The most important takeaway from this post is the filibuster, blocking popular legislation in the senate, should actually be called the sixty-vote threshold rule. Lawrence cites that reality in the video. He nails the root of the discussion but ignores the importance of the distinction.

 

The senate rule that killed the legislation to save our democracy has been misdefined to distract from the debate about the constitutional intention of majority rule, which would prove the “filibuster” is not only misdefined, it is illegal.

 

The tie-breaking authority in the constitution is a mandate to rule by majority vote. But now, incompatibly, the senate requires a supermajority just to proceed to the vote so it takes a sixty vote threshold to pass legislation. When the senate requires a supermajority to proceed to a majority vote, it's no longer a majority vote. It's minority rule.

 

Senate rule 8.1 obstructs majority rule so it is unconstitutional and it was just used to defeat voting rights.

 

Keep in mind, when trying to understand the corporate narrative explaining how we are all losing our democracy, that we never really had one in the first place. The constitutional theory of our republic has been violated from the beginning, by misinterpretation and corrupt intent.

 

Despite having the technology to enforce constitutional compliance now, we don’t and we won’t. Which exposes the non-representative nature of our government. Those who occupy it will continue to violate the constitution, as is the tradition, to increase their financial supremacy.

 

That’s not a democracy.

 

Our electoral systems are designed to prevent an honest democracy. Voters are confused by design. They attempt to navigate a political system based on belief, where truth is a choice. We vote for our beliefs to be true by electing liars. You're right, they'll say, when you're not.

 

Economic Apportionment: Mathematics vs Belief

 

There are two primary sides competing for control of our government, the corrupt and the confused. The corrupt always win because they have corrupted the system to favor corruption. If you disagree you might be confused, or possibly corrupt. Of course there are exceptions to a degree, but for the most part, that's the truth.

 

Good and evil are not defined by a map or a party of misguided beliefs. Behaviors are judged in universal truths that have been considered for centuries by the civilized and educated people of this planet and documented for future understanding and consensus. Good and bad behaviors are instinctively understood.

 

Doing the right thing is self-evident. The problem is doing the right thing is rarely on the ballot. Ironically, the people who get elected don’t often do the right thing, for the public.

 

The democrats have the majority in the senate now but yet they can’t even get a voting rights bill to the floor for debate, they say, which is preposterous. It’s an example of intentionally losing by misinterpreting the rules against yourself. Which is what democrats do, by and large.

 

Traitors and betrayal

 

It appears the opposition has either bribed, recruited, or somehow planted saboteurs on our side in the senate to sabotage the voting rights bill. They are blocking the democratic agenda by deploying shills to vote with the corrupt, against the public and our democracy.

 

Republicans with democratic name-tags will be deployed in whatever numbers are necessary to prevent democracy. The corrupt will vote against the public interest, as necessary, in service to private “special” interests. That’s what they do.

 

Some call them moderates.

The democrats always fail. Even when they win the public loses. For instance, the senators recently debated an infrastructure bill. After hearing that it’s time for corporations to pay their fair share, it’s becoming clear that whatever passes, if anything, will be paid for by borrowing more money from those who refuse to pay taxes.

 

Which is a typical fail.

 

There’s a phony theory going around about modern money mechanics, saying public debt doesn’t matter. It’s a theory being preached by the supposed progressives, yet ironically the practice enables massive inequality and allows tax immunity to billionaires. We borrow money instead of taxing it, to pay for public programs, which exposes the scam for what it is. It's a tax extraction scam that rewards investors who profit from public debt.

 

We need updated infrastructure but we also need a lot less public debt and fewer billionaires. We need an outright ban on billionaires, imo, by taxing them to balance our budget.

 

The appropriated stimulus money, if passed, will no doubt profit the undertaxed investor class the most. That’s why the republicans support the bill. They will make money by investing in those they hire. Those who actually do the work always make a lot less for their efforts.

 

Taxing inequality, reducing public debt, and providing an adequate democratic process for the public could all be part of this infrastructure bill, but that's not going to happen. It would if we had a representative government, but we don’t. We need to fix that.

