The national, statewide and local results of the November 2nd Midterm elections were hardly unexpected. The winners will accomplish nothing with respect to altering the real direction of the country which is a seriously ailing and quickly declining hyper-empire.
The electorate was never provided any meaningful choice but instead had to pick between the two defunct and corrupt political parties. The Tea Party was co-opted by Republicans and the other small alternative parties are perpetually ignored by the media in favor of following a mindless competition between the two ostensible power centers.
Republicans and Democrats are the opposite sides of the same coin. They both merely function as the political arms and enablers of the U.S. oligarchy/plutocracy/kleptocracy that actually controls the life of our entire nation. Therefore it does not matter which party actually controls Congress or occupies the White House.
Over half of the electorate did not bother to vote in these Midterms. This fact tells us everything about our country and its people. Some fellow citizens are willfully ignorant, congenitally stupid and hopelessly lazy and narcissistic to get involved in civic life whether it be on the local, state or national scale. Furthermore, the choice available to the electorate was merely the option of choosing Tweedledum or Tweedledee. No matter the rhetoric from either side, nothing gets accomplished and we have simply created a system of perpetual gridlock and paralysis that cannot address any major issues or challenges without first consulting with our Oligarchy.
I have not posted much on TMV for more than a month because the political discourse leading up to these elections was such a vapid, reality-denying farce that it merited no comment. Our mass media (24/7 info-entertainment providers) no longer care about journalism or presenting the real and complex facts to the electorate. National media outlets exist to perpetually entertain, feed emotions and misinformation, and market consumer junk to the masses. Their raison-d’être is to produce obscene profits for some of our controlling oligarchy. All other human activities in our society have similarly degenerated in being valued solely on their profit-making capabilities.
The laws and policies pursued in our nation’s capital are solely for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and business entities that also happen to fund the campaigns of both Republicans and Democrats. Our politicians are mere window-dressing of a defunct Republic that is wholly owned and controlled by the military-industrial complex, the financial/gambling sector, the zombie mega-banks, the largest insurance companies, the healthcare-pharmaceutical sector, Big agribusiness, and our well-connected energy and natural resources stripping industries.
It is rather appropriate that the American people returned ostensible power to the Republican Party that presided over the last economic meltdown. The Democrats were unable and unwilling to change anything in less than 2 years but then they made little effort to reform the corrupt system of which they are a part. Our ongoing national economic disaster and steep political/military decline are really due to a 30-year-long bi-partisan effort to principally serve the selfish short-term profit needs of our oligarchy over the best long-term interests of 85% of the U.S. population.
Everything that comes out of Washington is geared to pleasing these powerful groups with more tax breaks, trade policies that permits off-shoring more jobs to the lowest wage countries to decimate our nation’s manufacturing base, and soon our service sector and many professional jobs will also be off-shored in a similar manner. Only janitorial, landscaping, restaurant, retail, and care for children and the elderly cannot be off-shored but those jobs pay abysmally and they hold no viable economic future for this nation.
Not that our oligarchy has been particularly competent at running the nation for the past 30 years. That responsibility is far less important than the overriding goal of making money by any legal or illegal means possible. They have been quite adept at perverting the free enterprise system into a corrupt crony capitalist system that has merged big business and big government. If big government only serves big business, then why fund it? But if government were not strong and independent, who would protect us from the sociopaths who control our society and most private enterprises?
The oligarchy has consistently increased basic social programs for the citizenry in order to keep the general populace placated in order to avoid complete social disintegration. This is an updated variation of the Roman Empire’s gifts of bread and circuses to the masses. They keep making huge no-bid government transfer payments to various large business enterprises they control in order to keep the illusory profits coming to themselves.
However our oligarchy is not really willing to pay for all the government it needs to stay in power and thus the tens of trillions of of dollars in public debt it has created over the past 30 years. Therefore our country is effectively bankrupt. Excessive tax cuts during the Bush Administration, two unfunded wars of choice, and more bread and circuses at home – coupled with a massive housing and banking bust, have all lead to massive federal deficits as far into the future anyone cares to look. The choices for solving our mess are ugly for both Republicans and Democrats, and they cannot undertake anything tha displeases their financial benefactors – the oligarchy that pays for elections.
Sadly more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps today. More than sixty percent of our citizens and households live just paycheck to paycheck and have no effective income or assets to speak of. The large American Middle Class – that formerly had good-paying long-term employment with benefits, equity in their homes and other assets, and the ability to educate their children and take nice vacations – simply does not exist anymore in the U.S – and it is rapidly shrinking as I write this post.
