With all the discussion of the contentious 2016 election, the most shocking fact is often ignored: that millions of people had their votes stolen through malicious means. The Republican Party is currently working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

To explain this major attack on our supposed democratic process, Abby Martin interviews investigative reporter Greg Palast, who has done the most extensive work uncovering this massive disenfranchisement campaign.

 The Hidden Purging of Millions of Voters

In a jaw dropping article published in Rolling Stone in August of 2016, investigative journalist Greg Palast gave us fair warning about the massive voter purge set to take place during the 2016 presidential election. The system, dubbed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, often called Interstate Crosscheck or simply Crosscheck, promised to toss out the votes of any registered voter who places a vote in two different states.

With all the talk of voter fraud during the primary and general elections, a system to weed out potential fraudulent votes was a welcome idea to many. But the good news stopped there. Never mind that the claims of massive voter fraud were not based in any fact whatsoever, the entire Crosscheck program was a front- an integral part of a massive Republican-led campaign to disenfranchise millions of voters, robbing them, without their knowledge, of their constitutional right to vote.

Not only did Crosscheck strip registered and legal voters of their right to vote, but it did so in a way that tipped the scales in favor of the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald Trump. Crosscheck works by finding matches between registered voters in states participating in the program, disproportionately affecting voters based on their race. Eighty-five out of one hundred of the most common names are held by minorities and minority voters tend to cast their votes for democratic candidates. But Crosscheck does not simply look for 100% matches for names and other identifying information as one would expect- the program considers first and last name matches as the same voter even when middle names and social security numbers differ.

For an example of how Crosscheck influenced the 2016 election outcome, consider what took place in the state of Michigan during the general election. Donald Trump won Michigan by approximately 10,000 votes. Michigan’s Crosscheck list included half a million people with Palast estimating that 50-60,000 votes were deemed fraudulent, the majority of which were cast by people of color. It is easy to see how different an outcome there may have been had all of the votes cast been fairly counted.

Not only are votes discounted using Crosscheck in the United States, but there is a major campaign of voter suppression occurring across the country that undeniably targets voters of color, poor voters, and young voters alike. These attacks, and the reach of the Crosscheck program, are only increasing under Republican leadership with a full blown campaign underway working to purge millions more voters leading up to the 2018 election.

As Greg Palast explains in this eye opening and informative episode, American voters must join together to fight for fair elections and to fight against modern day Jim Crow tactics, all without the help of the Democratic Party.

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Abby Martin: In one of the most contentious presidential elections ever, a hidden fact is that millions of Americans lost their vote through various methods employed in a coordinated multi-million dollar operation. Stunning in a country that claims to be the greatest democracy on earth.We don’t hear about it. What we do hear about is, claims from Trump and Republicans that they system is rigged. Because, millions of people are voting illegally.

Donald Trump: It’s rigged like you’ve never seen before.

Stephen Miller: This issue, of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone working in New Hampshire politics…

Kellyanne Conway: Is there dead people registered? Are there illegal people registered?

Donald Trump: Dead, illegal, and two states, and some cases maybe, three states? But we’re going to stop it. We’re not going to back down.

Abby Martin: Not only are these hysterical claims provably false, but they are in fact used by the same people committing actual vote rigging. None the less, these myths are perpetrated by right-wing politicians and media to justify wide spread voter crackdowns.In the latest purge, nearly half a million people have been kicked off Indiana’s voter registration list. Just since the 2016 Presidential Election. That’s a whopping 10% of total voters in the entire state.Alongside an arsenal of voter suppression tactics, a program called Interstate Cross-check institutionalized vote theft nationwide. Investigative journalist, Greg Palast uncovered exactly how the cynical billionaire back scam works in his recent film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Where he travels the world exposing how the GOP is robbing millions of votes from minorities and poor people while the democratic party shrouds itself in silence.I caught up with Greg, to talk more about the 2016 Election and the myth of American Democracy. So, your film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, amazing film, that everyone needs to watch. It dealt with the interstate voter registration cross-check program. First talk about what exactly that is and it’s impact on the most recent election?

Greg Palast: Interstate cross-check, was Donald Trumps’ secret weapon. That handed him the election more than anything. It’s a way that you can eliminate voters of color. Just wipe them off the voter rolls, in my investigation for Rolling Stone, which is in the film, you’re watching me do it. Our experts estimate that 1.1 million people lost their votes in especially concentrated in those key swing states. Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, that’s where cross-check was operating. And that also, by the way, we talk about Trump, but let’s not forget that was also wiping out voters of color which meant that, that’s one of the reasons we have a republican congress. So that’s what interstate cross-check does. What interstate cross-check is, is go back to Donald Trumps’ line, “The election is rigged, there are millions of people voting many, many times. Millions of people voting twice.”That’s the second part of his statement that no one was picking up. And so, what that is, is his claim that there are people for example, a guy named James Brown in Atlanta is voting a second time in Detroit. That’s the accusation. Everyone says, “Oh, that’s nuts.” Well, it doesn’t matter if it’s nuts. The accusation was devastating because it was backed up by his political operatives, actually removing voters from the voter rolls on the accusation that they were voting twice. Over a million people.This is one of the grave hidden purges of 2016. And yet, they didn’t arrest. They didn’t arrest anyone for voting twice in the last election. Not one person was arrested for it, yet they’re removing people. And so here’s how it worked. And by the way, here’s how we knew it was going to be Trump.Because the guy who created interstate cross-check is a character named Chris Kobach. Who’s like this right-wing, Fox news darling who’s a secretary state of Kansas voting official, and he’s the guy who basically perfected and spread this system to hunt down these so called double voters and remove them from the voter rolls.He was backing Trump, so we knew that locks Trump for the nomination, and that locks Trump for the White House. And it doesn’t matter how you vote, because they’ve already eliminated the margin in those really close states.

AM: When did cross-track come into existence?

