America has a boundless capacity for self-deception and prevarication: if we could harness the power of our collective mendacity there would be no energy crisis in this world -- if we could power our civilization with the merciless mistruths of marketing and the audacious lies of the political realm then we all truly would live in the kind of cornucopian, utopian fantasy-land, that cinematic Wonderland about which every U.S. politician and pundit pontificates and which every one of us dreams: this mythical, nonsensical fairytale version of America, where everyone is beautiful and happy beneath their free money trees, where the sky is blue and the sun smiles benevolently down upon a perpetual, suburban, gas-guzzling dream.
Lying in this culture is endemic, deception and illusion is our only true religion; a nation that produces more lawyers than engineers cannot abide, a nation that is governed by clowns -- who in their clown suits get up and thunder and bluster while their offices are bought and sold by the lobbyists and lawyers of corporations and thuggish interest groups; clowns who don't, who can't, who couldn't possibly ever even read the millions upon millions of lines of mutually contradictory incoherent regurgitated regulation they legislate every year -- cannot and will never endure.
The Soviet Union collapsed abruptly: within a few short years corruption, a broken economy, and the crushing failures of socialism, the police state, secret prisons and rampant, unsustainable military spending brought the entire crumbling regime down. Today the other Evil Empire careens along the brink of that same precipice; it is a tricked out sports car whipping around a hairpin curve, but the driver cannot see the danger because he's in a coked-up, alcoholic fugue, soaked in gasoline.
Nobody here knows what reality is anymore; everybody here is a believer, an uncritical acolyte of the most audacious nonsense which any people have ever believed: this illusion of democracy, this peculiar and ridiculous idea that we are free.
It hurts me to hear rational people, good people, even friends of mine, abandon all reason and morality and buy into this dream. For it is a dream, a focus group-tested, pollster-driven, slickly-marketed, smoothly-packaged, grandstanding, mendacious, atrocious, imperialist dream.
The Republican Party is a tool of the robber barons; it masquerades as the representative of the middle class: wrapping itself in flags, it sends patriots off to die, then profits by foreclosing on the dead and shoving their widows into the streets -- as apt a metaphor for this last Administration as I can concoct. But the Democrat Party is no different: it pretends to advocate for the poor, yet it is just another faction of the ruling elite. The Democrats in Congress abdicated their Constitutional duty to declare war, yet continue to fund this never-ending series of military misadventures. They sold out, they sold us out. They sold out the unions to globalism; they sold out their constituents to the credit card industry, to predatory lenders, to usurers and Wall Street thieves of every stripe and kind. They tossed out all notions of fiscal responsibility decades ago and wallow collectively in the most venal, spendthrift acts of financial nepotism, bankrupting the future and betraying their own children. Together with their partners in crime the Republicans, the Democrats have brought this nation to moral and financial bankruptcy, reducing what was once the beacon of the world to a swaggering, indebted warmonger that bullies other nations into paying it tribute; with our disproportionate share of the riches of the Earth we have constructed for ourselves billions of dollars worth of baseball stadiums, a prison system of gargantuan proportions, seven fleets of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and more casinos than even a nation of compulsive schemers and dreamers could ever need.
How did this happen? How did we get this way? It's because every year, year after year, in nearly every city and every state, in every election and in every town, the choices and the only choices are Republicans or Democrats, "heads" and "tails." But the coins are loaded. The game is rigged. No matter which side turns up, the result is always the same: two complicit parties and a bankrupt nation borrowing to oblivion, waging war, occupying nations, turning its own people into debt slaves.
In business, monopoly through collusion is illegal, but in our politics it has endured for nearly a century, long enough to give it the aura of normalcy. But it is not normal. It is not even sane. And it is very telling that when we occupy another country and force upon it a veneer of democracy, an imposition conducted at the barrel of a gun, we do not impose this outdated, 18th Century American system, but a parliamentary democracy. Not even the Afghanis want an electoral college and the two-party dictatorship it engenders. Not even the Iraqis can tolerate such chicanery. However it suits the ruling class here just fine.
