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Joachim Hagopian Obviously the goal is to get the most viable presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to buy into your electoral reform bill as the leaders who could then sell it to the voting public. What if they either remain unreceptive or tell you, “yeah it looks good on paper, but that kind of radical change doesn’t come overnight, so we need to move in smaller incremental steps.” How would you respond to these two scenarios?
Sadly, they have both blown me off, as have various others including Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bloomberg, whom I had hoped would see that the Electoral Reform Act of 2016 was something he and the Senators from New York could move forward regardless of whether he ran for president of not. All I can do is keep posting to the Internet, posting Amazon Kindle white papers such as my latest, Democracy Riots! We are all black, deal with it!, and hope that over time the meme is picked up. I consider it very sad that all of Bernie Sanders’ admirers and all of the progressive press outlets pre-disposed to support ubber-fascist Hillary Clinton, are absolute ignorant of or unwilling to explore the reality that 60% of our voters have been completely disenfranchised, and the two-party tyranny is actively blocking the Constitution, Green, Justice, Libertarian, Reform, and Working Families parties from ballot access, along with all Independents. What I learned in 2012 as a candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination is told in my article, “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny” (Reality Sandwich, 24 May 2012).
Right now I consider Donald Trump a potential savior who will self-destruct, and Bernie Sanders a fraud with potential. Imagine if they both came together and agreed to co-sponsor a virtual Constitutional Convention, an unemployment workshop, and the Electoral Reform Summit that would force the Republican Party controlling Congress to pass the Electoral Reform Act of 2016, one that would over-turn the unfair super-delegate advantage that Hillary Clinton has bought or blackmailed her way to? Imagine if Trump and Sanders announced that if they won they would restore the Constitutional traditional of making the other candidate the Vice President, and they would work together to create a Coalition Cabinet able to guide an evidence-based government? For them to not do this suggests they are both part of the Establishment, and merely an advanced form of theater much as Chris Hedges has written about his book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
- Obviously the two party system has all the money and political clout supported by the Supreme Court Citizens United decision to make it legal to buy the president and Congress. Since 99% of Congress members are members of this two party system, how would you entice them to literally bite and destroy the hand that feeds them by voting for the reform bill. Undoubtedly they would perceive it as political suicide much the same way being critical of Israel and losing AIPAC’s financial backing is. How would you entice Congress members to embrace reform particularly if you cannot get the likes of Trump or Sanders behind it?
Article 1 of the Constitution calls for Congress to balance the power of the Executive. For centuries a diversity of parties honored this aspect, often achieving considerable bi-partisan comity. All of this was destroyed by Newt Gingrich when he set out to destroy Speaker Jim Wright and himself become Speaker. He turned all Members into foot-soldiers for their parties, forced to vote the party line (that is sold to any of the 40 odd billionaires that own Congress, as itemized by US News & World Report. The story of how Gingrich subverted Congress is told in The Ambition and the Power–The Fall of Jim Wright : A True Story of Washington.
To destroy the two-party tyranny and its toxic grip on Congress demands an Electoral Reform Act of 2016 and the election of 20-30 new Members into the seats being vacated. My ideal would be ten Constitution and Libertarian members, ten Green and Working Families Members, and ten Independent Members. I tried to get Tom Steyer to focus on this, my memorandum to him is posted online, but to no avail. I am constantly astonished at how naïve and unfocused our well-intentioned billionaires are.
From where I sit, Trump and Sanders, together with Bloomberg and the Senators from New York, and some others such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have the power to force the issue of an Electoral Reform Act of 2016, right now, before the primaries in May and June. I do not understand why they all refuse to embrace these fundamental ideas so in keeping with our Constitution and our ideals, but it is what it is.
As I outline in my proposals to Trump, Sanders, Bloomberg, and Steyer specifically, the Electoral Reform Act of 2016 focuses on electing free spirits to the vacated seats, not on threatening the two-party tyranny directly – the Members of the two-party tyranny would then receive one term in which to reassert their role as representatives of their constituents and we would end party control of privileges, assignments, and budgets in the Congress.
If Trump, Sanders and others refuse to engage on the Electoral Reform Act of 2016, then we must conclude they are all part of what Chris Hedges calls the triumph of spectacle, and we must prepare for a violent revolution….almost all of the preconditions of revolution exist in the USA today (and other major Western countries), we are at a point we must heal ourselves or die trying.
- Americans have become so dumbed down, apathetic and disempowered that a huge percentage of our population would be either too cynical, doubtful or apathetic to take electoral reform seriously. How would you get past this challenge to educate, empower and motivate citizens to become politically active and involved in electoral reform?
I am truly saddened by the ease with which George Soros is able to manipulate the so-called progressives who have not learned how to think for themselves, and I hope that Trump and his followers can demonstrate absolute discipline to show that it is the agitators who are spewing hate, hurling epithets, and inciting violence. I have not, however, given up on America. There is a very large body of veterans – over twenty million – as well as law enforcement officers – close to three million – and very large bodies of people of color, single moms, recent college graduates without jobs, and old guys like me – who are capable of thinking clearly.
