Considering What Just happened in the US, It should Be Painfully Obvious Why Canada Should Change Its Voting System

It's hard to believe but it's true.  Donald Trump is the President-elect of the United States of America.  A man who has never held a public office in his life now is Commander and Chief of the most potent and lethal military force in history.  Put another way, the fate of planet rests in the apparently small hands of a man many consider to be a narcissistic sociopath. 

Yes, this man now has access to the nuclear codes.  I sincerely hope and pray he doesn't decide to nuke anyone.

So, how did this happen?  Much has been written in the aftermath of Trump's victory.  Most of the analysis concentrates on socio-economic variables centered on gender, class, and race.  But the fact of the matter is that Trump did not win the Presidential election.  He lost the popular vote.  Indeed, Hillary Clinton received approximately 2.5 million more votes than Trump.  What occurred is that the Electoral College awards its votes on a state-by-state basis.  Whoever gets the most votes in the state (with the exception of Maine) gets all of the state's electoral college votes.  Add them up and the President-elect is the one who gets the majority of electoral college votes.  In other words, it is the distribution of votes in the winner-take-all electoral districts that determine the winner of the electoral contest.

Was this election democratic? No! Clearly, the democratic result of the popular vote was overturned by the mechanics of the voting system.  The name of the game in a Presidential election is to win as many states possible that produce the greater number of electoral college votes.  The margin of victory in any given state does not matter.  For example, the fact that Trump did poorly in the most populous states of New York and California did not matter since he won a greater number of smaller states that in the end produced 20% more electoral college votes than what Hillary won.

This is not the first time the candidate who loses the popular vote has gone on to become the American President.  The last time it happened was in the 2000 election when Bush defeated Gore despite not having the support of the majority of American electors.  Electoral results carry consequences like the war in Iraq, which was clearly the result of the lie that claimed that the Iraqis possessed arms of mass destruction that required a US military invasion.  What now lies in store for America and the world at large has given rise to great concern for the safety of the global community.

Certainly, the question that needs to be raised is how can the most powerful nation in the world use such a dubious electoral system to decide who will lead the nation?  Simply put, the problem is that the Americans have never gotten around to modernizing their electoral system, which is, for the most part, a relic of its colonial past as an English settler state.  Winner-take-all electoral districts are still in use in England, the USA, Canada, and Australia.  The rest of the world, however, has moved on to adopt electoral systems that do not produce such aberrant electoral results.

It just so happens that Canada is now in the process of deciding whether to change its voting method.  During the last federal election in Canada, the soon-to-be-elected Prime Minister Trudeau promised that the 2015 election would be the last using the winner-take-all, plurality system called first-past-the-post.  Ironically, Trudeau became Prime Minister as a result of the distortion brought on by the voting system: his Liberal Party only received 39% of the popular vote; but in one region, the Maritimes, he won 61 out of 61 electoral districts with only 56% of the popular vote, thereby giving him a "majority" government, meaning that the electoral system had created a majority when in reality his party only had the support of the minority of the population.

Fabricating majority rule and the reversal of popular vote are only two of the major problems of first-past-the-post.  It also systemically under-represents or denies altogether representation to smaller political parties.  Essentially, the supporters of such parties are effectively disenfranchised.  In the 2004 federal election, for example, the Green Party of Canada received almost one million votes but was denied any representation in Parliament thanks to the electoral system.

Canadians have been aware of these problems for almost one hundred years.  In fact, in the provinces other voting methods have been used, but for many reasons we have never taken these problems serious enough to make a qualitative change to the voting system at the federal level.  Looking at what just happened in the US, we should realize that a hostile take over of one of Canada's traditional governing political parties by a demagogue is wholly possible.  In fact, Germany adopted proportional representation largely to prevent this possibility from ever happening again given the tragic turn of events leading to carnage of the Second World War.

Let's not be smug Canada.  It could happen here.  Do the right thing.  Adopt proportional representation and make Canada Trump proof.




























 

Democraphobia Runs Rampant in North America

The fear of democracy has a long history.  Plato was mistrustful of the demos, believing it would be subject to bullies and to tyrants. In England, the storming of the Bastille in France by the sans-culottes during the French Revolution was dismissed as a regrettable manifestation of "mobocracy". According to Thomas Jefferson, one of the most influential framers of the American constitution: "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where the fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Really? I guess as a slave-owner, he had cause for concern if ever the "mob" had taken over and moved to take away his "right" to own slaves.

This denigration of the demos into the unruly mob is a tendency that we have not shaken through out the Anglo-American countries of the Northern Hemisphere.  Somehow down under, the Aussies and the Kiwis have been able to overcome the fear of the rule by the many and have adopted more modern democratic institutions, namely electoral systems in which the electoral results reflect the will and the desire of the masses in the representation found in their elected assemblies.

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This has not yet happened in Canada, the UK and the USA, which still cling to their outdated electoral systems that regularly distort electoral outcomes, where the results are often far from what the people intended.  In North America, this is particularly the case.

Here in Canada, the last two federal elections have produced "majority" governments in which a single party has found itself with a majority of seats in Parliament despite the fact that each of the two political parties that won the subsequent elections actually received less than 40% of the popular vote.  In effect, Canada is ruled by a minority that systemically receives the benefit of an electoral distortion in its favor and rules as if it had the support of the majority.

To the south of us, the Americans just staged a Presidential election in which according to the popular vote, the loser, Donald Trump, has become the President-elect despite the fact that his opponent Hillary Clinton received approximately two million more votes.  In this case, the election was decided by the infamous Electoral College which uses an antiquated method to decide the election: the winner of the popular vote in each state gets all of that state's electoral votes, and the winning candidate that goes on to become the President is the candidate who garners the majority of the College's electoral votes, not the overall popular vote.  At last count, Trump was awarded 20% more electoral college votes despite having received less votes overall than his opponent.

What's up with that?

Obviously, both Canada and the US pay only lip service to democratic principles.  For instance, the most fundamental feature of democracy is that it is the rule of the majority.  Yet, in both countries, electoral procedures are allowed to deviate from the democratic norm, which lead to the formation of governments that although created as a result of a popular election, do not reflect this most fundamental feature of democracy, the rule of the majority.  As is often the case, the Devil is in the details and in both countries the Devil manifests itself in each country's use of single member, winner-take-all, plurality electoral districts.  To the winner go the spoils of victory.  To the other candidates nothing.  Hence all the ballots for the other candidates, which often constitute the majority of the votes cast in the electoral district, do not bring about any effective representation for the electors who cast them.

Put another way, we do not hold democratic elections in North America.  What we do is stage electoral popularity contests guided by slightly different rules than in democratic elections. The winner of the popular election appears to have the legitimacy of a democratic result, but in reality the winning candidate or political party has won according to the rules governing the popular elections in each country, not by the rules governing democratic elections of which the most important is that each vote counts and counts equally.

This masquerade has been going on for quite some time.  At the heart of the problem is the fear of what the "many" might want and what the "many" might do.  Fear of an unruly mob taking over is far-fetched since the rule of law, backed by a substantial police and military presence, is well-entrenched in both countries.  However, the well-off few have reason to fear that the many, if given the reigns of power, would move to better redistribute the nation's wealth and to pass environmental and social legislation that would make the accumulation of great wealth of the few more difficult.  Heaven forbid! 

