RE: Naomi Wolf video (Give Me Liberty): Who is the group behind the takeover of our country?

[Mrs. Overall]

I'm referring to this video http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x207570

Listening to Naomi Wolf, it is amazing how many fascist stepping stones have already been put into place in the US, but I'm just not sure "they" can pull it off and disrupt the election.

My question is: Who is the "they" behind the attempt to subvert the constitution and enforce a fascist/police state?

Is it only Bush/Cheney?
If so, who are their cohorts?

Is it primarily the Bush family?

Is it Corporate?

Is it the individuals who are part of Project for a New American Century?

Some combination of all of the above?

If we were indeed to fall into some sort of police state (even to the point of Congress being dissolved) exactly what people would be running the show?

On Edit--And what is their ultimate goal?

[Junkdrawer]

1. The wealthy, multinational corporate elite who run our foreign policy....

and now, our domestic politics.

These folks have run foreign policy since the end of WWII. The vast majority of Americans looked the other way because they perceived it to be to their advantage.

But the accumulation of that much wealth and power never ends well, and now WE'RE in the cross-hairs.

[EmeraldCityGrl]

2. Both President Bushs brother FL governer Jeb Bush and cousin George W. Walker hired at lehman brothe

The MIC and the Texas contingent...the trail always leads back to them.



http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/75md5/both_president_bushs_brother_fl_governer_jeb_bush/

[Peace Patriot]

3. Very good questions....

Let's just call them, for the purposes of argument, the Corpo/fascists--my term for them--and presume, not unreasonably, I think, that a cabal of super-billionaires does exist and has been calling the shots behind their frontmen, the idiot Bush and the more menacing Cheney (and his close crony-in-crime Rumsfeld). And let's not forget that this cabal may include, say, Saudi Arabian sultans, and other wealthy foreigners, as well as the billionaire CEOs of the Corpo 'news' monopolies. Other Corpos--Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorp, GE, et al (oil and war profiteers); Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia (the election theft corporations)--and global corporate predators of various kinds (banks and financial institutions; insurance corps; Big Ag, Big Pharma, Monsanto, Wal-Mart and Gap come to mind) would also likely be "members" of this Dark Lords cabal.

I do think there is evidence of some fractures in this posited cabal (possibly along the lines of war having become bad for business, or bad for some businesses?). And some of the individuals and groups are worse than others (the Bush Cartel being among the worse.)

I think your timeframe is off by 8 years, and perhaps as much as 20 years (back to Reagan). The coup d'etat has already occurred; its purpose was to, a) hijack the U.S. military for corporate resource wars (first Iraq, then Iran--and, currently, failing Iran, possibly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia), 2) loot the federal and state treasuries of the U.S. and the pocketbooks of our people, unto the 7th generation; and 3) destroy the American people (north American) as the potentially most progressive force on earth (re labor rights, human rights, the environment).

This summary does not account very well for the Homeland Security/Patriot Act laws and secret executive orders, nor the spying, the torture, the detention without trial, nor other horrors of this junta--the shredding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights--nor for their turning of the presidency into a full scale, all powerful emperor/tyrant. But you can see how these latter policies aid the above-stated goals, without necessarily being the point of the junta. Spying, blackmail and fear can do a lot of damage to a political system, and can greatly aid the cause of unjust war--or large scale looting--without actually, say, shutting down Congress or declaring martial law. And, depending on your purpose, you can accomplish quite a lot more by these means, with a lot less trouble, than if you tried to bring the nazi boot down in a big, diverse country such as this.

The coup at the Supreme Court in 2000, and the subsequent fast-tracking, all of over the country, of highly non-transparent, "TRADE SECRET" code, electronic voting systems, controlled by three Bushwhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls, point to the Bush junta as the culmination of this Corpo/fascist coup d'etat. Their first big coup was getting Reagan into the White House, but they did that with Corpo 'news' propaganda (the brainwashing that Reagan was benevolent). To do what they have done recently--in the last 8 years--required much more direct control of elections. The election coups of 2000 and 2004 (also, 2006) also point to an intent, not to nazify the country, but rather to override the will of the people, and to fool the people.

I think that is what has happened. The coup has already occurred, in several stages. We are seeing the Final Looting right now. There isn't much left to loot. Our social programs are all in extreme peril from this bottomless "bailout." We may lose Social Security because of it. (They are already heavily borrowing against it, and against government pensions of every kind.) We are well on our way to becoming the biggest "banana republic" on earth. We are suffering the fate of many third world countries under Clinton "free trade" and World Bank/IMF policies, which were destroyed without firing a shot. (South America is rebelling against all this, as we speak--they are way ahead of us.)

