Blatant election corruption is now the rule rather than the exception across the western world, including in the United States. Elections now serve only one purpose in modern government: They perpetuate the illusion of an elected government that makes decisions. This means the “right kind” of people need to be elected, compliant politicians who will keep the corporate subsidies and bailouts flowing to the five-fingers of our fascist economy without raising too much alarm.
The problem is that the voters are not always compliant in that regard, so the Deep State has created a three-step way of managed-corruption in elections, both in America and abroad.
The levels of electoral corruption in our fascist empire are:
- Propaganda with vote-buying.
- Lawfare and vilifying propaganda.
- Color revolutions and assassination.
Apologists for the regime, often masquerading as defenders of the free market, attempt to propagandize the plebes with statistics that food like bread is cheaper in inflation-adjusted terms than before. But is the high-fructose corn syrup-infested food product that the supermarkets call “bread” really comparable to what our grandparents bought and ate back in the 1960s?
Or they enthusiastically tell us that the average house size is bigger than ever. But if ten people have 1,000 sq. foot houses, one builds on a 500 sq.ft. addition and an eleventh person enters the market and builds a new 11,000 sq.ft. McMansion, the average space more than doubles without the overwhelming majority of people seeing any change whatsoever. It’s not like the majority of those houses built in the 1940s and 50s had major additions put on them.
Military contractors place their factories strategically in as many congressional districts as possible. And that masterfully-planned policy is not to increase economic efficiency, but to increase political efficiency, to get their programs funded by Congress.
This propaganda doesn’t work when middle class workers are shouldering a higher tax burden than the middle class did during World War II, which they are, even though there’s no global war to fight.
The poor and middle class laboring people pay double the tax rate of the wealthy who work with capital, and they have been feeling that burden for decades:
The Democratic Party machine looks at the above chart and chants that the rich aren’t taxed enough; libertarians look at the above chart and conclude working people are taxed too heavily, and that the only solution is massive spending cuts (not tax cuts with deficit spending that create inflation and more debt) and tax cuts for the middle class and working poor. We are not the same. Democrats and compliant Republicans perpetuate the oppression of the middle class and working poor, while the libertarian path is to liberate them from high taxes, including especially the regressive inflation tax. Libertarians know inflation is wage theft.
So the regime tries to buy off the votes of the idle poor with welfare dimes and dangles college loans/aid to the middle class in an attempt to buy off the working poor and middle class’ votes by offering them back pennies on the fortune they are first forced to pay up in taxes. In the past, this always worked on American voters.
But federal student loans and the pittance of Social Security and Medicare in comparison to what working people are paying out to the government in the form of taxes are often not enough to buy their votes these days, as we saw recently with the 2016 and 2024 election of Donald Trump.
Trump is and always has been 95% on the side of the Deep State. He increased military spending for the military-industrial complex during his first term and bullied Europe into doing the same during his first term. He increased aid to Israel. The Deep State loved that.
But on the other side, he was unwilling to escalate relations between Ukraine and Russia into a full-blown war. And that was not enough for the greedy Deep State, which will allow no independence, and forsake no war materiel profits. Worse still from the perspective of the Deep State, Trump bragged in 2016 he had used the process of campaign donation corruption as a businessman, exposing the practice and campaigning on a pledge to end the practice (which he hasn’t, but that’s not the point here). The Deep State greatly preferred the calm of the zombie presidency of Joe Biden and the would-be servile presidency of the principle-free zone that is Kamala Harris’ brain to Trump’s occasional clumsy forays into foreign policy independence and gaffes publicizing inconvenient truths about corruption in Washington.
So there are other additional steps to take when the working poor and middle classes gravitate toward a political candidate that is not sufficiently servile to the Deep State. Consider the cases of populists Donald Trump, France’s Marine LePen, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. All of them have had criminal charges invented against them, just as Bolsonaro’s predecessor Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva had charges invented against him and was imprisoned (until the Brazilian Deep State decided Lula was more servile than Bolsonaro, and that he was the only chance of beating Bolsonaro in the 2022 election, after which Lula was magically freed from prison). Today, Lula’s out of jail and back in the presidential palace and Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election and is facing coup charges and prison.
