Anita Rios received nearly 100,000 votes as the Green Party candidate for governor this Election Day 2014. This 3.3% of all votes in Ohio needs to be placed in historical context. The Ohio Greens needed 2% of the statewide vote to remain on the ballot for future elections.

In five Ohio counties, the Greens polled more than 4% of the total vote: Athens County at 6.52%, Franklin County at 4.53%, Cuyahoga County at 4.28%, Portage County at 4.4% and Meigs County at 4.3. The only counties showing Rios votes under 2% were Darke, Mercer and Putnam. She received more than 2% in all 85 remaining Ohio counties.

The Green Party, committed to grassroots democracy and reining in unfettered corporate capitalism, reached numbers in Ohio that often reflect a much broader mass progressive movement.

In 1932 for example, Norman Thomas received 2.2% of the vote as the Socialist candidate for President. Scholars speak of the Socialist Party as the last mass movement of the “Old Left.” The high point of the Old Left was Eugene Debs’ 6% of the vote, gained in 1912 at the apex of the progressive era.

As we see the end of another political season, we all thank God that the end of this wave of propaganda is almost here.  But it made me think - why are billions of dollars spent each political season trying to make us come to decisions that in so many cases are against our own self interests??  As one of innumerable examples, the governor of Ohio Kasich is asking us to vote for him in part on his platform on education, yet he has reduced funding to public education by over one half of billion dollars.  His move clearly forces all of us to pay more for our children's tuition and for every student's tuition in the form of increased property taxes.

The GOP/corporate coup d’etat is nearly complete.

 The Republicans now control the major media, the Supreme Court, the Congress and soon the presidency.

 Think Jeb Bush in 2016.

 All throughout America, right down to the local level, buried in a tsunami of cash and corruption, our public servants are being morphed into corporate operatives.

 Our electoral apparatus is thoroughly compromised by oceans of dirty money, Jim Crow registration traps, rigged electronic voting machines, gerrymandering, corrupt secretaries of state.

 The internet may be next.  Above all, if there is one thing that could save us a shred of democracy, it’s preserving net neutrality.  This fight could in fact outweigh all the others, and may be decided soon.  Whatever depression you may now feel, shake it off to wage this battle.  If we now lose the ability to freely communicate, we are in the deepest hole of all.

 The roots of this corporate coup reach where they always do when empires collapse---useless, cancerous, debilitating, endless imperial war.

Medicare and Medicaid illegally pay for religious faith-healing.  Then those pay for   indoctrination into one specific religion.  The method of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) and Narcotics Anonymous (N.A.), the “twelve steps”, are on the Internet.  The method contains the religious faith-healing of step 2, the ‘surrender to God’ of step 3, “prayer” in steps 5,7, and 11, the religious mysticism of step 11, “conscious contact with God”, and the proselytizing of step 12, “we tried to carry this message”.  Proselytizing is evangelism when it is Christian.  The A.A.-N.A. message is the method, is the steps, and is the religion.  Fraud enters, because members and supporters of A.A. or N.A., who are professional addiction counselors, wrongly deny that religiousness, in order to receive those monies, which totaled $17 billion of combined federal, state, and local monies in one year.

Did the CIA try to thwart the nation's last investigation of President Kennedy's assassination? "The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation," says G. Robert Blakey, the former general counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which issued its report in 1979.

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Excerpted from Justice Integrity Project version

Did the CIA try to thwart the nation's last investigation of President Kennedy's assassination?

"The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation," says G. Robert Blakey, the former general counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which issued its report in 1979.

"It is time that either Congress or the Justice Department conducts a real investigation of the CIA," Blakey said at a conference last month. "Indeed, in my opinion, it is long past time."

Blakey, shown above, urged the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to comply promptly with a federal law unanimously passed by congress in 1992 requiring release of JFK records.