In reality, elections in North America are for the most part and with few exceptions little more than popularity contests conducted by the ruling elite that allows the population at large to participate in a public spectacle in which the public chooses between the two options provided to them by an electoral process designed and maintained by the wealthy.  For example, although there are considerable differences between Trump and Clinton at the level of outward appearance, neither represent a significant departure of the way wealth is acquired and maintained in the US.  Similarly, in Canada, with regard to social issues there are considerable differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals; however, both parties are the flip sides of the same coin when it comes to financial and economic matters.

Presently, in Canada there has been a Parliamentary Committee created to examine how to change the voting system as a result of the promise made by our new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, during the last federal election.  This is the fourth time such a committee has been struck in about one hundred years.  Will this time be any different? 

Indeed, a promise made during an electoral campaign is often much different than the promise kept once the government is in power.  In this instance, it is the fear of the unknown that prevents the newly elected government from changing the electoral system because by changing the rules by which governments are formed, notwithstanding the possibility of making the government more democratic, there lies a very real possibility that the ruling party might lose its lock on political power that the present system has conferred upon it.  Better the devil we know than to risk an uncertain future.

In my mind, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  In Canada, we spend billions to educate the public.  Consequently, we are not any less intelligent collectively than the people who govern us, although we are probably less concerned with the accumulation of wealth of the few than the well-being of the many.  To me, democracy is not such a scary proposition.

Get on with it!       

Sorry Folks, But This Scribe Saw It Coming

One really good thing about not watching television is that it is much easier to pick up on things that the mainstream media does not want you to think about.  As this Presidential election played out, what the media tried to do is sweep under the rug was the depth of the anger that a great number of Americans were feeling towards the ruling liberal elite: the Ivy league educated, neo-liberal, condescending-towards-working-class hucksters who used to run the country.  Because of their control of the media, they were able to persuade about half the population, city dwellers for the most part, that their way was the only way to run the country.  They were in for a rude shock.

Back in March of 2016, I knew something had changed and that this election would be different.  In a previous blog, America's Quiet Revolution, I wrote:

By now you probably noticed that things are not quite right in the land of Uncle Sam.  A lot of people are angry and "they ain't gonna take it any more".  So much so that the financial-media-congressional complex is losing control of the country.  In short, the dispossessed underclass from across the political spectrum are refusing to follow their marching orders handed down by the ruling elite of both the Democrats and the Republicans.  Imagine the Republicans choosing Donald Trump as their candidate for the presidency and the Democrats choosing Bernie Sanders.  The former is a demagogue while the latter is a self-declared democratic socialist.  What's up with that?

I think that the majority of Americans have finally woken up to the fact that they have been exploited mercilessly for the last forty years.  They now know that the economy is rigged for the benefit of the super rich, the .01% of the population.  For the great many, the economic recovery from the Great Recession has brought little if any relief, while the top of the top have received 80% of the newly created wealth.  Now the shit has hit the fan, and the underclass is about to take matters into their own hands. . . .

How this is all going to turn out is anybody's guess.  One thing is for sure, however, the USA is presently morphing into something new.  Traditional constituencies are breaking apart and a new order is on the horizon.

After seeing and having read about what happened surrounding the surprise result of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, I couldn't help but connect the dots.  In June of 2016, I published another blog, The Decline of the Anglo-American Empire, in which I explored what seemed to be a common thread:

The revolt of the elites in the West and most notably in the English-speaking nations has been going on now for the last thirty-five years.  Essentially, the members of the moneyed class have decoupled their futures from those with whom they share a geographic and political community. 

In short, the Washington-Westminster consensus entails a neo-liberal agenda of cutting corporate and personal income tax, deregulating financial markets, reducing investments in social programs, moving manufacturing to where labor and environmental laws are lax, encouraging predatory lending to the disadvantaged, and extracting wealth from the real economy to be re-invested in off shore tax havens. 

In doing so, the elites have left the common folk in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) behind to fend for themselves in a beleaguered society that no longer has the sufficient resources and economic opportunities to maintain the quality of life that previous generations enjoyed. . . .

Before, throughout the post war period, there existed an inclusive social contract that embodied the belief "that we (those of Anglo-Saxon descent and their close cousins) were in this together."  No longer.  Now, there exists a "sink or swim" worldview in which those with the good luck of being born into well-off families are gliding quite well through the turbulence that incessant globalization has brought about, a middle-class struggling to keep their heads above water, while the poor are drowning in hopeless despair.

What has changed is that the callous treatment previously reserved for members of visible minorities has now been expanded to be applied to the vast majority of those who represent the racial bedrock from which the Anglo-American Empire drew its strength -- the English in the UK and white Americans in the US.  Both groups, having grown accustomed to preferential treatment, resent the decline in their living standards and are now pushing back, refusing to follow the leadership of their ruling elites. . . .

The tectonic plates are also shifting is the US as the two-party political system seems to be coming to an end.  Most notably, in the run-up to the Presidential elections, white Americans have abandoned the leadership of the Republican Party to nominate the xenophobic, trash-talking, demagogue Donald Trump.  In doing so, they have repudiated the economic program that has left them behind as compared to the very well off, the upper 1% of the population.  Instead, they have embraced the vilification of those of different skin color, in particular Mexicans and Arab Muslims, who, apparently, are responsible for the hard times that many Americans are now experiencing as a result of the stealing jobs from white Americans by immigrants.

By the end of July 2016, once both parties had nominated their candidates, I started to sense that things might not unfold the way the mainstream media was scripting the campaign.  In my blog with the foreshadowing title, The U.S. Presidential Election: A Drowning Man Will Clutch at a Dragon, I wrote:

Well, it's done.  The Republican and Democratic Parties have nominated their candidates to become President of the United States of America, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Really? These are the choices? The sociopath who can do the least harm? . .

In offering these two candidates to the electorate, both parties have shown very clearly the failings of the two-party political system.  Moving forward to November, the media will focus its attention on what promises to be a campaign filled with personal attacks, a veritable tele-reality affair, which might play in Trump's favor, but in the end, regardless of the outcome, the real losers will be the vast majority of Americans.

Finally, during the last weekend of the campaign I saw what I thought was an absolutely brilliant video that addressed what I thought what had been the ballot box question all along.  If you want to understand why Trump won the election, you should view: Donald Trump's Argument For America.

Not that I was absolutely certain that he would win, but I thought he had a good chance despite all of the propaganda polls that were circulating days before the election.  In my final blog of the campaign, Choosing Between Donald the Vile or Crooked Hillary: The Absurdity of It All,  published on November 7, 2016, the day before Americans would prove the pundits wrong, I wrote:

I understand how it all came about.  Let's face it.  The majority of Americans have been screwed over royally by a ruling elite that cares more about their stock options and speaking fees than the well-being of the population.  Over the last ten years the meme of the top 1% has penetrated the national psyche.  To secure Clinton's nomination all that was needed was to control the Democratic primaries, which as it turned out proved relatively easy to do.  Seeing how her nomination turned out to be an unpopular choice -- no other politician symbolizes the politics of privilege better than Hillary -- the task for the media was to focus the electorate's attention on perhaps the only other candidate who could be even more repugnant than Hillary, Donald Trump.  The thinking was that the American electorate would never be that stupid as to elect a man who proclaimed that he would build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants and that he would get the Mexicans to pay for it.

