America's sugar high of "armed" lies, deception, disinformation, denial and devolution

 This morning’s news from Republican Minority Leader, Mike McCarthy, that should his party secure the majority in the House of Representatives, in the November election, they will cut (if not discontinue) support for The Ukraine, is a bombshell that needs to be heard around the world. Almost at the same time as this utterance was hitting the airwaves, Putin, himself, declared Marshall Law in the four “annexed” provinces in East Ukraine.

It is not only disconcerting that McCarthy (drugged by trump) would have fallen so limply and distractedly into the seductive trap of the former president, and Putin ally, it is almost impossible to think that the two announcements were not co-ordinated in some manner. Conspiracy theories are a “drink” from which I prefer to abstain; however, it appears that nothing, literally nothing is outside the realm of the possible, especially what would normally be considered “worst case scenario”.

Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) tweets, (from The Hill, in a piece by Emily Brooks, entitled, McCarthy defends ‘blank check’ remark on Ukraine, 10/19/22):

(Republicans) “want to cast aside American global leadership at a time when we should do the exact opposite.”…(Also from The Hill, “In May, 57 House Republicans voted against a $40 billions  security supplemental for Ukraine.”

There are, it is true, some Republicans who continue to support Ukraine, especially in the U.S, Senate. However, there is an American election in a few weeks, which, if current polls continue to hold and the trend favouring Republican control of both the House and the Senate proves to be contained in the election results, it is not only the U.S. that will be in extreme jeopardy. The whole world will experience a political shock that could eclipse that “shock and awe” George W. Bush expressed over this anticipated glee in initiating the Iraq war.

Yesterday, a reputable polling report indicated that 71% of American voters consider their own democracy to be in peril, while the same poll showed only a mere 7% were considering that fact to be one on which to cast a ballot to address. Economic issues including the astronomic prices of gas, food, housing are trending as “kitchen-table” issues that drive voters to mark their ballots. A devolving democracy, as the American union is indisputably, positioned immediately adjacent to the pressing domestic ‘cost of living’ issues, in the midst of a horrendous Ukraine war that has serious repercussions on inflation and those same prices for everyone around the world, seems to be rendering those responding to pollsters, opting for the punishment of the Democrats, and Biden, as the ‘perceived cause’ of the current economic crunch. Of course, they know that Biden himself, and the Democrats too, have taken considered legislative steps to soften the burden of rising prices, including tapping into the oil reserves, to help cushion gas prices. However, given that the country is undergoing a scorched-earth zero-sum game of political parties, in which one party has a single goal, taking back power for themselves, while the other attempts to govern, the question of who survives the “internal political war” seems to many observers, a foregone conclusion: that Republicans will likely be in the majority in both House and Senate.

With some 399 candidates currently running for seats at both state and national levels, many of them seeking Secretary of State offices in various states, all of whom are dubbed “election deniers” in that they fully support trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from their “leader” through fraudulent votes, a claim rejected by over 60 American courts, presided over in many cases by trump appointees, and national polls showing the Republicans over all to have a 2% lead in popularity over the Democrats, many of these election deniers will hold office after the election. And that result will catapult McCarthy into his “dream” job as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Voters who can and do endorse what is almost without dispute, what amounts to an illiterate candidate in Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and also who campaign to enact or pass laws in State legislatures that ban abortion outright, with no exceptions, give pause not only to other American observers and voters. They prompt outsiders, like this Canadian, to gasp in cynical horror at the prospect of an ex-president who escapes legal arrest and sentencing and a mob of his cult taking over the U.S. government after the November vote, and then paving the way for his own return to the White House in 2024. While that may seem like a dystopian and demonic scenario, today, it is clearly not outside the realm of both the possible and the feasible.

Voters who turn a blind eye to the personal positions of many of the trump acolytes, like seeking election in order to determine the results of elections, like outlawing abortion everywhere, like defunding medicare, social security, and other social-assistance programs, and generally do little to nothing to neutralize the inflationary pressures that all Americans (and Canadians, and Brits, and French, and Germans, and Italians, and Poles and Swedes and Finns and ….and….) are having to endure, seems to this observer to be a blatant and venal political “death wish” to the institutional stability and establishment that has been a cornerstone of American democracy, through the good faith and works of both Republican and Democractic parties for well over two hundred years. Post-modernism may have ushered in a post-truth tolerance of political rhetoric that is now totally unhinged from all of what once were the agreed guardrails of facts, on which politicians could and did debate, only after agreeing with the core data that served as the foundations for those debates. We have long ago moved out of a political culture that had and demonstrated honour, respect and dignity both for a body of facts and especially for one’s political opponent. There once was a kind of ‘chivalric’ and predictable and guard-railed cautionary public consciousness, both among candidates and among their electors, that served as a neutralizing chemical “base” for the virulent and acidic rhetoric of hate and the weaponizing of words, ideas, thoughts and especially human beings.

