Duty to Warn

Disturbing signs of the time-tested “Strip and Flip” strategy for stealing elections have already surfaced in 2016. Will they ultimately decide the outcome, as they have in too many recent elections?

The core approach is to STRIP citizens of their voting rights, then FLIP the electronic vote count if that’s not enough to guarantee a win for the corporate 1%.

Historically, “stripping” has been based on race. It’s rooted in the divide-and-conquer strategies of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Today it centers on racist demands for photo ID and other scams designed to prevent blacks, Hispanics, the young and the poor from voting.

You shouldn’t play with guns, unless you do it the way “Jim” apparently did.

His gun play — a (seemingly) satirical petition at change.org — has enveloped the looming Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer in awkward surrealism and forced the three Republican presidential candidates to duck for cover from their own words.

The petition, posted by Hyperationalist, who later identified himself to certain curious reporters as a proponent of gun sanity named Jim, demanded that the Quicken Loans Arena, where the convention will be held, lift its ban on guns in the building and that the Republican National Committee explain “how a venue so unfriendly to Second Amendment rights” was chosen for the convention.

This year’s presidential primaries have highlighted the importance of people of color to the Democratic Party coalition. Hillary Clinton’s lead in the party’s nomination race comes almost entirely from her strength among African-Americans and Latino voters. When people of color favor one candidate by large margins, they make the difference.

That will be true in the general election as well. Democratic nominees win if people of color vote in large numbers. If turnout is down or the vote is split, Democrats — who regularly lose the majority of white voters — will lose.

This reality means that African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans can make political demands. Politicians must compete to win our votes. The power of this can be seen with the Dreamers and the Democrats’ embrace of comprehensive immigration reform, with Black Lives Matter and Democratic candidates putting criminal justice reform at the top of their agendas. Voting rights and equal rights under the law also gain traction.

Hillary Clinton’s credentials at being a neoconservative warmonger are equal to the Republican neocons. This is something she brags about in her book and by her public support of Henry Kissinger. This then makes her a great Democratic candidate for the Ruling Class.  But who knew that Hillary has learned the fine art of election theft from Karl Rove and company?  Peace activists are well aware that the machinery used to control election outcomes always favor the war party, but until now those methods are rarely used in primary elections.  

Writing for Russia Insider, author Rudy Panko, described the election fraud in Arizona as a “masterpiece”.

After stealing Iowa, Nevada and Massachusetts the Clinton machine is unable to turn the tide against Bernie Sanders.  Bernie is filling arenas from coast to coast.  People wait hours in line to see him talk about rigged economies and climate change. Sanders is winning the millennial generation by huge margins, and has enthusiastic supporters crushing her on social media and on the ground.  Hillary events are at small venues, with crowd size exaggerated.  

The Governor of California has joked about building a wall all the way around his state if Donald Trump becomes president of the other 49. Secession would not be a joke had it not been given an undeserved bad name. It would not have that bad name but for our universal acceptance of imperialism and of an overly simplistic history of the U.S. Civil War.

“What I’m not trying to do is just pass legislation. I’m trying to change the face of American politics.”

Pull these words out of the context of “the news” and let them pulse like the heartbeat of the future.

The words are those of Bernie Sanders, of course — engaged last week in a confrontational interview with Chris Matthews. Free college tuition? Matthews loosed his skepticism on the presidential candidate, who pushed back:

“You and I look at the world differently. You look at it inside the Beltway. I’m not an inside the Beltway person.”

“But the people that vote on taxes are inside the Beltway,” Matthews retorted.

If the recent spate of anti-drone movies and plays was making you feel warm thoughts about U.S. culture, you'll want to avoid seeing "Eye in the Sky," starring Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, and Aaron Paul. This is what "Zero Dark Thirty" was for torture lies. This is what "The Interview" was for hatred of North Korea. The Director of "Eye in the Sky," Gavin Hood, openly brags about having had military advisors on this film, just as those films had their government advisors. And it shows.

"I'll bet the military loves this film," I told Hood after a screening in Washington, D.C., on Monday. He claimed that some loved it, some liked it, both in the military and in some human rights groups that I won't name because I doubt very much Hood's implication that at least one of them didn't condemn this piece of propaganda.

Like it or not, Bernie and The Donald are connected for the rest of this race and, in the bigger picture, for history. Talking heads link them by accusing Bernie's supporters of being cut from The Donald's supporters' same cloth. Shortsighted companymen in the media are undoubtedly satisfied at having noticed and developed a theory all on their own: people are angry.

While some writers write that this means Establishment Candidates will end up doing "such and such," others contend it proves that Anti-Establishment Candidates will wind up doing "this and that." Basically, expert pundits are experiencing difficulties and nobody knows whats to come.

What happens when there are endless wars accompanied by militarized policing, spreading racism, erosion of civil rights, and concentration of wealth, but the only news is election news, and none of the candidates wants to talk about shrinking the world's largest military?