GP: Its been around for quite some time. Before this guy Kobach took it national, a couple of states were sharing voter rolls to see if people were voting twice. There was no big damage. Because they didn’t find anyone voting twice so there’s no one to remove. Had no effect.This guy Kobach comes in a changes the whole thing and was basically after the Supreme Court, took the guts out of the voting rights act back in 2013. As soon as that happened, cross-check spread like virus. To 30 republican states where the republicans controlled the office of secretary of state, or the chief voting official, and these guys were sharing voter rolls.Now just so you know, Donald Trump said that there were three million illegal voters. Now that’s an important number to remember. Now people think, oh he just pulled that out of his wig, out of his comb over. No. That number comes from Kobach, because the list of suspects is seven million people. Seven million names. They said that’s three and a half million people voting twice. They use the list, they tag people as voting twice, and they removed not the whole seven million but they removed about 1.1 million voters in the 2016 Election.That’s just … We put it in the Rolling Stone, I put it on Al Jazeera, I put it in The Guardian. It’s all over the world, but not in the United States.

AM: Talk really quickly about how the voting rights act was guided and how it made cross-check easier to implement?

GP: What happened was, I contacted all these voting officials. Every single one and said, “Give us these lists that you’ve got from this guy Chris Kobach, accusing people of voting twice.” So we were turned down. They said, “You know, if you vote twice, it’s a crime.” Yeah, you vote twice, you go to prison for five years. So who would do this thing? So who are these people? But they wouldn’t give us the list because it’s a criminal investigation. Well you see the hat, I’m an investigative reporter, right? Took us about six months, five months to begin getting some of these lists we weren’t supposed to have. So we have these confidential lists of the voters, we have two million of their names. And we start going through the list. And this is where the rubber meets the road. Who is on the list of voting twice? Guys like 288 guys named, James Brown in Georgia voted in another state in the same election.How do they know that? Because they found a guy named James Brown in atlanta, and believe it or not, they found a guy name James Brown in Detroit, and said, “Obviously, James Brown, this is the same voter, voting twice.” Now here’s the thing about the list, and you’ve got to take a look at these lists. Name after name after name, James Thomas Brown’s supposed to be the same guy as James Edward Brown. Christina Isabel Hernandez is supposed to be the same person as Christina Maria Hernandez. By the way, these aren’t made up examples. These are real, real, real. James Brown Jr, and James Brown Sr are supposed to be the same- father and son are supposed to be the same voter.Now here’s the trick, you’ve heard Maria Hernandez, you’ve heard James Brown, David Kim is another one. When you’re looking at common names you’re looking at black people, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.85 of the 100 most common names in America are held by minorities like Rodriguez, Chung, Nguyen, Hernandez, and how do they vote? It’s not the color of their skin, they vote democratic. So if you want to knock out democratic voters, you knock out voters of color. Here’s where the Supreme Court comes in. In most of these states, you cannot put in a new system of removing voters like cross-check unless you get it first approved by the justice department and make a claim that it is in no way prejudicial against voters of color. Of course, when you’re knocking out James Brown and Jose Garcia, it’s a game that’s pulling out voters of color. So they could never get away with this if the voting rights act were still in place. The voting rights act also gave the justice department all kinds of powers to stop this game before it happens. You don’t remove everyone, ’cause this adds to the racial bias, they send post cards to people.They don’t even say, “You’re accused of voting twice.” They just say, are you registered to vote in another place? If you don’t send back the card, and most people don’t- the poor people, who move a lot don’t get the cards etc. You lose your vote. So that happened in mass. In Michigan, I was there after the election, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,700 votes. The secretary of state of Michigan himself told me, he’s a republican, “We move aggressively against people on the cross-check list.” Half a million people on that list in Michigan, we estimate they removed 50-60,000 voters. Mostly voters of color. Several times, Donald Trump’s supposed margin. March down the list of states like Arizona, North Carolina and Ohio. Cross-check made the difference.

AM: According to your research, 1/4th the names in this cross-check list you obtained didn’t have a middle name match. And the cross-check instruction manual even notes that the social security numbers may or may not match? That is astounding.

GP: Well, yeah. They use this con, this guy Chris Kobach who’s working for the Trump Campaign and is also a state official. When he’s asked about the cross-check list, when a reporter asks something, sniffs something, he says, “Oh well we check their middle name, we check the last four digits of their social security number. We checked their birthdate. It sounds totally kosher, how could you miss? “Well, in the instructions itself it says to ignore the mismatches. Ignore the mismatches? So the trick is, they have the information if anyone asks them, well what- you have all this information, but they ignore the mismatches deliberately. And let me tell you something, this whole business requires millions and millions of dollars of government money to effectuate this.Yet we have systems, these huge database operations, in fact for example, one owned by the Koch Brothers called I360. One owned by Trumps cronies called Cambridge Analytica. Those operators can with 99.9% certainty name every single real double voter in America, but then they would get all three. They wouldn’t be able to get a million people off the voter rolls.

AM: And you know people like to pain Trump as this anti-establishment figure who’s standing up to the empire. Greg, talk about his ties with Chris Kobach and how- who else is behind this.

GP: As an investigator, I can tell you, the oldest rule is the important rule: Follow the money. But what we’ve been doing is hunting down the money behind this steal. Now who funds Chris Kobach? The money goes back to a four letter word, Koch. K-O-C-H. We follow the trail back, boom. It’s the Kochs. And so the Kochs are behind the money to Kobach. Now, taking apart the voting rights act, 1965. It’s a really complex expensive lawsuit. And that was brought by Shelby, Alabama. Where does Shelby get the money? It’s 10’s of millions of dollars to bring cases like this. Where does little Shelby get this money? The answer is, it was supplied again by the Heritage foundation which is Koch money that they put into it, and other billionaires. And also a character that is known by his nickname the Vulture. His given name is Paul Singer but he’s a multi-billionaire who’s vital, he became the number one donor to the republican party for some time.So the money to take these things- to go after civil rights law and voting rights law, the money to run cross-check, the money to sell it to the public, is coming from people like Paul “The Vulture” Singer, the two Koch brothers who I’ve been following for years. And these are the people behind it. These are the people behind it. The Mercer family, and other billionaires putting their money in these operations. This is not new stuff. This is old accusation against black people.In the film, the big Klu Klux Klan propaganda film, Birth of A Nation which is now 101 years old. 101 years ago, they made this film and they had white actors in black face sneaking a second ballot into a ballot box. So the accusation that black people like to vote twice, that’s an old Klu Klux Klan trope and Trump just shop lifted it for this election.

AM: Yeah, and these people are just patsies like, again Trump paints himself as this anti-establishment figure, really he’s just a complete patsy for the Mercers, the Koch brothers, Banon too. You look at Breitbart, and the funneling with the Government Accountability Institute, it’s all Mercer and Koch money funneled right into these people and they’re just using them.

