Chris Hedges targets my deepest primal fear about Bernie Sanders and the 2016 election

as much as i love what's coming out of bernie sanders' mouth and as much as i would like to disagree with chris hedges' assessment, i can't muster an argument against hedges' sad take...

America’s Electoral Farce

I intend to devote no more time to the upcoming presidential elections than walking to my local polling station on Election Day, voting for a third-party candidate, most likely the Green Party candidate, and going home. Any further energy invested in these elections, including championing Bernie Sanders’ ill-advised decision to validate the Democratic Party by becoming one of its presidential candidates, is a waste of time.

Every action we take now must be directed at ripping down the structures of the corporate state. This means refusing to co-operate. It means joining or building radical mass movements. It means carrying out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as Kayactivists are doing in Seattle and fishing communities such as Kodiak, Cordova and Homer, as well as a dozen indigenous tribes, are doing in Alaska, to physically halt fracking, drilling for oil and natural gas or U.S. Navy training exercises in the pristine waters of the Arctic. It means striking for a $15 minimum wage. It means blocking city streets to demand an end to the indiscriminate use of lethal force by militarized police, especially against poor people of color. It means, in large and small ways, acts of open rebellion. It means always having as the primary objective the disrupting and overthrowing of corporate power. It means not playing the game. 

The corporate state seeks to get us to participate in the political charade of choreographed elections. It seeks to make us play by its rules. Our corporate media, flush with the dollars from political advertising, fills the airwaves with the ridiculous and the trivial. Candidates, pollsters, political strategists, pundits and celebrity journalists provide endless loops of banal and absurd “political” chatter, all of it a grotesque form of anti-politics. We will be bombarded with this propaganda, largely centered on the manufactured personalities of candidates, for many months. Tune it out. It means nothing. 

The voices of those who matter will not be heard in these elections. The marginalized and poor in our internal colonies, the 2.3 million people in our prisons and their families, the Muslims we persecute here and in the Middle East, and the suffering of the working poor are airbrushed out of the discussion. In this Potemkin America there is only a middle class. Our liberties, including our right to privacy, along with the consent of the governed—all of which have been taken from us—are held up in this electioneering farce as sacred and inviolate. We are assured that we live in a functioning democracy. We are promised that our voice will count. And even Sanders will tell you no different. If he stepped forward and spoke the truth, especially about the Democratic Party, he would be banned from the debates, vilified and crushed by the Democratic establishment, stripped of his Senate committee chairmanships and tossed into the political wilderness to which Ralph Nader has been exiled. Sanders, unfortunately, lacks Nader’s moral fortitude. He will, when it is all done, push his followers into the vampire-like embrace of Hillary Clinton. He is a Pied Piper leading a line of children or rats—take your pick—into political oblivion.

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Two video clips from RT on Bohemian Grove

why is it that our global super-rich elites, the very people who pull the strings of governments, corporations and, by extension, all of us, get to gather to discuss who knows what without any media scrutiny...? why is it that the only media coverage comes from a russian cable news network...? what a sad commentary on our so-called "news" media...

Inside of Bohemian Grove 2012

It's the secretive meeting that the world's elites don't want you to know about - some of the world's richest and brightest are descending on Bohemian Grove yet again this year. RT correspondent Abby Martin is on the ground and she is bringing the latest on what's really going on there.

Occupy protesters take on Bohemian Grove

2,000 of the world's most rich and powerful take a yearly voyage to the Bohemian Grove, a secluded camp out in the redwoods of Monte Rio, CA. With little to no media coverage of this elite pow wow, RT correspondent Abby Martin set out to cover the event herself. There, activists, protesters and grove attendees elucidate the dangers of power players colluding behind closed doors and how it affects the rest of humanity.

