Moving on from the expectation that we have a democracy

They're not going to let Bernie anywhere near the White House, and the sooner we stop fretting about it, the sooner we can begin to refocus on the kinds of education and organizing that need to be done. These are not about Sanders, and they're not about any candidate. They're about the structure of the system that has been captured by Capitalist thugs.

From 1961 to 1963, there was an epic struggle behind the scenes in Washington, whether the elected government or the Deep State was the final authority. In 1961, with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and Kennedy's dismissal of CIA Director Allen Dulles, it looked as though the elected government had won. 2-1/2 years later in Dallas, there was a different outcome, and the victors have been solidifying their control ever since.

Yes, the Deep State was able to get rid of JFK because he wouldn't tolerate the regime change wars that had become the main occupation of our CIA and DoD, because he wanted to curb the Fed's power to profit from control over our sovereign currency, and because his brother was cracking down on the Mafia. Three powerful enemies combined to murder him.

But the assassination was extremely costly and very risky. It very nearly failed. Two thousand people were murdered in the wake of JFK just to keep the lid on, and 50 years later, the vast majority of Americans still don't buy the flimsy story about Oswald and Ruby.

Why was JFK able to ascend to the presidency, from which they were compelled to assassinate him? (1) In 1963, the Democratic party was a three-ring circus, a decentralized free-for-all, out of control. (2) The voting system was by hand-counted paper ballot in almost a million different locations around the country. (3) And the press, too, was decentralized, with competing newspapers serving every major metropolis, and networks of TV and radio independent of one another and of the print media.

In the intervening years, the Deep State has worked it out so they don't have to kill presidents any more.

(1) The Republican party has been pushed from the realm of Eisenhower and Rockefeller and Ed Brooke into never-neverland. The Democratic party has been re-positioned where the Republican party used to be. Yes, Democratic is the new Republican. "Mainstream" Democrats today are positioned to the right of where Nixon was in 1970. And the (former majority) FDR Democrats have been deprived of a home.

(2) The voting system has been centralized with electronic machines, so the count can be manipulated by a few insiders with rudimentary programming skills, like Mike Connell.

(3) The press has been consolidated and taken over from the outside by corporate advertisers, from the inside by CIA plants in all the news organs that we used to think of as "liberal". (Douglas Valentine is another good source.)

(Image by Pat Bagley)   Details   DMCA

The only thing they don't control is the Internet. They're well aware of this, and doing everything they can to promote Internet censorship, using "fake news" as a pretext. They're working both through FCC regulation and also through the private monopolies of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.

So, where does this leave us? It leaves us fighting for our lives to save net neutrality and to cast off censorship. It leaves us face-to-face organizing and educating, getting people out into the streets to feel our strength in numbers and make an impression that doesn't depend on those who control spigots of the newsfeed.

We are not without resource. We are not without hope. But the first step is to shed our faith that anything like "democracy" is operational in America.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote these words 200 years ago. We've been slumbering a long while.