Fuck The Revolution- Let's Vote!

Here comes the common refrain:
"If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the outcome."

The opposite is true. By playing the game, voters agree to the rules. Only those who don’t play and withhold their consent have a right to complain about the outcome, especially since the winner will have his hand in the non-voter’s pocket.

Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity. Those who refuse to vote are not expressing silence. They are screaming in the politician’s ear: "You do not represent me. This is not a process in which my voice matters. I do not believe you."

Non-voting has a rich and long history through which the dissenting electorate has expressed everything from religious convictions to political cynicism.

Who makes the decisions in our society?

Who writes public policy?

Years of social engineering has caused people to be deluded on this matter.

The White House and Congress don’t really make the decisions, Wall Street and the Pentagon do. Who wins the election makes no difference because all politicians must do what the elite want. Elections are a scam whose function is to neutralize resistance movements and dupe ordinary citizens into thinking they control and/or have a say in matters of the state.

Bad "leaders" or bad system?

Better to place this action in an institutional context. The forces placed on the elected person by the state machinery and pressures from big business dictate the outcome. Your vote is meaningless. You can argue all you want that "We need to keep up the pressure to demand Politician______ needs to listen to ordinary citizens, not to business" and you will rot on the vine as your words disappear into the indifferent air.

There is a difference between the state and government. The state is the permanent collection of institutions that have entrenched power structures and interests. The government is made up of various politicians. It is the institutions that have power in the state due to their permanence, not the representatives who come and go. We cannot expect different politicians to act in different ways to the same pressures. However, this is all ignored by the voting political consumer who wishes Politician______ was more a socialist, green, populist etc. and could ignore the demands of the dominant class in society while in charge of one part of its protector and creature, the state.

So, given that a successful State requires legitimacy and that one of the easiest ways to achieve legitimacy is through widespread voter participation, what is the responsibility of the voters for the actions of its government?

By voting, it is clear that each voter endorses the governmental system under which he or she lives. By the act of voting, each voter is saying: It is right and proper for some people, acting in the name of the State, to pass laws and to use violence to compel obedience to those laws if they are not obeyed.

Voting is the epitome of doing nothing. It is in fact far worse. People think they are doing something of value when they vote. It's hilarious. It's pathetic.


To repeat:

Elections do not secure popular control over the state, they do help secure state control over the populace. Voting is a ritual that reinforces obedience to state authority. It creates the illusion that “the people” control the state, thereby masking elite rule. That illusion makes rebellion against the state less likely because it is seen as a legitimate institution and as an instrument of popular rule rather than the oligarchy it really is. This is why even totalitarian states like Russia under Stalin had elections. Embedded within all electoral campaigns is the myth that “the people” control the state through voting.

There's far more potential in 80% of the political drones staying home or burning tires in the street on election night but neither of these things will happen here in Never-Never Land. Instead the usual 50% will show up to keep the facade in place and validate the system that beats on their heads every day. Then the folk can swell with a moment of civic pride and think that "Democracy", if imperfect has been once again triumphed. "Well at least we got the vote", and other such dripping bathos will resonate through the corridors of America.

We have no say, or very little, in what even gets voted on be it issue or candidate let alone considering if the vote gets counted.

But as long as the vote charade goes on the appearance of "having a say" remains intact. And you must admit this is part of the genius of the system. It really does give you a few minor openings and the appearance that you are playing the game. LTTE's and three minutes at city council and petitions and call in radio and hey, "Let's call it Democracy!. Let's vote!"

Better to pull off the masque.

The Keys To Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur

A Word From Our Chairman James Hatt



















Successitudes™ began with my life-long passion for acquiring stuff- money, cars, fine cigars like this one I'm holding, chicks (of course). I learned long ago that if you want a piece of the action, you gotta strap on a pair of brass ones. Now, some inspirational merchandisers talk a good game about positive mental attitude. They'd have you festoon your office with posters telling you how life is like a golf course and paperweights telling you what T-E-A-M stands for. If that type of candy-ass uplift makes you feel better about your dead-end middle-management job, fine. But just remember- high-net-worth individuals like myself find chunks of suckers like you in our stools every morning. And that, asshole, is why you should write for our catalog today. P.O. Box 3788293, Chicago, IL 60637.


