Politics

Politics is a mechanism by which a small group of people who have great insight into how the masses think use that knowledge in order to extract a living from the people which is far in excess of the economic value which they inject into the economy by the sweat of their brows.  The main tools of the trade are shameless guile, sophistry, empty posing/posturing, avoiding hard decisions/kicking the can down the road, lying about the economy and printing money out of thin air. Politicians draw fat salaries which include lifetime pensions and medical benefits at the federal level.  In addition they are able to leverage their fame and their political bully pulpits in order to sell lots of books and to have an endless stream of paid speaking engagements lined up for them once they are eventually voted out.

In US politics we now effectively have a single party system which contains two competing factions.  The overarching party should be named the Unified Socialist Party.  Within it we have those on the right who would take on debt in order to support their business constituents and opposing them we have those on the left who would take on more debt in order to support their labor constituents.  The common denominator is the exponentially increasing use of debt in order to buy votes and to secure their political status.  Both factions highly support a welfare state because poor people are a politician’s best friend.  They take government handouts and thus are beholden to government.  They become captured by government.  They even favor tax increases because they never pay taxes anyway given that their economic contribution to society is too low to tax.

The favorite tool of politicians that is used to keep people off their scent is that of the weapon of mass distraction.  They have created a fake 2 party system and each side has taken on a set of pet emotional issues which they use to whip small minded constituents up into a frenzy and then they set the competing sides against themselves to bicker and fight and to create a wedge in the population.  Politicians have to do this because if the people ever stopped infighting they would figure out how badly we are getting screwed in this con game.  The whole Dem vs. GOP thing is a form of mass hypnosis – a Jedi mind trick and unfortunately most of the people are susceptible to such tricks.  The people asked for a change from Bush and what they got was a change in skin color.  But the same agenda of more debt, endless war with a phantom non-enemy, not closing Gitmo torture center, etc. is just as strong with Obama as it was with Bush.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Over time, government is also captured by the people.  Politicians who tell the truth don’t get very far.  People believe that there is a bottomless pit of wealth ready to serve their every need and they don’t care who pays the bill or if it ever gets paid at all as long as they get what they want right now.  After all, as the great economic con man Keynes once said “in the end we are all dead”.  So the order of the day is for politicians to spend all they can to buy votes and for constituents to demand all they can get lest they withhold their votes and nobody gives a damn if the country goes bankrupt and our children go hungry as a result.  We are absolutely without real leaders.  Washington DC is full of posturing, posing, poll watching, sound bite speaking, moral free, gutless losers. 

The invisible hand of bankers has been running a shadow government for decades now.  If it wasn’t clear before 2008 there should be no doubt after all the loans and bail outs that happened.  The Federal Reserve loaned money to Harley freaking Davidson for the love of Pete.  What business does our central bank have in making loans directly to corporations?  What about all the small businesses that just keeled over due to lack of credit?  Too bad so sad.  Capitalism hasn’t been part of Americana for decades.  We have something else – crony capitalism – where the rich and powerful pick winners and losers.  Of course the winners are their rich and powerful friends and everyone else is a loser in some form or fashion.

The US has been running a global debt Ponzi since we went off the gold standard.  It’s been at least 30-40 years in the making.  Instead of collecting enough taxes to cover all the election promises that have been made, our government has been running the national credit card up at an exponential rate.  When Bush 2 began office the debt was 6-7 trillion.  Now, just 10 years later it is 14 trillion and going up by 1.5 trillion per year at least.

