(written for The Africa Report)
by
Quincy Saul, October 2012
Crises
of all kinds are converging on every continent – ecological,
social, economic, political, military and more. If they have not
visited you yet, they will soon! And here in this gauntlet
of world history, the world is watching as the political process of
the global superpower self-destructs. Welcome to elections at the end
of the world.
Chapter
1: Money
“The
capitalist society is a democracy in which every penny represents a
ballot paper.” Ludwig
von Mises
This will be the most expensive election in world
history. The numbers are coming in too fast to count, but estimates
are already as high as five billion dollars. It's unclear if
we will ever know exactly how much money is being spent, because
campaign money, following the global trend, has emerged from
purgatory into a deregulated wonderland. Like banks before them,
electoral institutions have entered a new stage in evolution.
Political Action Committees [PACs] have merged to form Super PACs,
which have spawned Shadow PACs, and the list goes on. No one knows
where all the money is, where it's been, or where it's going. What
happened to mortgages is happening to democracy.
There
was nothing sudden about this. The US kicked off the millennium
already possessing the best democracy money can buy,
and since then has simply stayed the course. This course culminated
two years ago in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision known as “Citizens
United.” In a powerful feat of logic, the Supreme Court deduced
that since corporations are people, money is therefore speech. Ergo,
corporate spending must have the same legal prerogative and
protection as the freedom of speech. So freedom to speak equals
freedom to spend. Without a doubt, this is more of the same thing
we've been seeing develop for decades—but it is so
much more of the same
that there has been a qualitative shift. More than 300 Super PACs are
registered with the Federal Election Commission. We have moved from
measuring elections by the millions, to measuring them by the
billions.
Whose
money is this? Ari Berman reports that
In
the 2010 election, the one
per cent of the one per cent
accounted for 25 per cent of all campaign-related donations . . . Or,
to be more precise, the
.000063 per cent.
Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 per
cent of the money raised by Super
PACs
in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each . . . In a recent segment of
his show, Stephen Colbert noted that half of the money ($67 million)
raised by Super PACs in 2011 had come from just 22
people.
"That's seven one-millionths of one per cent," or roughly
0.000000071 per cent, Colbert said while spraying a fire extinguisher
on his fuming calculator. "So, Occupy Wall Street, you're going
to want to change those signs."
Where
is this money going? We'll probably never know, but the major media
networks are certainly making a tidy bundle from all the campaign
advertising. “The media promote the election, the election promotes
the media, and advertising competes with democracy” as one unusual commentator observed
in
the last election cycle. It's a nice round deal that benefits
everyone in the 0.000000071%. But unlike some of their shadier
transactions, this one probably leaves everyone involved with a clean
and even righteous conscience, doing their parts for democracy.
The 2012 election will consume more money than the
entire gross domestic product of many smaller Third World countries.
The world is ending, so now more than ever the show must go on.
Chapter 2:
Spectacle
“In
this imperfect world, the sovereign citizens of the first and
greatest Electronic Democracy . . . exercised once again its free,
untrammeled franchise.”
Isaac Asimov
Given the price tag, it is guaranteed in advance that
the 2012 election will be spectacular. But given the severe limits of
the actual political debate, it is also guaranteed to be a massive
anti-climax. It is the job of the technicians and consultants to make
careers and campaigns by hiding and prolonging this contradiction.
While
we have not yet reached the climax of Electronic Democracy as
foretold in Isaac Asimov's classic short story “Franchise”,
we are on our way. Combine the technological predictions of Asimov
with the sociological analysis of Guy Debord's 1967 book The
Society of the Spectacle
and the result will be something resembling the current 2012 US
presidential election.
To
give one only example, take the new “dial metre group” system.
Steven hill reports that these are now “a standard feature
in virtually every presidential race and other high-profile
campaigns,” in which “voters twist dials to
register approval or disapproval of specific passages in a speech,”
to help candidates lean how to manipulate their constituencies
better:
It's a bizarre and
frightening spectacle, this notion of wired humans co-operating in
the fashioning of campaign missiles that will be aimed right back at
people like themselves via television ads . . . It is a kind of
Orwellian group-think that is expertly crafted and staged to induce
maximum emotional peaks from viewers, trying to attain a kind of
visceral script that will prod, poke and catch their imagination. No
wonder former New York Times columnist
Frank Rich has called this new-fangled presidential selection process
the "Survival of the Fakest" . . . Not surprisingly,
McCampaigns have become little more than sales pitches and
advertising jingles, using "crafted talk" and "simulated
responsiveness" to sell political products . . . So when you get
excited over a Barack Obama speech, remember: the mad scientists who
work for him are really good at figuring out what you want to hear.
