When Both Sides Are Corrupt, Democracy Pays the Price: A Call to Heal the Divides

The root causes of America's polarization and division, the pervasive election corruption across both political parties, and the hidden powers that maintain control regardless of who's elected.

As the election draws near, I believe we can safeguard democracy and the greater good regardless of who’s elected into office. One thing we must guard against is the social polarization so evident in major events such as the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Studies show that times of crisis can bring us together in profound ways. Tapping into the human instinct for connection and collaboration requires that we heal the forces keeping us divided and ask the deeper questions mainstream media ignores.

This article delves into three important dimensions of this conversation: the root causes of America's polarization and division, the pervasive election corruption across both political parties, and the hidden powers that maintain control regardless of who’s elected in office. In our closing, we emphasize that the solutions are out there. The greater good and what’s possible are waiting for us.

What’s Driving the Polarization and Division in America?

Journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon asked this question as she traveled the country, engaging with everyday Americans to uncover their perspectives on the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Contrary to mainstream media narratives, she found deep consensus on the most important issues between working class Democrats and working class Republicans. Communities across the country were more diverse and open to viewpoint diversity than she previously thought.

In her book Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, she writes that the major driver of polarization isn’t political division, but the class division between the elite control regime and the working class. Both political parties serve the interests of these powerful elites, and not the needs of the larger common good. The raging culture war around political identity is little more than a tool used by the powerful to corrupt the media and both sides of the political aisle, resulting in the working class endlessly fighting each other.

In short, it’s not the Blue or Red party but the Money party behind most political decisions.

A study by Princeton University found that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy dominated by the rich and powerful elite. Over the past decade, the wealth of the global top 1% grew by $42 trillion. The COVID economy led to the greatest wealth transfer in history. We've borrowed so much money to finance wars that interest payments on these debts now exceed the entire cost of our national defense spending, which amounts to trillions of dollars. Inflation spun out of control, largely due to rampant corporate price gouging that made it harder for average people to make ends meet.

Billionaires and large corporations now wield enormous power and influence in all sectors of society–technology, banking, media, food, medicine, national security, the criminal justice system. This centralization of power and wealth happened under every presidential administration.

In the last century, Republican and Democrat presidents have pursued a broadly similar political agenda. This agenda has benefitted elites at the expense of the general public. Loyalty to this agenda takes precedence over party loyalty. This naturally raises the question: who is really shaping American policies? We’ll address this below.

Election Corruption On Both Sides of Political Aisle

Domestically, election corruption happens on both sides of the political aisle. Internationally, covert forces within the US government manipulate elections and governments all over the world, supporting fascists, drug lords, and terrorists. Carnegie Mellon University researcher Dov Levin tracked more than 80 times that the US has interfered in elections of other countries between 1946 and 2000. Ex-CIA director James Woolsey even admitted that they meddle in other countries’ elections “for a good cause.”

In the 2000 election, Al Gore won the popular vote but a Supreme Court decision gave the presidency to George W. Bush. Among the many controversies of this election, it was discovered that tens of thousands of eligible voters in Florida were wrongly prevented from voting. These voters were predominantly Democrats, Blacks and Hispanics, and people from low-income communities. Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris paid a private data firm Database Technologies to target and remove eligible voters, including people whose voting rights were restored after they served their sentences and those who were innocent yet accused of committing felonies. The illegal purging of these voters significantly impacted the election outcome.

Following this irregular election, the Bush administration started a disastrous war on terror and invaded Iraq under false pretenses, resulting in countless crimes against humanity. 4.5 million people have directly and indirectly been killed as a result of the US post-9/11 wars.

In the 2016 election, leaked emails revealed that the Democratic primary was rigged from the start. The Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Hilary Clinton campaign, and major news outlets colluded to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning his party’s nomination.

Unlike Sanders, Clinton was in deep with the military-industrial complex, having recently approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors while Secretary of State. She fully supported former president and husband Bill Clinton’s crime legislation in 1994, which ultimately became one of the main drivers of modern mass incarceration that devastated predominantly Black communities. The Clintons politically profited from the dirty fossil-fuel industry and CIA-backed organized crime operations that trafficked drugs through Arkansas as part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Ironically, Iran-Contra was largely carried out by prominent right-wing forces to maintain the US position of global dominance.