 

Solution: Electoral Infrastructure

 

Rather than modernizing our electoral network infrastructure for citizens to vote, our corporate controlled government is conspiring to suppress our voting rights even further. They intend to sustain control of our government and to protect and defend the extraction scam, legally, from now on. That's their plan.

 

Voter suppression efforts like denying access to the ballot and gerrymandering are in vogue now, as I predicted way back. I wrote ten years ago, "quasi-legal tactics will be used as propaganda to convince you that the monolithic antidemocratic conspiracy wins elections legally, so it’s fair, you believe, which will distract you from the outright election fraud and other schemes likely being used, that are criminal, which is not fair."

 

Political crimes.

 

Gerrymandering, like the filibuster, is designed to scam and confuse. They are professionally explained as if there’s no choice to them. There’s no alternatives to consider, they'll say, to defend their scams.

 

Gerrymandering is in fact a form of legalized election fraud. It’s one antidemocratic strategy among many.  It’s not going to overturn the results of a statewide election by itself though, unless the election is really close, because congressional districts are required to be divided into equal populations.

 

Keep in mind when you gerrymander a district, which should be outlawed, the neighboring districts minority gains votes and becomes more of a majority. So a guaranteed minority victory requires more than gerrymandering. You can expect all means of electoral fraud strategies to be used. They should all be identified and corrected by law.

 

When a small fraction of the population controls a large fraction of the nation's wealth, elections shouldn’t even be close. They say the public is evenly divided. Maybe they are, maybe they're not. Either way, nobody deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to election results.

 

If our electoral system can't validate its results to the satisfaction of a well scrutinized inspection, we need a new system that can.

 

Election Fraud versus Voter Suppression

 

The absurdity of the big lie, alleging election fraud, being remedied by voter suppression tactics should be all the insight you need to understand the deceptive and antidemocratic intention of the opposition.

 

Preventing an honest democracy is what our government does. So to achieve representative government, we need a new apportionment act to revolutionize the way we vote.

This is the anniversary of the voting rights act.

 

56 years ago president Johnson was forced to pass voting rights laws because his world was about to explode in conflict and division. A violent revolution was becoming imaginable. Compromise was becoming  the only logical option, for self-defense. So they passed a law that they knew was unconstitutional. That way it would appease the angry agents of change but they could still strike it down in the court, if necessary, someday in the future.

Well, someday has finally come and the establishment has decided it’s time to undue what Johnson did way back then and gut the voting rights laws.

 

Those who control the government no longer need to compromise with the angry masses, like they did in the sixties. Now the establishment has the technological arsenal and the militarized police forces to control any situation. They can suppress any amount of domestic opposition and that’s exactly what they plan to do, for a living. It's a business model. They not only want the opposition, the conflict-based economy needs the opposition to survive and it always needs more conflict to prosper.

 

Defund the Police

The correct term is "de-militarize the police". Not Defund the police. “Defund" is the wrong word.

 

De-militarize the police.

 

Police reform is necessary to prevent the police from being militarized against the public. It’s not that hard to figure out. The real issue is about why people have to protest in the first place. Protests are caused by injustice, which is the government failing to fulfill its responsibility to the public. Justice is the goal of a responsible government. Police are public servants sworn to protect and serve, being used by our government to suppress and oppress the public

 

The division is intentional, for profit, by design. 

 

When investors profit from oppression the establishment is motivated to increase oppression. It’s common sense.

 

All conflict should be non-profit. 

When people are provoked by injustice and oppressed for profit, the militarized police force becomes the economy. Conflict is the economic engine of that business model. More conflict equals more growth. The establishment invests in oppression and crafts public policy that is oppressive, to increase conflict and make it more profitable, for them.

That is the conflict-based economy.

Democracy threatens the establishment and their profits from the conflict-based economy. That’s why they misinterpret the law when necessary. That’s why the establishment is against democracy. That’s why some people are against education for others.  The unfair advantage is to secure financial supremacy for themselves.

