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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><span style='font-size:22.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>How The US Elections Manipulate Voters, Prevent Progress<o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><br>By Byron Williams, <a href="http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_28719012/byron-williams-rhetorical-misdirection-is-used-maintain-status" target="_blank"><span style='color:blue'>www.contracostatimes.com</span></a><br>September 1st, 2015<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><b><i><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Rhetorical misdirection is used to maintain status quo that benefits a few</span></i></b><b><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></b></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>If the 2016 presidential race stays true to form, it will be dominated by preliminary bouts, otherwise known as primaries, followed by the main event, the General Election.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>The primaries will be a competition to see who is more in touch with the respective party’s base. This means Democrat and Republican candidates will appeal more to their parties more ideological sectors, only to make a mad dash to the center after the nomination process is complete.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>With some exceptions, this has been the basic formula that both parties have employed for the last four decades. It depends on a linear left/right axis.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>What’s great about this approach is its neatness, or at a minimum the appearance thereof. For the portion of the electorate that participates in the political process, it is a call to arms — to hunker down in the predictable silos of orthodoxy, questioning the sanity of those who possess the unmitigated gall to see the world differently.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>But it is a shell game. It is no different from those great magicians who effectively use misdirection to have the audience focus on something, which is often insignificant to the illusion.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>While the nation over this 40-year period has focused on so-called hot button issues such as affirmative action, illegal immigration, tough-on-crime polices and gay rights, the sleight-of-hand misdirection has effectively changed the American landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Titillated by the emotion those issues as well as others provoke, there was no time to see how both parties have become addicted to the opiate of corporate campaign contributions. Dominated by narrowly defined corporate interests, the electorate, largely frustrated and fearful, must take small solace in supporting the candidates whose rhetoric is most in line with their thinking.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>In his two campaigns for president, Barack Obama spent in excess of $1.8 billion. How many still believe that amount was the result of average Americans sending $50 checks?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>According to Politico, Charles and David Koch (aka the Koch brothers) have an operation that plans to spend $889 million to elect someone to a job that pays $400,000 annually.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>While some are still whipped into a frenzy about the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage in all 50 states, we can’t forget corporations have gained First Amendment privileges. Which is really more harmful to our nation’s future?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>It’s time for the largest and most diverse segment of Americans to change the axis on which America currently operates. Instead of operating on a left/right axis, why not go in a bottom/up direction?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>This is the only way to combat the unhealthy methodical direction that America has been on since the end of the civil rights movement. That majestic movement forced America to come closer to values that it committed to paper in 1787.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>It was the decade of the ’60s when the civil rights movement begat the free speech movement, which begat the Vietnam protest, which begat environmental legislation. Each movement began at the bottom treading the arduous path upward.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>The Occupy Wall Street and tea party efforts offered glimpses of this bottom-up effort but ultimately fell short. The occupy movement didn’t have the messaging to hold the nation’s attention; and the tea party has been coopted by moneyed interests and now sits comfortably on the left/right alignment.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>A bottom-up trajectory can create new alliances.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>Income inequality, in my view, is the holding company for the myriad subsidiaries that are void of a moral order. The current left/right axis possesses no moral direction — that is invariably created from a bottom-up ethos.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>While much of America is moving at the frantic pace of a hamster on a treadmill, they are being encouraged by a bipartisan coalition of left/right advocates.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>But this is merely the misdirection to maintain a maladjusted status quo that benefits only a few.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto'><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"'>It effectively keeps the nation on a left/right axis because it knows once the trajectory becomes bottom-up substantive change is around the corner.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>