But the choice for many Americans is not a rational one.  In fact, for many the decision is fraught with emotion.  Dare I say that the decision to vote for Trump, aside from fascists and xenophobic racists, is simply a grand gesture of saying "fuck you" to America's ruling liberal elite.  In living memory, Americans can remember earning $80,000 a year from a single job that had benefits and a decent pension.  Now, millions toil for paltry wages: two jobs to earn $30,000, and a whole generation is stuck with mountains of student loan debt of which many will work a lifetime without ever paying off the debt.

I can see the twisted logic.  It's payback time.  Force those who have the most to lose by America running of the rails to have to deal with the antics of Donald Trump.  It's like someone who lives in an all white enclave accepting a lower offer to buy his or her house in order to sell to an African-American family just to piss his or her neighbours off.

I guess desperate times cry out for desperate measures and I think electing Trump would unquestionably be a wake up call for America's ruling elite who thought overwhelming advantage in campaign spending and media coverage would be enough to have their candidate elected.

Yet, things may not turn out as planned.  The unthinkable may come about.  Seeing through the charade of an election designed to place yet another millionaire into the highest office in the land and to do likewise with Congress, more than half its members are also millionaires, ordinary Americans just might serve notice that they are no longer to follow the script laid out for them, thinking that if the top 1% has, in effect, abandoned the population, in having to deal with a Trump as President at long last they will be in the same boat as their fellow citizens.

Misery loves company.

So, there you have it, my take on the Presidential campaign.  Without question, Trump winning the election represents a significant rupture from the past.  Was it a total surprize?  I don't think so.  But to see it coming, you had to discard the opinions and the analysis from the mainstream American media and read the reports of those who were travelling through the USA during the campaign and capturing what they experienced.  It was all captured by the written word, but you had to search for the reports and resist the spoon feeding provided by those who had way too much invested with maintaining the status quo.

 

   

 

Choosing Between Donald the Vile or Crooked Hillary: The Absurdity of It All

So America, it all comes down to this: the whole world waits with bated breath while you decide which of your more despised Presidential candidates loses the election.  I think it's safe to say that those of us living outside of the USA hope that Trump loses.  After all, if he wins, as Commander and Chief of the most potent military force on the planet, he would be given access to the codes that control America's nuclear arsenal.  Oops, sorry about that humanity.

Other than my immediate concern about the safety of the planet, what strikes me the most about this election is how absurd it is.  Come on America.  Really? That's the best you can do?  Give the electorate the choice of being led by an overtly narcissistic, racist, misogynist sociopath or a cold-hearted, calculating, sell-out-to-the-financial-elite sociopath?

These are the choices?

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Back when I was in high school, I had to study The Theatre of the Absurd in such plays like Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Ionesco's Rhinoceros.  Having to decide between the two most reviled Presidential candidates since public opinion polls have been used to measure popularity strikes me as an absurd proposition.  I liken it to being invited to be a judge for a body building contest only to find out that all of the contestants are morbidly obese.  What's up with that?

I understand how it all came about.  Let's face it.  The majority of Americans have been screwed over royally by a ruling elite that cares more about their stock options and speaking fees than the well-being of the population.  Over the last ten years the meme of the top 1% has penetrated the national psyche.  To secure Clinton's nomination all that was needed was to control the Democratic primaries, which as it turned out proved relatively easy to do.  Seeing how her nomination turned out to be an unpopular choice -- no other politician symbolizes the politics of privilege better than Hillary -- the task for the media was to focus the electorate's attention on perhaps the only other candidate who could be even more repugnant than Hillary, Donald Trump.  The thinking was that the American electorate would never be that stupid as to elect a man who proclaimed that he would build a wall to keep out illegal Mexican immigrants and that he would get the Mexicans to pay for it.

But the choice for many Americans is not a rational one.  In fact, for many the decision is fraught with emotion.  Dare I say that the decision to vote for Trump, aside from facists and xenophobic racists, is simply a grand gesture of saying "fuck you" to America's ruling liberal elite.  In living memory, Americans can remember earning $80,000 a year from a single job that had benefits and a decent pension.  Now, millions toil for paltry wages: two jobs to earn $30,000, and a whole generation is stuck with mountains of student loan debt of which many will work a lifetime without ever paying off the debt.

I can see the twisted logic.  It's payback time.  Force those who have the most to lose by America running of the rails to have to deal with the antics of Donald Trump.  It's like someone who lives in an all white enclave accepting a lower offer to buy his or her house in order to sell to an African-American family just to piss his or her neighbours off.

I guess desperate times cry out for desperate measures and I think electing Trump would unquestionably be a wake up call for America's ruling elite who thought overwhelming advantage in campaign spending and media coverage would be enough to have their candidate elected.

Yet, things may not turn out as planned.  The unthinkable may come about.  Seeing through the charade of an election designed to place yet another millionaire into the highest office in the land and to do likewise with Congress, more than half its members are also millionaires, ordinary Americans just might serve notice that they are no longer to follow the script laid out for them, thinking that if the top 1% has, in effect, abandoned the population, in having to deal with a Trump as President at long last they will be in the same boat as their fellow citizens.

Misery loves company. 

Life, Liberty, and the Sociopathic Pursuit of Wealth

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

(The United States Declaration of Independence)


Well, it has been decided.  Donald Trump will be the Presidential Candidate for the Republican Party and Hillary Clinton will be the candidate for the Democrats.  I know.  It's so easy to say that "these are the choices?"  Yes, they are and it says miles about what kind of nation the United States of America has morphed into.

The nation was indeed founded on lofty ideals arising from the Enlightenment, extending to the early settlers primarily from Britain, but the rights were not extended to the indigenous peoples and the African slaves.  It would take a bloody civil war during the nineteenth century and the struggles of the civil rights movement of the twentieth to arrive at some semblance of all humans being created equal although many members of the indigenous, feminist, and LGBT communities might disagree.

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Looking closely at the aforementioned unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it seems clear enough that one has the right to be alive and to be free to do as one wishes within the existing legal framework, but it is the pursuit of happiness that raises the most concerns, especially how it is presently pursued in the United States.  To be happy requires, at the very least, that one's basic survival needs: food and water, adequate shelter, clothing, education, and the possibility of earning a living are met and in a manner in which that one doesn't have to worry from one day to the next if they will be.  That being said, it is evident that millions of Americans have reason to belief that their pursuit of happiness has been seriously impeded by social structures that favor one segment of the society, the rich, at the expense of the majority of Americans.

To be sure both candidates represent the interests of wealthy Americans who desire to focus their pursuit of happiness on their pursuit of wealth.  In fact, both candidates are multi-millionaires.  In the case of Donald Trump, he inherited his wealth from his father and has continued in his father's footsteps as a real estate developer.  In the case of Hillary Clinton, she was born into a family of more modest means, but yet somehow managed to team up with her husband, the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, to parlay their public service careers into a multi-million sum of net worth.  In other words, one was born rich, the other got rich.

