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October 28, 2012
A weblog about the politics and affairs of the old and glorious City of Albany, New York, USA. Articles written and disseminated from Albany's beautiful and historic South End by Daniel Van Riper. If you wish to make a response, have anything to add or would like to make an empty threat, please contact me.
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October 28, 2012
The Much Better Corporatist
One last chance: an appeal to younger voters to save
The Empire from destroying itselfOnce again, the political party that controls our country is putting up two candidates for the office of President of the United States. Both the incumbent and the challenger are hardline corporate socialists, both believe that our republic should be replaced by a corporate dictatorship and all traces of democracy suppressed. Thus it should come as no surprise that both candidates are Baby Boomers.
But there is a world of difference between the candidates themselves. Judging by his actions while in office, President Barack Obama of the Democratic half of The Ruling Party believes that the transition to a corporate socialist society (that is, socialism exclusively for corporations) should be done incrementally and as slowly as possible. As far as I can tell, this comes from a sincere desire by the man to cause as little disruption as possible to the lives of ordinary Americans, while at the same time working to provide a steady long lasting income to the corporate owners of The Ruling Party.
In sharp contrast, challenger Mitt Romney of the Republican half of The Ruling Party has made it very clear that he wants to apply what he calls “creative destruction” to the United States. His plan is to initiate chaos and conflict across the nation as soon as possible so as to quickly and brutally impose the corporate dictatorship for the fastest possible profit for the corporate owners. Through “creative destruction” he made Bain Capital a leading holding corporation, this is his plan for the rest of us.
First, I’ll get to the point. The Party has given us two choices to lead The Empire. Whether or not we like having so few options, and I certainly do not like choosing between two flavors of corporatist, we have to face the ugly reality before us and make a decision that we can best live with. Otherwise the decision will be made for us by the worst sorts of moneyed elites.
The 2012 presidential election will be decided by the young voters, many of the same 18 to 30 year old citizens who came out in record numbers in 2008 and gave Barack Obama a sweeping mandate to save the country, and then were deeply disappointed by him. If only a large minority of these younger citizens bother to vote this year, then Mr. Obama will win. If this year they all refuse to vote, then Romney will ooze into the White House. It’s that simple.
If today’s youth refuse to vote then history will be repeating itself. Their Baby Boomer elders, large numbers of them, simply refused to vote. Ever. This generational attitude started after the 1968 election and continued until about the middle of the last decade. As we can see from the state of our country today, this widespread Baby Boomer anti-voting attitude has been devastating.
Off and on over the past few decades I would try to get some of my fellow Baby Boomers to register to vote, but all too often they would sneer at me and say dumb things like, “I don’t have time in my life for politics” or “They don’t give me the choices I want” or my favorite, “I vote with my career so I don’t have to.” Always excuses for being irresponsible, so typical of the Me Generation. And so proud of their mindless stupidity. Are their children and grandchildren any smarter?
I have a message for the youth of today. Don’t be stupid like your parents and grandparents. You guys are smarter, or you can be smarter if you want to be. If you refuse to vote then you are voting against your own future, just like your Baby Boomer elders did. Only this time, unlike them, you will reap the consequences.
I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama since before he was elected to the White House. Unlike so many others, I was not shocked and disillusioned by his actions during his first term. Back in 2008, despite all the hype and nonsense, I could clearly see that Mr. Obama is an extreme right winger who first and foremost serves the irresponsible corporate elite.
But despite having a realistic attitude I was stunned by Mr. Obama’s shockingly audacious pro-corporate opportunism, particularly his massive bailout of foreign financial parasites like Goldman Sachs and AIG. Also I have been horrified by his blatantly unconstitutional expansion of “emergency” martial law legislation, which has caused a permanent ache of terror in the pit of my gut. One cannot help but conclude that the ultimate goal of these two policy crimes is the forced extraction of our remaining wealth so as to to further enrich America’s foreign corporate enemies.
Nor was I prepared for the sheer scale of his military adventurism around the globe. For example, how many Americans are aware that right now our country is in the early stages of mounting a military invasion of Mali in West Africa? Drones that we paid for with our tax dollars soon will be dropping bombs on dry dusty villages in the Sahara desert, teaching another remote helpless community to hate the United States and wish for our destruction. Doesn’t that make your chest swell with patriotic pride?
Yet despite these enormous policy crimes Mr. Obama has done some significant things that directly benefit our nation, that do not directly benefit the corporate elite. It is these smaller scale domestic subsidies and policies that cleanly separate Mr. Obama from his designated challenger and also from his aristocratic nitwit predecessor George W. Bush. And it is these little bones thrown at the taxpaying public that has earned him the laughably false “epithet” of (human) socialist.
