by Denis Conroy for The Saker Blog
No doubt about it; there are no answers, only responses, and the Tuesday, November 3, 2020 elections will probably deliver yet another fake litmus test for shysters who find ever more ways of using taxpayer’s money and labour as a source of capital.
Intensive solvency concerns about the performance of large US-based and European Financial Institutions have not gone away and continue to steer the global financial system toward systemic shrinkage. The response to the 2008 financial crisis was incapsulated in Obama’s ability to use syrupy sweet words to conflate hope and imprecation for the purpose of projecting Chicago School economics into the heartland of corporate enterprise…a pas de delux revealing how public interest and deep-state economics successfully…neo-conservative economics that is…manage to survive together in spite of the fact that private interests continue to engorge themselves on the wealth of the nation while emasculating the spirit of the American charter.
And as non sequitur, the inscription on the Statute of Liberty could equally be read as hyperbole in the hands of recruitment agencies seeking a labour force;
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…” But wait, who is the ‘me’ here?
As the wheels of the industrial revolution turned, an opportunity opened up for the wretched of the earth to decamp from the miserable conditions they experienced under an old-world peonage system. “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” the millions caught in the maw of fiefdoms controlled by robber barons, despots, monarchs and every other one-percenter extracting whatever they could from their lowly brothers and sisters. Forever acting in deference to the principles of capitalist exploitation, they imposed the yoke of serfdom on their fellow beings for profit, whenever and wherever the possibility arose. The history of the American experience would be more of the same for a vast number of them.
Accompanying the parcelling-out of land in the newly ‘acquired’ Americas was the sound of the banker’s quill scratching the ledger as old European money etched its tentacles of ownership into a legal framework that would sanctify private property as reality de jure. The people would be allowed to dream the American dream, but the bankers would craft it in their own image.
Not aware that all systems are inevitable gamed…as rules of the game are kept in place to suit the people who gain most from them…the mesmerised multitudes seeking salvation in a continent that already possessed a multitude of people…albeit un-Christian…commenced their journey into to the heart of the capitalist ‘me’. The ‘me’ that needed them for extermination purposes and the clearance of vast tracts of indigenous land in order to access a state of colonial munificence. The original racist blueprint, nurtured within Western Colonialism’s sub-consciousness, set about replicating white supremacy and exploitive capitalism in the so-called new world in ways that presented (or misrepresented) their ability to exploit commercial opportunities in ways that inflated the idea of their own character and culture per se.
Being involved in the exploitive colonial experience, European man soon interpreted his own whiteness as something superior and promptly consigned people of colour to a lower caste. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. It was merely the awakening of the greed-is-good factor and discovering its predatory maw.
The industrial revolution produced the British Empire per means of colonisation, as did the American one. Extracting profit from labour became the denouement that would keep the labour market in bondage to a Tory psycho-social-babble-narrative that was more stick than carrot. The name of the game was to keep the vast majority of the people subjected to the will and wiles of the people who gamed the system…rules were rules because they served the interests of a governing class who needed to keep the majority of the people in a box, and the box was the status quo…or an arrangement of things that would benefit the psycho-social-babble-narrative that required fake media to deliver its delusional message of exceptionality.
And so, over time, fake became more potent than essential truths. Nobody could tell anymore who or what was real or if there were any leaders in possession of a moral compasses anymore. As business-as-usual became the mantra, the marketplace became the Holy Grail and more of the same meant more money and more power. Pretty soon many people lost their capacity to distinguish jackasses from people who could speak truth to power… the jackasses had become the majority.
With the arrival of this topsy-turvy world, movers and shakers of the moolah kind competed to satisfy the needs of a class of ‘wanters’ who wanted everything now…mainly goodies galore from a system that had consigned them to the consumerist box.
