We cut their taxes in half so that they'll create jobs. They don't create jobs. Instead they funnel their money overseas where there's ZERO TAX. And even when it's revealed in leaks like "The Panama Papers" or "The Paradise Papers" our governments of puppets make only token efforts (if that) to recover the money.

THAT'LL DO PIG

Awk! This has gone on long enough. I'll post this and then start on the last part.