Bernie Sanders represented something different. He was catalyzing a populist revolution to create a fairer economy by ending the rampant greed, corruption and fraud that pervaded Wall Street and corporate America. He was a passionate voice for the working class and a real advocate for environmental justice.

During the election, Sanders’ growing popularity was subject to a media blackout, while he was strategically smeared and discredited by the press.

The media began counting superdelegates [for Clinton] in October as if they’d already voted even though today they still haven’t; the DNC performed something shockingly similar to money laundering for the Clinton campaign to circumvent donation maximums and funnel millions to her campaign; the debates were reduced, canceled, or scheduled at times few people would watch, which prevented Bernie Sanders from becoming better known earlier in the primary; and the primary rules as a whole were written and rewritten by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz … a longtime Clinton friend and ally. Even worse: voter rolls were mysteriously purged in many states; caucus rules were changed suddenly; and actual votes were flipped by the thousands in many states, according to scientific analysis.
— journalist and media activist Tony Brasunas, “The Deeper Reason Many Intelligent Progressives and Independents Will Not Support Hillary Clinton”

Mainstream media, US intelligence agencies, and establishment leaders attributed the leaked emails to a Russian conspiracy aimed at interfering in U.S. elections and damaging Hillary Clinton's reputation to benefit Donald Trump. Yet no evidence was found to support this claim. Even more damning, these allegations turned out to be a product of government disinformation. Clinton’s campaign manufactured and paid for the Russian collusion hoax, which costed taxpayers millions of dollars. Investigation into the matter produced the Mueller Report and Durham Report, both of which failed to produce any evidence of Russian collusion. FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith even lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on an application related to spying on individuals suspected of Russian collusion.

This should’ve been a major story, but it wasn’t. Former NPR veteran reporter Uri Berliner couldn’t believe that the media was burying this story. Where was the mainstream media coverage on these revelations of blatant Democratic Party lies?

Interestingly enough, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh alleges that DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked the damning documents. After Rich was shot and killed in DC in an apparent robbery, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange strongly implied that Rich had been the source and that his untimely death may have been related to that.

Why Hidden Forces Within Government Remain in Control No Matter Who is Elected into Office

This machinery is inaccessible by design. How we vote is irrelevant to its operations, yet we're told that voting is the only way we can change things. So we vote for the big stone heads. And we ignore the machinery supporting the big stone heads, hidden from view.
– WantToKnow.info news editor Mark Bailey, Free Mind Gazette Substack

Elections are meant to serve the interests of the people. In theory, they’re the primary mechanism by which public will is translated into representative governance. In practical terms, elections may be less important than we’ve been led to believe.

Taking a sober look at the state of our society, our greatest problems have remained unaddressed election cycle after election cycle. Republicans and Democrats have both proven themselves equally unwilling to solve these problems. Issues like chronic illness, intelligence agency abuses, Big Tech corruption, and the war machine are rarely mentioned on the campaign trail. These issues negatively impact us all, yet they’re ignored by presidential debates because they’re also profitable components of the machinery of power.

Presidents on both sides of the political aisle consistently fail to address the chronic illness and disease in our country

In the US, we spend far more on healthcare ($4.3 trillion) than on defense ($1.3 trillion). Yet we have the poorest health outcomes among high-income countries. In 1960, only 6% of American kids lived with a chronic health condition. Today, it is more than half. No US president has addressed the root causes of our health crisis, which aren’t mysterious. Giant corporations that place profits ahead of people control our food and healthcare systems.

Corporate profiteers in the junk food industry reap profits from the weight-loss industry, in which 1 in 8 American adults have taken a weight-loss drug. Congress protected Big Pharma when they exacerbated the deadly War on Drugs and made billions from opioid prescriptions, only to then sell drugs to treat opioid addiction.

