RINF<\/a>) – It is a virtual certainty that the American establishment will resort to
\nelection fraud to help Hillary Clinton. They simply do not know what to do
\nabout Donald Trump. America\u2019s election system was not designed to handle a
\nphenomenon like him, a non-politician, a man with some genuinely fresh
\nanti-establishment views, who quickly rides a wave of popularity to do a
\nhostile take-over, as it were, of a major old-line party.<\/p>\nAmerica\u2019s election system is designed to give the theater of democracy with
\nvirtually none of the substance, but even in the face of that reality,
\nelection fraud in America still has a long history. Even though we are
\nusually talking about two establishment candidates representing two
\nestablishment parties, the competitive instincts of the two rival gangs,
\neach eagerly seeking power and privileges and appointed offices for
\nthemselves and their adherents, have often resulted in vote fraud. How much
\ngreater is the impulse now in that direction to defend against a candidate
\nwho actually wants to change something?<\/p>\n
Despite an unprecedented spectacle of the press acting as a national public
\ndisinformation system united in one goal, to discredit Trump, including
\neven polls deliberately engineered with sampling errors to give a false
\nview of what is happening, and a massive effort to build Hillary up into
\nsomething she is not, a decent human being, the momentum for Trump
\ncontinues.<\/p>\n
Even if you don\u2019t have reliable numbers, you can just feel it from the very
\ndesperation of the establishment. The President spends much of his time
\nflying around making insipid speeches for his party, the newspapers leap to
\npublish every unconfirmed negative report about Trump or such absolute
\ntrivia as this or that movie star or pop star saying what an awful man
\nTrump is. And you have to ask where all these voices were during decades of
\nbusiness deals in the great cities of America and other places which saw
\nsuccessful projects springing up all over with fanfare and publicity.<\/p>\n
No, it is only now that the establishment actually feels of the hot breath
\nof popular revolt against much of what it has done over the last two
\ndecades – its uniquely poisonous policy brew of constant war and completely
\nignoring most Americans – that we get this explosion of rumors, unproved
\naccusations, and Joseph McCarthy-style innuendo. Before that, Trump was a
\nhighly productive member of society welcome at public events of every kind.
\nAfter all, wealth and celebrity are always welcome in America. It is only
\nchange that is not.<\/p>\n
Critics are right about a lot of unpleasant things in America, and their
\nvoices are simply not heard in its tight little press oligopoly. Is
\nAmerica\u2019s establishment right about Syria? About Libya? About Yemen? About
\nIsrael? About NATO? About Russia? China? Being right in America today can
\nbe quite lonely.<\/p>\n
America invented marketing. It is one of its few truly original
\ncontributions to culture. And the arts of marketing are intensely at work
\nin politics there, to the extent there is often almost no substance despite
\nall the carefully-packaged words. The immediate period after an American
\nelection resembles the experience of a person who has purchased a new
\nproduct which quickly proves to work nothing like the advertising promises
\nsaid it would.<\/p>\n
American elections closely resemble a marketing battle between two
\noligopolistic corporations, as between Coke and Pepsi or McDonald’s and
\nBurger King. There are only two parties and that situation is controlled
\nthrough countless institutional and regulatory gimmicks put into place by
\nthe two parties themselves.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s campaign financing system is a deliberate and effective method to
\ndiscourage the birth or growth of any new parties. It is what economists
\ncall a barrier to entry into a market, the kind of thing which keeps
\nnon-political oligopolistic markets from becoming more competitive. The
\nlittle ones are allowed to just struggle along on the margins for
\nappearances and owing to the disproportionately high cost of eliminating
\nthem too<\/p>\n
Most of the noise and intensity of American elections are just hollow, but
\nit is the kind of stuff to which Americans are exposed in their economic
\nlife, day-in or day-out, so for ordinary people without the time to be
\nwell-informed, nothing could sound more normal.<\/p>\n
That is what is so different about Trump. Despite his flaws and distasteful
\ntendency to be a bigmouth, on some really important matters, matters of
\nlife and death, he is speaking truth and speaking it plainly. There is a
\nkind of revolutionary quality in parts of his message. Of course, this in
\npart reflects the fact that he has never before been a politician, only a
\nsuccessful, hard-nosed actor in the economic sphere.<\/p>\n
That is something new in American elections, and the establishment is
\nrather shaken by it. Therefore, the American press has created and
\nsustained an unparalleled campaign of highly biased and even vicious
\nreporting and commentary.<\/p>\n
People abroad do not realize that about 90% of what Americans hear comes
\nfrom just six big companies, none of whom, you may be sure, is interested
\nin change and especially anything even slightly revolutionary. National
\nbroadcasting and national press have been so consolidated through years of
\nmassive mergers that there is no real alternative voice reaching most
\nAmericans.<\/p>\n
And those huge news corporations – intimate members of the establishment,
\nalways supporting the government of the day in its imperial wars and
\nprojects – have made a concerted effort to diminish and demean Trump.
