Classic Liberal Blog

Yes, elections are important. Yes, there are some worthy candidates who need support. Yet I continue to find it difficult, near impossible really, to drum up any excitement over the coming election. I have run out of patience with partisan-boosterism.

"We the People" are facing an economic collapse that will last for years, probably decades, perpetrated by the Democratic and Republican Party Elites BOTH. Neither is innocent. Neither merely negligent. They are criminals who fed themselves and their protected banking cartel at our expense.

The Age of Mammon

As our economy hurtles towards its meeting with destiny, the political class seeks to assign blame on their enemies for this Greater Depression. The Republicans would like you to believe that Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank and their Community Reinvest Act caused the collapse of our financial system. Democrats want you to believe that George Bush and his band of unregulated free market capitalists created a financial disaster of epic proportions. The truth is that America has been captured by a financial class that makes no distinction between parties. These barbarians have sucked the life out of a once productive nation by raping and pillaging with impunity while enriching only them. They live in 20,000square foot $10 million mansions in Greenwich, CT and in $3 million dollar penthouses on Central Park West.

These are the robber barons that represent the Age of Mammon. The greed, avarice, gluttony and acute materialism of these American traitors has not been seen in this country since the 1920's. The hedge fund managers and Wall Street bank executives that occupy the mansions and penthouses evidently don't find much time to read the bible in their downtime from raping and pillaging the wealth of the middle class. There are cocktail parties and $5,000 a plate political "fundraisers" to attend. You can't be cheap when buying off your protection in Washington DC.

You Call This Capitalism?

Capitalism is supposed to be an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned and operated for profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are not made by the government; Profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses. The American economy is in no way a free market capitalistic system. It has become a oligarchic consumer capitalist society that is manipulated, in a deliberate and coordinated way, on a very large scale, through mass-marketing techniques, to the advantage of Wall Street and mega-corporations.

America. Please wake-up! Partisan-boosterism is a fool's game. A cruel joke played at our expense.

America's Ruling Class

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust.

When it comes to Republican vs. Democrat, "choice" is but an illusion.

Republican Or Democrat Does Not Equal “Choice” At The Polls

Grocery stores confuse me and I tend to stay out of department stores for fear of getting lost ...

So why is it that when I vote in America, I’m dumbfounded by the lack of choice?

Let’s see; I can choose a Democrat…or a Republican…a Democrat…or a Republican…a Democrat…or a Republican.

Some choice. It’s like voting for the devil or his twin brother. And always it makes me feel discouraged, as if knowing that neither choice will bring the change I hope for locally and in Washington. I’ll be forty-three years old on Wednesday, July 14th, and having voted for twenty-five years, I come to find that I’ve never voted for anyone I thought was a good choice.

I’m supposed to have choices ... But time after time, the choice I’m left with is (R) or (D). Like I said, some choice.

It’s not a choice. It has the illusion of choice, but it’s not really a choice. If it were, we might be able to trust a politician when he says he’s an outsider and he’ll change things. But when I look at that guy and see a (D) or an (R) behind his name, I know that no change is coming. That guy is a Democrat, or a Republican. If you think he’s suddenly going to have new ideas and new values, you are crazy. I’ve been watching these guys for twenty-five years. I’ve been waiting for the guy who actually carried the mantel that went with the words for that long. I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard all of the “I’m different!” speeches that I care to. I heard the first words out President Obama’s mouth the night he won the White House, “Change has come to America!”

No, it hasn’t.

It's this illusion of choice that perpetuates our problems. As long as "our" team controls the levers of power, whatever they do is okay. Constitution? The left only likes it when Republicans are in power, and the right only likes when Democrats are in power.

We can't criticize "our" president, now can we?

Partisan-boosterism is the road to ruin. "If you do not believe this, then you are a sheep for the shearing -- and then, after several shearings, the roasting. You are on some politician's menu."

The following is Murray Rothbard on the revolutionary election of 1994.

The November Memorandum

[T]he meaning of the truly revolutionary election of 1994 is clear to anyone who has eyes to see and is willing to use them: it was a massive and unprecedented public repudiation of President Clinton, his person, his personnel, his ideologies and programs, and all of his works; plus a repudiation of Clinton's Democrat Party; and, most fundamentally, a rejection of the designs, current and proposed, of the Leviathan he heads.

In effect, the uprising of anti-Democrat and anti-Washington, D.C., sentiment throughout the country during 1994 found its expression at the polls in November in the only way feasible in the social context of a mass democracy: by a sweeping and unprecedented electoral revolution repudiating Democrats and electing Republicans. It was an event at least as significant for our future as those of 1985–1988 in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, which in retrospect revealed the internal crumbling of an empire.