Toxic chemicals in our food and everyday products are linked to devastating chronic diseases, irreversible consequences for children’s health, and major environmental destruction. Some of these chemicals are banned on golf courses because of how toxic they are, but they’re approved for use on farms that grow our food. Meanwhile, billions of pounds of pesticides are used each year on our food despite their use being identified as a cancer risk comparable to smoking.

The corporations controlling our food system have done everything in their power to prevent us from adopting healthier alternatives to their dangerous products. They’ve corrupted scientists and politicians, manipulated public opinion, and systematically attacked the organic food movement.

Yet the organic food movement is a game-changing remedy to start addressing our health crisis. Studies show that toxic pesticide levels dropped by 60% after eating an organic diet for just one week. Organic food is also linked to significantly lower cancer risk and is effective in treating and reducing the severity of autism in children. Organic and regenerative agriculture can radically boost local economies and reverse environmental damage. French farmers are even being paid to go organic by the government as part of a larger effort to clean up water pollution. Why aren’t our leaders talking about this?

We have the solutions to make America healthier again. These solutions can unite us across our differences. When we can think and feel well together, that’s a double win for the common good.

Presidents on both sides of the political aisle have deep ties to Big Tech

It doesn’t matter to Big Tech who wins the presidential nomination. This past year, the nation’s largest tech companies spent $28 million to persuade lawmakers and regulators from both sides of the political aisle to let them continue what they're doing unregulated. Big Tech even paid high-level intelligence and national security officials to help stop legislative efforts that would break up Big Tech’s unfair control over the market. In the last four years, every major tech antitrust and competition bill in Congress has died.

The world’s biggest tech companies are becoming more powerful than most countries. With so much power in their hands, Big Tech has punished those who create public tools that reduce screen addiction and allow people to take back control of their social media feeds. By controlling the smartphone app store market, Apple and Google removed apps that offered alternative forms of social media. These alternatives could have challenged the collusion between Big Tech and high-level government officials to censor social media content and the capture of our personal information to sell it to other companies and influence our behavior.

We've documented countless examples of how Big Tech violates human and environmental rights. Both political parties do very little to hold them accountable. Instead, our elected officials are standing by as these companies become deeply embedded within the military-industrial and law enforcement world.

Facial recognition software is being deployed everywhere, even as it often misidentifies innocent people, disproportionately affecting Black communities. Lethal AI weapons systems are rapidly being developed for wartime, posing a grave risk to innocent civilians and armed service members. And who knows what else? Thousands of Big Tech’s military and law enforcement contracts go unreported.

AI doesn’t cause harm by itself. We should worry about the people who control it. We live in societies in which power is exercised by a few to the detriment of the majority, and that technology provides a means of consolidating that power.
– journalist Kenan Malik

When used wisely and consciously, technology and social media are powerful forces for good. They harness life-enhancing human creativity and innovation, ideally contributing to a global commons that can bring us together. Biomimicry is a growing field of study that merges technology and the natural world to solve global and environmental challenges by drawing inspiration from nature and living species.

Taiwanese government officials worked with a decentralized civic tech community to address increasing political division by asking, "How do we find a way not to measure division, but construct consensus?" This led to a social media platform that hosted online spaces for debate where comments that were consensus-oriented got the most visibility. What they found was that within a few weeks, they could clearly identify where most people agree on many different issues. Politicians used this process to create outcomes the government could actually act on. Dozens of laws have now been passed based on what they found through this process.

Who are the tech companies in the US working on similar initiatives?

Presidents on both sides of the political aisle fail to hold US intelligence agencies accountable for their abuses and crimes against humanity

The CIA and other intelligence agencies have a long history of abusing their powers. Administration after administration has failed to hold these agencies accountable for their crimes. The CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind control program began under Eisenhower in 1953 and continued into the Nixon administration twenty years later. US intelligence agencies have also trafficked drugs to finance black budget programs, established a network of secret torture prisons that mass produced human rights violations, and erased the expectation of privacy with their mass surveillance operations. The CIA has been involved in assassination programs and the collection of sexual blackmail, which was used to manipulate government officials at home and abroad. They infiltrated the media to shape public opinion during Operation Mockingbird and targeted domestic dissidents, anti-war activists, and other progressive movements under Operation CHAOS.

