DEMOCRATS CRASH AND BURN (AGAIN)—two assessments

US Midterm Electoral Results
A “factsheet” summary

Stephen Lendman

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]gnore scoundrel media who won, who lost horserace rubbish. US electoral politics is too debauched to fix. Big money corrupts it.

Democracy is pure fantasy. None whatever exists. Most bums are reelected. New ones replace others. Things change but stay the same.  Special interests rule. People have no say. US-style democracy mocks the real thing. Key points bear stressing.

Fact: America’s electoral process is farcical.
Fact: Kabuki theater.
Fact: Illegitimate by any democratic standard.
Fact: Things aren’t what they seem.
Fact: Skim milk masquerades as cream, wrote WS Gilbert.
Fact: Candidates are pre-selected, pre-packaged cardboard cutouts.
Fact: Powerful interests choose them.
Fact: Big money owns them.
Fact: Key outcomes are predetermined.
Fact: Voters get the best democracy money can buy.
Fact: Media critic Robert McChesney calls America’s system a “dollarocracy.”
Fact: Big money and media election complex controlled.
Fact: Monied interests win every time.
Fact: Ordinary people lose.
Fact: Duopoly power rules.
Fact: Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin. Fact: Interchangeable with each other.
Fact: Not a dime’s worth of difference separates them on issues mattering most.
Fact: Including corporate empowerment, imperial wars, police state justice, Big Brother surveillance, and capital’s divine right to exploit workers, control markets, plunder world resources, and rule without challenge.
Fact: Beneficial social change doesn’t matter.
Fact: Independents are shut out.
Fact: Media scoundrels ignore them.
Fact: Issues mattering most go unaddressed.
Fact: Horse race journalism and trivia substitute.
Fact: Millions of Americans are disenfranchised.
Fact: Millions more don’t vote.
Fact: Half the electorate or more opts out.
Fact: Why bother. Their interests aren’t represented.
Fact: Tuesday‘s turnout was a pathetic 38%. In California, barely above one-third.
Fact: Despite almost $4 billion spent campaigning.
Fact: The most expensive midterm ever.
Fact: The supremely pro-business High Court’s Citizen United ruling gave monied interests virtually unlimited power to control things.
Fact: One dollar now = one vote. Trampling on democratic freedoms. Affording them to special interests only. Denying them to all others.

New York’s Cuomo. Though a Democrat, his agenda is also reactionary, and amply supported by business interests across the board. His cover is “fiscal responsibility” and similar nostrums but such cosmetics can’t hide his betrayal of the working class.

Ralph Nader denounced Citizens United, saying:

It “shreds the fabric of our already weakened democracy by allowing corporations to more completely dominate our corrupted electoral process.”

“It is outrageous that corporations already attempt to influence or bribe our political candidates through their political action committees (PACs), which solicit employees and shareholders for donations.”

The cancer stage of capitalism is not a metaphor.” It’s “a world-system disorder.” 

“With this decision, corporations can now also draw on their corporate treasuries and pour vast amounts of corporate money, through independent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dollars.”

Capitalism is a cancer indeed, and of the most awful and ravaging kind. Unfortunately John McMurtry is painfully correct. “Any entity that defines itself through exponential growth, be it a cancer tumor, the financial system or a runaway nuclear reaction, can only have one outcome: catastrophic failure with the sole chance of survival being the recognition of and response to the disorder. McMurtry provides both the diagnosis and antidote for this current state of our world.” – Marcel Schlaf, Professor of Chemistry, University of Guelph

“This corporatist, anti-voter decision is so extreme that it should galvanize a grassroots effort to enact a Constitutional Amendment to once and for all end corporate personhood and curtail the corrosive impact of big money on politics.”

“It is indeed time for a Constitutional amendment to prevent corporate campaign contributions from commercializing our elections and drowning out the civic and political voices and values of citizens and voters.”

“It is way overdue to overthrow ‘King Corporation’ and restore the sovereignty of ‘We the People’ “!

Fact: Dirty money infests politics.

Fact: Duopoly power corrupts it.

Fact: Corporations and powerful interests groups decide things.

Fact: Democracy is a convenient illusion.

Fact: Constitutionally flawed by design.

Fact: Wealth, power and privilege alone count.

Fact: Government serves their interests only.