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War is a far more important priority than health care and old age pensions for Americans

endless war and the vast amounts of money it generates are clearly the top priorities for our super-rich elites and their bought-and-paid-for elected officials... the common good...? fuck that... grandma and grandpa having a healthy and financially secure old age...? fuck that... poor schoolkids eating a nutritious breakfast...? fuck that... the ONLY people that matter are those who already own our collective asses...

paul craig roberts...

Washington’s priorities and those of its presstitutes could not be clearer. President Obama, like George W. Bush before him, both parties in Congress, the print and TV media, and National Public Radio have made it clear that war is a far more important priority than health care and old age pensions for Americans.

The American people and their wants and needs are not represented in Washington. Washington serves powerful interest groups, such as the military/security complex, Wall Street and the banksters, agribusiness, the oil companies, the insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and the mining and timber industries. Washington endows these interests with excess profits by committing war crimes and terrorizing foreign populations with bombs, drones, and invasions, by deregulating the financial sector and bailing it out of its greed-driven mistakes after it has stolen Americans’ pensions, homes, and jobs, by refusing to protect the land, air, water, oceans and wildlife from polluters and despoilers, and by constructing a health care system with the highest costs and highest profits in the world.

[...]

This is economic destruction. It always occurs when an oligarchy seizes control of a government. The short-run profits of the powerful are maximized at the expense of the viability of the economy.

the super-rich elites are out to create a world suitable only for themselves, a gated community in which they can indulge themselves to their hearts' content while the peasants grovel outside for a crust of bread...

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A defective system of money, banking, and finance puts money in the wrong places

there's a lot of good common sense here... unfortunately, our super-rich elites don't give much of a shit for either common sense or the common good... they would fight recommendations like these tooth and nail...

How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule

How is it that our nation is awash in money, but too broke to provide jobs and services?

[...]

In the 1970’s Wall Street interests began pushing a deregulation agenda that led to a transfer of financial power from Main Street to Wall Street. Wall Street’s mega-banks lost interest in real investment and developed a new business model. They now specialize in charging excessive fees and usurious interest rates, providing leverage to speculators, speculating for their own accounts, luring the unwary into mortgages they cannot afford, bundling junk mortgages to sell them as triple-A securities, betting against the clients to whom they sell the overrated securities, extracting subsidies and bailouts from government, laundering money from drug and arms traders, and offshoring their profits to avoid taxes.

The consequences include the erosion of the middle class, an extreme concentration of wealth and power, a costly financial collapse, persistent high unemployment, housing foreclosures, collapsing environmental systems, the hollowing out of U.S. industrial, technological, and research capacity, huge public and international trade deficits, and the corruption of our political institutions.

Wall Street profited at every step and declared its experiment with deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy a great success. It now argues for extending the same measures even further.

How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule spells out details of a six-part policy agenda to rebuild a sensible system of community-based and accountable financial services institutions.

1. Break up the mega-banks and implement tax and regulatory policies that favor community financial institutions, with a preference for those organized as cooperatives or as for-profits owned by nonprofit foundations.
2. Establish state-owned partnership banks in each of the 50 states, patterned after the Bank of North Dakota. These would serve as depositories for state financial assets to use in partnership with community financial institutions to fund local farms and businesses.
3. Restructure the Federal Reserve to function under strict standards of transparency and public scrutiny, with General Accounting Office audits and Congressional oversight.
4. Direct all new money created by the Federal Reserve to a Federal Recovery and Reconstruction Bank rather than the current practice of directing it as a subsidy to Wall Street banks. The FRRB would have a mandate to fund essential green infrastructure projects as designated by Congress.
5. Rewrite international trade and investment rules to support national ownership, economic self-reliance, and economic self-determination.
6. Implement appropriate regulatory and fiscal measures to secure the integrity of financial markets and the money/banking system.

the only way things like this will ever see the light of day is if the american people band together to make it happen... this would involve tossing the super-rich elites, the banksters and their bought-and-paid-for elected officials out on the street or, better yet, herding them onto u.s. navy ships and holding them in indefinite detention in the lagoon at diego garcia in the indian ocean...

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