In 2020, 51 members of the intelligence community attempted to mislead the public by publishing a letter falsely suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation while the CIA financed social media spying tools to censor anyone who investigated the potentially incriminating contents on Biden’s laptop. Around the same time, intelligence agencies began taking more direct control of public discourse by actively censoring the internet and manipulating social media.

In light of all we now know, our intelligence agencies appear untrustworthy and unreliable. This is of grave concern, because these are the very agencies our leaders rely on for answers to hard questions about what’s going on in the world and what should be done about it. Intelligence agency power abuses aren’t inevitable. But stopping them will require more than electing a new president.

Presidents on both sides of the political aisle support the war machine

Barack Obama was elected on a platform of bringing peace to our world. While Obama slashed the number of US troops in war zones, he expanded the role of high-tech special operations and paved the way for automated warfare. His administration’s secret drone program killed thousands of innocent civilians in at least 7 countries, including drone-bombing funerals and targeting those who show up at the scene of an original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead.

Donald Trump continued the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the use of deadly drone strikes across the globe. Trump repeatedly claimed Saudi Arabia was behind 9/11 and slammed Hilary Clinton for accepting money from the Saudis, given their horrific treatment of women among other human rights violations. Yet once elected, he pushed through weapons sales of $500 million to the kingdom while receiving lavish personal gifts from its rulers.

The Biden administration and the U.S. Congress passed the largest Pentagon budget ever. Biden authorized the transfer of cluster bombs to Ukraine. Cluster bombs are an internationally banned weapon due to how they kill and maim indiscriminately over a wide area and for years after a conflict, with children being the primary victims. Biden also oversaw the delivery of billions in military aid to Israel as Israel was attacking Hamas in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process.

Who are the winners of these bipartisan, endless wars? Financiers and defense contractors, a group that now includes Big Tech and venture capitalists paving the way for an unprecedented AI arms race. The revolving door between contractors and government offices makes meaningful regulation of these contractors all but impossible. Recent bipartisan legislation has made it even easier for contractors to fleece taxpayers.

Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons.
– activist and author Arundhati Roy

It doesn’t have to be this way. Iceland and Costa Rica are two of the world's happiest nations and they have no military forces whatsoever. All over the world, people are healing the war machine in inspiring ways.

Ending The Culture Wars for the Greater Good of All

We are a people divided, living under the twin tyrannies of government and big business, in the context of ecological collapse and geopolitical instability. Looking soberly at this invites us to begin taking responsibility for our part in it. More than anything, this new era demands healing, in both an individual and a social sense.
– WantToKnow.info news editor Mark Bailey, Free Mind Gazette Substack

Across all sectors of society, powerful, corporate entities work in cooperation with corrupt public officials to strategically control the media and the federal agencies designed to regulate them. In other words, the common good falls by the wayside while government officials further consolidate their power, and corporate profiteers make more money.

Social polarization stifles community and democracy itself. As we sit around speculating on the dangers of Project 2025 or worshiping the presidential candidate who we deem as the “savior” to our country’s problems, what if we start turning to each other, and not just within our own echo chambers? The most important issues shaping our collective future affect all of us, and we may have more in common than we think.

People from both sides of the political aisle are leaving their partisan identities to turn their attention to the deeper perpetrators of harm: Wall Street, big business, and their enablers in Washington. The number of voters identifying as independents is skyrocketing, as more and more people find less and less value in the two-party system.

The latest neuroscience shows that the brain is designed to rewire itself with conscious thought–opening up to new ways of seeing, relating, and making sense of the complexity in our lives and world. By naming the chaos clearly, we begin to shift it. By opening ourselves up to the good and possible, we can start healing the fears that stifle critical thinking and begin tapping into our innate creativity and wisdom.

In our conversations and in our actions, we can begin noticing where we fall into dualistic thinking (either/or, us vs. them, left/blue), do our best to understand and have compassion for our differences, and bring our focus back to the collective and democratic values that bring us all together. Let’s end these culture wars for the health of our communities and planet.

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WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.

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