What we have been missing is a precipitant of revolution, like the Tunisian fruit seller. I wrote an article for CounterPunch, “On the Seventh Day: A Fantasy,” that opens with a soccer mom torching herself on the steps of Capitol Hill after first posting a denunciation and manifesto to YouTube. That is the kind of precipitant we are missing. The assassination of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders would serve as well.
- Do you foresee the elitist power structure using the corrupted judicial system as a weapon to thwart any chance of reform becoming successful? Do you have a strategy to deal with legal barriers that might be imposed?
In my view the legal system is effective only as long as 80% accept its legitimacy. We are far past that point. Matt Taibbi has written two Nobel-level books in the past decade, the first chronicled the merge of financial and political crime (Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America) and the second documents the complete collapse of the US legal system (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap). We are now at a point where violent revolution is the alternative to electoral reform and the good news is that the uniformed officers are by and large on the side of the 99% — as Chris Hedges so wisely observes in Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, the 1% can continue to repress the 99% only if the uniformed officers continue to support the elite. That is no longer the case, in my view.
- What you’re introducing here with your reform bill is a fundamental transformation of power from the ruling elite that’s had it their way virtually forever to the people as informed, empowered citizens participating in the democratic process that our Founding Fathers envisioned. Evil power as we know isn’t going to passively sit by while it’s stripped away from the elite. Aside from legal channels to block your reform efforts, what other means do you see the powerbrokers taking to stop reform? And how would you respond to them?
I am huge on Truth & Reconciliation for the simple reason that vindictive justice is destructive, and there is nothing to be gained from confiscating what is essentially false digital wealth based on compound interest within a rigged system. Apart from electoral reform I call for communities to take control of their land and property – end all absentee landlords – and begin creating infinite wealth by following the precepts of Richard Wolfe, among other, who calls for the insertion of full democracy into every workplace. The idea of humans as slaves is with us still, wage employees are nothing more than slaves in costume. It is the five billion poor – whose economy is four times the size of the one billion rich (four trillion a year in aggregate income instead on one trillion a year) – that will save us. We need to deliver free Internet, free energy, and free water to all of them as quickly as possible, I have outlined a plan for doing this using Open Source Everything Engineering, delivered to the United Nations as Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) – Achieving the SDG Goals in a Fraction of the Time at a Fraction of the Price and subsequently refined as The Ultimate Hack – Resilient Villages, Smart Cities, Prosperous Nations at Peace — and Unlimited Clean Water.
- As you well know of all people with your background having worked in intelligence for many years, the crime cabal government has employed hit squads seemingly forever in covert assassination programs by the rogue elements you’re obviously familiar with to silence/neutralize any perceived threat(s). They of course took out our greatest hope of leadership in the 60’s that could have shaped a different history. If anything, over time it’s only grown worse with the highly sophisticated remote technologies used now to induce heart attacks, aggressive disease, etc. that are virtually untraceable only further supported by a corrupt system that’s always ready to rubber stamp suicide or natural cause as cause of death. As a CIA whistleblower you probably have already experienced some of this as a high profile target yourself. They probably got to former FBI honcho Ted Gunderson and lots of others as well. How would you deal with these very real threats/barriers that could be used against you and others attempting to essentially strip power from the criminals currently holding all the power at their disposal?
We now know with precision that the US Government was a party to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We know, as you suggest, that many people have been assassinated, among whom I would include several Senators. However, the times they are a’changing. First off, I am simply not important enough to be worth killing. I have been very successfully marginalized, not only by the secret intelligence community, but by the progressive press that fronts for them including Mother Jones, Slate, Truth Out, and Rolling Stone, the occasional investigative piece not-with-standing. All these people are generally bought and paid for; as long as I lack both celebrity and money I am not a threat. You are absolutely correct about the use of guns that can cause cancer and heart attacks, as well as the popular “Boston Brakes” or automobile computer hacking and hijacking such as was used to kill investigative journalist Michael Hastings. And let us not forget, they always have the old-fashioned methods, Gary Webb ostensibly committed suicide by putting not one but TWO bullets into his brain – and the US legal system accepted that.
By the by, I am not a whistleblower. I have never violated my lifetime secrecy oath, I have never betrayed secrets, I am simply the most published legal, open critic of the dysfunctional secret intelligence sources and methods.
I consider intelligence to be the single best professional in the world, and the most important. I wrote a piece once on how politics and intelligence were not in conflict, as long as they both retained their integrity – politics is supposed to achieve best results for the greater whole, and intelligence is supposed to achieve best truth in support of political – which is to say in theory – human centric – decision-making.
In my view, we are ready for an awakening – a massive shift in public consciousness in which all the good people in the US Government that have been enabling treason by religious or ideological zealots as well as your garden-variety financial crooks say ENOUGH! Keeping Truth & Reconciliation in mind, there is absolutely nothing standing in the way of the United States of America becoming a prosperous nation at peace with the world. We the People simply have to want and demand that….
See Also:
Democracy Riots! We are all black now — deal with it!
Democracy Lost — with 100+ Book Reviews