The top 1% of U.S. households hold nearly half the country’s wealth and assets and they annually reap almost one-fourth the national income. The top 20% of Americans own more than 80% of the nation’s total assets. The bottom half of the country controls less than one percent (1%) of total wealth and assets and they earn less than 10% of the total national income. Certainly the bottom half is not in any financial position to pay much more than payroll taxes to partially fund Social Security and Medicare, and some sales taxes to prop up most State governments.
The U.S. has the largest income disparity and least amount of social-economic mobility among all developed and many developing countries, except Turkey and Mexico. Anyone who denies the significance of these facts in defining why the U.S. is on such a rapid trajectory towards systemic economic and political collapse is an arrogant and deluded imbecile who luckily is a spokesperson for the Oligarchy.
The top 10% are unwilling to even pay income taxes at levels far lower than the 1960’s through the 1990’s. They are busy de-coupling themselves from our country and shifting their assets and business enterprises overseas. They are running out of things to steal in the U.S. but there’s a whole world out there waiting to be raped. The U.S. has devolved into a third-world “banana republic” status and it’s time for our oligarchy to move on to better feeding grounds. You’ll soon find their new heavily-secured residences in Lichtenstein, Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Costa Rica and Belize.
Republicans will not be able to change our declining national trajectory nor improve the overall merged political-economic system since both they and the Democrats are part and parcel of that wholly corrupt system. The two parties can change some minor priorities at the margins but taxing and spending policies, national security, infrastructure and environmental policies, and all public education and welfare programs will be shaped solely to perpetuate the oligarchy’s control over this country.
If unemployment benefits, food stamps, Social Security and Medicare are funded in the future, their sole purpose will be to insure there is not a violent insurrection by the bottom half of the nation that has been effectively screwed, marginalized and totally ignored by our utterly corrupt system. Fortunately it may take many years for many of the uneducated and willfully ignorant and delusional Americans to figure out how they have been so duped, used, conned, and abused for so long – and who is really at fault.
There are others who might claim that these End of Empire blues have been perpetuated for decades and they are untrue because we have managed to find silver bullets in the past to reinvigorate our system. It actually took two centuries for the Roman Empire in Europe to collapse and many decades for the British and Spanish empires also to collapse.
These prior empires fell as a result of (1) too many overextending perpetual military adventures, (2) a glaring failure to encourage scientific and technological innovations and a well-educated general population, (3) an inability to assimilate immigrants into their territories, (4) shamefully stupid economic and monetary policies that left them bankrupt, (5) an over-zealous religiosity which resulted in arrogant hubris and a delusion of exceptionalism, (6) a general failure to adequately maintain or expand their key infrastructures, (7) tolerating huge income disparities with only a small number of people and enterprises controlling the life of the nation, and (8) permitting their aristocracies to become completely out of touch with the general citizenry. The U.S. is simply on a similar 21st Century path towards general collapse regardless of our silly, useless and diversionary Merry-go-Round of rotating political parties in Washington every two years.
The only noticeable change as a result of the Midterm elections will be that High Speed Rail and most desperately-needed transportation infrastructure investments are effectively dead in the U.S. for all practical purposes. Our controlling oligarchy/plutocracy/kleptocracy really did not see any personal use for such expenditures that would only serve the best interests of the vast majority of Americans. If the top 10% of our society cannot directly benefit or profit in an obscene way, then those ideas and important long-term national priorities will simply be ignored.
The same future neglect will apply to our entire educational system and rudimentary job training programs. Unless Americans are willing to work for less than $1 an hour or as short-term temporary free-lancers with no benefits, regardless of their educational, skill and experience levels, Americans simply cannot compete globally with billions of desperately poor people who are willing to work and live as pseudo-slaves for the Oligarchy.
The American people are still mired in ignorance, denial, willful stupidity, and blind rage about what has happened over the past few years and decades. They still do not realize they originally enabled – and continue to perpetuate – this take-over by our upper class aristocracy to their overall detriment and the outright impoverishment of our future generations.
Too many of Americans perpetually divert themselves with new electronic gizmos, various forms of shallow entertainment, obsess on the lives of our celebrities, and whether there are enough women, blacks, Hispanics, gays and members of other special groups in elective or appointive office. These superficial members of our society completely miss the big picture of who really controls our system and they still foolishly believe elections have consequences.
For those delusional fools who think the two-party system and our elections still means anything, or that we still have a functioning economy or democracy, I truly feel sorry for you. You are merely intellectual shills and tools of the oligarchy in its 30-year behind-the-scenes take-over of this nation. Your comments and opinions are wholly meritless.
In reality, the vast majority of Americans are of no use to our oligarchy and our political parties. We had better start thinking of ways of cooperating locally and regionally in order to survive over the long haul in a declining North America without ever looking to Washington, Republicans or Democrats for any assistance, guidance or leadership.
Submitted by Marc Pascal, happily ranting from Phoenix, AZ