The League of Women Voters used to be in charge of the national presidential debates. Thanks to the Jill Stein campaign, people are talking about that fact again. Its a little detail that the major political parties and the mainstream press has tried to sweep under the rug. Now, we are expected to watch these debates as though they are produced by neutral forces and actually serve as a true platform for debate.
Over the span of time in which the debate was conducted, the League of Women Voters had been pressured in many ways to behave in a less neutral manner. In the 1988 Presidential Campaign, the Bush and Dukakis teams actually sat down together and conspired to remove control from the League. They approached the League with a set of conditions they had secretly agreed upon, and told them that in order to stay part of the debates they would have to agree to all terms.
League president Nancy M. Neuman, made the decision to protest this coup-de-tat, and made the following statement:
"The League of Women Voters is withdrawing its sponsorship of the
presidential debate scheduled for mid-October because the demands of
the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American
voter," League President Nancy M. Neuman said today.
"It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to
add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of
substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions," Neuman
said. "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the
hoodwinking of the American public."
This was no spur-of-the-moment reaction either. The League was genuinely outraged by this and attempted to raise attention about it through a series of press conferences. In those pre-Internet days, the story died quickly and quietly as the mainstream press ignored it. In a press release, the League of Women voters again called it a fraud.
"Obviously, we have been presented with campaign demands before. We have
agreed to some, and we have challenged and negotiated others. But
never in the long history of the League of Women Voters have two
candidates' organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding
and self-serving demands."
Now those fears have become truth, as the "Commission on Presidential Debates" is a private collaboration of both political parties and it really shows. Populated by party elites; the "Commission" works to keep the questions easy and to keep third party candidates out. They are so intent on this that they locked Jill Stein up in a black site in 2012 for attempting to attend the debates, and despite her credentials to be there for an interview. The "commission" is not a government body, but they still have the power to use the police to remove their political opposition, and that should worry any American.
It is far past time that we demand the League of Women Voters be reinstated as the official organizing body of the presidential debates.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Saturday, October 15, 2016
The Trojan Horse that is "Free Trade"
 | |
| Source: Global Justice Now |
"Free Trade", the Trojan horse used to sneak corporate rule through our gates. Both parties have worked very hard on these deals. If you think the TPP is going to screw us over, you're right. The TPP is just one of three agreements though. The others are the TTIP and the TISA. These deals, collectively, include almost every other nation on Earth, except for Russia, China, and their closest allies.
A vote for Clinton or Trump is a vote for austerity. Different veneers, but similar outcomes. With a friendly puppet in the White House, the oligarchy will rule this nation through Investor State Dispute Settlement(ISDS) systems and the notion that we're supposed to compensate corporations for any of our laws that they think might be hurting their profit margins. This is a massive corporate subsidy system and the ISDS will crush our legal sovereignty by making it too expensive to have environmental, labor, and anti-monopoly laws.
When will people wake up and see that the DNC is not on their side? When will they see that both parties are riddled with people who have sold every shred of integrity to the corporate establishment? We're running out of time to escape this trap. #DemExit
The following article is an excellent read on the matter. I encourage everyone to read all they can about it though.
Stay Chill For Jill
Please remember to be respectful of others when promoting Jill Stein, Ajamu Baraka, and the Green Party. You will meet a lot of efforts to demean you, to belittle your positions, to mock your principled stand, and even get personal with you about it. Never back down, but stick to the issues. Don't use loaded words like "idiot" or "sheep", don't assume people are fools because they haven't reached the same conclusions you have. Don't assume they've ever been shown the truth or knew it when they saw it.Help them understand the facts, refuse to accept their false narratives, but always keep in mind we are trying to create a more inclusive and empathetic society here. You can't ever achieve a goal like that through force, coercion, or duplicity.
So in conclusion, be polite, and #StayChillForJill
#ItsInOurHands and we can do amazing things if we are engaged and informed. Use those hands to help lift people out of ideological pits, not to push them deeper in.