The idea behind lawfare is to busy independent-minded candidates so they can’t campaign and taint them with the stench of criminality among the population. This step also doesn’t work all the time, and the “tainted” candidate needs to be removed from the ballot, as we saw in Romania and France recently.
Or they can be openly carted off to prison, like Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a former national cricket star, who faced the manufacture of more than one hundred indictments on a wide variety of charges (sound familiar?) and is currently serving a 14-year sentence for “corruption.”
Sometimes the independent streak of political candidates is broader than one or two tentpole candidates who can be taken out with criminal charges, as Egypt found out in 2013. The CIA had already taken out its longtime lackey Hosni Mubarak in a coup just two years earlier during the Jasmine color revolution that swept part of the Islamic world. The problem was that Egyptian voters had chosen Mohamad Morsi as president in a broad multi-party coalition. His Freedom and Justice Party, though it sought peace with Israel, was insufficiently supportive of Israel’s ambitions in the region. So the CIA went back to military dictatorship the following year with a military coup under the brutal General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was trained at the U.S. Army War College (and there likely recruited into the CIA).
Sure, sometimes the regime changes demanded by Washington have to take the form of full-blown violent foreign invasions, like the invasion of Iraq deposing Saddam Hussein, the 2004 coup deposing Haitian President Jean-Bertrande Aristide, and the joint NATO and CIA murder of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya in 2011.
But most of the coups are soft coups, color revolutions like Ukraine’s Maidan in 2014, where elected presidents and their parties are deposed and exiled, and new leaders are “elected.”
Either way, Washington has to get its way with compliant politicians, who preferably just want to collect a check, who have no principles and who have no aspirations to impact policy.
Likewise, businessmen are supposed to be compliant to the Deep State. Even Elon Musk, who is essentially a 2004 Democrat and the richest man in the world, can comically find himself labeled a Nazi by fanatical dupes, find all his businesses under investigation, and be labeled a pariah from polite society by the Deep State’s media allies because of his support for Donald Trump. The talking points memos went out from Washington, and Musk is a Nazi to all the dedicated consumers of the corporate captive media.
The corporate media taken captive by the Deep State today most closely resembles Imperial Japan’s Zaibatsu, a handful of vertically-integrated conglomerates. If you look at the big five media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Universal, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and FOX-Newscorp), you find that ten years ago they controlled all aspects of the media production system, from production to network to local distribution for about 90% of the media Americans consumed. In other words, they owned the national news networks, the Hollywood production studios, the major cable television providers, many of the local affiliates, movie theaters nationwide, many radio stations, etc. Such a vertically-aligned cartel is necessary if you want gate-keeping control of information, which the Deep State desires.
The only good news is that the big five media companies, though attaining an annual revenue well in excess of $200 billion, have been bleeding audience for the past two decades and have been totally eclipsed by the podcast industry. The average Joe Rogan podcast has a larger audience than the entire 24-hour cycle of Fox News (the largest news network), plus the 24-hour cycles of CNN and MSNBC—combined. Watch half an hour of programming (appropriately named) from any of the big-five networks’ “news” shows, and you see advertisements that explain precisely how precariously they are sustained. You see ads subsidizing them from the military-industrial complex, giant pharmaceutical and agricultural companies, and advertisements for products for senior citizens (like walk-in showers and Medicare supplement programs) that reflect the demographic reality of how their audiences are literally dying off.
With the tech industry (Amazon, Facebook, Google and a few others) on board with the Deep State, tiny upstarts like Parler can be squashed temporarily and Alex Jones can be banned from most platforms. But like a hand squeezing a balloon, the audience just leaves their grip and flees to other, better-prepared alternatives like Rumble and the Elon Musk-era Twitter/X.
The free market poses no threat to the current economic system because the entire system of votes and vote-buying is based on preventing the free market from going too far in liberating the worker, the consumer and the voter from the heavy tax and regulatory burden they bear. It remains to be seen if the global censorship complex will succeed in banning or bringing to heel Rumble (which is banned in France and Brazil) and Twitter/X. The election of populists like Trump and Bolsonaro show that elites don’t always control the presidential offices, and there are cracks in their wall preventing people from seeing the information that could liberate themselves. But it’s far from clear that the free market, even the quasi-free market in media today, is enough to break the hold the fascist economic and political system currently in place has on Washington DC.
