Obama Voting Rights Act Demagoguery

by Stephen Lendman

Democracy in America is pure illusion. Human and civil rights are vanishing in plain sight. Voting rights are more fantasy than real for millions - the nation's most vulnerable and disadvantaged, abused and disenfranchised.

Fifty years ago on August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. On August 8, Obama defended it duplicitously.

He claimed it "broke down legal barriers that stood between millions of African Americans and their constitutional right to cast ballot. It was, and still is, one of the greatest victories in our country's struggle for civil rights." 

Earlier articles explained it nominally supports 15th Amendment protections. They prohibit federal or state governments from denying citizens voting rights based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

On February 3, 1870, it was ratified. Fulfillment didn't follow promise. Nor from the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

US enfranchisement was constitutionally flawed by design. America's founders believed only adult white male property owners deserved it.

Laborers were excluded. So were women. They were considered homemakers and child-bearers, an appendage of their husbands. Nothing else. Slaves were  property, not people. 

Native Americans, free Black men, apprentices, felons, and persons considered incompetent were denied.

From inception to today, US elections were never open, free and fair. They're farcical. Big money controls them. Electoral fraud is rife nationwide - in federal, state and local contests.

Things are pre-scripted. Voters have no say. Secrecy and back-room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process.

Candidates are pre-selected. Monied interests own them. Key outcomes are predetermined. America is a one-party state. Duopoly power rules.

Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin. Not a dime's worth of difference separates them on major issues mattering most.

Self-styled people's candidate Bernie Sanders is as hawkish as war goddess Hillary Clinton - as pro-corporate as the array of Republican presidential aspirants, as guaranteed to betray his supporters as any high office hopeful in recent memory. 

As they say: as phony as a three dollar bill, part of the dirty system, deceiving supporters to think he's different. He's a card-carrying member of America's deplorable establishment, part of its dark side.

Things are rigged to assure only pre-selected duopoly candidates win. Independent ones like 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney are shut out entirely. 

Media scoundrels ignored her - the same way they gave Ralph Nader short shrift, as well as current and 2012 Green Party presidential aspirant Jill Stein. 

So-called duopoly party "debates" are farcical - pure theater, no substance. Issues mattering most aren't addressed. Scoundrel media feature horse race journalism and trivia rubbish.

Millions of Americans are disenfranchised. The Sentencing Project estimates around six million. Criminal records exclude one out of 13 Blacks - a deplorable example of racist discrimination. 

Efforts to suppress minority voters are rife. Half or more of eligible voters opt out - because no one represents them. The interests they most care about go unaddressed. 

Corporate-controlled touchscreen voting machines steal elections with electronic ease - programmed with secret software, easy to manipulate to produce outcomes duopoly bosses want.

Losers are declared winners. Partisan politics serves privileged elites exclusively. Democracy is pure fantasy, a figure of speech. It bears repeating. Americans get the best one money can buy. 

Supreme Court rulings affirmed it. One dollar = one vote. Deep pockets cast many. It's the American way. It shams the right way.

Obama ludicrously claimed America is a better place because "people who love (it) change(d) it…and…buil(t) a better country for our kids."

In June, investigative journalist Greg Palast explained Jim Crow thrives in America. "Electoral purge" threatens "millions of minority voters" - in 27 mostly Republican states.

Last October, Palast wrote an extensive report titled "Jim Crow Returns." It never went away. It's tactics alone changed, helped by state-of-the-art technology.

Imprisoned in America then exiled for her redoubtable political and social activism, Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940) once explained: "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal."

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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