GP: The big backer of Trump was a guy called JP, John Paulson as he’s known, the foreclosure king as he’s best known. And JP the foreclosure king joined with Paul Singer to take Delphi Auto Parts which is GM Auto Parts and move it to China and move it to Mexico. And yet, he’s the big backer, one of the big secret backers of Donald Trump, and yet Donald Trump stood at the gates of a closed Delphi plant which his donors had moved to China, and said, and his donors had moved also, one of the plants from Warren, Ohio to Mexico. He said, held a big rally and said, “See this, see this closed plant? I’m going to build that wall higher and bigger. Every time I look to this plant I just add a few more feet to that wall.”Now I don’t know what the wall has to do with moving the plant across the border but it was his boys who were funding his campaign. And by the way, it’s very important to understand this, Donald Trump just plays a billionaire on TV, he’s no billionaire. He’s hocked up to his keister. So he had to turn to these guys quietly.

AM: You know, this has always been kind of a talking point, the voter fraud, especially on Fox News. The voter ID laws have been pushed through and through. Alec and Koch brothers and that think tank. It seems like Trump was really the one to mainstream it, just act- you know, creating that false reality and that paradigm that people just fall behind and believe it.

GP: He took it out of the Fox News, foxhole, spread it nation wide, they’re coming to take your vote way. This is the idea: If someone votes twice, they’ve taken your vote away. And of course, never just anyone, it’s always a voter with dark skin. It’s an immigrant swimming the Rio Grande, voting illegally. Find me one, I know of only two convictions. And it’s very easy to find alien voters, they show up to vote, sign their name. One was a republican in Georgia from Austria. Not in Georgia, in Florida from Austria.So what’s happened is, they create this false hysteria. And here’s a new one. By the way, as we head towards 2018. Chris Kobach, met with Donald Trump in Trump Tower just days before the inauguration. He had a memo in his hand which you could see, he didn’t hide it when he was shaking hands with Trump before they went in, there’s pictures of him holding the memo he’s about to give Trump. Well, we could blow it up about 100 times and see what it was. And it said, one of the things it said on it was, “To change and amend the national voter registration act.” That’s the Motor Voter law, which is one of the main things that registered minorities in America, when you get a drivers’ license, you get a voter form attached.He would remove that, he wants people to prove, Kobach, and now Trump want people to prove that they’re citizens to vote. And I say, well why not? Prove you’re a citizen to vote. Excuse me? How do you prove your a citizen in America? This is not Red China, we don’t carry citizenship cards. Social security cards, drivers licenses, those are issued to aliens, including my team who aren’t American citizens but have green cards.So, social security number, drivers license mean nothing, you have to have a passport? Now excuse me, who has a passport? Or there’s your original birth certificate, good luck finding that. Or naturalization papers. So what happens is, Kobach, Trumps’ guy, took this thing on a test drive in Kansas saying, you’ve got to prove your a citizen. The only thing that happened was, 36,000 students were blocked from voting because they couldn’t get these papers, they didn’t have passports, they’re too young. They had no passports, they didn’t have birth certificates. 36,000 young people.Now a federal judge knocked that out. A federal judge said, “You have 36,000 people who couldn’t register, could you tell me one, Mr. Kobach, even just 1 out of 36,000 that’s an illegal alien voter?” He couldn’t name it. So the judge said, “This is all bogus.” Threw it out. Why? Because of the National Voter Registration Act which this violated. So he’ll eliminate the act, just like eliminating the voting rights act, eliminate the national voter registration act, he’s going to eliminate the civil rights act.

AM: Greg, your movie was devastating, because it’s not only the cross-check, it’s not only the voter ID laws, you go to some of these polling places, and the disenfranchisement is stunning. Miles long lines. Thousands of people waiting in the freezing cold for hours and hours. Talk about some of the other voter suppression methods that are going on too?

GP: In Ohio for example, which is as we know, the vital swing state, and this happened many places, they did this in Wisconsin too, where they said, “Early voting, you can only have one single voting station for an entire county.” And they tried this is Wisconsin as well, this was key to Trumps victories in Ohio, supposed victories in Ohio and in Wisconsin. What they did, was you wait in line, on Tuesday when most white people vote in Ohio, they had for example, in Montgomery county which is Daton, they had 178 polling stations.But yet, on election on the Sunday before, which was when black people tend to vote, they call it Souls to the Polls day, there’s one polling station. The result was, and you can see it in my film. I saw literally, I’m walking, walking, there’s a half mile long line, there was one polling station, are you ready? For 80,000 voters. One polling station for 80,000 voters. You’ll see this line of black people waiting to vote. Waiting, when I was in Daton, five hours to vote. And at the end of the process, and they did this in Wisconsin, this very election, at the end of waiting all this time, they’re not given ballots, they’re given absentee ballots.Now what’s the difference? You fill out a- in Ohio and Wisconsin, you fill out the ballot, you put it in an envelope, you have to fill out the envelope perfectly. If you don’t have a driver’s license and it says, driver’s license and you leave it blank, you lose your vote. You lose your vote because you left off your driver’s license which you don’t have. You have to write “No driver’s license.” You have to sign it in several places, properly, and your signature has to match exactly your registration’s signature. So if you no longer include your middle initial but you signed your registration form 40 years ago with a middle initial, you lose your vote.All these tricks, because officially, this is an ugly thing that we don’t talk about in the United States, people who mail in their ballots, absentee ballots, or mail-in ballots, 1.7 million of those ballots never ever get counted. This is the ugly type of what I called soft apartheid in voting in America. We use fancy terms like disenfranchisement. You know what, someone steals your car, you don’t say, “Someone’s disenfranchised my car!” No, they’ve stolen your car. They steal your vote. It’s a theft.

AM: We focus on obviously the presidential elections with this because obviously its the biggest most vast disenfranchisement of the votes, but local elections, every election this is happening.

