How the Billionaires Control American
Elections
Eric Zuesse, originally posted
at Strategic
Culture
The great investigative journalist
Glenn Greenwald gave an hour-long lecture on how America’s billionaires control
the U.S. Government, and here is an edited summary of its opening twenty
minutes (the best part of it), with key quotations and assertions from its
opening — and then its broader context will be discussed briefly:
The Intercept, 9 July 2020
2:45: There is “this huge cleavage between how members
of Congress present themselves, their imagery and rhetoric and branding, what
they present to the voters, on the one hand, and the reality of what they do in
the bowels of Congress and the underbelly of Congressional proceedings, on the
other. Most of the constituents back in their home districts have no idea what
it is that the people they’ve voted for have been doing, and this gap between
belief and reality is enormous.”
Four crucial military-budget amendments
were debated in the House just now, as follows:
1. to block Trump from withdrawing
troops from Afghanistan.
2. to block Trump from withdrawing
10,000 troops from Germany
3. to limit U.S. assistance to the
Sauds’ bombing of Yemen
4. to require Trump to explain why he
wants to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty
On all four issues, the
pro-imperialist position prevailed in nearly unanimous votes — overwhelming in
both Parties. Dick Cheney’s daughter, Republican Liz Cheney, dominated the debates,
though the House of Representatives is now led by Democrats, not
Republicans.
Greenwald (citing other
investigators, which I shall link to below) documents that the U.S. news-media
are in the business of deceiving the voters to believe that there are
fundamental differences between the Parties. “The extent to which they clash is
wildly exaggerated” by the press (in order to pump up the percentages of
Americans who vote, so as to maintain, both domestically and internationally,
the lie that America is a democracy — actually represents the interests of the
voters).
16:00: The Chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee — which writes the nearly $750B annual Pentagon budget — is the
veteran (23 years) House Democrat Adam Smith of Boeing’s Washington State. “The
majority of his district are people of color.” He’s “clearly a pro-war hawk” a
consistent neoconservative, voted to invade Iraq and all the rest. “This is
whom Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have chosen to head the House Armed
Services Committee — someone with this record.” He is “the single most
influential member of Congress when it comes to shaping military spending.” He
was primaried by a progressive Democrat, and the “defense
industry opened up their coffers” and enabled Adam Smith to defeat the
challenger.
—
That’s the opening.
Greenwald went on, after that, to
discuss other key appointees by Nancy Pelosi who are almost as important as
Adam Smith is, in shaping the Government’s military budget. They’re all corrupt
(campaign-financed by the megacorporations that sell billions to the ‘Defense’
Department). And then he went, at further length, to describe the methods of
deceiving the voters, such as how these very same Democrats who are actually
agents of the billionaires who own the ‘defense’ contractors and the ‘news’
media etc., campaign for Democrats’ votes by emphasizing how evil the
Republican Party is on the issues that Democratic Party voters care far more
about than they do about America’s destructions of Iraq and Syria and Libya and
Honduras and Ukraine, and imposing crushing economic blockades (sanctions)
against the residents in Iran, Venezuela and many other lands that those
billionaires also want to control. Democratic Party voters care lots about the
injustices and the sufferings of American Blacks and other minorities, and of
poor American women, etc., but are satisfied to vote for Senators and
Representatives who actually represent ‘defense’ contractors and other
profoundly corrupt corporations, instead of represent their own voters. This is
how the most corrupt people in politics become re-elected, time and again — by
deceived voters. And — as those nearly unanimous committee votes display —
almost every member of the U.S. Congress is profoundly corrupt.
