YES, THERE WILL BE ELECTION FRAUD, AND ON A GRAND SCALE
America’s election
system is designed only to give the theater of democracy with none of the
substance
John Chuckman
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’s election system was not designed to handle
a phenomenon like him, a non-politician, a man with some genuinely fresh
anti-establishment views, who quickly rides a wave of popularity to do a
hostile take-over, as it were, of a major old-line party.
America’s election system is designed to give the theater of
democracy with virtually none of the substance, but even in the face of that
reality, election fraud in America still has a long history. Even though we are
usually talking about two establishment candidates representing two establishment
parties, the competitive instincts of the two rival gangs, each eagerly seeking
power and privileges and appointed offices for themselves and their adherents,
have often resulted in vote fraud. How much greater is the impulse now in that
direction to defend against a candidate who actually wants to change something?
Despite an unprecedented spectacle of the press acting as a national
public disinformation system united in one goal, to discredit Trump, including
even polls deliberately engineered with sampling errors to give a false view of
what is happening, and a massive effort to build Hillary up into something she
is not, a decent human being, the momentum for Trump continues.
Even if you don’t have reliable numbers, you can just feel
it from the very desperation of the establishment. The President spends much of
his time flying around making insipid speeches for his party, the newspapers
leap to publish every unconfirmed negative report about Trump or such absolute trivia
as this or that movie star or pop star saying what an awful man Trump is. And
you have to ask where all these voices were during decades of business deals in
the great cities of America and other places which saw successful projects
springing up all over with fanfare and publicity.
No, it is only now that the establishment actually feels of
the hot breath of popular revolt against much of what it has done over the last
two decades - its uniquely poisonous policy brew of constant war and completely
ignoring most Americans - that we get this explosion of rumors, unproved
accusations, and Joseph McCarthy-style innuendo. Before that, Trump was a highly
productive member of society welcome at public events of every kind. After all,
wealth and celebrity are always welcome in America. It is only change that is
not.
Critics are right about a lot of unpleasant things in
America, and their voices are simply not heard in its tight little press oligopoly.
Is America’s establishment right about Syria? About Libya? About Yemen? About
Israel? About NATO? About Russia? China? Being right in America today can be
quite lonely.
America invented marketing. It is one of its few truly
original contributions to culture. And the arts of marketing are intensely at
work in politics there, to the extent there is often almost no substance
despite all the carefully-packaged words. The immediate period after an
American election resembles the experience of a person who has purchased a new product
which quickly proves to work nothing like the advertising promises said it
would.
American elections closely resemble a marketing battle
between two oligopolistic corporations, as between Coke and Pepsi or McDonald's
and Burger King. There are only two parties and that situation is controlled
through countless institutional and regulatory gimmicks put into place by the
two parties themselves.
America’s campaign financing system is a deliberate and
effective method to discourage the birth or growth of any new parties. It is
what economists call a barrier to entry into a market, the kind of thing which
keeps non-political oligopolistic markets from becoming more competitive. The
little ones are allowed to just struggle along on the margins for appearances
and owing to the disproportionately high cost of eliminating them too
Most of the noise and intensity of American elections are just
hollow, but it is the kind of stuff to which Americans are exposed in their
economic life, day-in or day-out, so for ordinary people without the time to be
well-informed, nothing could sound more normal.
That is what is so different about Trump. Despite his flaws
and distasteful tendency to be a bigmouth, on some really important matters, matters
of life and death, he is speaking truth and speaking it plainly. There is a
kind of revolutionary quality in parts of his message. Of course, this in part
reflects the fact that he has never before been a politician, only a
successful, hard-nosed actor in the economic sphere.
That is something new in American elections, and the
establishment is rather shaken by it. Therefore, the American press has created
and sustained an unparalleled campaign of highly biased and even vicious reporting
and commentary.
People abroad do not realize that about 90% of what
Americans hear comes from just six big companies, none of whom, you may be
sure, is interested in change and especially anything even slightly
revolutionary. National broadcasting and national press have been so
consolidated through years of massive mergers that there is no real alternative
voice reaching most Americans.
And those huge news corporations - intimate members of the
establishment, always supporting the government of the day in its imperial wars
and projects - have made a concerted effort to diminish and demean Trump.
Equally, they have universally praised and supported Clinton, despite her dark
record of unethical personal behavior and violent public acts, despite having
been responsible for the deaths of thousands of women and their families.
Never mind Trump’s private off-color remarks, here is a
woman married for decades to a genuine sexual predator, a man who was having
sex with a young intern right in the Oval Office. And she wants to bring him
back into affairs in Washington, having promised to give him responsibility for
economy?
Why did she tolerate decades of his disgraceful and even
criminal behavior? Because it gave her serious leverage over him in office,
whether as Governor of Arkansas or President of the United States. We have a
hundred voices telling us of her violent temper and demands and the central
role she would assume even though elected to no office.
She has always been about one thing only, and that is to
enjoy power over others which she has exercised with brutal intensity, all
while maintaining a bug-eyed, laughing face in public. She is without question
a genuine sociopath.
Even when we see fascinating revelations about her inside
political maneuvering and dishonesty from leaks on the Internet, the national
press manages largely to ignore them or to diminish them. They do not catch
fire. The techniques of public relations and damage control – outgrowths of
marketing principles and psychological manipulation techniques – are employed
to suffocate any fires.
We do see signs that the Internet is starting to have some
real impact with the general population, and to the extent that is true, we
also see the establishment working towards suppressing alternate and
independent voices on the Internet by a variety of means.
America uses an awkward expression, “controlling the
narrative,” to describe what the establishment is quietly undertaking, always
trying not to assume the open appearance of old Soviet-style suppression of
information or the promotion of heavy-handed disinformation while in fact
assuming the substance of their purpose.
In the longer term, I am not convinced they can succeed. The
Internet is an almost uncontrollable force, that is unless you actually
suppress and control aspects of the Internet itself, something recent remarks
by Obama – a man who is a strict disciple of secrecy and inner-sanctum
privilege – suggest in vague and politically-correct language, there may well
be efforts underway towards that goal.
This fact only adds to the importance of this election. If
Trump loses, there can be no doubt, the secretive, manipulative, and ruthless
Hillary Clinton will commission whatever efforts are required for information
suppression. After all, a person ruthlessly pursuing war and secretive
manipulation of world affairs can never be a friend to openness and truth,
which are literally enemies of such goals.
The entire business of terror and fighting terror offers a
great deal of latitude this way, suppression in the name of fighting terror,
the great irony, of course, for America being that it does not consistently
fight terror, it frequently employs it as a tool of statecraft. We’ve seen that
in my lifetime in everything from the long covert battle against Castro and the
hideous, pointless war in Vietnam to the employment of jihadists in
Afghanistan, Libya, or Syria.
For some genuine history of American vote fraud, readers
should see my lengthy comment on Obama’s recent speech, in which he told Trump
to “stop whining”:
