Friday, October 30, 2020

The 2020 Presidential Election Is Irrelevant To The Fate Of The United States

This will be my tenth presidential election.  In one of those elections, I voted for a Democrat.  In another, a Republican.  The vote for a Republican was George Bush in his first election because I thought four more years of Clinton policies would destroy our nation.  Not because I had any confidence in Bush.  The Democrat was Barack Obama in his first term.  I believed him as honest.  But he was a more adept con man than Trump.  And literally within a month, I was writing on here that he was a pathological liar.  I noted on here that both Bush and Obama as war criminals.  And, they were traitors to the American people.  Every other time, I voted for someone who told some degree of the truth, supported power to the people and supported the common good.  The U.S. has never been a society. It’s a civilization in the sense that an anthropologist would claim any city is representative of civilization.  But to have a true society, Enlightenment Principles clearly understand there must be a social contract for the common good.  That has never existed. Some have tried but the class-based elements of corporate capitalism and their political stooges have then spend every waking hour until they have destroyed it.  And, as a result, now karma is here to collect the past due rent. 

We are about to choose presidents in an election that is almost completely irrelevant to our nation’s future. I realize that view sounds quite ridiculous but indeed it is true.  What kind of society do we live in when 330 million people are completely reliant on the competence of one person; the president?  When we are unable to function as a society unless we have a monarch telling everyone in government and society what to do and what to think? Because that is our world.  Americans have outsourced their responsibilities to a king.  Mind you, this has been our world since possibly the beginning of our nation.  It’s nothing new but this dynamic and many others have been discussed on here ad nauseam. Interestingly, about 130 million Americans who support one of the two massively corrupt, corporate-captured parties don’t agree with me.  Which is exactly why my remarks are accurate.  They are brainwashed by the social cults created in society.  Or as Eric Hoffer noted, they are the True Believers. Each hypocritically blaming the other.

Is it Donald Trump’s fault that society has placed our response to the pandemic or our economy all upon him? One man? In a democracy? One man who literally has zero constitutional powers except in times of war or the veto power.  The reality is the entire system is a failed state.  The U.S. is a failed state.  A puppet government ruled by the corporate plutocracy.   Aren’t we supposed to live in a society of laws? One where government power is limited by enumerated powers? Where there is a separation of power? And, that means each of us has a responsibility to act harmoniously with one another to meet our needs?  That’s hilarious.  The U.S. has never had a society.  A common good.  A social contract.  It’s always been a dog-eat-dog culture that will ultimately destroy itself at moments like this.  That’s why I noted before a single pandemic death that our response would uniquely be a disaster.  We are a nation of science illiterates.  A nation where we hate our neighbors because politicians or the media told us what to think.  U.S. citizens play as much role in government as the do in the Chinese Communist Party or the USSR.  Vote for the party-chosen official and then go away.  Even in those countries, people get to vote on the candidates selected by the party who then tell its citizens what to do and what to think.  Just like the U.S.

Do you believe the right president is going to save us from continuing down the rabbit hole I’ve (and a few others) been writing is coming for the last 15 years? Politicians and corporations created this mess. It will be up to us to fix it. And, I don’t mean voting for the corporate state. I mean by actions and deeds that will restore our local communities and our democracy from corporate plunder. Or, we can watch the U.S. disappear like every other civilization. Shatter into pieces. Again, nothing new on here.

On the eve of the last election, I penned a post that Trump would win if history is a guide. And, laid out the eerie comparatives to ancient Athens.  Trump had all of the macro factors in place to become our greatest president.  If by nothing else, using his bully pulpit.  But, I wrote that was ridiculous to assume because he’s a crook.  A con man like PT Barnum. He is a pathological liar like the horribles; Obama, Clinton and Reagan. If our nation is to survive, we must change how officials are chosen(citizen lottery or similar) and restore individual rights and responsibilities to localities and communities. That is never going to happen under corporate capitalism. Ever. As I’ve noted endlessly, corporations need an all-powerful central government to enforce its tyranny on society.  We see that clearly in how corporate executives wax poetic about China and even fiefdoms like Saudi Arabia. American corporations couldn’t wait to leave our nation and go to communist China regardless of the devastation they left in their wake. They are fukcing criminals. And, so are the politicians who voted to allow it.

