Tracing the Chain Links in the Non Zero Sum Games [i] of Politics and Governance
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
August 19, 2010

In the game of political campaigning, the people pay for one of the two parties to place attack and counterattack ads in the various types of media.  While one of the parties will win, its victory will be based on bogus issues.  The contest will have been irrelevant to the true and critical issues determining the fate of the people or nation; therefore, the people lose by wasting their donated money.  Regardless of which party wins in the contest between bogus issues, the media always wins because they were paid huge sums to host the game.  The game is ninety percent unrelated either to the local issues facing the people or the governance of the nation.  In short, campaigning is a huge waste of the people’s money.  Campaign rhetoric, however, is a highly successful camouflage diverting the people’s attention from indigenous, clandestine, political corruption of the nation’s leaders, exploitation of the people of this nation and all other nations, as well of diverting away from our nation’s horrendous acts of destruction around the globe.  This successful camouflage means that the people will never know how profoundly they have been cheated and betrayed. 

The big corporations either own, or own sizeable percentages of stocks in, the big media corporations.  Therefore, by a circuitous route, your campaign contributions, unknown to you, are going straight into the war chests of the very corporations that are exploiting you, controlling the government, and causing all sorts of the havoc on nature and the peoples of the earth.  How do they accomplish this?  Corporations pay lobbyists to influence legislation, but indirectly you are paying for the same lobbyists who successfully get legislative bills passed that ultimately mean great harm and loss to you.  Ultimately, campaign contributions by big donor corporations are contributing to the election of the executive and legislative branches that, in turn, do their bidding, carrying out their demands, which virtually are commands.  Thereby, corporations, with brilliant stealth, are winning the class warfare against the people of this nation and now, not just the US but, also of the world.       

Unless you are enamored of the political game, should you spend, waste that is, your money on donations to campaigns?  Might your money be better spent by contributing to alternative media with serious investigative reporters or to splinter groups who work to oppose the malevolent corporate-governmental-media complex?  With respect to splinter groups, I am not referring to the huge number of NGOs that work around the world to repair the damages done directly or indirectly by both corporations and our military.  Why?  When NGOs Clean up the mess, then the press can downplay it in until the outcries die down, or the media can, and does, actually spin the decimation and devastation into insignificance or nonexistence.  Of course, none of this serves to terminate this vicious (ghastly) chain of political game, campaign contributions, lobbyists, legislative, and executive acts that ultimately end plundering the world.  Furthermore, your taxes and campaign contributions are going to the protection of corporations and  their sinister enterprises by funding the humungous, otherwise unwarranted, US military, which is deployed wherever there are US economic interests around the world, such as, oil.  Unwittingly, therefore, the ‘cleanup operations’ of these NGOs are merely serving to perpetuate the agendas of multi-national corporations. 

Once again, as one-step in the chain of events, one third of the people’s taxes go to the military.  One-step back in the chain, corporations get the contracts, which are paid for by taxes, to manufacture and  maintain the military "materiel.”  One-step further back in the chain, campaign contributions go to media corporations (owned by the big, multi-national corporations), and, next in their turn, these corporations instigate their endgame, malignant step in the chain, of world conquest.  Finally, these media, in concert with these corporations, foster bogus pretexts for war and military ‘occupations’ on foreign soils.  Of course, there are also the covert operations that foment civil wars in natural resource rich underdeveloped countries.

You may know that politicians are paid the bare minimum to survive in DC.  While the law prevents lobbyists from directly paying for the living expenses and life styles of politicians, there obviously are ways of getting around this law as politicians seem to live quite well, even the non-independently wealthy ones.  Tracking down how so many not so wealthy newly elected politicians miraculously seem to become quite well off would be impossible.  A key point, however, is that with all of the bogus pizzazz of political party contests insulating individual politicians from scrutiny on the truly critical issues, their impotent roles are never discerned by the public.  They can go on entertaining before the microphone or on the stump and feeling inflated by their pseudo importance and power.  They safely can keep on entertaining us with feigned fighting in staged political contests.  This being the case, I would now like to propose a re-appellation from the label politician to that of ‘politainer.’ 

So, what’s a citizen in the hinterland, ghetto, or suburb for that matter, to do about all of this sham and lethal subterfuge?  Similar to the way Joan Baez protested in the sixties by not paying taxes to her war mongering government, I would like to suggest that the people neither pay taxes nor make campaign contributions, since doing so is actually funding each link in the chain of the media-politic-corporate-government-military-duped people complex.  There surely must be additional effectively disruptive tactics of which I have not conceived.

What I have just done is carry out a variation of an attenuated, mini-systems analysis.  Analysis of structures and systems is an essential part of the Natural Systems theory and approach.  I might add that one cannot make an analysis such as this by relying on the news from the major television channels or print media.

In sum, I am suggesting that the people accept the fact that they are on the short end of a Non Zero Sum game.  Like the famous “Commons Dilemma [ii],” greedy interlinked corporations around this globe are devouring our planet’s natural resources and they are destroying earth’s organic nature and eventually all humanity along with it.  The net effect of this myopic stratagem inevitably is to leave the corporations themselves victims of their own avarice.  Should we choose to wait for that day, we do so as the condemned ascending the final steps to the guillotine.   

Using the usual approach of populist political protests and rallies merely provides fodder for the media’s infotainment and has little to no effect – I venture to say none whatsoever - on the menacing course of world events. 

These observations being accepted, as a next step, perhaps, you could try to find a non-traditional way of doing your unique part in breaking this linked chain of vicious corporate steps, or in excising this malignant, metastasizing system, which is destroying our world. 

This is truly a challenge of Promethean magnitude.  Have no illusions about that!

If you do come up with some innovative strategies, please let me in on it.

Thanks,

ed

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