by Roger Stone
News Analysis

Donald Trump has said publicly that he fears the next election will be rigged. Based both on technical capability and recent history, Trump’s concerns are not unfounded.

A recent study by Stanford University proved that Hillary Clinton’s campaign rigged the system to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
What was done to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin is stunning.

Why would the Clintons not cheat again?

The issue here is both voter fraud, which is limited but does happen, and election theft through the manipulation of the computerized voting machines, particularly the DIEBOLD/PES voting machines in wide usage in most states.

POLITICO profiled a Princeton professor — who has demonstrated how the electronic voting machines that are most widely used can be hacked in five minutes or less! Robert Fitrakis Professor of Political Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College has written a must-read book on the strip and flip technique sued to rig these machines. Professor Fitrakis is a Green Party activist.

A computer hacker showed CBS how to vote multiple times using a simple $15.00 electronic device.

To be very clear both parties have engaged in this skullduggery and it is the party in power in each state that has custody of the machines and control of their programming. This year, the results of machines in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, where Governor John Kasich controls the machines, must be matched with exit polls, for example.

Illinois is another obvious state where Trump has been running surprisingly strong, in what has become a Blue state. Does anyone trust Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Clinton hatchet man. not to monkey with the machines? I don’t. He was using City funded Community groups to recruit anti-Trump “protestors” who posed such a threat to public safety the Trump Chicago event was canceled when the Secret Service couldn’t guarantee his safety.

How do the pols of both parties do it? As easy as determining, on the basis of honest polling, who is going to win. Then, if it isn’t your candidate, simply have the votes for the other guy be given to your guy and vice versa. You keep the total vote the same. This is where the “strip and flip” technique described by Professor Fitrakis comes in.

Maybe you don’t need all the votes the other guy was going to get. If you have a plan in mind involving votes and their redistribution, you can find a programmer who can design the machine instructions to produce that outcome. Or you can hack the machine you are voting in with that $15 device that you can get at BEST BUY.

Europe has rejected electronic voting machines because they are untrustworthy. This is not a secret. The media continues a drum beat insisting voter fraud is non existent without ever addressing the more ominous question of manipulation of the voting machines. It keeps those in control in control.

Additionally some states still use machines that include no paper trail. The “evidence” is destroyed. Florida’s machines have no paper trail in Bush v. Gore.

In Europe, they use exit polling to determine who won and lost. The tabulated vote only serves as a formal verification. But that is done with paper ballots and hand counts under supervision, the way we used to do it.

Here’s the recipe now:
(1) Publish a poll contrived to suggest the result you are going to bring about.
(2) Manipulate the machines to bring about precisely your desired outcome.

As someone with great sentimental attachment to the Republican Party, as I joined as the party of Goldwater, both parties have engaged in voting machine manipulation. Nowhere in the country has this been more true than Wisconsin, where there is irrefutable evidence that Scott Walker and the Reince Priebus machine rigged as many as five elections including the defeat of a Walker recall election.

Mathematician and voting statistic expert Richard Charnin has produced a compelling study by comparing polling to actual results and exit polls to make a compelling case for voting machine manipulation in the Badger state.

When the Trump vs. Cruz primary took place, the same pattern emerged again of a Marquette University poll showing a 20 point shift from Trump ahead by 10 percent to Trump behind by 10 percent, which was simply absurd. Shifts like that don’t happen over brief intervals of time, absent a nuclear explosion. It didn’t make any sense — unless you knew what was going on was an “instant replay” of Walker’s victories. The machine Priebus built was delivering for Cruz big time.

Today, the polling industry has been reported to be “in a state of crisis” because they are altering their samples to favor Hillary. The Reuters poll actually got busted for oversampling Democrats in order to inflate Hillary’s lead. We even had the absurdity of a Gallup poll proclaiming that 51 percent of those who had heard Trump’s speech were less likely to vote for him, which was endlessly repeated by the shills at MSNBC.

I predicted that Trump would lead in the polls after his highly successful convention (despite the media frenzy over the non-issue of a Melania Trump staffer plagiarizing a handful of words). In fact, post convention polling for the Trump effort by pollster Tony Fabrizio in key swing states was encouraging. Perhaps this is why the establishment elites have gone into over-drive to attack Trump.

Hillary hasn’t exactly had smooth sailing. Julian Assange of Wikileaks said he had inconvertible proof that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton armed Isis. The IRS has opened an investigation to the Clinton Foundation and it’s many offshoots, and Hillary got caught lying about what FBI Director Comey did say about her.

But you will see less of Hillary’s problems in the mainstream media, which has gone completely overboard in its relentless, even hysterical, efforts to lambaste Trump and promote her. Every remotely objective commentator has been stunned. Trump will, however, have an opportunity to drive these points home in the debates.

We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls. The computerized voting machines can be hacked and rigged and after the experience of Bernie Sanders there is no reason to believe they won’t be. Don’t be taken in.

