Eric Zuesse
On February 14th, the reader-comments at a popular website for Democratic Party activists expressed outrage when a report was posted there that “Pompeo Secretly Met Russian Foreign Minister”.
The “Best” (or most-liked) reader-comment to that was:
atterman
Fucking goddamn TRAITORS.
Dems need to be ALL OVER THIS.
But will they be???? I tend to doubt it.
And what will we do when Tangerine Traitor Tot fake-“wins” another election???
WHERE ARE THE MOBS IN THE STREETS?????
They didn’t believe that all of the investigations, into a possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Russian Government in the 2016 U.S. Presidential contest between Republican Trump and Democrat Clinton, found no credible evidence of any such collusion.
They were angry that Hillary Clinton lost that contest, and they did not blame her and the DNC, the Democratic National Committee (which had actually rigged her instead of Bernie Sanders to become their nominee), for that outcome. And that’s how and why Trump ended up becoming the President — by the DNC’s crime against its own Party’s voters. Russia had nothing to do with it. In fact: “Former NSA Tech Chief Says Mueller Report Was Based on CIA-Fabricated ‘Evidence’”. If that’s not an authority — if the whistleblower Bill Binney isn’t an authority and the fake ‘whistleblower’ who was actually and still remains a CIA employee is — then who else would be an expert who is trustworthy on Binney’s high level? But true-believers of the Democratic-Party faith simply ignored Binney’s proof that, as he more recently put it, “Our probability of error in making the statements we do about the DNC data, is like 1 chance in 2 to the 35,813th power — which is like, one chance in a one followed by 1200 zeros. It’s trillions of times better than DNA [evidence], you know?” Just like the Republicans were convinced by the RNC view that Bill Clinton had to be removed from office because of his marital infidelity, the Democratic voters believed the DNC view, even though it’s founded upon a physical impossibility.
They believed that whereas the RNC (Republican National Committee) was traitorous (hostile toward the interests of the nation’s population), the DNC was not.
One of the benefits that an aristocracy (or “oligarchy”) derives from its being known to and recognized by the public only via two or more of its segments (or official political Parties), is that the members of the public can then attribute whatever they don’t like to ‘the other Party(s)’, instead of to the Party that they personally identify themselves with. They personally identify with a faction of the aristocracy, and they think that that faction of the aristocracy cares about their welfare. This inter-Party division prevents the aristocracy itself from being blamed, even if (as is the case in almost all countries) the prevailing political rot comes from itself — the nation’s own aristocracy — and not actually from any segment of the public, nor from “foreigners.” In an aristocracy — and not in any democracy — the nation’s leaders of government represent only the aristocracy, not the public, because any nation where the leaders of government represent the public is a democracy, no aristocracy at all. (The most-democratic nations tend to be the most-equalitarian countries, such as the Scandinavian ones. America is one of the least-equalitarian.)
Consequently, a ‘democracy’ that’s actually a multi-Party dictatorship is highly likely to have a public that is politically (i.e., by party) divided into contending factions that hate and despise and deeply distrust each other, and that therefore can never come to any effective political agreement to change the existing political status-quo or the nation’s laws unless the nation’s aristocracy itself is strongly unified about that given matter. In such a country, stasis or equilibrium about any issue is exceedingly difficult to terminate, because first the aristocracy must effectively terminate its own internal divisions regarding that given matter, and this will require deals and concessions which are exceedingly difficult to attain because a significant percentage of the aristocracy will have to accept that it was defeated — and not only defeated, but defeated by its peers, who are virtually the only people whom aristocrats respect and actually care about (consider “us” rather than “them”). Duels to the death used to be the way that irreconcilable differences within an aristocracy were finally settled, but now it is more commonly done as settlements between political parties, or, actually, between the individuals who control each of the parties.
In an aristocracy, truth is virtually prohibited from affecting political outcomes, because instead power determines everything, and — because it is an aristocracy — power is ultimately dependent upon a person’s wealth: it is dependent upon that individual’s ability to hire employees and other agents to do what he or she wants them to do. Here is how that works, in the U.S. example:
In the 2016 U.S. presidential s‘elections’, one billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, spent $82,522,800 on Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and another billionaire, Tom Steyer, spent $91,069,795, on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. And that’s just the traceable money, not including “dark money.” And many other of America’s approximately 700 billionaires also contributed. One thing that virtually all of America’s billionaires agree upon is the need — even after the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991 — to defeat Russia and Iran, conquer them; and, so, Russia and Iran are their favorite targets of blame for the American public (such as Democratic Party activists), who are the subjects (or ‘citizens’) of those billionaires (or of their regime, the U.S. aristocracy). This explains why all of their mainstream, and almost all of their non-mainstream, media spread lies against those Governments and the leaders of governments that are friendly toward those target-Governments — such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Yanukovych, and Xi Jinping.
