You can't fool all the people all the time, but if you can get enough to forget the last con job, which usually doesn't take long at all, they're good for another four years.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Fool us non-stop, with no shame to that game, and you've got Amerikan politricks.
As your future representative, my campaign promise to you is that that future will never arrive.
If voting changed anything it would be illegal, so it's been said (by Emma Goldmann and others). That quip applies to us, we the people, hoodwinked by electoral circuses, greatest farcical shows on earth, to choose among pre-selected candidates representing ruling interests from local to state to national levels of power, for whom voting does change things, if only to maintain the status quo of a protection racket to advance their interests.
Elections like most everything else in the U$, Inc. have long been controlled by corporate wealth and subject to all the techniques of the propaganda system, especially since becoming televised spectacles, making for the best demokracy money can buy. You can find 'third world' nations where voting and the popular will might mean something still beyond 'our' system of social engineering, which is one reason why agents of Pax/Pox Americana have made it a tradition of interfering in their elections, if not simply staging coups and regime changes.
But you don't have to travel any farther than your neighborhood precinct to come into contact with such practices as voter fraud, especially in 'our' digital age. And homegrown coups are hardly unAmerican since the national security state got into action after WW2 and JFK threatened to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds."
The two-party monopoly or duopoly is a chief means of population control. Representing the liberal and conservative branches of the ruling class, Demopublicans and Republicrats play good-cop/bad-cop routines in partisan theater to divide and conquer us with wedge issues (e.g. abortion, gun control) and race and gender culture wars, so they can keep laughing all the way to the bank, as bloated Pentagon budgets and disappearing dark money by the tens of trillions pass us by. It's no wonder these two wings of this profiteering bird of prey have long laid down rules of governance which make it next to impossible for third or alternate parties to exist. No wonder that roughly half the eligible electorate routinely doesn't bother to participate in the ritual performance of voting (which gains them the label 'apathetic'), and that the 20/80 rule applies to political as well as economic influence whereby upper class echelons of professionals and servants of the ruling class effectively manage the underclass masses.
Any number of reforms of the corruption and criminality that comprise politricks have been proposed, from overturning SCOTUS' corporate coup of Citizens United, curbing if not abolishing lobbying (aka bribery) on K Street, or getting the big bucks out of campaigns and candidates' pockets with fairly distributed public funds, to establishing a multiparty system of proportional representation rather than winner-take-all, term limits to prevent career politicians in favor of more genuine representatives of common people - particularly with more modest salaries and benefits, real accountability to constituencies via immediate recall, etc.
But none of these will amount to a hill of beans, or the bullshit which politricksters peddle, without people who are active as citizenry organized to push back on the filthy, rotten system with their power. And insofar as we have settled all too comfortably, or not, into the American dream machine which produces a consumer society all too passive and indifferent before public affairs beyond our own private pursuits of money-making and commodity fetishism, we the people have collaborated with our own undoing. In this respect, perhaps the most insidious effect, if not design, of all to established electoral politics is to reduce politics to a spectator sport, to the detriment of our own participation in a larger body politic of direct democracy, self-governance, and building our own society and history.
In conclusion, it should be recognized that much if not all of this discussion may be moot post-2020. Whatever reality or pretense of a constitutional republic obtained in this nation's past already for decades had been effectively replaced by an "inverted totalitarianism" (Sheldon Wolin), where constituional facade covered for political power captive to the corporatism Mussolini identified as the essence of fascism. Now in the new abnormal global corporatocracy has laid hold of national soveriegnty the world over to impose the paradigm of governance by technocracy, by means of what Giorgio Agamben calls the permanent state of exception to the rule of law and elected, representative government by the biosecurity state introduced with the covid coup. Perhaps you've noticed, for instance, that not only do bought and paid for polticians comply with the lies of the present, but that life as we once knew it has largely been upended by non-elected representaitves and unaccountable forces of dictatorial power.
Perhaps you've noticed that more than ever, if not now or never, we the people need to recover lost revolutionary traditions of both this nation's and the world's past, and renew our own power to recreate this world anew.
“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
In the process of running for local elections you get media space. When not running for elections you get maybe one letter to the editor every 3 weeks or so. So yes they do have an impact even if you don't get elected. If you do get elected that's when the real problems start.
The election that gives me just a spot of hope -- I hope Kari Lake can overcome the fraudsters in Maricopa county. And hopefully she can be a partner-in-crime to DeSantis. And if DeSantis and Lake lead the way, more timid governors like Abbot might have to follow.
