Tag Archives: Two Party System

Politics Is Dead, Here’s What Killed It

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Representational democracy–a.k.a. politics as a solution to social and economic problems–has passed away. It did not die a natural death. Politics developed a cancer very early in life (circa the early 1800s), caused by wealth outweighing public opinion. This cancer spread slowly but metastasized in the past few decades, spreading to every nook and cranny of our society and economy as “democracy” devolved into an invitation-only auction of elections and political favors.

Politics might have had a fighting chance but three forces betrayed the nation and its citizenry.

1. The Federal Reserve transferred trillions of dollars of unearned wealth into the feeding troughs of the super-wealthy and corporations, vastly increasing the wealth the top 0.01% had to buy elections and favors. The Federal Reserve cloaked its treachery with jargon– quantitative easing, stimulus, etc.–and then stabbed the nation’s representational democracy in the back.

2. The Supreme Court betrayed the nation’s representative democracy by labeling corporations buying elections and political favors a form of “free speech.” (Please don’t hurt yourself laughing too hard.) The Supreme Court’s equating wealth buying elections and favors with individual citizens’ sacrosanct right of free speech was a knife in the back of the nation and its citizenry.

3. The two political parties betrayed their traditional voter bases to kneel at the altar of corporate / elite wealth, wealth which bought elections and political favors. The Democrats, traditional champions of the workforce in the 20th century, abandoned workers in favor of serving their corporate masters, masking their betrayal with fine-sounding phrases.

The Republican Party, traditionally promoters of Big Business (Wall Street, banks, mega-corporations), had maintained a narrow but crucial interest in trust-busting (limiting monopolies) to defend free enterprise and small business from the predations of monopolies and cartels. Those days are long past; just as the Democratic Party tossed the working class overboard to the sharks, the Republican Party walked small business off the gangplank right into the voracious jaws of cartels and globalized, financialized corporate sharks.

To cloak their betrayal and treachery, the parties have pursued a divide-and-conquer distraction game, pushing half the nation into one-size-fits-all “enemies lists” with labels that have lost all meaning other than as means to promote divisiveness and rancor: Liberal and Conservative, socialist and capitalist, etc.

It’s not the citizenry who are “deplorable,” it’s the parties’ corporate-derriere-kissing toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks, purveyors of propaganda, enforcers, apologists, sycophants, grifters and “leaders” who manage to greatly increase their private wealth while “serving the public” (heh).

These three betrayals of public trust and representational democracy caused the demise of politics as a solution to social and economic problems. “Politics” has been stripped to its essence: an invitation-only auction of elections and political favors. The price to watch from the rear of the auction is $1 million; to actually place a bid, the minimum is $10 million, but the winning bids are generally much higher.

(Lobbying, campaign contributions, bogus think-tanks, and philanthro-capitalist foundations are all part of the auction funding.)

Here’s “politics” in America now: come with mega-millions or don’t even bother to show up. Choose which “enemies list” you want to be on; there’s not much choice. And don’t forget to put a flower on the grave of representational democracy.

Covid: A Collision of Historical and Scientific Illiteracy

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By Kevin Ryan

Source: The Burning Platform

It’s been a year since I’ve written anything for this blog. The reason, frankly, is that I have been at a loss for words. What has happened to human society in the last two years has been, for anyone with an understanding of history, beyond belief.

Of course, it should not be beyond belief because we know history repeats itself. And in the last two years it has been repeating with a vengeance.

I spent 18 years working to understand, and help others understand, the crimes of September 11, 2001. Those crimes were never honestly investigated apart from the work of independent researchers. The official accounts are widely known to be false and those who have taken the time to look deeper have found that there are good reasons to believe that people within government and major corporations were involved in planning and executing the attacks.

September 11th was a deception used by rich and powerful people to steal resources, consolidate power, and control the masses. It was just one example of such a mass deception.  Others include the following.

  • The CIA’s assassination of JFK
  • The false Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the CIA’s war in Vietnam
  • The deceptions used to justify the 1991 Gulf War
  • The government-sponsored 2001 anthrax attacks
  • Claims of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the second invasion of Iraq
  • The many manufactured terrorist events following 9/11
  • Previously hyped pandemics, including the 2005 “Bird Flu” and 2009 “Swine Flu” that were grossly exaggerated by the World Health Organization for the benefit of big pharma companies

Along with these conveniently over-looked crimes, the last 18 months have shown that the 9/11 lie was not taken seriously. Anyone who still believes that governments and media care about our health has forgotten that deep state actors murdered thousands of citizens on 9/11. The corporate media and corporate-owned governments then covered it up so that a million more could be murdered to steal resources and control people.

Historical illiteracy is largely to blame for the Covid scare although much of that illiteracy is by choice, through willful ignorance of events that cause cognitive dissonance. The examples cited above are but a few in the long history of deceptions used by governments to drive the agendas of the powerful few. People who ignore these historical facts not only turn a bind eye to history, they ignore painfully obvious features of current affairs including that “terrorism” has mysteriously disappeared.