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| Jill Stein at Occupy Wall Street |
People are DESPERATE right now for alternatives. They just need to see how realistic this actually is, and how incredible a blow it would be to establishment politics. All those people who want Trump because he seems like an outsider need to realize that the Clinton Campaign "elevated" him and he isn't an outsider at all. #JillStein is an outsider to the political machine, but one with experience wrestling the juggernaut.
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| Jill Stein protesting the Dakota Access Pipe Line(DAPL) |
She has more political experience than Susan B. Anthony did, and it would be hard for anyone to have said she would have been unqualified for the job. Jill and Ajamu are activists, and right now we need an activist so badly. If a vote for Jill Stein is a "protest vote", let's make 2016 a protest the likes of which the establishment has never seen. Spread the word, teach people about the #GreenNewDeal. This is our nation and #ItsInOurHands
Friday, October 14, 2016
Jill Stein: A Brave Choice
In May of 1930, something incredible happened that changed the world. The people who changed it neither raised a hand in violence or even to protect themselves from violence. They were people of many races and religions, with the simple goal of restoring their sovereign rights. They shook up the ideological foundation of one of the greatest empires in world history. It was in India, under the leadership of Ghandi and others, that a large protest was organized to object to the nature of British rule there.
Had you done polling on British voters a day before the news broke, the idea of a unilateral withdrawal from India would have been unpopular. The British people, by and large were accepting of the official narrative that India was in need of British guidance. The Indian people were not willing to accept that though, but also didn't want violent conflict with the British either.
On the morning of the protest, Ghandi had just been arrested & other leaders were forced to organize without him. Without their beloved leader, the British hoped they would quit and fall in line. They did fall into a line, but not the way the British hoped.
The core issue was access to India's salt supplies. The British used the tactic of controlling salt supplies in several subject lands to exert political power over the native people. Indian citizens were widely critical of the British strategy, and frequently spoke out against it. It came to a head when they began the Salt March in May of 1930, but the true tipping point was the march on the Dharasana Salt Works.
The Dharasana Salt Works was the most important source of salt in India, and the protesters were determined to reclaim it from the British. They also were committed to non-violence. So the plan was to walk toward the lone bridge into the Salt Works and not resist at all if the British guards beat them. Lead by the poet, Sarojini Naidu, almost 3000 people marched in a line 6 men wide, and the British guards beat them severely. As they began to walk forward Naidu said "Last night they took Ghandi from us. They expect us to lose heart, or fight back. We will do neither"
The protesters didn't raise a hand in defense, as was agreed, and the men would rejoin the line if they were able after the first beating. The savage treatment was so extreme and unwarranted that it shocked the British public. It took an American reporter named Webb Miller to break the story on it, and he had to threaten British telegraph operators to get them to send it after they censored his first telegraph report.
The scene is immortalized in the film Ghandi. A clip of this powerful scene will help you understand what happened there:
In our present times, we're again facing what seems like an impossible challenge. There is a political machine that is ghastly in its scale and it is entrenched. We don't know if we can storm the gates. We doubt that trying violence would accomplish anything, and we don't want violence anyway. We want radical change, but we don't want our society to break down in the process. All we can be sure of at this point is that we can keep throwing our ideals at this ghastly wreck, and maybe eventually we will get through.
I think of this scene every time people tell me that Jill Stein won't be president. It isn't about winning. It isn't about fighting. Its about drawing lines and saying we stand for something greater than ourselves. If the people of India or England had been polled right before that incident, very few would have believed it possible that British rule in India would be ended because the British committed an atrocity. They may break us, they may beat us, but the movement will continue, and we will stand for what is right rather than what is convenient. If my vote is a protest vote, then I will throw it in the faces of all those who would suppress my voice. This is our country, and we deserve a government that respects that.
#DemExit #JillStein2016 #TwoPartyFraud #NeverTrump #NeverClinton #GreenParty
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
The stunning brilliance of Hillary Clinton
It is rare in the course of political history that you get such a perfect storm of political chicanery as has been generated by the race for the presidential nomination in 2016. It is an age where grass roots activism is becoming so much easier to organize and the powers that be are at least unable to hide the truth.