GP: Really, what’s very, very important, is that most of this vote theft is actually aimed at the state, local and congressional elections. I’ll give you an example. One of my first big investigations of vote theft was back in 2000 when I discovered that Katherine Harris and Jed Bush, of Florida had removed 10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls.10’s of thousands of black men from the voter rolls, what was the reason? They were all felons, criminals who aren’t allowed to vote. And Florida is one of the only states that still removes people from the voter rolls if they have a felony conviction. Okay. The problem was, I investigated and not one, absolutely zero of the people on this list who lost their vote, none of them were illegal voters. None. But yet George Bush became president by 537 votes because of what Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris did.But here’s the trick, they didn’t do it to elect George Bush. It was originally created two years before this system of purging black folk off the voter rolls to elect Jeb Bush as governor.

AM: There’s so many backups in place to secure the republican vote, to secure that this happens which brings me to the most obvious question, of course Hillary, and during the run up to the election, every time Donald Trump would bring this up she would poo-poo it and say, “Oh you’re crazy, how dare you question this sanctimonious system that we have?”

GP: This is one of the big problems that I run into. I’ll get questions like, “Well, if the republicans are stealing votes, how come the democrats aren’t saying anything?” Well, one answer to that, by the way, is democrats steal votes too, lots of them. I saw some of the most ugly Jim Crow style tactics used against Bernie Sanders voters here in California in the Sunshine State. I mean it was raw, today as you and I speak, there’s still over a million ballots that were cast, that were never tallied, never counted.Over a million, today, overwhelmingly those were Bernie Sanders votes. The victims are always the same, the victims are always voters of color, poor people, students, basically progressive votes. And because the democratic party, if they let everyone vote and help everyone vote it would be a very different party. So the establishment democrats don’t want those votes. They’d rather lose them in the general election than have those votes in the primary.That’s just the ugly awful truth.

AM: I think its hard for people to believe that the Clinton dynasty would give up power because they would rather legitimize the system that bred them.

Greg: The Clinton’s are the system. Remember, whether we like it or not, Hillary Clinton did some pretty shady things, the last thing she wants to do is talk about illegality. And misuse of the electoral system, misuse of campaign finance.

AM: Here you are, doing this giant in depth investigation, this feature film, trying to get this story out and here everyone, is just hysterically fear mongering about another country, usurping our election.

Greg: Well, heres the problem, the Russians did not tell Hillary Clinton, “Do not make a single stop in Wisconsin.” She didn’t tell those long lines in Ohio. Did Russia remove the votes of students in Georgia because they didn’t have citizenship proof papers? It wasn’t the Russians.

AM: We cannot count on the Democrats to fix this, Greg, what do we do, how do we give back a voice to the voiceless here?

GP: We have to form the organizations and participate in the organizations that exist right now that’ll expose the con that America has the world’s most perfect elections. We don’t. We still have apartheid elections, we still have Jim Crow. The only difference now is that Jim Crow has gone from wearing white sheets to using spreadsheets. We can expose it, and then we can act on it. We gotta do those two things and not ask the Democratic party to do it for us.

FOLLOW // @AbbyMartin & @Greg_Palast

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

From his Wall Street roots and apocalyptic film career to his cultivation of alt-right bigots at Breitbart News, Abby Martin exposes Bannon’s true character in this explosive documentary.

Abby Martin Exposes Steve Bannon

A familiar name to some and a new one to others, Steve Bannon is a right wing ideologue who should not be ignored. With some calling him “the intellectual force behind” Trump’s agenda and others directly referring to him as President, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News has his hands in some of the most controversial executive orders and foreign policy decisions in this administration.

Bannon’s political development began during his time in the US Navy from 1976-1983. During this time he never served in war himself, but his time spent as an officer on ship created a lifelong thirst for military supremacy and war, still bubbling to the surface today.

After leaving the Navy, Bannon found himself at Goldman Sachs for 6 years before founding his own investment firm, Bannon & Company. Two short years later, he sold his firm to a media giant, funding his next endeavor – making apocalyptic films laden with right-wing propaganda, stoking the fears and insecurities of a growing and increasingly agitated audience. His films range in subject from demonizing the Occupy movement to praising Sarah Palin in a potential attempt to ride her coattails to fame, to dangerous propaganda about the perceived dangers of immigration.

Many of Bannon’s business dealings and relationships have been laden with controversy. In 2004 he began working with Internet Gaming Entertainment, exploiting online games such as World Of Warcraft. Utilizing his experience and connections, “Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plow $60 million into a company that sold imaginary goods in an imaginary world.” All three heads of IGE were sued for sexual abuse of underage boys, including the founder and CEO, Pierce Brock, and investor Marc Collins-Rector, a fugitive on the run for child rape and human trafficking.

In addition to controversy in his business life, Bannon’s personal relationships have been tumultuous. In 1995 Bannon embarked on his second of three marriages, only three days before his new wife, Mary Louise Piccard, gave birth to their twins, stating that he would not marry Piccard until he had proof that the babies were “normal.” After multiple bouts of physical and verbal abuse, Piccard filed a restraining order and divorced Bannon. Unsurprisingly Bannon was never convicted after Piccard was a no show in court, later claiming to have been threatened by Bannon. He retained visitation rights but was later caught hitting one of the twins when they were only 17 months old.

In the early 2000s, Bannon forged a relationship with Andrew Breitbart with Breitbart affectionately referring to Bannon as the “Leni Riefenshtahl of the Tea Party movement.” At the time, Breitbart was a protege of Matt Drudge, creator of The Drudge Report. The Drudge Report successfully brought the power of right wing talk radio to the internet. Breitbart expanded on The Drudge Report’s model by manipulating headlines to demonize progressives, women, immigrants, and more. Soon Alex Jones and his following were brought into the fold. As Breitbart News began to go under, Bannon was hard at work sourcing funds from right-wing investors in an attempt to reanimate it, when Andrew Breitbart unexpectedly dropped dead. Bannon quickly stepped in as CEO.

Soon Bannon created the Government Accountability Institute, an official sounding ring-wing think tank, bankrolled by an investment from Robert Mercer. Mercer had recently financed anti-Muslim adds in opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque” resulting in an increase in xenophobic panic. Other notable GAI investors included the power hungry billionaires, the Koch Brothers. GAI also served as a money laundering scheme for Breitbart in which wealthy donors could donate to the non-profit with their donations quickly forwarded on to Breitbart’s reporters.

With the rise of Trump came a rise in Breitbart News reader loyalty, including an instant increase in monthly readers – from 8 million to 18 million. Trump and Bannon both found something attractive and desired in the other – Trump being a powerful and accessible mouthpiece and Bannon being a household name with a large, loyal, and extremely passionate following.