Take health care for example. There is only one permanent solution to this corporate induced crisis, eliminate the unnecessary parasitic corporate middlemen responsible for the crisis. This he did not do. But despite my anger over Mr. Obama’s failure to bring the US up to First World standards, I grudgingly admit that Obamacare does indeed lay the groundwork for the slow creation of a useful, affordable, universal single payer healthcare system. In fact, here in New York State there is a strong movement in that direction, we can only hope that we succeed.
Possibly the most significant and long lasting achievement of the Obama administration will turn out to be the resumption of basic research into solar power collectors. More than thirty years ago Ronnie Reagan famously killed all government support for solar, thus deliberately condemning The United States to dependency on foreign oil and on the corporate parasites. It may turn out to be too little too late, but Mr. Obama’s very promising research initiatives are laying the groundwork for freeing our nation from foreign and corporate dominance.
Local And State Politicians Congratulate Each Other For Receiving Obamamoney, At The Corner Of Morton And Delaware Avenues, April 2009
Then there was the relatively small domestic “stimulus package” at the beginning of his first term, what a friend of mine insisted on calling “Obamamoney.” This program funneled federal cash directly to local communities all across the country, delivered and spent almost instantly so as to minimize stealing by local politicians. This method appears to have kept the process honest, despite the many millions of dollars involved. I’ve heard very few reports of stimulus cash ending up lost and never found.
The downside of this Obamamoney program was that most of the cash appears to have been spent on less than vital things. For instance, here in the City of Albany the vast majority of the money was wasted repaving roadways that lead to the suburbs. While it certainly is nice to drive on a fresh macadam surface when I go buy heroin in Guilderland or patronize prostitutes in a Colonie trailer park, I do feel there were more important things around here that needed cash.
But at least that was something. Most of our national wealth continues to be wasted on corporate parasites who transfer their humungous welfare payments to foreign banks or to China, wealth that will never come back home. But at least the President returned a small part back to the taxpayers. Clearly Mr. Obama understands that you have to occasionally feed the magic goose if you want the bird to continue to lay golden eggs.
Challenger Mitt Romney has an entirely different approach to handling the magic goose. He could best be described as an arrogant welfare queen flaunting his sense of entitlement. He firmly believes that his penchant for ruining things and picking valuables from the rubble makes him the cleverest boy in the country and thus qualified to lead. His only virtue is that he is sometimes honest about his radical corporate socialism, although he hasn’t been lately.
In the classic Grimm fairy tale, Romney is the ideological equivalent of the farmer’s wife. He believes that if he kills the goose and cuts it open then he will be able to collect all of those golden eggs at once. Of course, all that is left is a dead goose and no more gold eggs, but we’re not supposed to think that far ahead.
Romney has always run his personal corporation Bain Capital exactly like that, killing the golden egg producers, then selling the carcasses to China and pocketing the cash. Make no mistake about it, for Mitt Romney the United States is one big gigantic magic goose and Romney for sure is salivating at the thought that he might be in a position to murder the bird. Why? Because he wants to sell that big bird carcass now.
There is so much wrong about Mitt Romney that the rational mind seizes up at the thought of sorting out all of his faults. His public career is the classic case of the CEO who has gone into politics, a petty dictator attempting a takeover of the competition. More to the point, he is a 65 year old spoiled brat Baby Boomer who wants everything for himself and he wants it now and he doesn’t give a damn about anybody else.
But like any spoiled brat Romney is basically very spineless, a wimp. Brats do not look much past their own whims, everybody else in the world exists to serve his or her wants and desires. After all, if you always get your way by manipulating others then you really never learn to deal with true adversity and you always end up caving in to bigger manipulators.
One clear example of what I’m talking about, one of many. In the recent crisis in Libya, some local warlord attacked the US consulate in the City of Benghazi (not the embassy in Tripoli) and killed four diplomatic employees. The cover distraction for the attack was religious outrage over an amateurish anti-Muslim video that some freak uploaded to Youtube.
As countless corporate media pundits have pointed out, Romney’s response to this tragic minor crisis was to attack the President with a series of false accusations while the crisis was happening, firing crap from a cannon just to see where it splatters. It never seems to have occurred to Romney that his lies and posturings amounted to a seditious attack against the United States. To me it looked like he made a miscalculation, he appears to have forgotten that the public expected him to include the appearance of loyalty to “his” country as part of his attack routine.
Yet Romney’s stupid and seditious behavior earned the approval of some of the wealthiest billionaires on the planet. These persons, such as the notorious Koch Brothers and gambling kingpin Sheldon Adelsen to name a few, have consistently used their vast wealth to try to overthrow the US Constitution and obliterate popular sovereignty. These rich boys are sponsoring Romney with their cash and he has consistently been their obedient servant.
Around the world people are observing Mitt Romney and the Republican half of the US ruling party with a mixture of puzzlement and horror. What, they wonder, is his appeal to the American voter? Why would anyone other than utter and complete fools support such a dangerous boy? Is there something wrong with Americans?
The answer, I think, is that on a very basic level Romney encapsulates and broadcasts all the worst characteristics of the Me Generation. He lionizes greed, he doesn’t give a damn about anybody other than himself and he positively oozes self-contempt. Baby Boomers instinctively identify with Romney, and they are currently the largest voting block in this country. As harsh as that sounds, it’s the sad truth.
So, you might point out, isn’t Barack Obama also a Baby Boomer, and doesn’t he therefore have the same failings as Romney? Well not really, anyone can see that the President does not behave like a typical Baby Boomer. He is steady, competent, very intelligent, and displays not a trace of self-contempt.
There are good reasons why Mr. Obama does not act like a member of his own generation. For one thing, the man spent a good part of his early years living outside of this country, during that time he was not shaped and suffocated by the selfishness and closed mindedness of his generation.
Perhaps more importantly, living in a foreign country young Barack formed his worldview without being trapped inside the US corporate media like his peers were. Thus unlike most members of his generation, including Romney, he is capable of separating fact from prevailing fantasy. And let’s not forget that his politically incorrect skin color makes him permanently different from the majority of the Boomers.
Paul Ryan is Romney’s vice presidential mate, this year’s Sarah Palin. He is as ditzy as Palin but much more dangerous because a) he is apparently male and thus perceived as more important, and b) unlike Palin he has taken the time to memorize lots of impressive factoids and numbers which make him sound smart. His stated plan for the rest of us is to completely stop returning taxes to the American people and instead send our wealth directly to corporate foreigners.
He could best be described as a nasty little peckerhead. He could also accurately be called a liar, which was a word used widely to describe him after his speech at the Republican convention. And lying is a manner of expressing contempt. Ryan’s political philosophy, as best as I can understand, is to espouse “conservative” Christian values while at the same time he is guided by his beloved icon, the atheist Ayn Rand. If elected he will be the first atheist vice president, but of course he doesn’t have the cojones to admit that.
In short, he is a typical teabagger dittohead, a representative of the so-called “Tea Party” faction of the Republican half of The Ruling Party. He is the first member of “Generation X” to run for the White House, which makes him equivalent to the first Baby Boomer to run for vice president, James Danforth “Dan” Quail in 1988. Romney chose Ryan as his mate for the same reason that Daddy Bush chose Quail, not because he has any useful abilities but because he “balances out the ticket.”
For me, the most distressing thing about this nasty little freak Ryan is that he displays all the worst characteristics of his Me Generation elders amplified and rolled into one package. He is a cartoon caricature of a Baby Boomer, thus his appeal to Boomers. It’s both sad and alarming to see such stupid selfishness passed onto the next generation and taken so seriously.
Joe Biden has been chosen once again by Mr. Obama to be vice president, the first Catholic to hold that job. The former senator from Delaware, I was surprised to find out, is almost 71 years old, six years older than Romney. Two decades older than Mr. Obama, the Vice President is technically too old to be a Baby Boomer. He may be the last member of his generation to enter the White House.
Mr. Biden is a tough bird with lots of practical experience and plenty of accomplishments as Vice President, most of which never hit the media. Of course he too was chosen to “balance the ticket,” the old guy with the younger man, but no one questions his competency or his ability to move legislation through Congress. If Mr. Obama is successfully assassinated by teabagger terrorists or by an FBI hit squad, then we can all be sure that the Presidency will pass to someone who can handle the job.
The stylistic downside to Mr. Biden is that he is every inch an old pol. He often campaigns and presents himself to the public as if the corporate media still monopolizes information, and if he doesn’t play to the corporate information brokers then they will instantly destroy him with spin. For most of Mr. Biden’s career that’s what the corporate media did routinely to Democratic politicians who made even the tiniest of public errors, he is not likely to change the cautious habits that have allowed him to survive politically.
For a while it looked like Mr. Obama was cruising to an easy win, but then he didn’t bother to prepare for the first televised debate against his Re-pub challenger. It’s pretty clear he had more important things to do, like deal with the Libya crisis. The President didn’t make the same mistake twice and came back roaring in the second debate, making Romney look like the babbling fool that he is.
But it was too late. If you look at presidential campaigns for the last forty years or so, the only debate that matters is the first one and the rest are quickly forgotten. Mr Obama blew it big time. In the first debate he let Romney chatter and jape for the cameras like a deranged ape while The President stood there looking presidential and disgusted with the crap coming out of Romney’s mouth.
Mr. Obama of all people should have known better. The TV presidential debates are never about issues or even common sense. You have to remember that the kind of people who take television seriously are the kind of people who demand first and foremost to be entertained. That night Romney was way more entertaining than the incumbent, therefore Romney won the debate hands down.
