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The People vs Donald J Trump: Donald J Trump did not win this election; he didn’t win the popular vote and he didn’t win the votes in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin … Those states were stolen. Greg Palast, Home to the Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Youtube 2016
Vote thievery doesn’t come cheap … These are the creepiest billionaires on the planet. ibid.
Donald J Trump said this election’s rigged – and he’s right. ibid.
‘Over a million people voted twice in this election.’ ibid. Dick Morris
‘You have people in my opinion that are voting many many times.’ ibid. Trump
2000 Bush vs Gore: Florida – a different hidden data base of voters secretly tagged for elimination. ibid.
2000: The Great Felony Voter Purge. ibid.
Thousands of mismatched birthdates … Thousands never convicted at all … The number of real felons on Bush’s vote list – zero. ibid.
Koch – Heritage Foundation – Voter Crosscheck. ibid.
[Paul] Singer, the Vulture, is the number one donor to the Republican Party. ibid.
They [black voters] waited for hours. ibid.
Over 1,000,000 absentee ballots are rejected. ibid.
Over 3,000,000 of you will not have your votes counted. ibid.
Horror: The Koch Brothers Bring You the Ultimate in Fear! ibid.
It’s now lynching by laptop. ibid.
Ohio: 43,000 black voters have just vanished. ibid.
June 2013: The US Supreme Court ripped out a key section of the Voting Rights Act … It was Koch money behind the hit. ibid.
Is vote suppression just another profit centre? ibid.
The model for this new simplified world was American … Gary, Indiana, is almost derelict. But seventy years ago it was a new kind of model city planned in an ordered way around a giant steel mill. To its builders it was a chance to break with the complexities of the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box I: The Engineer’s Plot: A Fable From the Age of Science, BBC 1992
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War – was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the Air Force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisors to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizzkids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defense with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
He [Goldsmith] would be used as a battering ram to break down the old system of power that had ruled America for fifty years. The conscious shaping of society by a corporate and political elite would be destroyed by people like him and replaced by the blind force of the markets. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set III: Destroy the Technostructure, BBC 1999
Ronald Reagan had come to power at a moment of economic crisis. But he promised a dramatic regeneration of the country’s fortunes. But not by government which he blamed had led America into the chaos. His solution was to give power away to Wall Street and to the financial markets. He wanted them to find a way to regenerate America. ibid.
Investors were falling over themselves to invest in junk bonds. But to [Michael] Milken they were more than just a way of raising money. Junk bonds were a powerful weapon with which to challenge the established power of Wall Street. ibid.
The big corporation was at the heart of American life. It was far more than just a way of making money. The idea of the corporation had been born fifty years before out of pressure from politicians. They had wanted to find a way of protecting America from the growing chaos of the free market. ibid.
Goldsmith and Milken now set out to take over the technostructure. They would do it by borrowing billions of dollars with the promise that they would repay vast interest. They were confident they could do this because hidden away within the giant corporations was fantastic wealth which they could unlock and sell off. ibid.
It was the reconstruction of America by the power of the market. ibid.
A patrician elite who had run America for fifty years. ibid.
Downsizing became one of the most important factors fuelling a boom in the American stock market. Every time the raiders sacked managers and workers their share price soared, and in turn that pushed the bull market even higher. As the takeover boom grew, millions of workers were downsized. Whole towns were decimated. ibid.
But Goldsmith was beginning to suffer from delusions of grandeur: he forgot that he was no more than a creature of the banks. And having taken over control of industry from the state, he decided he now had the power and the money to take over foreign policy as well. And the first thing he decided he would do was undermine the Soviet Union. Goldsmith believed that the growing anti-nuclear movement in the West was completely controlled by the Soviet Union; so he and a number of right-wing tycoons set up a private organisation to undermine the peace movement. Goldsmith was going to privatise Western Intelligence. Goldsmith’s main target was the World Peace Council, an innocuous and ineffectual organisation. ibid.
Goldsmith’s belief that he was powerful was a fantasy. The men who really had the power were the bankers. The men who really had the power were the bankers. They were using Goldsmith’s bullying nature as a weapon to break down the corporations. But the banks themselves were about to fall from grace. And Goldsmith would be left helpless and exposed. ibid.
The New York attorney [Giuliani] revealed that the takeover movement was riddled with corruption. ibid.
But the revelations of corruption started by Boesky kept growing. ibid.
But the Democrats’ optimism was to be short-lived. In November 1992 Clinton was triumphantly elected president. But within weeks his administration discovered that the budget deficit was far greater than they had anticipated. At a meeting at the White House in January 1993 the head of the Federal Reserve told them that the deficit was nearly $300 billion. There was no way they could borrow any more without panicking the markets and causing a crisis. The only way to pay for the proposed tax cuts would be to cut government spending not just on defense but on welfare. Clinton was faced with a choice between the old politics and the new, and he chose the new. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self IV: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering, BBC 2002
In August 1996 Clinton signed a bill which ended the system of guaranteed help for the poor and unemployed. ibid.