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.
In fact, all the male energies in American political economy have been directed lately in the service of a one multifarious enterprise: the support of fraud, which includes the promotion of untruth, the protection of the wicked, and the evasion of reality. That can only end badly as this vast cargo of lies passes through the event horizon of circumstance and sucks us into the unknown territory that lies beyond the fall of empire. You can be certain of this: genuine male energy will re-emerge from the shadows and that energy will re-engage the still unresolved tensions abroad in this land. When they do, anything can happen. For now, the election of 2012 remains a mere pussy riot.
The storm churning through the Gulf of Mexico may remind us just how large and uncontrollable the forces of nature are as the curtain rises on the political season of a grievously misled nation.
Replies
Michael Snyder, Contributor
Activist Post
What in the world have we done to our kids? If you spend much time with them, you quickly realize that the next generation of Americans is woefully unprepared to deal with the real world. They are overweight, lazy, undisciplined, disrespectful, disobedient to their parents, selfish, self-centered, and completely addicted to entertainment. And that is just for starters.
We feed them insane amounts of sugar and high fructose corn syrup and then when they become overactive we pump them full of prescription drugs to calm them down. Instead of raising our children ourselves, we allow the government schools and the entertainment industry to do it. By the time they reach the age of 18, they have spent far more time with their teachers, their video games and the television than they have spent with us.
Our young people are #1 in a lot of global categories, but almost all of them are bad. Young people in the United States are more obese than anyone else in the world, more sexually active than anyone else in the world and they become pregnant more often than anyone else in the world. Of course it probably doesn’t help that we have the highest divorce rate in the world either. Our families are a complete and total mess, and it is our kids that are paying the price. One top of everything else, we have accumulated a 16 trillion dollar debt which we will be handing down to the next generation. I am sure that they will appreciate that.
The following are 40 signs that we have seriously messed up the next generation of Americans….
1. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
2. More than 25 percent of all U.S. children have a chronic health condition that affects their ability to learn. Perhaps we should not be feeling them so much junk food.
3. In 2011, SAT scores for young men were the worst that they had been in 40 years.
4. The average young American will spend 10,000 hours playing video games before the age of 21.
5. One study discovered that 88 percent of all Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 play video games, and that approximately four times as many boys are addicted to video games as girls are.
6. According to a survey conducted by the National Geographic Society, only 37 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 can find the nation of Iraq on a map.
7. According to one survey, 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot find the state of New York on a blank map.
9. Only 10 percent of Oklahoma high school students know how many justices sit on the Supreme Court.
10. At this point, 15-year-olds that attend U.S. public schools do not even rank in the top half of all industrialized nations when it comes to math or science literacy.
11. Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than children in Europe are.
12. The United States leads the world in eating disorder deaths.
13. The average American drinks more than 600 sodas every single year. That is by far the most in the world.
14. Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese. Right now, approximately 36 percent of all Americans are obese, and it is being projected that number will rise to 42 percent by 2030.
15. In America today, many families allow the television to raise their children. In fact, the United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.
16. There are more school shootings in America than anywhere else in the world.
17. The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin. This is ripping millions of families with children to shreds.
18. Without solid family units, more kids than ever are joining gangs. Today, there are approximately 1.4 million gang members living inside the United States. That number has risen by 40 percent just since 2009.
19. There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.
20. If you can believe it, an average of five children die as a result of child abuse in the United States every single day.
21. Sadly, the United States actually has the highest child abuse death rate on the entire globe.
22. Approximately 20 percent of all child sexual abuse victims are under the age of 8.
23. In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.
24. According to researchers, convicted rapists in the United States report that two-thirds of their victims were under 18, and among those cases 58% said that their victims were 12 years old or younger.
25. The percentage of children living in poverty has risen from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent today.
26. Today, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
27. It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.
29. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4 percent of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1 percent of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6 percent of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6 percent of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
30. It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.
31. It is estimated that child homelessness in the United States has risen by 33 percent since 2007.
32. Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
33. Law enforcement officials estimate that about 600,000 Americans and about 65,000 Canadians are trading dirty child pictures online.
34. The average high school boy spends two hours watching pornography every single week.
35. An astounding 30 percent of all Internet traffic now goes to pornography websites, and the U.S. produces more pornography than any other nation has in the history of the world.
36. In the United States today, 47 percent of all high school students have had sex.
37. One out of every four teen girls in the United States now has an STD.
38. The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate on the entire planet by a wide margin.
39. One survey found that one out of every five teen girls actually wants to be a teen mom.
40. We have borrowed 16 trillion dollars that we expect future generations to repay. We have consigned our children and our grandchildren to a lifetime of debt slavery and they don’t even realize it yet. When they do realize what we have done to them they will probably curse us bitterly
When did…
1) ….Educated people become so unfamiliar with small business that they began to believe that a company will practically build itself as long as the government provides roads, street signs, and police?
2) …Freedom change from something we should all be seeking to something we’re supposed to be terrified to face without the government holding our hands?
3) …We stop asking, “Can we afford this?” along with “Is this a good idea?” when it comes to government programs?
4) …Demanding that people come to this country legally if they want to stay here and become citizens become too much to ask?
5) ….We start rewarding victims so richly for victimhood that we have to wonder if every unseen hate crime is real or a staged charade to receive public sym...?
6) …Sticking to the Constitution and living within our means become “extremism?”
7) …The job of the press change from reporting the news to doing everything it can to help the Democratic Party?
8) …It become okay to sue a company because some moron knowingly did something dangerous with the company’s product and hurt himself? That’s not negligence; it’s Darwinism at work.
9) …Protecting some barren tundra in Alaska become worth more than thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in wealth created, and lower prices at the pump for the American people?
10) ….Hollywood change from supporting the troops in foreign wars to undercutting the war and smearing the troops as dangerous, mentally unstable drones?
11) …We stop caring if government programs worked or not as long as they sound compassionate?
12) …Virginity, chastity, and believing marriage should be for life become “old fashioned?”
13) …Witty sound bites start becoming more important than wise words?
14) …We come to believe that we would never have to pay off our debt?
15) …The comfort of Americans today start to become more important than giving future generations an opportunity to have a better and brighter future?
16) ….People stop becoming ashamed of taking welfare, school lunches, food stamps, receiving handouts, and living in their parents’ basements?
17) …Our first priorities in wars become not hurting enemy civilians and getting good press instead of protecting the lives of our troops and winning the war?
18) ….”tolerance” start to mean approval and disapproval become tantamount to hate?
19) ….Our immigration policies become centered on what’s most convenient for illegal immigrants instead of what’s best for the American people and those who want to come here legally?
20) …It become okay for the Democrat Party — which was behind slavery, segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, and Jim Crow laws — to accuse Republicans of wanting to do those things? It must have been after most people forgot Democrats were behind all of those things and Republicans have always opposed them.
21) …Debates about politics stop being about whether certain policies work or not and start centering on the intentions, motives, and personal characteristics of the person on the other side of the issue?
22) …God’s definition of marriage, the same definition that has been around for millennia, become discriminatory?
23) …”Racism” change from an expression of hatred towards another race to an expression of disagreement with Democrats?
24) …The “not” get removed from the first part of John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
25) …Borrowing money from the Chinese to spend on useless government programs that produce nothing become an “investment?”