the trojan horse presidency and its implications;

by Dmitri Orlov for the Saker blog

The US midterm elections are nigh and, as I happen to be a good and patriotic Russian national, it behooves me to meddle in them. Election-meddling is an example of Russia’s soft power, which is much nicer than Russia’s hard power, so you should be glad that it’s still on offer.

I am on record saying that “The United States is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is president” multiple times in multiple places, and I stand by that statement, which I believe to be a provable statement of fact. Statistics show that there is zero correlation between public preferences and public policy decisions but a strong correlation between business lobby group preferences and pubic policy decisions. Thus the US is not a democracy (rule by the people) but an oligopoly (rule by business groups). From this it follows that it doesn’t matter who is president because both parties of the Democrat-Republican duopoly are owned by the same set of business groups.

And so it doesn’t matter who is president and your vote means nothing? Granted; but then does it matter WHETHER there is a president? Methinks, it does!

What if the president is an organo-servo-robot, a senile puppet, backed up by a vice president specifically chosen for being even more feeble-minded? This is an excellent ploy for putting in power an extremist group that is only tangentially related to the usual business lobbies that determine what gets done in Washington. Don’t think of some vast and amorphous “deep state”: executing such a power grab requires tight coordination, some amount of secrecy or, at least, discretion, and, of course, vast sums of money. Think instead of a singularly well-endowed evil oligarch and his multiple minions whom he has carefully groomed and insinuated into positions of power.

The overall goal of such an extremist group may well go far beyond the usual interests of business lobbies, such as preserving shareholder equity, a wider spot at the federal subsidy trough, knocking down transnational barriers to trade and movement of capital, lower business taxes and so on. These zealots may well have an altogether different view of the future in mind, in which a tiny group of ultra-rich owns everything while the rest of us own nothing but, being made tame and docile through all sorts of medical and technical manipulation, feel happy about this state of affairs… like so many animals in a menagerie… not too many animals, mind you: drastic population reduction is likely a key goal of theirs.

What might the overall goals of this organization be? It’s not exactly a secret. Here’s a sample, taken from the “Goals 2030” document from the 2018 conference at the Complexity Institute in Santa Fe:...........more..........