People don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we do not live in democratic societies any longer. Yet today the world is fully run by an oligarchy and that oligarchy wants us to be diverted and outraged about superficial things while staying ignorant or silent on issues important to us like the following.

  • Indefinite detention without charges at Guantanamo Bay
  • Unwarranted mass surveillance
  • Voting machine hacking and election theft
  • Failure to prosecute the crimes of previous administrations (e.g. drone killings targeting weddings and funerals, torture at CIA black sites)
  • The increasing totalitarian censorship of dissenting views

Some people have accepted or ignored the poverty and famine being driven by the reckless response to Covid. And they have also ignored that the people driving the Covid scare have a history of crimes against humanity.  Not the least of these are Bill Gates, who has monopolized healthcare and has tried to buy off the media, and Anthony Fauci, who is known for having killed nearly 200,000 HIV patients with the toxic drug AZT.

How has the public’s willful ignorance been established so easily?  The Covid crimes were carefully practiced beforehand through a series of exercises conducted by governments and corporations since 9/11. And the operation builds upon elements utilized in all the previous government crimes against humanity.  Here are three primary components.

  1. As has been demonstrated through all of history, the most effective way to dumb down a population is through fear.  Communism, terrorism, WMDs, virus… it all works the same way. This basic feature of the Covid scare is one of many features and outcomes that it shares with previous psychological operations.
  2. Censorship is another hallmark of authoritarian tyranny and we are seeing it raised to a new level in the media today. Any doctor or scientist who has spoken out about the obvious lack of scientific scrutiny applied to the Covid scare has been blocked on social media and ignored or smeared on television, radio, and in print.
  3. In America the most useful tool driving willful ignorance has been the narrative behind the phony 2-party system in politics. The Covid scare works in part because many Americans are easily controlled through the farcical theater of “right-left” identity politics. Today if you want “the left” to take a position, all that is needed is to frame it as opposition to Trump.  Control of “the right” is just as easy. This works despite the fact that we are ruled by an oligarchy that does the same things no matter who is in office.

Added to this formula of fear, censorship, and cartoonish politics has been the complete abandonment of science. Scientific illiteracy is known to be quite high in America, but that has become the case for many nations and today anyone with a lab coat and a pointer promoted by the media is accepted as a scientific authority. What people often forget is that it was doctors, not soldiers, who committed the worst crimes in Nazi Germany. These days it is just as easy to buy a doctor or a scientist as it is to buy a politician.

Scientific literacy in America took a giant leap downward after 9/11. The absurd anti-scientific approach taken by the government for the destruction of the Word Trade Center buildings was either accepted or left unquestioned by many Americans. No doubt the death of science with respect to 9/11 was a key step in enabling the Covid scam.

Here are a few examples of how people around the world abandoned science when it came to Covid.

  1. The PCR test for Covid infection in the U.S., which was used in many other countries as well, did not identify a unique coronavirus. In other words, the test had a high rate of false positives. Still, people accepted the narrative of “cases” that drove the fear.
  2. The policy endorsed by the WHO and the CDC that attributed Covid as a cause of death for anyone who tested positive using the false PCR test, no matter what their actual cause of death was, dramatically inflated the number of deaths attributed to Covid.
  3. Both the word vaccine and the word pandemic were redefined by agencies like the WHO to enable the Covid scare.
  4. The “vaccines” are experimental gene therapies that are making people sick and killing them. Those bought into the vaccine narrative responded to this fact with the diversionary claim that the Covid drugs do not change your DNA. But most gene therapies do not change your DNA. Instead, they provide a functioning gene in addition to your DNA. More importantly, all the Covid “vaccines” provide genetic material that drives the production of toxic spike proteins that cause blood clotting, endothelial tissue damage, antibody dependent enhancement, and death.
  5. The Emergency Use Authorizations under which these Covid drugs were granted temporary approvals were based on fraudulent attacks against long-established, effective treatments like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.  The suppression of these effective drugs is responsible for the deaths of the patients who did die from Covid (instead of just with Covid).

How do we go forward realizing that many of our friends, family, and coworkers have decided to remain willfully ignorant of history and science and the facts about the Covid psychological operation?

It is a difficult question but one that has a few clear answers. First, we must stop parroting the absurd official narrative regarding Covid. It is an illness that has a 99.7% survival rate for the elderly and higher for everyone else. And it is very obviously a tool of propaganda in a psychological operation that exhibits all the features and outcomes of previous psychological operations. So, the first step is to not accept or repeat the nonsense narrative.

Secondly, since social media and other corporate media are completely compromised and engage in censorship of any facts related to Covid, we must reach people directly. This means speaking out locally, and contacting your city, county, and state government representatives to oppose the Covid agenda.

There are creative ways to resist as well. For example, if you are forced to wear a mask in public areas in order to conduct your life, put a message on the mask that lets like minded people see you. Something like “Mind Control” or “You stay safe, I’ll stay free” would work.

Finally, realizing that this will all get much worse before it gets better, plan to reduce your dependence on goods and services controlled by the oligarchy. If you can, get off the grid. In other words, find alternative sources of power, food, water, and the other necessities of life before the ultimate tool of control—the vaccine passport—limits your access.