So, the question remains: What will happen next? Will we go the say of FDR and the "New Deal" or will we go the way of Hitler and Germany in the 1930s?

Obama intends to continue the Forever War (he's just going to move it to Afghanistan), and he is on board for the Final Looting--at least that's what he says. Who knows, these days, what politicians really think, what kind of pressures they are under, or what they will do? Any of them with good instincts--and I think Obama does have those--has to avoid getting whacked, either by the Corpo/fascist media, or literally, by paid assassins. I think, when he brought Joe Biden aboard--who is a thorough-going corporatist and war profiteer supporter--he made his "bargain with the devil" (this Corpo/fascist cabal), and they are going to permit him to be elected, but they may have a nefarious scheme to unravel the U.S., during his administration, and let some outright Hitler type take it over, to prevent us from restoring democracy here--while democracy is still in living memory--and possibly to draft our unemployed sons and daughters into more resource wars, and to loot whatever profit we manage to build back up, through hard work and suffering.

I think the key to "what will happen next" is the voting machines. If we can get rid of these "TRADE SECRET" election theft systems, and restore vote counting to the PUBLIC VENUE, we can start to elect real representatives of the people--who have accountability to the people--and slowly start to reform this system. This is what the South Americans have done. It has taken time and hard work, but they have TRANSPARENT vote counting, and it really shows. They are electing leftist (majorityist) governments all over the continent, and the trend is moving into Central America as well.

We may have only a short "window of opportunity" to do this, so it is very urgent. And we must not rely on Congress to do it. They won't. Period. They fucked up our voting system once. They did it deliberately*. And they WILL make things worse. It has to be done at the state/local level, where ordinary people still have potential influence, and where the power over voting systems currently still resides.

The Anthrax Congress did not mandate e-voting. We still have a choice. It did fund it, though ($3.9 billion) and fast-tracked it with no controls. And what Congress will likely do, next session, is federalize and centralize the voting system, and make electronic voting mandatory. They will call this a 'reform' (as they did the first time), and may provide a ballot, but I guarantee you that they will not require that the ballots be counted.

Our best recourse is a big and widespread citizen movement to pressure county registrars, secretaries of state, and state legislatures to restore PUBLIC vote counting. This movement is in progress, but it has not yet grown big enough to restore transparent vote counting for this election.

If Obama wins, don't be lulled to sleep! We still have a VERY IMPORTANT thing to do to insure the return of democracy here: We have to get rid of these 'TRADE SECRET' voting systems!

Transparent vote counting is THE most fundamental component of democracy. Without it, we do not have a democracy.

Don't worry so much about what these Dark Lords might do. Worry about what they have done and how they did it. It's useless to fear what they might do, when we have not taken care of the most fundamental power we have as a people to fight them with: our vote.

And it really doesn't matter who they are. This Corpo/fascist cabal exists. Its effects are obvious. It changes nothing, and gains us nothing, to name them. Nobody's going to indict them. Nobody's going to put them in jail for their many and heinous crimes. Only underlings and toadies get caught and put in jail. And nobody's going to get our money back from them. They are global corporate predators with enormous wealth and power. They may not even live there, or they can easily extract themselves and their wealth at any time.

How do we get our power back? That is the most important, and most strategically relevant, question. All of our sovereign power as a people derives from our votes. That power has been taken away from us. We must get it. We MUST!


------------------

*(It's interesting that the key Democrat in turning our voting system over to private Bushwhack corporations and their "TRADE SECRET" code was Christopher Dodd--working with indicted criminals Tom Delay and Bob Ney (prior to their indictments). Dodd is a member of the secretive Bilderberg Group--which in some ways qualifies as the kind of Corpo/fascist cabal I described above. Ideas like how to use electronics to steal elections in the U.S. probably originate there--although I don't think the real decision-makers are all that visible. Dodd is just a corrupt toady--as are many of our Democratic leaders, and, of course, Republicans as well. The Republicans have been useful in forging this unholy alliance between the Corpo/fascists and some 'Christian" groups, that we see on TV--as if these Corpo/fascists were Christians. Ha, ha! The Democrats have been useful in creating the illusion of choice, the illusion of democracy. There is nothing more illusory than "TRADE SECRET" vote counting. And the Democrats were key to its passage, and have been critically important to turning off the public's alarm buttons about it.)

