“And no, sneaky pants Putin did not undermine (non-existent) US democracy (how is it possible to interfere with something that does not exist?) and insert his tangerine-tinged minion into the office of the US presidency.”

~ Phil Rockstroh

You ever wonder why establishment loyalists are still to this very day continuing to attack Jill Stein? Go to her Twitter page right now and you’ll see every one of her tweets packed with vitriolic comments from Maddow muppets accusing her of being a Kremlin stooge, accusing her of stealing money for the election recounts, accusing her of giving the country President Trump, all based on no evidence whatsoever. As Stein relates in her recent interview with Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted Podcast, the photo of her sitting at a dinner table with Vladimir Putin depicted nothing nefarious, the Green Party still has two active lawsuits over the recounts, and there is no mathematical basis for blaming her for Clinton’s loss.

All of which we already knew, by the way. Glenn Greenwald thoroughly debunked the Democrats’ Putin photo smear job when it first surfaced way back in August of last year, long before Rachel Maddow resurrected it completely out of the blue in February of this year. We’ve known since the election that Clinton would have still lost even if she’d been given the votes of every single Jill Stein voter for some bizarre reason in an alternate universe where woke lefties would willingly vote for a warmongering neoconservative, and the active court cases are a matter of public record. Any actual, real journalist would be aware of all of these things after a few minutes of research, but corporate media pundits do not exist to deliver journalism. Corporate media pundits exist to serve as attack dogs for the establishment.

There’s a relentless ongoing public flagellation of not just Stein but anyone who voted for her. Even though we know their votes made no difference in the outcome of the election, mainstream pundits continue to stomp on their heads every single day, screaming “You! Will! Not! Disobey! Again!” They are not satisfied with the fact that this wonderfully wise woman, whose Green New Deal could have literally transformed America and saved the world, received only one percent of the vote. They need to make an example of her and of everyone who voted for her as well.

In a corporatist system of government, which America unquestionably has, corporate media is the same as state media. It is propaganda. These immensely powerful media conglomerates collaborate to ensure that the US status quo which has been so friendly to their billionaire owners continues to make emperors of the wealthy and serfs of everyone else. The press, the only profession explicitly protected in the Constitution, exists in its most celebrated forms today not to create an informed populace as originally intended by America’s founding fathers, but to actively deceive the peasants into collaborating with their own serfdom. It is used to transform them into human livestock, whose efforts are funneled straight into expanding the empire of America’s ruling elites.

So they keep kicking Jill Stein voters, and kicking them and kicking them and kicking them until rank-and-file Democrats join in, and now you’ve got actual human relationships being ruined by the way people’s MSNBC-watching friends unleash the demons they’ve been fed upon their Green-voting friends and associates whenever anyone dares utter anything vaguely supportive of third parties. The completely irrational demonization of Jill Stein is now so complete that the CIA-funded Washington Post’s Dave Weigel recently posted a picture of progressive hero Jimmy Dore interviewing her in response to Dore’s criticism of Weigel’s establishment advocacy:

That’s seriously all Weigel felt he had to do in order to feel vindicated in that public debate. “Look, he talked to this demon once. I win.”

These people openly argue that the Greens should never have run a presidential candidate, insisting that they should just focus on state and local electoral contests, despite the fact that the Democrats attack them just as ferociously in those contests, and despite the fact that running a presidential candidate is an essential component in generating party legitimacy. “No, you must let us run our fake popularity contests between our two corporatists while struggling in obscurity, unseen and unheard.”

This is just one of the many, many obstacles keeping third parties from gaining any political traction in America, and it’s a huge one. If you can keep people from even thinking they deserve something other than two corporatist candidates who both support exploitative neoliberal economic policies and bloodthirsty neoconservative foreign policies, you kill the revolution before it starts. The American people could shrug off this brain box at any time like a heavy coat on a warm day, but as yet this has come nowhere remotely close to happening.

So what are the American people left with, now that any sense of entitlement to a third party alternative has been successfully stomped out of them? The choice between two corrupt, corporatist, oligarchy-serving parties, one of which cannibalizes progressive candidates and is now openly stating that it has no obligation to provide real party primaries.

That is not democracy. Even if America had a functioning electoral system (and it doesn’t), the fact that Americans are forced into a rigged two-party system wherein both parties are saturated in corruption means that nothing remotely like democracy is happening there. Libertarians will inevitably jump on this article with their “America is not a democracy! It’s a representative republic!” schtick. No it isn’t. It’s not a representative republic either. No political philosophy in which citizens can use votes to influence their government can rightly be applied to America today. As things stand right now, the American people have no power to use their votes to influence the behavior of their government. Even Republicans who thought they’d cheated the corrupt system with Trump are now seeing the administration rapidly escalating toward full-scale war with Syria, which was a major issue for his base. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

America is not a democracy, not a democratic republic, not a representative democracy, not a representative republic. None of those possible ways of squinting at America’s system of government correctly apply. America is a corporatist oligarchy.

And that’s the funniest thing about all this Russia nonsense. Even if everything the establishment is saying about Russia is true (and it isn’t), accusing Putin of attacking America’s democracy is like accusing him of attacking Bolivia’s fjords; there is no such thing. If Russia did succeed in undermining public trust American democracy, that can only be as bad as undermining public trust in the tooth fairy.

I continue to have faith that the American people can wake up out of this thing. I’ve witnessed too many miracles, seen too many strange and inexplicable shifts toward the light for my trust in human potential to be undermined by a few cold, hard facts. But at some point America is going to need to face those facts.

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