The psychological operations of the media and political establishment are ramping up. They’re targeting every weakness of the gullible public, from its scientific and historical illiteracy to its most banal prejudices, in order to inflame superficial separations from the farcical left/right division to racial tensions. They know us better than we know ourselves.

Let’s resist these provocations and see if we can establish control groups within this corrupt system that can survive and educate future generations.

Kevin Ryan is a chemist, former laboratory director, and prominent voice in the 9/11 Truth movement. You can read more his work at his blog. You can also watch his testimony to the Toronto Hearings on 9/11 here, his video on the parallels between 9/11 and Covid here and his interview as part of our Covid19/11 series here.

I Speak, You Speak, We All Speak Newspeak

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By Joziah Thayer

Source: Activist Post

In George Orwell’s infamous book 1984, Big Brother imposes Newspeak on the people of Oceania. Newspeak is defined as “a controlled language of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, meant to limit the freedom of thought — personal identity, self-expression, and free will — that threatens the ideology of the regime of Big Brother and the Party, who have criminalized such concepts into thoughtcrime.”

Society today has dimensions of Newspeak infused into our everyday lives. We are all polarized penguins waddling our way through the masses, blocking, deleting or belittling anyone who has opposing views until we find ourselves face first in a corner. After waddling like penguins into the walls of our echo-chambers, we turn around and face the world, but by then we have become territorial terriers ready to attack anyone who threatens to breach the walls of our carefully crafted echo-chambers. Instead of protecting the truth, we protect our truth.

The consequences of this are that instead of the truth being known, there are two truths; and this process will duplicate and recycle itself until there is no truth, there are only lies and propaganda. People like Marc Lamont Hill are a perfect example of Newspeak being in full effect in our society today. Hill made comments about the Israeli oppression of Palestinians and he was fired, not because he said something anti-Semitic, but because he said something unacceptable in society today — in Orwellian terms Marc Lamont Hill committed a thoughtcrime.

Instead of having actual free speech, we have accepted speech. We protect the illusion of free speech— like a lonely man in the desert, protecting his paradise, which in reality is just a mirage. The will of the people will never be honored so long as we elect monetarist gargoyles in suits that are afraid of change because it means their demise. In America, we have a representative democracy and what we need is a direct democracy. A democracy in which our votes as citizens mean something and our elected officials are held accountable or voted out.

Perhaps the worst case of Newspeak in society today is when it involves war. Major news networks have long-winded debates about what they call “America’s role in the world.” This is a form of Newspeak. Instead of saying that we are actively bombing eleven sovereign nations, killing innocent men, women, and children, mainstream media casually calls it “America’s role in the world.” Another term commonly used as a form of Newspeak is: “Our troops are protecting American interest overseas,” How is it Newspeak? The accepted language for America’s endless wars is that America is only spreading democracy around the world. This “accepted language” couldn’t be any further from the truth, yet anything that deviates from this accepted language is deemed an unacceptable thoughtcrime and that is what makes it Newspeak.

War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. – Arthur Ponsonby (Falsehood In War-time)

We often acknowledge the faults of our government, our media, and our financial system, but in doing so we neglect to acknowledge our faults. Our way is the only way! It is as if the masses have been rocked to sleep or hypnotized into being binary static robots incapable of walking outside of the dotted line or thinking outside of the box.

Newspeak is not to be confused with “Political Correctness,” it is far more dangerous than that. Political Correctness is divided among party lines. What is politically correct to a Republican is most likely going to be politically incorrect to a Democrat and vice versa. Newspeak is not divided among party lines, Newspeak foments at will in both parties and if left uncorrected politics will remain the cesspool of polarization that it is today. The powers-that-be have no interest in fixing our political system — in their eyes, it’s working just fine.

Democratic Party crisis explodes in wake of Brazile revelations

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By Patrick Martin

Source: WSWS.org

The political crisis in the Democratic Party, brought to the surface with the publication Thursday of excerpts of a campaign memoir by the former interim chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Donna Brazile, erupted into mutual denunciations over the weekend.

Brazile made public an unprecedented agreement between the DNC (under previous chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that involved Clinton paying off the DNC’s debts and providing it a monthly subsidy in return for gaining control over the appointment of DNC officials and the right of approval over key operational decisions.

The deal was concluded in August 2015, six months before the first votes were to be cast in caucuses or primaries, when the DNC was required by its own rules to remain neutral in the contest between Clinton, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and several other candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A further revelation from Brazile’s book was made public Saturday: she acknowledged discussions among leading Democrats in September 2016, after Hillary Clinton had collapsed at a ceremony in New York City marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, over whether Clinton should be replaced as the presidential candidate because of health concerns. Brazile writes that she herself considered Vice President Joe Biden as the logical replacement, but did not make the proposal.

Within hours of this report, 100 former Clinton campaign aides, headed by campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign manager Robby Mook, put their signatures on an open letter denouncing Brazile’s criticism of the Clinton campaign.

