"The Sanders/Trump Smokescreen
by Moti Nissani
March 10, 2016
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” ― Mark Twain
“What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.”—Woodrow Wilson
History reinforces the view that nothing can be expected from electoral politics in America (and in most other countries of the world). If change ever comes to our shores, it cannot possibly be brought about by politics as usual.
Many of my acquaintances, and many writers in the alternative media, put their faith in electoral politics. They feel, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it makes a difference whether a Republican or a Democrat is elected, that it makes sense to sue the government for one or another gross violation of the public interest or common decency. They fail to notice that most of our presidents, governors, and mayors, most of our “elected” representatives at the local, state, and federal levels, most of our judges—are puppets of the men in the shadows (a few international banking families and their lieutenants in huge corporations, governments, armed forces, and intelligence services).
Others acquaintances, a bit more sophisticated but still profoundly misinformed about the nature of American politics, reject the corrupt two-headed party system out of hand, yet put their trust in the electoral process itself and in the ability of friends of the American people (as opposed to the traitors, swindlers, sycophants, and psychopaths who now infest most public offices of this land) to gain political or judicial office and bring about meaningful change. That trust is touching, but it fails to acknowledge incontestable political realities. To campaign for a Ron Paul, or a Bernie Sanders, or a Donald Trump, or a Eugene Debs, or Jesus of Nazareth himself, in this system is counterproductive. A few crystalline raindrops cannot disinfect a cesspool.
The reasons for this futility, the reasons it is misguided in principle and perhaps even immoral to take part in electoral politics are many. For the moment, I can only offer a summary statement and some supporting documentation for the seven interacting factors (there could be more, but at this writing I can only think of seven) that render electoral politics in America a sad joke (for a more detailed review of the first three factors, please consult this).
1. Information
“I am sure that I never read any memorable news in the newspaper.”–Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854)
“American Journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor.”–Upton Sinclair (The Brass Check, 1919)
Almost all conventional sources of information—schools, universities, think tanks, books, movies, newspapers, TV, radio—are under the thumb of the men in the shadows. Most of us, therefore, end up voting against our own convictions and interests. For example, in 1919 Upton Sinclair (The Brass Check, p. 9) already sizzled:
Many people put their trust in experts, not realizing the centuries-long dependence of academics and intellectuals on the bankers and their lieutenants. Arthur Schopenhauer:
“Party interests are vehemently agitating the pens of so many pure lovers of wisdom. . . . Truth is certainly the last thing they have in mind. . . . Philosophy is misused, from the side of the state as a tool, from the other side as a means of gain. . . . Who can really believe that truth also will thereby come to light, just as a by-product? . . . Governments make of philosophy a means of serving their state interests, and scholars make of it a trade.”
Prof. Anatal Fekete provides a less polite characterization:
“The light has gone out at the great American universities as far as monetary science is concerned. Through bribe, blackmail, and attrition all upright and serious monetary economists were bumped from their academic chairs. The Great Chinese Cultural Revolution was a picnic in comparison to the Great American Cultural Revolution eliminating monetary economics from the curriculum.”
I wish to make the point clear: Information nowadays is controlled everywhere and always. For instance, the bankers reserve to themselves the right of censoring all academic publishing (not only in economics, history, or political “science,” but also in the natural sciences) under the guise of the referee system. And here is another typical example, this time from the strait-jacketed world of children book publishing. Madeleine L’Engle looks back:
“A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I’d read to them at night what I’d written during the day, and they’d say, “Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!” A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn’t done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don’t find, or didn’t at that time, in children’s books. When we’d run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That’s how it happened.”
Recommended Starting References: 1. Sinclair, U. 1919. The Brass Check. 2. Carlin, George. Who Really Runs America? 3. Loewen, James, 1995. Lies my Teacher Told me. 4. Media Coverage of the Greenhouse Effect. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 21: 27-43.
2. Sunshine Bribery
In the USA, bribery is institutionalized. In fact, if one looks only at the sheer quantity of wealth being stolen from the people, one can perhaps surmise that the USA is the most corrupt country that has ever existed. Bribery is implemented principally through campaign financing, then complemented by such things as lucrative speaking and publishing arrangements after leaving office and by invitations to serve on the boards of the corporations that benefited from the ex-politician’s or ex-judge’s duplicity. As a result, politicians and judges gain adoration and millions, while a handful of banking families and their thousands of corporations gain extraordinary power and trillions.
