No one meddles with American elections better than Americans do. The amateurish Russians, and even the slick Israelis who managed to insert their rightwing Prime Minister inside the US Congress to address the actual elected members, must wait far back in the queue of homegrown meddlers in order to exercise any undue influence. The Iranians, whatever their own shortcomings, are perfectly correct to mock the US election system as a vulnerable, corrupt and incompetently run shambles.
That’s how US elites want it ~ an arrangement riven with racist voter purge lists, scandalously faulty electronic voting machines, partisan gerrymandering and legal gimmicks designed to discourage lower income voters. It is only several infamously close elections that revealed how cracked the whole ramshackle edifice is because only then does the system draw scrutiny. Turnouts even at presidential elections are very low (55 to 60 per cent at most) compared to other Western democracies, and voters’ participation rates exactly reflect their income levels.
The more assets you own the more likely you vote, just as the posher your school district the better the pupils perform. (As readers might surmise, what is left of the American middle class is extremely ambivalent about installing a truly equal public education system, for the increased competition might hurt their own precious kids’ chances of getting ahead.) The American Civil Liberties Union determined that 5 million eligible voters were disqualified in 2012. Investigative journalist Greg Palast reckons 14 million mostly low income, young and minority voters were deleted from rolls since 2013 after a conservative Supreme Court ended Federal oversight on State voting rules changes.
In 2016 a restoration of purged voters in 3 states alone ~ all of which had installed voter suppression measures ~ would have given Hillary Clinton the victory her feverish disciples claim was stolen by the Russians for Trump. Of course, a scrupulously honest Democratic party primary system might well have made Bernie Sanders, not Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate. Why are Americans in turmoil? The Brookings Institution reports that 44 per cent work “low wage” jobs in the land Trump boasts is so prosperous. The reason is that the vast added wealth of the last five decades ceased being shared.
The top 10 per cent now possess 71 per cent of household wealth (with the top 1 per cent nabbing most of that). The rest gets divided up among the middle class, while the poorest half of the populace mostly languish in debt and at bloodsuckingly high interest rates. For average income earners, according to the national PayScale Index, their real purchasing power declined 9 per cent since 2006. These trends persist no matter who inhabited the White House. Most Americans haven’t a clue about the actual maldistribution of wealth because the experts who routinely taunt Americans for their ignorance won’t tell them, but the public feels it anyway.
Neither major party displays any interest in running elections that are fair, transparent, and encourage participation. Only the affluent are really welcome to vote because they don’t endanger the status quo. The cable news networks, sponsored by colossal corporate and banking firms, devote their pundit firepower to explain why Bernie Sanders cannot attract sufficient support to be elected because they themselves are doing all they can to scuttle his campaign.
Renowned pundit Chris Matthews recently envisioned an elected President Bernie Sanders unleashing execution squads on enemies, which is so deranged a notion that it does not take a psychoanalyst to detect that it is likely a projection on Matthews’ part for what he and fellow media multimillionaires secretly would like to see befall Sanders and his supporters, who also are ritually tarred as Neanderthallike “Bernie Bros,” although the majority of Sanders’ support is from women.
Now the very same US intelligence agencies that meddled in countless foreign elections and deceived Americans into an endless global war, which pumps up military- industrial complex profits, ask everyone to take their solemn word that Bernie Sanders is aided and abetted by Russia on Putin’s direct orders. You might think the Russians, if guilty, would have improved their game a bit during the whole uproar over Russiagate but no, not at all. From all appearances, you would think that Democratic Party overlords, who detest Sanders, have hacked into Moscow’s inner sanctum, not the other way around.
Yet the Russians supposedly continue doing silly things that amount to an act of war. The high level functionaries circulating these preposterous rumours probably do not believe Russian security services are so stupid, but they do hope the American people are. This month billionaire Mike Bloomberg, a lifelong hardcore Republican, is welcomed into the ranks by the Democratic Party National Committee (which violated its own rules to do so). Yet their incessant talking point has been that Sanders is not a true Democrat although, in fact, he best exemplifies the programmes of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which were high watermarks of pro-working class policies.
It’s been downhill ever since. One reason the Democratic Party elites abhor Bernie Sanders is that he reminds those who have any historical sense of how they betrayed all the principles of FDR’s Democratic party in order to sup at the corporate trough. Elites are in a bipartisan panic that Sanders will introduce “too much democracy.” There are worse fates.
(The writers are well-known political commentators and authors of No Clean Hands, Parables of Permanent War and many other books)