The “Open Letter From Hillary For America 2016 Team” makes use of the same Russia-baiting technique employed by the Democrats in their political conflict with the Trump White House, but this time directed against a former top Democrat. In assailing Brazile, the first paragraph of the open letter declares: “It is particularly troubling and puzzling that she would seemingly buy into false Russian-fueled propaganda, spread by both the Russians and our opponent, about our candidate’s health.”

The health questions about Clinton were fueled, however, not by Moscow, but by video broadcast over American cable television networks showing the candidate being lifted into a vehicle by aides and Secret Service agents, in visible distress. The characteristic duplicity of top campaign officials, who initially sought to conceal the incident, added to the ensuing furor.

Even more revealing is what is missing from the Clinton camp’s “Open Letter”: there is no reference whatsoever to the main revelation stemming from Brazile’s book—the secret joint fundraising agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC, six months before the first caucus in Iowa, giving Clinton effective control of the party apparatus. The Clinton aides do not dispute that this backroom deal occurred and make no attempt to justify it.

On Sunday morning, Brazile appeared on the ABC News program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” The host, himself a former top political aide in the White House of Bill Clinton, provided a platform for Brazile to repeat her exposure of the collusion between the Clinton campaign and the DNC and discuss the “Open Letter” from the former Clinton campaign officials.

She bitterly denounced the Clinton camp, both for its treatment of the DNC while she was in charge, and for their ferocious response to her new book. “George, for those who are telling me to shut up, they told Hillary that a couple of months ago,” Brazile declared. “You know what I tell them? Go to hell! I’m going to tell my story.”

Brazile also touched on a topic of intense but largely behind-the-scenes discussion in official Washington: the July 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a low-level IT staffer at the DNC, who was shot to death in what police called a failed robbery attempt. The Trump White House and ultra-right media allies, including Alex Jones of InfoWars and Sean Hannity of Fox News, have portrayed Rich, rather than Russian hackers, as the likely source for the DNC emails obtained by WikiLeaks, and his killing as a retaliatory “hit” ordered by the Clinton campaign.

Brazile reportedly suggests in her book—which will not be available to the public until Tuesday—that Rich’s death, warnings from the Obama administration about Russian hacking and repeated online threats from Trump supporters had made her extremely concerned about security issues, to the point where she had her home swept for bugs and installed multiple security devices. In her interview Sunday with Stephanopoulos, she spoke of her fears for her own personal safety. Her mention of Seth Rich, entirely unsolicited, seemed a veiled warning to the Clinton camp that more revelations about 2016 campaign skullduggery could be forthcoming.

Current DNC Chair Tom Perez was interviewed Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC and directly rejected the two main issues raised by Brazile. He maintained, “The charge that Hillary Clinton was somewhere incapacitated is quite frankly ludicrous,” although he did not attribute that concern to Russian propaganda.

He went on to argue that Clinton won the Democratic primary contest by four million votes, and the DNC was not in control of those elections, which are run by the state governments, while noting that the caucuses, which are controlled by the party apparatus, were mostly won by Sanders, not Clinton. Perez would concede only that “the DNC fell short during critical moments of the primary,” in terms of openly favoring Clinton over Sanders.

Significantly, neither Sanders nor any of his top aides or supporters made an appearance on any of the Sunday television talk shows. Sanders issued a statement on Brazile’s revelations suggesting that the conduct of the 2016 campaign was a diversion from the effort to mobilize opposition to the Trump administration.

The fact is that Brazile informed Sanders of the joint fundraising agreement and the takeover of the DNC by Clinton more than a year ago, and he has chosen to say nothing about it. This is part of his effort to prop up the Democratic Party and prevent the millions of working people and youth who supported his campaign from drawing the political conclusion that it is necessary to break with the Democrats in order to conduct any genuine struggle against the billionaires who dominate the US political system.

The conflict within the Democratic Party has erupted under conditions where the Republican Party is bordering on civil war, with several Republican senators denouncing Trump as a threat to American democracy—and then announcing they would retire from office rather than oppose him—and a vicious conflict developing between the party establishment and the fascist-minded elements around Trump, spearheaded by his former chief political aide and campaign manager, Stephen Bannon, now returned to his position as chief executive of the ultra-right Breitbart News.

In recent days, it has been reported that in an upcoming book titled The Last Republicans, the author cites interviews with George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush in which the two last Republican presidents before Trump denounce the current occupant of the White House and reveal that they refused to vote for him in 2016. In response, Trump tweeted an attack on his Republican presidential critics.

The ABC “This Week” program on which Brazile was interviewed began with the presentation of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing public support for Trump falling to its low point for the year, only 37 percent, with 59 percent opposing. Trump’s showing was the worst for any first-year president since modern polling began. Other polls have shown public support for the Republican-controlled Congress hitting new lows as well.

The vast majority of working people are increasingly alienated from the two-party political system in the United States, correctly regarding both the Democrats and the Republicans as tools of the super-rich and looking for an alternative. The central political question is the building of a political movement of the working class that will fight the capitalist system as a whole and advance a program to defend jobs, living standards and democratic rights, and oppose imperialist war.

Our Political Parties Are Obsolete

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance.

History informs us that once something is obsolete, it can disappear far faster than anyone expected. While we generally think of obsoleted technologies vanishing, social and political systems can become obsolete as well.