Essentially, they represent two sides of the same coin, the sociopathic pursuit of wealth.  By that I mean that they embody characteristics often associated with sociopaths: narcissism, lack of empathy, a belief that they are exempt from societal norms and rules, and engaging in intentional deceit to advance their self interest.  Taken together these characteristics bring forth an attitude of indifference with regard to how their behavior might have negative consequences for others.

Of the two candidates, it is much more apparent that Trump manifests sociopathic tendencies.  He is unabashed in his efforts to promote his name and image -- to such an extent that some journalists are saying that he is not a serious candidate and is only using the Presidential campaign as a means to promote his name and the Trump brand.  Given his outlandish statements, for example, telling people he intends to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to keep out the drug dealers and rapists and will get the Mexicans to pay for it, it doesn't seem out of the realm of the possible that he is testing the limits of what he can say and do as a candidate in order to cash in on his exploits at a latter date.  Moreover, his crass comments about minorities clearly demonstrates lack of empathy and his refusal to make public his personal financial records show a blatant disregard for the public's right to know sufficiently the background of the person they are contemplating voting into the most powerful political position on the planet. 

Of course, his economic plans include reducing the taxes of the most wealthy and improving the economic lot of white, lesser educated, males by implementing xenophobic social and economic policies.  Less immigrants supposedly means more jobs for white people, not necessarily good paying jobs with benefits, but jobs nonetheless.

With Clinton, the sociopathic tendencies are not as readily apparent, and she exploits the constant opportunity to redirect attention concerning important questions about her character and behavior towards the easy target, Donald Trump.  Repeatedly, members of the public raise the question of how could the Clintons become so rich as politicians supposedly employed by them to advance the public good.  It is well known that she was paid princely sums to give speeches to associations from the financial sector on Wall Street, but she refuses to make public the transcripts of the speeches.  Perhaps, the so-called speeches were little more than bribes attached to services rendered and to be rendered at a later date.  Likewise, what are the connections between the Clinton Foundation and the US State Department, of which Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State?  It appears that donations to the Foundation opened doors within the Obama administration.  Answers could be forthcoming but unfortunately people who could shed light on what was happening behind closed doors end up dying under mysterious circumstances before they have the opportunity to testify.  Similarly, important and troubling questions about how the integrity of the Democratic Party Primaries leading to Hillary's nomination as the Party's Presidential candidate remain unanswered to date although a number of lawsuits alleging electoral fraud have been launched, the President of Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was forced to resign, and a few people who worked on Clinton's campaign have also met their untimely demise. 

Although Hillary appears to be much more liberal in her social views, her economic policies favor the pursuit of wealth by the rich liberal elite, those educated at Ivy League universities, like Hillary, Bill, and Obama, who parlay their social connections in the financial, legal, technology, and entertainment sectors to do very well for themselves in the neo-liberal order they helped to create.  It should be noted that Hillary is already more than half way to her goal of raising one billion dollars for her presidential campaign.

Looking forward to the Presidential election in November the average American has very little to hope for.  Both candidates represent the interests of the already and the soon-to-be rich.  For those on the outside looking in on the spectacle of the ostentatious display of wealth that the modern-day Gatsby-like personas love to put on, good luck to you.  However, if you believe that your vote could make a difference and you are thinking that maybe it is in the best interest to limit the damage that either one of these sociopaths could inflict upon America, you should consider voting for a progressive candidate in the Senatorial or Congressional elections.

The U.S. Presidential Election: A Drowning Man Will Clutch at a Dragon

Well, it's done.  The Republican and Democratic Parties have nominated their candidates to become President of the United States of America, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.  Really? These are the choices? The sociopath who can do the least harm?

In some ways, they both appeal to the same constituency, the super rich.  Neither of the candidates promise to do anything that would upset the unbridled pursuit of wealth that America is famous for.  Why would they?  They are both multimillionaires.  Both have increased their wealth using suspect practices, Trump in the real estate market and Clinton with her dubious charitable foundation.  Given their histories, neither will make wealth distribution an important feature of their political agendas.

Where they differ is in their outward appeal to wealthy Americans.  Trump is the candidate of the military-industrial complex.  Might makes right and in so doing a lot of profits for military contractors.  Hillary, on the other hand, is the candidate of the financial-media-entertainment-technology complex.  Fortunes are now made distributing infotainment and no one knows this better than the Clintons.

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Where they also differ is in which segment of America's rapidly growing dispossessed they can find electoral support.  Trump's appeal is with the down and out of the white underclass, those who have been pushed out of the comfort of a middle class lifestyle and are now forced to compete for jobs in the low paying service sector with people of color, immigrants and Afro-Americans.  On the contrary, Hillary, as a woman vying to be the first female President, appeals to the people of color as someone who has overcome the obstacles that society has put in her way to attain her version of the American dream.

In reaching out to both sectors of America's underclass the Presidential candidates are asking those who are having difficulty keeping their heads above water to reach out and grab the tail of a dragon because after giving either one four years at the helm of the nation, the lot of the underclass won't be any better, probably worse, while whoever goes on to become President will quickly forget the plight of the majority of the electorate as soon as he or she takes the oath, involve America in yet another senseless military conflict, and make sure that his or her cronies are well taken care of.  In other words, same as it ever was.

What makes this election different, however, is the rather large number of traditional supporters of the two grand political parties that don't want to have anything to do with either candidate.  On the Republican side, there are a great many who see the nomination of Trump as the death of their party, prompting former President, George W. Bush to muse publically whether he would be the last Republican President.  For the Democrats, a very large segment of the progressive wing has come to the realization that the Democratic Party is no longer a viable option to advance their political causes and won't vote for Hillary if it means increasing the possibility that the neo-fascist Trump will become President.

In offering these two candidates to the electorate, both parties have shown very clearly the failings of the two-party political system.  Moving forward to November, the media will focus its attention on what promises to be a campaign filled with personal attacks, a veritable tele-reality affair, which might play in Trump's favor, but in the end, regardless of the outcome, the real losers will be the vast majority of Americans.      

The Decline of the Anglo-American Empire

The revolt of the elites in the West and most notably in the English-speaking nations has been going on now for the last thirty-five years.  Essentially, the members of the moneyed class have decoupled their futures from those with whom they share a geographic and political community. 

In short, the Washington-Westminster consensus entails a neo-liberal agenda of cutting corporate and personal income tax, deregulating financial markets, reducing investments in social programs, moving manufacturing to where labor and environmental laws are lax, encouraging predatory lending to the disadvantaged, and extracting wealth from the real economy to be re-invested in off shore tax havens. 

In doing so, the elites have left the common folk in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) behind to fend for themselves in a beleaguered society that no longer has the sufficient resources and economic opportunities to maintain the quality of life that previous generations enjoyed.

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Before, throughout the post war period, there existed an inclusive social contract that embodied the belief "that we (those of Anglo-Saxon descent and their close cousins) were in this together."  No longer.  Now, there exists a "sink or swim" worldview in which those with the good luck of being born into well-off families are gliding quite well through the turbulence that incessant globalization has brought about, a middle-class struggling to keep their heads above water, while the poor are drowning in hopeless despair.

