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There's a good reason why
nobody is paying attention to the election
this year except the people who, one way or another, get paid to be
interested: because for
all that's at stake there is
no coherent discussion about any
of it. By 'at stake' I mean what we are going
to do when the major systems
we depend on for everyday life begin to wobble and fail.
There is zero cognizance even among the paid kibitzers that we are near
that point. Rather, a rapture of techno-narcissism holds in thrall even people who ought to know better, and a
chatter-stream of infotainment
propaganda spreads an hallucinatory fog of national
self-esteem-boosting figments ranging from "energy independence" to "green jobs."
The truth of our situation is an implacable
contraction of the turbo-corporate economy due to remorseless looming energy scarcity. That is, strange to relate, not altogether
bad news (if we were psychologically disposed to process it, which we
are not). It doesn't have to mean
that everything in
American life goes straight to shit -- though it might.
It could well mean that some
of the most destructive corporate
actors go to shit (quickly
and unexpectedly), making
room for some really beneficial transformation.
For instance, the tensions of excessive scale and lack of resilience could put WalMart and everything like it out of business. It wouldn't take much to fatally compromise the
12,000-mile supply lines
and the 'warehouse-on-wheels'
that the behemoth retailers depends on. $6 diesel
fuel and a few more currency war
provocations against China could
put the schnitz on the operating system of national
chain retail. It would be the end of the unacknowledged "entitlement"
called "bargain
shopping," but it would
also provide the opportunity to rebuild the very local and regional economies that these predatory outfits put to death thirty years ago - and, more importantly,
open up a vast range of careers,
positions, and roles for Americans
to play in truly running their own commercial economies in their own home-towns, in particular young Americans otherwise demoralized by an economy that has left so many of them
stranded.
This is the
direction that reality is
taking us in, and one wonders
why the candidates can't begin to articulate it in these ridiculous
show-and-tell spectacles that we
misunderstand to be
"debates." Obviously
it has as much to do with the sheer inertia of the status quo than even with
the grotesque distortions of politics
inspired by the Citizens
United Supreme Court decision
that has allowed the complete corporate capture of elections. And even that nation-wrecking calamity is probably
out-weighed by the US public's
wish to keep all the familiar machinery of daily life going at all costs.
This last part is surely understandable, but it will certainly
lead to a tragic outcome:
political and social collapse. No one in any realm of US leadership will face the difficulty and uncertainty of finding our way out of this predicament. Both candidates for president
are devoted to sustaining
the unsustainable and telling
fairy tales about running the WalMart
economy on "green" pixie
dust.
The systems that we depend
on for running everyday life can
all be clearly described and understood:
commerce (WalMart); farming
(agri-biz); transportation (happy motoring + airplanes); medicine (sickness hostage racket); education
(babysitting), and so on. All of them are near the end of their existence in their current mode of operation. But
the system in greatest danger is
finance, which is system that is supposed
to manage our accumulated
wealth and deploy the
surplus for purposes that
keep civilization going. Finance is the sickest of all these systems now and the one that is most
susceptible to collapse.
The basic problem is that finance and its organs of banking now run
entirely on accounting fraud, which is to say the misrepresentation of our accumulated wealth and the subsequent misallocation of what's left of it. Pervasive accounting fraud and control fraud (the criminal abuse of
trust in money matters) is
joined by the systematic
corruption of markets. The stock and commodity markets can no longer perform their primary role of "price discovery" due to the criminal
manipulation of indexes, and in particular the
computer arbitrage racket known as high frequency trading, not to mention
the absence of regulation and rule-of-law more generally. And the
money markets can no
longer perform their primary tasks of truthfully pricing debt in relation to risk - that is, establishing
interest rates -- due to the desperate
interventions of central banks.
The result is a money management system that
could collapse at any moment into a vacuum of unreality, and the chaos that would ensue is
capable of wrecking the current
incarnation of advanced industrial
civilization. Mitt Romney
represents all the forces that
seek to pervert truth in banking, markets, trading, and
commercial business. He made his fortune in a
business of lethal arbitrage, hunting
through the underbrush of
American business like a poisonous
snake, striking his victims in stealth and then consuming them. Barack Obama, lawyer and president, forgot that one of his duties is
hunting snakes, and has allowed the garden of America to become overrun with snakes. There is even the pretty good chance that, if he loses
this election, Mr. Obama will become one of those snakes himself.
Personally, I have no faith in either of them, and watching them pretend to battle in the trumped-up arena of "debate" makes me sick.
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