American Billionaires Farm This Public
By Feeding to the Voters the Politicians
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org
Any animal farm needs to feed, to its livestock, food that the farmer has selected, so as to fatten the animals in the way that the farmer wants, in order for him to serve his selected market — serve them what that market wants.
Foie-gras ducks (and geese) are fed in order to produce foie gras — sickly enlarged bird-livers — which aristocrats traditionally have craved to eat. Many rich people eat this almost tasteless “delicacy”, as a status-symbol. By French law, foie gras is defined as the liver of a duck or goose fattened by force-feeding corn with a feeding tube. The final weeks of the bird’s life consist of nothing but these force-feedings, as the animal’s only supply of food. That’s the way to produce those highly valued, sickly enlarged, bird-livers.
In the following video, the actress Kate Winslet explains and shows how this force-feeding is done (it’s showing there a bird-analogue of what’s done to America’s voters):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyOu-GVtgPQ
Those ducks and geese need to be force-fed this food because the birds don’t actually want to eat it — they’re forced to ‘eat’ it; it’s simply forced into their stomachs. That’s not really eating of food, for nutriment or for health, and especially not for pleasure, like real eating is. It is, instead, just the farmer’s forcing corn into the bird’s stomach, regardless of what that victim wants, or needs, or can even tolerate. It’s something that’s done to the bird, not by the bird. So, although it’s feeding, it’s not actually eating.
This is the way that American elections increasingly are, for Americans — elections are increasingly something that’s done to them, and less and less what they themselves do.
America’s Democratic Party voters aren’t as politically disaffected as are America’s Republican Party voters, but both groups are reluctant to vote for the politicians whom the aristocracy is offering to them as constituting their final general-election options. And there are now a larger number of unaffiliated or “independent” American voters than the voters of either Party — and America’s independent voters are astronomically politically disaffected. This was shown on 26 October 2016, just before the U.S. election, when Britain’s Guardian bannered
Most Americans do not feel represented by Democrats or Republicans – survey
Participating in this poll had been (as shown on page 42 of the pollsters’ full report) two thousand scientifically sampled American adults, 18 or older — including ones who hadn’t even registered to vote (and so this was a scientific sampling of the total U.S. adult population, instead of only of registered voters, or only likely voters) and consequently the most disillusioned voters who don’t vote at all were included in this political poll, which is absolutely extraordinary — and it found, as the Guardian summarized it, that: “Sixty-one per cent of survey respondents say neither political party reflects their opinions today, while 38% disagree. Nearly eight in 10 (77%) independents and a majority (54%) of Republicans took this position, while less than half (46%) of Democrats agree.”
So (to clarify that incompetent writing in the Guardian): just before America’s 2016 general election, 46% of Democrats were politically disaffected, 54% of Republicans were, and a whopping 77% of independents were; and 61% of all Americans were. Fewer than 39% of Americans thought that the U.S. Government represented them. Not necessarily in words, but definitely in reality: 61% of Americans thought they weren’t living in a democracy — they thought that America is actually a dictatorship. A better headline for that news-report would therefore have been: “61% of Americans Think They Live in a Dictatorship.” It would have been shorter, clearer, and equally as true, as the Guardian’s headline.
Since Democrats are the least-displeased American voting-group, regarding the politicians that their aristocrats have selected for them and fed to them, let’s focus on and consider here, in some detail, this least-displeased American voting-group, because they’re the least like any resistant (or “anti-Establishment”) foie gras geese and ducks are; Democratic Party voters are far more passive than other Americans are, far more willingly accepting of what’s being fed to them by the aristocracy.
