THE LOSS OF OUR DEMOCRACY

By Robert Murri  7-26-2012

Sorry I have not kept up with my blog. I speed too much time on FB with my rants. Guess I better catch up a bit.

I have been obsessed with this year’s presidential and congressional elections. I know I’ve sounded like I might be losing my mind and maybe I am. But as I see it lining up, it gives me great fear. It is like looking at the stars in astrology and reading the possible future, and it doesn’t look good.

Since the inception of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Christian Coalition, Koch brothers reincarnated Tea Party, aka the John Birch Society of old, and their Freedom Works, CATO Institute and the organization known as the Family or Fellowship, which is a radical Christian fundamentalist organization, and add to this the Ayn Rand disciples, and the growing Libertarian ideology of Ron and Rand Paul, … (I don’t know this as fact, it’s just an assumption on my part, but I might suggest that Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul and a Senator might have been named after Ayn Rand, since she embraces many of the Libertarian philosophy.)  …these organizations have been on a decade’s long quest to obtain total power over the USA politically and culturally. All of these groups have slightly different final objectives, but they do have a common thread that has come together in a force like we have never seen before in the USA.

First all of these organizations are extremist of the far right of the political spectrum. By comparison, the Soviet Union was actually a right-wing conservative form of governance. They want total power, they abhor any opposing philosophy or political ideology, they purge members of the party who waver from the lock step order of the leadership, they will eat their young to maintain power, and they will use any method available, propaganda is one of their major tools to convince the public that they are the trusted ones, regardless if it is honest and true or not or downright lying and manipulative to gain and maintain that power.  They will manipulate and even commit voter fraud to insure they gain and retain power. The Soviet Union was really never a true socialist system, it was a pure communist system which has some socialist features, but communist centralized economy failed and cronyism replaced pure communism even before the coup d’tat in 1989. Communism is collectivism on steroids. 

The only difference between the Soviet Union and these organizations are two: 1) The Soviet Union rejected free market capitalism. The USA on the other hand grew out of merchant and agrarian economies into a highly industrialized capitalist economy.  2) In the Soviet Union the plutocrats of the oligarchy were not corporations, but communist party members whose position gave them wealth and power, even though there was not supposed to be any economic classes of their society or any individuals of privilege. In the USA our plutocrats of our oligarchy are major multinational corporations and very wealthy individuals who can buy their way into power via money to legislators of all levels of government and through their huge resources of funds to manipulate the messaging of an election.  In the USA we have a rather expanded power structure that is part of the plutocrats and that is our banking and finance institutions. And they are very, very powerful by having control over the Federal Reserve Banks and the Dept. of the Treasury. This gives them almost unlimited access to money and monetary policy making.

The financial sector of our economy as part of the GDP was held to about 9% in history, expect for the decade before the Great Depression and it only rose to 12%. Today it is reaching nearly 20%. When any institution reaches that level of GDP it gives them inherited power in governance. Goldman Sachs, Citibank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, MetLife, US Banc Corp, HSBC of America, and a few others hold the majority of Americas money assets. This has allowed them to dominate the seats on the various regional and nation boards of the Federal Reserve Bank. Since the Reagan administration, the Treasury Secretary has come from one of these major banks, primarily Goldman Sach. Most all of them sat on one of the Fed boards as well. This has compromised the separation of the Fed, with the Treasury Secretary and even the economic advisers to the president, regardless of what party or who is president. They all come from these banks. That is why you don't see economic scholars like Paul Krugman as a presidential adviser.

What we are witnessing is a Coup D’Tat by these groups either coordinated or that they just happen to be coming to power at the same time, for whatever reason that might be. But nevertheless, it is happening.

Since the 1970s, the USA has been under internal political and cultural assault. The conservatives want to eliminate any opposition party. The Christianists want to establish a theocracy. The corporate powers want unrestricted and unregulated markets with no labor laws, no safety laws, zero taxation and no environmental laws; nothing that would reduce profits. The wealthy upper 1% are attached to the corporate desires to maximize returns on their investments without paying any taxation. The Neo-Conservatives want an imperial nation that commands all other nations to adhere to their orders, much the same as it was with the British Imperialism 200 years ago. The banking and finance institutions also want unregulated and unrestricted ability to make money at the expense of the underclass.  We have been witnessing the biggest shift of wealth from the middle-class in the shortest period of time to the benefit of the upper 1% of the world. 

Now let’s fast forward to 2012. What we have today is the force and power of these groups to manipulate the upcoming elections so they can complete their cop d’tat. Except for the Christianist, the other groups of the oligarchy have the man they want for President, Mitt Romney. He is one of them. He will follow their orders because it would be in his own financial benefit to do so.

