Click here to access article by Greg Palast from Rolling Stone.
Elections have always been held up as a primary feature of "democracy". However, our ruling capitalist class have learned over the years how to subvert that process of democracy. In this article Palast seems to focus narrowly on the GOP, and I question why.
It is no accident of history that our ruling capitalist class first restricted the vote to white property owning males. You see, our reverently referred to "Founding Fathers"
(they have been deified) did this intentionally because they feared the rest of the population. At that time they discovered that mixing people into large voting areas
tended to dilute any real democratic pressures from below. (Remember
that roads were poor and the means of communication was limited.) It has
been taught to us, along with a lot of other garbage, that the system
of checks and balances that is a part of the design of our government
was to protect against autocrats from coming to power. The truth is that the
new American ruling class led by Hamilton and the banker Morris had a terrible fear of citizens and designed the new government to protect them from the "unwashed masses". (Read Unruly Americans by Woody Holton and An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard.)
Since then we have witnessed the extension of voting rights to
most of the rest of the population, but this was only allowed because over time
the capitalist class tightened their grip on the media and education to instill ideas that were favorable to their rule. They also used a variety of other tricks to subvert any meaningful democracy by their control over what political parties were allowed to participate, gerrymandering districts, poll taxes, and now with the purging of voter rolls.
(If all else failed, they
never hesitated to hire private hooligans (for
example, the Pinkertons), or us the FBI, the National Guard (for example, the Kent State massacre) to insure that their interests and policies are protected. Nowadays they are using aggressive local police forces trained in crowd control by the Israelis.)
Judging by the extremely slanted coverage of the current
presidential campaigns by corporate media, it is clear that the deep state wants Hillary Clinton as the figurehead president. Donald Trump is
too much of a maverick who likely cannot be bought or intimidated to
follow their orders. They will insure that Hillary is elected and that neoliberal and neoconservative interests are well represented in Congress.
So the way that Palast frames this article, he seems to be promoting the idea that only Trump and the GOP are seeking to subvert the elections. This is only a shameful step away from promoting the idea that Hillary Clinton should be elected.