So this Barack Obama, this audacious Pez dispenser of hope and dreams, is simply an upper class marketing campaign. This man won't end the wars. This man wants to broaden them. He wants more soldiers, thousands more of them. He is there to do a job, and his job is to sell you on wars, on a draft, on higher taxes, on more bailouts. Oh yes there will be bailouts; bailouts for all the gangster capitalists who looted the stock market, bankrupted the mortgage industry, and turned the American home into a debtor's prison. This is just the latest crooked scheme of the money interests; they have already glutted themselves on globalization, the destruction of labor, and the bloody fruit of war.
Of course Barack Obama is simply a tool of the capitalists, the government rackets, the special interest groups. His biggest campaign contributors are Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Blackstone. Nobody who speaks truth is allowed anywhere near the nomination. It is easy to scoff at Fox News for being nothing but a partisan arm of the Republican party; it is harder to see that the Democrats have three network media propaganda machines of their own preaching hope and spinning dreams. Dennis Kucinich was hounded out of the race by this villainous cabal. Ralph Nader is vilified and marginalized for challenging the blood-encrusted grip of these murdering thieves.
It is palpably disgusting that a party that calls itself the Democrats and claims to represent the people uses such a transparent and naked tool of election-fixing as "super-delegates" to thwart the very will of the people it purports to represent and ensure the continued power of the masters of capitalism.
We didn't vote for more debt. We didn't vote for a corrupt, rotten, twisted financial system that throws young people into debt slavery under the crushing burdens of student loans, debts so pernicious they can't even discharged in bankruptcy court -- nobody would vote for something as insane as that. But it's there.
We don't want expensive gasoline. We don't want falling wages. We don't want more inflation raising the price of everything from food to fuel ever higher. But it's there. It's happening. It's happening because in order to pay for all this garbage our government can't afford they have to keep creating more and more money out of nothing, destroying the value of the dollar, forcing people into poverty. Nobody voted for that. Nobody wants that. But it's what we get, because our political system is broken, because it is corrupt, because good governance in this country is collapsing at an accelerating rate, because the rich in this country don't care: because they are taking more and more for themselves and leaving everybody else in an increasingly impoverished, crime-stricken, unsustainable, undrivable, unwalkable, unlivable suburban nightmare.
Ordinary Americans don't want war. We didn't vote to invade Iraq, to occupy Afghanistan, to threaten Iran, to parade nuclear-armed submarines off the coast of China. Bring the soldiers home. All of them, from everywhere. We don't need soldiers in Germany. Why are they there? We're not afraid of the Germans. Their military was stamped out sixty years ago. Those people are harmless imbeciles, look at them: they poured out into the streets in the hundreds of thousands to cheer for Obama, a symbol of the very force occupying their country with a nuclear-armed military -- they yelled slogans for the charismatic choirboy of a warmongering, imperialist American propaganda machine!
What are we doing with soldiers in Europe? In Korea? In Japan? Defending liberty? Protecting freedom? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain a global military machine, a machine we obviously can't afford. We don't have enough money to pay for this extravagance. Every year we "borrow" hundreds of billions of dollars from Swiss bankers, Muslim kings and Chinese Communists just to keep the whole dream humming along. It's a cleverly-concocted extortion racket, but deficit spending and imperial overreach has destroyed every Empire in history, and we will be no different.
For it is an Empire. What other reason is there for hundreds of thousands of soldiers scattered across the planet in 500 military bases? What use is the largest defense budget on the planet, larger than all the others combined? Why have billion dollar warplanes with nuclear missiles, depleted uranium, fire bombs, and all the other infernal contraptions of the merchants of death flying all around the world nonstop? This is democracy? This is freedom?
To what end our dominion? Is it to force the world to yield up their energy patrimony or the products of peasant labor in exchange for worthless paper dollars and bonds which will never be honored?
Is it to expend billions of dollars of munitions on an undeclared war against no actual enemy but upon a tactic, a religion, a region; to forever be dropping million dollar bombs that must be bought and replaced again and again; is it to be caught in a never-ending cycle of blood and corruption that enriches a few and empowers the elite but turns the poor and the patriotic into flag-draped coffins?
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