When a black man named Barack Hussein Obama won the election in 2008 was a big surprise. They truly thought that John McCain having being a household name and some appeal to the independents because he bucked the party a few times, that would be the winner. They didn’t use their system of manipulating the vote count that election and they thought that if they did when the polls were showing Sen. Obama with such a huge lead, that if McCain had won, there would be major unrest in the country, especially minorities that would cause a revolt in the streets.

They didn’t want that, so instead the Republican leadership in Congress pledged to not participate in any governance of the country, unless absolutely necessary. They will stand firm and vote against any Democratic and Pres. Obama’s bills. That is my Mitch McConnell stated right after the inauguration that his primary goal was to make Pres. Obama a one term president. It was not to help the country recover from the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, it was not to stimulate the economy to create jobs, it was not to insure that our credit rating remained at AAA to keep the lowest interest rate on our debt, it was not to negotiate for a better health care bill, it was not to do anything that would give Pres. Obama and the Democrats any credit for saving the nation from disaster or benefit those who were losing their jobs and homes. If thing improved, then Pres. Obama was sure to be reelected for another 4 years and that was way too long to wait to complete their coup d’tat.

Karl Rove made it very clear both when he was a student at the University of Utah in Political Science and when he was remaking G.W. Bush for the presidency, he stated that he wanted a permanent conservative Republican government in all branches and to create a system that insured that any opposition could be diminished quickly. Part of that move was to capture as many state legislatures and governorships so they can redraw districts to reduce or eliminate opposition strong holds, pass laws restricting voting that would impact those who lean more heavily toward Democrats, pass laws to eliminate labor unions, since these are the last major supporter of the Democrats with their money for TV ads and their organizational skills to get Democrats out to vote. Once they are eliminated, then the big money of the party can drown out any opposition message with false propaganda.

The next step was to gain control of both houses of Congress. In 2010 they were able to take over the House, but didn’t quit make it in the Senate, but they did reduce the majority’s margin so that the filibuster could be used to stop all legislation proposed by the majority, thus the minority controls the Senate.  If it hadn’t been for just a few moderate Republican in the first year of Pres. Obama’s administration, the ACA and Stimulus bills would not have passed. But that changed in the second year when the Republican leadership whipped their members into line to oppose everything. Since then the only bills that have been proposed by the Republican are about abortion, prayer in public meetings and schools, birth control restrictions, and other Christianist objectives.

This current congress has passed the fewest bills EVER in our nation’s history.  It is the least productive and least responsive to the needs of the nation that ever before. The Republicans are not the loyal opposition; they are the radical, non-loyal opposition. The very statement by many that the only compromise they will consider is if the Democrats come to their way of thinking. Otherwise there is no point in even talking about it.

When the chairman of the health and human services committee in the House called the minority ranking member on the committee to talk about the ACA bill, the Republican responded that there was not going to be any negotiation or compromise so there was no reason to meet and talk it over, period.

Now we are at a stage that it is very likely that Mitt Romney will become the president, not because he actually wins the true and actual votes, but my the voter restriction laws and by the possible rigging of the voting tabulation machines that testimony states are very vulnerable to hacking and manipulation with a simple USB thumb-drive and 2 seconds of access to the machine. An executable worm would change the outcome of the vote to Mitt and then eat itself in such a way that it would be impossible to forensically find it. In fact one retired computer programmer for NASA testified that he did just that for a law firm in Florida to test the security of their voting equipment. Actually the law firm was an agent for the Florida Republican Party Central Committee. 

What happened to that little program is unknown as the law firm and the party says they never ordered such a program and the programmer is lying about it. However the programmer has proof that he received payment from the law firm at the time he claims to have written the hacking program. This all took place in 2003 and the programmer surmised that it was used in Ohio since the exit polls are so far off from the tabulation of the votes for Bush that it was statistically impossible to have such a large spread with Bush winning when exit polls showed Sen. Kerry won by a small margin. 

Also a programmer and computer engineer that worked on the voting machines and tabulators testified that they are plat formed on windows 98 OS and was full of holes for hacking. He testified that nothing has been done to update the OS and secure them from hacking. There was never any intent to secure these machines from the day the company received the contract to make them. However, the companies testified to Congress that the machines were secure and near impossible to hack into or to change the vote. They stated that the paper trail would prohibit this from happening. However, no one has challenged the count and ordered a hand count of the paper trail to the tabulator outcome and the engineer said that even that could be manipulated because as the voting machines communicate with the tabulator, the tabulator could cause printing of votes on the machine that were not actually cast by real people. So unless they take the huge amount of time to not only count the paper printouts, they would have to research the name of every voter to determine if they are real or not. The cost of doing that is so astronomical that no one has even contemplated that possibility.

So with all that said now, you can see that the USA has become a banana republic that has rigged elections so the ruling plutocrats and oligarchy retain power.

We have lost our democracy. The return to the Noble cause of a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people will be a very difficult and most likely a bloody one.