No reasonable person would suggest Hillary Clinton is not good at what she does. What she actually does seems to be a lot less clear to many people than it should be. Its truly brilliant, and perhaps even has taken some inspiration from fiction.
In the "Old Republic" of the "Star Wars" universe, the galactic empire is attacked by a Sith Lord named Count Dooku. Dooku commanded a robot army that was threatening the safety of the Empire. The people turned to the head of the imperial senate, Chancellor Palpatine for solutions. He came up with a horrific plan to use human clones as warriors. The idea was ghastly, but they voted for it out of fear. Meanwhile, the Jedi, who had once been this impartial force in the empire(like our media used to be) stood by and watched it all decay with no real plan to stop it. Palpatine turned out to be Dooku's real boss, and together they committed a coup-de-tat on the empire. Maybe its a far far away comparison, but the very real doubt has surfaced about this with the leaking of the Podesta emails.
In the leaked emails, it shows the Clinton Campaign actively conspiring to promote extremist Republican candidates, in hopes of making them less electable. The media was instructed to take them seriously. All that free air time, all that hate speech that Trump has promoted, all of that was brought to you via a platform built by the Clinton Campaign.
Another unfortunate parallel to this is the way intelligence services use extremists like radical Islamist jihadis to fulfill objectives. Don't like the government of a certain country, but can't legally depose their government? Arm the craziest people in the country, provide them with other backing, and hope they're easy enough to betray later on. In a very real sense, Trump is an ideological ISIS, dropped into the RNC to destabilize the regime.
It is very impressive! She gets to play Sith Lord and watch her enemies tear themselves apart from within. Even within the DNC she created dissent with all the fraud perpetrated in the primaries. This has created so much division within the Left that many people stop talking to each other over if they should support Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein. It has become especially taboo among Clinton supporters to even question her, and far too often the myth of the "spoiler" vote is thrown into play.
We now also have evidence that Clinton's state department was directly arming ISIS. We've had American military and intelligence officers come out and say similar things to what is in the emails, but now we have more proof. We know for sure that Obama was selling offices within Clinton's state department to large money donors; so it is likely "defense" contractors have been directly manipulating public policy.
Like magic, whenever scandals arise about Hillary Clinton, the focus is so often on non-issues. Her state department distributed an awful lot of weapons(over 100 billion worth). That's just the weapons we know about too. Many of those same weapons are now in the hands of our enemies. Some of them are in the hands of some people who should be our enemies but whom we call allies.
I can't help but be impressed with the cunning strategies she uses, or the way they've positioned the public to be too busy fighting over nonsense to really address these issues.
No reasonable person would suggest Hillary Clinton is not good at what she does. What she actually does seems to be a lot less clear to many people than it should be. Its truly brilliant, and perhaps even has taken some inspiration from fiction.
In the "Old Republic" of the "Star Wars" universe, the galactic empire is attacked by a Sith Lord named Count Dooku. Dooku commanded a robot army that was threatening the safety of the Empire. The people turned to the head of the imperial senate, Chancellor Palpatine for solutions. He came up with a horrific plan to use human clones as warriors. The idea was ghastly, but they voted for it out of fear. Meanwhile, the Jedi, who had once been this impartial force in the empire(like our media used to be) stood by and watched it all decay with no real plan to stop it. Palpatine turned out to be Dooku's real boss, and together they committed a coup-de-tat on the empire. Maybe its a far far away comparison, but the very real doubt has surfaced about this with the leaking of the Podesta emails.
In the leaked emails, it shows the Clinton Campaign actively conspiring to promote extremist Republican candidates, in hopes of making them less electable. The media was instructed to take them seriously. All that free air time, all that hate speech that Trump has promoted, all of that was brought to you via a platform built by the Clinton Campaign.