Bannon preys on society’s problems and falsely directs the blame where he wants it – on immigrants, globalism, progressives, millennials, and more. Bannon’s misdirected desires to halt Muslim immigration, his strategy to rally the white working class against their poor neighbors and his seemingly unquenchable thirst for war are bleeding their way through Trump and into the world.

“The real Resistance will come from what Bannon seems to fear most—a United, multicultural progressive movement in the streets.”

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Abby Martin: If there’s one person other than Trump who has gained a surprisingly huge amount of political power over the past year, it’s Steve Bannon. The right-wing ideologue is most notorious for his role as former Executive Chairman at Breitbart News, a website that he dubbed, “The Platform of the Alt-Right,” and hosts stories like these. Bannon’s candid about his lust for power — quoted as saying, “Darth Vader, Dick Cheney, Satan, that’s power.” As Trump’s ineptitude, and lack of political ideology becomes increasingly obvious, many have noticed that there are other forces steering the ship.While the Christian right is one sector of the right-wing establishment guiding his policies, the alt-right has their own influence in the White House, namely through Steve Bannon. He’s been called the intellectual force behind Trump’s agenda.And in just mere months, he’s propelled himself from right-wing media outlier, to top propagandist of the U.S. Empire, as Trump’s chief strategist. That means Bannon is the number one person who Trump relies on, to guide his every move. Just like Karl Rove served as the brain for George W. Bush.David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard, said of Bannon, “You have an individual who’s basically creating the ideological aspects of where we’re going. And ideology ultimately is the most important aspect of any government. “Bannon’s power grab hasn’t gone unnoticed. As Trump spends the majority of his time tweeting, watching news about himself, and golfing at the lavish Mar-a-Lago Resort, there’s a big void for Bannon to fill.So, who is this mysterious man behind the curtain? Well, Bannon’s story really starts with a youthful lust for war.Bannon credits his formative political development to his time in the U.S. Navy. He served from 1976 to 1983, mostly on a ship as a pampered officer. It was on this ship that Bannon’s thirst for military supremacy, and war was fully formed. While he never served in war himself, he lamented his missed opportunity as a political turning point.While Bannon was at sea, the empire was hard at work trying to strangle the Iranian revolution. Which had deposed U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah, famous for chilling torture, and executions of political opponents.The Pentagon was planning a military assault on Tehran, which ended in embarrassment, and ultimately was pulled back by Carter. Bannon bitterly sailed on in the lonely seas. Becoming more reactionary over the incident, he developed a fawning loyalty to Reagan, and even attended his victory party in uniform. He ended up working in the Pentagon under Reagan.Although he left the military, his love for war never ceased. Bannon’s long-time writing partner and former close friend, Julia Jones said, “Steve is a strong militarist. He’s in love with war. It’s almost poetry to him.”But apparently Navy life was below Bannon. Even with his preferred Commander-in-Chief. In 1984 he moved on to more lucrative adventures as an investment banker, at financial behemoth Goldman Sachs. He got the job like most who exist in this world of privilege, meeting the son of a Goldman Sachs executive. He stayed at Goldman for six years, before he recruited his banker pals to found his own investment firm — Bannon and Company, which bankrolled media corporations.The industry cashed in big with Clinton’s 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allowed media companies to be gobbled up in massive monopolies. Two years later, Bannon sold his firm to a bigger media giant.This gave him the lavish wealth to focus on his true passion, making apocalyptic right-wing propaganda films.

Crowd: (chanting, drums)

Man: There shall be open borders, and it’s just nuts.

Man: What would have happened if a Senator was killed by Armando Garcia?

Abby Martin: His movies over the years cover an array of far-right dystopian fantasies that depict a society in collapse, invaded by criminal armies.

Man: The cartels control everything.

Abby Martin: Whoa… Dang…Bannon’s political films were never successful outside the dark circles of Tea Party types. So, in 2004, he took a more lucrative position at a peculiar company — Internet Gaming Entertainment. IGE was based on exploiting Internet games, like World of War Craft, paying thousands of people to drone away at mining virtual resources, so that they could be sold to other players.Brought in for his banker connections, IGE’s investment paid off well. As one industry expert pointed out, “Bannon managed to convince Goldman Sachs to plough $60 million into a company that sold imaginary goods, in an imaginary world.”In addition to the bizarre nature of their profits, Bannon was making money for highly problematic people. IGE was an investment project of Mark Collins-Rector, a fugitive on the run for child rape, and human trafficking. In fact, all three heads of the firm were sued for sexual abuse of under-aged boys, including the founder and CEO of IGE.A year after Bannon secured the investment, the company tanked, embroiled in shady dealings, a class-action lawsuit brought by gamers. As the company went down in flames, its remnants became Affinity Media. Bannon had the CEO ousted and replaced, with himself. He stayed in this position until leaving for Breitbart, in 2012.Considering Bannon’s lack of ethics in his professional life, it’s not surprising that his personal life is also marred with scandal.Like several members of the Trump Administration, Bannon has a disturbing history of alleged domestic abuse. Details from the second of his three marriages reveal what kind of man Bannon really is.In 1995 he married Mary Louise Picard, only three days before she gave birth to their twins. According to Picard, he wouldn’t marry her until the babies were proven to be, “normal”. In the divorce documents, Picard wrote, “Bannon made it clear that he would not marry me just because I was pregnant. I was scheduled for an amniocentesis, and was told by the respondent that if the babies were normal, we would get married.”Even though the babies were normal, Bannon didn’t seem to pay much attention to them, as he made them wear costumes to tell them apart, and repeatedly refused to pay them child support.Less than a year into their marriage, a violent incident happened that could be best explained through the police report itself. According to the report, Bannon got angry at his wife for making noise while feeding their newborn twins. When she asked him for money to buy groceries, a fight erupted, and carried out onto the driveway.The fight culminated with Bannon becoming violent, grabbing her wrists and neck, and, “pulled her down, as if he was trying to pull her into the car, over the door.” When she broke free to try to call 911, Bannon jumped over her and the twins, to grab the phone from her.”I took the phone to call the police, and he grabbed the phone away from me, throwing it across the room and breaking it, as he was screaming that I was a crazy F****** C***,” the document states.Police verified the abuse, writing, “I saw red marks on her left wrist, and the right side of her neck.” These were photographed.According to a study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, women who have been strangled by their partner are seven times more likely to be killed, than other victims of domestic violence. The same study shows that 43% of women murdered in domestic assaults, had been strangled by their partner in the previous year. According to the officer on the scene, she broke down and admitted that their turbulent six-year relationship had been plagued with physical violence early on. Bannon was arrested for misdemeanor domestic violence, battery, and witness intimidation. Picard filed a restraining order, and divorced him. But Bannon was never convicted, because Picard didn’t show up for court.Later, she revealed that Bannon and his lawyers had threatened to ruin her life, if she pursued charges. Bannon retained visitation rights of their children. Yet, just months later when the babies were only 17 months old, he was caught hitting one of them. Picard then requested visitation in public spaces only, because she said he was verbally abusive in front of their kids, and she did not feel safe.He’s also been charged with crude verbal abuse against female employees. When one female worker challenged his leadership, he reportedly called her a bimbo, and threatened to, “kick her ass”.But his relationships, and Wall Street career, have always come second to his drive for political influence. Throughout his years as a propagandist, Bannon hitched his wagon to things he thought would elevate his views.When the Tea Party movement emerged, Bannon praised it as the vanguard of a new American revolution.When Sarah Palin came on the scene, Bannon was so enthused by her popularity; he created an entire film about her. Considering Palin herself isn’t even interviewed in the film, it’s unknown whether Bannon actually saw her as a visionary political leader.