Both for sure. The US has been highjacked since Abraham Lincoln, I believe. The corruption of moral is on a high level among most people with money. Is has always been this way, throughout history. Money corrupts as does power.
FLhas DeSantis as Governor, instead of a democRt Pervert because of 30,000 votes Az has a MAGA Governor candidate for Nov instead of the rinoRat they had as Governor for 8 years, and the Rino they tried to steal into the win. it took Overwhelming Votes to destroy their Steal. Yes, both rinoRats and democRats steal sElections, But Huge Turnouts can Win. The 2020 Steal of the presidential election will turn out to be a blessing as it Wakes Up Millions of Americans due to the democRats destruction of our lives. Some people need a 2x4 to the head to wake up! Hopefully We Win without a CW, but if that is what it takes, then so be it, but Vote so you have no regrets.
Simone Weil.... On the Abolition of All Political Parties
To assess political parties according to the criteria of truth, justice and the public interest, let us first identify their essential characteristics.
There are three of these:
A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian – potentially, and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so. These three characteristics are factual truths – evident to anyone who has ever had anything to do with the every-day activities of political parties.
Do voters want change? Or do they prefer slogans about change? What change might a majority of voters want that is in the interest of every voter and why does no one run for election on the issue? Republics always fail - as do all social systems. Much about governance in literate populations rests on dissimulation. We accept all. We vote. We refuse to vote. We knock on doors or pay people to campaign and the campaign is a business of selling a candidate as a different Cola, not selling Un-Cola. Except for Trump who listened to Bannon and then dumped him in office. Both political parties are poised for realignment and new parties emerging. Old interests will fight to the bitter end to keep control. The degree of tension between change that helps and change that hurts is in every voter's mind.
Hijacked and bankrupted a long time ago, which was part of the process of hijack and corruption.. The two party system is a ruse to make you think you have a choice, you don't, when you own both parties, think good cop bad cop, and neither really represents the people, they represent their lord and master..
The very word ‘politician’ may as well be interpreted as meaning.. ‘a publicly appointed career criminal’.
You can't fool all the people all the time, but if you can get enough to forget the last con job, which usually doesn't take long at all, they're good for another four years.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Fool us non-stop, with no shame to that game, and you've got Amerikan politricks.
As your future representative, my campaign promise to you is that that future will never arrive.
If voting changed anything it would be illegal, so it's been said (by Emma Goldmann and others). That quip applies to us, we the people, hoodwinked by electoral circuses, greatest farcical shows on earth, to choose among pre-selected candidates representing ruling interests from local to state to national levels of power, for whom voting does change things, if only to maintain the status quo of a protection racket to advance their interests.
Elections like most everything else in the U$, Inc. have long been controlled by corporate wealth and subject to all the techniques of the propaganda system, especially since becoming televised spectacles, making for the best demokracy money can buy. You can find 'third world' nations where voting and the popular will might mean something still beyond 'our' system of social engineering, which is one reason why agents of Pax/Pox Americana have made it a tradition of interfering in their elections, if not simply staging coups and regime changes.
But you don't have to travel any farther than your neighborhood precinct to come into contact with such practices as voter fraud, especially in 'our' digital age. And homegrown coups are hardly unAmerican since the national security state got into action after WW2 and JFK threatened to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds."
The two-party monopoly or duopoly is a chief means of population control. Representing the liberal and conservative branches of the ruling class, Demopublicans and Republicrats play good-cop/bad-cop routines in partisan theater to divide and conquer us with wedge issues (e.g. abortion, gun control) and race and gender culture wars, so they can keep laughing all the way to the bank, as bloated Pentagon budgets and disappearing dark money by the tens of trillions pass us by. It's no wonder these two wings of this profiteering bird of prey have long laid down rules of governance which make it next to impossible for third or alternate parties to exist. No wonder that roughly half the eligible electorate routinely doesn't bother to participate in the ritual performance of voting (which gains them the label 'apathetic'), and that the 20/80 rule applies to political as well as economic influence whereby upper class echelons of professionals and servants of the ruling class effectively manage the underclass masses.
Any number of reforms of the corruption and criminality that comprise politricks have been proposed, from overturning SCOTUS' corporate coup of Citizens United, curbing if not abolishing lobbying (aka bribery) on K Street, or getting the big bucks out of campaigns and candidates' pockets with fairly distributed public funds, to establishing a multiparty system of proportional representation rather than winner-take-all, term limits to prevent career politicians in favor of more genuine representatives of common people - particularly with more modest salaries and benefits, real accountability to constituencies via immediate recall, etc.