Over the years we have gotten used to occasional outbursts on this issue (please consult this source for countless quotations). For instance, in 1987, Robert Byrd, then Senate majority leader, appealed to his colleagues:
“It is my strong belief that the great majority of senators–of both parties–know that the current system of campaign financing is damaging the Senate, hurts their ability to be the best senator for this nation and for citizens of their respective States that they could be, strains their family life by consuming even more time than their official responsibilities demand, and destroys the democracy we all cherish by eroding public confidence in its integrity. If we do not face a problem of this magnitude and fix it, we have no one but ourselves to blame for the tragic results.”
Political scientists Adamany and Agree share that view:
“[The] political finance system . . . undermines the ideals and hampers the performance of American democracy . . . . Officials . . . are . . . captives of the present system. Their integrity and judgment are menaced—and too often compromised—by the need to raise money and the means now available for doing it . . . . The pattern of giving distorts American elections: candidates win access to the electorate only if they can mobilize money from the upper classes, established interest groups, big givers, or ideological zealots. Other alternatives have difficulty getting heard. And the voters’ choice is thereby limited. The pattern of giving also threatens the governmental process: the contributions of big givers and interest groups award them access to officeholders, so they can better plead their causes . . . . The private financing system . . . distort[s] both elections and decision making. The equality of citizens on election day is diluted by their inequality in campaign financing. The electorate shares its control of officials with the financial constituency.”
A 2013 update:
“Pretty much every politician in the western world is basically an employee of the ruling class, which is made up of a handful of traditionally powerful families including the Rothschilds and Rockefellers.”
Recommended Starting Reference: Pillars of American “Democracy:” Sunshine Bribery.
3. Contemporary Human Failings
We are not only indoctrinable, but seem to enjoy being brainwashed (how many of us abstain from commercials and TV?). We are not as open-minded as we need to be, nor do we readily surrender convictions in the face of overwhelming evidence against them. More often than not, we prefer obedience and conformity to individualism and critical thinking. Most of us lack the self-confidence, and perhaps the inborn taste, to detect quality on our own—in food, architecture, music, drama, paintings, literature, or politics. The vast majority of the still-reading public (which is itself a small minority) depends on the bankers for their choice of books, instead of trusting their own tastes and proclivities. Many of us have accepted the bankers’ absurd self-serving notion that crass materialism, endless accumulation of money and power, consumerism, specialization, and selfishness hold the keys to personal fulfillment.
Moreover, these failings are magnified by the diminution—probably deliberate—of our very humanity. Our bodies nowadays are loaded with synthetic chemicals, heavy metals (e.g., mercury, lead), and radioactive substances. Our brains are loaded with thousands of commercials, infomercials, trivialities, and lies. It is no accident that the bankers facilitate prescription and illegal drug use in the USA, for such use clearly serves their interests. The bankers and their allies discourage us from ever getting even close to dissident literature, classical music, folk music, critical or holistic thinking, compassion, and non-conformity. By getting us addicted to TV and artless movies, through their control of the educational system, and by doing everything they can to suppress the love of reading, they even managed to diminish our vocabulary—and thus our capacity to detect nuances of speech and thought.
Consider Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense. According to Wikipedia, “in relation to the population of the Colonies at that time, it had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history.” Could 1% of today’s Americans understand and be moved by such a pamphlet? In just 239 years, then, there occurred a remarkable decline in the intellectual and spiritual caliber of the American people.
In short, we are not as rational, altruistic, and compassionate as we should be. On top of that, the bankers have deliberately diminished our positive qualities and amplified our failings, thus putting another nail in the coffin of our electoral process.
Recommended Starting References: Human Failings: 1. Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority. 2. Conceptual Conservatism: An Understated Variable in Human Affairs? Social Science Journal, vol. 31, pp. 307-318. Human Strengths
(under natural conditions, human beings prefer cooperation, freedom,
and rough equality of material possessions): 1. Stefansson,
Vilhjalmur. Lessons In Living From The Stone Age. In A Treasury of Science, 1943, p. 502. 2. Mann, Charles C. 2005. The Founding Sachems. 3. Harris, Marvin. Life Without Chiefs.
