#138: “Realpolitik: The Real Poker”
2012 is an election year in the US and that means one thing. Poker on TV hits primetime. Not real poker of course. Real poker is a game in which players are supposed to bluff and mislead. It is also a game that has rules and etiquettes that are rarely broken. The poker we will be watching is the high stakes game of Realpolitik.
Remember that scene you used to see in old Western movies…
Inside a dusty saloon, a poker game is in progress. A middle-aged gun-toting cowboy raises all-in and despite having the better hand, a younger cowboy is unable to cover the bet and is thus forced to forfeit the pot.
Well that’s a near perfect model for politics in the US and the economic system it has created. Yesterday it was released that 22 people (including the corporations that, since the January 2010 US Supreme Court decision on ‘Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission’ are defined as people) provided half the capital for all the SuperPacs who essentially fund the campaigns of US politicians (and the road trip vacations of half-term Alaskan governers). The game is rigged to benefit the billionaires and multi-millionaires. They pay just 15% in capital gains tax, an anomaly that people like Mitt Romney spent a lot of money lobbying to create. The other day, presumptive vice-presidential nominee Marco Rubio said that America is a country of ‘haves’ and ‘soon-to-haves’ while at the same time in his own state of Florida, they force people on welfare and unemployment benefit to pay for their own mandatory $30 drug tests, a condition of them receiving their $15 a day.
For the next 9 months, we will be treated to the misinformation, exaggeration and empty promises of professional liars. Unless by some miracle, Ron Paul wins the election, it simply doesn’t matter who becomes the 44th President of the USA. Obama said he would close Guantanamo and instead passed the NDAA, expanding the powers of the disgraceful Patriot Act, making it legal to indefinitely detain without trial anyone suspected of terrorism.
America is bankrupt yet it continues to spend billions of dollars that it doesn’t have being the policeman of the world. At the last State of the Union address, Obama said that he would try peaceful negotiations with Iran and got a limp round of applause. He followed up by saying that the use of extreme force was certainly still on the table and received a rapturous standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The US say that if Iran close the Straits of Hormuz (something they need desperately for their own economy), then that will be an act of war. The sanctions currently being placed upon Iran are the real act of war but you can be sure that in an election year, neither side will talk about peaceful negotiation. It’s simply not good poker. It’s the political equivalent of limping with a marginal hand in the bubble.