Should a poor soul who entered a deep coma a year ago awaken today, we must forgive his/her astonishment at the political wreckage left by the 2016 election. The Democratic Party, a mere year ago an absurdly over-funded machine confident in an easy victory in the presidential race, is now a complete shambles: its leadership in free-fall, its Fat-Cat donors disgusted, and its demented intoxication with pinning collaboration with Russia on the Trump camp eroding whatever feeble legacy legitimacy it still holds. What the party stands for is a mystery, as its Elites are clearly beholden to insiders, special interests and Corporate donors while glorifying the worst excesses of globalism and the National Security State’s endless war on civil liberties.

The newly awakened citizen would also marvel at the chaotic war zone of the Republican Party, in which the Insider Warlords are battling insurgent Outsiders, while the same Elites that fund the Democratic machine are wondering what they’re buying with their millions of dollars in contributions, for it’s unclear what the Republican Party stands for: it’s for Small Government, except when it’s for Bigger Government, which is 95% of the time; it’s for more law enforcement and the militarization of local police, and more intrusion into the lives of the citizenry; it’s for stricter standards for welfare, except for Corporate Welfare; it’s for tax reform, except the thousands of pages of give-aways, loopholes and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations all remain untouched, and so on: a smelly tangle of special interests masked by a few sprays of PR air freshener to the millions left behind by the globalization that has so enriched Corporate America and the class of financier-owners, bankers, insiders and technocrats–the same group that funds and controls both political parties.

Political parties arose to consolidate centralized control of the central state.We have now reached the perfection of this teleology: the political elites and the financial elites are now one class. In our pay-to-play “democracy,” only the votes of wealth and institutional power count.

As I have often noted here, the returns on centralization are diminishing to less than zero. The initial returns on centralizing capital, production and social-political power were robust, but now the centralized cartel-state is eating its own tail, masking its financial bankruptcy by borrowing from the future, and cloaking its political bankruptcy behind the crumbling facades of the legacy parties.

Now that technology has enabled decentralized currency, markets and governance, the centralized political parties are obsolete. They are the political equivalent of buggy whips, and those holding tight to the fantasy that their current dissolution will magically be transformed into unity by some future leadership will be disappointed.

The fragmentation of the political parties is not temporary–it is permanent. As I discussed yesterday, political and social fragmentation are the consequence of economic fragmentation–these are self-reinforcing dynamics, as fragmentation in one feeds fragmentation in the others.

Those who have gotten rich inside the bloated machinery of the parties will never accept their era has ended. The dreams of private jets and millions of dollars in contributions die hard. But the voters and donors are both waking up to the cold reality that the parties are nothing but wealth distribution machines that sluice millions from financial elites to various political elites.

All the legacy claims of both parties ring false; neither party gives a hoot about the working class, small business or civil liberties. Their entire game plan is to whip up hot-button social issues to distract a fragmented citizenry and arouse last-gasp emotional loyalty to empty slogans.

Is it any wonder that people are abandoning both parties and claiming Independent status? All the core systems of the nation are failing, visibly, painfully, badly, and yet all the parties can dredge up is more of the same and TINA–there is no alternative.

The citizen who just awakened also awakened to the truth: the legacy parties have no solutions; their game plan is to milk the system as long as they can before it collapses in a rotten heap of corruption, fraud, collusion, debt and profiteering that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

When the parties do finally implode, the general mood will be: good riddance. A centralized spoils system is no longer a viable way to govern the nation. Political systems everywhere are facing a choice: Decentralize or die.

Made For Each Other

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic. The ship is the techno-industrial economy. It’s going down because it has taken on too much water (debt), and the bilge pump (the oil industry) is losing its mojo.

Neither faction understands what is happening, though they each have an elaborate delusional narrative to spin in the absence of any credible plan for adapting the life of our nation to the precipitating realities. The Blues and Reds are mirrors of each other’s illusions, and rage follows when illusions die, so watch out. Both factions are ready to blow up the country before they come to terms with what is coming down.

What’s coming down is the fruit of the gross mismanagement of our society since it became clear in the 1970s that we couldn’t keep living the way we do indefinitely — that is, in a 24/7 blue-light-special demolition derby. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with accounting fraud, but in the end it is an affront to reality, and reality has a way of dealing with punks like us. Reality has a magic trick of its own: it can make the mirage of false prosperity evaporate.

That’s exactly what’s going to happen and it will happen because finance is the least grounded, most abstract, of the many systems we depend on. It runs on the sheer faith that parties can trust each other to meet obligations. When that conceit crumbles, and banks can’t trust other banks, credit relations seize up, money vanishes, and stuff stops working. You can’t get any cash out of the ATM. The trucker with a load of avocados won’t make delivery to the supermarket because he knows he won’t be paid. The avocado grower will have to watch the rest of his crop rot. The supermarket shelves empty out. And you won’t have any guacamole.

