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The billions, which could be spent rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure, improving schools, or reducing the scourge of malaria in Africa, will instead be squandered in a heinous free-for-all of slander and personal destruction, alienating voters as never before.
The media will inevitably focus on the personalities of the bloated roster of narcissists lusting after the White House, but scant attention will be paid to the Wall Street bankers, industrial polluters, and casino magnates whose grip on American democracy will remain vise-like.
While attention this weekend turns to the Democrats, the Republicans remain quietly confident about their chances of purchasing the nation's highest office. In the words of one top operative, "Our billionaires can beat their billionaires."
USA elections are a classic example of who can spend more, most sensibly, to distort democracy. It's an exercise in furious propaganda, and the only people that win are the political elite, and advertising/media companies.
Literally billions of dollars that are spent on opinion-mongering, that can be more sensibly spent on improving social services, homelessness, the poverty-stricken.
There is no democracy in the US of A. There is no choice. You have a choice between lunatic Republicans, and lunatic Democrats. The only difference between them is a matter of a few piddling percent of the public budget, like all the rest of 'democratic' western governments. Really, they just play a game with your heads, they only pretend to be 'different'. They are both dedicated to the same game-play: earning political power for reasons that are completely selfish. They don't care about you or I, they only care about their own power structures.
My choice is not to vote for any of them. I urge everyone not to vote and express disgust for the lot of them, and their vested interests.
I am Australian, but it's the same syndrome here. Except Australians are required by law to vote. I have refused to vote for a couple of decades. I claim that it violates my human rights to be forced to subscribe to a political system that I simply don't believe in.
The extraordinairily simplistic idea that 'if we look after the economy, all is good!', is a meme we have all been taught to beleive in.
Economy is not reality. Economy is simply a methodology we have used to organise our society. But when our system of organization becomes more important than the reality it is based upon, then it can be properly argued that it's a case of self-delusion.
In a debt-dedicated world, there is no choice but to continually expand the 'economy'. Which largely depends on having a bigger and bigger population, so there are more earners and spenders, in order to make more and more money whizz around at more and more spectacular rates, so that both companies can earn more and governments can get more taxes and spend more.
But it doesn't work. It can't work. You can't expand 'economies' on the basis of expanding populations ad infinitum in a finite world. It's a concept that is doomed to failure.
I don't want to live in a world where the entire biosphere is dedicated to human consumption. Where there are no longer such things as whales, tigers, lions, polar bears, sloths, gorillas, etc, etc. Where wars will be fought over water rights and farming lands.
But that is the future our myopic governments are developing. All in the name of 'Economics'.
All bow down and pray to the Great God Dollar!!!!!!