During the 2016 primaries-season, which are the contests within each of America’s parties, one candidate stood out above all others as being by far the most-preferred one by the American general electorate: Bernie Sanders. He was Hillary Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic Party primaries. Although all of the Democratic Party’s billionaires were funding Ms. Clinton’s campaign, the American public strongly preferred Mr. Sanders. In the numerous one-on-one polled hypothetical choices versus any of the opposite Party’s contending candidates, Sanders crushed each one of them except John Kasich, who, throughout the primaries, was the second-most preferred of all of the candidates of both Parties (and who performed far better than Trump did in the hypothetical match-ups against Clinton). But Kasich received almost as little financial backing from the billionaires as did Sanders; so, like Sanders, Kasich didn’t receive his Party’s nomination. In the hypothetical match-ups, Sanders beat Kasich by 3.3%, whereas Kasich beat Clinton by 7.4% — that spread between +3.3% and -7.4% is 10.8%, and provides a pretty reliable indication of what the Democratic National Committee threw away when rigging the primaries and vote-counts for Hillary Clinton to win the Party’s nomination. All of the DNC insiders knew that Sanders would be the stronger general-election candidate, no matter whom the Republican nominee would end up being; all of the polling showed it clearly, and they all read the polls voraciously. In all of this hypothetical polling, Sanders beat Trump by 10.4%, whereas Clinton beat Trump by only 3.2%. That spread was 7.2% in favor of Sanders over Clinton, and that’s a huge spread. However, the DNC cared lots more about satisfying its mega-donors, than about winning, when they picked Clinton to be the Party’s nominee. Ms. Clinton’s actual victory over Mr. Trump in the final election between those two nominees turned out to be by only 2.1% — close enough a spread so as to enable Trump to win in the Electoral College (which is all that counts), which counts not individual voters but a formula that represents both the states and the voters. Sanders would have beaten Trump in a landslide — far too big a victory-margin for the Electoral College to have been able to go the opposite way, such as did happen with Clinton (who was so stupid her campaign was a mess, definitely stupider than Trump’s). This fact, of Sanders’s clearly trouncing Trump, was also shown here and here. That’s what the DNC threw away; but discard it they did, because their billionaires were strongly opposed to Sanders (and many of them might have donated even to Trump in order to defeat Sanders).
Hillary Clinton received by far the biggest support from billionaires, of all of the 2016 candidates; Sanders received by far the least; and this is the reason why the Democratic Party, which Clinton and Barack Obama (two thoroughly billionaire-controlled politicians) effectively controlled, handed its nomination to Clinton.
The poll that had been reported by Britain’s Guardian, is shown in fuller detail here, documenting how loathed both of the two Parties’ Presidential nominees were:
“Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continue to have historically low favorability ratings with fewer than half of the public viewing each candidate positively (41% vs. 33%, respectively). Clinton is viewed less favorably than the Democratic Party (49%), but Trump’s low favorability rating is more consistent with the Republican Party’s low favorability (36%).”
Of course, the Republican Party won everything, though its favorability-rating was the lowest. In no way was this outcome the result of democracy.
The real action in American politics is in the primaries, and the billionaires know this. The primaries are the process where any candidate who wants to represent the public instead of the aristocracy, gets eliminated from further competition. That’s the reason why the billionaires are especially concerned to win in their respective party’s primaries — the first-stage selection process — so that the general-election options will be only candidates who are acceptable to the aristocracy. Then, if a particular billionaire doesn’t like what his party has nominated, he can either back that candidate if acceptable, or else might back another party’s nominee, who was selected by that other party’s billionaires. In either case, the billionaires’ class-interest will still be served, even though the given billionaire might philosophically disagree with the other party’s candidate. It’ll still be the same aristocracy ruling the country, even if a different segment of it.
This means that, for the voters, the final choice doesn’t include any anti-aristocratic (or pro-democratic) option: it’s instead between nominees all of whom represent some faction or another within the nation’s aristocracy.
That’s the situation amongst Democratic Party voters — these being the voters who are the least-disillusioned about their country’s ‘democracy’. Apparently, no matter how much the Democratic Party lies to its voters, those voters are extremely reluctant to reject their Party’s nominee. Even if their Party has stolen the nomination from them, and handed it to a nominee who ends up losing in the final contest, Democratic Party voters are still willing to back the Party that stole the nomination from them, for the weaker candidate, and that thereby handed the victory to a different party.