But none of these will amount to a hill of beans, or the bullshit which politricksters peddle, without people who are active as citizenry organized to push back on the filthy, rotten system with their power. And insofar as we have settled all too comfortably, or not, into the American dream machine which produces a consumer society all too passive and indifferent before public affairs beyond our own private pursuits of money-making and commodity fetishism, we the people have collaborated with our own undoing. In this respect, perhaps the most insidious effect, if not design, of all to established electoral politics is to reduce politics to a spectator sport, to the detriment of our own participation in a larger body politic of direct democracy, self-governance, and building our own society and history.
In conclusion, it should be recognized that much if not all of this discussion may be moot post-2020. Whatever reality or pretense of a constitutional republic obtained in this nation's past already for decades had been effectively replaced by an "inverted totalitarianism" (Sheldon Wolin), where constituional facade covered for political power captive to the corporatism Mussolini identified as the essence of fascism. Now in the new abnormal global corporatocracy has laid hold of national soveriegnty the world over to impose the paradigm of governance by technocracy, by means of what Giorgio Agamben calls the permanent state of exception to the rule of law and elected, representative government by the biosecurity state introduced with the covid coup. Perhaps you've noticed, for instance, that not only do bought and paid for polticians comply with the lies of the present, but that life as we once knew it has largely been upended by non-elected representaitves and unaccountable forces of dictatorial power.
Perhaps you've noticed that more than ever, if not now or never, we the people need to recover lost revolutionary traditions of both this nation's and the world's past, and renew our own power to recreate this world anew.
“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
---Thomas Paine
There is no 'deep state' but only "The State."
Just noticed that I posted about this on June 12th:
https://rayhorvaththesource.substack.com/p/voting-and-corruption
In the process of running for local elections you get media space. When not running for elections you get maybe one letter to the editor every 3 weeks or so. So yes they do have an impact even if you don't get elected. If you do get elected that's when the real problems start.
The Government gets in no matter who you vote for.
Stop participating.
If anything get yourself involved in your local politics and then recruit other like minded people.
The election that gives me just a spot of hope -- I hope Kari Lake can overcome the fraudsters in Maricopa county. And hopefully she can be a partner-in-crime to DeSantis. And if DeSantis and Lake lead the way, more timid governors like Abbot might have to follow.
Our salvation is in the states, not DC.
Both for sure. The US has been highjacked since Abraham Lincoln, I believe. The corruption of moral is on a high level among most people with money. Is has always been this way, throughout history. Money corrupts as does power.
FLhas DeSantis as Governor, instead of a democRt Pervert because of 30,000 votes Az has a MAGA Governor candidate for Nov instead of the rinoRat they had as Governor for 8 years, and the Rino they tried to steal into the win. it took Overwhelming Votes to destroy their Steal. Yes, both rinoRats and democRats steal sElections, But Huge Turnouts can Win. The 2020 Steal of the presidential election will turn out to be a blessing as it Wakes Up Millions of Americans due to the democRats destruction of our lives. Some people need a 2x4 to the head to wake up! Hopefully We Win without a CW, but if that is what it takes, then so be it, but Vote so you have no regrets.
Simone Weil.... On the Abolition of All Political Parties
To assess political parties according to the criteria of truth, justice and the public interest, let us first identify their essential characteristics.
There are three of these:
A political party is a machine to generate collective passions.
A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members.
The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit.
Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian – potentially, and by aspiration. If one party is not actually totalitarian, it is simply because those parties that surround it are no less so. These three characteristics are factual truths – evident to anyone who has ever had anything to do with the every-day activities of political parties.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-on-the-abolition-of-all-political-parties
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2022-08-05/collapse-wont-just-reset-society-it-will-destroy-it
Do voters want change? Or do they prefer slogans about change? What change might a majority of voters want that is in the interest of every voter and why does no one run for election on the issue? Republics always fail - as do all social systems. Much about governance in literate populations rests on dissimulation. We accept all. We vote. We refuse to vote. We knock on doors or pay people to campaign and the campaign is a business of selling a candidate as a different Cola, not selling Un-Cola. Except for Trump who listened to Bannon and then dumped him in office. Both political parties are poised for realignment and new parties emerging. Old interests will fight to the bitter end to keep control. The degree of tension between change that helps and change that hurts is in every voter's mind.
Hijacked and bankrupted a long time ago, which was part of the process of hijack and corruption.. The two party system is a ruse to make you think you have a choice, you don't, when you own both parties, think good cop bad cop, and neither really represents the people, they represent their lord and master..
Unequivocally 'BOTH!'