On The Road » Wandering Stiff ~mainstem~

So I was prompted to vent. Hope the internet doesn’t mind. Didn’t see the Pete Hoekstra political ad, didn’t watch the SB. I know one thing, Hoekstra’s done what he wanted to, stirred things up to get people talking, and it all serves his opponent much the same, riling up the bases of their parties.

If no rings, and no elephants and donkeys ridden by ladies doing tricks, then no one comes to the circus to expend their political energies in relatively harmless ways that allow the powers to do what they want after the populace has exhausted itself. Political circus with no substance or bearing on the actual debates that could be made about real issues. Instead, we get mock-debate over debt ceilings and health care “reform” both parties actually wanted to deliver to their corporate sponsors.

In fact, the decisions are already made, more or less, and the question is only how it all gets spun and which politicians get to play lackey/power broker for the truly elite who find such things below them. I’m completely convinced that the aim is to keep us the audience, a captive herd to be bargained around by the political players who’ve managed to lasso us by our money and our votes. Keeps us harmless and uninvolved spectators rather than participants and actors.

Giving money to a party is not politics; it’s paying someone else to be political for you. Watching an ad and agreeing or disagreeing is not politics, it’s sitting in the choir. How many of us really know what is politics? Not sure I know. I do know this Hoekstra thing isn’t politics beyond someone trying to buy your right to think and be political for the price of a TV ad. It is a distraction masquerading as politics, and so is the Dem response. Between the two, they’ve got the entire country held captive to the power elite.

From this standpoint, pulling a Thoreau and simply not participating in/validating the madness seems more political than anything going on with the primary elections. I know I’m not being represented; I’m being asked to pretend that one side or the other represents me. As if!

The fact that not one of our politicians is able to escape, if we pin them down, is that we are where we are because of the combined forces of GOP and Dem policies, which are really one policy under the tent of neoliberalism, which is the opening up of “free” markets, aka globalization. The US owes China because of the policies enacted by both sides of the aisle on behalf of their corporate sponsors to pursue globalization since the fall of the USSR. Most of what has happened is intentional, not by accident, and the true aim of the political class is to get us to see anything but that, to keep us from the doorstep of real power by keeping us at each others’ throats, to keep us from realizing that the troubles we are facing as people are to the politicians only collateral damage stemming from actions they and their ruling class overlords have not come close to repenting of, and that no matter which party is in power, the rule of the neoliberal agenda remains law.

The ruling class is not concerned over US debt to China; they own China as well as the US, so why should they care? It’s only a round of cards to them in which they play all hands. It’s a game where the little people have no place at the table, and no politician who hopes to be elected wants us to realize because such a realization delegitimizes their binary headlock on the American people and, through US muscle, the people of the entire world.

The ultimate cynicism, then, is Hoekstra pretending that US debt to China matters to him any more than it does to Stabenow, and this for the purpose of political theater playing to populist sentiments on the right. He knows, just like we all do, that we need China’s cheap goods and low labor costs and loans because of decisions made twenty years ago to go down exactly the road we are on. There is no going back, and the real politics is to question how to go forward in a way that stops enslaving the various scattered human families to the exploitative globalist urge. How do we the American people start calling the shots? How do we move toward the things we really care about, in equality with the rest of the world?

Hoekstra/Stabenow? I think I’ll pass!

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