Sarah Palin: The man can only ride ya, when your back is bent. So, strengthen it!

Abby Martin: Or, if she was just a convenient vehicle for his own vision. This strategy of riding a fringe character to power didn’t succeed with Palin. But it would with Trump. But nowhere would Bannon’s quest for political influence be realized more, than at Breitbart News. Bannon developed a friendship with Andrew Breitbart in the early 2000s, through a shared love of arch-reactionary media. Breitbart even had a cute nickname for Bannon, the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement. Riefenstahl was a Nazi filmmaker known for creating some of Hitler’s most iconic propaganda. The comparison was meant as a compliment.When Bannon became a protégé of Andrew Breitbart, he entered into a fringe circle with enormous sway over the beliefs of millions of dispirit white men. Andrew Breitbart is credited for changing the way media is consumed, helping launch huge websites, like Huffington Post, with good friend at the time, Ariana Huffington; and of course, his own website, Breitbart News. Breitbart was a protégé of Matt Drudge, creator and head of the Drudge Report. He converted the power of right-wing talk radio, where ideologues had a platform for views unacceptable on TV, onto the Internet.Drudge Report is an aggregate that curates a particular narrative of white male victimization. Long-time Editor, Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, took this model of aggregation, but manipulated the headlines into stories that fostered a hysterical climate against progressives, women, immigrants, etc., As well as a comfortable hub for white nationalists. Along with Breitbart, the elusive Matt Drudge also handpicked Alex Jones, as the next right-wing icon. While Alex Jones is treated as just a loony Internet sideshow, he has a following of millions of people, who take his every word as gospel. Bannon was a fitting addition to this mix. Bannon’s initial role in Breitbart News was as a money bundler, again, using his Wall Street connections to raise capital for their project. But by 2012, the site was going under. It was blacklisted for a hoax against a black government official, where her speech was manipulated to appear as if she had advocated violence against white people.During this time, Bannon was hard at work raising cash from right-wing millionaires to resurrect it, and Andrew Breitbart dropped dead. Bannon promptly stepped in as CEO and relaunched the site under his leadership.In his scheme to inflate his new platform, he created the Government Accountability Institute, a right-wing think tank which issues reports like this one, that attempts to validate the conspiracy of paid protestors.GAI’s donor list shows who among the empire’s ruling elite are behind Bannon. It was bankrolled by a multi-million dollar investment from a man named, Robert Mercer; dubbed one of the most influential billionaires in the world. Mercer has financed anti-Muslim ads that use the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, to whip up xenophobic panic, as well as campaigns advocating the death penalty.But he’s also known for something else — having the largest collection of machine guns in America. What else would a far-right billionaire spend his money on, other than stockpiling an arsenal of weapons in his mansion bunker? Other top donors to Bannon’s GAI, are America’s premiere bloodthirsty, planet-destroying billionaires, the Koch brothers.But GAI had another purpose. It offered a way for these super rich donors to essentially launder money to Breitbart, without them having to deal with the fallout of doing so publically. Hey, they’re just making charitable donations to a non-profit.Their tax-deductible donations through GAI were sent directly to pay Breitbart reporters’ salaries, which is illegal. Though Breitbart News had always been a medium for extreme right-wing forces, Bannon took it even further down that path.While he remains more tight-lipped in public about the true nature of his beliefs, Bannon used this site as the vehicle to promote his most incendiary views. According to one former Breitbart writer, Bannon ran the site and controlled the content as a dictator. Making sure his guests and contributors all fell in line with his own ideological outlook.Among the voices Bannon often highlighted on Breitbart, are Pamela Geller, America’s most prominent anti-Muslim bigot. Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-lived National Security Advisor, who says Islam, is a cancer. And washed up hate peddler, Milo Yiannopoulis.Entire sections of Breitbart are dedicated to sensationalizing distorted facts about minority groups, to whip up and justify hatred of Muslims, and people of color. For example, one tab, labeled, “Black Crime,” aggregates stories of offences committed by black people, another compiles reports of honor killings, and child marriages, from around the globe.The site routinely portrays Muslim refugees as disease-carrying criminals. As it has sought to expand its presence in Europe, the website has frequently attacked Muslim communities, by propagating racist tropes, and justifying violence against immigrants. This site has taken advantage of recent anti-Muslim hysteria in Europe, to exploit their audience’s irrational fears of Muslim immigration.The presumable audience of angry white men that Bannon accumulated at Breitbart, reached far greater heights with the rise of the Trump phenomenon. While Breitbart News, under Bannon drew in about 8 million readers per month, it shot up to over 18 million, in the months after Trump announced his campaign.A new relationship was born. Trump had something Bannon always wanted — a bigger megaphone for his right-wing dreams of transforming American society. And Bannon had something Trump cherished too — a doting audience.Now that Bannon has this much power, a lot has been speculated about his actual political beliefs. And because he rarely gives media interviews to people, other than Breitbart employees, we don’t often see him challenged. Bannon is a well-known critic of mainstream conservatives, but not just for the sake of pushing them further to the right. He wants to build an insurgency — to destroy both traditional Republican institutions, and everything to the left of them.He’s called a populist, but he’s really only a populist for a specific sector of the working class. That’s nothing new. Throughout history rulers have rallied the white working class against other poor people, to avert blame for systemic crisis — in Germany and beyond, this tactic has served as the basis for fascism.His political philosophy is also rooted in a rejection of what the alt-right calls, globalism.

