No Matter Who Wins the White House, Americans Lose

Are you as nauseated, saddened, horrified and disgusted by this Presidential election campaign as I am? In one generation, mine, this country has gone from the world’s beacon of democracy and prosperity to the giant village idiot bumbling and stumbling incoherently around the planet, an untethered corporate mascot gone berserk.

With the ascension of Trump, our election process has become an international joke, and other countries look at us with pity and sadness as they watch a once admired champion lean helplessly against the ropes, punch-drunk and bran damaged, in what is surely its final round.

We are here today thanks to greed, plain and simple. Despite a booming economy and a real chance for citizens to live the American dream, the military/industrial/media complex of the 1960s/70s, like Frankenstein’s monster suddenly realizing it has superhuman strength, woke up to its horrible potential to influence this country’s political process through its wealth and connections to America’s elites. The ball really got rolling during the Reagan administration with its tax cuts for the wealthy and, despite sixteen years of Democratic rule, the trajectory has been downhill ever since.

Having destroyed America’s middle class, stretched income inequality to ludicrous extremes and purchased the two major political parties, the wealthy elites are surely enjoying the spectacle we serfs naively call a democratic election. The reality is, they don’t care who is crowned President. The oily, snake-tongued Trump is one of their members, as is the neo-liberal Clinton. Neither candidate is a threat to the current hegemony that is pulling this country beneath the surface like a weight tied around its ankles.

The corporate media dutifully continues its assigned goal of making the Presidential campaign look like a race when it is actually more like a horrific automobile accident from which we can’t avert our eyes. Our elections have turned into a dark spectacle, a cirque du macabre of huge laughing orange faces, cackling countesses and obese promoters counting their stacks of coins backstage. We willingly pay the price of admission while they laugh at our gullibility from behind the curtains, filling their vaults with our hard earned cash.

This election year, regardless of who moves into the White House, Americans will lose, and despite being conned once again, their attention will be drawn to the shiny object the media tells them is the next big thing.