Donald Trump was elected because the political center (both parties) has no answers to working class issues.  The radicalization of the U.S. has been ongoing for generations due to these very issues. Issues created by the political center. If you don’t like millions of Americans marching in the streets because police are pumping bullets into Black men, or more broadly that 60% of Black Americans make less than $20,000 a year, and are effectively still slaves, you aren’t prepared for the future. If you don’t like millions of angry White Americans supporting a pathological candidate like Donald Trump, you aren’t prepared for the future. 

When Trump was elected, I compared his archetype to that of Hitler; the ruler. The comparatives don’t end there. Hitler was elected because the political center was unable to resolve working class German issues.  From MAGA, similar to the Aryan tenets, to his manipulative ability to entrance the mob as public speaker(manipulation), to the underlying economic crises, to Nazi and Hitler’s hatred of the left, to his victimizing of un-pure Germans (U.S. immigrants), to his own claims of being victimized by the media and on and on.  Hitler and Trump have incredible similarities.  One difference is Trump is anti-war. 

This is a result of the radicalization of society by a ruling class.  Not only did it happen in Nazi Germany as it is happening in the U.S., it also happened in ancient Rome.  And, Roman leadership radicalization increased as the empire found it more and more difficult to control its population for the benefit of the ruling elites. In other words, radicalization became a proxy for coming collapse.  Hierarchical societies create this type of radicalization as the need to control the masses creates greater and greater socioeconomic aberrations impacting those they are trying to control. Another way to view this is that in a hierarchical society, those on the top are never responsible for their actions. (corporate executives, politicians, standing armies, academia, etc) So, they never receive the emotional or individual feedback necessary to course correct their aberrant, controlling behavior.  The consequences of their behavior are shouldered by those they control.  And, the masses becoming radicalized is the feedback telling them to stop what they are doing.  Yet, why would they?  They never suffer the consequences. In that regard, all three societies were plundered by a very stratified class of hierarchical, institutionalized power.  In the U.S. and Germany, it is corporate capitalism.  In Rome it was the patrician class that controlled the masses through similar “corporate-type” control.  The working poor and anyone not of propertied wealth were reliant on the rich for their own livelihood.  And, the patricians gave just enough dog food to ensure the working class survived.  Just like the U.S.  Interestingly, our founding fathers used to the same line of thinking to deny anyone but propertied men the right to vote.  Because if one was not a land owner, one relied on others for their income and, therefore, truly was not free.  In today’s world, how many Americans work for the state or for corporations or some other form of economic servitude?  They certainly are not emotionally-free.  They vote for what serves their masters in an expression of their own self-interest.

This is the impetus for the rage, anger, paranoia, hate and general vitriol in this nation.  It is the karmic kickback against mainly corporate state power. But, hierarchical, institutionalized power.  Especially coming from White Americans who are generally more conservative. Yet have become radicalized by the corporate state.  Black Americans generally have never had anything. They have no feelings of loss for something they never had. They are angry, and rightfully so. But, the White Americans who voted for Trump see the world they had a fleeting glimpse of in the 1950s-1970s disappearing at an incredible pace.  While that world is long gone, pieces of it continued to be dismantled for the last forty years until nearly none of it is remaining today.  The middle class has been shredded except for some in the professional class that does the bidding of their masters.  Just like all hierarchical societies; the most brainwashed are the most successful with the system.  Those that have sold their soul to support the system for their own personal benefit. This was very prevalent in the USSR, Nazi Germany, communist China …. and the U.S. It’s even true in banana republics and places with leaders like Saddam Hussein.

While it is irrelevant what I support because the system failures are going to continue to metastasize, I support all movements by the people. I support the right of the people to organize against tyranny. I support direct democracy and populism. Are many people brainwashed? Yes. Is there violence involved that shouldn’t be? Yes. Yet, I support the right of people to self-govern.  Eventually, the people will realize the issue isn’t Black versus White or left versus right or other attempts by the economic/corporate elites to have the masses fight their wars for them. And, mind you, that’s what happened in our last Civil War. Americans were manipulated into fighting the wars for their masters. To support the enrichment of those who enslave them.  There’s no reason to believe that will happen again even though fringe, hateful elements, generally on the right, certainly foment this divisiveness.

Society never progresses from the center. And, it never progresses from the right.  It progresses because a small number of radicals foment change for humanity.  That’s what happened in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And, that’s what is happening today.  While they like to tell us otherwise, the Republican Party really had little to do with freeing Black Americans.  We saw this with Republican policies even after the Civil War.  There was a north party and a south party.  The north party, the Republican Party, was comprised of corporate elites, bankers, laborers and a small number of generally religious radicals who fomented for the abolition of slavery on the grounds of ethics. Ethics has seldom had anything to do with American civilization.  But, in this case, the pressure they mounted was astronomical.  It drove change because the working class was often supportive of these ethics.  And, because they too suffered under the yoke of power.  Certainly not the capitalists nor the bankers.  As the southern elites rightly noted, the northern bankers and corporate elites treated white northerners often as bad or worse than many slaves were treated.  Today, the Republican Party has become the Democratic Party of the Civil War.  Interestingly, I remember when a Republican Senator, George Voinovich, lamented this a few decades ago.  The modern-day religious right is morally bankrupt and views Christianity through the lens of American Jesus who loves war, bombing poor people, denying Americans a social contract and basic dignities, hates anyone who is different, and through their deeds confirms they really could care less about the plight of the poor or slavery in this nation or anywhere else.

As I noted in a prior post, the Bernie Sanders’ campaign was really akin to a Roman slave revolt. That is, the masses who are exploited or forgotten by corporate capitalism because they are meat for the corporate grinder.  And, too, so is the Black Lives Matter movement.  And, so too are the angry voices of White Americans often with conservative views.  This isn’t going to go away.  They are the first signs of a coming class and labor wars in this nation.  Just as I noted long ago.

What has been written out of history is the U.S. has a long and incredibly violent past of labor wars.  The bloodiest in the world.  I’ve talked about this in some detail in prior posts.  In some regards, those wars started at our very founding. Enslaved with war debts, Shay’s Rebellion of the working class in the 1780s frightened our new leaders.  That led to an immediate, secret convention to approve the Constitution and a resultant powerful federal government. And, immediately thereafter a central bank to enforce our slavery to a central bank’s debts.  Labor or the working class and working poor continued to chafe against the system until the end of slavery. Then, the real fun began. Corporations started gaining a stranglehold on labor without the competition from slavery. And, gained unprecedented rights through corporate personhood.  Large labor movements and attempts to organize workers started soon after the Civil War and lasted continuously until the outbreak of World War II.  The working poor, including large immigrant populations who were easily exploited by corporations as they arrived with nothing, rose up in literally tens of thousands of walkouts, strikes and rebellions against corporate power for nearly a century. Hundreds of thousands, (some estimates have deaths peaking in the railroad industry alone at nearly 30,000 a year)  if not millions, of Americans died working in slavery labor conditions. Corporate elites even bombed society and blamed violence on radical workers. We see this false flag activity is still used today both inside and outside of the U.S.  CIA whistleblower Agee noted that he used to bomb Catholic Churches in Central America and plant leaflets for communists taking responsibility with the intent of stopping populist movements against U.S. corporate power in their nations.  Private armies, corporate spies and government stooges fought Americans in the streets and corporate towns in our labor wars, often murdering and beating people like dogs. They don’t teach that in our corporate politician-manipulated educational system.

