{"id":270890,"date":"2016-10-03T17:58:57","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T17:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=270890"},"modified":"2016-11-30T01:45:48","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T00:45:48","slug":"clinton-trump-corrupt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/clinton-trump-corrupt\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Both Clinton & Trump Are Corrupt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In order to overcome the partisanship on both sides of this U.S. Presidential contest, the corruption of both of the candidates needs to be acknowledged, and a quick way to do that is to consider the cases of their respective charities (we\u2019ll go beyond that to a broader view afterward):<\/span><\/p>\n

On September 10th, David A. Farenthold headlined in the Washington Post<\/i>,\u00a0“How Donald Trump retooled his charity\u00a0to spend other people\u2019s money\u201d<\/span><\/a>,\u00a0and he documented that Trump has lied in his many statements asserting that he donates lots to charities, and that he has even used his (actually meager) Foundation as a device to collect donations from others and then simply donate that money from others, to other charities as being \u201ccharitable donations by the Trump Foundation\u201d; he even has sometimes used donations others had made to his \u2018Charity\u2019 in order to purchase things for some of his own businesses<\/i>. So: not only is his \u2018charity\u2019 meager, but it consists largely of the charity of others \u2014 and of benefit to himself and to the value of his brand.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding Clinton\u2019s case, an article was published by Huffington Post\u2019s \u201cblog\u201d on 29 May 2016, that optimistically (and unrealistically trusting that the U.S. government would actually follow through on this) predicted\u00a0“Hillary Clinton to be Indicted on Federal\u00a0Racketeering Charges\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for her having used the U.S. State Department to fundraise for her Clinton Foundation (money that she and her family control), but the article lasted less than a day online before being taken down by HuffPo management. I have personally checked out all of this article\u2019s linked sources and found that they are sound and collectively documented an extensive racketeering operation. Other articles have documented some of its harmful consequences, such as (here<\/span><\/a> and here<\/span><\/a> and here<\/span><\/a> and here<\/span><\/a>) against the Haitian people for the benefit of both Haiti\u2019s and America\u2019s aristocracies; and, so, even if what the immediate withdrawn-by-management article predicted would happen has turned out to have been false (as now seems inevitable \u2014 Hillary won\u2019t be prosecuted), the things that it was alleging to have already occurred (the historical account)<\/i> were, indeed, entirely true, and damning. The article does show Hillary Clinton to have been operating the U.S. State Department as a personal racket. And other articles document many harmful consequences from it<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Presidential nominees of both of our major political Parties are profoundly corrupt, and they lie to the public about their kindness and their generosity, which are absent (more like the opposite) in reality<\/i>. Hillary Clinton\u2019s attempt to destroy evidence in the criminal case against her, by destroying all records she could of her emails, and the FBI\u2019s refusal even to investigate to find the motive for that crime and thereby to say it wasn\u2019t prosecutable,<\/span><\/a> are additional crimes (that won\u2019t be prosecuted) regarding the Clinton Foundation side of this matter, but both of the major-Party nominees are poseurs, liars, and psychopaths.<\/span><\/p>\n

The deeper question is why, at the present stage of U.S. history, our supposedly (but no longer actually<\/span><\/a>) democratic system of government, has offered to the American people, what the theocratic Iranian system offers to its<\/i> people: a choice between only uglies \u2014 excluding any and all decent, progressive, nominees. There was one decent and progressive candidate in the Presidential contest, Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries, and he had the highest net approval-ratings, and also in all the polls showed as being able to beat, by the biggest margins, each and every one of the opposite Party\u2019s candidates, and so that candidate, Sanders, was clearly preferred the most, by the largest percentage of Americans<\/span><\/a> \u2014 but today\u2019s corrupt American political system excluded that person from being even a choice at all<\/i>, in the final round (November 8th) contest. (Sanders also has by far topped the annual surveys of approval of each of the 100 Senators among the people within the given Senator\u2019s own state, the very people who have considered that person\u2019s policy-record and Senate votes the closest and the longest; and, in the latest published survey, which was reported on 13 September 2016, Sanders\u2019s approval-rating there was 87%, and the second-most-approved Senator had an approval-rating of 69% \u2014 an enormous fall-off of 18% from the number-one Senator<\/span><\/a>). It\u2019s like Iran\u2019s mullahs excluding the best candidates from the final choice by the Iranian people. (Incidentally, on the Republican side of the 2016 Presidential contest, the strongest candidate in the head-to-head matchups against both Clinton and Sanders was John Kasich<\/span><\/a>; but, just like in the Democratic Party, the strongest-polling candidate failed to win his own Party\u2019s nomination. In the polled match-ups between Kasich and Sanders, Sanders was almost always the winner, but in the polled matchups between Kasich and Clinton, Clinton was.)<\/span><\/p>\n