What has changed is that the callous treatment previously reserved for members of visible minorities has now been expanded to be applied to the vast majority of those who represent the racial bedrock from which the Anglo-American Empire drew its strength -- the English in the UK and white Americans in the US.  Both groups, having grown accustomed to preferential treatment, resent the decline in their living standards and are now pushing back, refusing to follow the leadership of their ruling elites.

Recently, much to the chagrin of Westminster and the City of London, those who felt very strongly they were being left behind (the English outside of London) and wanted to change Great Britain's trajectory voted to take the UK out of the European Union (EU), causing an immediate 10% devaluation of the national currency and a 120 billion dollar decline in the value of the companies listed in the national stock exchange. 

I think the Westminster crowd now realizes that what goes around comes around.  Because of the push back from the underclass, not only has the UK reduced its economic exchange with the largest trading block on the planet, it also now faces a very real threat that Scotland will leave the UK in order to maintain its ties with the EU.  Far from its imperial glory of ruling over the British Empire, Westminster might have its territorial reach reduced to the puny territorial expanse of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland -- a far cry from the sun never setting on the Empire.

The tectonic plates are also shifting is the US as the two-party political system seems to be coming to an end.  Most notably, in the run-up to the Presidential elections, white Americans have abandoned the leadership of the Republican Party to nominate the xenophobic, trash-talking, demagogue Donald Trump.  In doing so, they have repudiated the economic program that has left them behind as compared to the very well off, the upper 1% of the population.  Instead, they have embraced the vilification of those of different skin color, in particular Mexicans and Arab Muslims, who, apparently, are responsible for the hard times that many Americans are now experiencing as a result of the stealing jobs from white Americans by immigrants.

Things are almost as bad on the other side with the Democratic Party.  Coming into the Party's National Convention in July 2016, the favorite, the former Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, still has not secured the Party's nomination as Presidential candidate, in a campaign that has been marred by widespread electoral fraud and voter suppression.  Indeed, the vast majority of the under 40 electorate has turned its back to Hillary and would rather support the candidacy of the declared Democratic Socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Faced with unmanageable debt loads incurred while pursuing a post-secondary education, combined with limited economic opportunity in their immediate future, millions of millennials are now pushing for substantial change to America's political economy, including a living wage of $15 per hour, single-payer health care, free university education, and a substantial reduction of military expenditures.  They may not get their wishes granted in this election cycle; however, over the next twenty years, because of their demographic weight, they will inevitably change the trajectory of the American military-industrial-congressional complex.

How this will play out on the world stage remains to be determined.  Will the US remain as the world's only super power?  I doubt it.  Faced with growing divisions within, the US will be forced to turn its attention and more of its resources to domestic matters.  During this period of internal preoccupation, other world powers, military, political, and cultural will exert greater influence and bring to a close the hegemony of the Anglo-American Empire.

Unless, of course, the US decides to embark on yet another military campaign to rid the world once again of some regime accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction, supplied by the same elites who stand to gain financially by selling to the US government the arms necessary to neutralize the new perceived threat to global security.

The United States of Fear

It is extremely odd to come to the realization that the citizens of the most powerful nation humanity has ever seen, the United States of America, are very much afraid.  Indeed, fear permeates the lives of the vast majority of Americans at many levels.  They fear being attacked by terrorists.  They fear being attacked by crazed gunmen with automatic weapons.  They fear being shot by strangers.  They fear being shot by people they know.  They fear getting sick.  They fear being able to pay the medical bills.  They fear losing their jobs.  They fear growing old.  They fear their families falling apart.  They fear not being able to get a good education.  They fear not being able to pay off their student loans.  They fear immigrants speaking foreign languages.  They fear these immigrants taking their jobs.  They fear homosexuals living close by.  They fear giving up their guns.  They fear having to pay taxes.  They fear falling into poverty.  They fear their country losing its place in the world.  They fear going to hell.

Living in such a climate of fear, no wonder Americans call their country, "the land of the brave."  With all that fear, you have to be brave just to get through the day.  But, it doesn't have to be that way and that's something that most Americans simply just don't get.

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Yes, life is full of uncertainty.  At times, we can be dealt a bad hand.  We can fall sick, lose a job, be in an accident, have a marriage come to an abrupt end, or in other words, "to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

Given life's inherent risks, it makes sense to try to mitigate them -- for everyone.  It's not rocket science.  Progressive countries all over the world have figured it out some time ago: extract a portion of the money that circulates in the economy and use it to pay for health care, education, pensions, child care, periods of unemployment, a guaranteed income for those who cannot work, the public infrastructure (public buildings, roads, bridges, railways. airports) and pay civil servants to run the system effectively and efficiently. 

It's never perfect.  There are always things that can be improved.  However, for most of the people, most of the time, it works pretty good for those who are fortunate to be born in one of the nations that have chosen to go that route.  I consider myself extremely fortunate to live in Canada.

So, what's up in the United States?  How is it possible that with all that wealth. all that military power, they are unable to do something as simple as prohibiting people from owning automatic and semi-automatic weapons?  You know, the ones repeatedly used in the tragic mass shootings that regularly occur there.

Fundamentally, it is the fear factor, the fear of the slippery slope.  Starting with a ban on automatic weapons, other rights will surely be transgressed.  Indeed, all that talk about the necessity to protect and advance the common good might mean that wealthy individuals and corporations might be asked to contribute more to the common good.  Heaven forbid, at least the Heaven and the God that fundamental right wing Christians believe in.

Instead of calling it the American Dream, it should be called the American Nightmare.  Instead of pursuing the American version of the good life, most Americans are simply trying not to succumb to one of the fearful demons that lie in wait, lurking to heap misery on the poor, the sick, and the abandoned.

It's as if life in America has become a giant zero-sum game, with most of the wealth and the well being money can buy going to a very small number of players, while misery engulfs the increasing number of losers ill-equipped to compete in a game in which the rules are rigged against them. 

It doesn't have to be that way, but the rules of the game need to be changed.  Yet, those who control the corporate media would have you believe that any change to the status quo would be dangerous, embarking on a perilous route leading to an uncertain destination.  Better the devil we know.

Looking at how the Presidential election is shaping up, it appears to be nothing more than a campaign based on fear: the fear of the other, the immigrant, the terrorist, the homosexual as mongered by Donald Trump, or the fear of letting him assume power, as mongered by Hillary Clinton.  In the end, the status quo remains.

Looking from afar, I observe that Americans have become so paralyzed with fear they have become unable to extricate themselves collectively from the mess of things they have created.  America's trajectory is not about to change, and I fear that it will continue to drag down the rest of humanity.

There Is Something Rotten in the State of California, New York, Arizona, Nevada . . .

William Shakespeare

Oh my God, what's that smell.  It stinks to high heaven.  Incredibly, the stench from what's now going on during the US primaries is making it's way all the way up to Canada.  Take a whiff.  Something is rotten to the core.  It is the smell of a corrupt society.  If Yogi Berra were still alive, he might say that it's Deja Moo all over again.  We have seen this bullshit before, in Arizona, in New York, in Nevada, and now on a massive scale in California.

