Blonde Ambition
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

http://www.counterpunch.org/

Excerpts:

Hillary Clinton can not win the Democratic nomination for president. The numbers tell the story. Even with robust victories in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, Hillary will trail Obama in popular votes and pledged delegates as they enter the convention hall in Denver.

Any other candidate would have been shamed into dropping out long ago. But these are the Clintons and they have no shame.

So why does Hillary persist? Because she hasn't abandoned her aspiration for the White House. Not in 2008, but for 2012. Here's the perverse logic at work.

If Obama defeats McCain in November, it will take an act of treachery beyond anything even the Clintons have ever conjured from their grimoire of political demonology for Hillary to challenge him in 2012. She will be 69 in 2016, almost ready to move into one of the Beverly Nursing Homes, owned by a company she once represented as a corporate lawyer, aggressively protecting the bottom line against such extravagances as healthy meals, clean sheets and proper medical care for the elderly.

Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most of a remorseless situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political fratricide. Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother.

In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound Obama as candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she can run against McCain in 2012.

Down in Mark Penn's dark computer lab, the data culled from pulse polls and focus groups probing the hidden prejudices in the psyche of white America are being packed like shrapnel into political landmines set for Obama: he's unpatriotic, he's un-Christian, he's a Palestinian symp and, yes, he's black. That's three strikes and one head shot.

..................

The fallout from Ms. Clinton's racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They've done it all before. The Clintons' reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC's sophomoric bungling of the health care reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political profit. Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party's prospects, designed to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the DNC into their own private PAC.

That's the logic of triangulation. The daisy-cutter tactics of Hillary's current campaign might be called pre-emptive triangulation. The Clintons enrich themselves politically by looting the ruins of their own party.

.............

Meanwhile, Obama plays the role of willing victim like he had trained for it at Actor's Studio. He exudes a sense of entitlement nearly as all-engrossing as the Clintons and compounds this with a martydom complex that dramatizes the wounding of each sling and arrow lobbed his way.

Although it's not strictly attuned to her peculiar pathology, Hillary could almost call it quits right now, even before she claims Pennsylvania as a scalp. She has fatally toxified Obama and almost certainly secured the White House for her good friend John McCain.

Well, if it's any consolation. The next president will reign over a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. A perfect storm. Here's a piece I found about it. I would want to be president over this.

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A Perfect Storm

Todd Gross, the affable Boston weatherman, didn't invent the phrase, but he certainly coined it for popular use back in the fall of 1991, as three powerful weather fronts crashed as agents of true serendipity to create - as he so succinctly described - "A Perfect Storm", over the waters of the Georgia Banks to forever change the way we view causation and the sheer brutality of circumstance. The movie, of the same name, detailing the drama of a small Glouster fishing boat's tragic contribution to that moment in meteorological history, drove that moniker even deeper into the lexicon of our American culture, cementing forever it's place in the language we share as members of this latest version of humanity's endless effort to unite the globe under one homogenous authority.

A Perfect Storm. It almost sounds noble. As if it might be something that God would create to cleanse the earth of that which has gathered over time to the detriment of creation. A course correction, perhaps. A courtesy flush - as they used to say, when the stink grew to be unbearable, but there was still work to be done to clear one's vessel of that which had become repugnant and toxic. The heavens, bringing it all together to purge the straining increase through the combination of all that's gathered, in one mighty release - the consequences be damned - as "look out below" becomes the mantra for all that is free to scatter to protection and shelter. A cataclysm of continuum and malignant intent, married with environmental impact and raw circumstance. The pure justice of karma on that which neither believes, nor feels the touch of such a quaint notion, until it becomes that which passes through its dying moment. A final regret.

History will record that the American Empire went down as spectacularly as it rose. A Perfect Storm. Not a slow erosion, or a gradual decline in power and influence over centuries of diminishing returns as the way of those ancient rulers of their known worlds. Not this empire. This revolution of human aspiration - the first attempt at large scale democracy - will be remembered as a dynamic and volatile beast, as famous for its wonderful passion as it will be infamous for it's writhing seizures of wrath and global carnage. The ultimate yin and yang of human freedom and self determination. A societal manifestation of the good and the evil that resides within all who call this planet their home.

Yes. A Perfect Storm. A triangulation of our own construct, brought together by own our design, raining down upon our heads as testimony to the truth that no persistent evil can survive the balancing of the scales in this or any other world. That God's will is the natural order of cause and effect. True justice as the going around that comes around. No escape from that which has been carelessly - negligently - set into motion. This trinity of destruction, our own creation - as yet again, the powerful are emptied through their own belligerence, their own willful disregard for the threat that God has seen fit to demonstrate to His people since the dawn of civilization itself.

