Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.

The first to be assassinated that year, Martin Luther King, had dared link the suffering of African-Americans and the people of Vietnam. When Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, she spoke perhaps unconsciously for millions of America’s victims in faraway places. More

Within the theories of self-determination that lie at the heart of democracy and capitalism the idea of a political ‘center’ is paradoxical. Individually determined views and wants would bear no necessary relation to one another to be aggregated toward a common set of views without some unifying device. And any such device would render the idea of individual determination improbable. Propaganda was invented by (American) Edward Bernays in the early twentieth-century as just such an 'external' unifying device with public opinion being the views of an authoritarian elite who use psychology and social coercion to tell the public what opinions to hold. Bill Clinton was a master of ‘Political Coercion for the Hell of It’ through his use of micro polling with little apparent understanding of its limitations. More

Many Bernie Sanders activists and supporters are understandably disgusted by the contemptuous mistreatment they and their candidate have received from the corporate-Clintonite Democratic Party and its numerous media allies....It hasn’t just been about insults, put-downs, and smears. There’s also the Clinton-captive Democratic Party’s systematic and authoritarian distortion and, yes, rigging of the primary nomination process at the local, state, and national levels. There are abundant reasons to believe that Hillary has benefitted from electoral and administrative shenanigans across the (seemingly endless) primary season. The fixing process was evident in Las Vegas recently, when the Nevada Democratic Party chair “shut down debate behind a screen of uniformed police” after the party excluded 58 Sanders delegates with sudden “rules changes” clearly made to block Sanders’ rightful claim to have won Nevada. No wonder a Sanders delegate grabbed a chair and thought about tossing it. More