The walking bridge in Chattanooga is full of pedestrians during a holiday crowd, many of whose members believe GOP control of the U.S. senate is important.
Charles Hugh Smith
Please don’t claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional.
If you really think it matters which political party controls the U.S. Senate, please answer these questions. Don’t worry, they’re not that difficult:
1. Will U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast change from being an incoherent pastiche of endless war and Imperial meddling? Please answer with a straight face. We all know the answer is that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, Presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.
2. Will basic civil liberties be returned to the citizenry? You know, like the cops are no longer allowed to steal your cash when they stop you for a broken tail light and claim the cash was going to be used for a drug deal.
Or some limits on domestic spying by central state agencies. You know, basic civil liberties as defined by the bill of rights and the U.S. constitution.
Don’t make me laugh — you know darned well that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.
3. Will the predatory, parasitic policies of the Federal Reserve that virtually everyone from the Wall Street Journal to what little remains of the authentic left understands has greatly increased income and wealth inequality be reined in?Please don’t claim either party has any will or interest in limiting the Fed’s rapacious financialization. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim — it is pure wishful thinking.
4. Will the steaming pile of profiteering, corruption, waste, fraud and ineptitude that is sickcare in the U.S. be truly reformed so its costs drop by 50 percent to match what every other developed democracy spends per person on universal healthcare? It doesn’t matter if ObamaCare is repealed or not; that monstrosity was simply another layer of bureaucratic waste on an already hopelessly dysfunctional system.
If you answer “yes” please run a body scan on yourself to detect the biochips that were implanted while you voted Demopublican.
5. Will the influence of Big Money be well and truly banned from politics? If you answer yes, please pick up your tin-foil hat at the door.
6. Will the incentives in the Status Quo be reset to punish rapacious financialization and gaming the system and reward productive investment and labor? Before you answer, check out who’s buttering the Senators’ bread. Hint: Wall Street does not qualify as productive unless we’re talking about the production of life-draining parasites. Virtually none of the vast armies of skimmers and scammers, from those pursuing bogus disability claims to lobbyist leeches, will suffer any consequence.
Moral hazard is the status quo’s prime directive.
7. Will anything be done to dismantle the neofeudal debt-serfdom known as student loans? You are delusional if you think either party has any interest in limiting the predation of an academic upper caste that came to do good and stayed to do well.
Used by permission. Charles Hugh Smith is the author of the oftwominds.com blog, No. 7 in CNBC’s top alternative financial sites, and seven books on our economy and society, including Get a Job, Build a Real Career, Defy a Bewildering Economy, Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It and The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education. His work is published on a number of popular financial websites including Zero Hedge, Financial Sense, and David Stockman’s Contra Corner. Here is our review of Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change.
