Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Time to dump the evil, corrupt 2-Party System in America




There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.
― John Adams, The Second President Of The United States

The two party system of government in the United States of America has become so corrupted by money and power that they no longer have the ability to govern.  They have become multi-millionaires in their service to the special interests they serve and America cannot heal until the evil is excised.  They, not the people choose who is to govern through corrupt primaries, redistricting and onerous voter I.D. laws that subvert the will of the people and subjugate the populous to financial slavery. 

Through their fealty to big pharma a generation of children have been reared on psychotropic drugs, mercury laced inoculations and school to prison pipelines through for-profit charter schools.  Another generation has been condemned to a lifetime of servitude to their government protected highly profitable bankers who provide loans just to acquire a higher education to fill nonexistent jobs. 

Those who cannot attend college become cannon fodder for endless wars of aggression in cash poor, resource rich countries to pursue the goals of an insatiable empire.  Others are gunned down in their classrooms and at concerts by semi-automatic rifles fully sanctioned by the politicians.  It is time to dump the corrupt and evil 2-party system in America but doing so will be almost impossible as the parties control the entire voting process.  From The Free Thought Project:


Excerpt:

Powerful Poll Shows Most Americans Now Realize Gov’t is Owned by Lobbyists—Not the People

Transcending party lines, a new poll published by the Associated Press-NORC Center reveals both the right and the left distrust Congress and understand that they are beholden lobbyists and not the people.

Washington, D.C. — (RT) The overwhelming majority of Americans, irrespective of party allegiance, holds a dismal opinion of Congress, a fresh poll shows. It found 89 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans disapprove of the legislature’s work.

The new poll, published by the Associated Press-NORC Center on Monday, revealed that a total of 85 percent of Americans believe the Congress’s job is below par…

Only 44 percent of Americans approve of the work their own Congressman or Congresswoman is doing on Capitol Hill, 41 percent of Democrats and half of Republicans…  Fewer than 20 percent of Americans believe there is merit to the lawmakers’ legislative work, while over a third of all respondents think it is mostly bad…

The plunging ratings aren’t a product of the Trump era and its partisan skirmishes. Americans have long been disenchanted with Congressional politics. A glance at the Gallup Congress approval chart through the years will show that it rarely climbed over the 20 percent threshold since 2010…

“Large majorities in both parties report lawmakers should pay attention to the majority of Americans but believe lawmakers actually pay attention to donors and elites…  The part of the population most catered-for by the lawmakers are the lobbyists that “gave money to last election campaign,” according to the survey.

Yeah pretty shitty statistics but congress doesn't fear the people, the people fear congress and what they'll do next.  It's not as if we can vote them out, we can only hope that they will resign and they don’t resign until they have become extremely wealthy through insider trading.  It’s sad but true.  That is life in the American Empire and the world knows it.  From Information Clearing House:

Excerpt:

Don't Bother... They're Here

February 27, 2018 "Information Clearing House" -  When empires begin to die, their public acts--in sharp contrast to the ponderous, stately sobriety of their behavior while ascendant--tend to be marked by queer and pathetic eruptions of idiocy, bathos, and mania.

Though it can’t be known when our last Imperial Clown will douse the last lights of The Exceptional Empire and drop the keys in the mailbox for the last failed bank--America is showing clear signs of approaching meltdown…

The American Empire, enmeshed and floundering in a smothering net of contradictions, deceptions, and disastrous choices, is now playing out a pathetic absurdist farce before a fascinated and astonished world.

The essence of it is this. Due to prolonged betrayal of working people by the Democratic Party over many decades, the blatantly falsity and obvious deception it peddled so hard and so long to keep them in thrall have at last lost their grip. The result was loss of the Presidential election in 2016.

Stunned and unable to swallow the undeniable reason for it, the desperate party leadership concocted a preposterous, threadbare fantasy narrative to deny responsibility and direct shame, blame and disgrace away from itself.