In time, capitalism in America would succeed in rendering the American dream comatose. Consumption of fake culture began to take its toll as weak-minded ‘exceptionalism’ fomented political unrest within the national psyche. American culture, in all its multiple forms, had reached its limit and the world was no longer impressed. Within a ‘box’ of tech escapism , greatness was talked up by charlatans tweeting vindictive verbiage 24/7 to a public that had long ago lost its political mojo…imagination…by not being able to imagine that there was any alternative to the ‘box’ that they were imprisoned in.
Like groundhogs, they would periodically emerge from their burrows to vote in a new president. November 3rd was such an occasion. This occasion was one where they could vote-in the expeditor of their choice, and like groundhogs using augury as barometer, sniff out the potential of their man or woman for their ability to keep America a buoyant and aggressive corporate force with a trickle down wealth effect to placate the needs of the masses.
American elections are not about real change; they are only about touting an American form of exceptionalism that nurtures the expansion of corporate power. It revolves around receiving copious amounts of taxpayer’s money to support the activities of The Pentagon and multiple intelligence agencies operating alongside America’s industrial and technical power base in order to deploy their skills in ways that ensure that the emerging economies…such as China’s state capitalist enterprise, itself a expeditor operating an inclusive economy that could give new meaning to social development.
America’s self-justifying foreign policy is about demonising those who pose a challenge to the pre-eminence of this narrative. For the past eight decades this narrative has wed those who shamelessly ‘want’ to exploit power (presidents and parliaments alike) for their own purposes and those who ‘want’ to abjectly go along for the ride.
So, it’s the voice of self-justification that has succeeded in focusing the American public on its own navel. The groundhogs who will emerge from their burrows on that designated day in November will not question why their masters believe that all those who oppose America’s desire to dominate the globe with their military might should be sanctioned out of existence or bombed back to the stone-age.
This is the genesis of a modern tragedy. The American people go to elections without being aware of what they have done in the world at large. Americans may attend their voting booths, but they and their candidates might as well stay at home, because they have become as groundhogs evermore emerging from their bunkers to sniff for signs of a spring that is losing its vibrancy.
But perhaps it’s time to extend the analogy to include the lemming. A small short-tailed furry-footed rodent that is regarded as the locust of mammals and will strip its habitat bare. This little creature tends to strip its environment of sustainable balances in its pursuit of craven objectives. Sadly, the American population and its go-it-alone policies have assumed metaphoric status… a derailed train rushing across a multilateral landscape toward cliff’s edge…simply because it has lost its ability to see itself for what it has become. Is it time to replace the Eagle mascot with the image of a lemming?
That it fails to see that the source of its craven behaviour is within its own obviously corrupt system suggests that its preoccupation with ‘particularisms’ is, by extension, a secondary problem arising from a myopia that is self-imprisoning.
The Founding Fathers ( the ancestors) of the groundhog-cum-lemming stakeholders were so totally committed to the ownership of assets…human and otherwise, that justice was left to blow in the winds of bloviators extolling Holy Writ in ways suggesting that the peon should be grateful for his lot and get-on-with-it. The foundation stones of orthodox capitalism supporting fake justice and social exclusion were set in place by the Founding Fathers and would thereafter remain embalmed in self-justification. The peons would remain captives to a system that excluded them from the narrative that gamed the system. In time, this narrative which was borne on the back of pragmatic opportunism would ultimately reach its breaking point in the 20th & 21st century.
The great-new-world developed a penchant for ‘greatness’. It had in its possession unbelievable resources. Opportunities existed in abundance and a self-righteous culture spread outward across the vast plains while simultaneously taking possession of the national psyche. The folk came to believe that they were God’s gift to history and adopted a vision of themselves as the dominant people. They accepted force as their modus operandi. They made a supreme effort to replace the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker with the banker, the media mogul, the lawyer and the fighter-pilot. Modernity need not be constrained by reason or civilising trope…progress was in the eye of the dealer and might became right. The American public would be indoctrinated into believing that it was o.k. to possess a mighty military and navy that could go forth and shit on the world by way of bombing millions of defenceless people…brown or yellow of course. They became proud of the fact that they had developed a technology that could threaten all and sundry…and their airpower confirmed that they could reach them and destroy them with merciless abandon.