You would have to be completely naïve not to believe that the Democratic primaries are being manipulated to produce a fraudulent result.  Blatant electoral fraud is going on at a massive scale.  Voter suppression is rampant.  Citizens are having their names purged from the voters list, are being given the wrong ballots so that they cannot vote in the presidential primary, and there is significant evidence that patches have been installed on many of the computers that tabulate the votes so to flip votes for Bernie Sanders into votes for his rival, Hillary Clinton.

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Moreover, the media is refusing to publish the results of the exit polls in the previous state primaries.  Exit polls serve as a measure of how people actually voted.  The media's refusal to publish the polling data indicates that the data called into the question the validity of the published electoral results.  Conveniently, there were no exit polls for the California, which is extremely odd since it send more delegates than any other state to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.  If that were not enough, the newswire, Associated Press, announced the day before the primaries were to be held that Hillary Clinton had already clinched the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, a clear attempt to lower the participation rate for Sanders' supporters.

Finally, what the fuck is up with President Obama endorsing Clinton before the results of the California primary have been declared official?  I guess he would know better than anyone else that the fix was on.  Most probably, the FBI investigation into the possibility of Hillary having engaged in illegal behavior with regard to her emails while she was Secretary of State has been derailed.  It would look very bad for Obama to endorse a candidate who has been charged with having committed a felony, which calls into question why would he be so quick to endorse her when she has not yet been cleared of the accusations of improper behavior.

The strategy is straight forward.  Bury Bernie as quickly as possible, so the momentum of moving forward to confront the media clown, devil incarnate, Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump will make people forget about the electoral fraud and focus their attention on the media's melodramatic presentation of the US Presidential election.  Clearly, this is an instance of the tail wagging the dog, America's liberal elite aided by its financial and media friends controlling how the electoral process will unfold for the population at large.

However, the shit has yet to hit the fan.  Considering the number of Americans who know realize that they have been duped, building a security fence around the arena in which the Democratic National Convention might not be enough.  Maybe, they will need a moat, water cannons, and tons of tear gas to repel the peasants storming the Bastille with pitchforks in hand. 

Will cooler heads prevail?  I sincerely hope so.  Yet I can't help but feel that what's about to be played out will not be pretty.

Canada Is Cool Once Again

Our Prime Minister Justin.  Check out his tattoo.

Before coming out and saying so, I had to wait a bit.  I had to make sure that the Trudeau-led Liberals were the real thing.  There are times when electoral expectations are not met, and we find out that the new boss is not really much different from the old one.

By now, I think all Canadians realize our new government is much different from the previous one under Stephen Harper.  During Harper's majority government, I often found myself is some uncomfortable situations when travelling in Europe, having to explain what had happened to Canada.  It is difficult to put into words how we had lost our collective mojo.  We had become as cool as a cardigan sweater.

Of course, that's all changed.  Sunny ways have pushed back the dark days of Harper.  It all begins with our newly elected Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.  Is this guy cool or what?  Obama didn't have a choice but to invite Justin to join him for a State Dinner in Washington.  Obama knows cool when he sees it.

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Since then, we have seen Justin holding a couple of pandas in his arms, greeting Syrian refugees at the airport, and inadvertently bumping a female Member of Parliament when trying to rescue a member of the opposition when he had been surrounded by members of another party who were attempting to prevent this member from voting on an important piece of legislation.  Shortly thereafter, Justin, in the epitome of what it means to be Canadian, apologized for his "unruly" behavior, and promptly received a standing ovation.  Only Canadians can understand how his gesture captures who we are.

But I have a confession to make.  During the recent electoral campaign, I sent a photo of Trudeau after he was jumped upon by young woman (also porting a tattoo) during a Gay Pride Parade in Vancouver, and wrote to my Mexican-American friend that Justin was simply way too cool to become our Prime Minister.

Canadians proved my wrong.  (OK, it was our stupid electoral system that gave him a majority government but that's what it is designed to do.  I'll get to this in a bit.)

Now, we have the coolest leader in the G20, the only one who has a visible tattoo.  The Americans are drooling.  Poor devils, they are soon going to have to endure a Presidential campaign featuring a contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, which is like being forced to listen to a radio that has only two stations, one for polka, the other for Japanese speed metal.  These are the choices?

Now, don't get me wrong.  Canada is not cool because Justin is our Prime Minister.  No, Justin is our Prime Minister because Canada is cool.

Now that I am older and having traveled a bit, I realize the Great White North is a cool place to live, and not only during the winter.  We have it right, a balance between freedom and social measures to make the notion of freedom meaningful for everyone: single payer health care, decent public education, affordable post-secondary education, an advanced mixed economy, but, more importantly, a social milieu that respects the fundamental human rights articulated and defended by Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  I live in a place where prejudice in whatever form is not accepted, whether it be based on colour, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief.  Moreover, we have moved as a society to realize that our cultural restrictions of our Judeo-Christian past are no longer applicable in the 21st century.  People can marry their same sex partners, smoke marijuana if they chose to, and, if of sound mind, end their days with the aid of physician.  In other words, we care for each other without imposing our beliefs upon others.  That's very cool.

In closing, I have another confession to make.  I had been thinking about this post for a couple of weeks and I was going to entitle it: "Canada Is Cool, Except When It Comes To Sharing Power".  The reason?  Well, after promising to change Canada's electoral system, it appeared that the Trudeau-led liberals were going to continue to the practice of stacking the important committee looking into electoral reform so to give themselves absolute control of this legislative process even though they had not won a majority of votes during the last election -- a glaring anomaly if one is sincere about democratic reform.  However, the representation on this committee was changed.  It now reflects in a much better way the diversity of political views in Canada.

Again, I was overly pessimistic.  Maybe, I had lost my cool.  Maybe, Canada had attained a level of cool and I hadn't noticed.  Maybe, it took a new leader to show us how cool we had become.

Sunny ways, Justin, sunny ways Canada.  I stand on guard for thee.

Deja Moo: The New York Democratic Primary

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth  (Lucy Parsons)

Well, the Democratic primary in New York has come and gone and Hillary won.  What a surprize!!!  Tens of thousands of people flock to see Bernie Sanders live compared to the couple of hundred who attend Hillary's event.  Yet, Hillary wins going away.

Do my eyes deceive me?  No.  It's just another case of using the rules of voting to gain advantage.

In New York, the primary is closed, meaning that you have to be registered months in advance as a Republican or a Democrat in order to vote in the primary.  All the independents and all the recent converts to Bernie's cause were shut out.  Imagine that.  And to add insult to injury, more than a hundred thousand registered Democrats in Brooklyn, Bernie's home town, had their names mysteriously vanish from the voters' list, a troublesome occurrence to say the least, causing the state's comptroller to demand an audit of the Elections Board, a classic example of too little too late since by the time the investigation wraps up, Hillary will probably be in the White House.

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Different day, same old bullshit of voter suppression.  In Arizona, they reduced the number of voting stations, forcing people to stand in line five hours or more in the dessert heat if they wanted to vote.  In both cases, these voting irregularities swayed the results in favor of Hillary.