The obvious best target was Trump…  It would not suffice, though, to attack him as a legitimate opponent because that would mean the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice… No, there had to be a nefarious agent that hoodwinked naive voters and diabolically stage-managed this vile and treasonous outcome.

Since the entrenched, master apparatus of America--the Deep State--has, as its main object, the care and feeding of its Militarist, Imperialist agenda, and since the Democratic Party has become its official voice, it was clear long before the election that Russia and Putin were the enemy of choice…

Putting aside the fact that America has no democracy, and never has had, the DNC honchos finessed their treachery while raging at their putative hijacking by enemies of America. In other words, the crime was not the fact of gross DNC misfeasance, but the horror that it was exposed by evildoers.

Yes in 2016 the unthinkable happened “the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice” and dumped the career politicians in both parties and chose Donald Trump.  The Democratic Party after “prolonged betrayal of working people over many decades” was dumped by those working people who flocked to Donald Trump.  Instead of learning from their mistakes, they exhibited insane hubris in fabricating the Russian collusion witch hunt to justify an out of control Special Investigator with a dubious past of service to the Deep State.

But I digress.  The DNC devised a fool proof way of denying the Democratic voters a say in their primaries by awarding “super delegates” a veto over the American people.  In 2008 Hillary Clinton won the primary but was denied the nomination by the “super delegates.”  For instance Hillary won Massachusetts by 15 percentage points yet, Massachusetts delegates went to Obama.  In Michigan and Florida Hillary won the primaries and the delegates were awarded to Obama, who by the way wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.  Has the party learned their lesson?  From Zero Hedge:

Excerpt:

Lawyers For The DNC Argue That 'Primary Rigging' Is Protected By The First Amendment

The ongoing litigation of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit and the appeal regarding its dismissal took a stunning turn yesterday. The defendants in the case, including the DNC and former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, filed a response brief that left many observers of the case at a loss for words.

The document, provided by the law offices of the Attorneys for the Plaintiffs in the case, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, and appears to argue that if the Democratic Party did cheat Sanders in the 2016 Presidential primary race, then that action was protected under the first amendment…

The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: “…Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs’ process server in an attempt to bolster attention for this lawsuit…”  The DNC defense lawyers then argued that: “There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign.”

The brief continued: “…To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party’s nominee for public office...”

If all that weren’t enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty “to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent.”

It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any “fiduciary duty” to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

Like I stated earlier, this is what the DNC did to Hillary in 2008.  The Democratic Party of Florida sued the DNC for nullifying the Florida Primary and the Court ruled in favor of the DNC and awarded Obama the Florida delegates.  From Political Ticker:

Excerpt:

A Florida court threw out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Democratic Party's decision not to seat delegates from Florida.

(CNN) - A Florida court threw out a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the Democratic Party's decision not to seat delegates from Florida - as litigants prepared to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court…

"This is nuts. This is not right. How can they remove Florida after all the things that Florida has suffered through– hanging chads, through Bush v Gore, and they're sticking it to us again," DiMaio said before the hearing. 

Judge Richard Lazarra sided with the party, saying political parties have the right to make their own rules.  DiMaio's is the second Florida lawsuit protesting the Democratic Party's decision to be thrown out of court. An earlier one filed by Sen. Bill Nelson and Rep. Alcee Hastings, both Florida Democrats, was also dismissed.

Yep, nothing new happened in 2016 same chicanery different primary.  Bernie Sanders voters need to blame themselves for Bernie not winning the primary because they were too lazy to research the different rules in different states.  In some states you must be a registered Democrat or Republican to vote and there is a deadline to register.  Diamond and Silk, the North Carolina ladies who supported Trump did their research and notified voters in each state of what they would have to do to vote for Trump in plenty of time to be in compliance.  By the way, St. Bernard would not have been much different than Hillary on anything.  From Anti-War:

Excerpt:

Et Tu, Bernie?