So, what did it do to the American psyche? How is it possible for the people of America to not be aware that their myopic view of the world exists because they are boxed-in by their own ignorance. At the mercy of American media and tweet-street culture as it continues to release an unending stream of vitriolic admonishments imputing that some particular quarter of the system is more craven in its behaviour than another…a futile pot- calling-the-kettle-black exercise designed to shift the blame elsewhere. But alas, as the corruption is endemic, there is no othe SELF JUSTIFYING AMERICA IS PREPARING FOR ANOTHER GROUNDHOG DAY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONr particular quarter to shift the blame to.
It now seems that a significant number of Americans would not recognise craven behaviour if it bit them on the nose…more pity to those enlightened Americans caught-up in this dealer’s web of lies and more power to their elbows.
As contempt and vitriolic vapours continue to waft out of the political swamp, ever more puke will emerge to coalesce and pollute the air in ways that suck the oxygen out of the air feeding the lungs of the body politic. The movers and shakers will continue to corrode the body politic as the people’s lack the ‘bottle’ in confronting the problem of systemic corruption remain dormant. Meanwhile, President Trump and his followers will be pursued as an exceptionally corrupt clique by an equally corrupt clique such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC who conceal their own involvement in pernicious propaganda. What these two sides of the same coin have in common is a loathing for new concepts and the fear that social pressures might rise up and set about ushering in programs that would challenge their privileges and give them the short shrift to boot.
Furthermore, expect the Trump witch-hunt to gain ever more momentum in spite of the fact that his predecessors were no better than he. Trump is merely another American president expeditiously running a bully pulpit, which includes a penchant for stamping on orthodoxies…an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, comes to mind. Strangely, the American public is proud of their amoral presidents and celebrities…think Truman, Nixon, both Clintons, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Obama and others too numerous to mention and you realise that all these people had the same thing in common…an inability to live in conformity with their conscience. Ontological America had become blasé. It was o.k. to accept the fact that their leaders valued power more than conscientious deliberation.
American media (and its message) repeatedly ran half-baked delusional tropes that endlessly and selectively engaged the public in the subject of good versus evil. The idea was to project the image of American culture as a panacea for the ills of the world. Self-justification became its home-grown mantra. Throughout the 20th century it would repeat ad nauseam portrayals of itself as saviour on the big silver screens across the movieland world…that new country of distraction where propaganda reigned supreme… and with Hollywood tropes pushing the America first agenda to persuade the rest of the world that the American way of doing business could be the only feasible way of achieving progress, their endgame could be realised. The idea of making business the business of America would in time translate into making America an Empire held together by ever more propaganda to counter the fake self-justification factor.
The plan was to show that Americans could fix everything because they were a can-do people and anybody who thought otherwise had to be ‘fixed’ and the fixers didn’t need the ability to live conscionable lives to qualify as presidential candidates. Over time, the fixers became the can-do dealers in regime change and the people kept voting in presidents who promised to keep them market dominant. And the people named in the previous paragraph were chosen as laureates, not because of their enlightened views…they were not required to have them…but their business acumen and ability to fake niceties in the service of corporate expediency were seen as prerequisites for producing more of the same.
And recently, Hillary Clinton postulated the idea of regime change, declaring Trump to be an “illegitimate president.” She could not accept the fact that her clique was denied foreordination. Shakespeare believed that all the world was a stage. If he were alive today, he might say that media has become a staging mechanism wherein human perversions chase wanton dreams to waste their mojo in the quest for liberal phantoms that might fill the vacuum their ‘wanting’ moments need to fill.
Count on it, the next electoral season in the land of groundhogs and lemmings will tip the clueless political dialogue toward the cliff edge. Truly, American style democracy is nothing more than packaged freedom and fake liberalism. That’s what corporate capitalism does best, impose fake legitimacy on its own manufactured version of the American Dream.
