Every year people go to Las Vegas, and the billions of dollars they lose gambling … stays in Vegas.
The house has a built in advantage on all the games. The gambler who plays long enough … will lose. The Smart Gambler plays the games with the smallest House Edge like Baccarat or Craps. The Idiot Gambler goes straight to Keno or the slot machines. But lowering the odds doesn't mean you are going to win. It just means you might win some of the time, but overall you'll lose more slowly.
Commercial casinos gross about 34.6 billion yearly, Native American casinos rake in bout 18.5 billion, and state lotteries do a little better at 19.1 billion. Add it all up and you're looking at 72.2 billion dollars lost every year by people who don't seem to care that all the games are rigged in favor of The House.
The House Edge. Everyone knows about it. Everyone knows the rules. Gambling is a consensual act. If I gamble and lose … I have no one to blame but myself. Y'see I knew it was a rigged game before I bet my first dollar. And knowing the House Edge ... I would rather wager my life's savings in Las Vegas than vote in an American presidential election. At least I'd have a chance of winning in the casino.
Now that I've reached the ripe old age of “I'm too old for this shit” I think it's about time I yanked the remaining bits of political dissonance out of my skull and drag them out in the back yard and drown them in the goldfish pond.
Euphemistically speaking of course.
I don't have a goldfish pond.
But I do have remnants of gibberish banging around in my head where half the time I don't believe in them at all … but then I spend the rest of the time acting as if they are true as gravity. It's time for me to stop wasting my time and energy on magical thinking. It's way beyond the time to stop, actually … because it's too late.
Write This Down: DemocracyIntegrity.org
Go there.
Read This Article: Just Doing the Math, Electoral Fraud In The 2016 Democratic Primaries by Giovanni and Marcello Pietrobon, This should convince anyone who isn't dead yet that the voting process in The United States isn't just broken … it's gone. Something that's broken might be fixed. But you can’t fix something that isn't there any more.
And now it's time to Cut and Paste from the article:
In the 2016 democratic primary elections unadjusted exit polls show that Bernie Sanders has been robbed of the following percentage of votes:
Alabama 6.1%
Arizona 22.1%
Georgia 5.5%
Massachusetts 4.0%
Mississippi 4.7%
Ohio 5.0%
South Carolina 5.2%
Texas 4.2%
Wisconsin 6.9%
West Virginia 6.0%
New York 5.9% (CNN New York exit polls indicated that Bernie Sanders may have done better than 48% there).
The probability of this happening without fraud is 1 in 77 billion (6.8-sigma). In other words, one can expect something this improbable to happen less than once since the extinction of dinosaurs—if elections were to be a daily event.
This is only a piece of the larger story of how fraud has become part and parcel of American elections, which has been at work since the 1960s, reaching extraordinary highs after the year 2000. Most notable have been the elections stolen from Al Gore by 6 million votes, from Kerry by more than 10 million and the landslide vote margins stolen from Obama both in 2008 and 2012. But if until now the biggest share of electoral rigging has come from the Republicans by far, it looks like the Democrats are more than willing to step up to the plate if an uncorrupt candidate dares to challenge their establishment.
If the Democratic primaries weren't rigged, Giovanni and Marcello Pietrobon estimate that Sanders would be ahead of Clinton 51.5-48.5% with a lead of 780,000 votes in his favor.
After the 2000 and 2004 elections nothing was done to fix the fraudulent process. Nothing. For some reason it looked like the Republicans somehow had cornered the market on how to steal elections. I knew that couldn't possibly be true. Technology and corruption are, if nothing else, bi-partisan. It wasn't a bunch of Republicans pulling the strings … it was the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” Elite pulling the strings. It was simply a matter of time before The Elite backed a power-serving Democrat over a power-serving Republican. Or most recently, a power-serving Democrat over Bernie Sanders.
I could say we were defrauded, or we were robbed, but that doesn't really convey the depth of the violation. Plain and simple … We've been fucked over for 16 years.
We voted for Al Gore and he won. But 6 million of our votes were stolen and we got 4 years of George Bush. Then we voted for John Kerry and he won. But 10 million votes were stolen and we got four more years of George Bush. And now we have voted for Bernie but were ripped off once again. Crazy stupid Americans may have chosen Donald Trump … but we sure as shit did not choose Hillary. We're still being fucked over.
And I don't know what we can do about it. We could waste a lot of time and energy by playing the “Speaking Truth to Power” game and let The Power Elite know in no uncertain terms that we know we're being fucked over … but they already know that. Y'see they're the ones fucking us over.
Or we could politely ask The Power Elite to let us restructure the voting process so that every vote is counted by hand and there's a paper trail of accountability. In essence how do we get The Power Elite to give up their House Edge?
I have no idea. Historically when was the last time a Power Elite voluntarily gave up any power?
Around the time of the 2008 election, I can't remember where I heard or read it, but it went something like this. We know the system is rigged so the only way to beat the system is to have massive numbers of Obama voters show up at the polls. They can't steal the election because it will be blatantly obvious that the voting machines are rigged.
Regardless of the fact that huge numbers of people voted for Obama and he won the election, it was still downright jarring to realize that it was understood the voting process was a rigged game. Instead of walking into a voting booth, we were walking into a casino where we probably would win. And if we walked into the casino en masse, our odds of winning would be improved. That's gambling … not voting. We're supposed to vote … not play the odds.
Like I said … I don't know what to do. But I do know this … there is no way in hell we fix the rigged game by continuing to play the rigged game. If we acknowledge that the voting process is rigged, we're consenting to the bait and switch by continuing to vote.
As Sam Goldwyn may have said, “Include me out.”
Or as Emma Goldman really did say, “If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.”