Sanders signs on to Russia-gate conspiracy theory

One by one, the plaster gods fall, cracked and crumbled on the ground: the latest is Bernie Sanders, the Great Pinko Hope of the (very few) remaining Democrats with a modicum of sense who reject the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” paranoia of Rep. Adam Schiff and what I call the party’s California Crazies.

The official Democratic leadership seems to have no real commitment to anything other than fealty to a few well-known oligarchs, who provide the party with needed cash, a burning hatred of Russia – an issue no ordinary voter outside of the Sunshine State loony bin and Washington, D.C. cares about – and exotic issues of interest only to the upper class virtue-signalers who are now their main constituency (e.g., where will trans people go to the bathroom?).

Overlaying this potpourri of nothingness, the glue holding it all together, is pure unadulterated hatred: of President Trump, of Trump voters, of Middle America in general, and, of course, fear and loathing of Russia and all things Russian.

And now the one supposedly bright spot in this pit of abysmal darkness has flickered out, with Bernie Sanders, the Ron Paul of the Reds, jumping on the Russia-did-it bandwagon and cowering in the wake of Robert Mueller’s laughable “indictment,” in which the special prosecutor avers that $100,000 in Facebook ads were designed to throw the election to Trump – and to help Bernie!

Oh no, says Bernie, from his place of exile in the wilds of Vermont, where the Russians did not take over the electrical grid: It wasn’t me!  Instead of standing up to the crazies – by which I mean the Democratic party Establishment – and saying that the whole Russia-phobic campaign is based on nothing but hot air and fantasy, he’s kowtowing to the very people who are trying to smear him as a Russian agent…

Not only is Bernie buying into Russia-gate, now that the case for it is collapsing – nearly two years later and there’s still no evidence of “collusion” – but he’s calling for a full-fledged witch-hunt…

The Deep State’s bid for power has hit several roadblocks recently, but it could yet succeed. First, Mueller could indict the President for “obstruction of justice” – a charge derived not from any real criminal activity, but from the investigation itself. I think this is the most probable outcome of all this.

Barring that, however, there is one road they could and probably would go down, given the intensity of their hatred for this President and their overweening power lust. Having gone this far in an attempt to overthrow a sitting President, they can’t just stop halfway to their goal. They have to go all the way, or else suffer the consequences – public exposure, and possible criminal charges. In short, if they fail to get Trump on some semi-legal basis, I think they’d welcome his assassination.

The Deep State cannot allow the Trump administration to stand for a number of reasons, the chief one being that the coup is already in progress and there’s no stopping it now. The President’s enemies are legion, they are powerful, and they are abroad as well as here on American shores.

They cannot allow his brand of “America First” nationalism to succeed, or seem to succeed: it conflicts too violently with their globalist vision of a borderless America-centric empire ruled by a coalition of oligarchs, technocrats, and Deep State operatives who’ve been shaping world events from the shadows for generations…

Will they oust a sitting President and institute a new era in our politics, one in which the political class can exercise its veto over the democratic will of the people?  That’s the issue at hand and that’s why I spend so much time writing about Trump and his enemies’ efforts to destroy him. Because if the Deep State succeeds, the America we knew and loved will be no more. Something else will take its place – and believe me, it won’t be pretty.

Yes, St. Bernard is no different than Hillary.  He supports the illegal war the U.S. is waging in Syria and stands by every criminal act of Benjamin Netanyahu.  St. Bernard has supported the U.S. Empire time and again.  That is why the corrupt, evil 2-Party System must go.  From Covert  Geopolitics:

Excerpt:

US Collapse – the Spectacle of Our Time

May you live in interesting times, goes the Chinese proverb. Few can doubt that we are indeed living in such an interesting time. Big changes are afoot in the world, it seems.  None more so than the collapsing of the American Empire.

The US is going through an historic “correction” in the same way that the Soviet Union did some 30 years ago when the latter was confronted with the reality of its unsustainable political and economic system...