Denis A. Conroy,
Freelance Writer
Australia
This essay pretty much sums up Americans — spoiled kids buying their own bullshit, and not having a clue about anything else.
sadly, I watched the saker blog transform or “reveal” an anti U.S. citizen agenda. soft war’s a bitch, U.S. patriots are ready and the dipshit masses are waking up
It’s not an “anti-US Citizen agenda”, IMHO, whyatt.
In the more thoughtful participants here, that is. I’ll comment on the others further down.
So don’t be sad, be glad.
It’s just a kind of Collateral Damage to the egos of the dipshit clueless masses who have imagined themselves to be “good”…and free….and on the right, justified path in their clueless disregard for the rest of humanity…for many, many decades…..living their small …and shrinking lives of consumerism..and cultural decay….and ignorance…………quite similar to the clueless masses in many places………………….such as the “good” Germans of the 1930’s.
Many of those equally propagandized Americans are walking up, and not nearly enough attention to that fact is paid here.
But don’t let that get you down or turn you off. The great majority of those Rip Van Winkles have such a long, long way to go…before their bearings are reset with any reasonable accuracy, and this site can help with that reset.…like smelling salts…can rudely awaken the unconscious person.
So I advise to develop a little thicker skin……and be GLAD that you have a place to refer Americans to where, if they can take the heat, they can more quickly ….and more fully grasp…….just how close they have come to full ignorant complicity in aiding and abetting (more in acts of omission than commission) the global “New World Order” enslavement of all humanity…..including themselves.
Then, work on the more entrenched cynics and pessimists here that can’t yet see …….or yet trust….or even understand …… what you refer to with “US patriots are ready” and I think it will not be at all impossible for the more astute and intelligent among them to eventually grasp the fact that that untapped, slumbering potential within the US Citizenry…can be ………… is already, in all probability!! ….more of a base of support in favor of a Multi-Polar World of Sovereign Republics…and the Long Overdue Burial of the Empire Model………..than almost ANY citizenry……..anywhere else in the world.
That fact is going to be very, very difficult for the cynical despisers of all or 99.9% of all US Citizens here to swallow……………because a major portion of their egoic identity is that they are NOT US citizens……..or WISH they weren’t….LOL….or..maybe even pretend they aren’t…in order to more fully secretly enjoy the Anti-Empire comraderie here…………an identity that not that long ago historically…was more “American” than characteristic of any other citizenry …anywhere else on earth.
Meanwhile just get more ready for more and more of the more astute and intelligent among the participants here to come around….and recognize in you… an ally…or potential ally…that it would be absolutely stupid…..and quite self-destructive…..and unhelpful to the cause of Multi-Polarity…… to completely snub or alienate…for such petty and pathetic egoic reasons.
mike k
The nation has been reduced to remote controlled robots, controlled by the media. The media in the US has four tasks: To filter what what foreign news comes into the country, to filter what general news there is in the US, to direct the public’s attention to local matters and to create a public opinion. When I came to New York City in 2005, the first headline news in the city that I saw pertained to a tree which fell and damaged the windshield of a car. And there I was, watching a tree on my TV.
I am afraid that this type of censorship and brainwashing is going to have a horrendous result. The general public is vaguely aware of America’s foreign debt. Few know there is such a thing as a domestic debt, which is many times larger (in fact it is so large, that analysts and university professors are at odds how large it really is). The US Government cannot permanently go on printing dollars backed by nothing and postponing the repayment of the debt, which in any case cannot be repayed. I am afraid we are going to see a horrendous crash of the finances. And then what ? How will the shocked population react, as it won’t be able to buy a loaf of bread with funny money ? Some analysts are mentioning a new civil war. I don’t see it coming. What will come will be some very nasty social and political disturbances, resembling a civil war. Will the US in it’s present form survive this ? I don’t think so.
Denis, you’ve penned a symphony, while describing the dissonant discordant. Bravo!
