Thanks for passing on this item, Charles. I think they may be understating the case in terms of the new technology, so it could more than a 5% play in terms of official results.
We've never had a fully honest national election in the US, but the nature of the corruption was such that the Democrats would steal in areas where they were usually going to win anyway and the Republicans would do what they wanted pretty much where they were in charge. What's new is the lack of balance in these things. This has also created the fundamentally changed nature of the two-party system. When American capitalism was such that you had conflicting elites within it, factions and parties actually tended to reflect substantive, sometimes conflicting differences of interests within the ruling class. In that kind of rivalry, you can make an argument that such a difference might matter to one part or another of the working class or the middle class.... This just isn't so at present. While relative differences remain, they are nothing like the differences that were once there. Rather than factions of merchants and planters or industrialists and financiers using the party to resolve differences, we now have a more homogeneous ruling class and a two-party system financed by the same interests. This is surely how the approval rating of the most corrupt administration in U.S. history could simply collapse at least three times since 2001, but without an "opposition" unwilling to deliver the coup de grace. Solidarity! Mark L.
