The 2014 Midterm Elections have now ended with predictably sad results. In reality, it could not have been otherwise. Even the best imaginable outcome within the range of realistic possibilities would have been at best disturbing.
My fundamental distress over the current political universe is this: I perceive a broad spectrum of current problems and looming crises in the nation and the world. These growing threats range from the suppression of popular dissent by means of mass surveillance and militarized police forces to epidemic levels of environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change. This lethal combination is poised to destroy not just our species, but the Earth’s biosphere. Few if any politicians are taking any of these matters seriously, mostly because they owe their souls to greedy and apparently overwhelmingly powerful forces that have chosen to let their own short-term selfishness determine the course of our future.
These forces, the international corporations and banks, now control all aspects of our government, from the courts to the Statehouses, and are forcing their tentacles ever downward into ever smaller units of local government such as county and town boards and local school boards. This unseen and unelected oligarchy controls the mass media, which it uses to censor and distort information and mold public opinion as it chooses. The oligarchy is currently grasping for control of the Internet to complete its control of access to public opinion and eliminate the last channels of dissent.
The oligarchs are not monolithic in their interests; some, for whatever reason, have culturally liberal values and are tolerant of gay rights, reproductive choice, and drug legalization, while others have made alliance with culturally conservative social and religious movements that would prefer to suppress these social liberties.
Likewise, the economic overlords seem to be somewhat divided in their opinions on the desirability of continuous warfare, and this schism has been sufficient to permit the current administration to avoid armed conflict with Syria and Iran so far, although the hawks have so far had their way with Afghanistan, and the Islamic State is providing a rationale for entering a new conflict of undefined boundaries and proportions in the Middle East.
It is within the crevices that divide the oligarchs that our political parties are allowed to have their differences with each other. The liberals fight for social liberties, and the conservatives struggle to enforce their view of morality. With few exceptions (minimum wage perhaps being one), no issue is permitted to rise into public attention if it is opposed by a consensus of oligarchs.
It is not correct to say that there is no difference between the parties; clearly, there is, particularly on the previously mentioned issues of individual liberty. However, the differences that do exist are too small, and do not begin to span the range of critical issues that the world faces. Climate change, for example, was not even mentioned in the 2012 Presidential debates, and members of both parties are all too willing to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry. Both parties have been complicit in the growth of the Surveillance State. Both have actively worked to replace a public education system and an educated populace that were once the pride of the world with a privatized system of narrow vocational education that produces heavily indentured drones trained to unquestioningly take up roles as cogs in the industrial machine, with an infirm and largely inaccurate knowledge base that precludes them from seeing or thinking beyond the narrow boundaries of the world as defined by Fox News, Facebook, and reality TV.
The problems we face are so severe, and the time remaining to address them so short, that I despair of the power of politics as usual to even begin to address them. Further, I believe that these problems cannot effectively be addressed piecemeal. Either we quickly and decisively gain control over the Corporate State that threatens to overrun us, or we will be crushed beneath the massive weight of power-mad forces that are so short-sighted as not to see that their own doom will follow shortly upon ours.
Where are the politicians who will take on the Evil Empire?