FROM MY CORNER

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https://howellhurst.com/2017/07/07/the-g-20-dice-game/

The G-20 Summit strikes me as little more than a well-scripted advertising bonanza containing about as much political authenticity as a back alley dice game. The primary winners are world leaders and TV media moguls.

The world leaders get an international stage to look “leaderly” on. And the media moguls pick up several millions of dollars from well-heeled capitalists with a lot of stuff to sell to gullible consumers.

Since all the leaders eventually get most of their campaign funds from the advertisers, it helps cement the symbiotic relationship of them to each other. It lets the leaders talk cozy political talk and it lets the advertisers appear safely distanced from the politicians.

But, its overall end result is big bucks looking out for big bucks. You cover our politics and we’ll cover your marketing needs. As for the main ring of the circus, Putin and Trump, well they’re just the top stars of the show.

And as for subject matter, it’s an international debate about two divergent concepts: Politics as world contest of who’s the toughest kid on the block, versus the less popular idea of Maximizing world trade as a money maker for all.

In other words, it’s government as the roughest competitive body sport in the world, versus the ever-fading idea of government as overseer of national populations’ well being.

With the exception of someone as serious as Germany’s Angela Merkel, it’s fundamentally just pretty silly stuff. Business as usual, you could say. She’s the exception because, having lived under both communistic and capitalist systems, she knows the equal dangers of each.

She’s the only one to have comprehensively recognized the current refugee and immigration crisis as the direct result of the decades-long melee and mayhem among nations, guided by leaders incapable of governing without sixteen wheel truck loads of weapons of mass destruction.

Trump and Putin are in it for glory and money, probably the rest are too, and only a handful really care about the millions of homeless veterans and refugees living like wild animals, as the rest of the world frets about where to get their cars washed, and where to store their excess tons of wasteful over consumption.

The problem with the G-20 is: it does not take the world seriously. No one talks about the vital need for all the leaders to stop spending trillions upon trillions of dollars and rubles on nuclear weapons and audaciously expensive navies and air forces.

The main problem the world confronts right now is a gang of utterly ignorant religious guerilla fanatics, possessing the sensitivity of boa constrictors cross-bred with wild boars, endangering what progress the human race has made in the past ten thousand years.

While all politicians are playing their “I’m a tougher guy than you” act with one another, the leaders find it impossible to discuss the utter stupidity of the trillions of dollars and rubles they squander on irrelevant military weaponry. And how to eliminate the terrorists.

They are all theoretically supposed to be good talkers and masterful debaters, but can’t even bring themselves to talk about the real condition of the human race as it bloodily stumbles its way on down the pike.

While all the rest of us some six billion people struggle under the essentially incompetent ineptness of these handful of leaders, they all live lives of intriguing drama and financial richness.

What is needed is a Worldwide New Deal that stops the carnage and lets everyone share in the massive wealth of the planet. This requires capitalists and socialists recognize that the growth money-making business of the world is the recovery and inclusion of all the homeless and poor into our society.

And that for that to happen, it is vital we all acknowledge the massive waste of assets, money, and people in the self-destructive craft of warfare that is keeping the human race from reaching its real potential.

When was the last time you heard any leader say that?

Angela Merkel, introducing the start of the G-20, said all the leaders must learn how to compromise with one another. I beg to differ. Compromise is not what is needed. What is needed is for all the leaders to agree on ditching the tough guy competition game they are all playing. And to stop toadying up to the defense corporations.

What is needed is for them to collaboratively divert the trillions of wasted military dollars and rubles on investments in people. The reason is simply that only that will give them what they all so fervently want: a strong return on their national tax investments.

A handful of people worldwide are obscenely wealthy from their military defense businesses, all bankrolled by our taxes. Meanwhile, a planetful of people are living anxiety-filled lives on the economic crumbs dropped from the multiple dinner tables of the multiple homes of the defense wealthy.

The only rational behavior for us citizens is to stop acting so irresponsibly and begin to elect leaders who will identify that the key goal of the 21^stCentury is not to bloodily compete with one another, but to collaborate on saving the endangered human race.

And to do that, by mutual agreement the G-20 and every other political meeting held from now on should be required to begin with a discussion of how to bring this about. Trillions of hours of our time and money century after century being wasted on weapons is just plain too dumb to continue.

It has to be replaced with the only rational conversation available: how to preserve and encourage the healthy continuance of the entire human race. Now, that’s worth spending some advertising dollars on.

What is needed is real leadership. It is time we began to demand it. We have too many fake leaders. It is time leaders stopped playing with people’s lives like we were all just pawns on a chessboard.

How about it?  If offered that option, wouldn’t you vote for it?