America’s Presidential Elections: Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic. “The Ship is Sinking, Everyone Knows That”
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The 2024 US presidential election is raising a degree of excitement in certain quarters.
Witness the chilling performance of 81-year-old President Joe Biden at the March 6, 2024, State of the Union address, with Kamala Harris popping up every 15 seconds or so to lead the clattering Congresspersons in feverish applause.
The message? President Joe Biden “will not bow down.” Nancy Pelosi called the spectacle “a master class.” Others called it another example of “Dark Brandon.”
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump cheers on Israel in its assaults on the Palestinians, while his chorus of “deplorables” hoot and holler from the audience pit and Merrick Garland rounds up even more January 6 “rioters” to throw behind bars. Meanwhile, Fani Willis and Jack Smith sweat bullets over giving Trump his “day in court.” Meanwhile the Supreme Court, fresh off a 9-0 decision to allow Trump ballot access, lurks.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., asserts he will make a difference, because he offers the voters a “choice.” Kennedy says: “No more Open Borders. No more Medical Lock-Downs. No more Debt. No more illegal Deep State Surveillance on US Citizens. No more Obstruction of Justice. No more Race Riots. No more Cover-Ups. No more Foreign War.” Sounds good, but can he even get on enough state ballots to compete, especially on a shoe-string budget depleted by the price of security after Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas’s refusal of Secret Service protection? Kennedy has also alienated many would-be supporters by his failure to work for a just peace over the Gaza crisis.
No offense, but Cornel West has long since said anything impactful.
Finally, Jill Stein, the Green, calls out the war machine in her lonely voice that was yet potent enough eight years ago to earn a taste of Hillary Clinton’s spleen, who claimed that Jill was yet another of Putin’s ubiquitous secret agents.
Then there’s the mysterious “No Labels” candidate, another attempt by a few vain money-bags at trotting a “spoiler” across the stage.
And where, oh where, is Col. Douglas MacGregor?
Of course, close to half the electorate will not even bother to vote. And honestly, why should they?
The ship is sinking—everyone knows that.
Meanwhile, the Neocons (remember PNAC?) press remorselessly for World War III against a) “the Putin” b) Xi and/or c) BRICS, Iran, the Axis of Resistance and anyone else who “will not bow down.”
And we haven’t even touched on the question of what exactly are President Joe Biden’s millions of illegals here for?
So my question is, how will the deck chairs be arranged on the deck of the Titanic the morning after election day?
Assuming there is an election day.
I am going to try to give a short answer to the question of what is really going on here?
Let’s start with the obvious fact that sitting at the top of Western society—at the pinnacle of the Empire’s elite—are a small number of very rich people who seem to get richer and richer with every twist and turn of events.
These people have under their control a financial system that runs by lending businesses and people money—putting them into more and more debt.
They do this by lending money they do not have at rates of interest that used to be called “usury”; and sometimes still is, in the case of 22.75% APR credit card rates. They create this money “out of thin air” through a privilege called “fractional reserve banking.”
It has long been known that the overall effect of usury is gradually to suck all the available money in circulation into the financiers’ own hands.
When the society where they reside goes broke, in spite of citizens’ best efforts to survive by climbing the earnings heap, the money-lenders go to war and take over other nations and suck all of their available money into their own bank accounts.
The people who were divinely inspired to create the Judeo-Christian religion understood all this, which is why both the Old and New Testaments forbade usury.
Many have believed it’s why Jesus drove the money-changers from the Temple, an incident the Bible suggests was the last straw for the priests and Pharisees who had lapsed from their own ancient faith. The Islamic religion also condemns usury.
This is why the medieval church outlawed usury, creating one of the most happy and prosperous societies on record during the High Middle Ages. It’s why Shakespeare wrote, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and why America’s greatest sage, Benjamin Franklin, wrote, “Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.”
It’s why Abraham Lincoln spent Greenbacks into circulation during the Civil War rather than borrow from the New York and London banks. It’s why hundreds of American businesses and communities created scrip currency throughout the 19th century and began to do it again during the Great Depression.
It’s also why a few hardy souls today created Bitcoin, or trade through barter associations, or have conducted various experiments in local currency. It’s why anyone else who wishes to protect themselves or their families will get out of debt as soon as possible, though many others cling to a semblance of prosperity by gaming the system—often to the detriment of other members of society.
Among the most predatory of game-players are the vulture capitalists who take out millions in short-term loans for “leveraged buyouts,” where they fire most of the employees and strip the assets, then saddle the business remnant with the debt that sinks the entire enterprise. As bad are boards of directors who borrow money for stock buybacks to enrich themselves, their hedge fund partners, and the top corporate executives. This is what weapons manufacturers are doing with Congressional appropriations supposedly to create American jobs and help Ukraine.
It’s also a fact that every business trying to stay in existence does its best to avoid debt. In fact, paying down debt is a major cause of businesses raising prices—i.e., inflation.
Bankruptcy is obviously a safety valve against total societal collapse, but with many limitations and pitfalls.
Governments at all levels are also in thrall to the usury system, with bankruptcy, or default, a potential nightmare. “Debt service” is an ever-present tax burden for the entire population.
Usury banking did not exist in the growing prosperity of colonial America but began to take root with the Bank of North America in 1780, followed over the years by the First and Second Banks of the U.S. and the national banking system that began in 1863, with the final nail driven into the Constitution’s coffin with the Federal Reserve System created in 1913. With the Federal Reserve, the usury system had triumphed. As night follows day, over a century of world war followed and is still going on.
It’s the system of usury that for the last several centuries has been swinging open the doors to endless war, organized crime, exploitation, pollution, genocide, pandemics, terrorism, addictions, depressions, poverty, subversion, and the other ills that corrupt the world today. Contrary to the World Economic Forum and Club of Rome, both billionaires’ confabs, the fault is not too many “useless eaters.” The fault, rather, is the money these billionaires skim through fractional reserve banking at compound interest.
The Greens are the only political party with a monetary reform plank that would change the usury system. But this isn’t gathering much attention, is it?
It’s all so distracting that few people notice dropping temperatures, nightfall coming, and the icebergs gathering in the sea.
But election day, November 5, 2024, is just around the corner. The Titanic has set off on its appointment with destiny. Time for people to get themselves a comfortable seat on the deck of the ship.
Or not, as the case may be.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014.
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This article was originally published on VT Foreign Policy.
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Our Country, Then and Now
by Richard C. Cook
ISBN: 9781949762853
E-book ISBN: 978-1-949762-86-0
Year: 2023
Our Country Then and Now takes us on a 400-year journey through America’s history, providing unique snapshots from African enslavement, native dispossession, financial scandals, and wars of expansion and aggression, interspersed with tales from author Richard C. Cook’s ancestry—from Puritan forebears to fighters in the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, to Midwest Pioneer farmers and their relations with native nations.