Swirling within one front we have the impending economic disaster. 400 billion dollars in vapor currency is set to flood our economy in the weeks and months ahead. This, combined with the previous hundreds of billions of vapor currency, sent into our precarious wealth imbalance to offset the natural response to wholesale disregard for the value of that which is acquired verses that which is applied to acquisition, will send all values to their respective corners to await an arbitration that has not been called to congress, and will - in all likelihood - never be called together as those, psychologically crippled by the reckless irresponsibility and greed that's dominated the last several decades of this global shell-game of financial/market management, reflexively push for yet another spin of the wheel.

It has finally come to that inevitable moment when all these players - circling the center as in a children's game where salvation stares each one in the face as a progressively dwindling prospect - must find a seat, even though, through the years, more and more seats have been yanked as this moment has been delayed far beyond any reasonable culmination point. Each contestant knows exactly what lies ahead, and yet, is as psychologically incapable of reaching for that seat - and the security if offers - as the greedy monkey caught by its own hand in the cookie jar, refusing to accept its freedom over the cost of a released cookie.

And so they circle and sweat. Watching each other to see who will break for safety first, initiating the collapse of this game they've been locked within since any of them can remember. This rising pressure is only one front, bearing down on a point of rendezvous with history itself.

A second front contains decades of building disdain within the global community for a frighteningly powerful child, who has yet to learn the lesson of perspective and context that only a free fall from prominence can teach one so arrogant and willfully ignorant. Each member of this international collective has endured its own cataclysmic decline, with some - such as Italy - more wrenching than others. Only this flagrant, relentlessly demanding infant has yet to feel the sting of collapse and ruin, followed by the long harrowing climb to a much lower platform from which to settle itself into the hierarchy of nations, to find its own version of survival in a world of competition and inevitable elimination for all that exists. None of which holds God's favor or blessing, regardless of the marketing collateral.

All around this screaming child, the nations smile to one another as they watch the coming storm, and consider their own contribution to this disaster. After all, one nation's fall is another nation's ascension. The natural order of a competitive environment. Certainly nothing to abhor, or be ashamed of. Certainly nothing that this terrible brat wouldn't do - or hasn't done - to any one of them if given the opportunity. This universal disregard for the survival of the newest and largest of empires, by the world which allows the existence of this empire, is surely a powerful front in this triad of impending catastrophe. In fact, the migration from the dollar, in all corners of the financial universe, and the ascension of the Euro as a stable and welcome currency, is strong evidence of this preparation for what our planet sees as a coming fall equal to that of Rome. No dark ages for this modern world. Not beyond the borders to the United Sates, at any rate. Not on the heels of this fall. In fact, the world is well prepared for this fall, and seems to be in anticipation of it's coming at long last.

The third, and most destructive front, the storm that will give this catastrophe the epic proportions that befit the fall of such a powerful global entity, is the sheer malignancy of selfishness, frustration, hatred and individual isolation of each member within the culture itself. Initiated, nurtured, and focused by the corporate owned and directed politics for the immediate benefit of those wishing to capitalize on the moment at the cost of the future of this society, this societal programming effort has gone on for generations, creating a culture of anti-social rejectionism disguised as individualism that has served the needs of those whose only skill involves pitting us against each other for the profit of those who - through their own minor conspiracies - have become mighty in our collective separation. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. A small conspiracy - in a society incapable of communion - is a majority, and therefor a ruling majority, since no other majority is possible.

As the two other fronts come together over this universal and stationary environmental condition, the impact of the two will launch this from the inert potential it's always been and give it the dynamic life that will metastasize the three as a destructive force that the modern world has never seen. Each front - as its own potential - manageable, survivable. Combined, a perfect storm of engineered calamity, a detonation of unfathomable impact on those within the kill-zone.

The economic collapse, surely triggering the suspicions, the resentments, the hatreds, programmed into the psyches of the entire society through generations of the celebration of the smallest unit of community possible - the nuclear family - and the rejection of community as an indication of individual weakness and irresponsibility. What coming-together could ever be possible? Even when that unity would be the only means of societal survival. The damage has already been done. The army of one has always been the looming destruction of the American Experiment. The strength of the individual has never been, and will never be, the power needed to ensure the survival of this species. The building isolation, nurtured by advances in technology and the establishment of product-centric alliances within the personality of the modern American, has sealed the fate of this society.