Furthermore: Adam Smith’s opponent in
the 2018 Democratic Party primary was Sarah Smith (no relation) and she tried
to argue against Adam Smith’s neoconservative (pro-U.S.-imperialism)
voting-record, but the
press-coverage she received in her congressional district ignored that, in order to keep those voters in
the dark about the key reality. Whereas Sarah Smith received some coverage from
Greenwald and other reporters at The Intercept who mentioned that “Sarah Smith mounted her challenge largely
in opposition to what she cast as his hawkish foreign policy approach,”
and that she “routinely brought up his hawkish foreign policy views and
campaign donations from defense contractors as central issues in the campaign,”
only very few of the voters in that district followed such non-mainstream
national news-media, far less knew that Adam Smith was in the pocket of
‘defense’ billionaires. And, so, the Pentagon’s big weapons-making firms
defeated a progressive who, if elected, would have helped to re-orient federal
spending away from selling bombs to be used by the Sauds to
destroy Yemen, and instead toward providing better education
and employment-prospects to Black, brown and other people, and to the poor, and
everybody, in that congressional district, and all others. Moreover, since Adam
Smith had a fairly good voting-record on the types of issues that Blacks and
other minorities consider more important and more relevant than such things as
his having voted for Bush to invade Iraq, Sarah Smith really had no other
practical option than to criticize him regarding his hawkish voting-record,
which that district’s voters barely even cared about. The billionaires actually
had Sarah Smith trapped (just like, on a national level, they had Bernie
Sanders trapped). (Furthermore, she campaigned against the billionaires, but many Democrats — even lower-income ones who
struggle to make ends meet — respect billionaires and are not opposed to voting
for billionaire-backed candidates; many of these people simply don’t
even want to know how corrupt the system is. They want to believe that
the only political problem is bigoted individuals — not the entire
crony economic system in
which they are embedded and which provides them their ‘news’, and which systematically promotes all types of
bigotry. So, campaigning
against the system drives away more voters than it attracts.) (After all, the
system itself is supremacist: it supports any type of supremacism.)
Of course, Greenwald’s audience is
clearly Democratic Party voters, in order to inform them of how deceitful their
own Party is, against themselves. However, the Republican Party operates in
exactly the same way, though using different deceptions against its voters,
because Republican Party voters have very different priorities than Democratic
Party voters do, and so they ignore and allow different types of deceptions and
atrocities than Democratic voters do. Each Party plays the “good cop, bad cop”
routine against the other: “Vote for me because my opponent is so bad (on the
things you really care about).”
Numerous polls (for examples, this and this and this) show that American voters (except for the minority
of them that are Republican) want “bipartisan” government (Republicans are the
exception: they tend to view their opponents as enemies that must be conquered
instead of compromised with); but the reality in America is that this country
actually already does have that: the U.S. Government is actually bipartisanly
corrupt, and bipartisanly evil. (This is the reason why members of Congress,
even of opposite Parties, get along very well together, amongst themselves:
it’s “us against them” and the “them” is the voters, who need to be controlled;
and the “us” are the rulers.) In fact, it’s almost unanimous, it is so
bipartisan, in reality. That’s the way America’s Government actually functions,
especially in the congressional votes that are nearly unanimous and that the
‘news’-media don’t publicize (except to fudge what the bill was actually
about). However, since it lies so much, and its media (controlled also by its
billionaires) do likewise, and since they systematically cover-up instead of
expose the deepest rot, the public don’t even know about this bipartisanship.
They don’t know the reality. They don’t know how corrupt and evil their Government actually
is. They just vote and pay
taxes. That’s the extent to which they actually ‘participate’ in ‘their’
Government. They tragically don’t know the reality. It’s hidden from them. It
is censored-out, by the editors, producers, and other management,
of the billionaires’ ‘news’-media. These are the truths that can’t pass through
those executives’ filters. These are the truths that get filtered-out, instead
of reported. No democracy can function this way — and, of course, none
does. But the voters can’t figure that out for themselves. And the media they
receive don’t explain it to the public, because their owners require them to
hide it from the public. In fact, this is what they require their media to hide
above all else. And that’s why they hide this fact 100%, not only 99%, but
actually 100% — totally hide it, won’t even allow it to be
discussed in their media. (Incidentally: this article is being submitted to
virtually all English-language media for publication free of charge. If you
don’t see it being published in places such as CNN, the New York Times,
or The Atlantic, then you might want to watch the remainder of the
complete presentation by Greenwald there, in order to understand in more depth
how billionaires
control America.
Greenwald’s discussion focuses only on the imperialism issue, but in a recent
article I explained
the mechanism by which the billionaires police the censorship, on all issues.)
—————
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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