For those who refuse to consider that the process is rigged against Sanders, check the following links out:
http://www.electionfraud2016.wordpress.com
https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/category/election-myths/
If you want some of the same info in an easy to digest video format, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmYYvZASoks
The discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote count alone should be raising some serious questions about the integrity of the electoral process, especially considering that there is no way to audit the voting machines.
The evidence that the Democratic Primary is being rigged against Bernie Sanders in favor of Hitlery is overwhelming. (S)election rigging is nothing new in this nation's history. I'm not necessarily for Sanders. I was hoping Rand Paul would get somewhere, but of the Ds and Rs in the running that aren't Rand Paul, Sanders was certainly the least offensive to my sensibilities. If someone put a gun to my head and made me choose between Hitlery and Trumpolini, I'd pick Trumpolini without a doubt, but under no circumstances would I willingly vote for that.
But it's not just the exit polls that are the problem during any primary or (s)election when the exit polls and the official results don't match. They are far from the sole reason there is a discrepancy.
Events including but not limited to incorrect purging of legitimate voters[1], computer failures and other technical problems[2], entrances locked shut during expected hours of operation[2], voter registrations having been switched without the voter switching it[3], large numbers of voter complaints[4], all occurred during the NY primary alone, but were not events exclusive to it.
Events such as these will undoubtedly have an effect on the official vote tally in some way, minor or major. Any attempt to conduct an exit poll will be affected as a result of a flawed sample with which to gather its data from, that sample being the vote itself.
In every (s)election cycle without exception, those sorts of aforementioned events, plus events such as lost votes[5](or even deliberate vote dumping[6]), flipped votes[7], uncounted votes[8], acts of fraud[9], illegal bribery[10], legal bribery(commonly referred to as campaign contributions, which are without effective limitations)[11], and other dirty tricks(some of which are older than Tammany Hall itself), occur regularly within the U.S.
(S)elections tampering is still possible before a single vote is ever made. Common techniques for this include but are not limited to gerrymandering[12], limitations placed on candidate access to the debates[13] and/or speaking time[14], private money purchasing legislation or contract deals to provide the method of the vote itself[15], restrictions on candidate ballot access[16], as well as limitations placed on the voting process itself with respect to voter access[17], all of which will have an outcome on if/when/where/how any individual person votes due to variables that can be entirely outside of that person's control.
If a primary cannot even be properly and consistently conducted according to procedure(let alone conducted fairly), then I have no reason to be confident in the common assumption that a (s)election actually represents the will of the people who were eligible to vote and whom also took time out of their day to do so.
This 2016 primary, to me, is no exception to influencing my level of confidence in this process.
The fact is, the existing checks on the (s)election results are failing to match the official results, often well outside the margins of error. This discrepancy occurs WHILE these (s)elections are neither fair, nor truly representative of the will and/or views of the American people themselves due to the common presence of irregularities in modern U.S. (s)elections.
There exist many terms used to describe an election that is such.
It's rigged, tampered with, skewed, fixed, fraudulent, crooked, or any other synonym of your choice.
It leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that we, the American people, are openly being cheated.
It is interesting that the American people are expected by the establishment to find this acceptable somehow, and even more frustrating that a significant percentage of the American people do find this acceptable.
Any claim to the U.S. being by definition a democracy, or even a representative republic, is a claim that is in-congruent with real-world history and events. This is especially problematic then, that the U.S. wants to spread its “democracy” to the world's inhabitants, taking millions of lives while heading towards bankruptcy thanks in part to that effort, to the expense of us all.
If Sanders is elected, he will be the first centrist president we have had since Carter. He may be center left, but virtually all the other D/R candidates are right-wing authoritarians to an extreme degree, as every president has been since Reagan(including the right-wing neoliberals Bill Clinton and Barack Obama). Sanders is too milquetoast on civil liberties for my tastes; we need someone that will dismantle most of the state and allow liberty for a change, but as a centrist on this issue, he's leaps and bounds a better candidate than all the other D or R candidates simply for the fact that he distinguishes himself as not being an authoritarian neoliberal or neoconservative. Rand Paul leaned very slightly in the direction towards liberty, but his father was the true revolutionary in this regard.