When the economic collapse strikes, there will be nowhere for each member of this fractured culture to turn. No community. No extended family. Nothing of common origin or continuum. Nothing to focus on but raw survival of self to the level of all others as enemies of that sense of survival. Duty, honor, community, all notions of the intellect - marketing slogans, generated by a government/industry collaboration that has betrayed the individual, releasing that individual from the bonds of those lofty ideals. As if such ideals ever actually existed at all in a society where true interdependence was anathema to what it meant to be a Real American.

Alliances, while formed for expediency and strength, would have no lasting quality, replaced by the next better deal, as day turns into week and week turns into month and month into year. And year into generation. You see, as true Americans, we only imagine the fall as occurring, but we never seem to imagine that we'll still exist beyond that fall. As if the movie will end, and we'll be allowed to leave our seats and return to our homes, glad that we don't have to actually deal with the ramifications of such a disaster. No Balkanization of the once-united states. No fracture of region into principality. No rise of religious or sectarian division within the larger whole, with strongmen and their militias establishing their own rule of law for pockets of civilization within a nation at war with itself on every conceivable front.

In a society where the dollar is the stability in our lives, what will we do when it's no longer viable? When the dollar becomes worthless in the global community, what will it be worth to us? When we have no currency, what will anything be worth? What will we use to determine the cost of living, and who will provide us with that currency? What office building will be the source of our daily devotion, when no company has the answer to our question of "what do we do now?"

And all the while, the global community looks at our terror, and slowly shakes its head. It was coming, and they knew it was coming. They can now see what we've made of its arrival, and who would ever step in to restore the order? Our entire military can't restore order in Iraq. What army could ever restore order in a shattered America? When New Orleans fell down, what police department precinct was capable of protecting its citizenry? What military descended upon the streets to restore order before the losses became intolerable? What food and water prevented widespread destruction and criminality?

And this was one city, surrounded by a perfectly functioning national economy and social structure. Imagine a complete economic collapse, trillions lost in the devastation, anger and resentment, fueled by the Internet and media's exposure of the sins of a ruthless cabal between government and industry to ravage the lives of the average citizen. The demagoguery, as the politics of fear and hatred is once again offered as common sense and reasonable discourse, pouring gasoline on the fires that threaten to consume us all. The cries for patience and humanity spun as weakness and socialism to a population taught to hate community and sharing as the vain temptations of Satan's own religion of dependence.

What nation would ever bother to save us from ourselves?

A Perfect Storm. Three massive fronts converging to create that which is greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, it's coming, and we'll be witness to it.

So what comes after this perfect storm? In all likelihood, preparations have already begun for that dramatic shift in societal structure. Yes, there will still be a US military, even if it receives orders to stand back initially to allow us to eat each other. Yes, there will still be international corporations and markets. Yes, there will still be a global economy. Yes, there will still be an international banking system. And yes, there will still be the very same powerful people who rule all of these, as they do even now. The world will not change for these people. These people own this world, and they decide how this world will operate. Their world will remain as it's always been. It is our world - the world within our continental borders - that will change.

Once the smoke has cleared, it will be determined what is salvageable and what is not. It will be determined what is needed to eliminate the spontaneous expressions of social order that have sprung up here and there across the landscape. It will be determined who, among the survivors, has demonstrated a capacity for adherence to a new, and very different, societal requirement - and more importantly, who hasn't. It will then be determined how to move forward with the new United States of America, and the establishment of that structure as imposed by sheer brutal force for the overall good of the nation itself. For its very survival.

And it will be welcomed by those of us that are still around to witness it, as if it were the long awaited return of the Christ to grant one thousand years of peace and justice to a grateful world exhausted by the violence and immediate hell of an Armageddon of hatred, ignorance and self-serving expediency. It will be the anticipated result of generations of social programming - the greatest and most powerful authoritarian state the world has ever known, as the ultimate prize - for those with the vision, and patience, to allow us to destroy our one and only chance at self determination.

It will then be on to the future of mankind.

Maybe one more thing might be a factor for this awful scenario to occur...a pandemic to help cull the herd, and make the remaining population more manageable and sustainable for whatever comes after.

Maybe one more thing might be a factor for this awful scenario to occur...a pandemic to help cull the herd, and make the remaining population more manageable and sustainable for whatever comes after.

Black Death. Now you're talking.