Hitting nails on the head again, and this particular one is applicable in a number of countries:

You have corporate media interests dominating public discourse with lies, misrepresentations and distortion, you have rich and powerful people skirting around norms and exploiting deficiencies in the constitution to the point that the country is being run as an authoritarian feudal dictatorship…

Indeed and the world has been there before:

The Secret Elite has always had a handle on the press. Newspapers have immense power to influence how people think and act. Important events in public life, including appointments and elections, are swayed by them. They like to portray themselves as standard-bearers for morality, for loyalty, for what is for the public good. When they get it right, they promote themselves with unconscionable arrogance. When they get it wrong, they simply move on to the next opinion. Few have absolute loyalty to a political party. They smell the wind and change their allegiance accordingly, but their concerted attacks can bring down politicians or blacken the character of public figures. Newspapers serve their owners and always have. When their owners are part of the greater conspiracy [1], democracy itself becomes a fraud.

that paragraph is to be found in:

‘Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War’ Gerry Docherty and James Macgregor page 144

but has resonance with today, with other forms of media being now adjoined to newspapers, and what we are seeing in Britain and Europe today.

Docherty and Macgregor draw much on the writings of Professor Carroll Quigley especially ‘Tragedy and Hope’ and ‘The Anglo-American Establishment’ PDFs of each, and other titles, can be downloaded from:

book by Carroll Quigley

Either Putin has played his cards well to destabilise Britain the EU, the US, NATO and even the UN or he has been extraordinarily lucky. When one understands the financial ties between key members of the British establishment and government, in the form of the Tory party, it is easy to believe the former was in play.

https://twitter.com/BartHubbuch/status/1009571866128846849

Yeah, tell the people of Duluth that they’re a bunch of toothless rednecks. That’ll convince them to vote for your terrible candidate next time around.

I don’t think it’s the case that 90% of Jill Stein voters would have voted for Clinton. I think it’s the other way around, that of those who do vote rather than staying home, it is the Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin voters who would have gone for Hillary, and Stein voters would have gone for Trump. It was a decision that they did not want to vote for their party’s candidate. Trump for incompetence, immorality, recklessness. Hillary for corruption and warmongering(maybe Bill’s rape too).

Throw in the Dems who could not vote
for a badly damaged candidate, Trump
would have lost the North Star State by
10% or more.

Bernard, that’s been repeated for forty years, with just names changing, and it will be said again forty years from now.

122 years ago:
”There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if
you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on
those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses
prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

‘Punish the Dems and teach them a lesson by not voting.’

Hmm. Yeah, it’s an idea. IOW: Get out and suppress the vote. Wait, hang on a minute. Now, who would have an interest in floating an admittedly attractive nuisance like that?

Much as I’d like to smack me some DNC upside the head, let’s try and come up with something a little more constructive, shall we?

Doris Kearns Goodwin a few hours ago on MSNBC’s 11th Hour:

I don’t know what we’re going to do about our whole electoral system but I think it’s really in trouble today when we, if we go back again now, and we produce another Trump, then the citizens are responsible…

What the Democrats have to do most of all is to frame the story. Right now the story is not simply about Russia, not simply about the corruption, it’s about what’s happening in every department in the country right now; what’s happening in the EPA, what’s happening in the Justice Department, Fair Housing is being undone. In the 19th century when you had the muck-raker journalists they made sexy the stories about the corruption of Standard Oil and the railroad – we should be hearing about those, we should care about those, we should care about what’s going on in Medicare, we’re so obsessed right now with an investigation which will happen no matter what we do, we don’t have control over that.

The Democrats have control over the narrative but they’re not winning it. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in November, it seems like of course it’s going to be a blue wave, but it may not be unless they control the narrative which they are not doing right now.

Just quietly, as an outsider to the US, it is clear that democracy in the States is failing, dying. You have corporate media interests dominating public discourse with lies, misrepresentations and distortion, you have rich and powerful people skirting around norms and exploiting deficiencies in the constitution to the point that the country is being run as an authoritarian feudal dictatorship, and the very institutions that would usually protect the country being deliberately and systematically dismantled so that real democracy can never come back from the sucker punches being delivered.

And then there’s Russia…

Also on MSNBC a few hours ago was a commentator (I can’t recall who – if someone knows I’d be happy to find out) noted that the GOP is no longer the Republican Party, it is the Trump Party. This is the naked truth, and it bears thinking about, because a future where such a party becomes cemented in is one where the last vestiges of democracy will be forever lost in the US.

Foreign interests such as Russia and China want to see the USA become a shadow of its former self, a shell that no longer has the ability to shape world events,. Domestic interests such as the old rich and the corporate vampires simply want to enhance the economic (and political) feudalism that benefits a small minority, whatever the cost to the rest of the country. And all of these interests are achieving their goals with the simple expedient of selling an Orwellian Doublethink fantasy to the proles, and the proles are happy to swallow it all if it means that they can be sated by the dross projected through their telescreens.

Smart people need to be smarter in combating this scourge, and established institutions need to be firm in their resolve to stand rather than capitulate. If more ground is given you could possibly even end up with a president who uses his power to pardon himself for everything he’s done and will do in the future, and who will remove any challenge that might be mounted on the basis that a person cannot judge themselves.

See that realised and then it’s a small step to real and permanent dictatorship…