The only stoppage was World War II that ameliorated poverty and created massive numbers of jobs. By that time, Roosevelt’s policy changes had supported organized labor as well.  After World War II, the U.S. had a global monopoly on production for a few decades as the rest of the world’s production capacity was decimated. That continued the labor war reprieve as people were generally able to find work in the U.S. Then, starting in the 1970s, American corporations willfully started outsourcing labor to avoid what was again becoming a radicalized society as foreign corporate competition started again taking away hard fought employment wage and benefit gains. (There is a famous Republican letter that has surfaced from this time that was foundational to the party’s policy of busting democracy’s labor and sending jobs overseas. I’ll post a copy of it at some point.) That outsourcing of labor has continued to this day. In its place, the U.S. has ramped up national security/military and finance employment; the two necessary ingredients to support expansion of U.S. dollar empire.  The seeds of this really gained critical mass with the election of Ronald Reagan who unleashed private capital (finance), deregulated corporations and ramped up corporate military spending.  And, the first noticeable outcomes to his policies were increasing U.S. military aggression, the floodgates being opened to Japan and Korean imports (as long as trade was conducted in dollars the U.S. financial system could profit from), the S&L crisis that nearly destroyed our economy and the creation of NAFTA. It was Reagan’s team that dreamed up NAFTA but the corporate state couldn’t get it passed until a Democrat was elected.  The supposed party of the people run by the psychopath, Bill Clinton.  And, the rest is history.  Outsourcing to China, India, Mexico, Vietnam, Canada, the EU and on and on and on.

As a result, we no longer really have an economy. Nor a democratic nation.(we never really had a democracy as noted on here many times.)  We live in a corporate plantation. And, our government exists to constantly rig, provide policy and financial subsidies for the corporate plantation.  We saw this in the 2008 crisis and again this year where people were literally given almost nothing while corporations and banks were given trillions that American citizens are on the hook to pay back.  Today, in October of 2020, we have tens of millions of Americans in soup lines who cannot literally afford shelter, health care or food.  Yet, corporations and the military endlessly receive trillions of bailouts in plain sight. 

What people in today’s world don’t often realize is the labor-private capital(corporate capitalism) model does not afford a middle class.  It’s labor versus private capital. And, that means the middle class will eventually be completely destroyed. All with the help of corporate plantation politicians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

I’m going to break this down into much more detail to show how corporate capitalism requires constant rigging, constant handouts by the government, constant laws passed by government and the like to keep the system going.  How the U.S. has literally spent well north of one hundred trillion dollars in the last handful of decades to keep corporate capitalism from collapsing. Which is why the average citizen literally doesn’t have a pot to piss in.  All of the money goes to prop up the corporate state.  The upward transfer of wealth is never-ending. It has existed since corporations received the massively corrupt Supreme Court decision that gave them the rights of people.  But for now, let me end on one final note.

I’d like to end with this. Those in charge of our economy, our banking system and corporations have no fukcing idea what they are doing.  American politicians, finance executives and corporate executives are some of the most incompetent in the world.  I’ve been inside around one hundred major companies in various consulting roles.  I speak from experience.  Our economy is not a discrete system. In other words, events today may be tied to policy of a year or decade or fifty years ago.  The economic crises we’ve experienced are continuations of past crises.  They create cumulative effects.  The fact that we had three massive crises in the last twenty years, each of which saw massive collapses in the value of assets are continuations of the same crisis.  Each attempt to reflate the economy is an attempt to recover the losses from prior bubbles.  And, each crisis narrows the participation rate of both companies and individuals.  As I’ve noted, new business creation in the U.S. is down 90% since Reagan’s election.  That’s not a coincidence and I’ll continue to dig deeper into why.  That leads to narrowing ability to reflate the economy and resultant price aberrations.  In other words, wealth collects in fewer and fewer hands as does inflation.  These are tied to events and policy decisions made by names like Truman, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.  And, the corrupt corporate stooges in Congress who ignorantly followed our cult of president. There is never a generalized recovery to these crises.  100 million or so jobs have been destroyed or outsourced in the last sixty years. There was no plan.  Only corruption and greed.  These jobs have been replaced generally by doing-each-other’s-laundry jobs.  The “new” economy or the “post modern” economy or whatever the half wits who pontificate on these topics label it.  In reality, it’s the Ponzi economy. And, it completely lacks resilience and an ability to recover and sustain itself.  It’s almost all discretionary servant jobs reliant on corporations turning sentient beings into yammering idiots who mindlessly consume. Or capital-consuming finance or the military. Now all of tyrannical finance and military/national security apparatuses including their pliant employees are targeted to exploit the American people as they have been targeted to foreign countries. 

