post OBAMA POTUS UNDER ANALYSIS
We are already
experiencing the powerlessness of
POTUS... Submitted
by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
We are already
experiencing the powerlessness of POTUS. We all know the POTUS (President of the United
States) has the power as Commander-in-Chief to engage the nation in
senseless, costly, needless wars. We also know the POTUS has a media-saturated bully
pulpit to set an agenda and fashion a cultural tone for the nation.
But beyond the power to wage war and dominate the
media spotlight, does the President have the power to solve the structural
problems that are eroding the nation's economy and social contract?
This chart summarizes one such problem: wage earners
are receiving a diminishing share of the nation's output (GDP):
A second related problem is the national income that is
flowing to wage earners is increasingly flowing to the top 5%:
If the president can't solve the
nation's systemic problems, then he/she no longer matters. The President, outside of declaring war,
is nothing but a source of "news" chum for the media feeding frenzy
aimed at grabbing eyeballs to maximize advertising revenues for the media's
corporate owners.
Analyst Gail Tverberg explained
why the political machinery of POTUS cannot change the downward trends in
household earnings in a series of insightful essays, most recently Overly Simple Energy-Economy Models Give Misleading Answers.
In summary: successful civilizations generate
sufficient surplus to invest in complex hierarchical communication-command-control
mechanisms which boost productivity and generate additional surplus. The cost
of these complex systems continually rises while the increases in production
eventually plateau and decline in an S-Curve:
The net result is a
society with higher costs and diminishing returns. Eventually the costs of
maintaining the status quo exceed the benefits of maintaining the status quo
hierarchy and the society decays and collapses.
My own work has focused on two
dynamics of the cost of increasingly unproductive complex systems. One is privilege, which can be
defined as unearned wealth and power. Privilege is by definition
unproductive, and a drain on the economy and society. Once the privileged class
(i.e. the protected class that shifts risks and taxes to the unprotected/non-elite
classes) expands and social mobility decays, the economy collapses under
the dead weight of the privileged class.
I covered the history
and dynamics of this process in The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility,
Collapse Is Inevitable (April 18, 2016).
The second dynamic is the destructive
consequences of a self-serving political-financial elite that is structurally
incapable of real reform because real reform will collapse the high-cost
structures that enable the concentration of wealth and power.
I explain these dynamics in Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.
I know this runs counter to the
media-supported delusion that POTUS is the most powerful person on Earth, but
in reality it no longer matters who's president. The inevitable collapse of a debt-based model of complexity, energy
extraction and consumption is already baked in.
The only potentially positive
role of any President would be to downsize the unrealistic expectations of the
citizenry to align with real-world dynamics. But downsizing expectations doesn't get
you re-elected, so the political reality is that future presidents will no
longer matter in terms of solving the critical problems we face in the coming
decades.
We are already experiencing the
powerlessness of POTUS: the
campaign for the office of President has already been reduced to two poor
players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage, a tale told by an idiot
media, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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