But America’s Republican voters, and especially America’s independent or non-affiliated voters, are very much in the position of reluctant, or even highly resistant, foie gras ducks and geese (the ones who squawk and squirm more). Democratic Party voters are the most accepting of what they’re being force-fed. That’s why most of them remain as Democrats, even after their Party’s having stolen the nomination and handed it to Clinton, and even after Clinton’s subsequent choice for DNC Chair — and not Sanders’s choice — becoming selected in 2017 by the DNC to run the Party in the 2018 mid-term elections. The fewer-than-a-thousand people (447, to be exact) who are allowed to vote in DNC elections, are, as a group, thoroughly unrepentant, even though they had, to a large extent, made Trump President. (That last linked-to site, being mainstream, and thus necessarily controlled by the aristocracy, said that “the DNC’s exact roster of current members doesn’t appear to be easily available on its website”, but that was a lie, because the membership-list simply wasn’t at all available on its website — and it still is being kept a secret there, which fact, of the DNC’s secrecy about whom those 447 DNC members are, further displays the type of ‘democracy’ that America is, which fact, in turn, explains the vast political disaffection in the United States, though Democratic voters especially accept this ongoing abuse of Democratic voters, by the DNC.)
America’s voters are foie gras birds, but some of these birds (the Republicans and especially independents) are more resisting than some others (Democrats) are.
The way that America’s billionaires farm this public is by feeding to the voters the politicians, without even considering the needs — much less the wants — of that public.
And this is the reason why the only scientific study that has ever been done of whether a given country is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, which was a study that was done about the U.S., found that America is clearly a dictatorship, no democracy at all. It found that whereas the very wealthy and well-connected do have very significant effect shaping America’s laws, the public-at-large has virtually none: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Such a country isn’t a democracy; it’s an aristocracy — a nation where only the rich and well-connected have impact upon the government. America’s public are foie gras ducks.
And the situation in America is getting rapidly even worse: Amy Baker Benjamin’s “The Many Faces of Secrecy”, in William & Mary Policy Review, 21 November 2017, is a path-breaking study of recent expansions of U.S. Governmental secrecy, and it concludes that: “We are confronting a systemic secrecy crisis. For various reasons and under cover of conflicting rationales, large swaths of policy-making have been placed beyond the review-and-reaction authority of the American people, to the detriment of even the most humble conceptions of transparency and democracy.” Dictatorship depends upon government-secrecy, because it depends upon lies, and because lies depend upon hiding the key truths. For each lie, there are key truths that must be hidden.
Two of the U.S. aristocracy’s leading magazines, Foreign Policy, and the super-prestigious Foreign Affairs, both recently headlined articles “Is Democracy Dying?” and neither magazine so much as even mentioned (nor linked to, either directly or indirectly) any of the studies — nor, really, referred to any of the realities — that have been mentioned here. This information is being blocked from reaching the public, blocked as much as the aristocracy can. The public are intended to supply the votes and the labor and the markets; and the way to get all three is to hide the truth, so that the lies can more readily be accepted, so that the aristocracy will remain in control — which they are determined to do, at all costs (especiallly all costs to the public).
Globally, the most prominent example of a duck or goose who refuses to cooperate and who is willing to experience the worst possible punishments for resisting (in other words, is a person of supreme courage and integrity), is Julian Assange; and, on June 9th, the great investigative journalist John Pilger, at Consortium News, stated the ugliness and depravity of the aristocracy, as displayed (and which the aristocracy does everything possible to hide) in that specific case:
“There is a silence among many who call themselves left. The silence is Julian Assange. As every false accusation has fallen away, every bogus smear shown to be the work of political enemies, Julian stands vindicated as one who has exposed a system that threatens humanity. The Collateral Damage video, the war logs of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Cablegate revelations, the Venezuela revelations, the Podesta email revelations … these are just a few of the storms of raw truth that have blown through the capitals of rapacious power. The fakery of Russia-gate, the collusion of a corrupt media and the shame of a legal system that pursues truth-tellers, have not been able to hold back the raw truth of WikiLeaks revelations. They have not won, not yet, and they have not destroyed the man. Only the silence of good people will allow them to win. Julian Assange has never been more isolated. He needs your support and your voice. Now more than ever is the time to demand justice and free speech for Julian. Thank you.”
If civilization doesn’t totally end from what that international network of thugs is doing, then human history will continue beyond the present generation, and the case of that lone and very courageously resistant bird, Julian Assange, will be a prominent part of it.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.