4. Cloak and Dagger
Occasionally, in ancient Rome or Greece, or 21st century UK or USA, a champion of the people poses a threat to the Machiavellian system itself. In such cases, overwhelming evidence suggests, the top oligarchs resort to character—or literal—assassinations. They routinely malign, incarcerate, poison, or blow the brains out of anyone, anywhere on earth, who threatens their control—whistle blowers, congressmen, judges, U.S. presidents, DC madams who know too much, environmental activists, businessmen who dare tell the American people the truth about the Mexican Gulf disaster, sport celebrities naïve and idealistic enough to join the neo-colonial armies yet smart enough to read the writings of fake dissidents, journalists who uncover the bankers’ collusion in the “war” on drugs, American peace activists, singers/songwriters with a huge fan base who figure out how the system works—and dare share this information with the public, movie directors who had come to know a member of the Rockefeller family a bit too well—and who are bold enough to tell the world what they have learned, British princesses who speak up against landmines, union leaders, the bankers’ own head of the IMF (International Mafia Fund), countless foreign heads of state who would not betray their countrymen.
Once upon a time, oligarchs kept such calumnies and strangulations below the surface, following their masters Niccolò Machiavelli’s and Amschel Rothschild’s sage advice. But now, as befits the emerging in-your-face style oligarchy, some of these atrocities are carried out in the open.
There is a common misconception in progressive circles that America had once been the land of the free and the home of the brave, and that its decline only commenced with President Reagan. In reality, what is happening in 2016 is merely a culmination of a centuries-long gradual march towards fascism. I have provided numerous examples of this here so, for now, let me give a couple of quotations from the past (Upton Sinclair’s self-published The Brass Check, 1919):
“There was a certain labor leader in America, who was winning a great strike. It was sought to bribe him in vain, and filially a woman was sent after him, a woman experienced in seduction, and she lured this man into a hotel room, and at one o’clock in the morning the door was broken down, and the labor leader was confronted with a newspaper story, ready to be put on the press in a few minutes. This man had a wife and children, and had to choose between them and the strike; he called off the strike, and the union went to pieces. This anecdote was told to me, not by a Socialist, not by a labor agitator, but by a well-known United States official, a prominent Catholic.”
“I cite this to show the lengths to which Big Business will go in order to have its way. In San Francisco they raised a million dollar fund, and with the help of their newspapers set to work deliberately to railroad five perfectly innocent labor men to the gallows. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, the great Woolen Trust planted dynamite in the homes of strikebreakers, and with the help of their newspapers sought to fasten this crime upon the union; only by an accident were these conspirators exposed, and all but the rich one brought to justice. Do you think that ‘interests’ which would undertake such elaborate plots would stop at inventing and circulating scandal about their enemies?
“Most certainly they did this in Denver. I was assured by Judge Lindsey, and by James Randolph Walker, at that time chairman of Denver’s reform organization, that the corporations of that city had a regular bureau for such work. The head of it was a woman doctor, provided with a large subsidy, numerous agents, and a regular card catalogue of her victims. When someone was to be ruined, she would invent a story which fitted as far as possible with the victim’s character and habits; and then some scheme would be devised to enable the newspapers to print the story without danger of libel suits.
“In extreme cases they will go as far as they did with Judge Lindsey—hiring perjured affidavits, and getting up a fake reform organization to give them authority. Lindsey, you understand, has made his life-work the founding of a children’s court, which shall work by love and not by terror. Love of children—ah, yes, all scandal-bureaus know what that means! So they had a collection of affidavits accusing Lindsey of sodomy. They brought the charges while he was in the East. A reporter went to the Denver hotel where his young bride was staying, and when she refused to see the reporter, or to hear the charges against her husband, the reporter stood in the hallway and shouted the charges to her through the transom, and, then went away and wrote up an interview!”
