I was watching Meet the Press Sunday and found it fairly comical when they got around to discussing Hillary Clinton. In fact, they replayed a SNL skit from Saturday night that made fun of Hillary and the fact that she is the only viable candidate for the Democrats because of the Clinton dynasty. The host of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd and his panel guests all had a good laugh “ha ha ha… yes that’s funny because it’s true ha ha ha”. And once they had a good if not awkward chuckle, one can only presume at the expense of the American people, they simply moved on and stepped over that giant elephant in the room. So despite the fact that we all understand something is incredibly wrong with the fact that Hillary has no challengers in a nation of 330 million citizens we are simply supposed to ignore this giant puss filled boil on the face of our democratic process.
How can this be? How is it that in such a well educated society with an abundance of opinions throughout this vast land the Democratic party is unable to find anyone outside of the core political machine willing to even take a stab at becoming the chief public servant? This is supposed to be a self governed democracy. We have destroyed the entire Middle East over the past 15 years in the name of self governance and rule by the people for the people. What a farce! How can anyone in this country say with a straight face that we are a nation ruled by the people for the people when the system is so locked down to anyone outside of the elite political insiders that we cannot even find a few tokens to throw at the facade of democracy at work?
It is absolutely disgusting that on one hand our political ‘leaders’ stand high on their towers of righteousness proselytizing a natural right to self governance around the world to the point that they use it to defend the immense piles of collateral carnage building up behind the fence. While on the other hand our political ‘leaders’ have mutated the political process here at home to such an extreme that not only do we not have any impact on the legislative process between elections but have now totally abandoned the actual election process toward self governance itself.
That is, it has become such an incredulous notion that a citizen outside of the political elites could ever hope to one day lead this nation as President that we simply stopped wasting any effort on pretending. I don’t just mean the you and me type folks have given up but even those who a couple decades ago would have run and perhaps stood a slight chance have now given up. Again the process is such that the political elite is constantly making the process more and more water tight so as to completely negate any chance of an outsider imposing their or the peoples’ will on Washington.
The truth is the American citizen has no way to bestow her will on the political process any longer. Slowly and methodically over the past 100 years we the people have been relegated to just a logistical function in the political process i.e. we are the coin in the coin toss.. heads Dems or tails Repubs. But we get no say as to which end of the field or if we will kick or receive, we’re just the logistic function that dictates which team gets to make the calls.
The insider circle continues to get smaller and smaller. Here we are about to see the third Bush and second Clinton to run for president in just the past 25 years. And sure one can say that well the Bush’s are citizens too so why not them? And my answer is this – If they really and truly wanted what was best for this nation in the spirit of the founding fathers both the Bush’s and the Clintons would recuse themselves from this election. The idea is that the founding fathers were adamant that America not turn into some oligarchy or aristocracy. As we have so obviously become exactly that, those who put their nation before themselves would do the right thing and break the oligarchical cycle. But these familial dynasties don’t and they won’t and so we know that their self interest is greater than their interest in what’s best for America.
But we the people laugh awkwardly with the press as we step over the glaring contradictions to democracy in our own political process. In fact, we’ve gotten so good at ignoring the things that should be obvious causes for disqualification of any candidate that we don’t even blink at criminal activities like Hillary’s email debacle. We ignored that George junior dodged the Vietnam draft and then dodged his duties in the role that allowed him to dodge the draft all while other men were being sent to their certain death.
What makes that even more sickening is the fact that his father and grandfather were very much involved in getting us into that conflict and every other conflict of the past 100 years. Seriously, the Bush family has been involved in America’s participation in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and the past 15 years of continuous simultaneous multiple major theatre wars. Anyone interested is knowing how deep the Bush family roots dig into the covert ties between the Department of Defense (DoD) and military industrial complex (MIC) should read the book “Vietnam War, Volume 1” by Vinh Truong. Even to someone like myself who was fairly cognisant of the Bush family’s ties to the American war machine, this book was shocking. Mr. Truong provides such vivid detail at such a granular level that it leaves no room for ambiguity. This is the type of book that should be part of every high school’s literature curriculum.
But I digress. Look the point is that we the people have slowly been pushed out of our own system of self governance. Yet the political elites that pushed us out still use the perception of American democracy as a call to arms around the world. A call that puts our sons and daughters into their graves or into a new life of suffering that one wouldn’t wish on one’s enemy. Yet here we go into another presidential election that is estimated to spend $4B to $5B simply to get one of these political elites a job. One job. Anyone willing to spend $5B on securing one job has no f$cking business being in charge of $1 let alone a $16T economy.
The system and its players have become nothing but a wax museum. The election campaign landscape is but an attempt by a group of strategists to create the Norman Rockwellesque picture they feel the average American wants to believe and thus will respond positively to. And Americans know our part. So such a picture is delivered to us and we, in kind, know we are supposed to appreciate such a world and so we go along with it. We shun any candidate who slips up and cusses but we all run to the candidate that kisses a baby and snaps out a witty G rated one liner. It is all absolute nonsense.
You could ask 1000 people what characteristics they want in a president and 990 will describe Ron Paul. However, ask 1000 people what they think of Ron Paul and 990 will say he’s crazy. Why?? Because that’s what we’ve been told to think. So we think it. It is that simple. And that is why this country has been deteriorating for 100 years and really accelerating, faster each year for the past 15, toward utter collapse. But not to fear, the free fall is about to end… and with a thump. Economic technicians, if such a thing existed, will be looking at the long term economic charts and calling the period between 2010 and 2016 an economic dead cat bounce. Perhaps the first real economic dead cat bounce meaning an economic collapse before the economy has been able to recover and grow since the previous collapse. This is a sign of the absolute abuse of power that leads to resource misallocations throughout the entirety of our society. Simply put… the wax world we have created is beginning to melt down.
By Thad Beversdorf, Chief Economist, ABX/Bullion Capital
