(02-18-2019 10:00 AM)bullet Wrote: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/p...p-victory/
McGovern's & Carter's pollster who foresaw the rise of DJT.
"...Few people had more to do with Donald Trump’s amazing victory in 2016. The Washington Post concluded that Caddell “first wrote the instruction manual” for Trump when, entirely on his own, he conducted polls showing that the public “was ripe for an outsider candidate to take the White House.” No one I know in public life better grasped the angry voter mood that lifted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016.
During National Review’s Alaska cruise in August 2015, Caddell gave a seminar on the updated results of his “Smith Project,” a series of polls he had conducted since 2013 and named after the outsider senator in the 1939 Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I will never forget Caddell self-confidently declaring that the country was “in a pre-revolutionary moment,” with 84 percent believing that political leaders were more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right. Caddell noted that seven out of ten Americans no longer believe that the government receives its authority from the consent of the people, despite the words of the Declaration of Independence.
In his polling, Caddell had tested a hypothetical Candidate Smith, whom he didn’t identify by party, age, race, or religion. He only said of him:
Candidate Smith’s beliefs are not based on liberal or conservative ideas, just fundamental American common sense. Smith says we can’t change anything with the usual politics, the usual politicians, and the usual interest groups. We need new leaders from mainstream America, like Candidate Smith, who take on the political elites and special interests, and put the American people in charge again.....
“Make America Great Again was the greatest slogan of my lifetime,” he said. “And I think that the most powerful idea was ‘Drain the Swamp.’”...
He accurately predicted that the GOP would lose the House in the 2018 midterms, caustically explaining the loss to Breitbart News as follows:
The Republican party is essentially wusses. They will not fight. They don’t believe in fighting. They just lay down and roll over, and usually for their donor class, who are basically antithetical to 90 percent of Republicans and what they want...."
It's what I pointed out about Conference Realignment almost 7 years ago. And it is what I've been stating in many different ways on this board. Substitute Corporate Elite contributing PAC money for "their donor class" and you have the whole picture encapsulated in the OP.
From the 1980's until 2000 I watched the disappearance of privately owned businesses across this nation. They disappeared because they didn't spend millions in corporate lobbying efforts to gain tax breaks for the location of a store. They didn't spend millions to lobby for the states to permit them to keep the state portion of the sales tax until their buildings were paid for and then those that corporations that did lobby for all of that used that 11 to 13 point advantage to run them out of business.
In that same time frame local property taxes escalated to cover the lost sales tax revenue missed with capital no longer circulated between private businesses in the local communities.
In the middle of that time the two parties grandfathered in their right to be on the ballot with their nominees in all 50 states while third parties would be unjustly forced to qualify in each of the 50 states, an expense too great for an independent to overcome unless they too were super wealthy.
In the 90's the Supreme Court ruled that imminent domain could be used for a private endeavor the tax revenue it generated was for the public good of the community.
Ancillary to these changes it was corporate money from networks that induced what have been radical changes in an American touchstone, college athletics, enticing a rearrangement of schools for the sake of maximizing television revenue and in its wake destroying rivalries and experiences that had linked generations of people through the past associations.
It is the rise of the corporation beyond any status that would have been tolerated in the past by leaders like Theodore Roosevelt that has spearheaded the decline in opportunities for the middle class through the private ownership of business, have challenged and tied up in court the patents for inventions that private citizens have created until that inventor had to settle for far less than he/she was entitled to because they couldn't stand the infringement and did not have the capital to pursue drawn out litigation. It is the corporation through grants that have laid claim to the intellectual property of researchers at universities and forced those schools to employ teams of attorneys to comb through the language in grants to try to prevent such ensnarements. It is the corporation that sought the "too big to fail" status for their chicanery in the investment world. It is the corporation through its multinational connections that has been a constant source of security leaks. It is the corporation Equifax that exposed millions to a compromised personal security because their largess with the government gave them access to all of your personal information without your consent. And it is the corporation that has purchased access to both of our political parties and compromise their service to the citizens and foist upon them a global policy that circumvents our national interests.
Through corporate banking and investment in the Federal Reserve they made money off of our National Debt which grew from 205 million in 1963 to 22 Trillion by 2019. It is in that time span that their power has also grown exponentially. They used that money to lobby for expenditures that facilitate their corporations through government contracts. They then lobbied for campaign finance changes that effectively neutralized the third party so that they could try to prevent a populist backlash. It is why they have so exposed themselves in trying to destroy Trump. Remember it was not only the Dems that went bark at the moon mad over Trump but members of Trumps own party.
If we are to take back our government we need to undo the election changes that have been wrought over these past 30 plus years and restore the third parties to the national ballot on the same terms as those of Republicans and Democrats. Then we need to make it illegal for corporations to lobby Congress or donate to elections.
None of this is an accident. It's as old as government. And our forefathers who founded this nation foresaw it and warned against it. That's yet another reason they have been under attack after 200 years of a successfully established government that was their creation.
It is also why the classroom curriculum has been under assault. Remember that very valid old caution, "Those who do not understand their history are doomed to repeat it."
