The United States constitution defines our form of government as a representative democracy. Informed, aware citizens elect congressional representatives, a president, 
and vice-president who are to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
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- The stealing of the 2000 and 2004 elections by the Republicans
- the take-over of federal and state governments by American plutocrats resultinig in a one party system
- the Supreme Court coup d'etat of 2000 resulting in a tyrannous Bush administration
- the use of opinion polls for plutocratic goals
- the American people failing to educate themselves to be able to institute a true democracy and take back their government from the plutocrats
Not surprisingly, unelected-President Bush was the big winner in the race for all this money in 2000. He got a whopping $2.8 million—almost 9 times the piddling $327,914 Al Gore got, coming in seventh after 5 Republican and one Democratic Senate candidates. (McCain and Bradley came in 15th and 18th respectively. Ralph Nader was nowhere to be seen—just like on TV.)
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Table 1: Sector & Industry Breakdown
Table 2: Individual Federal Pork-Buyers
Table 3: Would-Be Federal Pork-Sellers
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The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 marks a turning point in U.S. history. Its placing George W. Bush into the presidency constitutes a fundamental and irrevocable break with democracy and the traditional forms of rule by law. There is no precedent for the action taken by the Court. After an election
in which 100 million people voted, the result was determined by five unelected judges in a five-to-four split decision.
Now that both the 2000 and the 2004 were stolen through criminal behavior, our right to elect our leaders and representatives has been taken from us, and whether we regain that right or not is an open question. The U.S. Supreme Court and Florida Republican officials in 2000 and the Florida and Ohio Republican officials in 2004 perpetrated and perpetuated a coup d'etat:
- the electronic voting machines are owned and manipulated by Bush junta buddies, some of whom are known criminals
- a president has been put into power (not elected) twice through massive election fraud, partisan politics, and conflict of interest
"An opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person's preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people's liking instead of one. To an ordinary man, however, his own preference, thus supported, is not only a perfectly satisfactory reason, but the only one he generally has for any of his notions of morality, taste, or propriety, which are not expressly written in his religious creed."
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We don't have opinion polls in the United States, because the majority of Americans aren't informed enough to have a genuine opinion. An opinion requires judgment or appraisal, which involves examining evidence and coming to a substantiated conclusion.
What we have instead are "popularity" polls--exactly like beauty contests in which people merely express their personal preferences. As Mill says, a so-called opinion not based on reasons is merely a "liking," a purely subjective feeling.
The so-called opinion polls, therefore, are worthless. All they reveal are the ignorance and gullibility of a large number of American people. Yet these "opinion polls" are being used as the pretext for Bush's campaign to make the world safe for corporations such as Enron, Halliburton, and Carlyle.
During Bush's first yearS in office, it's claimed that he had a "high approval rating." Supposedly, a large percentage of people "polled" indicate that they approve of his performance as president.
Ignored are those unfavorable polls, such as the January 15, 2002 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll that indicated that only 49% of registered voters said they would "vote to re-elect President Bush," and 21% said they would "vote for the Democratic candidate." Another 14% said their vote would depend on the Democrat or that it is "too soon to say." It's never mentioned in the mainstream press in 2005 that Bush now has the lowest approval rating in history for a newly-selected president.
Using only the favorable "polls" and avoiding any possible analysis of whether polls are created and administered in a scientific manner, the Bush administration has run roughshod over American constitutional liberties and fought a war for oil in Afghanistan.
In most opinion polls, the sponsors' names are never mentioned. The polling companies and the news media describe the samples to some extent, but don't explain how the samples were targeted or if the questions were loaded. Never mentioned is the fact that the "major polls" are owned by the plutocrats.
In recent years, opinion polls have been used to influence voters. In many instances the polls are released when some voters have still not cast their ballots, adversely affecting the voting process.
Opinion polls in general are being used to sway the emotions of the population, encouraging them to fit their own ideas into the supposed "opinions" of the majority of Americans. So, if most Americans approve of increased military spending, who am I, says John and Jane Doe, to disagree?
How the opinion polls are used depends on what the plutocrats want to accomplish. In the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, a single banking billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, provided the bulk of the financial backing to Kenneth Starr, Paula Jones, and other legal and political campaigns directed against the White House. In this case, the plutocrats wanted to attack the institution of the American presidency and the opinion polls became irrelevant to that criminal purpose.
