Date: Tuesday, 03 September 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-predicament-of-the-american-voter
https://theduran.com/the-predicament-of-the-american-voter/
The Predicament of the American Voter
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
Is a country a democracy if there are multiple Parties, and all of them are controlled by the country’s billionaires, who by means of their political donations and their news-media and their think tanks, etc., determine which candidates will and which won’t become able to be nominated by those Parties, so that the voters will always be choosing ONLY from candidates who have the support of at least one of the billionaires? This is today’s America, and has been ever since, at least, 1980. It is also the situation in all of America’s colonies (or ‘allies’), and the ideology for it is called “neoliberalism” for domestic policies, and “neoconservatism” for foreign policies. All of the two American political Parties present only neoliberal domestic policies and neoconservative foreign policies, as a result. And this means that whatever voters are (despite all the propaganda from the billionaires’ news-media etcetera) NOT both neoliberal and neoconservative, simply cannot be represented in the Government — cannot become the nominee of either of the two Parties, the Democratic or the Republican, Party. And this is the predicament of the American voter. It is also the predicament of the voter in each of America’s colonies (because the imperial power controls each one of its colonies’ government — especially regarding foreign policies, and this is what makes it BE a colony — and, so, in ANY empire, none of the colonies possesses sovereignty over its land. In any colony, sovereignty is in the hands of the individuals who control the imperial country).
The cover-story headline for the latest (September 6/September 13, 2024) issue of THE WEEK magazine is “The new brand: Can Democrats win as a patriotic, hawkish party? p.6” The article inside is “Harris: Will her patriotic pitch win over the center?” Their “patriotic” is instead actually nationalistic; and, so, the subterranean message that the publisher is conveying is that anyone who hasn’t already been suckered by America’s Military-Industrial Complex (MTC) to respect America’s military more than any other branch of the U.S. Government (including local government), isn’t “patriotic” (in other words, the message is that nationalism IS patriotism, and that any opposition to America’s MIC is un-“patriotic”). The article inside the magazine summarizes the opinions of two prominent neocons, Bill Kristol at The Bulwark, and Fred Kaplan at Slate, and of two less-extreme neocons, Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post. Whereas Bunch objected to Harris’s having “ignored calls to include a Palestinian speaker,” none of the other excerpted commentators objected to anything. All of the summarized commentators were entirely okay with continuing the post-9/11 permanent-warfare state and America’s annual $1.5 trillion in the Government’s total military expenses (an amount equal to that of all 200 other nations combined). This is how extreme America’s Government and its ‘news’-media actually are.
The rest of the magazine is likewise favorable toward the Democratic Party, and unfavorable toward the Republican Party (such as by quoting “Rebecca Traister in New York magazine” against “the GOP’s toxic hypermasculity” versus the Democratic Party’s “different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation”). Everything is bumper-stickers, ranked in priority, with the least important being given the top priority (in order to encourage the public’s confusion). The second leading headline on the magazine’s cover is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Will his exit help Trump? p.17,” and it headlines inside “RFK Jr.: Will his endorsement matter?”. The closing paragraph says, “With his craven capitulation to Trump, Kennedy becomes unworthy of his name, said his brother Max Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times,” and the other excerpted articles were likewise against both RFK Jr. and Trump, so as to make Harris seem better. The magazine contains nothing about RFK Jr.’s eloquent 48-minute speech explaining why he was endorsing Trump, but that speech, which he made on August 23rd, was a bipartisan condemnation of BOTH Parties, and of the deeply corrupt neocon take-over of post-WW2 America, a take-over which he described both Robert F. Kennedy and JFK as having turned against in the month before JFK was assassinated, and which he hopes that Trump will fight to reverse, and in which he explains why he is certain that today’s Democratic Party won’t reverse it. But his speech was much more than that — it was a detailed description of America’s increasing turn, since then, to Deep State control by America’s billionaires, utter corruption throughout the U.S. Government. I consider it the greatest progressive speech in modern times, but America’s media (except for two local TV stations) ignored it.
After that speech, RFK Jr. emailed to a few people whom he thought might find it of interest, an email that he had received, which had this picture headlined “24 Years of Putin” extending from 1999 just before he entered office, up till the latest calculated year, 2023, and (along with the sender’s note that, “I am not a fan of Putin. This is interesting if it’s true.”) here is what it showed:
1999 - 2023
GDP $196B - $2,215B
GDP per person $1,331 - $14,404
Inflation 36.56% - 3.51%
Gold F Ex Reserves $12.6B - $600.8B
Debt 92.1% GDP - 23% GDP
I replied:
Thanks. I dealt with this from a different angle by using World Bank figures:
Scott Ritter replied:
The critical thing here is not whether or not Americans should be fans of Putin, but to better understand why the Russian people are.
These statistics speak for themselves.
Now ask yourself why in God’s name do we think pursuing policies that seek to remove this Russian success story from power have a snowball’s chance in hell of success?
We should be tapping into Russia’s economic capacity to help grow our own.
More commercial interoperability, less military expenditure, more economic and physical security.
And, to Ritter’s comment, RFK Jr. replied:
Exactly.
I did some more research regarding the initial commenter’s question, “This is interesting if it’s true.” I found
Abstract. Due to the approach of 2024, when, under the current Constitution of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin will not be able to run for President, conceptual issues related to the results of the country’s development in the 21st century and, most importantly, its prospects for the coming decades, are becoming more acute. …
It included, as “Table 1,” remarkable polling results that showed the Russian people to have had consistently a “level of trust” above 50% and below 60% in Putin, while the level of trust was consistently below 50% in all other institutions, not only Governmental, but local government, church, schools, military, police, executives, entrepreneurs, banks, nonprofits, etc. So far as I am aware, no U.S. President in modern times — at least since JFK — has been trusted by more than 50% of the American people; but Putin has consistently by the Russian people — and yet the U.S. Government might go into a WW3 in order to overthrow and replace him. How sick is that?
This additional information places an exclamation point upon Ritter’s comment that, “Now ask yourself why in God’s name do we think pursuing policies that seek to remove this Russian success story from power have a snowball’s chance in hell of success?”
Inasmuch as Kamala Harris is at least as committed to continuing the neocon war to regime-change Putin as President Biden is, while Trump (as usual) has expressed only bumper-sticker opinions about that crucial matter, I feel that the predicament of the American voter right now is that though Harris would certainly be a dangerous (in the sense of causing WW3) President, Trump might also be.
On the other WW3 issues, which include America’s objective to grab control over Taiwan, and America’s objective to again grab control over (if not to destroy) Iran, both of the major Parties’ nominees appear to be entirely unacceptable — committed neocons.
And, as regards to domestic issues, both of America’s Parties are actually neoliberals — favoring aristocracy instead of democracy (or one-dollar-one-vote, instead of one-person-one-vote), the differences between them are, by now, merely cosmetic.
There is little reason to expect that — RFK Jr. notwithstanding — control of this country by the billionaires is going to stop. A second American revolution seems unlikely.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