The fact remains that in the U.S. today, if you are either a leftist, a centrist, or a right-libertarian, you have next to zero representation in congress, the courts, or in the executive branch. This country has thoroughly and utterly been taken over by right-wing authoritarians of various sorts, almost universally with a D or an R next to their name, all for the benefit of big business. This is troubling, since the American people have a much broader range of views and opinions than this, and if a sociology course I took during college is to be believed, a composite of the American people as a whole would be left-leaning economically and centrist on civil liberties issues, which is basically where Bernie Sanders sits, and polls consistently show him winning against Trumpolini by much wider margins than Hitlery in the general election should he get the nomination. Is it any wonder why congress' approval rating is consistently well below 20% and often in the single digits? The American people have no representation! Sanders is proving this with each day he is in the race.
Chalo said:
Nobody gets rich by himself. The richest all steal the profit from others' labor and cleverness, claim common ideas and words as their property, use up collective resources like it's a race to finish them off, and corrupt the law to their advantage.
On this subject, it needs to be said that:
1) Adjusted for inflation and accounting for the cost of goods/services, minimum wage in the U.S. used to exceed $20/hour in purchasing power in 1970 [18]
2) Since 1970, labor productivity per capita has more than doubled. [19]
3) Current minimum wage is now $7.25/hour [20]
4) Adjusting for worker productivity gains and the increased cost of goods/services since 1968, a "fair" minimum wage today would be well over $20/hour without increasing the costs of goods and services [21]
5) A burger flipper is paid $20+/hour in Norway[22] and a profit is still made off of their labor
6) The 20 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans put together which is more than 160 million people [23]
7) The wealthiest 1% of the world's population will soon have more wealth than the rest of the world put together[24]
8) For every job available in the U.S., there is consistently more than 1 jobless person seeking that job, meaning, full employment is not currently possible as the economy exists today no matter how badly the job seeker wants the job[25]
9) Most new jobs created since 2008 have been low-wage service sector jobs[26]
10) The effective tax rate of the Fortune 500 corporations is 12.6%[27], lower than that of most American wage earners at 31.5%[28]
Sander's $15/hour minimum wage proposal that the upper-income wing of the parasite class is complaining about is really the equivalent of handing out crumbs to people that work their ass off. I think they deserve more than crumbs for that work. If a fast food employee adds $50/hour of value to their employer, it's only fair that they are paid at least half of that. The corporations would have them working for free, if they could get away with it. These corporate millionaires and billionaires that are claiming wages are too high are the ones really and truly on the take, far more so than those 47% of poor Americans who are on the government dole in some form. The owners and highest paid executives of these corporations aren't the ones doing most of the work that add value to their institutions, the laborers are. The laborers are being paid a tiny fraction of the value they add to the corporations with their labor, and are simultaneously being automated out of existence while the savings are not translating into cheaper prices for the consumer. The disparity is bad enough in the U.S., and hundreds of times worse in the 3rd world where U.S. jobs are also being exported. The greed of the gold collar scum has no limits.
My dad's first job in 1970 was as a janitor making the minimum wage at $1.45/hour(*edit: I asked him. I initially thought he made only $1.00/hour, but it was actually $1.45). It was a part time job of about 25 hours a week. He had no scholarships, and used his earnings to pay for most of his college(taking out some loans), could also afford a 2 bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood, went out to bars on a regular basis to get trashed, and paid cash for a brand new MGB GT sports car without needing a loan to buy it. All of this, on minimum wage, without even needing to work full time.
I can barely afford today's equivalent as an electrical engineer making over $50k/year today working more than 40 hours a week. I do without a lot of things in order to pay off my student loans, wherein my scholarships paid for roughly 3/4 of my tuition. 100% of my student loan money went to tuition and books, and I had to work jobs on the side still to afford my books. Since finding employment, I've been living in the ghetto and commuting to work by bicycle so that I have enough money on the side to pursue my projects and goals while paying down the debt. If I lived in a middle class neighborhood and drove a new car, I would be living paycheck to paycheck(or worse, perpetually accumulating debt) like most of my co-workers. I don't use credit cards, I don't waste my money going out to bars, I don't have cable TV, I almost never shop for anything frivilous, and I don't take out any further debt for anything. I can forget about starting a family anytime soon... and I'm doing much better than the majority in this country(for comparison, one of my roommates is making $7.25/hr, and without splitting the rent, he would literally not make enough to live on, and he's debt free). By the time I pay my student loan off, I'll have paid enough in interest to buy a cheap house, except I won't have the house to show for it. Some gold collar scum who inserted themselves as an intermediary between me and the college education I needed to pursue my goals basically got all of that interest money, without ever having worked to actually earn it.