It is not a democracy when both of the two candidates that are the most preferred by the most people are excluded from the final two-person choice \u2014 such as in Iran, and, now, also in the United States. If America were a democracy, the final Presidential contest now would be between Sanders and Kasich \u2014 but it\u2019s not.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the situation that one would expect in an \u201coligarchy\u201d \u2014 a nation that\u2019s controlled by its aristocrats (the very few wealthiest persons). In all of politics, in every country, there is always an intrinsic conflict between money and voters, for control over the nation\u2019s government. During the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787, in which America\u2019s Constitution was written, the debates focused upon how to avoid the U.S. to become an oligarchy \u2014 rule by the wealthiest, against the public.<\/span><\/a> However, the only scientific study that has ever been done<\/span><\/a> of whether the U.S. is controlled by the public (a democracy), or contrarywise by only the wealthiest \u2014 an aristocracy or \u201coligarchy\u201d \u2014 finds (based upon study of 1,779 policy-issues during the period 1981-2002<\/span><\/a>) that the U.S. is, in fact, an \u201coligarchy.\u201d (The situation has probably become even worse since that period ended, but no study has been done of the subsequent years.)<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is correct to state that the U.S. now is \u201cjust an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.\u201d<\/span><\/a> The evidence since he left the White House in 1981 (and up till at least 2002) showed clearly that that is the case; and it has been getting worse (not better) after 2002 (because of the activist-conservative, Republican, rabidly pro-aristocracy, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as Citizens United<\/i> \u2014 which the \u2018Democrat\u2019 Hillary Clinton exploits more than any other politician<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, there was considerable rhetorical<\/i> difference between the candidates in the last U.S. Presidential election, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but afterwards in actual policies<\/i>, one can well imagine that Romney would have done much as Obama has done as President, and not only in domestic policies but even also in foreign policies. It was Romney \u2014 not Obama \u2014 who said (and it was Obama \u2014 not Romney \u2014 who mocked<\/i>), \u201cRussia, this is without question our number one geopolitical foe.\u201d<\/span><\/a> At the Bilderberg conferences and at all other forums in which the U.S. \u2014 and its other allied \u2014 aristocracy gather, or in their public statements such as in the U.S. aristocracy\u2019s Foreign Affairs<\/i> journal or Foreign Policy<\/i> magazine, this viewpoint (that after both the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991, still \u201cRussia, this is without question our number one geopolitical foe\u201d) is ceaselessly put forth (and in a March 2006 article in Foreign Affairs<\/i><\/span><\/a>, was even put forth the view that America should go all the way to nuclearly blitzing Russia; and Obama in 2015 started the Prompt Global Strike<\/span><\/a> plan in order to enable this goal to be able to be achieved mainly by non<\/i>-nuclear weaponry \u2014 he apparently wants to be able to make use of at least some of Russia, after it\u2019s conquered).<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are pushing for the TPP, TTIP, and TISA proposed treaties, which would give international corporations a higher sovereignty than any nation\u2019s sovereignty, and would, if passed into law, enable international corporations to sue the taxpayers of any participating nation, for multi-billion-dollar sums, in a supra-national system not of courts, and not of any nation\u2019s constitution and laws, but of three-person panels of corporate \u201carbitrators\u201d whose decisions (not dependent upon any country\u2019s laws) will be non-appealable.