Another unfortunate parallel to this is the way intelligence services use extremists like radical Islamist jihadis to fulfill objectives. Don't like the government of a certain country, but can't legally depose their government? Arm the craziest people in the country, provide them with other backing, and hope they're easy enough to betray later on. In a very real sense, Trump is an ideological ISIS, dropped into the RNC to destabilize the regime.
It is very impressive! She gets to play Sith Lord and watch her enemies tear themselves apart from within. Even within the DNC she created dissent with all the fraud perpetrated in the primaries. This has created so much division within the Left that many people stop talking to each other over if they should support Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein. It has become especially taboo among Clinton supporters to even question her, and far too often the myth of the "spoiler" vote is thrown into play.
We now also have evidence that Clinton's state department was directly arming ISIS. We've had American military and intelligence officers come out and say similar things to what is in the emails, but now we have more proof. We know for sure that Obama was selling offices within Clinton's state department to large money donors; so it is likely "defense" contractors have been directly manipulating public policy.
Like magic, whenever scandals arise about Hillary Clinton, the focus is so often on non-issues. Her state department distributed an awful lot of weapons(over 100 billion worth). That's just the weapons we know about too. Many of those same weapons are now in the hands of our enemies. Some of them are in the hands of some people who should be our enemies but whom we call allies.
I can't help but be impressed with the cunning strategies she uses, or the way they've positioned the public to be too busy fighting over nonsense to really address these issues.
Friday, October 7, 2016
A history of waste, fraud, and war that is undermining our national security.
Anyone
who truly wants to understand the mind-blowing insanity of the military
industrial complex just in terms of financial fraud and the undermining
of our defense capabilities should study the issue of the Bradley
Fighting Vehicle.
It has been estimated that the BFV cost upward of 21 billion dollars(almost twice that in today's dollars), over 16 years of development. While the vehicle went on to become an effective infantry carrier, the unbelievable costs involved and the initially inferior product undermined the safety of both our soldiers and our budget. Other nations have been developing comparable weapons, such as the modernized BMPs from Russia. Even armored personnel carriers from designers that were Italian, Ukrainian, Israeli, South African, etc. have produced good vehicles for tiny fractions of this cost and in a tiny fraction of the time involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/03/books/corrupt-from-top-to-bottom.html?pagewanted=1
Compare this to the Italian Centauro line, developed for well under a billion US dollars, and is actually much safer than our Strkyker fighting vehicle. The Stryker has had controversial safety record that is not easy to ignore. Nor was it a cheap system to develop, coming in at an estimated 15 billion dollars.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1067399/posts
We are even becoming more vulnerable because of the military industrial complex. It can't stop spending, it doesn't care what the results are, it doesn't care how many foreigners die, and it resists attempts for people within the system to see how much horror it is inflicting all around the globe through private military contractors and other mercenaries, or even current service members. Not all of these combatants really want to be in the fight, but they either do what they are told or go where the money tells them to go. Its death and destruction, and all these radical elements are out there growing in response to it. Putin has even said this so clearly when he talks about how the United States continues to create extremism when it is convenient for them, caring much more about how it affects US interests than how many people were dying for them. Well guess what, the rest of the world cares, because for the most part they are the ones doing the dying.
Don't even get me started on Vietnam. Ho Chi Min was at the Treaty of Versailles, beggin the West to allow Vietnam to determine their own fate, but he was ignored. The West traded Vietnam around like it was their property and then when they fought back against that the only ones they were able to turn to were the Russians. We could have been an ideological influence on Vietnam, being their friend and mentor as they modernized and joined the international community. Instead they sat by as the British and then the French treated them like subjects. The Soviet Union truly was a nasty beast that was rife with problems, but we drove Vietnam toward them and then we bloodied the hell out of them for it.