Of course, Mr. Obama was seriously hobbled in these debates because he could not substantially challenge Romney’s destructive style of corporatism. How could he have without drawing attention to his own, much more palatable style of corporatism? If Mr. Obama had kept his anti-corporate promises from 2008 (and before) then there would be no contest today, he would be a shoo-in. That is, if he had been allowed to live this long.
So now we have a real world nightmare on the horizon. You see, whenever a major race for public office is deemed “close” and the race involves some sort of Republican or Teabagger, then it is very likely that in at least a few key locations the electronic voting machines will be instructed to “tip” the race toward the “preferred” candidate. This has been true since electronic voting machines were first introduced in the late 1990s.
No, this is not a conspiracy theory. In this country all municipalities are required to purchase electronic voting machines and software to run the machines from one of three corporations. (Or this used to be true, many States are now defying this decree.) The software is completely secret and cannot be inspected by anyone except designated employees of the corporation that owns the machine.
Secret software. Supposedly the reason voting software is completely hidden from inspectors is because it’s “proprietary,” that is, if anyone actually sees the software then they might steal the software and start selling it as their own. Seriously, that’s the given reason.
Gee, I wonder how all the other software in America is protected from pirates. Perhaps they have to use copyright or occasionally a patent if the software is particularly innovative? You know, that way if someone steals your product you can sue them. How do other software owners get by without special legislation forcing us to buy their products and forcing us to not inspect what we buy?
Paid The Ultimate PriceSarcasm aside, it constantly astonishes me that almost no one challenges the decree from the Cheney/Dubya years that corporate owned election software is exceptional and shielded from inspection. Nor do we ever hear President Obama or any national Democrat discuss this problem or so much as allude to it. And of course the Secret Software Issue does not exist for the Gops or for the corporate media.
In 2008 Karl Rove was caught red-handed trying to manipulate the vote totals in Ohio. It took a court order the day before the election to stop Rove’s little setup, which re-routed all vote totals through a server in Tennessee. Not long after that the tech guy who spilled the beans, who was also the guy who set up Rove’s apparatus, met with a fatal accident involving a small plane. His name was Michael Connell and he was on his way to be interviewed by a blog about the fraud.
I don’t bother with conspiracy theories. The USA is full of scheming little b-holes like Karl Rove who work very hard to undermine our country. Reality is bad enough. Just let me remind everybody that Rove is the big boss of the 2012 Re-pub campaign. If Romney wins then Rove will become the effective despot of America, the new Dick Cheney. And Romney will become the new Dubya.
Based on recent precedent, if Mr. Obama leads by a large margin by Election Day, then he will win. If Mr. Obama only leads by a slim margin , then the electronic voting machines will be manipulated and Mr. Obama will lose the election. That’s how it works, up to this point the vote manipulators have been afraid to be too obvious about their fraud.
This why I say that the only way Mr. Obama will win re-election is if at least some of the younger voters, the ones who were disillusioned after the 2008 election, defy their elders and visit the polls on Election Day. Too many of their Me Generation elders, you see, identify with this Re-pub radical who wants to take away their jobs (or prevent them from finding one) and raise their taxes. These old farts are easily influenced by propaganda, and they rarely question anything they see on TV.
So it is up to the youth of America to tip this election toward the more tolerable corporatist, the one who doesn’t want to “creatively destroy” our nation. I seriously doubt that this country can survive four years of Karl Rove and Mitt Romney without devolving into chaos followed by widespread deprivation and poverty. Basically, if the youth of America want to have a future then this is their last chance to grab at it. Do enough of them understand how much power they have at this moment?
Finally, a big irony. The Democratic half of The Ruling Party is fielding a practicing Baptist and a practicing Catholic. By practicing I mean that both Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden are by all appearances sincere in their Christian beliefs and have even been known to attend church. Yet both respect the US Constitution enough to keep their personal beliefs out of public policy.
The Republican half of The Party is fielding a Mormon and an atheist. Mormons are only nominally Christian, they make Unitarian Universalists look like strict fundamentalists. And Mormons are not Trinitarians, which for much of the radical right is the measure of a “true” Christian. As for Ryan, before he pursued a career in politics he was very upfront about his atheism and his devotion to Ayn Rand, a woman who considered religion to be little more than a political tool.
All the so-called “conservative” Christians are voting for these two non-Christians in the hope that they will “uphold traditional Christian values.” This shows you what obedience to corporate propaganda will do to a person’s mind. And this bizarre contradiction shows how we are all desperately close to the final precipice.
This is it, folks. We will not survive four more years of Bush and Cheney. This time Bush is Mitt Romney and Cheney is Karl Rove, but the bullcrap is the same degree of deadly. And this time is the last time. We get no more chances after this.
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