There is, so far as this limited observer can tell, no recruitment office seducing recruits into a political warfare that know and observes and respects no boundaries on whatever is uttered both in campaigns and in the daily hurly-burly of scrums and interviews and pontifications following the votes. Funded primarily in secret by those flush with cash and an over-weeing obsessive desire and will to take control of  the public’s business, overtly, blatantly and narcissistically to enhance the right (not responsibility) of all businesses to effectively control the public agenda in favour of those businesses and their operators who fall in line with the profit motive, to the exclusion of all else. Issues that threaten the air we breathe, for example, wilt under the demand for more removal of restrictions on pollution by private business, coal-fired electricity plants are left free from the obligation to the public interest to either clean their emissions or shutter. Even the Potomac River suffers, right in the heart of the capital, from overflowing sewage that demands daily and hourly monitoring, without effective legislation to punish and thereby reform polluters.

Women daily and even hourly are expressing their shared fear and desperation that, should they have, for example, an ectopic pregnancy and need medical attention, it might not be available in time for their life to be saved. Others, like young girls of ten who have been raped, are facing the prospect of having to travel out of their home state, already, in pursuit of a needed abortion. The theocratic Supreme Court in shoving the question of a woman’s right to choose back to the states, effectively declared the United States both un-united, divided, and tragically and openly torn-apart, after fifty years of what became accepted public policy and practice, access to medical, and ethical abortions if and when needed. Marco Rubio, just last night, declared his opponent, Val Demings, for the Senate seat in Florida, to be the “ extreme candidate” in this election, reversing the word extreme which has been sewn on the consciences and lapels of pro-life candidates. Rubio’s flipped use of the word “extreme” came in confrontation of Deming’s position that, according to him “She supports no restriction, no limitation of any kind…she supports taxpayer funded abortion..up until the moment of birth.(from Politico, today) Axios reports, today, “Demings said she supports abortion access up until the fetus “viability” but did not specify what restrictions she would support.” This war over abortion, and it can only be considered a political war, has already generated casualties in the medical arena. Doubtless, there will be political casualties evident after the November vote.

And while the right to choose is a hot-button political issue, just as is the state of the democracy, voters are likely to be swayed into a short-term, vindictive and arguably unreasonable vote for the Republicans in many cases, given that “anger” and “revenge” and the “shoot-out” archetype analogous to the wild-west tales of the frontier are the emotional and psychic models that govern the American psyche…

War….guns….the second amendment, Florida’s ‘stand your ground’ law…anti-wokeness….anti-establishment(arianism)….lawlessness and the free speech that takes to the street, armed without concern for the casualties, all in pursuit of small or no government (or the cult leader trump back in power)…..all of these vacuous cliches could be the litmus test for the November elections…and whatever policies and programs and legislation and promises offered by the Democrats will land like powder-puffs in the face of millions of voters who have already decided that “raw power” in the form of the trump cabal is preferred to the more restrained, thoughtful, often rational and compassionate, long-term approach that undergirds, for example, the infrastructure and inflation legislation that seeks to restore the thousands of decrepit bridges, airports, ports and rail lines across the country.

Instant gratification, regardless of the form it takes, especially when fueled by intense, irrational and uncontrolled vindictive anger, especially when it is armed with AK-47’s and AR-15’s.....is a force with which no government anywhere is prepared or capable of neutralizing…it is a force that slides along the corridors of every mall, and into every coffee shop, and out into the bars and casinos’ and into the armouries, and apparently also into some of the private homes and hearts of FBI recruits, whose participation in the January 6 insurrection has yet to be clarified, and potentially prosecuted.

Just how rotten is the state of America? It seems that the evidence, like a volcano waiting to erupt, continues to heat up, spill over in trickles, while the world audience, already historically conditioned to expect the most dramatic (even if melo-dramatic) of dramas to emerge not only from the American theatre, but also, more recently, from the American political operatives.

And, as some cheap, and cunning and schemeing local politicians of my acquaintance were wont to say, ‘I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right!”….and drama, especially of the tabloid-fixated variety, serves as a magnet both for the participants starved for public attention, even if it is notoriety, and for the spectators whose lives seem to need, even depend, upon a little salacious spice for their psychic survival.

Policy, and policy wonks, historians and political theorists, even marketers and advertising guru’s, and also those seeking the public approval and potential income of public office….they all in effect defer to the deep and unbridled and unleashed animalistic instincts for a “bite of the sugary donut of power” as a path to satisfy even the most desperate and demonic of needs.

Nevertheless, that instant ‘sugar high’ is ‘no way to run a railroad’ in America or anywhere else!

Has anyone checked the commodity price on sugar lately? Currently $0.1870 per pound… with a forecast rise of 4% y/y, with support measures from the American government and expected sufficient global supply,. Last year, the average retail refined sugar price in America jumped by 8% y/y to 68.4 cents per pound. (globalnewswire.com)