Lesser Evil Voting as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
 The ever more nauseating rightward drift of the DDDs that is aided and abetted by LEV in the absence of serious movement building on the left is part of the context that lets Republicans absurdly suck up populist, working class anger. As the Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein (who rightly calls for Hillary’s felony indictment) told me last February, “Lesser Evil strategy requires you to be silent, to turn your voice over to a corporate-sponsored politics, to a corporate-sponsored party. The politics of fear delivers everything we are afraid of by entrusting the fox to guard the chick coup. Silence is not an effective political strategy. And besides the Lesser Evil invariably paves the way for the Greater Evil.” Stein cited the right-wing Congressional election victories of 2010, which reflected mass popular anger and disgust with the corporate-neoliberal Obama’s failure to pursue a remotely progressive agenda when he enjoyed Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and an angry citizenry ready to punish the plutocracy. Obama responded by acting to protect the bankers and “throw [ordinary middle and working class] people over the cliff.” By 2014, Stein noted, just a third of electorate came out to vote since “Lesser Evilism gives nothing to vote for. Eighty percent of young people stayed home. Labor stayed home. A lot of women stayed away…People don’t come to vote on what they fear,” Stein observes. “They vote on what they’re for.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/dont-blame-me-if-trump-wins/

The specific electoral and party system changes required to make U.S. elections worthy of passionate citizen engagement are well known. “We need,” Wilpert writes, “to address issues such as: the influence of money on political campaigns, the lack of any proportionality in representation (first past the post system), gerrymandering, inequality in representation (that small states have about 40 times the weight in the Senate as a large state, and three times in a presidential election), lack of access to mass media in campaigns, etc.”   Yes: imagine the introduction of an elections and party system aligned with the notion of popular sovereignty (the U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare, by the way). A Democracy Amendment to the U.S. Constitution anyone?
Trump may end up being more viable in November than I originally thought. This will garner lefties living in contested states more lectures on our solemn duty to block “fascism” by voting for a right-wing fanatic (Hillary Clinton) – for a warmongering enemy of workers and the environment, a friend of Wall Street and “free trade” (the corporate Clinton wing of the Democratic Party defeated efforts to insert opposition to the TPP into the party’s platform), and a genuine threat to launch World War III. When I reject that counsel and Trump wins, if he does, I am not going to take the blame for the ascendancy of the Donald. Sorry. The dismal dollar Dems and their left enablers will have a lot more to answer for on that score.

https://www.rt.com/news/350229-anti-nato-summit-poland/
https://www.rt.com/news/350289-eu-data-transfer-us/

https://www.rt.com/news/350281-stoltenberg-nato-buildup-russia/

&& more low fruits

Monsanto, Bayer, and the Push for Corporate Cannabis

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/08/monsanto-bayer-and-the-push-for-corporate-cannabis/