Interesting essay,I wonder what the dumber than shit American people will do when the depression comes rolling in,another product of capitalism that most people don’t wish to discuss,when the soft police state become a hard police state, when nothing is safe from crooks or those who claim to fight the crooks,I see little on the horizon but death and desolation as we swim thru the shit that we the people have permitted the country to become,except perhaps to blame the other guy the other party, that some way we aren’t to blame.We are.!!!
The US elites will just go on a rampage of foreign aggression, until the dollar collapses, or you trigger a thermo-nuclear war, or some mega-climate disaster, say a release of fifty gigatons or so of methane from the East Siberian Sea frozen clathrates, renders all human strutting and fretting pointless.
I think he would have said, “All the world is a stage, and most of you are desperately under rehearsed.”
Federal Elections – What the People Must Do
A new national cycle of insipid polemics fed to the public like gruel and hardtack sweeps over the population once more. We hear the monotonous elocution, “But we must win, win, win for democracy and right the ship to save America! We can do it this time, because now it will be different, it really, really will if you’ll just trust us. Please, please, we, your faithful serpents (I mean servants) beg you on bended knee and wrap the patriotic flag around our vile (I mean noble) hearts, hear our national anthem play in the background, give us the power to keep the country safe and us employed (and not you) to serve, serve, only the people. With tears of regret for past indiscretions rolling down our dirty (I mean pure) faces, oh God, please America, think of what it will mean to the tiny Tim’s across our great land if you abandon us for that other wicked side of politics (how true). Give us one, more, chance!!!”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, the clarion of propaganda blares to drag our sorry behinds to the polls and vote, vote, vote, for your favorite red (republican ) team or blue (democrat) team. Sadly the citizenry will do as commanded and after all the votes are tallied and the challengers win or the incumbents stay in office, the deep state and their political puppets facilitated by their corporate media handlers laugh raucously behind our backs at how the rubes keep falling for the same tatty canards. Yes, we are a dumb, dumb people.
Some will utter, “I have to vote, otherwise it will be wasted,” as if a vote was a golden coin thrown into the well of principled government to ensure the survival of the nation. Others will state, “They can’t be all unethical, one must be a little bit better,” and anoint that miscreant over his/her opponent. A small coven believes, “A third party is the answer, yes a third party. Let’s conjure one up! It will take years maybe decades but hell, it will be worth the wait, won’t it?” So they to, spew their seed down into the earth of false democracy in feeble hope that sprouts of liberty will grow, unaware the ground is too salted with tyranny for freedom to blossom.
So what’s left for a kind but ignorant people to do? Shall we raise the cudgel of violence, enact death and the destruction of property against the Washington oppressors as our courageous southern brothers did during the great War of Secession? The shadow government would love that to happen so they can crush the futile rebellion, further consolidate power and like QE I, II, III, etc. initiate Reconstruction Period II. The pernicious crone Madeline Albright would most assuredly rub her gnarled hands in delight and reach into her feculent bag of clichés and tell, “We believe it was worth it.” Wave goodbye to the republic for a unitary government awaits in the darkness of perdition to rise up and claim its thorny crown of totalitarian betrayal.
There must be another way, God would not abandon us. Perhaps prayer might do the trick. Pray? Pray for what, for the four horsemen to come and bring the apocalypse to bear down upon humanity and destroy the enemies of the Lord? No not yet, not for this.
What then?? What is the answer; how should we proceed to save our beautiful country?
If we ask an obscure Chinese philosopher he would say, “If an act continues to bring despotism, the answer is to withdraw from such act.” Could that be the solution to stop the wheels of kakistocracy? Let’s examine this concept through practical cases.
We all know in a seasonal climate that winter is devoid of growth because it is necessary in preparation for the renewal of life in the following spring. The withered plants that have used up their energy and purpose must be allowed to die as nature intended for they cannot live on in perpetuity. Chauncey Gardiner (wink) the legendary urban cultivator of botanical flora, would agree.