America’s military equipment is all privatized, produced for profit, by companies that are controlled by its billionaires, and on 14 February 2020 the IISS headlined “Global defence spending: the United States widens the gap” and reported that, “European countries are increasing their defence investments as a share of their total spending – for those countries with available data, funds rose from 19.8% in 2018 to 23.1% in 2019 – but the equivalent category reached 29% in the US. The United States’ defence investments were thus worth around four times as much as European states’ combined.” This enormous profitability of corporations such as Lockheed Martin couldn’t happen if America’s billionaires had not continued the Cold War after 1991; but, of course, their news-media constantly warn of “the Russian threat” and “Iran is the top state-sponsor of terrorism” and “China is cheating,” etc., to explain why America’s taxpayers have to spend 29% of GDP on the military that ‘defends the nation’ but actually serves only the billionaires’ corporations and their profits — profits from the public’s tax-expenditures.
This is how an aristocracy functions. Once it becomes entrenched, eliminating it becomes almost impossible.
For example: on February 15th, a Democratic Party billionaires’ site, Huffington Post, headlined “THE GOLDEN AGE OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME” and presented a credible and reasonably well documented case that
OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, nearly every institution of American life has taken on the unmistakable stench of moral rot. Corporate behemoths like Boeing and Wells Fargo have traded blue-chip credibility for white-collar callousness. Elite universities are selling admission spots to the highest Hollywood bidder. Silicon Valley unicorns have revealed themselves as long cons (Theranos), venture-capital cremation devices (Uber, WeWork) or straightforward comic book supervillains (Facebook). Every week unearths a cabinet-level political scandal that would have defined any other presidency. From the blackouts in California to the bloated bonuses on Wall Street to the entire biography of Jeffrey Epstein, it is impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it.
And why wouldn’t they? The criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously. …
But that ‘news’-report is allowed only because the present occupant of the White House happens to be a Republican, and it totally ignores the comparably profound corruption of top-level America and by its Government under the Democrat Barack Obama. The pretense is that this intensity of corruption is new and ‘Republican’. Most of the article’s allegations aren’t documented, nor even linked to any source at all. For example, here is one that’s not:
Jack Blum, a former staff attorney for the U.S. Senate, calls this impunity “the most urgent issue in America.” In Russia and Ukraine, as government capacity deteriorated during the 2000s, oligarchs increased spending on bribes, lobbying and parallel systems of power — their own private security forces, their pet media institutions. The same thing is already happening here.
Of course, blame Russia. That’s a bipartisan lie from America’s billionaires, of both Parties. And the fact is: agents of America’s aristocracy actually introduced American corruption into post-Soviet Russia where it became rampant until Vladimir Putin became Russia’s President in 2000 and subjected Russia’s billionaires to Russia’s laws and infuriated them and drove the worst of them to abscond to The West. That “deteriorated during the 2000s” is a blatant lie, the exact reverse of the reality. America didn’t import corruption from Russia nearly so much as Russia imported corruption from America. Putin told Russia’s billionaires that they would now have to pay their taxes and get out of politics or else leave, and this infuriated the billionaire-class not only there but worldwide. Russia’s steep economic slump between 1990 and 2000 was quickly turned around and Russia has been one of the best-performing economies ever since 2000, even despite America’s anti-Russia sanctions having started in 2012. That’s a fact which America’s billionaires — in both Parties — hide from their public, because America’s billionaires, in both Parties, hate Putin, for his resisting them. That’s why when “atterman” called for “MOBS IN THE STREETS” to protest confidential communication between the two nuclear super-powers, he could just as well have been a Republican protesting Obama for having denied in 2012 Republican Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” That was a lie from Romney, and Obama’s mocking it was a lie from Obama. And they both lied to say that Russia ever threatened America, or that in any sense Russia after the end of the Soviet Union has been — at all — an “enemy.” Russia really did end its side of the Cold War; America, however, never did, but is still aiming to conquer Russia. Practically all of America’s foreign policies can be understood on this basis, as being against any nation whose leader is friendly toward Russia.
And that’s an America which is controlled by an aristocracy that is profoundly corrupt, on both of its sides.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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