<\/span><\/a> Only deeply corrupt nations\u2019 governments can approve such treaties, because if their publics knew what those treaties\u2019 \u201cISDS\u201d provisions mean, the public would revolt against passage of it: therefore, the press need to be rigidly controlled in order for a \u2018democratic\u2019 country to sign it. If any of these three horrific treaties (introducing actually an international fascist dictatorship) goes into effect, then not only the U.S. will be thoroughly corrupt at the top, but the entire world will soon become so (the parts that haven\u2019t yet<\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: the U.S. aristocracy control U.S. politics; and that\u2019s the reason why both<\/i> of America\u2019s major-Party contenders are profoundly corrupt. This would not happen in an authentic democracy. It is not<\/i> the result of democracy; it is the result of democracy\u2019s having ended<\/i> in the U.S.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question of whether a \u2018benign dictatorship\u2019 has ever existed, can reasonably be debated upon the basis of the evidence. However, the answer to the question of whether the U.S. still is<\/i> a \u201cdemocracy,\u201d is clear and beyond debate, on the basis of the evidence \u2014 and it is not<\/span><\/a> a democracy. After 1981, it has been, and is, an aristocracy (the researchers used instead the term \u201coligarchy\u201d), ruling here. And any<\/i> aristocracy is profoundly corrupt \u2014 that is the very nature<\/i> of aristocracy: unaccountable power, what can almost be defined to constitute \u201can aristocrat.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

And that is why both Trump and Clinton are corrupt. This is the culmination of that deeper reality. On the surface is partisanship loaded heavily with lies; underneath is the reality of America\u2019s aristocracy controlling, now, both<\/i> of the two political Parties.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Incidentally, and so this is added here parenthetically: Americans who say such things as \u201cDon\u2019t vote for either of them\u201d or \u201cVote third-party,\u201d are pretenders to participating in their nation\u2019s politics, not actual participants in it \u2014 whatever it is, which, in the current U.S. case, is a choice of the lesser of two evils. Even Ralph Nader and Ross Perot failed to come even close to winning even merely a single one of the 50 States in the Electoral College; such \u2018candidates\u2019 are fakes, whose only real function is to attract enough more away from the number of potential voters for one of the two Parties\u2019 nominees than away from the other of the two Parties\u2019 nominees, so as to throw the \u2018election\u2019 \u2014 and that strategy has succeeded only once in modern history, when Nader drew enough away from Gore, both in New Hampshire and in Florida, so as to enable the five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to appoint George W. Bush as President, <\/i>by the Electoral College vote of 266 Gore to 271 Bush, though Gore won 543,895 more of the nationwide counted votes than did Bush<\/i><\/span><\/a>. Bush won the Presidency by, among other things, his 5-4-vote win in the U.S. Supreme Court, <\/i>an opinion<\/i><\/span><\/a> that was so corrupt \u2014 making unprecedented and blatantly antithetical use of the Constitution\u2019s Equal Protection Clause, to apply to ballots instead of to voters \u2014 so that even the 5-vote majority decision said, using tortured logic, that this ruling would not be able to be cited in future Supreme Court rulings as a precedent: <\/i>“Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.”<\/i><\/span><\/a> However, there is no actual applicability of the Equal Protection Clause to ballots, but only to people. That\u2019s not \u2018complex\u2019 at all. The Republicans simply don\u2019t want the Democrats to be able to cite this decision as a precedent in the future if, at that future time, the shoe might happen to be on the other foot. Nader\u2019s voters were suckers who helped him to throw the \u2018election\u2019 to Bush, <\/i>which was what Nader was trying to do<\/i><\/span><\/a>. In an aristocracy, everything related to government is corrupt, and the only way to \u2018justify\u2019 that sort of government is constant lying. But the voter\u2019s only choices in the final \u2018election\u2019 are the lesser-of-two-evils choice between the two major Parties\u2019 nominees, and anything else than that is abdicating the miniscule effect \u2014 if any at all \u2014 that the voter has. Nader, Perot, Stein, etc., are mere sucker-baits, even if the sucker calls it a \u2018protest vote\u2019. They\u2019re actually no vote at all.)<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org In order to overcome the partisanship on both sides of this U.S. Presidential contest, the corruption of both of the candidates needs to be acknowledged, and a quick way to do that is to consider the cases of their respective charities (we\u2019ll go beyond that to a broader view […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":270498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[96,698,804,524,754,6257,523,49,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-270890","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-cover-up","9":"tag-hillary-clinton","10":"tag-politics-2","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-syria","13":"tag-trump","14":"tag-ukraine","15":"tag-usa-news","16":"tag-warfare","17":"tag-white-house","18":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}