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Just Friends

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy... But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies".

-- Carroll Quigley, "Tragedy and Hope", 1966, p. 1247-48

Bill Clinton was known to have stated that Carroll Quigley was one of his mentors.

Proximate Cause In a Long Distance World

Ethical distancing and ethical problems of scale are not limited to high-impact military technology. The behavior and nature of modern technocracies, business, and government organizations are equally illustrative of this cold evil. Witness how corporations, now working on the global scale, routinely make calculated decisions about the risks of the products they manufacture. Typically, they weigh the cost of adding important safety features to their products against the potential liability to victims and the environment and then make the best “bottom line” decision for the company. More often than not, safety or environmental measures lose out in this calculation. As for people or nature, they have been “distanced” into numerical units relegated to profit-or-loss columns. The corporations then decide how many units they can afford to have harmed or killed by their products.

We witness daily the way the modern corporation has become distanced in time and space from its actions. A pesticide company has moved to another country or even gone out of business by the time—years after it has abandoned its chemical plant—the local aquifer and river have become hopelessly polluted, fish and wildlife decimated, and there is a fatal cancer cluster among the families relying on the local water supply. The executives of a tire company are thousands of miles or even a continent away and do not hear the screech of wheels and the screams as their defective tires burst and result in fatal crashes.

The workings of the global trade and finance corporations and organizations epitomize the physical and psychological distancing of cold evil. In the isolation of their First-World offices, members of the World Trade Organization and their partner financiers and economists of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) make decisions affecting millions. This is most evident in the imposition of “structural adjustment” measures on developing countries. For decades the IMF and World Bank loaned money at considerable interest to “developing” nations, essentially to capitalize modernization and technification. The funding was often for huge, ecologically devastating industrial projects. Not surprisingly, much of the money ended up in the hands of corrupt governments or as kickbacks to First-World corporations. As payments became overdue and interest rates skyrocketed, many countries found themselves unable to repay these loans. To solve this repayment problem the IMF and World Bank implemented a series of “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs). These programs involve renegotiating a country’s loan on more favorable terms if it agrees to "adjust” its spending policies, which means reducing wages, lowering labor and environmental standards, slashing social programs (particularly in health, education, and welfare), and allowing increased foreign domination of the country’s industries.

The effects of the SAPs have been disastrous. Millions have lost their jobs and find themselves with no access to housing, health care, or food. Spending on education in many countries has declined by more than 25% in less than a decade. It is now estimated that as many as 19,000 children die every day from disease or malnutrition as a direct consequence of the SAPs mandated by the IMF and World Bank. Yet despite its horrific toll, the cold-evil practice of structural adjustment has gone without ethical censure until quite recently. Contrast this indifference with the public and media outrage that would erupt if a group of terrorists, driven by hot-evil hatred, were killing thousands of children a day. It is now accepted, even by the global financial technocracies, that SAPs have been fiscally ineffective as well as socially and environmentally devastating. But the trade technocrats and corporations simply view this outcome as a policy “miscalculation” that requires “modification.”

Cold evil’s distancing is also profoundly present in those who work for corporations and other technocracies. Our minute and specialized jobs have separated us from ethical consideration of our collective work. Whether processing financial statements at a bank, riveting at a Boeing plant, litigating for a large law firm, or delivering on-line data to corporations, most people’s work represents a tiny cog in the great machine of production. As a result, we become psychologically numbed and removed from the ultimate consequences of the collective work being done. We fall into what E. F. Schumacher termed “‘the sullen irresponsibility” of modern work. Moreover, even if a worker were somehow able to overcome this irresponsibility, to breach the distance and cry out against the immorality of modern production (“I reject this alienating labor. Stop the machines; they are destroying nature, society, and the dignity of work!”), that person’s employment would quickly be terminated.