There are too many fault lines in the mighty edifice of our accounting fraud for the global banking system to keep limping along, to keep pretending it can meet its obligations. These fault lines run through the bond markets, the stock markets, the banks themselves at all levels, the government offices that pretend to regulate spending, the offices that affect to report economic data, the offices that neglect to regulate criminal misconduct, the corporate boards and C-suites, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the guarantors of mortgages, car loans, and college loans, and the ratings agencies. The pervasive accounting fraud bleeds a criminal ethic into formerly legitimate enterprises like medicine and higher education, which become mere rackets, extracting maximum profits while skimping on delivery of the goods.

All this is going to overwhelm Trump soon, and he will flounder trying to deal with a gargantuan mess. It will surely derail his wish to make America great again — a la 1962, with factories humming, and highways yet to build, and adventures in outer space, and a comforting sense of superiority over all the sad old battered empires abroad. I maintain it could get so bad so fast that Trump will be removed by a cadre of generals and intelligence officers who can’t stand to watch someone acting like Captain Queeg in the pilot house.

That itself might be salutary, since only some kind of extreme shock is likely to roust the Blue and Red factions from their trenches of dumb narrative. If the Democratic Party had put one-fiftieth of the effort it squanders on transgender bathroom privileges into policy for mitigating our tragic misinvestments in suburban sprawl, we might have gotten a head-start toward a plausible future. Instead, the Democratic Party has turned into a brats-only nursery school, with the kiddies fighting over who gets to play with the Legos. The Republican Party is Norma Desmond’s house in Sunset Boulevard, starring Donald Trump as Max the Butler, working extra-hard to keep the illusions of yesteryear going.

All of this nonsense is a distraction from the task at hand: figuring out how to live in the post techno-industrial world. That world is not going to operate the ways we’re used to. It will crush our assumptions and expectations. Lying about everything won’t be an option. We won’t have the extra resources to cover up our dishonesty. Our money better be sound or it will be laughed at, and then you’ll starve or freeze to death. You’d better hope the rule of law endures and work on keeping it alive where you live. And nobody will get special brownie points for the glory of sexual confusion.

I look for the financial fireworks to start around March – April, as the irresolvable debt ceiling debate in congress grinds into a bitter stalemate, and it becomes obvious that there will be no voucher for the great infrastructure spending orgy that Trump’s MAGA is based on. Elections in France and the Netherlands have the potential to shake apart the European Union, and with that the footing of European banks. Pretty soon, everybody in all parties and factions will be asking: “Where did the glittering promises of Modernity go…?” As we slip-side into the first stages of a world made by hand.

Electoral Politics and the Illusion of Control

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By William Hawes

Source: Dissident Voice

We have all been told a lie. The lie that says democracy can be maintained only through voting, through purely representative, parliamentarian means. When the founding fathers set up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were wary of any truly popular, working and middle class control of the United States. Our government was to be run as a republic, designed by elites, for the elites. Our three branches of government were not simply invented for checks and balances: another reason was to stymie any massively popular mandates that would go against the interests of the oligarchy.

Today, the checks and balances used ostensibly to prevent tyranny are being used against us: even though a high majority (65%) is against government surveillance which violates privacy, and 78% want Citizens United overturned, we are stuck with a broken system and statesmen bought off by corporations. Even though 80% of eligible citizens didn’t vote in the 2014 elections, this year our out-of-touch pundits and mass media puppets prattle on unceasingly about our democracy, still misguidedly believing these candidates represent the will of the people.

Just sixteen years ago, our very own electoral system, in the form of a gilded cage, shut down the popular will of the people, as Al Gore won about 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, yet still lost. Although the decision was made over 200 years ago, we have decided that the antiquated Electoral College system should still be used today.

More broadly, our never-ending election cycle serves as a palliative for ordinary Americans, but does nothing to cure the underlying disease and rot within our political system. Progressive liberals can take pleasure in Sanders’ statements supporting a raise in the minimum wage, debt relief for students, fighting income inequality, etc. Yet Sanders has no broad coalition in Congress to advance his agenda and to fight his “revolution”. Isolationist, non-interventionist conservatives can take pride in Trump’s support of Russia’s fight against ISIS in Syria, and his token rhetoric towards re-working unfair free trade agreements and bringing back jobs. Yet Trump’s pandering towards racists and xenophobes will only accelerate the descent towards fascism that the US has been slipping into for decades.

The second lie we’ve been told, or assumed implicitly, is that we are in control of our national destiny. Through the vote, we can supposedly make a clean slate every four years, to make up for the misdeeds of our past political leaders. The truth is much murkier. Our national security state and intelligence services have been built up to Leviathan levels, and presidential candidates are instantly discredited and marginalized for suggesting even small decreases in military spending. Corporate lobbyists and the conglomerate multinationals control the political landscape, determining the limits of discourse and shutting down anyone who exceeds the boundaries. Absurdly, third party candidates, some of the only ones with fresh ideas to invigorate our democracy, are demonized. Mainstream media coverage reinforces these imaginary limits of discussion, and Independents, Greens, Socialists, and Libertarians are relegated to the sidelines.

