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Yerevan, Armenia is currently a police state while the people and the government try to sort out who legally won the presidency and who will actually take power of the government.
Fun times.
There’s a revolution going down in Yerevan right now. Sort of.
My uncle is friends with Raffi Hovannisian, the man who supposedly won the election but was cheated out by the incumbent, Serzh Sargsyan. I’ve been told he is the Ron Paul of Armenia, but I don’t personally know anything else about him. I really don’t care who wins because Armenia has gigantic issues that probably won’t be solved within the next decade, but the situation is interesting to monitor for a few reasons.
Armenia received a lot of US funds over the past few years for a lot of reasons. Armenia is the only democratic christian state in the region and has a common boarder with Iran. The US built, what was at the time, the largest US embassy in the world in Yerevan. The US gave Armenia even more money in order to establish some comity with the Armenian legal system and for Armenia to begin extraditing felons who fled America for a safe haven in Armenia. Recently, the US came out in full support of Serzh’s re-election and they seem pretty set on supporting his administration for many reasons, including those listed above.
Personally, it really makes no difference to me but I’m interested because it’s pretty sad and pathetic that Armenians are fighting other Armenians, especially on the eve of the Armenian Genocide memorial coming up this month and also one of the companies I work for has been investing a ton of money in that country and instability isn’t exactly a welcomes site.
A lot of the political infighting stems around which super power people prefer to associate with or which Armenian conglomerate business owner the politician is friends with. If you think Corporatism is a major issue in America, Armenia is the flawless, if you can call it flawless, example of Corporatism at it’s peak. If you want to know what the future of American politics might look like, look to the situation in Armenia.
The news has probably completely ignored the situation but it’s pretty important as far as American Foreign Policy is concerned. I hate to say it, but I think the US might step in, especially if they see their man, Serzh, losing power and they see Raffi take office.
Follow along:
https://www.facebook.com/ArmenianWeekly?group_id=0
https://www.facebook.com/garabet.moumdjian
How Democracy Fails Again and Again.
I laugh every time I see someone outraged that a Presidential candidate received the majority of the vote but didn’t win the election yet those very same people never complain that the majority of our presidents are elected without ever receiving the majority of the popular vote. For these people, the system is only broken when it doesn’t return the results that they desired.
The real issue here is that most presidents are elected without receiving the majority of the vote. Not just the majority of all citizens or even those who were eligible to vote, but of those who were actually willing to partake in the scandal-laden process. We don’t want to admit, or are oblivious to the fact, that only about 15% of the population is in charge of selecting who is the most powerful man in both this nation and on the planet.
No one brings this to light, not the media, not the Republicans, not the Democrats and not even the Independents because that would underline the failure of our democratic system and government itself and it would highlight the painful fact that all government is the use of force where a portion of the population elects who will enforce the laws over all of the citizens of the country regardless if they approve or not.
Yet people will continually blame different cogs, like the electoral college or the chads or the media, for the failure of a system that is flawed by design.
A really good read on why voting machine fraud is not only relevant but should be a major concern by former Vermont State-Senator Ben Ptashnik. Here’s an excerpt:
As a former state senator, I can offer this insight. Politicians won’t touch the issue of election-rigging, foremost to avoid being labeled “conspiracy theorists” in the corporate press. But more pointedly, I believe the silence of the Democrats is rooted in a deeper fear. Most politicians, and political aspirants, live in - and profit by - the unquestioned paradigm of American exceptionalism - the idea that we are the “greatest democracy on earth.” Democracy is what we Americans “export.” Questioning the fundamental integrity of our elections may be our right under the First Amendment, but in politics it’s the equivalent of openly supporting the Constitutional right to burn the American flag. Good luck running for dogcatcher afterward!
Democrats - who have the most to lose from a voting machine industry that is increasingly dominated by right-wingers - have therefore stuck their heads in the sand, fearing political suicide. Additionally, some Democrats clearly fear that voters will stay home if the truth is exposed about how unsafe our system has become. But I find this excuse wanting. Not only is there no evidence to support this conclusion - in fact, voters are often rallied to the breach - but also the American people are not children: They deserve to know the truth.
