The establishment have pulled out all the stops with the 2016 election, presenting the two most hated candidates yet. But convincing the American people to accept the old game has proven no simple task. The latest round of propaganda includes the creation of a new super PAC in support of Clinton which was kicked it off with a video featuring wealthy celebrities including Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr, Don Cheadle, Keegan Key and others, edited together to berate the viewer with a very simple message: “We’re rich so our opinions are more important than yours.” The video is entitled Save The Day and if you’ve seen it, you probably weren’t aware that it was a Super PAC created by Hollywood director Joss Whedon.

Super PACs are a type of independent Political Action Committee (PAC) that are legally permitted to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, and individuals. One of the touchstones of the Bernie Sanders campaign was its lack of Super PAC money.

But the Save The Day propaganda video wasn’t the only helping hand Hillary received from her friends in Hollywood, as her subsequent appearance on the mock celebrity interview show “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis further exemplifies the extent to which moneyed interests are willing to go in their vain attempt to distract Americans from awakening to the realization that there are no political solutions, that the elections are merely a spectacle, and that it doesn’t matter who is elected. Continuity of the status quo marches on regardless of whose face is on it. Those who see the corruption but fail to understand the meaninglessness of the presidential circus understandably favor Donald Trump because of his appearance as a political outsider, and to express their fury at America’s dwindling economic status that took perhaps one of its hardest blows from NAFTA during the administration of Hillary’s husband.

Meanwhile the media have granted Trump billions of dollars in free television coverage to constantly push a message of fear, that the Donald is going to usher in an era of Fascism. But doesn’t America already resemble a fascist state? Look around. You ever hear about this endless string of police murders (more Americans have been killed by police since 9/11 than soldiers killed overseas)? You ever hear about the use of slave labor in our massive prison industrial complex that houses nearly two-and-a-half million prisoners (most of whom are there for the victimless offense of drug possession)? Have you been following the violent treatment of peaceful protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline? And how about the NSA’s egregious dragnet surveillance programs that constitute the most invasive obstruction of the Fourth Amendment in US history? Or the elimination of due process and Habeas Corpus through the extraordinary rendition (or kidnapping) of American citizens made legal under section 1021 of the NDAA? Have you watched the slow, institutionalized normalization and justification of CIA torture programs? And what about the unprecedented war against the whistleblowers who have sought to make the American people aware of these simple truths? All of this constitutes the actions of a kind of fascism. We’re there already. So Donald Trump is not the problem.

What is perhaps most ironic is that there are more black men in prison under an administration led by America’s first African American president than were enslaved in the 1850’s. And every single week we’re bombarded with yet another string of videos showing militarized police unnecessarily murdering African Americans or their SWAT counterparts suppressing the ensuing protests that invariably follow. Is Obama simply apathetic about African American lives, or is it just that presidents do not have any of the authority that most Americans ascribe to them?

As observed by Douglas Adams in the lat 1970’s, “The job of the president is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.”

The President is only a figurehead who wields no real power whatsoever. But many of us get so caught up in it as if elections determine the country’s socioeconomic or geopolitical trajectory, and as if citizens could ever influence them. As if the Electoral College doesn’t determine the outcome. As if the candidate with the most Super PAC money doesn’t always win. As if electronic voting machines in swing states haven’t repeatedly proven to favor the establishment candidate, even when exit polls reveal that the machines are counting the votes incorrectly. As if our elections aren’t decided years in advance at the Bilderberg Meetings by the world’s most powerful oligarchs. And as if the founding fathers actually desired a popular democracy in the first place (their idea of a democratic Republic did not grant the power of the vote to women, or Native Americans, or African slaves, or even white men who didn’t own land).

Longtime Clinton friend Jim Messina of The Messina Group attended the 2015 globalist conference. Messina also heads up the super PAC Priorities USA, which supported Obama and is now firmly in the Clinton camp. Messina also spearheaded Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and has just come back to the US after leading the deeply unpopular UK prime minister David Cameron to a surprise majority victory in British elections (of course, David Cameron resigned following the UK’s democratic decision to leave the EU).

So how best to convince an American constituency – who have become increasingly suspicious of corporate power – into accepting an establishment candidate like Hillary as the next Führer of the American Empire? A difficult pill to swallow considering the Clinton’s sordid history with pay-to-play politicking through the infamous Clinton Foundation. Despite public awareness of the truth, television personalities like John Oliver continue to signal establishment support for the Clintons by glossing over the most disturbing aspects of the Clinton Foundation, such as:

• The siphoning of Haiti relief money following the 2010 earthquake that prevented millions of homeless and starving Haitians from receiving aid
• Profiting from the mowing down of Colombian Rain Forests through the petroleum giant Pacific Rubiales, whose founder Frank Giustra sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation
• Protecting an African Warlord on behalf of a Swiss mining company called Lukas Lundin that violates international law to exploit Africa’s natural resources and paid the Clintons $100 million to keep the international community off their back for violating international sanctions in Sudan and elsewhere
• Selling Nuclear Weapons technology to China to finance Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in what has become known as the Chinagate scandal that resulted in the indictment and arrest of many top Clinton officials

When it became clear that many liberal American women weren’t taking the bait of accepting another corrupt Clinton as the “historic milestone” to follow up the disappointment that was the nation’s first African American president, Hillary’s campaign managers resorted to gender shaming women with Madeline Albright’s abominable declaration that there is a “special place in hell” for women who don’t support Hillary. This is the same Madeline Albright who calmly justified to a bedazzled 60 Minutes television audience in 1996 (while serving as Bill Clinton’s UN advisor) that the half-million dead children who perished as a result of America’s economic sanctions in the Mid-East was “worth it”. Isn’t that a message that American mothers can identify with? And if there ever really was a special place in hell for women who don’t support each other, then where was Madeline Albright’s support for Jill Stein?

