Op-Ed: US Politics vs reality – Guess who’s winning. You’re not.

US lawmakers battling to avert a government shutdown this weekend after the House of Representatives rejected a Republican-led funding bill – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Alex Edelman

If the last ten years have proven anything, it’s that politics and politicians are utterly useless when it comes to fixing human reality.

It’s simpler to define what politics doesn’t do. Politics doesn’t manage or in any way effectively control:

Health prices

Housing prices

Food prices

Poverty

Homelessness

Crime

Corruption

Pollution

Markets

Its own psychotic behavior

Political psychopaths

Hate and internal conflict

Quite a little shopping list, isn’t it? Check out this enchanting little ditty from Nature.com on the subject of current US poverty levels.

Poverty is an accurate measure of social failure. It’s the Multiple Sclerosis of socioeconomics.

If US politics are useful for anything (and they haven’t been for many years) they can be considered a study of multilevel catastrophic failure at civilization level.  

The rest of the Western world is only marginally better, not being blessed with the Titans of Mediocrity in the US.

In the last nine years, even the pretense of sanity is long gone. Grocery prices are as good a metric as any for who’s doing what and who’s doing nothing.

Prices are the reality.

Political ideology is the shoddy, incompetent, unimpressive packaging.

The point here is that politics as any sort of practical response to anything real doesn’t work.

All that useless political babble hasn’t moved prices by one cent.

Grocery price inflation is going down, but that just means the rate of price rises is slower than before. Prices are still going up.

Prices are also high due to decades of mismanagement and total political disinterest in the food supply chain. Water resources, logistics, soil degradation, outdated methods, whatever the issue, it’s not on any political agendas.  These issues barely make the news, let alone any level of discussion or government scrutiny.

Food pricing includes complex issues in terms of price structuring and market variables long before they hit consumer level. That usually means that by definition prices and management issues are excluded from political discussion and above all political commentary.

Both sides of politics not only dropped the ball on the supply chains, and they also didn’t seem to know there was a ball. Progressives don’t have the excuse of “don’t know” on these subjects.

Better still, the US public could hardly be described as an informed audience. Nor could their political representatives. People who can barely survive a simple sentence worth of their own information aren’t likely to be critically penetrant.

Even if they were, they’re very unlikely to get a word in edgewise. The American public has had enough of political issues. According to The Conversation, 5 hours a day of political “discussion” is actually a health issue.

Can you imagine 5 hours a day listening to that babbling drivel?

5 hours a decade is 5 hours more than it deserves.

The takeaway is that it’s the political system itself, not democracy, doesn’t work and can’t work. Democratically elected do-nothings are still do-nothings.

There is no real accountability. There is no statutory mechanism to ensure that they simply do their jobs.

In the postwar years, America was the bright young thing, the most prosperous country in history, best health, best levels of education, etc. America was a category killer in progress, prosperity, and productivity.

America has effectively demoted itself to a powerless spectator at its own funeral. Politics has done that. Decades of incredibly bad calls and domestic partisanship, selfishness, and apathy did the damage.

How do you fix that?

You need to ask that question because if you don’t, you’ll never get an answer. You’ll never get out of the grave you’ve dug for yourselves.

Politics obviously can’t trusted to be the fix for itself.

You don’t need politicians to administrate basic government business. Administrators can do that without being “blessed” by political imbecility.

Politicians shouldn’t have any say at all in core human rights or any ability to compromise those rights. These are NOT negotiable. (You parasites get to say, “Isn’t that nice,” and that’s it.)

Housing, health, and education are natural human rights. They aren’t negotiable, either. These were the foundations of America’s success, and American politics destroyed them.

“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were always right.

Note also the use of the expression “inalienable rights”.

That’s exactly what you need, and you need to ensure that these freeloading politicians have no option but to respect and enforce those inalienable rights.  

The fix for America is exactly what the Constitution was all about in the first place. Try it. You’ll like it.