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I came to political consciousness as a child during Watergate and learned early to recognize the “style” of the Nixon Administration and what dirty tricks in politics looked like. Nixon’s crimes included the secret bombing of Cambodia (in which Henry Kissinger was involved), actions to undermine his political opponents and deliberate attempts to destroy or conceal information.
As a teenager, I watched Ronald Reagan’s announcement of his candidacy in 1978 and vowed to leave the country were he to win. Reagan began the slide toward corporate totalitarianism that we are seeing move into its final stages today.
I didn’t fully appreciate the harmful effects of Bill Clinton policies such as NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1996 Crime Bill, the 1996 Telecommunications Act and welfare reform at the time they were passed or the rightward shift the “New” Democratic Party had taken.
I knew as it was happening that Gore had likely won Florida and that the Supreme Court decision was a deliberate attempt to hide this fact. I watched Bush II as he put industry people in charge of the regulatory agencies, refused to sign one major treaty after another and gave the California electric grid to his friend Ken Lay. I knew that no good would come out of the closed energy sessions. I saw 9/11 suddenly give Bush the mandate he hadn’t had and how his administration took advantage of that.
I knew there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), that the Bush Administration was twisting arms at the CIA to get the intelligence they wanted and silencing, deriding and viciously attacking voices of reason like Joe Wilson, David Kelly and Hans Blixt. It was clear the invasion was pre-decided and would take place despite any words or actions of the Iraqis, the UN or the American People. I knew that the media was beating the drums of war. I knew the war would be a disaster and, if anything, expected it to degenerate and metastasize sooner than it ultimately did.
I fell in love with Barack Obama from his 2004 DNC (Democratic National Convention) speech, donated, volunteered and cried at the inauguration, but realized pretty soon afterwards that he would not deliver on the promise of his candidacy. Obama was my realization that whomever we put in the White House ultimately made little difference—the broad trajectories of U.S. policy are set outside of the Oval Office and the President can only do so much to change them.
Does anyone really believe that NSA mass surveillance was Obama’s idea? The JSOC Drone Wars? The Wall Street Bailout? The nationally coordinated crushing of Occupy? Unconditional support for Israel? The War Against Whistle Blowers? The militarization of police? Health Care that benefits Big Pharma and Big Insurance at the expense of the citizens? Support to the crushing of the Arab Spring and antidemocratic coups in Maldives, Honduras, Egypt and Brazil? Aggressive policies toward Russia and China?
Rather the President seems to answer to an unseen Board of Directors: the Military-Industrial Complex, the Fed-Treasury-Wall Street Complex, and all the other overlaps between the global cartels and the U.S. Government.
This election, however, has brought out behavior from the Democrats that provokes a weird déjà vu from those of us who remember Nixon. The DNC has operated with a cynicism, dishonesty and disdain for the people and the law that recalls the above-the-law arrogance of Watergate or the Machiavellian brilliance of a Rove.
While many of the DNC’s actions are probably legal, due to decades of undermining of our legal protections against corrupt politics, they have likely also committed multiple crimes. The WikiLeaks revelations come as no surprise to anyone not under the spell of corporate news, as does the symbolic firing of ex-Hillary Clinton Campaign Chief Debbie Wasserman Shultz and her immediate re-hiring by Clinton. As the Republican and Democratic Conventions have made clear, we now have a Democratic Party that looks politically and ethically Republican and a Republican Party that looks like a lynch mob.
TRUMP now leads in 538’s now-cast, our estimate of what would happen in an election today. https://t.co/djsqNajFrh pic.twitter.com/7DvrdieHOw
~ Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 25, 2016
Clinton is already losing to Trump and her poll numbers are sinking. Bernie Sanders consistently beat Trump in polls, but the media tells us this doesn’t matter and it’s now pretty clear from the WikiLeaks revelations that the DNC, corporate media and big donors colluded to elect Clinton.
Clinton’s main hope of winning at this point is that the only other candidate is Trump. If she does manage to get elected, expect the worst policies of the Obama years on steroids. Expect TPP to pass, perhaps with a minor facelift, and more pro-corporate transnational “trade” agreements. Expect Wall Street to go on unchecked until it again brings down the economy—and then get another bailout. Expect no corporate criminals to be held accountable for their crimes, and no serious effort to regulate or tax them.
Expect more drones, more surveillance, more crackdowns on dissent, more militarization of police, more lockdowns and more use of powers such as Indefinite Detention. Expect the poor and middle class to be squeezed both financially and in terms of their rights. Expect no end to the Prison Industrial Complex or the pervasive terrorizing of people of color. Expect more immigrants to be deported. Expect more war. Expect no serious action on climate change.
We cannot understate the dangers of electing a bigot, but too many people’s eyes glaze over when one talks about the architecture of totalitarianism that has been incrementally built over decades. Trump is easy to oppose: he is a caricature. It’s harder to see the danger represented by a Hillary. Empowering the DNC after all they’ve done is to validate their shift not only to the Right but to naked dishonesty and dirty tricks. The DNC deserves investigations, not votes, but the corporate elite that controls both parties seems to have us checkmated.
We’re abandoning our agency as the supposed protagonists of this election by allowing the DNC to nominate their preselected candidate in spite of her deep unpopularity, her inability to articulate a credible platform of change and the horrendous actions taken by both her and the Party leadership and major media outlets she is so intimately tied to. The result will either be a Trump Presidency or a validation of the new Right-wing Democratic Party. Either way, we are on track for corporate totalitarianism by the time the first major climate disasters start to hit.
Fort years of watching the U.S. political system has brought me to see that the evils I once associated with specific individuals and groups, such as the Nixon and Bush II Administrations, are in fact endemic to the whole system. This year, the Republican National Convention (RNC) actually behaved more ethically and democratically than the DNC, allowing the most popular candidate to win even though they didn’t want him. There were no irregularities in the Republican Primary like there were in the Democratic one and no one claimed the process was anything but fair. To those of us who have long been used to expecting such tactics from Republicans and not Democrats, this may take some getting used to.
What is really needed is a mass voters’ revolt to break out of the stranglehold the current system has gotten us in. We needed mass pressure to force the DNC to go with Sanders, the candidate who can win, and so avert disaster. Otherwise a mass shift to a third-party candidate—whether a Sanders freed from his obligation to stick with a party that secretly plotted to derail his candidacy or a Jill Stein buoyed by a surge of approximately half of like-minded Democrats and half of Independents, and thus suddenly a viable candidate.
But it looks like the American people are not ready for revolution, not ready to see how deeply corrupt their system has become and how urgent the need for immediate radical change is, not ready to take their power back and take the decision of who can be President away from the two parties. Clearly we need more suffering, and under either Trump or Clinton we’ll get it. The current system will neither be saved nor overthrown: it will be brought down by its own excesses and we will be left to deal with the consequences.
And sadly, most Americans will not be aware of any of this until it directly affects them.
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Author: Peter Cohen
Image: Instagram/Noorimages
Editor: Travis May
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