Recommended Starting References: 1. Pepper, William, F. 2008. An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. 2. Caldwell, Taylor, 1972. Captains And The Kings (fiction). 3. People vs. the Banks. 4. Pillars of American “Democracy:” Cloak-and-Dagger Smoking Gun Evidence.
5. Rigged Elections
Joseph Stalin reportedly said: “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” Now that the bankers everywhere in the Western World are ingeniously re-introducing their version of Stalinism, following the same script in each and every country (just to dispel any doubt about this being a coordinated attack), the Trojan Horse in modern Western elections is the counters themselves. Such outrageous rigging provides the bankers another safety valve, and again makes a mockery of those who believe in electoral politics.
Recommended Starting Reference: Palast, Greg. Election Rigged for Bush.
6. Broken Promises
There is a vast gap between what a politician or a party promise before the elections and what they deliver after the elections. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, promised peace but, once elected, served the bankers and, through guile, false-flag operations, and propaganda, led their country to catastrophic wars. Politicians lie and get away with it, again making a mockery of the people’s will and of ballot-box reformers.
Woodrow Wilson’s betrayal was, perhaps, the most disastrous of them all. He not only dragged the American people to war–against their will and on behalf of the bankers–but also broke his campaign promises not to sell his country to the bankers:
“During the Democratic Presidential campaign, Wilson and the rulers of the Democratic Party pretended to oppose the Aldrich bill. As representative, Louis T. McFadden, explained twenty years later, when he was Chairman Of The House Banking And Currency Committee (and before the bankers silenced him forever),
‘The Aldrich Bill was condemned in the platform . . . when Woodrow Wilson was nominated . . . the men who ruled the Democratic Party promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reins of government.
‘Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the ‘King’s Bank,’ to control us from the top downward, and to shackle us from the cradle to the grave.'”
We may note in passing that, to his credit, Wilson would later rue his betrayal:
“I’m a most unhappy man. I have ruined my country; a great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We’re no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
One additional supporting example: Obama’s promise to end the neo-colonization of Iraq. In another example, John Perkins documents the assassination threats, blackmail, and bribes used to turn decent elected officials into renegades.
7. Co-Option
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it.”–Lenin
The men in the shadows often support phony dissident organizations, e.g., the so-called “Tea Party” in the USA. Or, with their limitless supply of money, they might infiltrate and achieve partial control of a formerly genuine reform organization, e.g., the Sierra Club. They are thus able to control their own opposition. Also, an individual who discovers for the first time the sorrows of the biosphere might join, say, the Wilderness Society, and might never realize that this suit-and-tie organization had sold out decades ago. If she uncovers the deception, she might give up in disgust, mistakenly believing that it is just “human nature” to deceive, look out for number one, and ignore long-term perils. And even if she manages to find her way to a grass-roots environmental organization, she might have only few years left to put her wisdom to good use.
This applies, in particular, to “alternative” media. Many of these accept commercials and thus are, to a certain extent, at someone else’s beck and call. Other media have been created, funded, and sustained in order to throw confusion into the dissident camp. They magnify certain issues (which pose no threat to the bankers), thus deflecting attention from more pressing issues (e.g., Who is behind the ongoing destruction of the middle class, the ongoing Syrian and Palestinian genocides, the USS Liberty Massacre and cover-up, Pearl Harbor, USS Maine, 9/11, or the Boston Marathon explosions? How in heaven’s name did the Rockefellers and Rothschilds manage to exclude themselves from the list of the richest people in the world? What is money? Is the Rothschild/Rockefeller Cartel doing God’s work, as it claims, or Satan’s? Did this cartel accumulate its wealth and power honorably, or by sleight of hand? Who really owns British Petroleum, Monsanto, and just about any giant western corporation?).
These phony media and websites often accept the absurd contention that our rulers never ever engage in conspiracies (relying on that standard, absurd dismissal: “She is just a conspiracy theorist”). For them, there is no point in investigating 9/11, for the simple reason that our rulers never plot in secret! Well, yes, the Russians, or the Chinese, or the Romans might have, but our lily-white bankers conspiring? Are you out of your mind? Such sites often refer to bankers’ propaganda organs (e.g., CNN, New York Times) and to government sources as legitimate interpreters of reality. And again, seekers of truth must laboriously sift through their contrivances before beginning to see the world as it is.
Similarly, one of the most spectacular achievements of the Men in the Shadows is their success in defining our leading dissidents. Even though these “leading dissidents and intellectuals” receive financial support from the Deep State and are actively undermining the prospects of a revolution (the only path that can save us now), even though such “dissidents” are conspiracy scoffers, even though such “dissidents” are not interested in meaningful change (e.g., public central and state banks), even though they have never risked anything for the cause of a better world, they are still regarded as our best and brightest.
I’m writing these words, scarcely believing them myself. My heart tells me that this is preposterous, that there cannot possibly be people out there so vicious as to corrupt everything they touch and to deliberately diminish goodness, health, decency, and kindness in this world. But then my cortex takes over, providing me with multiple proofs—both personal and research-based—that these people do exist. The existence and ascendancy of pure evil is no conjecture, but fact. There are people in this world who have enough ill-gotten money to last them one thousand and one reincarnations of obscene physical comfort, but yet give nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the thousands of children who will go blind this year because they can’t afford $1 worth of Vitamin A. As if this is not enough, these villains steal from these children the few centavos they do have, and torture or kill them outright if they refuse to surrender these centavos. A key step in planetary recovery is acknowledging the existence of evil, its pervasiveness, and its capacity to control human destinies.
Mike Krieger:
“We must admit to ourselves that there are truly evil geniuses out there, and in most cases these characters have taken control of the power structure (corporations, politics and factions of the military in most of the nations we reside in).”
Recommended Starting Reference: 1. Helvarg, David. 2004. The War Against the Greens. 2. The Co-Option Pillar of American “Democracy.” Part I: Why Subvert the Opposition?
Closing Remarks
Electoral participation, in any way, shape, or form is counter-productive because it help foster the facade of participatory democracy and the belief that piecemeal reform is possible. Also, as long as we accept the bankers’ myth that the system can be changed peacefully from within, the bankers and the system are safe. Some of our best people take part in this charade either as candidates or supporters, deluding themselves that anything at all can come from their electoral toil. Imagine all that energy and good will channeled into a strategy that could possibly work!
Electoral politics cannot work for many reasons. To begin with, how can we tell whether our champion is indeed our champion? How do we know that she would prefer probable death by saying no to the bankers to joining the fairly exclusive multimillionaire club by saying yes? What guarantees do the people have that she will not break every single promise?
Moreover, the vast majority of gullible voters would believe that she is their enemy and that the bankers’ and weaponeers’ marionette is their friend. She cannot effect change because bankers can steal and print as much money as they want, which they can give to her opponents. In the very unlikely event that she survives all this and becomes a threat to the bankers, they will crucify her in their media, threaten her, offer her bribes, slander her, arrest her on false charges and keep her naked and humiliated, without trial, in solitary confinement, in a freezing-cold, filthy, noisy cubicle. In the still more unlikely event that she actually receives a majority of the votes, they will doctor the results. If she miraculously manages to overcome all this, and if nothing else works, she will be impeached on false grounds, suicided, incinerated in the skies or roadways, or poisoned.
She will waste time and money, and never change anything, even if she is sincere and courageous. Since the American people are too drugged and televised, they will not be outraged by yet one more assassination, and will accept the bankers’ version of events. In cases that cannot be readily forgotten, the bankers will establish a commission, appoint its members—and then proceed to ignore subsequent reports of even these carefully-screened commissioners that the investigation was a cover-up, a hoax. The vast majority would still do nothing when the bankers derisively reproduce the image of the people’s murdered champion on their fiat money or highways.
In more general terms, putting our hopes for freedom and for a better world in the process of electoral politics is fundamentally ill-advised, if not immoral. We must grow up, as the Ancient Athenians did, or as the American revolutionaries did, and provide for our own freedom and security. Our system is irreparably broken and must be overthrown, one way or the other. The contemporary ballot box is a bewitching siren, a mirage, a shibboleth, a bankers’ trap.
Moti Nissani is professor emeritus, Wayne State University, interdisciplinarian, and compiler of A Revolutionary’s Toolkit.
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