As we face the beginning of the prolonged charade that is the presidential election season, it’s time once again to prepare ourselves for the tidal wave of bullshit otherwise known as campaign promises. Personally, I can’t believe we still participate in this farce we call elections. It’s bad enough that we have to choose our elected officials from candidates pre-selected for us by the money masters. But to endure a year and a half of pathological lying, fear mongering and manipulation as they artfully tell us how they’ll keep us safe, provide jobs for us, reform the government, lower taxes, cure cancer and end baldness – all things they have neither the power nor the intention of actually accomplishing – that just piles insult upon injury.
The problem here is that entire system of government is built on a colossal falsehood. We’re led to believe that the government is the top of the pyramid, the final authority, the keepers of the aggregated power of our great nation. We’re told that it is through our elected officials the will of 300 million American citizens is transformed into public policy, and that our interests are represented in the very highest circles of power.
This is a boldfaced lie.
The truth is the government is not the top of the pyramid. In fact there are – and have always been – people, organizations, institutions and entities who, as individuals and as a group wield far more power than any government official, be it President, Senator, Congressman, Chancellor or Prime Minister.
This can be hard to believe, after all we have grown up in a world where the President of the United States is generally considered the most powerful man – in the most powerful country in the world.
But how powerful can you really be if your position relies on the whims of a fickle, easily manipulated voting population, and if you can only hold your post for a maximum of 8 years? Billionaires have no term limits. Neither do Corporate Executives, Wall Street chieftains, Council on Foreign Relations Members, Federal Reserve Chairs or Bilderberg Invitees. There are entities and organizations who’s power is not up for grabs every four years, instead they prevail, and occupy private seats of power for decades. The leaders of these long-lived institutions are able to pursue sophisticated, long-term, self-serving agendas. Their ambitions are not limited in either a temporal or geographical sense. Their power, plots and schemes pre-date – and will out-live – the terms of a succession of public office-holders. To these elites, elected officials are simply seat warmers; public servants of their will, whom they control and place before us so that we might be deluded into thinking that we have a say in the way our country is run… we don’t.
Barack Obama works for the same people that George Bush, and Bill Clinton worked for before him… and it’s not the American people. It’s the moneyed elite. I’m not talking about the people you and I would normally describe as rich – having a few million in the bank, a few homes, a yacht and multiple fancy cars does not make you one of the moneyed elite. To be one of true money masters you need to be in the club. In this club it’s not simply about the money you have – although they are all exorbitantly wealthy – but the money you control. Yes, the elite can donate hundreds of thousands of their own money to a candidate’s campaign, but they can also funnel millions of dollars of their institution’s money to the candidate as well. And when it’s time for political payback, their status as pillars of the American economic system gives them excellent cover, so what’s good for them can easily be spun as what’s good for the country. Consequently it’s very easy for their lobbyists to press corporate-friendly legislation into the pre-greased hands of our slimy politicians – and for the politicians to then go out and sell those bills as great deals for their constituency.
But the underlying truth of our corrupted system is that it exists only to increase the power, control and wealth of the ruling class. This elitist cartel of loosely connected megalomaniacs has been the power behind the powerful for many decades. As individuals they may have diverse power bases – financial, commercial, industrial, political, military – but together they share a belief that as a group, they know best how to run the world; that this is their game, and we commoners are only pieces to be moved around the board as they see fit.
Though in public they profess great love and fealty for the people, in private the master class are contemptuous of common people. To them, words like Democracy, Freedom, Liberty, Justice, Sovereignty, Equality are simply terms used to manipulate the masses – they themselves are quite beyond belief in such trite concepts, just as they above petty partisanship. The elite are neither Democrats or Republicans – as these too are meaningless labels, used only to separate the people into perpetually opposing camps. And while they have us squabbling with each other over emotionally charged issues like abortion and social security, they push through an agenda that perpetuates their privilege, their power, and their stranglehold over the rest of us.
And every four years they dust off this hoary old play, in which their actors candidates take on the opposing roles of Protector of the People vs. Protector of the Country. They take the stage with intricately prepared positions – careful blends of fear and hope. But what we never know – what even the candidates often don’t realize – is that the fix is always in. It doesn’t matter which of these egomaniacs win the election because the secret, unannounced, un-voted-for agenda of the real power will go on, in spite of anything the candidates might say or do.
If anything happens in this political system, it’s because the powers-that-be wanted it, or allowed it to happen… period. But in our corporate-controlled media we are fed a steady diet of manipulation and misdirection so that we can never discern their true agenda.