Stone is a former consultant to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, a New York Times Bestselling Author and a veteran of nine Republican presidential campaigns from Nixon to Trump.
Source: http://www.thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/291534-can-the-2016-election-be-rigged-you-bet

They try to wear down our resistance with one fake trade treaty after another

by George Monbiot

Is it over? Can it be true? If so, it’s a victory for a campaign that once looked hopeless, pitched against a fortress of political, corporate and bureaucratic power.

TTIP – the transatlantic trade and investment partnership – appears to be dead. The German economy minister, Sigmar Gabriel, says that “the talks with the US have de facto failed.” The French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, has announced “a clear halt”. Belgian and Austrian ministers have said the same thing. People power wins. For now.

But the lobbyists who demanded this charter for corporate rights never give up. TTIP has been booed off the stage but another treaty, whose likely impacts are almost identical, is waiting in the wings. And this one is more advanced, wanting only final approval. If this happens before Britain leaves the EU, we are likely to be stuck with it for the next 20 years.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is ostensibly a deal between the EU and Canada. You might ask what harm Canada could do us. But it allows any corporation which operates there, wherever its headquarters might be, to sue governments before an international tribunal. It threatens to tear down laws protecting us from exploitation and prevent parliaments on both sides of the Atlantic from legislating.

To say that there is no mandate for such agreements is an understatement: they have received an unequivocal counter-mandate. The consultation the EU grudgingly launched on TTIP’s proposal to grant new legal rights to corporations received 150,000 responses, 97 percent of which were hostile. But while choice is permitted when you shop for butter, on the big decisions there is no alternative.

It’s not clear whether national parliaments will be allowed to veto this treaty. The European trade commissioner has argued that there is no need: it can be put before the European Parliament alone. But even if national parliaments are allowed to debate it, they will be permitted only to take it or leave it: the contents are deemed to have been settled already.

Only once the negotiations between European and Canadian officials had been completed, and the text of the agreement leaked, did the European Commission publish it. It is 1,600 pages long. It has neither a contents list nor explanatory text. As far as transparency, parity and comprehensibility are concerned, it’s the equivalent of the land treaties illiterate African chiefs were induced to sign in the 19th Century. It is hard to see how parliamentarians could make a properly-informed decision.

If you seek to buy a secondhand car these days, the salesperson might wheedle and spin, but they will also – thanks to EU consumer protection laws – be obliged to explain the risks and caveats. If you want to know whether or not to buy this trade treaty, you have no such protection: the EU’s website tells you what a wonderful set of wheels this is, but carries not a word about the risks.

Here is its answer to the question of whether the CETA negotiations were conducted in secret. “Not at all … During the five years of talks, the Commission held various civil society dialogue meetings for stakeholders.” I followed the link it gave and found that four meetings had taken place, all of them in Brussels, all dominated by corporate trade associations, which are likely to have been on the inside track anyway. Where was the publicity? Where were the attempts to reach beyond a gilded circle of lobbyists and cronies? Where were the efforts to take the discussion to other nations? Where were the debates, the drive to seek genuine public engagement, let alone consent? If this is transparency, I dread to think what secrecy looks like.

After long hours struggling with the treaty, I realised I hadn’t a hope of grasping its implications. I have had to rely on experts commissioned by groups such as Attac in Germany and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Like TTIP, CETA threatens to lock in privatisation, making renationalisation (of Britain’s railways, for example), or attempts by cities to take control of failing public services (as Joseph Chamberlain did in Birmingham, laying the foundations for modern social provision) impossible. Like TTIP, it uses a broad definition of both investment and expropriation to allow corporations to sue governments when they believe their “future anticipated profits” might be threatened by new laws.

Like TTIP, it restricts the ways in which governments may protect their people. It appears to prohibit, for example, rules that would prevent banks from becoming too big to fail. It seems to threaten our planning laws and other commonsense protections.

Anything not specifically exempted from the agreement is considered covered. In other words, if governments don’t spot a potential hazard before the hazard emerges, they are stuck with it. The European Union appears to have relinquished its ability, for example, to insist that investment and retail banking be separated.

CETA claims to be a trade treaty, but many of its provisions have little to do with trade. They are attempts to circumscribe democracy on behalf of corporate power. Millions of people in Europe and Canada want to emerge from the neoliberal era. But such treaties would lock us into it, allowing the politics we have rejected to govern us beyond the grave.

If parliaments reject this treaty, another attempt is already being prepared: the Trade in Services Agreement that the European Union is simultaneously negotiating with the US and 21 other nations. May’s government has expressed enthusiasm: her Department for International Trade says “the UK remains committed to an ambitious Trade in Services Agreement.” So much for taking back control.

Corporate lobbyists and their captive governments have been seeking to impose such treaties for over 20 years, starting with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (it was destroyed, like TTIP, by massive public protests, in 1998). Working in secrecy, without democratic consent, they will keep returning to the theme, in the hope of wearing down our resistance.

When you are told that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, this is what it means. This struggle will continue throughout your life. We have to succeed every time, they have to succeed only once. Never drop your guard. Never let them win.
www.monbiot.com