Before modern agriculture, farmers used to leave some of their land to lay fallow. They did this to allow those fields to regenerate the natural nutrients in the soil that were depleted from the constant planting of crops. The farmer knew to let his soil be still, to rest for one season for its long-term survival. One could say the function of the land was allowed to die temporarily, in preparation for a healthy return back to work.
When a carpenter is called by a property owner to repair a residence, the tradesman would perform an estimate to evaluate the amount of work to be done to bring the home back into livable condition. Some houses are too rotted to restore and cannot be saved no matter how much shoring up in material and labor is expended to save it. If he is an honest man, the carpenter would advise the owner to tear down the building and rebuild a new one. Effectively the structure must die first, before a new home can be started and built that will serve the needs of the occupants, that is the people.
In an economy, there needs a period of deflation to balance against inflationary periods that run too long in order to reset the value of goods, services and the currency used for exchange. Therefore inflation has to die in order to allow private enterprises to revitalize back into healthy and prosperous markets of commerce.
Four examples have been presented where events require the necessity of death in order for life to survive in the future. The end of the central government must come too, when its core foundation has decayed and cankerous gangrene has infected the blood of its functionaries to the point where no amount of ‘hope and change’ will recover it. It has to perish like the withered plant, the fallowed land, the unlivable home and the empty purse of inflation. We must save what is left of our freedom, independence and wealth to deny the dystopian vision that Eric Blair warned his readers about years ago.
I am one of millions of Americans who are eligible to vote in America’s presidential and federal ballot elections next year. I am only one person but I can personally stop these monsters in Washington, DC., cold. I can do it very easily without violence, without armed conflict, without performing Herculean feats of political hoopla or through the use of previously unknown secrets of mystical incantation induced by a theurgist’s wand in hand to command at my will.
At first blush my action will be criticized as insignificant, impractical to achieve any meaningful results and even condemned with tittered laughter. But I am undeterred for I know the real power it can accomplish as well as others who join in united resolution on election day; that is those who know the congress, executive, federal judiciary and the system of central government appointments is completely and utterly corrupt and cannot be revived by conventional means.
Gravity is said to be a weak force in nature and that is true. However in relation to a large massive object it keeps man grounded and spaceships from ascending into the heavens without the use of powerful chemical rockets to break free of earth’s gravitational pull. How easy is it though, for man to pick up his foot and put it down ahead of himself foot by foot, yard by yard, mile by mile until he walks across a great distance. He turns and looks back and says, “Look how far I’ve traveled, for I started with one small step.”
One simple performance is all I need to do to stop these evil men, to do my part to end the murder of innocent people abroad who have never threatened me, my family, friends, neighbors and most likely have not harmed you as well, for they do not know you as you do not know them, face to face. On that Tuesday when the polls open across our great country I will conduct with full conscience. It will be swift yet appear not to be anything at all. Like gravity its real power can only be realized when it is part of a larger body. In this case a gathering of the electorate is needed to have the full desired effect.
My fellow American, will you join me and become part of the movement to multiply the power to stop the killing in foreign wars, end the pilferage imposed by monetary inflation, cease the strangulation and manipulation of free markets, curtail the government indoctrination of our children and halt the constant and relentless attack of fear mongering to control all who dare to enjoy their privacy or take a breath of freedom?
It won’t be hard to do, require any special skill, equipment, the expenditure of monies or even time. All you have to do is this one simple act:
Don’t vote on November 3, 2020.
That’s it, that’s all we have to do. I said it was simple and I was true to my word. No matter how engorged the leviathan of government becomes they need our consent to legitimize their authority. Don’t give it to them. Let the system die an ignominious death. We will save the lives of America’s youth as well as countless Arabs, Persians, Russians, Chinese and others if we shut off the elitists’ power. We accomplish this by not participating in the federal electoral system they abuse to continue their reign of terror around the planet.