Virtually all corporations and government bureaucracies are dictatorships in which autocratic managers quickly punish any underling who begins to demand an ethical basis for work and production. Each of us is caught, therefore, in a kind of job blackmail. By allowing ourselves to become numbed by inhuman, meaningless work and to become fully distanced from what we actually produce, we forsake responsibility for the consequences of our production system. We sell our moral birthright in order to “pay the bills.” In this way we each experience our own “pilot’s dilemma.” The distancing endemic to our huge technological system and the massive private and public technocracies that run this system have turned workers, the vast majority of us, into ethical eunuchs and even unintentional criminals.

Whatever their ultimate moral and physical cost, our paychecks do allow many of us to become profligate “consumers.” This cold-evil lifestyle is termed “the good life.” We proudly bring home the new, convenient, “family friendly” SUV, fully distanced from the global warming to which this gas guzzler contributes and the respiratory illnesses it cause in our and our neighbors’ children. Similarly, we buy our kids hamburger meals with “happy face” logos. But both parents and children would recoil with horror if suddenly forced to participate in the almost unspeakably cruel slaughter of the particular cow involved or to take a power saw to the rain forest or personally commit the other environmental crimes behind so many of our fast-food burgers. We turn the computer on without stopping to think that the power is supplied by a nearby nuclear power plant with all of its social and environmental risks. We even feel virtuous eating our vegetables, without a thought to the topsoil loss, pesticide pollution, and loss of diversity caused by their industrial-style production. If we paid attention to the sources of what we buy, we would find that we are complicit in myriad wrongdoings stemming from the technosphere’s systemic evil, which is not easily recognized because of the distancing involved.

We're # 1!: America a Nation of Firsts

Hey, aren't we the most exceptional nation in history? George Bush and his pals thought so -- and they were in a great American tradition of exceptionalism. Of course, they were imagining us as the most exceptional empire in history (or maybe at the end of it), the ultimate New Rome. Anyway, explain this to me: Among all the exceptional things we claim to do, how come we never take credit for what may be the most exceptional of all, our success of successes, the thing that makes us uniquely ourselves on this war-ridden planet -- peddling more arms to Earthlings than anyone else in the neighborhood? Why do we hide this rare talent under a bushel?

They don't call us the sole superpower for nothing. Paul Wolfowitz might be looking for a new job right now, but the term he used to describe the pervasiveness of U.S. might back when he was a mere deputy secretary of defense -- hyperpower -- still fits the bill.

Face it, the United States is a proud nation of firsts. Among them:

First in Oil Consumption:

The United States burns up 20.7 million barrels per day, the equivalent of the oil consumption of China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined.



First in Carbon Dioxide Emissions:

Each year, world polluters pump 24,126,416,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. The United States and its territories are responsible for 5.8 billion metric tons of this, more than China (3.3 billion), Russia (1.4 billion) and India (1.2 billion) combined.



First in External Debt:

The United States owes $10.040 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.

First in Military Expenditures:

The White House has requested $481 billion for the Department of Defense for 2008, but this huge figure does not come close to representing total U.S. military expenditures projected for the coming year. To get a sense of the resources allocated to the military, the costs of the global war on terrorism, of the building, refurbishing, or maintaining of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and other expenses also need to be factored in. Military analyst Winslow Wheeler did the math recently: "Add $142 billion to cover the anticipated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; add $17 billion requested for nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy; add another $5 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies…. and you get a grand total of $647 billion for 2008."



Taking another approach to the use of U.S. resources, Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Business School lecturer Linda Bilmes added to known costs of the war in Iraq invisible costs like its impact on global oil prices as well as the long-term cost of health care for wounded veterans and came up with a price tag of between 1 trillion and $2.2 trillion.

If we turned what the United States will spend on the military in 2008 into small bills, we could give each one of the world's more than 1 billion teenagers and young adults an Xbox 360 with wireless controller (power supply in remote rural areas not included) and two video games to play: maybe Gears of War and Command and Conquer would be appropriate. But if we're committed to fighting obesity, maybe Dance Dance Revolution would be a better bet. The United States alone spends what the rest of the world combined devotes to military expenditures.