The net to what I stated in the last paragraph is that we live in a civilization that places the value of property and things above that of their fellow man.  Or, what is really a corporate capitalist death cult only achieved by brainwashing the masses.  Turning sentient beings into mindless consumers of things.  Even while their fellow man nearly starves.  And, we’ve seen that in spades in 2020 while those who have great wealth consume at an incredible rate while tens of millions are so poor they are unable to feed their children or in jeopardy of losing their homes. Our culture has to be one of the most baseless, inhumane and vile in the “developed” world.

The system is reaching greater and greater crisis levels with each passing year.  These crises are not isolated events.  Their consequences reverberate forever in what the average American has to deal with.  It doesn’t matter if Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Houdini is elected.  Is one person going to fix this?  One person who has no idea what is really happening?  One person who is almost always one of the most flawed people in our society-who wants to be president?  Only the most pathological.  And, who wants to vote for one person to be king?  Someone who is entranced by their masters. A society of hierarchy always ensures the most pathological rise to the top. Because it is those who seek dominion over their fellow man who wish to hold those positions.  Be that corporations, academia, standing armies, religion or government.  And, it will be society that pays the consequences.  It always is.

This system will continue down the path of its own destruction until or if Americans wake up in enough numbers to stop the madness of the corporate, military and political madness that rules us.

I realize there are many talking heads who don’t live in the real world that this election is the most important in our history.  And, that we may not live through four more years of Trump.  We lived through more than 100 years of enslaving millions who had every ounce of dignity taken from them.  We lived through times when men could and did beat and butcher their fellow man in this nation.  I’m sure Donald Trump won’t be any worse.  This election literally makes almost no difference to our fate.  Politicians bend to those who control them.  That will only be the American people if we take back our power from the corporate state.  That means we will determine our fate.  Not a politician.  Not a president or king.  Chaos is dead ahead because the people are at a boiling point. Past labor wars and revolts against political and corporate tyranny in this nation are our guide.  We are a war-like nation and that means Americans seldom back down.  There is volatility dead ahead. 

Trump may be more outwardly pathological. But, Biden has arguably destroyed more lives than Trump could ever imagine destroying.  He’s supported endless unconstitutional wars (murder), torture, he voted to send millions of wealth-creating jobs out of the US, he voted to increase poverty (reduce social safety nets) on numerous occasions, he created laws to send loitering men(those with no hope or economic opportunity) to prison by the millions, he supported the outright destruction of what small social safety nets we have, he kicked five million families out of their homes in the last crisis while bailing out Wall Street criminals to the tune of $29 trillion, he was forced to resign his presidential run decades ago because of pathological lying and on and on and on. And, it certainly appears he has been involved in many corrupt activities that opened the economic doors for family members.  Nothing new.  Trump, his cabinet and past politicians have done this for two hundred years.  Trump and Giuliani may be buffoons (and they are) and the evidence they have shown, be it accurate or not, looks like reality TV nonsense, but from the outside looking in, it is a fact that it’s impossible for the average American to get paid tens of millions of dollars by corrupt governments. So, that Biden’s son has while his father is a supposed public servant certainly smells like shit. And, that means Biden is likely even more corrupt than many thought imaginable.  Even with his history of evil.

The cycle of volatility continues.

posted by TimingLogic at 3:25 PM