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Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality.
Reality is the only party with an agenda consistent with what is
actually happening in the world. Reality doesn't need to drum up dollar
donations from anyone. Reality doesn't have to pander to any interest
group or subscribe to any inane belief system. Reality doesn't even need
your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter
what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and
Mitt Romney to lead the executive branch of the government.
In the vicious vacuum that national party politics has become, the
Republicans and Democrats are already dead. They choked to death on the
toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions
animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue
of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes of their
legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the
Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC) as
a mass of writhing maggots.
These are desperate days in
the republic. Between the two empty spectacles of the official party
nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge
of the swindled body politic. The putative contest of ideas is a
dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or
even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this country apart, in
particular the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of money and
banking - which is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it
has invested in itself and its future. In the USA of 2012, anything goes
and nothing matters. Reality has a different view of where this all
ends and how it will work out.
Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:
The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of
everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue
expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more
schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the
machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old
days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on
which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term
compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in
the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid
immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and
re-localizing of everything we do.
The two major parties
regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither
party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets
that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates,
and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in
booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting
fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing,
flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging
flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges,
and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic
functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable
store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive
purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal.
Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality
provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements:
civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation
and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they
are.
The two major parties pretend that so-called
"entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and
abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream)
at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this
incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make
other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread.
This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will
occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who
want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make
themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic
model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice
besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to
prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be
expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return
if they are able-bodied.
The two major parties both
proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties
are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage.
By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new
wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the
supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All
the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is
expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails
unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of
automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities
connected by inland waterways and railroads.
The two
major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as
long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news
off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US
Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the
foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of
the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things
in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be
found today. The two major parties also favor the application of
war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders -
i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank
records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says.
Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time
will come when American government officials who authorized these
activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from
traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.
Mitt
Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if
they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is
harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over,
fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is
everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney
convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work
its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is
America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.