Being morally opposed to the military, I could have dropped out of high school and sold crack, and potentially been a lot better off than I am now for a lot less work... but since I wouldn't be whoring myself out to some corporation or whoring myself out to the military, this government would then think being exploited in prison is the right place for me. It matters not that a crack dealer is providing a product on a purely voluntary basis, unlike say, the IRS demanding a cut of my wages with the threat of theft of my assets for non-compliance, or the threat of imprisonment if I resist the theft, or the threat of death should I resist the imprisonment. The crack dealer is truly independent from the government and corporate system, and in this day and age, that is a no-no.
If you are born in a family who doesn't have the assets to run their own business, you are herded into either the workforce, the military, or prison. The laws are set up in such a way that you are given no viable alternative. The threat of destitution is usually the sole motivator to work. Someone who was typically born rich gets to claim a portion of the value of your work for themselves, and I'm not talking about my fellow ghetto rats with their EBT cards(some of whom, admittedly, do know how to game the system). If you are born with a silver spoon up your ass, you pretty much get to do what you want.
Being that I wasn't born with a silver spoon up my ass, I took what job I could get, and not the job I wanted. I had hopes and dreams of going into the electric car industry in some form, but am nowhere near that goal and have now invested so much time and effort into the utility industry out of financial necessity that my only likely chance is to go back for more schooling and more debt, just to have a chance at pursuing my dreams, which would mean making the same mistake of taking on student loans a second time. I had to leave my conversion back at my parents' house out of financial necessity when I found employment 3 states away, because I could not justify the rent costs of a garaged apartment in a good neighborhood with enough space to work on it; what would be the point if I didn't have the spare cash to work on it? That conversion may be my only ticket to working for, say, Tesla, an increasingly remote dream.
It would have been a lot nicer not to have to pay the middlemen interest by going into debt to pay for overpriced schooling in order to get a permission slip to work called a degree, along the way. The job I am doing now is so below my capabilities that I could have done it out of high school with some training, but I'm stuck. As a result, I'm failing to live up to my potential, like most people in this country, and it's not even remotely my own fault or due to a lack of ability or intelligence on my part.
This economic system is a combination of both theft and slavery. By paying the workers less than is possible, the workers have to spend more of their lives working to afford the things they need(and if they are lucky enough to have anything left over, the things they want or any opportunities that require financial resources to pursue). I have experienced this first hand, working for a contracting firm that charges a company more than $100/hour for my work, and then pays me less than half of their remainder after their overhead and expenses are accounted for, making a larger profit margin off of my work than I am being paid for my labor, even though, ME, and not the company, is doing the actual work. I get roughly 2 weeks a year to split between seeing my family members and working on my electric car, and my family members are now dying. 2 weeks a year, to live my own life for myself. I'd love to undercut my company by buying my own equipment and work for the utility directly, but being forced to sign a no-compete contract as a condition of employment, with the contract being non-negotiable, gets in the way of that. Of course, I suppose I'm free to quit and go destitute and homeless when I no longer have an income source, as in this economy, jobs are very difficult to obtain. I suppose I could have stayed in my parents' basement unemployed and broke with my capabilities going to waste... or sold crack on the street corner...
I can't help but conclude that there is something implicitly wrong and unfair with this arrangement.
There's no incentive to work hard, because the greedy parasites at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy think that they are entitled to most/all of the productive value added that humanity collectively has to offer. The totality of most ordinary peoples' incentive to work is the threat of destitution. That's a poor incentive, and it shows in all of those poor who decide gaming the system is a better way. The parasites at the low end of the socioeconomic ladder are receiving veritable crumbs when they get their EBT cards and government housing. This economic engine and this over-bloated government that allows it and who has bribed the poor with their pathetic handouts is not serving the 99%, it is enslaving them while the middle class pay for it and the gold collar scum 0.1% at the top make away with the bulk of value added by those who work for a living. The slave drivers are at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, making all the money, while complaining that they pay too much taxes in spite of having a grossly disproportionate percentage of the gains relative to their percentage of the population. According to a study by Princeton University, those at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy are making all the major decisions in society, and not we the people as a whole[29]. Read that Princeton study for yourself. Consistently, whatever policy decisions the American people want have no impact on the decisions made by their (s)elected leaders; the small percentage of very wealthy are calling the shots in a so-called "democracy" that was originally meant to be a "representative republic", but is really and truly an oligarchy of sorts. "Corporate Dictatorship" or "Inverted Totalitarianism" would be more accurate terms for what the U.S. really is today.