Man: The globalists and their minions just want to get rid of our sovereignty, and say we don’t have a right to have a country.

Man: It doesn’t matter what race, or country you’re from, you should be against the globalists. We need nationalist governments.

Man: But the world at large, however, is not united by a common culture. That’s why the globalists are waging a war against national identity.

Woman: Globalism means any law your government passes is subject to invalidation by unelected hall monitors, who would rather police the boundaries of free speech, than the borders of actual countries.

Abby Martin: It’s a vague concept that’s applied to everything from a shadowy international network of elites usurping American sovereignty, to the destruction of Western culture from foreign invaders –- a.k.a. immigrants. They rail against multiculturism, which really just means people of different religions, and nationalities, co-existing.Bannon vehemently denies the charge of white nationalism, but he proudly calls himself an economic nationalist.

Steve Bannon: The internal logic makes sense. Their corporatist, globalist media, that are adamantly opposed… adamantly opposed (applause) to an economic nationalist agenda, like Donald Trump has. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day… every day, it is going to be a fight.

Abby Martin: But who is fighting whom? What is this nation Bannon says he stands for? And who does he consider part of it? Well, it’s clear who he doesn’t consider part of it.

Man: It’s pretty dark here in Europe right now, but there’s something actually much darker, and that is Islam.

Abby Martin: Bannon doesn’t even try to mask his anti-Muslim bigotry as a fear of terrorism, as others do. He’s clear in stating that Islam is a threat to white American Christian culture.

Man: To be brutally frank, I mean, Christianity is dying in Europe, and Islam is on the rise. Let’s talk about that.

Abby Martin: Bannon’s views on Islam, make Trump’s Muslim ban look like child’s play. If it were entirely up to Bannon, no Muslims would ever be able to enter the U.S.

Man: Why are you going through all this thing on vetting? Why even let them in? The opportunity cost to put in a structure to actually vet these people, the cost to do that… to what end? Can’t that money be used in the United States? I mean, I think the issue is, should we just take a pause and a hiatus for a number of years?

Abby Martin: Apart from Muslims, Bannon’s anti-immigrant views go as far as to depict his nation as literally, being at war. In his 2006 film, “Border War: The Battle over Illegal Immigration,” he uses a small majority white border town as a symbol of America — depicting it as being invaded by an evil immigrant army. But Bannon goes even further than most of his anti-immigrant counterparts. His nation doesn’t even include highly educated, totally legal immigrants. In this 2015 recording, we hear Bannon rebuking Donald Trump on the matter.

Donald Trump: We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country. We’ve got to create, you know, job creators. One man went to, I think it was Harvard, there was a story a month ago — went to Harvard. Did well, good student, wanted to stay in the country, wasn’t allowed to, went back to his home in India, started up a company.Now it’s a very, very successful company, with thousands of people. He wanted to do that here. We have to be careful of that, Steve, you know. We have to keep our talented people in this country.

Steve Bannon: Um.

Donald Trump: I think you agree with that. Do you agree with that?

Steve Bannon: Well, I… I’ve got a tough… you know, when two-thirds, or three-quarters of the CEOs, in Silicon Valley are from South Asia, or from Asia, I think, I… on a… my point is that a country is more like Sessions. A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.

Abby Martin: Apart from immigrants, Bannon’s ideology, as seen during his reign at Breitbart, heavily scapegoats African-Americans, with racist depictions as welfare scammers, and violent criminals.So, while Bannon says he’s just a nationalist, not a white nationalist, it seems that his nationalism doesn’t apply to anyone other than white people. At the same time, he claims that the alt-right’s appeal to racists is simply coincidental. Bannon’s fears of Islam and immigrants, are tied to what he sees as the demise of Judeo Christian values, which he believes were foundational to the so-called golden age of capitalism. Bannon’s ideology appeals to people, because he’s pointing out actual problems in society — like the absence of a rising middle class, and many other symptoms of neoliberalism. According to Bannon, America’s golden age was in the 1950s, where institutions, stability, and upward mobility for white families thrived. While African-Americans, and others, continued to be impoverished and brutalized. Bannon thinks the Civil Rights and Social movements of the 1960s, eroded these stable institutions. Without them functioning as they did before, Bannon thinks corporate greed was able to run wild. Big government and big business, schemed together against the interests of small businesses, favoring instead globalization and free trade agreements. The problem is that the globalists gutted the American working class, and created a middle class in Asia, Bannon says. Though Bannon’s story about the economy does contain some kernels of truth, he demonizes those hurt most by these policies. He even blames the 2008 financial crisis on the Civil Rights movement, and anti-racist movements. As his 2010 film, “Generation Zero” explains.

Man: So, white Americans have been in a position where they constantly have to prove that they are not racist. It is that phenomenon of white guilt, is what pressures people in the government to say things like, everybody has a right to a house.

Abby Martin: This hatred of progressive movements was accentuated in Bannon’s 2012 film, “Occupy Unmasked.” Which became the main propaganda piece smearing the movement. With Breitbart News, he often discredited organic mass protests as manufactured fronts, for either communists, Democrats, or George Soros. With the decline of the capitalism that made America great, Bannon curmudgeonly blames millennials, their secularism, and pop culture, as having, “sapped the West of its strength to defend its Judeo Christian ideals.” He even blames this for the rise of ISIS. Bannon’s economic agenda, and his racism, go hand-in-hand.His economic nationalism dissolves any semblance of minority rights, as they are all under a dominant zeitgeist of Judeo Christian values, and a distinctly American — really white, cultural identity.

Steve Bannon: I think we… the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy. Not an economy just in some global marketplace, with open borders. But we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for being.