And Obama, just like Bill Clinton and George W Bush, is really
talented at reading the Teleprompter.
The
electronic spectacle culminates in the debates. If there weren't so
much at stake, this would be some of the best comedy out there. While
we pass tipping points for irreversible catastrophic global climate
change, the big question is, who will drill more on federal land? Who
is the better friend of coal, gas and oil? Who will accelerate
genocide by biofuel faster?
Who will build more pipelines? Who can more smoothly insert nuclear
and renewable energy into the same breath? As usual, it's only the
jokers who dare to speak the truth: “Who won? Who cares? You
Decide!” reported Rap News.
By
now my liberal progressive readers are squirming uncomfortably. We
must after all vote for the lesser of two evils (or as Abbie Hoffman
put it more accurately, the evil of two lessers). We might not like
the Democrat, but the Republican is worse. This masterful
feedback-loop is a piece of conditioning against which no argument
stands a chance. In spite of the degeneration of the politics and the
process, every four years we must beat ourselves over the heads with
this time-tested guilt trip. Sure, the most important issues (climate
change, war, civil liberties, Wall Street corruption, etc) are not up
for discussion. Sure, there has been more continuity than change
between the presidencies of Obama and Bush. But nonetheless, we have
been conditioned to remember and repeat, we must vote for the
Democrat because the Republican is worse. It's a persuasive argument,
and it might even be relevant if it mattered. But for the votes to
matter, the system has to actually work.
Chapter 3: Theft
“It's
not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.” Joseph Stalin
Elections are stolen in the United States. But the
biggest obstacle to democracy is not this theft. It is the inability
of US citizens to believe it. It is the extreme hubris, the kind
which only a superpower is capable of, which prevents people in the
US from recognizing that the system is rigged. If stolen elections
are the bombs that threaten the political process, it is the arrogant
denial that hits the self-destruct button.
Elections are stolen in two ways, overt and covert.
These overlap in various ways, including the way in which they are
completely ignored by just about everyone.
The
overt theft takes the form of new laws which have been enacted to
prevent certain targeted populations from voting. Who are the
targets? “[O]nly two states” Greg Palast reports,
“. . . have more than 50 percent of eligible Hispanic citizens
registered”. Yes, this is a trend:
The fact that these new voting laws specifically target poor people of color is not controversial. In fact it is not even controversial that they have been enacted on behalf of Republicans. This overt take-over of the electoral system is completely transparent and unashamed about its intentions. As Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai boasted publicly in June, the new “Voter ID” law will “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
The covert fraud is more complex, but barely less hidden. It takes place on touch-screens, on which more than 90% of all votes are cast. Three private corporations, Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia, control 80% of this electoral system. It is not controversial that these machines are faulty. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office published a report saying that these machines have inherent flaws that “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to ... the integrity of the voting process." It is also not controversial that the owners and manufacturers of these machines have outspoken political leanings toward the Republican party.
Since Greg Palast's seminal expose of the stealing of the 2000 election, numerous other studies have confirmed that electronic voting is deeply vulnerable to manipulation. There is no shortage of testing and study on this subject, and the results are uniform and conclusive. Watch these videos.
And yet US citizens pretty much refuse to look at this subject. Even following the more-obvious-than-usual fraudulent re-election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker there was no public outcry. Not only do “progressives” fail to challenge a fraudulent process, they don't challenge the stolen result—even when they lose! As a result, the billionaires and ballot bandits who are perpetrating this massive fraud are doing less and less to hide it. Governor Romney has been so bold as to go into the voting machine business himself! If we are all lucky enough to survive a few more election cycles, we might find that Asimov's science fiction is not as far off as we might hope.
***
Now that we've cleared the air, let's think clearly
about all this.
Obama became president in 2008 for a reason worth
celebrating: a mass movement of new voters outnumbered the extent of
legally and illegally purged votes. Can we expect a similar outcome
in 2012?