Further, the government taxing the hell out of the middle class and small businesses while letting the Fortune 500 corporations avoid paying their fair share does not help anything, either, nor does the Federal Reserve manipulating the value of our currency to benefit its favored institutions and shareholders(who are kept secret from the public) while devaluing the currency and reducing the ability of ordinary people like me to save. It also doesn't help that government regulations are structured in a manner to allow established industries a loophole to the rules, while providing enough red tape and taxation to penalize an average person for trying to start their own enterprise. There are a lot of small business owners working 80 hours a week or more and also having to function as their own accountants and lawyers while servicing debt, often paying 35% tax while the Fortune 500 boys collecting the interest payments don't pay s***[30], relatively speaking, while the small business still has a 90% chance of failure[31].
To those right-wingers here deriding violent protesters as wanting handouts, the entirety of our society is run using the threat of violence. The violence of a few justifiably upset protesters is nothing, compared to the violence used by the state to make sure everyone is exploitable by the corporate gold collar scum that reap the majority of any benefits to be derived from the arrangement. From what I can tell, most people don't want handouts. They want rightful compensation for their labor and a livable society where prosperity is accessible, both of which are far from unreasonable demands, as when this society was less wealthy and less productive, it was more livable and wages were significantly higher than they are today. The protestors want the gold collar scum to pay for preying upon society as a whole and taking all of the benefits for themselves, and for this arrangement to be turned on its head and reversed.
In short, the elite have got to go. Otherwise, if a peaceful means of deposing them is not allowed, violence will be the inevitable result. It's not because the masses are selfish and want something for nothing, it is about survival and being entitled to a dignified existence as a fair exchange to spending what is often half of ones' waking hours laboring so that someone richer can collect.
If I had my way, laborers from a lowly janitor on up to a CEO and small businesses would never be taxed at all on their wages, and all of the taxes would be taken directly from the profit margins of the corporate behemoths, starting at $100 million/year. Between $100 million and $1 billion/yr profits, 25% tax rate, no loopholes of any sort. $1 billion to $5 billion/year profits, 50% tax rate. Above $5 billion/year profits, 90% tax rate. This would be used to fund the basic functions outlined in the U.S. Constitution, and if and only if there is anything left and pending a constitutional amendment to allow it, only then would a check of equal amount be cut for each and every American as a sort of minimum income for all. Throw in Bernie Sanders' proposal for taxing Wall Street transactions so as to prevent the rapid trading that goes on today and is used to extract money from transactions by virtue of computer processing speed and blatant market manipulation. Failing these two proposals, then I'd prefer to abolish the IRS and tax system altogether. In either event, a rule would be established abolishing the minimum wage with regard to small business owners and raising it to $25/hour and indexed to inflation for those that work for large corporations, with the stipulation that the highest paid employee and/or owner of a business was not allowed to be paid more than 10x that of the lowest paid employee of said business. Usury, interest, and the entirety of the current system of credit would be banned, so that we could all watch the prices of college educations, homes, healthcare, and other necessities plummet to reasonable levels as less fiat money is available to chase them and as the middlemen collecting on the interest are cut out. The Federal Reserve would be abolished, along with the FBI/DEA/NSA/DHS/TSA/BATF and the rest of the military/security/surveillance industrial complex. The national debt would also be abolished, a balanced budget amendment pushed, and the money from then on would have to be backed by some kind of tangible asset(such as gold/silver).
I am a pseudo-Marxist that has zero problem with free enterprise on a small scale and thinks that our Founding Fathers had some damned good ideas. One might think these traits mutually exclusive, but need I remind you that even Thomas Paine wanted a guaranteed minimum income for all as he wrote about in Agrarian Justice, well before communism or socialism were even defined words, and Thomas Jefferson himself was highly distrustful of concentrated corporate power. My problem is with the gold collar scum whom think that they have a right to own/exploit humanity and/or the near totality its productive output, the same gold collar scum that have purchased virtually all of the world's governments including that of the United States and dictate the laws that we are all expected to follow, yet whom find workarounds to these same laws themselves and have so thoroughly purchased the justice system that hardly anyone attempts to prosecute them for their crimes.
