Home > Oligarchs Won’t Let You Vote Their Wars Away

Oligarchs Won’t Let You Vote Their Wars Away

by Daniel Patrick Welch - Open-Publishing - Wednesday 11 May 2016

Asked to provide commentary on Trump something or other, I kind of let loose in a somewhat comprehensive denunciation of the process writ large. Where are those good-sized Near Earth Objects when we need them most? Audio at link, transcript below.

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/09/464810/us-2016-presidential-election-trump-clinton-bush-graham

"The danger, first of all, in providing any analysis or commentary on individual candidates or individual races is that it lends legitimacy to a process that is otherwise a complete fraud. And I think that has to be spelled out first. It can’t be said loudly or often enough that there is *not* a democracy in the United States. This isn’t just some left wing commie point of view from little old Daniel Patrick Welch. No, this comes from a former president, Jimmy Carter, who came out and said that there is no functioning democracy in the United States—we’re living in an oligarchy. It comes from the Princeton study, which determined empirically that regular people have absolutely no effect on policy and that it is effectively an oligarchy.

"You see it in everything that is going on around the world, in these horrible crimes that are being committed in the name of the American people. But the American people don’t have any real choice when it comes to voting, and the voting system is broken. Carter himself also said, when someone suggested that the US elections be monitored—he kind of sheepishly said, well, we couldn’t do it from my agency because it doesn’t rise to the minimum standards for a monitor-able election. It doesn’t have a central, functioning agency that oversees elections—there are a whole range of things that just don’t take place in the United States.

"It just is not a democracy. You have this kind of circus where you have certain—what I call oligarchic paternalism—you have certain vetted candidates chosen by the oligarchs who are then carefully selected to run in this bogus horse race or popularity contest against each other so that it looks like a real democracy. And this year it was supposed to be this kind of fake setup between a Bush and a Clinton—to continue this dynasty that has been going on for what will have been 30 years now if Clinton serves a full two terms.

"A"nd the Trump phenomenon upset this apple cart, but the Trump phenomenon also plays into this whole thing, because by having Trump as a sort of side show—really a cartoon of a candidate—it makes it more likely that Hillary Clinton, the real establishment candidate, will be ’chosen’ in this sham of a democracy. Because you have this bogeyman of Trump, and how awful and evil Trump is, so the only alternative—lo and behold, you put your thumb on the scale, ruin the election for an alternative progressive candidate, don’t let them into the race in any event, don’t have more than the two identical parties, don’t allow any third parties, don’t allow any real debate... and so then you have this ugly trojan horse, this racist, fascist candidate. So then the vote is just *against* him. What does Clinton have going for her? She’s not Trump.

""And of course what Trump has going for him is that he’s not Clinton—which could backfire on the elites. Because the only person who could potentially lose to Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton. She is both widely despised and seen as a shill for corporate interests. But also she has this pedigree—she keeps touting this pedigree. But that pedigree is this awful, awful history of bombing and murdering all over the world.

"There’s a meme that goes around social media that says ’why vote for someone who promises to kill innocent families,’ which implies Trump, and then it goes on, ’when you can vote for someone who has a proven record of killing innocent families!’ Clinton and her husband before her pioneered the idea of Responsibility to Protect to allow them to rain bombs on Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

"And then going on, to voting for the Iraq war, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, the coup in Honduras, the attempted coups in Venezuela, the ongoing attempted coup against Dilm Roussef in Brazil—this is a world wide phenomenon, and this woman is in the forefront of this. She never met a war she didn’t like. She is the perfect establishment candidate. Trump is a red herring, but he has surrounding him the same neocon advisers that she has. It really is true that there is not a dime’s worth of difference, as the saying goes.

"So Americans are pretending like they have a choice, they’re kind of like rats in a cage looking for a way out, when unfortunately the world has to look out. Because the person poised to take the chair, if the establishment has its way, is one of the greatest warmongers in the history of the office. She has a proven record of mass murder, and she has vowed to continue it: against Iran, against Russia, against China. She has promised ’a more muscular foreign policy.’ And if that doesn’t scare the rest of the world and the American people, I don’t know what else could."

(c) 2016 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to danielpwelch.com. Political analyst, writer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. Welch has also appeared in numerous television and radio interviews, and can be available for comment and analysis as his day job permits. Please contact to schedule.

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