 

The public interest is not the same as the interests of our corporate government, or the politicians and their parties, or their companies and their employees. Their interests are different.

 

Public versus private.

We are now living in a post-truth society. The entire establishment is conspiring to mislead the public from understanding their democratic potential. That’s because they are in the process of destroying it. Our government is waging a campaign of antidemocratic intention against the public. It’s a war against the public, being waged against us by our own government, and their allies, foreign and domestic.

The news is reporting that the majority of us, or a very clever minority of us, are using our laws and democracy to conspire against us and it looks like they are going to succeed. It looks like they will defeat us and our democracy, in court.

After the court decided that there was no need for states to continue to get federal permission to change their voting laws, guess what happened. The states are all changing their voting laws.

 

I’m sarcastically surprised.

The court deemed the requirement to fair elections obsolete, apparently, by technicality. The decision being preordained, whether the states had transcended racism or not was irrelevant to the ruling. They ended the law and the previously illegal behavior became the practice. How many times has that happened? And how many of those previous mistakes were intentional?

Like repealing The Glass-Steagall Act, which has corrupted our entire economy. Was that a mistake? No. It was corruption, that screwed the public financially.

 

How about the normalizing of dark crypto money? Is that a mistake now? Pretending that computers guessing integers has any equivalence to the full faith and credit of taxpayers, is a joke. It's a political crime in progress, accepted as legal. 

 

How about unlimited political contributions in the name of free corporate speech. Was that mistake? Of course not, nor was the massive public debt that made so many so rich.

 

Time for a democratic upgrade.

 

The original voting rights act, that required only some states to seek pre-clearance to change their election laws, was unconstitutional. The voting rights act could have required that all states were to obey voting law regulations equally, but no, it didn't. If it had, the law would have been constitutional. They could have written the law to withstand legal challenges, but they didn’t. Was that a mistake?

How about the senate retiring the rule that ended debate, which now supposedly prevents a majority vote by waving the magical ‘filibuster’ wand. Was that a mistake? Or even true? No. No it wasn’t.

 

The filibuster is really just a word that distracts from the unconstitutional senate rule which allows the minority to defeat legislation with majority support. The problem has nothing to do with extended speech or ending debate. The problem is requiring a supermajority to pass legislation.

 

The problem is senate rule 8.1.

 

Nobody wants to acknowledge senate rule 8.1. because that rule is unconstitutional and it helps prevent beneficial public policy and a representative government.

The senate filibuster, as incorrectly explained by the professionals, totally confuses the truth. The senate is intentionally misinterpreting their own rules, as a cover story, to avoid identifying the real problem and the discussion that could lead to the correction of rule 8.1.

 

Notice in the video that Lawrence O’Donnell correctly identifies the procedure in question as the sixty-vote threshold rule. It’s not technically a filibuster, he says, and he’s right. He ignores though, further examination to help you understand the importance of the distinction. Which I will attempt to do here.

 

Rule 8.1 is the sixty-vote threshold rule. It allows any senator to object to proceeding. An objection is a debatable motion. It takes sixty votes to end debate. The opposition logic is if you don't have sixty votes to end debate, don't start the debate or the "filibuster" will never end. The fallacy is that debates always end, by the rules, even filibusters. So the logic is flawed, as interpreted. The minority is requiring sixty votes to end a debate that never starts. If the debate started it would eventually end and the senate would proceed to a majority vote. So what's happening is the sixty vote threshold to end debate is fraudulently being used on the vote requirement to proceed to debate, which should be a majority.

 

The misinterpretation can be remedied by removing the right to object to proceeding from senate rule 8.1.

 

The bottom line of the so-called filibustered cloture vote discussion is this, anything that is not compatible with constitutional intent is illegal, or should be ruled as such by the court for correction. Specifically senate rule 8.1 is need of correction for constitutional compliance.

Check the recent procedure in the senate during the vote count on the Voting Rights bill. There was a vote on a motion to proceed that required a supermajority of 60 senators. They called it a cloture vote - simply to change the vote count for victory from 50 to 60, which makes a tie vote impossible, and the vp vote irrelevant.