Like gravity, weak to begin but grows exponentially in strength as more mass is added, so must we act by not voting, to save our country and the world from Washington’s cruelty and repression. We cannot change what is immutable, we cannot extend our grasp to hope, to rationalize, to plea, to appeal for deliverance from the doom merchants. No proxy can do it for us, we have to do it ourselves.
You know the phrase, “land of the free and the home of the brave”? Let’s give real meaning to those words. Let us turn them into deeds, to steadfast our freedoms before more Intolerable Acts are put down on our heads. Withholding your consent is a vote of “No Confidence”, an act of defiance against Washington’s abject theft of all that is precious to the nation.
On November 3rd, 2020, I will declare my personal day of independence by abstinence. I hope you will too.
I will gladly join you!
Wont do any good, I already proved that the constitution is defective b/c of this one simple lack of fore site. For, even if no one voted, just the one percent (who benefit from the current system as it is and have every reason to vote) would vote themselves in office and carry on as they do today.
Nothing would change b/c their is no stipulation in the constitution as to just when is the country in such a pitiful state so as no one, almost no one, cared enough to vote.
So you see my friend, there is really not much that can be done that is already not being done, to address your concerns.
Most Americans already don’t vote. The great majority who MIGHT drop out have already dropped out, or never dropped in to begin with — probably because they know that the real America is “a big club and you ain’t in it”.
‘I never vote-it only encourages them’.
Totally meaningless action. Some will still vote & they don’t give a $hit if you don’t.
I’m afraid it will take a full blown rebellion to change things – and a lot of human sacrifice.
Don’t think that Yanks are up for that – too fat & lazy & still believe the lies from both parties.
James you are so right, as there are no provisions (percentage of voting citizens as opposed to refrainers). The question is: When would the vote be invalid? with 1 person or 0 persons voting?
Denis, I loved your Lemming story, which I read as analogy to the human parasites destroying this planet for “moolah” as you said.
“The question is: When would the vote be invalid?”
imho everything under 75% is, but i believe they would have trouble defending a election were only 5-15% cast their votes.
P/N, I agree with you, but that would be in ideal conditions. I do not think you can find any elections where more than 50% of eligible voters vote, yet the results are happily accepted. Also, if we divide the above number into number of parties (10 as it may be in some countries) you end up with “majority” party which was voted in by say 20%. My numbers are fictitious and are used to give us the picture of the said “Western Democracy”.
Speaking of the US Presidential Selection campaign, it gets even more farcically Orwellian with the latest Democratic Party debate.
Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang stand accused of repeating Kremlin Talking Points because they stated that the USA has blood on its hands for arming extremist groups in Syria to effect regime change there or that the USA has also participated in election interference in other nations (as Russia allegedly does).
Both Gabbard and Yang are thus guilty of the Thought Crime of repeating “Kremlin Talking Points”!!!!
Truth Is A Kremlin Talking Point
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/10/17/truth-is-a-kremlin-talking-point/
This is America, where ignorance is strength.
Denis….. This is just profound. Hits the nail on the head in so many places. “A derailed train rushing across a multilateral landscape towards the cliffs edge”… Indeed.
I havn’t voted for 20 years. Why? You can’t vote out Neoliberalism. The entire West has been ensnared in this depraved ideology that greatly enriches the very few, and grinds the vast majority into the dirt.
Any political party that genuinely challenges this orthodoxy will be crushed.
Austerity, user pays, tax cuts for the wealthy, closing of services; such as libraries, offshoring of jobs, privatisations, atomised individuals within an entire Social Darwinist ethos – coupled with the appendage of Identity Politics; used as a cynical divide and conquer tactic. To distract from the very real pain and misery that Neoliberalism creates. So many human beings discarded as…. expendable.
The huge rise in the West of substance abuse, mental health issues, suicides, along with relentless brainwashing from the despicable media that has many believe there is no alternative.
Wasn’t it Warren Buffet who said “it’s class warfare, and my class is winning”? Thanks for your eloquent words.