Abby Martin: Bannon’s message had so much reach in the recent election cycle, because it appealed to the same economic issues the Democratic Party establishment has been unwilling to address. All of this is couched in a virulently anti-establishment ethos. Democrats and mainstream Republicans are the ones that got us into this mess.His solution is as apocalyptic as his films. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishments. “Now, that he has the President’s ear, it’s not hard to see how, even within the first several weeks, his ideology and most outlandish fantasies have been put into action. Bannon is credited for penning the most extreme elements of the Muslim Ban, excluding those on tourist visas, and green card holders initially.Part of Trump’s anti-immigrant plan is a tactic straight from Breitbart News. Trump announced he would publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Trumps main attack strategy on the media, is also straight from Bannon’s mouth.In an interview with the New York Times, Bannon said, “The media here is the opposition party.”

Donald Trump: Yeah, I think the media is the opposition party.

Reporter: …state categorically–

Donald Trump: –You are fake news.

Abby Martin: Perhaps the biggest danger of Bannon’s power and influence in the White House, is leading a march to his first love — war.

Man: You have an expansionist Islam, and you have an expansionist China, right, they are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march, and they think the Judeo Christian West is on the retreat.

Abby Martin: Last March, Bannon boasted that there is no doubt the U.S. will be going to war in the South China Sea, in the next five to ten years.In January, a Chinese government official wrote, that a war within the President’s term, or war breaking out tonight, are not just slogans. They’re becoming a practical reality.The danger of a war with China is just one terrifying scenario we face under Bannon’s guidance. With a myriad of generals, and politicians, hoping to push Trump into new wars with Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq again, Syria, etc. — Bannon could be the deciding factor. For Trump, with so many loathsome establishment figures in his ear, Bannon is the trusted companion to tell him whether or not to listen.While Bannon may likely be just using Trump to advance his own agenda, there’s a whole extremist group of the empire’s elites who are using Bannon to advance theirs.While it’s imperative to fight every member of the Trump Administration, we need to understand the ideology behind their policies, in order to best defeat them. That demands we expose figures like Steve Bannon, and the entire system that subjects us to the will of such repugnant individuals.The fact that someone like Steve Bannon could attain such a high seat of power, shows how illegitimate the system really is; how quickly steps towards progress can be reversed.The Democrats, who are beholding to their own corporate interests, and advocate the same racist wars, cannot be trusted to lead any real opposition.The real resistance will come from what Bannon fears the most — a united, multi-cultural, progressive movement in the streets.

FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles & @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

After 10 years and three terms, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa’s time in office has ended. Under his administration Ecuador made far-reaching economic and social gains, despite having inherited a country on the brink of collapse.

In one of his last interviews before leaving office, Abby Martin talks to him about his legacy, his critics, and the struggle ahead for Ecuador and beyond.

From commenting on Trump and the global crisis of inequality, to addressing CIA plots and opposition in his own country, hear Correa’s last words as President to the people of Latin America and the United States.

President Correa on His Legacy & Critics

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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles & @AbbyMartin

WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles

The hallowed halls of a once respected US government are now filled with the hollow promises of an impotent governing class. In a political landscape riddled with indecision, political pageantry and growing despotism, the people are hungry for a leadership that represents them. Instead, we are faced with a corporatocracy – one hellbent on the consolidation of wealth and power rather than the proliferation of freedom and justice.

Believe it or not, there was a time when representative government worked on behalf of the people, but those days have long succumbed to the political distortions of misguided leaders. Thus, the age old questions remain: If it is possible to revitalize the self-governing power potential of the ‘We the People’, then what might be a viable alternative or how might we augment the current system to provide the infrastructure for a change of guard? Perhaps by looking to the revolutionary ideas of the internet and the co-creative force of its users and developers we can begin to find the answers.

One of the groundbreaking ideas that the internet has provided is that of open-source development, which promotes the universal access to a product’s design as well as redistribution of that design. This developmental model set by programmers and software developers exemplifies the highest order of free trade, and serves to utilize the best ideas for the overall benefit of the system. If we are to apply a similar model as the framework for government, we begin to see parallels between open-source programming and the ideas put forth by America’s founding fathers.

Unfortunately, the fundamental ideology of the US political system has been absent from view for quite some time. The growing disconnect between the people and their representatives has led to a lag in public representation, thus resulting in a severe lack of people’s interests and ideas being properly expressed by US legislation.

A recent example of this contrast is illustrated in the debate over the legalization of marijuana, where an overwhelming public support for legalization has not been echoed by the government, nor the legislation regarding the issue. However, the ‘War on Drugs’ is only one of many examples which illustrates the delay we are experiencing in our current democratic process.

In a world where efficiency and speed are essential to human progress, it’s unfortunate that our legislative powers have become cumbersome and inefficient. However, the internet’s crowd-sourcing concept could provide us with the possibility to facilitate some level of autonomy, where the average individual has the ability to exercise their right to self-representation.

The idea of crowd-sourcing was first referenced by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine, and can be best understood as the purposeful re-appropriation of resources for achieving a particular goal by an indeterminate group of individuals. Much like open-source programming which relies upon a multitude of contributors, so too does crowd-sourcing rely upon the involvement and contributions of the collective.

There are many examples of crowd-sourcing being used throughout the internet today.  Chemists have crowd-sourced protein folding techniques, YouTube has done so with entertainment, Facebook with different language versions of it’s site, while politicians and artists alike have crowd-sourced funding for their campaigns and projects. If this is a successful tool for science, entertainment and finance, couldn’t it also be possible to apply crowd-sourcing to politics?

Endless possibilities could present themselves once we focus the “spare processing power of millions of human brains” towards the evolution of political representation. For example, a truly participatory system could unfold which no longer relies upon single individuals to represent the will of many, but instead allows all people to become micro-leaders in a process of collective representation. Although this idea may seem farfetched, it’s not far from the framework that helped to build this country’s political ideology.

The founding fathers believed that public office should be held by its citizens, to act as contributors as well as beneficiaries in an effort to provide society with a fair and just governing body. As we continue to evolve socially and intellectually, it’s the hope that our leadership would incorporate the enlightened ideas of the past as well as those that propel us into the future. If they don’t, ‘We the People’ can and will find ways to represent ourselves through active participation in the political process.

As more and more people wake up to the corruption of the current system and the lack of political reflection on a federal level, passive acceptance of oligarchical rule will end, soon to be replaced by an active contribution in the political progress of this country, and ultimately, the world.

Written by Justin Blush for Media Roots

Photo by FlickrJBrazito