The opinion polls during Clinton's administraton showed two-thirds of the public thought Clinton's admission of a relationship with Monica Lewinsky should bring the Starr investigation to an end. But the attack on the presidency came first, public opinion be damned.
Americans in the twenty-first century must remember that a maniacal, murderous dictator like Adolph Hitler was remarkably popular with the German people in the 1930s. Popularity does not mean that a leader is right and in fact can mean that he is merely a devious manipulator of public feelings.
So a vicious circle is at work here: the American rulers create an illiterate, uninformed citizenry, then use the baseless "opinions" of the citizenry as the excuse for implementing policies that destroy the American way of life.
As we've seen, the American media are to an appreciable extent responsible for the ignorance and unawareness of citizens. We've also examined how the gullibility and idiocy of a large number of Americans has been brought about by the deliberate devastation of American intelligence--education and critical thinking--by American rulers. And we examined how vulture capitalism attacks the very lives of American working class citizens, forcing them into unemployment, loss of retirement funds as with Enron, and marginalization.
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It's bad enough that the Republicans are using opinion polls as the excuse for tyrannous policies, but the Democrats are allowing themselves to be hamstrung by those same polls to avoid any real program of needed reform. Dick Gephardt's reply to Bush's January, 2002 State of the Union speech was a wasteland of inanity and non-confrontation.
There are about 195 million adults in America, of every imaginable background and circumstance. The polling agencies say that a survey of only 800 or 1,000 adults can indicate what the entire country is thinking? How can a thousand people speak for us all? They use what is called a random sample of the American population. Taking a random sample is similar to a blood test; we don't have the doctor take all our blood to test for a problem, we have him take a sample.
There are a number of potential problems with "opinion polls" which are seldom addressed. Poling agencies claim that their sample audiences are a fair representation of American citizens, but seldom do they give precise details as to how the sampling was carried out.
As Neil Postman indicates in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, the public's "opinion" on almost any issue will be a function of the question
asked. Unless we can actually examine the questions used in the poll, and can determine that the questions were value-neutral and non-leading, then we have reason to question the poll results.
But all these potential difficulties with opinion polls are actually completely beside the point, because opinion polls are flawed at their core. We saw above that there really can be no opinion polling because most Americans don't inform themselves enough to have authentic opinions. Opinion polls merely record the subjective whims of the persons questioned.
What's wrong with that? Let's take an example. Suppose you're to be judged by twelve people as to your being guilty or innocent of a murder of which you're accused.
 | A. Would you want to have a 12-person random sample of the community merely polled as to what they feel about your innocence or guilt without their having any real knowledge of you? |
B. Or would you want them to be informed in as complete a manner as possible as to the facts concerning the case? And would you also want their deliberations and judgement to be based on rules of evidence and other factors of critical thinking?
"We compel [the members of the jury] to hear both sides before casting their vote. We compel them to hear those two sides according to some rational rule of evidence and advocacy; and then, having taken these precautions, we take the further precaution of having the evidence summarized by an expert in the shape of the judge, who shows its relation to the law. Only then have we some hope that their decision may be broadly a sound one."
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Of course, any of us would choose B above. A mere survey of subjective feelings about critical issues is useless. And that's why opinion polling is useless; it merely reflects the uninformed opinion of people, degenerating into a popularity contest. We should not allow these polls to be used by our leaders as the excuse for their policies and actions.
The American people are failing to educate themselves to be able to institute a true democracy and take back their government from the plutocrats.
- Actively support the few congresspersons who have been bold enough to speak out during this time of crisis:
- U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and the House Republican Black Caucus members who were brave enough to contest the fraudulent 2004 Ohio election returns
- Join in activist programs to demonstrate against an imperialistic war and legislation to limit civil rights to take back our government--groups such as Buy Back Our Government
- Know our rights and not allow them to be abrogated in any way
- Make certain that our congressional representatives know that we will not re-elect them if they do not stand up to the current constitutional crises
- Do away with the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) which makes it impossible for third-party candidates to get a fair hearing
- Don't allow ourselves to be distracted by the terrorist crisis while the plutocrats try to plunder our hard-earned tax dollars and weaken our civil liberties