Fact: Shutting out all others.

Fact: We the People don’t matter.

Fact: For sure not now.

Fact: Egalitarian principles exist in name only.

Fact: Checks, balances, equity, justice and democratic values are meaningless figures of speech.

Fact: Plutocrats rule America. Wall Street. Corporate bosses. Billionaires.

Fact: What they say goes.

Fact: Not according to laws, high moral or ethical standards.

Fact: Executive, congressional, and judicial officials systematically lie, connive, and pretty much do what they please for their own self-interest.

Fact: America more than ever reflects plutocracy, hypocrisy, not democracy.

Fact: Freedom, fairness, equity and justice are figures of speech. Four-letter words.

Fact: US elections were never open, free and fair.

Fact: Electoral fraud is rife.

Fact: Corporate-controlled touchscreen electronic voting machines are rigged.

Fact: Programmed with secret software.

Fact: Easy to manipulate.

Fact: Used to steal elections.

Fact: Things are pre-scripted.

Fact: Secrecy and back-room deals substitute for governance of, by and for everyone equitably.

Fact: Losers are declared winners.

Fact: Polls show only 21% of Americans call economic conditions good or excellent.

Fact: Around one-fourth alone see improvement next year.

Fact: US-style representative democracy is fake. A cruel sham. Neither representative or democratic.

Fact: Grassroots direct democracy alone works. People power.

Fact: America is too corrupted to fix. 

Fact: Debauched beyond repair.

Fact: Unfit to live in.

Fact: Symbolizing absolute power corrupting absolutely.

Fact: Scattered reforms won’t work.

Fact: Transformational change is needed.

Fact: So is disruptive people power more than ever.

Fact: Making it the new normal is vital.

Fact: Resisting tyranny is a universal right.

John McMurtry was this writer’s Progressive Radio News Hour Tuesday guest. Discussion focused on his new book titled “The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure.”

His first edition was published over a decade ago. His new one greatly expands and updates it. It’s must reading. Connecting important dots. Explaining a global disorder. Headquartered in America.

“As in any cancer system, the life host is increasingly plundered, but the cancer is masked from immune recognition or response,” says McMurtry. “The cancer stage of capitalism is not a metaphor.” It’s “a world-system disorder.”

“(A)n explanatory model.” Explaining the “characteristics of cancer invasion.”

“Proliferat(ing), decoupl(ing) from, and attack(ing) the productive functions of life hosts.” Genocide becomes its “leading edge.”

“Transnational money sequencing” becomes a be all and end all. Manipulated to make more of it.

Multiplying like cancer cells. Self-destructive and then some. Endless wars best explain. So does predatory finance. “(W)hole societies and tens of millions of people pay the price in mass disemployment, social system dismantling, and foreign expropriation,” says McMurtry.

“The life-blind private conglomerate money-sequences precipitat(e) collapse across nations.” Victims are blamed for what’s done to them.

” ‘Contagion’ conceals every moment of the cancer system at work.” Monied interests crowd out life sustaining systems. Mainstream economics ignores what’s wrong.

“The people must pay for the money-sequence cancer growth, and so more public wealth and individual savings must be taken away to do it,” McMurtry explains.

Operating by “debt multiplication.” Piled on governments and individuals. Done to enrich bankers and other corporate favorites. Profits matter more than people. A slippery slope to carcinogenic self-destruction. US electoral politics sustains the unsustainable.

Cumulatively worse the longer it’s unrecognized. Destroying ecological, social and organic life. The “Great Sickness,” according to McMurtry. Global ecogenocide. Degrading air, soil and water. Destabilizing climates and oceans.

Destroying species. Endangering life systems. Creating intolerable levels of world poverty, inequality and human misery. Benefiting privilege few at the expense of most others.  Producing health destroying “junk” unfit to eat. Indebtedness crowds out productive investments.

Wars take precedence over peace. Corporate empowerment matters more than life. McMurtry says a “social immune response” is required to fight “macro cancer.” More than ever a viable alternative is needed. Sustaining societies requires a universal commitment to life and nature. Entirely absent in Western societies. Mainly America. On a fast track toward decline. Self-destruction.

Money-controlled politics corrupts. Unsustainable longterm. Revolution is the only solution. Survival depends on it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.