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Op-Ed: 2016 and the hysterical, mindless ugliness of American politics

Sanders has some good ideas, and Trump has unexpectedly rattled the smug GOP cage, a lot, but when all this talk gets to Congress, it’s going nowhere, and big divides in both parties won’t help. Congress goes where the money wants it to go, which is straight in to the same old pockets. The national interest is the last thing on anyone’s minds.
All the hysteria and hate is “deeply ingrained” and it’s just PR. Bernie Sanders was branded a “liberal weasel Jew who hates Christians and America” by somebody called Michael Savage — note the two standard right wing pejoratives, “liberal” and “Jew” and the standard “us words,” Christian and America. This is standard macro fodder in Obscene America. No “We the People” here; it’s “They the problems.” It’s brainwashing with sponsors. The country is basically falling to bits, one embarrassing debacle after another, but that just fuels more hype, never results and never change.
Domestic politics is an absurdly complex obscenity. The U.S. is now decades behind other Western nations. International politics is a clumsy afterthought, unless there’s a military contract in it somewhere, where a few more Americans can lose their lives fighting for Wall Street.
Congress is a shameless collection of duly elected corporate employees who basically push corporate agendas to the exclusion of all else. It’s a very cynical process. The various national disasters don’t get a mention except as “policy,” which is a meaningless word when nothing is ever done about actual problems.
For example:
Since 2000, 119,000 Americans have died from gun violence, with 294 mass shootings in 274 days of 2015. The Second Amendment doesn’t say anything about The Right to Massacre Your Fellow Americans, but what the hey?

Hospital bankruptcies
are now following personal medical bankruptcies to whatever oblivion awaits this policy-free, statement-free, zone.
Pharmaceutical prices are causing chaos for Americans on a routine basis — no action at all, except a theory of fixed prices and some hot air from those asked. This of course is sabotaging all types of medication insurance coverage, as well.
Now let’s look at a national double whammy as a political issue — poverty and chronic levels of obesity have now been linked in a new study by the CDC. Whole states are identified as major behavioral risk zones. Hearing anything about that from Politics R Our Gravy Train? No, of course not.
The welfare event horizon, over which Americans routinely disappear, has become ludicrously non-objective. The anti-government conservative states, in fact, have added bureaucracy to this blender, achieving nothing at great expense. Any word from Washington? Nope, as usual.
The state of the U.S. workplace is another no-go zone for Washington’s Furriest. Amazon and Apple are both accused of workplace horror stories. Workplace culture makes headlines daily around the nation, but not in the Big Money Laundry near Maryland. Not a peep out of anyone on either side.
Internationally, there’s America’s bad habits of losing wars, losing the peace, and funding its next set of enemies. Nothing to see here; move along.
The Pacific Free Trade Agreement allowing corporations to dictate national terms of free trade (literally) are carried out in secret. How could that be a problem, when everyone’s outsourced already? Not an issue for government, surely?
Education — who needs an education, when all you need is a phone? Will Washington seriously do anything about a multimillion-dollar line of credit to America’s next generations? Next question.
If conservatives are easy targets for anyone who can read and write, liberals and progressives have nothing to brag about, either. Reform isn’t happening. Change has stagnated in the delirium of DC’s babbling liar factories. In a dysfunctional system, they liberally and progressively refuse to go outside that system and do something themselves. If an old machine doesn’t work, you get a new one. If an old form of government doesn’t work, you somehow assume it will? What’s progressive, let alone liberal, about that?
The working theory is this — when America is governed by talentless losers, it loses. The last few decades of cowards, sycophants, and corporate vermin and their seemingly endless disasters is a good indication of how that theory works in practice. In the past, America quickly and easily eclipsed the rest of the world with its innovation, and the Land of Opportunity actually existed. Thirteen rustic backwater English colonies became a super power. The world’s best and brightest shone.
Is that the case now? Does anyone seriously believe the current crop of losers and gravy train riders has anything to offer to deal with the real issues? Bernie Sanders may be a nice guy, and Donald Trump may be able to browbeat some people in to action, but the machine is obsolete. From super power to stupor power has been the itinerary for nation lost in its own false imagery.
2016 won’t solve much, if anything, but it might create the drivers for change, simply to deal with the things the system refuses to deal with. The only real question is why anyone would want to preside over such a mess.

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Written By

Editor-at-Large based in Sydney, Australia.

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