So when Albright’s declaration about “women who don’t support each other” backfired, the machine resorted to the one tried-and-true tactic that has worked like a charm in just about every presidential election in our collective memory: the lesser of two evils boogieman.

This strategy is simple. Scare the bejeezes out of the people with a scary opposing nominee to pressure them into supporting the favored pick. This is why the media have given so much air time to Trump while practically blacklisting Bernie and outright ignoring Dr. Jill Stein.

In many ways, Donald Trump is the trump card for the elites. Trump reinforces the faux-feminism of the Clinton Cartel by demonstrating his very own brand of bona fide chauvinism with his beauty pageants and unfortunate instances of mouth-diarrhea. The media have worked hard to turn the 2016 electoral farce into a men-versus-women circus. The problem is that women don’t automatically support Hillary just because she’s a woman any more than men support Trump just because he’s a man. In fact, Hillary’s disingenuous bombast has been described by many as bourgeois feminism – a particularly vile brand of ideological feminism that neglects millions of immigrant women, poor women and the women under America’s bombs.

We’ve been told incessantly that this is “history in the making,” since“never before has a woman run for president!”

But this so-called “historic occasion” was already achieved many times over. In 1872 Victoria Woodhull ran for president after being nominated with the Equal Rights Party with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Then there was Belva Ann Lockwood in 1884, Grace Allen in 1940, Ellen Jensen in 1952, Charlene Mitchell in 1968 –and the list goes on.

Clearly this is not history in the making.

Fortunately, reading the comment sections of the aforementioned videos and articles reveals an inspiring truth; that after decades of broken promises, blatant corruption and political impotence from Washington, many Americans aren’t buying into the bullshit anymore. In fact, the free publicity for Trump seems to be backfiring a la The Streisand Effect.

And let’s not forget that voting machines are designed, programmed and manipulated by the very corporate elites who own the system and seek to preserve their power by rigging elections. This is why swing states are plagued by voting machine glitches, gerrymandering, prohibitive voter ID laws and even conspicuous acts of outright fraud. Presidents are not elected. Presidents are selected, and not by you or I.

Even after he was given the Nader treatment, Bernie Sanders played his role like the obedient puppet he is. When America’s confidence in the political process was at an all-time low, he got people excited about it again. When Hilary rigged the Democratic Primary against him, he endorsed the Democratic nominee – just like he said he would two years before his campaign even started – before taking a bow and exiting stage left. In the weeks and months since the DNC he has only betrayed the message of his campaign to parrot the politics of fear and peddle the nonsense of lesser-evilism. The same is true of other turncoats like Elizabeth Warren and Robert Reich, whose allegiance to the system outweighs all logic and certainly outweighs their genuine concern for the American people. The politics of fear predominates the narrative of every election. Its obtuse ideology paves the way to hell. The 2016 cycle is no different.

Even if, by some miracle, a candidate who actually had the best interests of the people in mind was allowed into the Oval Office and sworn in as President, their proposed policy positions would always be massively outgunned by the money, resources and lobbyists of the military-industrial-complex, the oil companies, the banks, et cetera.

If Jesus Christ somehow became President with the Buddha as his Vice and the 12 disciples fulfilling the roles of secretary of State, Defense, Treasury, Interior, and so on, the system would continue right on the way it always has because its structure determines its trajectory. It doesn’t matter who the players are.

We know that the elections are rigged. We know that there are no political solutions. We know that the banks and corporations are infinitely more powerful than the politicians they control. So why do we default back to this bogus idea that, “This time it’s different“?

America’s imperial system is a self-actualizing feedback loop that grants a monopoly of force and authority to the ownership class by siphoning resources away from anyone who refuses to bow at their feet. Distraction from this reality is the explicit purpose of electoral politics.

Perhaps we’re just addicted to pointing the finger at external personalities for the way things are. If we don’t face our own shadows we end up projecting them onto other people, and who better to point our fingers at than people like Hillary and Donald?

Then again, perhaps we don’t actually want things to change. Perhaps Americans really enjoy the heated hatred and finger-licking loathing that each election cycle brings to the table. It is, after all, an entertainment spectacle among the greatest shows on earth. Perhaps Americans are addicted to complaining instead of acting. Complaining is a comforting default but solutions require work.. It takes less effort to tolerate and complain about our enslavement than it does to alter the underlying foundations of it. So perhaps we subconsciously enjoy being ruled. Self-reliance, after all, requires personal responsibility. Laziness can never grant or maintain liberty. .

Plotting a course through uncharted political wilderness is an endeavor of uncertainty and our tendency to retreat to the familiar side of the river is strong when the water’s currents prove scary and cold. For many, a familiar lie is preferable to unknown and yet-to-be-discovered truths.

If we want the world to change around us, the first thing we have to change is ourselves. We would do well to heed the wise observation of French Sociologist Jacques Ellul who proclaimed:

There are no political solutions, only technological ones; the rest is propaganda.” 

Gabrielle Lafayette is a journalist, writer, and executive producer for the Outer Limits Radio Show.
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