It's
not about what we believe or feel; this is about numbers. For
instance, in Indiana, 72 thousand African Americans are likely to be
prevented from voting this year. “Coincidentally,”
reports Palast,
“that’s three times Barack Obama’s victory margin in that state
in 2008. Coincidentally.” This is the kind of math that will decide
the election. Not polls. (As usual, The Onion
came closer to the truth than most of the “real” news, reporting that “this year's election will almost certainly be decided by a
small handful of swing corporations.”)
Over the last four years, Obama's support has fallen
drastically. There are many reasons why, but it includes the fact
that he has done almost nothing to distinguish his administration
from George W. Bush's. Many new voters supported Obama because they
hoped he would stop foreign wars, protect the environment, or
preserve civil liberties. Over the last four years he has given them
every reason to feel used and betrayed. So it is no surprise that we
do not see the outpouring of support for Obama that we did four years
ago.
The
question is not who will win, because no one wins or loses in a
rigged system. The question is whether Obama's supporters will once
again outnumber the purged votes; whether the mobilization will be
greater than the fraud. Since Obama's support has decreased while the
fraud (overt and covert) has increased, the evidence points in a
clear direction. Romney is not going to win this election, any more
than Bush won in 2000 or 2004. But he is very likely going to be
declared president. In fact it might as well be declared in advance.
The Final Chapter:
“Progressives” on Trial
What is the lesson for the rest of the world, held
hostage as an audience to this election? Is this massive fraud the
climax of the development model that the US is supposed to represent,
the model which Africa, Asia and Latin America are supposed to look
forward to?
In
the US, the
real question for everyone is not about the lesser of two evils. It
is what are the citizens of the superpower going to do about their
self-destructing political system?
In 2008, self-defined “progressives” united around
the slogan of “change we can believe in,” and in retrospect
that's what we all got. Forget about change that these progressives
can't believe! What is revealed in the US today is a severely limited
politics, and more deeply, a severely limited imagination.
One
of the foremost “progressive” magazines in the US, The
Nation,
is full of examples. Neither there nor in any other “progressive”
publication will you find any discussion of the most important fact
about this election—that it has already been stolen. In an
editorial of its latest issue titled “Why Obama?” (October 22,
2012) The
Nation
admits that “it is impossible to imagine any progress . . . with a
Romney administration in power.” This is a powerful
self-condemnation of progressive politics and imagination. It is
tantamount to admitting that progressives cannot imagine any progress
whatsoever.
No matter what we think of Obama, Deepak Bhargava
writes in the cover article, “it is crucial that we lean into this
election without ambivalence.” No matter the cost to country or
conscience, we who are about to vote, salute you! On the high-voltage
gate leading to the polling stations of this election, a sign reads:
“abandon all politics, ye who enter.” Drink the Diebold Kool-Aid:
Voting will make you free.
All
of these kind-hearted liberals should know better. But they don't,
and that is the sad fact of the matter. There are too many questions that they are not ready to ask.
Only Ai-Jen Poo, to her credit, had the sense to state clearly the
explosive potential of these end times. “[T]here is a broader base
for an economic justice movement than ever before,” she writes:
Regardless
of election outcomes, this may be the greatest opportunity for us to
unite in generations. To seize the opportunity, we must pay attention
to the connective tissue needed to build and hold a broad movement
together... We should be organizing as many actions as possible to
take place immediately after the election.
But
who is going to organize like this? Will it be the same progressives
that have been apologizing for the Obama administration for the last
four years? Unlikely. Glenn Greenwald has compiled some important statistics about the politics of these progressives:
53
percent of self-identified liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of
moderate or conservative Democrats — support keeping Guantanamo Bay
open . . . 77 percent of liberal Democrats endorse the use of drones
. . . Democrats approve of the drone strikes on American citizens by
58-33, and even liberals approve of them, 55-35.
Without a doubt, many progressives will come out into
the streets to protest Obama's war and police state, once they become
Romney's. But with the enemies we have, who needs friends like these?
What's really at stake here is a political class unfit
to rule, and a civil society unfit to replace it. These are the
conditions for imperial decline, clothed in the best hubris that
money can buy. The voices of reason and compassion are more than ever
buried, not only by fear and hatred, but—what is almost worse—under
equally suffocating progressive nonsense.
And
if enough people vote for Obama to outweigh the voter fraud, what will we have to celebrate? There is no solace in any possible outcome of this exorbitant farce.
We can only hope that revolutionaries start getting their act
together.
