Is it futile to combat computerized vote-counting fraud, given the more general disenfranchisement of the American public? This and the emerging battlefield of corporate versus public interest is explored in this adapted excerpt from “CODE RED”by Jonathan D. Simon.
Jonathan D. Simon
Many despairing observers of The New American Century have asked me whether – given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs – an honest vote counting system would even matter anymore. A fair question to which I believe the ultimate, if uneasy, answer is “Yes.”
There was a brief glimpse during the Occupy movement of what public anger at American Systemic Injustice might come to if it found a way to assemble, to come out of its isolated private homes and apartments and shelters and cubicles into the public squares of the nation. It was a powerful image, one that so shook US rulers in their corporate and governmental corridors of power that they soon resorted to a federally-coordinated blitzkrieg to empty those squares and kill Occupy before it multiplied any further and before the Bastille was in any real danger.
Perhaps the most penetrating lesson to be drawn from the Occupy experience is the disclosure of a previously unrecognized divide in the American body politic: that of the “99%” and the “1%.” Throughout American history our enduring system of representative democracy has thrived on the two-party dialectic. Certainly for living generations, the vision we have of politics is that of the Democratic and Republican parties carrying the ark into battle for their relatively evenly matched constituencies, taking turns advancing an agenda as the political pendulum swung.