\nEqually, they have universally praised and supported Clinton, despite her
\ndark record of unethical personal behavior and violent public acts, despite
\nhaving been responsible for the deaths of thousands of women and their
\nfamilies.<\/p>\n
Never mind Trump\u2019s private off-color remarks, here is a woman married for
\ndecades to a genuine sexual predator, a man who was having sex with a young
\nintern right in the Oval Office. And she wants to bring him back into
\naffairs in Washington, having promised to give him responsibility for
\neconomy?<\/p>\n
Why did she tolerate decades of his disgraceful and even criminal behavior?
\nBecause it gave her serious leverage over him in office, whether as
\nGovernor of Arkansas or President of the United States. We have a hundred
\nvoices telling us of her violent temper and demands and the central role
\nshe would assume even though elected to no office.<\/p>\n
She has always been about one thing only, and that is to enjoy power over
\nothers which she has exercised with brutal intensity, all while maintaining
\na bug-eyed, laughing face in public. She is without question a genuine
\nsociopath.<\/p>\n
Even when we see fascinating revelations about her inside political
\nmaneuvering and dishonesty from leaks on the Internet, the national press
\nmanages largely to ignore them or to diminish them. They do not catch fire.
\nThe techniques of public relations and damage control \u2013 outgrowths of
\nmarketing principles and psychological manipulation techniques \u2013 are
\nemployed to suffocate any fires.<\/p>\n
We do see signs that the Internet is starting to have some real impact with
\nthe general population, and to the extent that is true, we also see the
\nestablishment working towards suppressing alternate and independent voices
\non the Internet by a variety of means.<\/p>\n
America uses an awkward expression, \u201ccontrolling the narrative,\u201d to
\ndescribe what the establishment is quietly undertaking, always trying not
\nto assume the open appearance of old Soviet-style suppression of
\ninformation or the promotion of heavy-handed disinformation while in fact
\nassuming the substance of their purpose.<\/p>\n
In the longer term, I am not convinced they can succeed. The Internet is an
\nalmost uncontrollable force, that is unless you actually suppress and
\ncontrol aspects of the Internet itself, something recent remarks by Obama \u2013
\na man who is a strict disciple of secrecy and inner-sanctum privilege \u2013
\nsuggest in vague and politically-correct language, there may well be
\nefforts underway towards that goal.<\/p>\n
This fact only adds to the importance of this election. If Trump loses,
\nthere can be no doubt, the secretive, manipulative, and ruthless Hillary
\nClinton will commission whatever efforts are required for information
\nsuppression. After all, a person ruthlessly pursuing war and secretive
\nmanipulation of world affairs can never be a friend to openness and truth,
\nwhich are literally enemies of such goals.<\/p>\n
The entire business of terror and fighting terror offers a great deal of
\nlatitude this way, suppression in the name of fighting terror, the great
\nirony, of course, for America being that it does not consistently fight
\nterror, it frequently employs it as a tool of statecraft. We\u2019ve seen that
\nin my lifetime in everything from the long covert battle against Castro and
\nthe hideous, pointless war in Vietnam to the employment of jihadists in
\nAfghanistan, Libya, or Syria.<\/p>\n
For some genuine history of American vote fraud, readers should see my<\/a>
\nlengthy comment on Obama\u2019s recent speech, in which he told Trump to \u201cstop
\nwhining\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"*America\u2019s election system is designed only to give the theater of democracy with none of the substance* (RINF) – It is a virtual certainty that the American establishment will resort to election fraud to help Hillary Clinton. They simply do not know what to do about Donald Trump. America\u2019s election system was not designed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1301,"featured_media":195675,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-275104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275104","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\/1301"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}