So, what is playing out in the Democratic primary is a grass roots movement, primarily made up of young people, challenging the system by mobilizing with great force to demand fundamental changes to the American political economy, and the old guard that uses its control of the voting procedures to engineer a result that is more favourable to their interests.  If I were a betting man, I would place my money on the old guard to win this contest.

Given that this electoral contest has been rigged in advance, I think its just a matter of time that this wave of progressives come to the realization that to get to the place they would like to go, they just can't get there from here.  The way is blocked.  The rich are not going to let the population at large vote away their wealth, and the two party political system is set up to protect the status quo at all costs.

In the end, it all depends on how Bernie is going to react to his defeat.  Will he accept the bitter result or will he say, "Fuck this", I'm going to run as an independent"?

I think it would be a historic move that would bring to an end the two-party political system in the United States.  Surely, the specter of Donald Trump as President will be used to encourage people to choose the lesser of the two evils: the more popular (Hillary) of the least popular presidential candidates of the major parties since records have been kept.

It won't be until the summer before Bernie makes his decision, and in the meantime I guess I'll have to sit tight and watch this pathetic rerun of an electoral script to see if there will be a surprize twist to what appears to be a predetermined ending, bought to you by the good people of Corporate America.

Everybody Knows But Not Everybody Gets It

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows    (Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows)


Last weeks publication of the Panama Papers, a leak of more than two terabytes of documents detailing the creation of off-shore shell companies and their dubious financial transactions only provided us with the details of what everybody knows: the rich don't play by the same rules as you and I when it comes to paying their fair share of taxes.  Tell us something that we don't know.

Nevertheless, heads have begun to roll.  Days later the people took to the streets in Iceland and the Prime Minister was forced to resign.  Those pesky Vikings.

Somehow, I don't see the same thing playing out in Russia even though hundreds of millions of dollars were paid to one of  Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest friends and confidents.  As you can easily imagine, taking to the streets in Moscow is a much different affair.

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Here in North America, we simply shrug our shoulders and continue going about doing our business.  Most of us don't give it a second thought while we dutifully fill out our tax forms that determines how much we owe or the government owes us.  But we should.

For the last forty years, we have been subjected to the neo-liberal rhetoric, telling us that we have been living beyond our collective means, that we have to become more productive (do more for less pay), and that we must be prepared to take more individual responsibility for our lives.  During this same time period, the standard of living for the middle and lower classes has dropped significantly while the top one percent of revenue earners has continued to increase their take of the national income.

You would think it would be a relatively simple task of connecting the dots between lower taxes on the rich and corporations, moving manufacturing to low wage, low regulatory foreign countries, and funneling profits to off shore tax havens so to escape higher domestic taxes in order to see the emerging pattern for the population at large in North America is one of getting screwed.  The proposed Trans Pacific Partnership, for example, a deal that both Canada and the United States agreed to before releasing the details of the accord to the public, is just the latest instance of the super rich using elected governments to advance their personal interests at the expense of those who cannot move their assets and change their income sources at will, the so-called 99% of the population.

Considering that the United States is presently witnessing a presidential campaign in which the stakes of the election include the possibility of electing a candidate, Bernie Sanders, who would make it his business to put an end to the corporate domination of the political sphere in the US, you would think that much more of the electorate would see this election as a once in a lifetime opportunity to reign in the powers that care little for its well being.

Saldly, this is not the case.  What is unfolding in the American main stream media is an unparalleled smoke and mirror show designed to divert the electorate's attention away from the real issues that should be the focus of attention of the political debate.  Most of the media attention is focused on the outrageous performance of Donald Trump, a loud, boorish man of wealth who seems intent on showing Americans how stupid they really are because, left to his own devices, he could become the Republican candidate for the office of the President of the United States.

Do Americans really want to have a man who announces that he is going to build a wall between the USA and Mexico and will get the Mexicans to pay for it as the Commander and Chief of the most powerful military force in the history of humanity?  I don't think so.

Indeed, the narrative that the corporate-owned media is spinning raises the spectre of having a buffoon running the country, thereby paving the way for their preferred option, the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  Much to their chagrin, however, the democratic socialist candidate, Bernie Sanders, has an outside chance to upset Clinton and win the Democratic Party's nomination, in spite of the overwhelming bias of their reporting in favor of Clinton.  Such a result would constitute a serious setback at the corporate sector's insatiable appetite for ever-growing profits.

What is truly amazing is that Trump is able to reach out and gain the support of the disenfranchised members of the white underclass, while Clinton is doing the same in the minority underclass.  Simply put, this large segment of the electorate is focused on identity politics and can't see the forest for the trees when it comes to the real issues that affect their well being.  Economic concerns should be front and center, but unfortunately the race card is being played so that both segments will not embrace the candidate who would most probably do the most for their benefit.

Seeing that so many Americans are incapable of critical thought and are easily swayed by emotional appeals to their base instincts, it seems unlikely that a populist candidate like Bernie Sanders could become President of the United States.  There's just not enough well-educated Americans who can connect the dots in order to change the tide of their nation's recent history.

I may be wrong.  Here's hoping.

Bernie's Plan B: Run As An Independent

Watching the Democratic primaries, it seems unlikely that Bernie will receive the nomination to be the Party's candidate in November's presidential election.  Not that he isn't a worthy candidate and not because he couldn't win the election.  Simply put, his politics do not hold favor with the elite who run the party and its financial supporters. 

Essentially, mainstream democrats are quite comfortable with the status quo.  It has served them well, allowing them to accumulate wealth, educate their children, and have access to quality health care when it is needed.  That these societal benefits are not extended to everyone is a cause for concern, but not a sufficient cause to begin making qualitative changes to the American political economy, namely raising taxes on the wealthy, reducing military expenditures, and enacting effective regulation of the environment and financial markets.

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For heaven's sake, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Yet, that's exactly what Bernie intends to do if elected.  He intends to create a much more egalitarian American society, where all Americans, regardless of their race, sex, age, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation have a fair chance of attaining the good life.  Presently, the good life in America is more or less reserved for the members of an exclusive club, largely determined by birth, but certainly by income, which is why the wealthy liberal elites of the Democratic Party don't want him to become President.  Bernie would tear down the systemic barriers that prevent the vast majority of Americans from joining the ranks of those who enjoy the so-called American Dream, and in the process raise taxes at the expense of the top 10% of revenue earners in the US.  It's one thing to administer social programs for the disadvantaged; it's quite another to reduce the wealth gap between the classes.  Hillary's supporters will have none of the latter.

Which raises the question why is Bernie seeking the nomination of a political party that, for the most part, does not support his political views?  His support is largely with independents and with the under 30 age group who have yet to identify with either of the mainstream political parties.  Bernie is a progressive, and the Democrats haven't supported a progressive since Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.  In fact, the Democrats have put into place a primary process which includes super delegates who are chosen by the party to vote in order to prevent a grass roots candidate like from Bernie from winning the nomination.  So much for democracy.

So, don't be surprized that at the end of the day of the Democratic National Convention, Bernie falls just short of winning the nomination.  What comes next could be historic!

Bernie should run as an independent candidate.  He has all the momentum.  Thousands attend his rallies.  He has the capacity to raise the millions necessary to run the electoral campaign, and he occupies the moral high ground.  His policies speak to the masses.  He represents their interests. 