So we find ourselves in a desperate Catch-22. If political leaders won’t speak the truth, neither will the press. And if the press does not report the truth - or worse, attacks whistleblowers as “nut cases,” then politicians won’t speak out.
This is how Karl Rove got to power, as an anti-abortion NeoCon computer nerd, and this is why so many question the 2000 and 2004 elections (Hacking Democracy, a Diebold documentary) and it’s also why I question the 2008 (ACORN, dead voters, disenfranchisement) and why I will question the 2012 election (Diebold again, dead voters again).
Still think your participation in the system matters to them?
“The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B.
In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
—H. L. Mencken.
“…every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
(via laliberty)
(via voluntaryexchange)
Hacking Democracy 2.0. How the GOP election will be sold to the highest bidder.
If you haven’t seen Hacking Democracy, I urge you to watch it. It explains how Diebold and a consortium of corporations and extremely rich individuals paid for and delivered the 2000 and 2004 elections.
In this year’s GOP primaries, we are seeing the same thing happen except without the need to hack computers.
In Iowa, all of the college towns ballots were lost or took days to reach the vote counters, deeming them expired. In short, the votes that were cast were not counted. These caucuses polled to be overwhelmingly for Ron Paul. So what did Iowa do? They gathered the delegates and had them pick their own winners. Essentially a handful of men decided for an entire state and perhaps an entire country.
Now in Nevada we have more voters and votes cast than the total number of eligible registered voters. The end result was a confused voter base, a skewed vote count and the GOP Chairwoman of Nevada, Amy Tarkanian, resigning.
But I bet most of you didn’t see this during the Super Bowl.
The Examiner has a great look at the sham that is the GOP primaries. Lori Stacey, author of the article “It is official: Elections in America are a complete hoax”, writes:
It is now almost 24 hours after voters in Nevada went to their caucuses to try to cast their votes and we still mysteriously only have results for 71.1% of the caucuses . The remaining caucuses that are still not reported actually make up the most populated caucuses in the entire state. We were told late last night that all the votes cast in Clark County had to be recounted to ensure accuracy before they would release any of the numbers to the press. Excuse me?
Where does one even begin to voice their outrage regarding this complete joke of a corrupt system we are all witnessing? If you believe the results finally coming out of Nevada, you must be living on Fantasy Island. How can caucuses that count their votes right there at the precincts have to conduct complete recounts many hours after they are over and almost everyone has gone home before they will even report most of the counts in the entire state to the public? There is only one explanation for this insanity: Corruption at its boldest! It is completely inconceivable in a caucus situation for votes to ever have to be recounted away from the precinct. The votes are not even cast on ballots like in the primary states, they are usually nothing more than little pieces of paper with a name on them stating the voter’s preference. .
As I wrote in a previous article, many of the polls leading up to voting have been wrought with deliberate deception. The only logical conclusion for such disturbingly unfair polling data is that they are being deliberately created to not only deceive voters into believing which candidate can win a particular contest but that they are obviously being used as a precursor to try to later justify completely fraudulent voting results.
The long night was filled with voter intimidation reports of having to prove or declare a religion (see video), countless reports by the media that were harassed or even kicked out of caucuses and told they could not film the events, hundreds of voters being turned away especially if they admitted they supported Ron Paul and then we still do not have a full accounting of the votes. It is being admitted by party officials that there are precincts in which the amount of votes cast outnumbers the amount of voters present. In other words, ballot stuffing at its finest. What is going on here and why are we continuing to just put up with it?
Why are we putting up with it? Simply put, because we aren’t even aware of it.
Look at Iowa, for example. We had already moved on, nearly two states later, when I first heard of the Iowa issues. I live in California and I tend to think I’ve very actively involved in the political process in America. Unfortunately, I’m the rare minority.
Most people either don’t care or they think that there’s nothing they can do about it. Then there’s the invisible hand of mass media. How convenient that the two big election fraud charges came to surface right around Super Bowl week. Best way to cover up a scandal is let someone else do it for you. Then there is no cover up for anyone to have to take responsibility for, just a bait-and-switch that the only real responsible party is the public for their unyielding thirst of sports and reality television.
Here’s a link to the original Hacking Democracy in it’s entirety.