As the neoliberal order reinforces and deepens material poverty and intellectual ignorance, public discourse narrows without totalitarian overt manipulation. This makes issues seem as if they are progressing naturally, when public debate and consent is in actuality homogenized and conformist. This is analogous to the concept known to scientists as “shifting baselines”: here it applies to a public that accepts deeper cuts to social services, increases in privatizations, and increased militarization and policing of the public sphere, because the momentum seems inexorable and immutable. The establishment uses rhetorical threats and excuses to further corporate agendas and destroy civil society, all in the name of maintaining “economic growth” and upholding “law and order”.

The truth is that only by staring into the abyss can we collectively begin to dig ourselves out of our self-dug graves. The US has been in an unofficial recession since 2008. Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with minimal society safety nets, leading to insecurity, uncertainty and cynicism towards the future, and crippling anxiety. Politicians routinely show they do not care about the working class and the poor when they speak to the “middle class”, whatever that means anymore. Our leaders are handpicked by Wall Street billionaires, and/or defense and fossil fuel industrialists. Abroad, covert war is ongoing in a dozen or more countries in Asia and North Africa.

With so many minds confined to the hypnotic and myopic gaze focused on high technology, mass media, and our official “leaders”, 21st century man falls further into enslavement every day. As Fromm would say, we Escape from Freedom into self-indulgence and apathy, leaving hard decisions to technocrats and oligarchs. Control over our food, medicine, intellectual property, and basic social and environmental rights are consolidated into a handful of multinational corporations who inundate us with false needs through advertising and propaganda. Computer algorithms tell us what to buy, and social media manipulates our emotions, fulfilling the preaching of techno-dystopian prophets who warn of non-human intelligence guiding humanity towards dark futures.

Revolutionary fervor lurks under the surface, yet whether a popular progressive movement can blossom remains to be seen. Conversely, a missed revolution could easily result in an authoritarian and fascist takeover by the reactionary far-right. One thing we know for certain is that continuing under this two-party charade will only lead us to our doom.

Average citizens have never had any control of the republic since its founding. A complete constitutional overhaul is needed, and forms of direct, consensus, and deliberative democracy must be woven into a hybrid system. Elections should be funded by the public, with no corporate money allowed, shorter election cycles, and no discrimination towards third parties, unlike the current Commission on Presidential Debates. State governments should gain power, and federal programs reigned in and redefined towards streamlined regulation and oversight. Tax subsidies should be stripped from the fossil fuel industries entirely and redirected towards the best scientists and engineers in the field of renewable energy.

What is desperately needed is a shift in worldview to promote government that sees its job as not simply to tax and legislate, but to also support healthy life-world systems. Also, promoting humble and dedicated leaders who are stewards of community and the Earth, who do not insist on blatant exploitation of distant nations and pillaging resources, would go a long way. This cannot be done within the confines of the Democratic and Republican parties, who thrive on domination, coercion, control, and manipulation of public interests.

To break the cycle, we must collectively embrace our frailties and limitations. The deadly, patriarchal energy technologies such as the petrochemical industries and nuclear energy must be shut down. We must learn from the man-made tragedies of Bhopal, Katrina, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and dismantle dangerous plants and factories, and begin to move humanity away from areas susceptible to natural disasters and coastal flooding. The US, Russia, and the nuclear nations must formally apologize for the atmospheric nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties which will kill millions from cancer, and ban nuclear weapons for good.

Learning to relinquish control and learning to keep one’s ego in check are two of the ultimate tests our leaders must accept. As the Tao Te Ching says:

Therefore the sages:
Manage the work of detached actions
Conduct the teaching of no words
They work with myriad things but do not control
They create but do not possess
They act but do not presume
They succeed but do not dwell on success
It is because they do not dwell on success
That it never goes away.1

  1. Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained. Derek Lin. SkyLight Paths. 2006.  Translation by Derek Lin. [↩]

 

William Hawesis a writer specializing in politics and the environment. You can find his e-book of collected essays here. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, and Counterpunch. You can email him at wilhawes@gmail.com Read other articles by William.

Cutting the Cords of Empire: The Spectacle of US Elections

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By William Hawes

Source: Global Research

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.” -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

It’s almost time for our quadrennial political distraction, masquerading as the US presidential election. As opposed to previous elections, this one feels quite different. Even with Obama/Romney in 2012, important, basic economic issues were discussed, health care reform was questioned, and foreign policy was given its due.

However, this time, the spectacle of the personalities seems to dominate the conversation: Mrs. Clinton is somehow on a feminist crusade, an inspiration for women everywhere. Going unmentioned are her irredeemable backers, such as the genocidal Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright. As for Trump, his version of America is as naïve, narrow-minded, and delusional as a Leave It to Beaver episode, or a Captain America comic book. In the background, the monstrosity of global capitalism goes unquestioned, and the cries from victims of US institutional racism and structural violence go unheard.

Global warming, broad economic policy, and nuanced foreign policy are simply too much to ask of these candidates. Their stupidity knows no end; their corruption and depravity know no bounds, and many of both of their supporters, as well as media, political, and corporate backers and sycophants can be considered “deplorable”. Many supporters of the two-party system do not bother to think about the damage either potential president would do to people outside the US. Many backers of Trump and Clinton have little to no basic knowledge of world cultures and history.

