Bernie Sanders (and American People) Cheated Again by Billionaire Oligarchs

Empowering Weak & Oppressed

Kevin Barrett

Sha'ban 07, 1441 2020-04-01

News & Analysis

by Kevin Barrett (News & Analysis, Crescent International Vol. 49, No. 2, Sha'ban, 1441)

The Democratic National Committee was as terrified of Bernie Sanders and his mass-based movement as was the Republican rival Donald Trump. The billionaire oligarchs running the DNC decided to sabotage Sanders’ campaign by manipulating the voting system and mysteriously handing over the “Super Tuesday” primaries to Joe Biden who was badly trailing Sanders before March 3. The US is not a democracy; it is run by the oligarchs to benefit themselves at the expense of ordinary people. (Photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

In late February, Bernie Sanders was the clear favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination. He had won the most votes and the most delegates, outpacing all his rivals by substantial margins. Sanders had raised enormous sums of money through very large numbers of small contributions from ordinary working people, while the other candidates relied on mega-contributions from billionaires—if they weren’t billionaires themselves, like Bernie’s then most formidable challenger, Michael Bloomberg.

Sanders was drawing overflow crowds to his huge rallies, while all the other candidates basically had to pay small handfuls of people to show up. The polls showed Sanders with a significant lead on the rest of the pack. No other candidate enjoyed even a tiny fraction of the popular support lined up behind Bernie Sanders.

Suddenly, on so-called “Super Tuesday”—March 3, the day fourteen states held primary elections, selecting one-third of the Democratic Convention delegates—everything changed. The anointed establishment candidate, Joe Biden, a sleazy political insider whose gaffes had led observers to suspect senility or brain damage, came out of nowhere to win ten states to Sanders’ four. Overnight the almost-forgotten Biden was the presumptive nominee. What happened?

The answer, in four words: The fix was in. Journalist Ruth Ann Oskolkoff reports that a Democratic Party whistleblower (who insha’Allah will not meet the same fate as Seth Rich) revealed on January 20 that Biden had been secretly pre-selected: “This person (the whistleblower) had interactions earlier that evening with high level party members and associates of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who said that they have now selected Biden as the Democratic Party nominee, with Warren as the VP. They also said the plan is to smear Bernie as a Russian asset.”

Primary election voters, not the Democratic National Committee, are supposed to select the nominee. How could the DNC possibly anoint the unpopular Joe Biden as the nominee three weeks before the first primary election, New Hampshire’s was held on February 11? And when Biden’s campaign fizzled and went nowhere throughout the entire month of February, how could the DNC insiders still pull off a miracle win for him on March 3, Super Tuesday?

There are several answers to that question. The first and most obvious is that Super Tuesday itself was created by corrupt DNC insiders to stop progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders. They made sure the biggest bloc of states voting that day was in the south, where more conservative, establishment-friendly candidates had an advantage. The first Super Tuesday was held in 1980 featuring three states, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. It grew to nine in 1984, then 20 (twelve of which were southern) in 1988. This year’s Super Tuesday favored Biden not only due to the influence of relatively conservative white southerners, but also because, as Obama’s vice president, Biden is popular among African Americans, who make up a substantial percentage of Democratic primary voters in southern states.

The second and more nefarious factor behind Biden’s miracle was the unanimous decision taken by the billionaire class, and its DNC and media hirelings, that Sanders must not be allowed to win the nomination. The mainstream media “mighty Wurlitzer,” especially “liberal” outlets like MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post, spent the run up to Super Tuesday smearing Sanders and promoting Biden, while all the other “moderate” (i.e. pro-billionaire) candidates dropped out to make way for the former vice president.

Additionally, the internet monopolies including Google, Facebook, and perhaps Twitter, almost certainly tweaked their algorithms to favor a Biden victory. According to Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and his colleague Ronald E Robertson, “Google now has the power to flip upwards of 25 per cent of the national elections in the world with no-one knowing this is occurring.”

The way Google selects and orders its search results, and the way Facebook and Twitter select the posts and tweets they show you, can completely control many people’s voting behavior below the level of consciousness. These alarming findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in August 2015, should have quickly triggered emergency legislation forcing the break-up of the big internet monopolies, which are illegal under existing antitrust laws. But apparently it was too late; the billionaires who own these mega-corporations, and their Deep State friends, already controlled the political process, and the politicians knew it.

But the most nefarious computer manipulation throwing Super Tuesday to Biden may have been direct, shameless vote-counting fraud. It is entirely possible that despite all of the media propaganda, and despite the search engine and social media manipulation, Sanders actually won Super Tuesday—but was deprived of his victory by black-box computerized voting machines running proprietary non-transparent software programmed to miscount the votes. Election integrity expert Theodore de Macedo Soares writes:

“The discrepancies between the (Massachusetts) exit poll and the vote count for Sanders and Biden totaled 8.4%— double the 4.0% margin of error (95% CI) for their exit poll differences. Warren’s and Biden’s discrepancies also totaled 8.4%, again double the margin of error (95% CI) for their exit poll differences. These discrepancies replicate the total discrepancy of 8.0% favoring Clinton in the 2016 Massachusetts Democratic Party primary between her and Sanders.”

The same 8% discrepancy emerged in South Carolina, while Sanders voters appear to have been targeted for voter suppression in California and possibly Texas. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal observed that “California Steals Its Own Election: Voting reforms create an electoral mess and deny Sanders a bigger win.” If any African, Asian, or Latin American country ran elections like this, they would be universally denounced as a sham democracy.

Why was the American oligarchy so determined to block Bernie Sanders’ path to the presidency? The answer is that Sanders and his movement are pushing changes that could significantly diminish the wealth and power of the richest 0.1% of Americans. Indeed, Sanders has proposed an “extreme wealth tax” on that very group—the fewer than one in one thousand Americans whose net worth is more than $32 million dollars.

Sanders’ proposals for a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Expanding Social Security, and Free College for All would not only tap into the billionaires’ ill-gotten gains, but would also force the Pentagon to slash its budgets for nuclear bombs, bioweapon vats, and other armaments, and perhaps to close some or all of the overseas bases that provide the military scaffolding of the Anglo-Zionist Empire. The Deep State, consisting of the self-appointed Platonic Guardians who inhabit such institutions as the National Security Council, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, has no intentions of relinquishing its empire without a fight. It will use all of its considerable power to prevent Sanders’ vision from becoming reality.

For the reasons explained above, the psychopathic elite running America will almost certainly continue to run the nation, and the planet, into the ground—at least until there is a widespread revolutionary uprising against it. Such an uprising might happen in the wake of an economic and social collapse. It won’t happen through a (rigged) election. In the meantime, would a Joe Biden administration be a significant improvement over Donald Trump’s?

Reasonable people differ on that question. Trump is clearly a sociopathic narcissist, and many of his policies are causing immense suffering. The neocons surrounding him are even worse than he is, because they are at least slightly more competent.

A Biden administration would be kinder, gentler, and more competent than Trump’s. It would bring back the JCPOA and at least ease the sanctions on Iran. It would strike more reasonable stances on international issues including climate change. It might even close the US embassy in Occupied Jerusalem al-Quds and move it back to Tel Aviv, triggering a replay of the Obama-Netanyahu feud.

But the people around Biden, smoother and smarter than those around Trump, would still be pursuing the evil goals of an evil empire. Their competence would ultimately be in service to evil. A lesser evil that is more competent in pursuing evil than a grossly incompetent greater evil is hardly a desirable choice. Ultimately, if the American people want decent leadership, they don’t need an election—they need a revolution.

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