Everyone and his brother seems to be asking the same questions these days. “Where did we go wrong? How did this economic crisis begin and how can we recover from it? ” The candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are addressing this issue as Job One; Barack Obama’s problems with swing voters are mostly about economic issues and all one needs to do is go to the store to buy some groceries to see the trouble in which we find ourselves. $2.75. It’s the new $1.80.
There is really a very simple answer to these questions, but first we must dig down into the root of the problem…the American consumerist addiction.
Read on for more.
Vast numbers of Americans are addicted to spending, to acquiring unnecessary and relatively expensive items that have no real bearing on their continued survival. This addiction exists up and down the scale of wealth, from McDonald’s right on through to McMansions and McEscalades. It has been going on since the advent of planned obsolescence in the early 1950s and it has been fueled by the corporate system’s total ownership of the media. We have literally been advertised into addiction. It is this addiction to wasteful living and inefficient spending that has put us in the position of being forced to wage overt and covert wars of economic imperialism so that we can continue to afford the consumption of many times more goods and services than are necessary for our own wellbeing. This conspicuously gross consumption leads in turn to poverty for the people from whom we take those goods and services…domestically as well as internationally…and that leads to even more war. More war, more terrorism, more domestic social unrest and crime and more debt problems for American citizens as well. A feedback system ensues, and in times of trouble we are hyped into even more consumption. ‘Round and ’round this system goes, and where it stops nobody knows.
Serious addictions only end in one of two ways…death or recovery…and there is only one way to truly end an addiction. Cold Turkey. All of the other “recovery” methods just impose a different addiction over the original one. Methadone for heroin, AA meetings for alcoholism, etc. Sometimes the new addiction is a step up and sometimes it isn’t.
There is only one candidate for the presidency who is advocating such a cold turkey move. Ron Paul. “What’s that?” you say. “I haven’t heard much from Ron Paul about consumerism.” No, you haven’t, but the topic is implicit in almost his entire platform and also in the way that he has chosen to lead his life. He advocates an end to the state of Permanent War in which we have lived since the `60s. What he does not say…not very loudly, anyway…is that bringing the troops home will end our militarily-backed favored nation status in the world, and that the transition from that position to one of self-sufficiency would be a long and arduous task. It would entail a tightening of the American belt in a way that has not been experienced here since WW II. His criticism of the Federal Reserve system and the financial boondoggles and bubbles that it creates would also mean a return to a non-credit based economy domestically, which would further militate against excessive spending by Americans.
Meanwhile, on the symbolic end of the whole presidency thing…a very important part of the job, need I remind you…he would be a president who does not dress in $1000+ suits. He would be a president who has lived in a house currently valued at around $300,000 for most of his adult life. He would be a president who drove a 15-year old, high mileage Buick around Washington before he got involved in this campaign. He would be a president whose wife would fit in quite nicely at the local supermarket buying her own food or caring for her grandchildren at the local playground. And he would not be a president who goes on multi-million dollar vacations. Bet on it.
Many people in the so-called “progressive’ world have problems with Ron Paul, and on this site a number of people quite obviously have problems with my own support of his candidacy. The almost total opposition to that candidacy by the media…again, in both overt and covert ways…fuels this attitude on all levels and sides of our political discourse, from the far left through the center and on into the far right and from no-brainer stupormarket tabloid readers through the clomp-clomp-clomping, knee-jerk middle class right on up to ivory tower-dwelling intellectuals as well. Yet almost no one seems to be questioning that media opposition. It is taken as some sort of a given that it is a fact-based phenomenon, that his positions and political history are just so wrong that of course he should be opposed.
My point? His policies would throw a monkey wrench right into the middle of the vast profit-making system that has as its primary weapon the consumerist addiction of the American people. Have you ever known a really vicious drug dealer? I have. Mess with their product distribution system at your own risk. Bet on that as well. But that is exactly what Ron Paul is doing, at the highest levels possible. His opposition to the ludicrous “War On Drugs” is only a fragment of what he is about. He is opposing the real “drug” dealers…the real American pushers of addictive substances, the consumer hype artists and their financial system owners. Thus they are opposing him en masse.
I can see the posters now.
THE RON PAUL REVOLUTION
COLD TURKEY OR BUST!!!
Let us pray.
And let us think as well.
Please.
If he were to win, it would be an FDR moment for the United States. Another new deal.
Think on it. Ignore the media and do your own research. I have, and here I am.
Think about it!!!
Please.
AG