[Mrs. Overall]

4. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions! This is a fascinating

post and I plan to go back and re-read it several times.

I agree with the fact that the coup has been long term (Reagan) and that this is the final looting.

I also agree that even with Democrats in charge, power is power, and we must not be complacent.

There's so much more for me to go back and read in your post. Again, thank you for the thoughtful detail and the shift of focus away from the Corpo/fasicists and their identities to what we need to do now and in the future.

[Peace Patriot]

5. I just want to add, about their FOOLING the people, rather than bringing the heavy

nazi boots down on us, most people here have NOT been fooled on items like the WMDs in Iraq, continuing the war on Iraq in 06, and the current Final Looting. I noticed, back just before the Iraq War, that nearly 60% of the American people opposed it. Feb 03-all polls. This astonishing opposition was just run right over by the warmongering Corpo 'news' monopolies. It was back-paged and ignored. No one was representing this great majority in the news media.

The reason I watched the polls so carefully is that the Corpo 'news' was giving the impression that most people were gung ho for war, and I wondered if my fellow and sister Americans had gone fascist, goose-stepping to Bush. I was amazed at what I found. 60% is very significant opposition. It would be a landslide in a presidential election. And, guess what? The bill that the Anthrax Congress passed, to convert our election system to non-transparency, run by Bushwhacks, was passed in the same month as the Iraq War Resolution. I think they are closely related. The IWR guaranteed unjust war; the e-voting bill (HAVA) provided the means of shoving the unjust wsr down the throats of the American people--in 2004, and then again in 2006. By 2006, SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people opposed the Iraq War and wanted it ended. We voted, with the Iraq War as the major issue in the Congressional elections--and what does the new 'Democratic Congress' do? They ESCALATE the war--and give Bush-Cheney billions more of our non-existent tax dollars to keep killing Iraqis until they sign the oil contracts--the complete opposite of what they were supposedly elected to do.

Clearly, the powers-that-be were aware of the big anti-war sentiment among the American people--although most people were unaware of it, and to this day think that the people supported that war. The Corpo/fascists knew they would need a means to defy our will--and passed the means (non-transparent e-voting) right along with the IWR itself, in the same month (Oct 02).

This is true on almost every issue--a big, BIG discrepancy between what the people want and what our leaders are doing--whether in the White House or Congress--never more evident, in these last couple of years, than with the utterly disgusting 'bailout'--one month before the presidential election. Congress now has a 10% approval rating--worse than Bush's!

What do I mean, then, by their "fooling the people" (rather than nazi booting them)? I mean "fooling the people" in a very particular way--fooling us into believing we are powerless, isolated and alone, in our love of peace and justice, and fooling us into believing that other Americans are all Bushwhacks. We then begin to see Bushwhacks everywhere, and we get into arguments with Bushwhacks, and we don't see the hundred other people in our day, who are silently suffering disempowerment. The Corpo media, of course, reinforces this trick--this illusion, this subtle but effective brainwashing. There was a period, in the first years of the Bush junta, where you couldn't avoid rigthtwing whacko talk shows, no matter where you turned on the radio dial. All the TV news, virtually all the radio talk shows and news, and all the newspapers--most of them fed by just a few news agencies (like AP)--were pro-war, pro-corporate and pro-Bush. Even the New York Times became a shit-rag, and a warmongering trumpet for the Bush's war.

But THE PEOPLE DIDN'T BUY IT, is my point. They felt helpless and isolated, wondering if everybody else had gone nuts (as I did for a while).

To me this was very positive information. Our problem, as a people, isn't that most of us are stupid sheep, rightwing nuts or nazis. Our problem is that we feel powerless and helpless, and don't realize where our power lay, or what has been done to that power. Educating people and empowering people are both difficult, in the midst of a fascist coup. But activating already informed people is easier than starting from square one--with people who aren't aware of the lies and the evil motives of bad leaders, and buy into it all. In this, we are far and away better off than Germany was in the early 1930s. And this how Barack Obama got nominated--by already informed people jumping into his campaign, because he was the last one standing who opposed the war--and his campaign's brilliant use of the CAUCUS states (not counted by Diebold & brethren!) to get his campaign off and roaring. He now faces a full-on Diebold & brethren vote count, however, and I figure that is why he's made his "devil's bargain" (the Forever War, the Final Looting and other policies).

Like I said, I have no idea what he will do, once in office. He may turn out to be an FDR and implement New Deal II. What we have to do is keep the pressure on, for a peaceful and just government, and, above all, restore our voting system.