I am more libertarian than the vast majority of Ayn Rand worshippers, in-spite of being a commie to some extent, but there is something to be said when a small group of people is making the bulk of society's decisions and hording the vast majority of its wealth. What's the point of having a civilization if there is going to be a complete and utter lack of civility? We may as well have anarchy, at that point... The Ayn Rand ideal taken to its logical conclusion can only be sustained with the threat of violence real and implied applied to those that do not rise to the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. I find this to be morally repugnant.
For the record, I was for the following candidates:
-2004: Ralph Nader (Nader wasn't on the ballot and write-ins weren't allowed, so did a coin toss. Heads: John Kerry. Tails: Michael Badnarik. It landed on heads. I despise Kerry, but Bush was that bad. In restrospect, I regret that vote and should have picked Badnarik.)
-2008: Ron Paul (I didn't vote. He wasn't on the ballot, I couldn't write him in, and I walked out.)
-2012: Gary Johnson (I voted for this one.)
-2016: Jill Stein (Depending on what happens with the rigged democratic primaries and the ballot, I may vote Sanders, but Stein is a better choice, as is Johnson.)
I have no illusions about a president magically solving any of our problems. Even the solutions I have proposed are not without inherent weaknesses. One of the only people in this topic that seems to understand how our society works as a system is LiveForPhysics, for as little words as he has said in this topic, he has said more than anyone. He seems to get it.
Hitlery and Trumpolini should run together on the same ticket as the Axis of Evil. Both represent everything that is wrong with the extremely right-wing, extremely authoritarian, socialistic/capitalistic hybrid corporate dictatorship that is the United States, which is itself technically/legally a corporation, not a nation.
I like the idea of Adam Kokesh running in 2020. If I get a little nest egg set aside, I might use it to run myself in 2020, just to see what happens(I doubt I would get anywhere, but it would be a fun experiment nonetheless). America needs an anarchist for president that will dramatically shrink and/or dissolve the Federal Government, regardless of whether its an anarcho-communist(my preference) or an anarcho-capitalist(such as Mr. Adam Kokesh).
At the same time, the financial elite need to be reigned in, as they are the driving force behind the destruction of our planet, the erosion of our national sovereignty, and our collective descent into neo-Feudalism. If the people of the world do not revolt against this arrangement, the human species is likely doomed to extinction.
References:
[1]
http://nypost.com/2016/04/20/im-one-of-nycs-125000-ghosts-that-couldnt-cast-their-vote/
[2]
http://usuncut.com/politics/new-york-primary-disaster/
[3]
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/pol...lawsuit-alleged-voter-fraud-article-1.2603876
[4]
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/pol...ry-voter-hotline-swarmed-complaints/83248288/
[5]
http://vote.arlingtonva.us/absentee/lost-damaged-absentee-ballots/
[6]
http://www.hermes-press.com/criminal_vote.htm
[7]
http://bradblog.com/?cat=166
[8]
http://www.gregpalast.com/one-milli...-lost-if-some-politicians-want-it-to-be-lost/
[9]
http://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/election-2016-how-can-we-stop-dead-people-from-voting/
[10]
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal/legacy/2013/09/30/electbook-0507.pdf
[11]
http://www.ibtimes.com/jimmy-carter...-allows-legal-bribery-politics-former-2291811
[12]
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/gerrymandering-is-even-more-infuriating-when-you-can-actually-see-it/
[13]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/13/libertarian-party-sues-chance-stand-2016-president/
[14]
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-gets-most-gop-debate-talk-time-rand-paul-least-360724
[15]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091601936.html
[16]
http://www.greenpartywatch.org/category/ballot-access/
[17]
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/to-the-point/states-clamp-down-with-new-voter-id-laws
[18]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31010.htm
[19]
http://www.epi.org/files/2012/ib330-figureA.png.538
[20]
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/minimumwage
[21]
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-minimum-wage-should-be-22-hour-says-elizabeth-warren-1134793
[22]
http://www.alternet.org/labor/burger-king-and-mcdonalds-pay-fast-food-workers-20-hour-denmark
[23]
http://www.ibtimes.com/richest-20-a...lth-entire-bottom-half-country-report-2206865
[24]
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/world/wealth-inequality/
[25]
http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf
[26]
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/b...more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html
[27]
http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/01/news/economy/corporate-tax-rate/
[28]
http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-workers-face-tax-burden-315-percent
[29]
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites...testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
[30]
http://www.americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-corporate-tax-rates/
[31]
http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpat...ail-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-10/
I was tempted to write in vote for Pat Paulsen for president, but I successfully resisted the urge. :lol:
