Jesse Ventura Could Pose a Greater Threat Than Biden or the Democrats Believe

What the 2016 electoral vote would have looked if the “FU / None of the Above” electorate had turned out (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

“If I were to become President, these wars in the Middle East would end. War is a money-making scheme done by the military industrial complex. I would start a war on the climate, a war on pollution. If the oceans die, we die.”
—Jesse Ventura (September, 2019)

On April 27, Jesse Ventura announced he's testing the Green Party waters:

OK, I've decided I'm going to test the waters. IF I were going to run for president, the GREEN party would be my first choice. I've endorsed the party and I'm testing the waters. #mondaythoughts #MondayMorning #MondayMotivaton #MondayMood

— Jesse Ventura (@GovJVentura) April 27, 2020

If indeed he runs, and he keeps talking like this (9:48 in the clip below)...

If I were to become the president, let's say it that way, these wars in the Middle East would end. I take my foreign policy from Major General Smedley Butler, who wrote the book War Is a Racket, because war is that, it is a racket. It's a money-making scheme done by the military-industrial complex. Our soldiers don't fight for the United States; they fight for the corporations.

So to me, I would start a war on the climate, on pollution. I live in Mexico. I'm watching the oceans die before my very eyes. I've got news for you, ladies and gentlemen. If the oceans die, we die.

...he's going to win a lot of votes from the #NeverBiden crowd on the left.

Or if he keeps talking like this: “Wealth distribution is completely out of line today. In fact, people have talked to me about the minimum wage. What about a maximum wage?”

Sounds a lot like Sanders, doesn't he? He even has Sanders' mark of authenticity — whatever he looks and sounds like, that's who he is. Ventura's also strongly pro-marijuana; listen to the clip starting at 7:22 for the striking reason why.

The whole interview from which this quote came is interesting, by the way, and it's not terribly long. Aside from his marijuana story and the climate change quote, he discusses President Trump , the current state of the WWE, living without a cell phone, and how and when he will make up his mind about running for office again.

(His comment about Trump: "The first night of boot camp, there's one person who will break down, wet their pants, cry for their mom. That's Donald Trump.")

Ventura, a former Navy SEAL, comes from a strongly libertarian point of view, but if one looks at this compiled list of his issues I don't see much there besides his quotes on gun control to alienate many pro-Sanders but #NeverBiden voters. He'd have to update (or clean up) his past contrarian positions, but he won't be the first (for example, Joe Biden) to have to do that ahead of a presidential run.

Tarred with an Alex Jones Brush

Ventura will have problems, of course. In the past he's been on the record as a 9/11 skeptic and climate change denier, as this 2009 Guardian article shows — note the reference to his since-deleted TruTV show, “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura” — and there's his occasional association with Alex Jones. He'll also get no press, or "what a clown" press only, so he'll get no good coverage at all that he doesn't create himself.

On the other hand, he's rather good at creating coverage for himself. Should he enter the race, Ventura would make an interesting 2020 wildcard — or a dangerous one, depending on your point of view.

Ventura Would Run Seriously

I do think if he chose to run, he'd run seriously and to win. As one Minnesota commenter put it in a thread discussing his potential 2020 candidacy (emphasis added):

I voted for Jesse [for governor of Minnesota].

In the days immediately before the election Jesse was polling at 10%. And then he won.

This is because 1) polling models only look at “likely voters,” 2) 50% of the public doesn't vote, 3) the Dem and GOP candidates were doctrinaire party stalwarts that no one really liked, and 4) the chance for a Fuck You/None of The Above from that 50% was overwhelming as the under 40 vote came out in huge numbers.

I know you said “he won't win,” but he has and he could again. Trump and Biden are that bad and the Fuck You/None Of The Above vote could be at an all time high this fall.

Now, how was Jesse as governor? I liked him. He was no-bullshit candidate and speaker. He got us light rail and treated the job seriously. Somewhere I have an article that detailed his effectiveness, where someone mentioned that it took the Dems and GOP three years to learn how to team up against him so he wouldn't be effective and they could prevent the ascendancy of the Reform Party he won on, but now that he's in the news there's so many new articles in my search that I can't find it.

But on bottom line, he did well, and was well liked, and might have won again. He just grew sick of the bullshit politics and decided four years was enough and went on with his life. And I can respect that.

I'm not calling for a vote for Jesse Ventura, just noting that in this train wreck season, another locomotive may soon be added to the track, and not a small one.
  

Can A Paltry Minimum Wage Increase Save The Senate For The Democrats?

It's no coincidence that Florida Democrats put a referendum on the November ballot legalizing medical marijuana. Aside from passing a really good proposal, the referendum should draw lots of pro-marijuana voters to the polls where, it is hoped, most will vote for Democrats. Unfortunately, no one took Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her financiers at the private prison industry into account, The people who are helping-- along with Big Sugar-- her run for the top Democratic House leadership post need those arrested pot smokers to keep their prison cells full-- so that they can make big profits and donate a cut to Wasserman Schultz's slimy political career. So… once again, the avaricious mess who allowed the GOP to gerrymander the state up in their favor in return for her getting an unassailable district filled with elderly Jews, has betrayed Florida Democrats for her own selfishness. She's campaigning against the marijuana initiative, prompting Florida's most important Democratic donor-- and head of United for Care-- John Morgan, to say that he knows the "most-powerful players in Washington, D.C.… [and that] Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked, she’s despised. She’s an irritant." Fortunately there's no Debbie Wasserman Schultz standing in the way of Democratic strategy in Arkansas.

In that state, where Mark Pryor, a very conservative Democrat, is facing off a far worse Republican, Tom Cotton, they've managed to put a very popular minimum wage hike on the ballot for November. Republicans tried to keep it off the ballot but supporters turned in more than double the number of signatures needed. The Republican Secretary of State, Mark Martin, has already validated over the 62,000 valid signatures that were needed. It's a paltry raise-- up to $7.50 by January 1, 2016 and then a buck more a year later. Pryor has endorsed the measure (Issue 5) and Cotton has been talking out of both sides of his mouth, as usual-- not wanting to piss off the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends who have financed his political career but frightened that Arkansas voters will figure out who he works for if he doesn't back the measure.

So how unpopular is increasing the minimum wage-- or even having a minimum wage at all-- with Cotton's paymasters? Everyone knows ending the minimum wage is a top Koch agenda item, but this week news broke that one of their top strategists told a roomful of right-winger that the minimum wage leads directly to fascism. No, really; he said that.

At a political strategy summit hosted on June 16 by the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, Richard Fink, their top political strategist, told the private audience that when he sees someone “on the street” he says, “Get off your ass, and work hard like we did.” Fink's anecdote came during his presentation titled “The Long-Term Strategy: Engaging the Middle Third,” which capped off a session of four speeches detailing the intellectual foundation of Charles Koch’s political ideology.

…In his speech titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” Charles Koch echoed an op-ed he wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal in both his paranoia and self-pity. The billionaire oil industrialist, hosting some of the most powerful men in Washington, without irony claimed in his speech that he and his brother were “put squarely in front of the firing squad.” He later framed the path ahead for America as a binary choice between freedom and collectivism, a catchall term he used to describe liberalism, socialism, and fascism. Koch refrained from drawing explicit parallels to fascists, but his lieutenants did not… This conflation was a running theme throughout the session, articulated in large part by grand strategist Fink. An economist by training, he pointed to psychology to explain the dangers of raising the minimum wage vis á vis totalitarianism.

“Psychology shows that is the main recruiting ground for totalitarianism, for fascism, for conformism, when people feel like they’re victims,” said Fink. “So the big danger of minimum wage isn’t the fact that some people are being paid more than their value-added-- that’s not great. It’s not that it’s hard to stay in business-- that’s not great, either. But it’s the 500,000 people that will not have a job because of minimum wage.”

He continued, “We’re taking these 500,000 people that would’ve had a job, and putting them unemployed, making dependence part of government programs, and destroying their opportunity for earned success. And so we see this is a very big part of recruitment in Germany in the '20s.”

“If you look at the Third -- the rise and fall of the Third Reich, you can see that,” Fink said. “And what happens is a fascist comes in and offers them an opportunity, finds the victim-- Jews or the West-- and offers them meaning for their life, OK?”

Fink cited the historical examples of Nazi Germany and communist Russia and China to segue to terrorism. “This is not just in Germany. It's in Russia, in Lenin, and Stalin Russia, and then Mao,” said Fink. “This is the recruitment ground for fascism, and it's not just historical. It's what goes on today in the-- in the suicide bomber recruitment.”

Fink’s commentary on collectivism led to observations on the psychological underpinnings of the environmental movement. According to Fink, in the same way that lack of meaning in life leads to terrorism, it leads to environmentalism.

“The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change.

I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer-- they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning.”

Fink's statement that he's not a climatologist is notable considering both his education and employment. Koch Industries is a leading proponent of climate change skepticism. David Koch has posited that climate change may turn out to be good for humankind in that longer growing seasons would support greater food production. And Charles Koch personally helped found the Institute for Energy Research, a group that defends oil industry tax subsidies. Despite his actions, Charles Koch railed against this type of behavior during the seminar. “So to truly help the poor and the economy, we have to eliminate cronyism,” he said. “We have to eliminate welfare for the rich.”

Fink also pointed to blocking cap and trade as a success of the Koch network, appearing to give it equal weight to their success in flipping the House of Representatives. Cap and trade, a market-based approach to curbing carbon emissions, was first implemented on a large scale during George H.W. Bush’s administration to combat acid rain. The measure, derided by the tea party as “cap and tax,” died in Congress in 2010, chiefly as a result of staunch oil industry opposition. Later that year, the movement would claim victory in the historic landslide election that turned the House of Representatives over to Republican control. Both Koch Industries and David Koch have previously been reluctant to acknowledge any involvement in the early days of the tea party movement, though Americans for Prosperity has fueled much of its rise. AFP was founded by David Koch and is the primary vehicle of the brothers’ political activity.

Fink described the differences between the three thirds of the electorate-- the "freedom" third, the "collectivist" third, and the non-ideological middle third of voters, whose recruitment he said is crucial for the Koch network’s success. “Mitt Romney won on leadership. He won on the economy. He won on experience,” Fink said. “What did he lose on? He lost on care and intent. Intent is extremely important.”

Fink spoke at length about the appearance of the Koch network’s motives to the middle third, and the business-oriented solutions for improving its political brand.

“Yeah, we want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, OK? Yeah, cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes,” said Fink. “There’s truth in that, you all know, because we’re in the 30 percent of the freedom fighters. But the middle part of the country doesn’t see it that way.”

“When we focus on decreasing government spending, over-criminalization, decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, OK? We’ve been reaching the third by telling them what’s important-- what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, OK? Well, we get business-- what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy,” he said.

Bilderberg-- The Secret Group That Runs The World?

The word "Bilderberg" immediately conjures up New World Order conspiracy theories. Wikipedia has a thorough explanation of what the group, which has been meeting annually since Holland's Nazi Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld convened it in 1954, is really all about. The basic wiki-intro:

The Bilderberg Group, Bilderberg conference, or Bilderberg Club is an annual, unofficial, invitation-only conference of approximately 140 guests, most of whom are people of influence in the fields of politics, banking, business, the military and news media. The names of attendees are made available to the press, but the conferences are closed to the public and the media, and no press releases are issued.

Because of its exclusivity and privacy, the Bilderberg group is frequently accused by conspiracy theorists from both extremes of the political spectrum of being an all-powerful secret society fixing the fate of the world behind closed doors.

Critics of Bilderberg conspiracy theories counter that it is nothing more than a policy discussion forum and social club which only serves as a means to brainstorm, reach consensus, and create social cohesion within the power elite of Western European and North American nations, to better promote Atlanticism and neoliberalism.

The Bilderberg Group has been denounced as a conspiracy from left and right, from everyone from crackpots like Alex Jones, Lyndon LaRouche, Phyllis Schlafly to Jesse Ventura (see video above) and Fidel Castro, who described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self" in an article he wrote for Granma.

The latest meeting was this past weekend in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Ancillary news stories included the violent expulsion of an Italian parliamentarian, Mario Borghezio, from the Swiss Canton, the non-violent exclusion of a Swiss Parliament member, and a lurid male prostitution scandal, but all were sideshows. Time gave some tame background last week and the Guardian was less circumspect. In the last few weeks we saw how the American and European ruling elites were-- and are-- ardent fascists. They haven't let the little mishap they had with their boy Hitler get in their way. The Rockefellers were huge fascists in the 1930s and '40s and David Rockefeller's power inside the Bilderberg Group, along with the power of the other transnational elites-- Henry Kravis, head of private equity giant KKR, and his wife, Marie-Josée (Hudson Institute; International Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve), "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle (Hudson Institute; PNAC; Hollinger; former Gaddafi adviser), Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Robert Gates, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Peter Thiel of Calrium Capital, Edmund Clarke, the queens of Holland and Spain, President & CEO of Canada's second largest bank, Toronto-Dominion, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Eric Schmidt of Google, EU President Herman Van Rompuy, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin-- gives reason for pause... even if two masters of the universe not invited-- or at least not able to attend-- this year were Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Houston-based Adley Abdulwahab of A&O Resource Management. Enough pause to watch the clip below?

At Its Core The Republican "Case" Is A Sham-- They Didn't Keep Us Safe At All

Crazed and rejected, the GOP Left Behinds have nothing better to do than carp and complain that Obama is making America less safe. Experienced from years of their bullshit, no one believes them-- except themselves. Jack Goldsmith is a professor at Harvard Law, a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law, and a former Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Regime. I doubt Cheney has enjoyed reading his book, The Terror Presidency: Law And Judgment Inside The Bush Administration. Nor will Cheney or any of the other apologists for the Bush years find much solace in a NeoCon-lite examination of why President Obama is waging a more effective war on terror than Bush did, The Cheney Fallacy in the current issue of The New Republic. I'm no fan of Goldsmith's but his readers can't walk away still buying the absurd premises pushed by the Inside the Beltway media that Cheney is a serious voice rather than a pathetic sore loser and lightweight hack.

Despite the media spin, polls show that most Americans prefer Obama's national security policies. They see Obama as a countervailing force between "the liberal left," whatever that's supposed to mean, and Dick Cheney. Most Americans think Obama is doing a better job-- by a 2 to 1 margin-- than Bush did. Like me, I bet a lot of Americans cringe when they hear toadies like Cheney and Sean Hannity claiming, as though any sentient being would ever buy their snake oil, that "Bush kept us safe." Bush didn't keep us safe; Bush was a vital part of the 9/11 tragedy. He failed to keep us safe and then compounded the damage with his wrongheaded, opportunistic responses from the next seven catastrophic years. The worst president in the history of the United States didn't acquire that sobriquet by keeping the nation safe.

You may have seen (or read about) former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura-- an ex-Navy Seal who's experienced waterboarding-- on >The View or on Larry King's show
He made the point that George W. Bush was the worst president of his lifetime and offered to waterboard Dick Cheney.

"It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning... I'll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.... I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it, because torture is against the law.

Yesterday he absolutely pulverized Sean Hannity on his own show. Take a look: