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I find it sad and sickening that most Americans, and the corporate media that shapes them, are more concerned about the effects of Russian “meddling” on our “democracy” than they are about our own home-grown oligarchs, who are not only meddling, but have bought Congress and turned this wonderful democracy we’ve been told we have into a joke—an anti-democratic cesspool.

In my view, the Koch brothers, among a host of others, present more danger to the U.S. than Putin could ever dream of. Christ, when are people ever going to accept the truth; the real danger is home-borne?

Like any other disease on the Centers for Disease Control’s fluctuating, potentially terminal watch list.

All nations fail on their own accord—it doesn’t take meddling from abroad when the cards are stacked against the oppressed in their own nation.

People watch too much TV. It’s sad they choose to ignore how duped they are by corporate media.

A mass uprising against the American oligarchs would leave Putin with nothing. After all, his American friends are our real enemies. Trump doesn’t even register, because he’s an incompetent flailing in the wind. Paul Ryan counts. Mitch McConnell counts. They’re Koch friends and benefactors, and business with Russia counts for them. They’re all for it, as long as it’s done properly—oligarch-to-oligarch, and in a far-less messy tyle than Trump’s deals.

You simply cannot trust the wall of obfuscation that surrounds us now, filtered through corporate media. With the party elites fighting each other over the “spoils of globalization” and the press-release media following along, the situation is untenable for ordinary men and women who cannot keep up with the cost of housing, education, health care and a Sundae at the local ice cream parlor.

As for the media? There’s a lot of steno-work out there now, and far too little investigative reportage.

Paul Edwards wrote astutely in CounterPunch last month:

“The claim that all that is wrong with America is due to the malignant machinations of Putin is the most blatantly false, potentially disastrous bucket of bullshit ever inflicted by the matrix on this ignorant, credulous, propagandized people.”

This is how I put it down a little over eight years ago in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a notable right-wing insurgency had emerged and the Tea Party rose out of the muck. The president had his drone wars and secret kill lists in order, if not a plan to democratize the United States:

Dear Mr. President, One presumes you had access to or knew all along about the trove of Afghanistan War documentation that has surfaced via WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. Yet you persisted in your quest to expand the war. At what point in your ascendancy did you make this pact with the corporate hooligans who must have told you to jump aboard the kill machine or be banished? Was it during your first campaign in the Illinois legislature? Or during your run to the U.S. Senate? Or did your sudden dash past Clinton in the primaries occur precisely because you took the payoff – “give us permanent war and you get another day in the sun?” President Obama, you are hope(less). The people were tired of dirty tricks and denial and the imperialist war machine when they voted you in over John McCain. And they remain tired of it. And all you can do is play the game that we were inspired to believe you might help finish off—the old game of Imperial Monopoly. It did not take you long to expose yourself as a fraud, Mr. President. Knowing this makes me sad. Yours truly, TS

Tea Party racists and retrograde Republican congressmen had their own brand of kill lists, of course—but theirs was unimpeded by secrecy. They attacked in broad daylight, and darkness soon spread over the land.

By the date of my open letter, July 26, 2010, I’d had enough of Obama’s lies and deception. Two years into his presidency it was clear; the first black American president was a fraud.

I took him to task, as did many others on the left, for his duplicity. The right was busy bullying him for the color of his skin, his theoretical birthplace in Kenya, and his “socialism.”

Obama hardly fought in return. He droned people abroad, listened to the bankers, and shrugged.

Yet today he is still revered in most Democrats’ eyes, in a deeply disturbing nostalgic way—despite making a mockery of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Dems had a problem back then, and they refused to deal with it, perhaps because of their corporate myopia and pathetic search for the golden urinal—the seductive status-quo jobs they revered more than good governance and democracy.

Now they pay lip-service to the loss they inspired.

This piece is a good intro for the centrist mob that still mourns for Hillary and the ineptitude surrounding her ’16 run for the top job.

America was cheated out of a presidential race that year, via corporate-groomed subterfuge, and what we got is exactly what we deserved.

As much as Dems would love me to join the party and blame the Russians, it ain’t gonna happen. “Comrade,” as centrist liberals have taken to calling anyone who disputes the Russia-did-it narrative, our mess is the fault of the American oligarchy—not Russia’s.