First in Weapons Sales:

Since 2001, U.S. global military sales have normally totaled between $10 and $13 billion. That's a lot of weapons, but in fiscal year 2006, the Pentagon broke its own recent record, inking arms sales agreements worth $21 billion. It almost goes without saying that this is significantly more than any other nation in the world.

The "Free" Market

The so-called "Free Market" is a theory. Which reminds me of a little joke, which I will now paraphrase and mangle:

Sniffed the economist to the reality-based community: "That explanation may be all well and good in reality, but it will never work in theory."

There is a reason why economics is called the "dismal science".

Econ 101: The most important condition that needs to be present in a free market is free, instantaneous, accurate, universally available information, which, alas, is against all universal laws of physics and human nature. That old reality thing again, it just won't quit, will it?

If, in Bizarro World, all necessary conditions are met, free market theory explains market behavior in the _______ run. If you answered "Short", go sew some burlap bags together and find your scythe, because Serf's Up!

If the free market corrects itself in the long run, what happens in the short run? Besides bargain-hunting and profit taking? How about lead in toys? Or Enron con games? Or exploding gasoline tanks? Or salmonella in spinach?

If enough people get hurt, the word trickles out and eventually the trickle becomes a rivulet and then a puddle and before long a little pond might form and then a crick and an arroyo then a gulley washer, well... you get my drift - it takes time for word to get to the market and force a correction. Harm to humans in short run, before "free market" correction in long run. That's all one really needs to know about the free market theory.

Goddamn, who could be against free markets!!! If you're against free markets, why, you're against FREEDOM, right?

The reality is that government regulations, and the insider elites who actually control the government regulations through the political process, as well as insider elite self-dealing, cancel out the conditions necessary for even a semblance of a free market. Klein's point is these elites use "shocks", both cynically those they manufacture and opportunistically those that just happen, as an excuse for repression by manipulating the so-called free market.

I am open to other explanations, if anyone has any.

Did I say the free market was a theory? Sorry, I was wrong. The Free Market is a big fat LIE.

Civilization?

I think civilizations are like dramas, with themes and roles and a plot. The major themes of western civilization have become unsustainable. We stern civilization has played itself out. The "game" has become uninteresting and unfulfilling. Every path is blocked and there is no next step, no new frontier. All of its traditions have been destroyed and all of its dreams snuffed out - and this just in our lifetimes, which is lightning fast. Part of the drama (and intrigue and excitement) of western civilization was its go for broke derring do speed and daring, so it probably shouldn't surprise us that it is going down fast and hard.

It can't go on. It won't. The attempts by the fundamentalists and racists and capitalists and jingoists to save it are futile and absurd, because their very efforts are just part of the drama of the collapse. At the same time, the urge to tear it down is just another role to play in the final act of the great drama.

We have a unique opportunity to step outside of the drama, that only comes once in a long while in history. We are in a civilization that is collapsing. We can't save it, we can't kill it. You might as well try to “help” a tidal wave or stop it.

What we can do, though, us plant the seeds for what comes next. It is not too early to start. I would cite the last great example of this from history, but since that is part of the drama of western civilization and we are all “against” western civilization, we would probably reject it as a model for us.

There is a lot to discuss. There is a lot of work to do. But we need to step off the sinking ship, figuratively speaking. There is a lot of tension for all of us because everything we see says that the ship is sinking, but we keep arguing about the best way to stop it from sinking, or among other groups they are arguing about plans for the future as though it isn't sinking. That causes a lot of tension and confusion and miscommunication.

Recognizing that the ship is sinking does not have to be depressing or discouraging – quite the opposite. To say “look at the murder and slavery and torture and lawlessness and environmental destruction and hatred” and then demand that we all put on a happy face and be positive is asking us to do something that we can't and shouldn't do. Nor should we give up and be without hope, though. Our hope is in something completely new while at the same time we don't kid ourselves about the dangers we are facing nor the probable hardships ahead.