What are the cords that connect us to these “leaders”, to our American Empire? They are the same ones that the Industrial Revolution, the basis of our civilization, has implanted in each of us since birth, as Alvin Toffler explains in The Third Wave. As our social world became modeled on the factory floors developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, a set of unspoken principles were ironed out, and transferred to the political, social, and economic realms. (1)  As we shall see, these principles spread unchecked, and have infiltrated political discourse and social hierarchies. Toffler identifies these implicit rules as:

1) Standardization: Industry, production, and factory life revolved around endless loops and inputs of metals, fabrics, coal, oil, and specialized parts for trains, cars, etc. The simplification and standard mechanical parts used were mirrored and reflected in the culture at large: eventually, markets, the media, radio and TV, and even great art and literature succumbed to commoditization and homogenization. We now have mass marketing, public relations, and “electioneering”, where our duopoly controls all branches of government.

2) Specialization: With the explosion in the fields of science and engineering, specialized techniques were taught to develop, invent, and maintain mechanical and electric equipment. Yet again, this philosophy infected the general society:  only bureaucrats are able to work in the halls of power, only industrial experts are able to administer federal agencies, creating the disgraceful revolving door phenomena in Washington.

3) Synchronization: As more people flocked into cities with gleaming promises of steady, factory jobs, time and punctuality became of prime importance. Punching timecards and meeting quotas were necessary: there was no room for leeway, as assembly lines demanded strict timelines. The time demands of labor leaked into white-collar work as well: in banking and finance, railroads, time zones, and office jobs, advanced scheduling became the norm. Eventually, synchronization of the political system gained traction, and the imperial system came to resemble a deathly machine, marching in time to bloody footsteps: military, immoral diplomacy and ideology, and industry worked together to lord over Latin America with the Monroe Doctrine, annihilate Native Americans using Manifest Destiny, even as today, the excuse of the “War on Terror” is used to exterminate entire populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.

4) Concentration: Think of the vast oil and coal stored underground for millions of years, only to be strip-mined, taken up by rigs, and transported by rail and tanker into vast refineries: concentration of energy. Further, every class of people became absorbed and intensified in the industrial system: workers into factories, children into schools, mentally ill into institutions, finance concentrated into New York, London, and Paris. Mega-mergers of corporations: today, it is the Apple, Google, Shell, and BP’s of the world who have coffers of blood money held tidily in banks throughout the world. Further, the concentration of technocrats who we supposedly need to run our societies: in the West, the military-industrialists, just as the Soviets were once told the nomenklatura was necessary.

5) Maximization: Firms were encouraged to grow as large as possible, and expand into as many fields as possible. Companies in Japan in the mid-twentieth century would actually have workers sing of the glory and greatness of their employer. Today, 62 people have the same wealth as half the world’s population. This is concentration and maximizing at its most obscene. Of course, you won’t hear Clinton, Trump, or anyone in Washington talking about this. Maximizing GDP, corporate profits, fossil fuel use, and flexing imperial muscle is what the Feds do best.

6) Centralization: Connected to the first five rules of empire stated above, centralizing power, wealth, and using knowledge for private gain is required to uphold the industrial state. Taxation, subsidies for industry, political debates via the sham Committee on Presidential Debates, the backroom shenanigans of the DNC and RNC, and cloak and dagger lobbying and bribery now dominate our system of government. Further, the Leviathan of state-sanctioned violence now lords over the world from the Pentagon and NATO, and the centralization of information runs through fiber-optic cables straight to the infernal, yet temperature-controlled offices of the CIA and NSA.

The elections have adopted all the patterns of the industrial, imperial state: we have standardized TV, scripted questions, airbrushed candidates, and childlike debates. We’ve seen specialized tactics of gerrymandering, vote-rigging, PR bullshit, and strategists whose careers accomplish nothing for the public good. We all know of the synchronization of Wall Street, defense and oil companies. The concentration of power in the hands of the few hardly needs mention: here’s the study by Princeton and Northwestern professors who conclude that the US is an oligarchy, not a democracy. We’ve witnessed the maximization of endless primaries, debates, press conferences, and town-hall meetings ad infinitum. The centralization of political ideology (triangulation in Clintonite terms, Machiavellian to a rational person) and the limitations of discourse that our candidates display are all too clear.

These are the iron chains holding us down, shackling us in Plato’s cave: our candidates are figureheads, shadows on the wall; they are puppets of the super-elite. The central position they carve out in the mainstream is really a pit, an abyss: one that we all find ourselves in, as we continue to vote for those who don’t fight for our interests.

The two best options for this election seem to be: voting for Jill Stein, or boycotting the election, as Joel Hirschhorn advocates. As for our obscene election cycles, I believe Zach de la Rocha summed it up best:

  A spectacle monopolized

The camera’s eyes on choice disguised

Was it cast for the mass who burn and toil?

Or for vultures who thirst for blood and oil?

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Countercurrents. He is author of the e-book Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and Empire. You can reach him at wilhawes@gmail.com

Notes:

1.) Alvin Toffler. The Third Wave. Bantam, 1980. p. 46-60.