 

Proceeding to debate was denied by a cloture vote, which is a vote to close debate. But the debate was never officially started so using the supermajority vote count, normally required to close debate, to prevent proceeding to debate, is an unconstitutional scam.

 

In reality the voting rights bill was killed by the senate minority because the majority rolled over to a senate rule that is unconstitutional. That is intentional failure.

The voting rights act vote tied in the senate and it was left unbroken by the chair, a democrat, as you know. Let’s dig a little deeper into that and we find the backroom cigar smoke still thick in the air, obfuscating what really happened to the voting rights bill. and what's the relevance of the vp’s non-vote?

There was no filibuster in this voting rights cloture vote ceremony. It was regular order. Speeches were not extended. Nobody filibustered anything. They just changed the vote count requirement from 50 to 60 to defeat the bill, that’s all. That was the “debate” on voting rights. Even if they called it a cloture vote to proceed, the result is the same. The law failed to pass by a vote in the senate and the minority vote claimed victory even though it was a tie.

 

 

Voting rights law will likely continue to fail in the future despite amended versions being watered down and gutted of ethical regulations and common sense, to appease the corrupt.

 

Even if the senate passes a voting rights law, it will fail for the public. The establishment will see to that. The solutions are simple and have been cited, yet ignored in perpetuity.

 

The establishment resists political solutions.

Because of the corrupted corporate court, It’s now every state for themselves. The states can dictate their voter suppression plans without federal concern or intervention. That was the result of what the senate did when it killed voting rights legislation, with their unconstitutional rule.

 

With that rule change a supermajority would be required to prevent proceeding. That’s how simple it is.

What really amazes me is the same government that made unlimited contributions to themselves legal, and made easy money way too available, for themselves, now say they are trying to protect our voting rights while they legislate against our voting rights. And people supposedly believe them.

The democrats are the willing patsies in this gag. They are going to lose and say they tried, as usual. I assume some of them will actually try, but they will fail. Like I said, there has never been an honest democracy.

President Biden has surrendered the filibuster battle as he warns us of election subversion. That’s a new concern, he explains, that gives state governments the right to choose who wins their elections. If they don’t like the results, the state legislatures will simply overturn the elections, he said, implying the federal government has no jurisdiction.

The duopoly was never concerned about vote counts before but now it’s clear the political system is being taken over by intruders. Joe might think he’s still working with his old buddies but he’s not. The intruders are not your father’s Republican Party, Joe. Your old friends have mostly retired by now with the spoils of their looted booty. Those who were inclined to stick around and those who have just signed up are currently preparing to destroy for good, what’s left of our dishonest democracy.

Joe Biden said ending the filibuster would cause chaos. So he’s against it, which exposes all you need to know about his antidemocratic intentions. Despite his warnings and concerns of electoral subversion strategies that will destroy democracy forevermore, he finds the filibuster, incorrectly, necessary.

What a perfect time to save our democracy with a new apportionment act. It’s never been more important. But we are helpless now to stop the states from legislating against us, ostensibly in reaction to the big lie, if you can believe that.

The big lie was where the republicans pretended that demonic child molesters stole the election from president Trump. They will make sure the “socialist" democrats don’t steal any elections in the future, they say.

The republicans are going to legally monopolize the path to public office for themselves, in the state legislatures. And the Dems will be helpless to stop them, forevermore. The corporate incumbency will entrench themselves so deep they will be able to legally withstand any amount of majority opposition. If that should happen, and you know it will, how is that not the overthrow of democracy?

I think the lie is much bigger and premeditated, contrived and scripted to perpetuate the conflict based economy. The professional narrative is a fairy-tale that serves as a veil to hide the truth from the public. The truth becomes more apparent to more people as our history becomes more accessible and understood by them. The digital revolution is changing everything, and they knew it would.

It’s August, 2021 and the public division keeps increasing. There’s still no solutions in sight, other than printing money and voter suppression. Election subversion laws are on the rise in state houses across the country, while Wall Street buys our land with money extracted from our futures. Political solutions for the public seem futile.

There’s a long list of mayoral candidates here, all running on the same empty promises we’ve all heard before many times over along the way, on our way to this society of ever-increasing social dysfunction. It seems pretty intentional, to me. This is how we do it and it keeps getting worse. The public will continue to lose no matter who wins. That could be changed. Those policies could be corrected.

Wall Street is making record profits while millions of people are being evicted from their homes, as predicted. Is that a mistake?

The federal eviction moratorium, due to the pandemic, is expiring and the 50 billion dollars that was appropriated to landlords has disappeared into state slush funds, apparently. That’s about a thousand millionaires in every state created with more taxpayer debt. Our money has been institutionally siphoned off and used to curry corrupt favor amongst the well-connected cronies of the establishment, I suspect.

Nice gig if you can get it.

The eviction moratorium was postponed for two months apparently because a cute family on the eve of eviction was featured on primetime news and well to do news viewers contributed a quarter million dollars to their plight. It was a nationally broadcast ‘go fund me’ tragedy feel good segment, which concluded with a big egg on your face non-family admission. "Refunds will be pending”. It shows the corporate media has way too much power and influence over public opinion while at the same time supposedly having very little influence over our public policy. They could advocate for policy that would prevent that situation from happening in the first place, to any family, but they don't.

 

Corporate media audience sizes need to be explored much further, legally and philosophically, to better understand the options to our current monopolistic paradigm.

 

It’s not being reported that unlimited debt is being used as an economic weapon to buy our houses and our land, as well as our companies and infrastructure.

 

Rest assured the sheriffs will be saddling up soon and the evictions will begin. The homeless population will increase, as predicted. The division and the chaos will continue.

Speaking of which, it looks like we’ve been evicted from Afghanistan and the Taliban is moving back in. It’s hard to know the truth, but it looks like we have begun "pulling out".

 

We are just leaving now, amidst chaos and violence, without any apologies for the mistake of invading them in the first place, or forcing them to fight each other.

 

We have occupied their country and trained them for a generation to fight each other and now Joe Biden says they must continue to fight, without us. Afghanistan is a perfect example of how the conflict-based economy has made a mockery of our democracy in service to corruption. Some people are forced to fight so that others will prosper.

 

The chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan is an intentional distraction from the history of the occupation and corruption. We knew this would happen and we knew it was happening. That should be the focus of hearings now. How and why is such massive corruption tolerated?

 

The protests have long been forgotten.

 

A civil war will likely be next for Afghanistan, or if history is any guide, and it is, maybe a genocide. We’ll be leaving behind enough weaponry to arm their conflicts for at least a generation. The news is reporting we have abandoned our allies and armed our enemies, as if that's something new.

 

Why again did we do that? revenge for 9/11? Sure we did. Two decades later the facts about that terrible day are still murky, as is the burial at sea, with religious honors, we gave to the alleged mastermind and perpetrator of that attack.

 

And those who advocated for such a horrible mistake, as to invade Afghanistan in the first place, they will continue to get off scott-free. Their war chests of compounded investments will continue to grow and corrupt our public policy further.

We are being bombed into confusion by friendly-fire, it seems. At least that is if you believe we’re all in this together. I don’t. Most of the public suffers from the policies of the government, whether they know it or not, because our government is being controlled by, and serves, corporate interests instead of the public interest.

It's time to stop saying "that’s just the way things are" and demand an adequate voting system and a valid democracy. You don’t stop electoral fraud with voter suppression laws, as is being done. You stop electoral fraud with a safe and secure electoral system that is nationally capable and locally verifiable.

An electoral system could be inserted into the infrastructure bill, and passed by majority. But it won’t be.

Our conventional wisdom is full of obvious contradictions which are consistently ignored by the professionals. The synergy of deception here in this post-truth dystopia is truly enough to shock the conscience, if you think about it. Most people don’t. But if you do you gotta be confused because the logic is irreconcilable, at best.