Moreover, the mainstream Republicans are in disarray.  They will not support the demagogue, Donald Trump.  Most likely, they will field their own candidate, which will throw the presidential election wide open.  A multi-candidate election is an election that Bernie could win because he has sufficient strength to garner the necessary votes in many of the key states to obtain their electoral college votes, which are the votes the actually elect the President of the United States.

Even if he doesn't win the election, he would re-animate the progressive movement in the United States and give the American people the political vehicle they need to represent their interests in a political system in which their plight is largely ignored.

Voting for Hillary is voting for the lesser of two evils, but why is this the choice?  The two party political system has been used for centuries in Anglo-American countries that use it to divide and rule the population in the interest of the monied classes.  If ever there were a moment in which the majority of Americans need to break out of this political system, the moment is now.

So, here's hoping that Bernie becomes the next President of the United States, preferably as an independent progressive. 

America's Quiet Revolution

By now you probably noticed that things are not quite right in the land of Uncle Sam.  A lot of people are angry and "they ain't gonna take it any more".  So much so that the financial-media-congressional complex is losing control of the country.  In short, the dispossessed underclass from across the political spectrum are refusing to follow their marching orders handed down by the ruling elite of both the Democrats and the Republicans.  Imagine the Republicans choosing Donald Trump as their candidate for the presidency and the Democrats choosing Bernie Sanders.  The former is a demagogue while the latter is a self-declared democratic socialist.  What's up with that?

I think that the majority of Americans have finally woken up to the fact that they have been exploited mercilessly for the last forty years.  They now know that the economy is rigged for the benefit of the super rich, the .01% of the population.  For the great many, the economic recovery from the Great Recession has brought little if any relief, while the top of the top have received 80% of the newly created wealth.  Now the shit has hit the fan, and the underclass is about to take matters into their own hands.

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Epilogue: The Tao of Politics

It's not as if the groundswell of discontent has fallen into  and file and manifested its support around a single cause or a single leader.  The USA is just far too diverse for that to happen.  Instead, there are two opposing forces within the underclass that are pushing forward their champions to advance their particular interests.  On the one hand, we have the Trump supporters, who are, for the most part, less educated and less likely to embrace the ethnic, cultural, and social diversity that now characterizes America.  On the other hand, we find the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who are better educated and more likely to be comfortable with the relatively new cultural and social mosaic that they find in America's urban landscapes.

What they both have in common is that they been shut out of the American dream.  In fact, the wealthy elite have turned their backs on the common folk, what Christopher Lasch wrote about in the 1990s in his prophetic book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.  By offshoring production in low wage countries with lax labour and environmental laws, the wealthy elites impoverished the lives of millions of Americans who can no longer rely on the possibility of providing for themselves and their families from wages earned in the manufacturing sector.  At the same time, the elites successfully lobbied for lower taxes which reduced the tax base supporting post-secondary education.  This in turn drove up the cost of a university education, forcing millions of students to take on crushing debt loads of which many will never be able to pay back.

For both camps, the future is bleak since the previous social scripts of either working hard on the job or in the classroom have not panned out.  Those without a higher education are trapped toiling away in low paying, dead end jobs.  Those with are bouncing back and forth from one contract to another in the gig economy.  Neither group has much hope to improve their lot if the status quo remains in place.  Consequently, both the supporters of Trump and Sanders have moved to overthrow the power structures within the established political system.  Simply put, the Tea Party is trying to take over the Republican Party, while the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do the same within the Democratic Party.

As could be imagined the members of the establishment are aghast.  Their worst nightmares could possibly come to pass: either a loose canon like Trump becoming the commander and chief of the most powerful military force in the history of humanity, or a democratic socialist like Sanders raising taxes on the wealthy and reining in the activities of the financial sector.  These are the choices?

From the perspective of the elites, it is clear that Hillary Clinton is the best bet to perpetuate the status quo.  However, despite the US Supreme Court ruling allowing for massive spending during the electoral campaign from the corporate sector, this financial might is offset by Trump's billions of dollars of personal wealth and Sanders amazing capacity to raise millions of dollars rapidly from the public at large.  This time around corporate cash cannot guarantee the result of the presidential election.

How this is all going to turn out is anybody's guess.  One thing is for sure, however, the USA is presently morphing into something new.  Traditional constituencies are breaking apart and a new order is on the horizon.

The Time Has Come For America's Next Great Generation To Make Its Mark

After yesterday's primary result in New Hampshire, it now looks like Bernie Sanders is the real deal, at least with the Millennials, the under 40 crowd.  As Bernie says with utter conviction, "no more establishment politics, no more establishment economics.  The time has come for a political revolution.  Politics should serve all Americans, not just the financial elite."  You tell them Bernie!

One thing is constant in this life and it is change.  Intergenerational change is upon us and there is nothing that the older generation can do to prevent it because the world has changed.  Technology has made it so that we can communicate easily amongst ourselves.  We no longer need the traditional media to tell us what to think, what is acceptable, and what choices we should make.

In the traditional media, thought control goes on unabated.  Everyday we are bombarded with messages designed to protect the privilege of those who maintain the status quo.  Fortunately, it has become readily apparent to those who comprise a critical mass in the younger generation that America has become incredibly self-serving playground for its elites and its boomers incredibly complacent in allowing this to happen.

Saddled with crushing debt from pursuing a post-secondary education, often just scraping by on a pathetic minimum wage, fortunate not to fall ill so to require medical attention, the Millennials know all to well that their future has been sacrificed in effort to make the rich even richer.  It must be very difficult for them to hear and put up with the bullshit that passes for political discourse in mainstream America.

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That's where Bernie comes in.  He's been speaking up for the average American for forty years.  He wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth like Hillary.  He doesn't have a Super Pac funding his campaign.  Goldman Sachs hasn't paid him $675,000 to give a crappy speech, rife with clichés and worn out ideas.  He doesn't listen to Kenny G.

For the people with money, Bernie comes across as a radical because he wants to rock the boat, spread some of that cash around in the richest nation on the planet.  In Bloomberg News, he was branded as a public menace.  How that got into my Facebook Newsfeed I'll never know.  Most of my Facebook friends are progressives, which brings me to the reason why this presidential election will go down in history like no other.

In short, the opinions expressed in the traditional media, on American broadcast television, like on Meet the Press and Face the Nation, or on Fox News won't make a difference in this election because these opinions don't reach America's younger voters.  Social media has definitely taken over and money can't control or even influence the millions of online conversations Americans are having each and every day. 

Bernie is speaking to the masses.  His YouTube videos are shared daily not only by his ardent supporters, but are reaching out into the extended social networks of the Millennials and their older family members who by now are all online.  Imagine grandma or grandpa finding one of Bernie's videos on their Facebook Newsfeed, posted by their favorite granddaughter or grandson.  Such a post is not easily ignored.  It's personal.  The channel doesn't get changed.

So, in closing, I think it's fitting that I leave you with the first Bernie Sanders video I shared on Facebook.  I hope to share many more.

https://www.facebook.com/brandon.weber.upw/videos/969400723122431/