Ok, here's a good way to understand Vietnam... Imagine you are at a card game in an old timey saloon, and one of the players you fear the most has a buddy who is weak. You know you need an excuse to go after the big guy if you don't want everyone to turn on you, so you treat his buddy like dirt, and keep messing with his cards and chips when he isn't looking. Finally, you just start beating the crap out of him until finally a gunfight breaks out and you kill a huge percentage of everyone in the saloon. Then the little guy gets more backbone than you expect, and his big buddy jumps in and pretty soon you have to tuck tail and run out of the saloon. Then, after all that, you pay off or intimidate all the witnesses and lie to anyone else who comes along so you can paint yourself as the good guy, even though there really is no good guy anymore.
The worst part is that this sort of thing became profitable along the way. Over two million human beings died in the Vietnam War, and millions more perished through the region as a result of the instability it caused. It took lots of bullets and bombs to do that though.
Thought I was getting sidetracked?
gao-u-s-has-fired-250000-rounds-for-every-insurgent-killed
Consider that fact. We spend money on 250,000 bullets for every single insurgent we kill. That's just bullets.
It has been estimated that the BFV cost upward of 21 billion dollars(almost twice that in today's dollars), over 16 years of development. While the vehicle went on to become an effective infantry carrier, the unbelievable costs involved and the initially inferior product undermined the safety of both our soldiers and our budget. Other nations have been developing comparable weapons, such as the modernized BMPs from Russia. Even armored personnel carriers from designers that were Italian, Ukrainian, Israeli, South African, etc. have produced good vehicles for tiny fractions of this cost and in a tiny fraction of the time involved.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/03/books/corrupt-from-top-to-bottom.html?pagewanted=1
Compare this to the Italian Centauro line, developed for well under a billion US dollars, and is actually much safer than our Strkyker fighting vehicle. The Stryker has had controversial safety record that is not easy to ignore. Nor was it a cheap system to develop, coming in at an estimated 15 billion dollars.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1067399/posts
We are even becoming more vulnerable because of the military industrial complex. It can't stop spending, it doesn't care what the results are, it doesn't care how many foreigners die, and it resists attempts for people within the system to see how much horror it is inflicting all around the globe through private military contractors and other mercenaries, or even current service members. Not all of these combatants really want to be in the fight, but they either do what they are told or go where the money tells them to go. Its death and destruction, and all these radical elements are out there growing in response to it. Putin has even said this so clearly when he talks about how the United States continues to create extremism when it is convenient for them, caring much more about how it affects US interests than how many people were dying for them. Well guess what, the rest of the world cares, because for the most part they are the ones doing the dying.
Don't even get me started on Vietnam. Ho Chi Min was at the Treaty of Versailles, beggin the West to allow Vietnam to determine their own fate, but he was ignored. The West traded Vietnam around like it was their property and then when they fought back against that the only ones they were able to turn to were the Russians. We could have been an ideological influence on Vietnam, being their friend and mentor as they modernized and joined the international community. Instead they sat by as the British and then the French treated them like subjects. The Soviet Union truly was a nasty beast that was rife with problems, but we drove Vietnam toward them and then we bloodied the hell out of them for it.
Ok, here's a good way to understand Vietnam... Imagine you are at a card game in an old timey saloon, and one of the players you fear the most has a buddy who is weak. You know you need an excuse to go after the big guy if you don't want everyone to turn on you, so you treat his buddy like dirt, and keep messing with his cards and chips when he isn't looking. Finally, you just start beating the crap out of him until finally a gunfight breaks out and you kill a huge percentage of everyone in the saloon. Then the little guy gets more backbone than you expect, and his big buddy jumps in and pretty soon you have to tuck tail and run out of the saloon. Then, after all that, you pay off or intimidate all the witnesses and lie to anyone else who comes along so you can paint yourself as the good guy, even though there really is no good guy anymore.
The worst part is that this sort of thing became profitable along the way. Over two million human beings died in the Vietnam War, and millions more perished through the region as a result of the instability it caused. It took lots of bullets and bombs to do that though.
Thought I was getting sidetracked?
gao-u-s-has-fired-250000-rounds-for-every-insurgent-killed
Consider that fact. We spend money on 250,000 bullets for every single insurgent we kill. That's just bullets.
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