Unless the nation lapses into lunacy on November 8, Hillary Clinton will be our next president.
The prospect raises an alarming question we've never before confronted.
How can a thriving democracy conceivably elect a president who is
dishonest and untrustworthy in the minds of 59% of the people? A woman
shown to be a felon but not prosecuted for want of precedent? A woman
who lies and contradicts herself, documented in video clips? A bold
hypocrite who solicits and accepts hundreds of millions in campaign
contributions from Wall Street banks, the armaments industry, and Big
Pharma, and claims to abhor Citizens United which enables her to do so?
The answer: we live in a moribund democracy, not a thriving one. A
conjunction of corporate political power and immense wealth is forcibly
installing a president. We haven't confronted this before, either. We
will cast our ritual ballots in November, but not in a free election:
the Democratic nominee was imposed upon us by the corporate and the
wealthy.
No, we have not been finessed by a patrician coup d'etat
nor a secret cabal in sinister conspiracy. Instead we are victimized
by systemic corruption in five institutions of public practice, and it
is subverting our democracy.
Of immediate concern is the corruption in the Democratic Party.
Directly violating the requirement for strict neutrality throughout the
primaries, the Democratic National Committee intervened in the process
at every opportunity, handicapping the Sanders campaign to assure
Hillary Clinton's nomination. The effort was covert, but it was
suspected, finally exposed, and ultimately successful.
This was the engine of coercion, the denial of democracy, and the
reason we will likely suffer a president unworthy of our trust. The
corruption was not an aberration, nor was it unique and
isolated: it flourished in a matrix of decadent institutions in which
democracy cannot survive.
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