In any case, all empires come to an end eventually. History is littered with the debris of countless empires. Why should the American Empire be any different? It’s not. Only arrogant “American exceptionalism” deludes itself from the reality.  The notable thing is just how in denial the political class and the US news media are about the unfolding American crisis.

This is partly where the whole “Russiagate” narrative comes into play. Blaming Russia for allegedly destabilizing US politics and society is a cover for denial over the internal rot facing the US…

For seven decades since the Second World War, “Pax Americana” was the grandiose name given to US imperial design for the global order. The period was far from peaceful as the vainglorious name suggests. Dozens of wars, proxy conflicts and violent subversions were carried by the US on every continent in order to maintain its empire. The so-called “global policeman” was more often a “global thug”…

Rather than accepting the fate of demise, the US is aggressively resisting by denigrating China and Russia’s power as somehow illegitimate. It’s the classic denial reaction of a sore loser.  So, what are the telltale signs that the US is indeed undergoing a seminal “correction” — or collapse?

The heyday of American capitalism is well passed. The once awesome productive system is a skeleton of its former self. The rise of massive social poverty alongside obscene wealth among a tiny elite is a sure sign that the once mighty American economy is chronically moribund. The country’s soaring $20 trillion national debt is another symptom of chronic atrophy. 

What the champagne bubbles can’t disguise is the structural failing of US capitalism to reverse exploding inequality and endemic poverty across America. The national prowess of US capitalism has been superseded by global capitalism where American corporations among others scour the planet for cheap labor and tax havens. There is no going back to a supposed golden age, no matter how much Trump crows about “America First”.

The other side of the coin from historic US economic demise is the concomitant rise in its militarism as a way to compensate for its overall loss of power.  It is no coincidence that since the end of the Cold War following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US military interventions around the world have erupted with increased frequency and duration. The US is in a veritable permanent state of war actively deploying its forces simultaneously in several countries, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East.

Washington of course gives itself a fig leaf cover by calling its surge in militarism a “war on terror” or “defending allies”. But, increasingly, US war conduct is seen for what it plainly is — violation of international law and the sovereignty of nations for the pursuit of American imperial interests.  In short, the US is patently lashing out as a rogue regime. There’s no disguising that fiendish fact…

The American Empire is failing and flailing. This is the spectacle of our time. The Western mainstream news media are either blind, ignorant or complicit in denying the historic collapse… Casting around for scapegoats to “explain” the deep inherent problems, the political class are using Russia and alleged Russian “interference” as a pretext.

World history has reached a foreboding cross-roads due to the collapsing of the American Empire. Can we navigate a safe path forward avoiding catastrophic war that often accompanies the demise of empires?

A lot, it seems, depends on ordinary American people becoming politically organized to challenge their dysfunctional system run by and for the elites. If the American people cannot hold their elites to account and break their corrupt rule, overhauling it with something more equitable and democratic, then the world is in peril of being plunged into total war. We can only but wish our American brothers and sisters solidarity and success.

There is another price to pay for the evil corrupt 2-party system of hegemony.  The mass shootings taking place in our schools and communities by untreated mentally ill people.  From Gregory Palast:

Excerpt:

Florida = Honduras: Inequality kills.  Want to end the American shooting epidemic?

Guns vs Homicides by Nation

A crucial factor about the Florida killer: his family had to move out of the school district because they couldn’t afford the rent. Resentment yields anger. Not every poor kid becomes a killer — think Bill Clinton — but there will be one. Inequality kills.

A student of statistics — my son — was surprised by his regression analysis of gun ownership per capita in each nation versus homicides.  He wrote, "The result of my scatter plot came as quite the surprise to me: there was just about no correlation between number of guns and number of gun homicides."  In fact, "the correlation coefficient was -0.105871699." That is, by a small amount, more guns meant fewer homicides.

