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Published on The Doomstead Diner on November 1,, 2016
Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner
We're down here to the last week before the big POTUS election, at last. Whoever gets elected here, it will be a welcome relief from the insanity of electoral politics we have been suffering through for around 2 years now. From the heady days when Jeb Bush was the "Front Runner" for the Grand Old Party to the meltdown of the Dark Horse Billionaire for Pussy Grabbing, from the Brief Shining Moment of the Bernie Sanders candidacy to Killary Clinton's emails and coughing fits, no election ever has been a better demonstration of the failure of Amerikan electoral politics and the purported "democracy" we live under.
Millions will rejoice as the nearly universally despised Kenyan Golfer finally leaves office, leaving behind a legacy of ever increasing war for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the failed reformation of the Medical Insurance industry known as Obamacare and a lot of expensive Hawaiian Vacations on the taxpayer dime. Not to mention of course the Federal Deficit now pushing some $20T, not including all the unfunded liabilities simmering in the stew of a failing economic system.
Whoever they get to replace Obama-sama as Puppet-in-Chief, it's not going to matter much at all. The President doesn't call the shots on when we go to war and with who, nor does he call the shots on who Da Federal Reserve dishes out funny money to either. Those decisions are all made in the board rooms of the TBTF Banks and the major energy corporations of Exxon-Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum. All CONgress and the POTUS do is put their signatures on laws and policy papers drafted up by the legal departments of these corporations. It doesn't matter which side of the Righty-Lefty divide the politician comes from, he's not going to get campaign funds if he doesn't put his John Hancock on these bills as they pass across his desk, and generally speaking neither he nor his constituents knows what is in those bills either in any detail. Trade Agreements like NAFTA and TPP are thousands of pages of legalese nobody except a corporate lawyer paid to do it would ever work through. Homeland Security bills like the Patriot Act and NDAA are signed off on pro forma, SECURITY is the #1 Priority, the Constitution be damned. Any vestige of "Liberty" that once existed in the FSoA is long gone now, and neither of the POTUS candidates who have a chance of winning this election are going to put a stop to that.
Besides the fact that whoever is nominally "in-charge" in the White House doesn't really have all that much power and is mostly just a figure head, the other reason whoever gets elected doesn't much matter is that not even the Puppet Masters pulling the strings can do much other than try to maintain their own perks as the spin down progresses. Collapse in one form or another is going to occur here, and it is doubtful any policy maker anywhere can control whether it goes nuclear or not. Even without a nuclear denoument, on the grand scale it is unlikely there will be a very good outcome here for most of the Homo Saps currently walking the earth.
So why do people worry and obssess over who will be the next POTUS? Does it really matter whether it is a Pussy Grabbing Billionaire or a Pathological Liar and Power Seeker with a philandering husband? There's no chance either 3rd Party candidate can win, Green or Libertarian all those votes do is swing the voting in the major parties one way or the other. A vote for the Green Party is a vote for the Donald, because it is one less vote for Killary. A vote for the Libertarian Party is a vote for Killary, because it is one less vote for the Donald. So if you are going to vote, why not just vote directly for the two major party candidates? It all amounts to the same thing anyhow.
As regular Diners know, this is not a concern of mine, because I don't vote at all. I have considered this so called "franchise" to be a travesty and rigged game since before I was even old enough to vote, and nothing has changed my mind in the intervening years. I am not going to drop my vote (which is my "stamp of approval") on any of these candidates. If I do that, I take some responsibility for what they then proceed to do in office, which is NEVER what they said they would do on the campaign trail. Even if you voted for somebody who was halfway decent as a human being like Jimmy Carter, what good did that do? It never made a difference, the trajectory of the Industrial Civilization has been an unstoppable juggernaut since the very beginning. The power unleashed so great that a few nation-states that got in early in this game were able to roll over every other nation on earth by force, to raid them of resources and employ their populations as slave labor.
Now this paradigm is falling apart, both because most of the cheap energy resource has already been burned, and because the population of Homo Saps walking the earth was artificially inflated past its carrying capacity in the absence of the fossil fuel resource. Beyond that, the extreme advantage that Western society had by getting to the resource first and building a war machine that uses it is also defunct. At one time, the Europeans could go in and enslave stone age people with gunz and cannon. Now everybody has gunz and cannon, and a whole lot more too, like cruise missiles. You can't just roll over the Chinese or Ruskies like you can a small country like Syria or Afghanistan, and even that kind of small proxy war is a waste of time, money and energy. Nobody "wins" these wars, they just go on interminably, bankrupting everyone who pursues them eventually. But still they go on, regardless of who is elected POTUS and regardless of what the general population thinks of them or wants to do.
Nobody can win these wars, everybody loses. Well, not EVERYBODY, there are always war profiteers running the biznesses of making munitions and uniforms for the cannon fodder who make a profit on the enterprise. But at this point, what is there really left to WIN in any of these wars? The landscape is already denuded of trees and agriculture has become impossible as water tables are depleted and there is nothing left to irrigate with. The oil still left in the ground is mostly too expensive to still pump up and sell to your own increasingly impoverished population. The countries are filled with impoverished populations who if you "win" said war become a liability on your own balance sheet, vast populations in need of support. Why doesn't Putin go in and roll over the Donbass with his tanks and annex the Ruskie speaking people there who just WISH he would and get them out from under the thumb of the Neo-Nazis running Ukraine at the behest of their NATO masters?
Not because Vlad the Impaler is afraid of the consequences of such an adventure, if he saw a profit in it he would do it. No, it is because he realizes that annexing Donbass is just adding more liabilities to his already overburdened balance sheet. Right now, Mother Russia is better off than most places, they have their own energy resource, their own agriculture and for their size geographically, a realtively small population with a powerful military to protect and defend it. Why would they want more? They don't, they just want NATO to stop further encroaching on their borders, trying to steal what they still have left.
The Chinese are another story altogether. They do NOT have their own energy reserves to power their industrial machine, they are seriously into population overshoot even given they occupy a large portion of the land mass of the earth, and as a result of their rapid and basically unregulated dive into industrial production have thoroughly polluted both their arable land and their water table. Beyond that, their banking system is a Ponzi scheme that puts Da Federal Reserve to shame, so who would expect this country to go anywhere but down the toilet as the industrial economy comes grinding to a halt? They are entirely dependent on their export model, but who are they going to export to? A few Ruskies in Moscow? China is TOAST, it's an accident waiting to happen and I doubt the Ruskies can support them. In this evolving War Phase though, they are allies of convenience, and so long as the Chinese are manufacturing good missiles and good electronic guidance systems for them, together with the Ruskies they are at least equal to the military power of the FSoA and NATO. For either side to directly confront the other is mutual suicide, so one can only hope the folks running the show can see this and avoid it.
Which brings us back around to the upcoming POTUS election, where either Killary or The Donald will be appointed as the Public Overseer of the spin down, renege on any and every promise they made in their campaigns and do the very best they can to make sure that as it progresses downhill, the Rich stay Rich and the Poor stay Poor, with as little internal violence in maintaining this status quo as is possible. Whoever is elected, if it is possible to do so the TBTF Banks will be bailed out still further in the attempt to keep BAU running. Somewhere along the line here though, this charade will come to an end, the tide will run out and our leader will be left Naked and impotent to do anything about the mess they have made here. Not a moment I look forward to by any means. The thought of seeing either Killary or The Donald naked is not something I wish to witness.