Where did/does all the money go?  Certainly not on internal infrastructure.  We see gas lines exploding in neighborhoods and bridges collapsing across America.   But we have plenty of cash it seems to blow up bridges in foreign countries so that we can pay Halliburton et. al ridiculous contract amounts in order to rebuild them.  Of course, the dramatic events of 911 also masked the admission of Donald Rumsfeld on national television on the very day prior to 911 that 2.3 T-T-Trillion dollars had gone missing from the pentagon budget and could not be accounted for.  It’s just interesting timing that the very next day those planes hit the towers and all.  It just made everyone forget about 2.3 trillion dollars.  No investigation was ever done because, by a stroke of really, really, really, really exceptionally bad luck which defied even the most astronomical odds, the plane that hit the Pentagon wiped out the computers that were tracking that $2.3 trillion loss along with the accounting specialists who were running them.  Yes, that’s right we were patsies in that scam.  If you didn’t know about that, go watch Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theories episode that covered it.  Forget all the dramatic music and faked surprise by the actors - get over the theater of it.  Instead, look at the data it presents and focus on that.  Ventura is a cheezy actor but let that not be your focus.  In fact, you can almost just forget everything else they say except that $2.3 trillion went unrecoverably missing as a result.  For $2.3 trillion dollars there are people who would kill everyone in the states of Texas, California and New York combined if they could and they wouldn’t think twice about it.  Taking out 35 people, a bunch of computers and a small piece of the Pentagon must have been a no brainer.

The goal of politicians right now is to, with a straight face, tell everyone that they will eventually get paid what they are owed even though they know the math isn’t even close to adding up.  We have a big bubble of boomers who are now leaving their working years where they were a net positive to the economy and they are entering retirement where they will be a net drain on the economy.  The first to retire and suck up all the benefits as fast as they can will be the only ones who see anything from Social Security and Medicare.  Is it any wonder that retirees are electing to draw Social Security benefits at the youngest age allowable?  Both of these programs are funded with borrowed money.  When we cannot find any more suckers to loan us money, these programs will not be funded.   Count on it.

The US now borrows 40% of every dollar it spends at the federal level.  At the same time the US government (Federal+State+Local) has grown so big and bloated that it has become 45% of the GDP.  If we reduce our government spending by 40% (assumes states and local are about as profligate as federal) in order to balance the budget then it means the government’s contribution to GDP will drop by that same 40%.  That comes out to an 18% drop in GDP.  If you have been paying attention, the Federal Reserve freaks out and prints money if the GDP goes below 2%  GROWTH.  A reduction of GDP by 18% would send the country into a tail spin.  It would be as bad or worse than the Great Depression.  Housing prices would collapse in an unprecedented manner and banks would fail en masse.  The FDIC is already a running joke in economic circles as it is now bankrupt.  The government (again, federal state and local; they are all guilty) has made unkeepable promise upon unkeepable promise to people.  Unkeepable promises will, by definition, be broken and when people finally figure out they have been lied to there will be a massive outcry by the people. 

Way too many people today actually believe all of the happy talk they hear from their representatives.  Very few people listen to Ron Paul who has proven to be an honest congressional whistle blower.  Something is going to give sooner or later and the outcome could easily be similar to what happened to the USSR in 1990.  In short, large territories of the former USSR spun off to go govern themselves.  There is nothing that says something similar cannot happen to the USA and in fact governors like Texas’ Rick Perry have been talking about secession from the union in public.  California and Nevada and New York and Florida are hopelessly bankrupt.  Many of the other states are in big trouble too but they are hiding it better.  New Jersey’s Chris Christie has taken to telling those who are counting on their state pensions that they shouldn’t have believed in “Fairy Tale Promises”.

Yet despite all of the real problems that face us, the politicians are trying to burden us even more with the government health care Ponzi scheme, cap and trade tax, and whatever else they can think up to turn into laws.  Just recently some moron Senator from New York introduced legislation to “ban pedestrians from using mobile devices, phones and music players when crossing city streets”.  And not long before that the government pushed though senate bill S510 which effectively stops people from sharing food that they grew in their yards with each other.  The nation is literally falling apart at the seams and this is what these jerks are focusing on, and we the people are not only allowing it but in many cases encouraging it.  We are all going to be very sorry some day that we didn’t pay more attention or give a crap about all of this that has been going on.  The weight of all this is bearing down heavily on some of the less stable citizens of our fair country and I fear that civil unrest is the most likely outcome even though such activity will only make things worse.