Under the fake is more fake

Fake right down to the bottom.

Be inspired America.

If Burger King and McDonald’s had exactly the same menu at exactly the same prices then we’d have no illusion of choice. In fact, there may be a fast food item somewhere on some menu that is in fact a bit healthier or cheaper or somehow better but in general the fact that we have an obesity epidemic and that millions of people have low wage jobs are related to a fake system of choice in food.

The same goes for politics. We have Democratic and Republican parties. If they were exactly the same, it would be obvious we don’t live in a real democracy. So, Democrats, for example, are generally pro-choice while Republicans in general say they are pro-life.

Meanwhile, the basic law of the land, based on Roe v. Wade, hasn’t changed in 50 years. In the states, Republicans have pushed through some restrictions on abortion, enough to given them credibility with their base that they are indeed a pro-life party, but have not challenged the basic law of the land, that abortion is protected by a right to privacy.

The Republicans have had control of the Supreme Court for at least 25 years. To be politically correct in elite language we are supposed to call the justices on the Supreme Court “liberals” and “conservatives” but they are in fact Republicans and Democrats and get on the court, and then make rulings on the court, more or less the same way politicians get into the Senate.

The Republicans on the court have not touched Roe v. Wade. The national Republicans do not care about abortion. In fact, the situation is ideal for them. Do they want to inject any volatility into elections?

The two parties are running a business that is successful in doing what they want, allowing the power of money to flow into politics to the benefit of insiders and their friends. The system is working perfectly. They only want to manage the business, not start a new business, or change anything fundamental.

It must have really sucked to live in the Soviet block. Only one party. We, here in the US, have it SO much better. We have the Democrats, who support endless war in the Middle East, the Republicans, who support endless war in the Middle East. We have one party in favor of massive increases in defense spending and another party in favor or more massive increases in defense spending. We have one party in favor of banking deregulation and low taxes on the rich and another party in favor or more banking deregulation and even lower taxes on the rich.

What a great diversity of opinion. Well, we always have primaries where we can work out the factional differences so everyone gets their opinion heard, even those of us like me who think we need fundamental and revolutionary change. Here is the official DNC position filed under penalty of perjury in federal court on the primary system last week:

Neil Gorsuch got on the Supreme Court because he was shepherded along a judge pipeline by billionaires in the oil and gas industries. They tagged him, elevated him, and kept his career moving. His job on the court is to guarantee that labor and environmental conditions in the country favor large industries. Social issues like gay rights don’t figure in this equation.

On either end of any social issue, there are people who are willing to donate money and volunteer their time to either protect rights or abolish rights. The parties rile up their respective bases from time to time and Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitch McConnell don’t give a shit about these issues at all… as long as they keep getting rich.

And indeed, Obama has gotten quite rich quite quickly since leaving office. I guess not prosecuting anyone for the 2008 crash and handing CitiBank 470 billion in low interest loans, and letting Michael Froman vet his cabinet was a good move for his bottom line.

The pro-choice side will tell you that we are five days away from the apocalypse, that any minute now it will be back alley abortions and coat hangers. The pro-life side will tell you that it’s a baby holocaust going on right now. Meanwhile, the situation hasn’t actually changed much in 50 years, compared to how much everything else changed in those 50 years.

Well, that’s a wedge issue for you. That’s the way politics works, basic 101 electioneering. Yes, that’s how it works, if you live in a fake democracy.

By 1989, it was exceedingly obvious that the ideology of the Soviet block was utter nonsense. The people in power didn’t even bother to talk about “the proletariat” much. The truth was crystal clear: a small group of insiders was dominating society by brute force for their own benefit. So, the people rose up and tossed the system aside.

In China today, the same dynamic is more or less there — a small group of insiders is benefitting themselves and there is a clear threat of force to anyone challenging their position. The Chinese Communist Party has done a better job of cutting more more people into the system and channelling more sources of power into a consensus.

The United States is the most effective undemocratic oligarchic system of the three cases, way more effective than either the Soviet Union or modern China. Brilliantly, the United States has two parties instead of one. This difference alone accounts for much of the robustness of the US fraudulent tyranny. Also, the propaganda and ideological component of the US oligarchic system is far more pervasive and embedded in the minds of the populous than anything cooked up in China or the Soviet Union. Further, the US has done better than China, for now anyway, at offering consumer goods to the people. The US has a good system of private property ownership. All of this make people reluctant to rise up and feel they have some sort of stake in the status quo.

On the top level, however, decision making and resource allocation, how power is channelled and used, are really not very different in China and the US. Wall Street, military contractors, media companies, tech companies, oil and gas companies, spy agencies, and the military itself all operate in the US with little concern that anything that might happen in the electoral process or any information published publicly might somehow change policy. The priorities of the state are set by a negotiated and mediated process of sectors working together through nodes of power. John Podesta was a node of power and his email was published online, so we can see how this works in real time.

Really, we as a people should be at the wall, the gate, like the people of Eastern Europe, and rip this system down. We should never listen to the corporate media, or do so extremely critically. We have no constitutional protections while they, the elite, can break any law with no threat of consequences. Who went to jail for tanking the economy in 2008? For invading Iraq? For killing Qaddafi and blowing up Libya? For creating Isis? For torture? For the Panama Papers? For all those secret accounts at UBS? For fixing the election in 2016? For the water in Flint?

Meanwhile, there are 25 people walking around now who were exonerated from Death Row. They were convicted and sentanced to death, then later proof emerged they were innocent. For every person exonerated, a dozen innocent people were executed by the state. That’s our justice. Plant weed in your car, kill you for no reason. For them, they can do whatever they want.

It used to be that the Democrats and Republicans would rile up their respective bases with social issues, the media would put representatives of each party on television to pretend to be adversaries, and that would be it. Presto, democracy. Wise up. Rise up. It’s all fake.

The DNC admitted in their court papers last week that primaries do not have to be free and fair.