So what DID prove a strong correlation? Homicides versus the "GINI" coefficient. GINI is the measure of income inequality in a nation.  I've just returned from the nation with the widest gun ownership in the world, Switzerland, which has vanishingly few homicides — although almost all men 18-35, due to ancient military tradition, must keep weapons in their home (many fully automatic).

The nation with the same population as Switzerland, Honduras, has the world’s highest homicide rate — yet Honduras outlaws personal gun ownership.  David Hemenway, of the Harvard School of Public Health notes, "Switzerland and Honduras are not even close to being the same in many aspects of their society that will influence the levels of violence and homicide."

Exactly. Want to end gun violence? End violent inequality…

Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany Austria, Iceland — all nations with tiny small homicide rates — and very low GINI scores. Iceland, where a huge one-third of households have guns, is the most economically equal society on the planet — with a homicide rate of ZERO.

There will be no equity in America for as long as we have an evil, corrupt 2-party system answerable to no one.  They do not care about the American people, they only care about the special interests that they serve.  This cannot be tweaked, this cannot be incrementally changed. From Lew Rockwell:

Financial Tyranny: ‘We the People’ Are the New Permanent Underclass in America

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

Americans can no longer afford to get sick and there’s a reason why.  That’s because a growing number of Americans are struggling to stretch their dollars far enough to pay their bills, get out of debt and ensure that if and when an illness arises, it doesn’t bankrupt them.  This is a reality that no amount of partisan political bickering can deny.

Many Americans can no longer afford health insurance, drug costs or hospital bills. They can’t afford to pay rising healthcare premiums, out-of-pocket deductibles and prescription drug bills.  They can’t afford to live, and now they can’t afford to get sick or die, either.

To be clear, my definition of “affordable healthcare” is different from the government’s. To the government, you can “afford” to pay for healthcare if your income falls above the poverty line. That takes no account of rising taxes, the cost of living, the cost to clothe and feed a household, the cost of transportation and communication and education, or any of the other line items that add up to a life worth living...

Indeed, Americans currently pay $3.4 trillion a year for medical care. We spent more than $10,000 per person on health care in 2016…  As Bloomberg reports, “Rising health-care costs are eating up the wage gains won by American workers, who are being asked by their employers to pick up more of the heftier tab… The cost of buying health coverage at work has increased faster than wages and inflation for years, pressuring household budgets.”

Appallingly, Americans spend more than any developed country on healthcare and have less to show for it. We don’t live as long, we have higher infant mortality rates, we have fewer hospital and physician visits, and the quality of our healthcare is generally worse. We also pay astronomical amounts for prescription drugs, compared to other countries…

While Obamacare (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act) may have made health insurance more accessible to greater numbers of individuals, it has failed to make healthcare any more affordable.  
One investigative journalist spent seven months analyzing hundreds of bills from hospitals, doctors, drug companies, and medical equipment manufacturers. His findings confirmed what we’ve known all along: health care in America is just another way of making corporations rich at consumer expense.  This is clearly not a problem that can be remedied by partisan politics.

The so-called Affordable Care Act pushed through by the Obama administration is proving to be anything but affordable for anyone over the poverty line... Indeed, for too many Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle just to get by, the tax penalty for not having health insurance will actually be cheaper than trying to find affordable coverage that actually pays for care.

This is how the middle classes, who fuel the nation’s economy and fund the government’s programs, get screwed repeatedly.  When almost 60% of Americans are so financially strapped that they don’t have even $500 in savings and nothing whatsoever put away for retirement, and yet they are being forced to pay for government programs that do little to enhance their lives, we’re not living the American dream.  We’re living a financial nightmare.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls…

In other words, in the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than indentured servants and sources of revenue.  If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It is time to dump the evil, corrupt 2-party system that has ravished America.  The entire system is corrupt from corrupt big media, to corrupt big pharma, to corrupt military industrial complex, to corrupt intelligence agencies, to corrupt politicians.  It is time, America cannot wait.  We must vote out every incumbent that is financed by the Deep State.  It is time to excise the evil.



By Patricia Baeten



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