I voted once, Gezzah, when young and naive. I quickly learned that it was a sick sham, so did not feel the need to join in the charade ever since. I have watched, over the ensuing centuries, or so it seems, the descent of society and public life into the sewer, with new depths plumbed regularly. I know that, even as I imagine that the sadistic thug posing as a ‘Christian’ who we have as Fuhrer at present, presiding over a regime of exquisite imbecility, moral putrefaction and spiritual depravity, must be the worst that can come along, that such an observation is pure Panglossianism-even worse beasts are already emerging from their lairs, to assert their right to rule. I draw some slight surcease of sorrow from the knowledge that the whole corrupt mess is about to crumble, but that will be the end of us all, or most of us, and who is to say that it will not be the human cockroaches who survive, at least a little longer than the rest of us.
Mulga, it took me a while to wake up to the whole thing being a hollow charade. Parliamentary ‘democracy’ while those who really rule keep plundering and pillaging and murdering on an industrial scale. Refer to Emma Goldman’s famous dictum about voting. Heck, just refer to the excellent comment by Poke The Truth above.
I told someone recently about the state of the World economy, about Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan, et al, about the state of society, the rampant hedonism, the vast debt levels and they asked me if I was okay, and perhaps I should see a psychologist!! Hello? Ding Dong. The level of cognitive dissonance, the wilful blindness to what’s actually going on, just surreal. Just bonkers. And yes, I see fast approaching black clouds as well. The manure will soon be hitting the fan in huge quantities.
You’re correct about willful blindness, Gezzah. The sheer brainwashed stupidity and happy pig ignorance of the Ocker mediocrity once amused me (in the halcyon days, long, long, ago, when I believed that we would get better as a society)but today, when it is personified by that EVIL buffoon Morrison, the hate-driven ‘Christian’ (there’s an oxymoron for you, or, in his case a ‘poxy moron’)it just fills me with horror. When the child’s crusade to avoid a climate cataclysm, and be allowed to live out their lives, is met with totally unhinged HATRED, veering into the spittle-spraying, instantly, when the ecological collapse is met with fanatic DEMANDS to drive on, to death and destruction, just so long as the loot keeps flowing, when the poor, the weak, the defenceless are treated with exquisite and concerted sadism and cruelty, all while we sing our own praises endlessly as the wonder of the world, when the crumbling of the economy is met with demands for yet more tax cuts for the rich, privatisation looting and attacks on working people, when the mountain of private debt is the greatest this side of Switzerland, and nobody gives a toss, you know that you are living in a country with some sort of Death Wish. One about to be granted, by the Fates, I fear. In fact, I know.
The basic Western drive is for dominance. We can see that from the history of internecine battles along class, race and sectarian lines, hardened over time into ideologies of dominance like capitalism, and resistance to it. And we can further see it in the West’s dealing with other civilizations, where aggression, invasion, dispossession, genocide and oppression and exploitation were the norm in centuries of imperial and colonial expansion, and in the decades of neo-imperialism and neo-colonialism under the auspices of the Washington Consensus of IMF, World Bank, GATT, WTO etc, since WW2.
The Chinese, in contrast, aim for harmony, within their society, and between nations. Although not perfect in execution, it at least offers a modus vivendi for humanity to live at mutually beneficial peace. Is it any wonder that the Five Eyes authoritarian psychopaths hate and fear China so very much.
War against Humanity -Western Front
Oh the American peoples are not as clueless as you all think. Folks on the streets are refusing to speak politics with each other but very quietly the lines are being drawn, resources collected and a sense of personal resolve formed.
Yes, the clueless are always present in great numbers but while I find the ranting to be cathartic and at times amusing it is as devoid of utility as the propaganda of the opposing political narratives. saker wrote something which I have been pondering latelyTertium non Datur.
There is that historical moment of tension that hovers over us as we all sit in the synoptic gap of thesis/antithesis. No one is seeing clearly at this time . Hopefully we will blunder through it all together.