Take Obamacare. On the left this was portrayed as a program that would finally give Americans the kind of health care support that most other modern countries adopted long ago. Whereas on the right it was vilified as socialism. Both of these positions artfully hide the true purpose of the plan, which was simply to create a law forcing all Americans to purchase health insurance. This was a gift to our privatized hospital industry – who will now have less uninsured patients detracting from their profits. It was also a gift to the insurance/pharmaceutical/medical industries – who have been handed millions of federally mandated new customers. And ultimately it was a gift to Wall Street – to whom most of this new premium monies would flow. So a program, which was ostensibly intended to help the people, turns out to be yet another way of extracting money from the masses, transferring it into corporate coffers and Wall Street ponzi schemes, and inevitably putting it in the pockets of the money masters..
Or let’s talk about Clinton’s signing of the NAFTA free trade agreement. Clinton campaigned vigorously against NAFTA when it was part the conservative George Bush Sr. administration’s agenda, protesting correctly that it would cost jobs and hurt the working class. But once elected, he quickly signed it – claiming with a straight face that by helping raise the Mexican standard of living it would lead to increases exports from the U.S to Mexico – and thus be good for both economies… In fact, the only thing NAFTA was good for was inflating the profits of multinational corporations, their bankers and the Wall Street casino system that makes money betting on them. For average American workers NAFTA has meant millions of fewer jobs, skyrocketing unemployment, a reduced standard of living and increased levels of insecurity, stress and misery.
Next up will be the TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership – another “Trade Agreement” which will actually be the the next great step in corporate domination of the world. Though we don’t really know what this new agreement entails – this because it is being written in secret by representatives of international corporate interests – what we know so far is that it seeks to create international legal structures that will make all world governments subservient to the economic interests of multinational corporations. So, for example, if a country wanted to protect – let’s say their shoe industry – from the flood of inexpensive shoes manufactured in the third world, the TPP would prohibit this and allow the damaged multinational shoe corporation to sue for the hundreds of millions they would be loosing in potential profits. And the court which they would sue in… well that would be comprised of lawyers selected by the multinational corporations themselves. So what we have here is a crystal clear example of the powers that be trying to transfer the “soft-power” that they have long held behind the scenes, to the “hard power” of a new class of international economic legislation which they intend to supersede the powers of the sovereign governments of the world.
The Trans Pacific Partnership, like NAFTA before it, will destroy the ability of governments to protect their citizens from the rapacious tactics of corporate elite. But that is unlikely to stop it from becoming law. And during this campaign there will be candidates who lie and say it will be good for us, and candidates who lie about how it will be bad for us. But neither will speak of its true abominations, and both will surely sign it into law if they are elected.
Why, you might ask, would any politician accede to a “trade agreement” which undermines – if not negates – the actual power of their offices? You might as well ask why a manager of a chain hotel agrees to the policies of their corporate HQ. Politicians, like hotel managers, have no “real” power. For todays political players, success, advancement, security and wealth are gained, not by representing the people’s interests, but by pretending to do so while in fact executing the agenda of the money masters. Their payoff is in having their re-election assured by the guarantee of nearly limitless campaign funds, or by the promise of lucrative no-show jobs in the private sector once their political careers are over.
So in the upcoming presidential campaign. Let’s not be duped by the impassioned speeches of these pathological liars. Let’s not fall for their false compassion, their phony rectitude, or their deceitful depictions of the great things they want to do for us and for this country.
These people do not have our interests in mind. They have sold their souls to the elite and they have sold our country to the highest bidders. In spite of what they will say to the contrary, a vote for any of today’s politicians is a vote for the establishment and the status quo, for big banks, multinational corporations, wars, surveillance, the police state, recession, depression and slavery.
And the worst part is… there is no solution. The rot and corruption is systemic. Even if we could vote the bums out – which we can’t – their replacements would appear as if by magic, arising from the same machine, with the full support of -and the same secret alliance to – the power elite.
They don’t care who you vote for because they own all of the horses in the race. Whoever wins the presidency in 2016 – they will have their man (or woman) in the office. Your vote is meaningless no matter how it’s cast.
That’s why I’m proposing that we all abstain from voting – all of us. Let’s call it a voting boycott. Let’s be noisy about it. Let’s make it clear we are not going to participate in their fraudulent, corrupted election process anymore. Let’s refuse to rubber stamp their criminal takeover of our government. Let’s not vote en masse! Imagine an election with just 5% of the voters turning out! They wouldn’t be able to write that off as voter apathy – it would be a Voter Revolt! That would send a greater message – and represent a greater mandate – than any election in the history of this country. It would tell them in no uncertain terms that we the people are finally fed up. That we are no longer asleep, that we are aware of what they are doing to our country and the world, and that we refuse to be a part of it.
After being subjected to more lies and manipulations, as these minions to the master class lead us inexorably toward the looming cliff’s edge, wouldn’t it be satisfying to tell them to fuck-off? Wouldn’t it be powerful to let them know – and let the world know too – that these thieves and murderers do not represent us, that their policies of war and debt are not what we want, that their banks and their corporations do not own us, and that we the American People reject their corrupt leadership?
That would be a declaration of independence worthy of our founding fathers.