Again, it should be clear that what is being rejected is big government in general (its taxing, mandating, regulating, gun grabbing, and even its spending) and, in particular, its arrogant ambition to control the entire society from the political center. Voters and taxpayers are no longer persuaded of a supposed rationale for American-style central planning.

But then he warned ...

But there are great problems and resistances ahead. It is vital that we prepare for them and be able to deal with them. Rolling back statism is not going to be easy. The Marxists used to point out, from long study of historical experience, that no ruling elite in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power; or, more correctly, that a ruling elite has only been toppled when large sectors of that elite, for whatever reasons, have given up and decided that the system should be abandoned.

The imminent problem facing the new American Revolution is all too similar: that, while using the inspiring rhetoric of freedom, tax-cuts, decentralization, individualism, and a rollback to small government, the Republican Party elites will be performing deeds in precisely the opposite direction. In that way, the fair rhetoric of freedom and small government will be used, to powerful and potentially disastrous effect, as a cover for cementing big government in place, and even for advancing us in the direction of collectivism.

Since World War II, and especially since the 1950s, the function of the Republican Party has been to be the "loyal," "moderate," "bi-partisan," pseudo-opposition to the collectivist and leftist program of the Democratic Party. Unlike the more apocalyptic and impatient Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks (or social democrats, or corporate liberals, or "responsible" liberals, or "responsible" conservatives, or neo-conservatives – the labels change, but the reality remains the same) try to preserve an illusion of free choice for the American public, including a two-party system, and at least marginal freedom of speech and expression.

The goal of these "responsible" or "enlightened" moderates has been to participate in the march to statism, while replacing the older American ideals of free markets, private property, and limited government with cloudy and noisy rhetoric about the glories of "democracy," as opposed to the one-party dictatorship of the Soviet Union.

The Parasitic Elite

After all, the disjunction between rhetoric and reality can become embarrassing, even aggravating, and can eventually lose the elites the support of the party rank-and-file, as well as the general public. So why indulge in the rhetoric at all? Goldwater supporter Phyllis Schlafly famously called for a "choice, not an echo"; but why does the Establishment allow radical choices, even in rhetoric?

The answer is that large sections of the public opposed the New Deal, as well as each of the advances to collectivism since then. The rhetoric is not empty for much of the public, and certainly not for most of the activists of the Republican Party. They seriously believe the anti–big-government ideology. Similarly, much of the rank-and-file, and certainly the activist Democrats, are more openly, more eagerly, collectivist than the Democrat elite, or the Demopublican elite, would desire.

Furthermore, since government interventionism doesn't work, since it is despotic, counter-productive, and destructive of the interests of the mass of the people, advancing collectivism will generate an increasingly hostile reaction among the public, what the media elites sneer at as a "backlash."

In particular, collectivist, social democratic rule destroys the prosperity, the freedom, and the cultural, social, and ethical principles and practices of the mass of the American people, working and middle classes alike. Rule by the statist elite is not benign or simply a matter of who happens to be in office: it is rule by a growing army of leeches and parasites battening off the income and wealth of hard-working Americans, destroying their property, corrupting their customs and institutions, sneering at their religion.

The ultimate result must be what happens whenever parasites multiply at the expense of a host: at first gradual descent into ruin, and then finally collapse. (And therefore, if anyone cares, destruction of the parasites themselves.)

Hence, the ruling elite lives chronically in what the Marxists would call an "inner contradiction": it thrives by imposing increasing misery and impoverishment upon the great majority of the American people.

The parasitic elite, even while ever increasing, has to comprise a minority of the population, otherwise the entire system would collapse very quickly. But the elite is ruling over, and demolishing, the very people, the very majority, who are supposed to keep these destructive elites perpetually in power by periodic exercise of their much-lauded "democratic" franchise. How do the elites get away with this, year after year, decade after decade, without suffering severe retribution at the polls?

The real political divide in America is between the Ruling Class and the Country Class.

Severe crisis is our future.

• America is no longer the land of the free.
• Corporatocracy Has Replaced Capitalism.
• More bailouts ahead!
• The country adds $4 Billion per day to the National Debt
• Collapse is just a matter of time

Yet, a stupid frickin' mosque remains the talk of the town, and let's not forget gay marriage ... IF the government would just "do something" ... at least if those good, wholesome Republicans ...

It's a fool's game for the masses. A cruel, sick joke.