If you’re in the Collapse Party, then you’ll want to ride the Romneymobile. Why not try the rooftop seating? Image: DonkeyHotey.

This election year, the total collapse of industrial civilization has gained a popularity not seen since the heyday of The Planet of the Apes franchise.

All over the blogosphere, people who worry about climate change, peak oil, financial meltdown, debt slavery, species extinction, overpopulation and rampant commercialism along with the spread of military drones, techno-warfare and the surveillance state have given up on the electoral process.

They say that voting for either one of two big government, pro-corporate candidates won’t make any difference. It’s too late to try to fix industrial capitalism before it snuffs out our few remaining freedoms and destroys the Earth.

Instead, some argue that nothing less than quick collapse of the global political and economic system can prevent either the advent of a totally Orwellian dystopia or the destruction of the Earth’s ability to sustain life.

Unless you follow Ayn Rand and believe that the free market will create new air, water, soil and living beings based on market demand, you have to agree that the industrial civilization is on the highway to hell, with human extinction in the current century a real possibility.

Plutocracy rampant

Meanwhile, after Citizens United and the rise of Super PACs, the power of rich people to run government as a cover for destructive extraction and pollution industries has only increased.

Last year, Occupy Wall Street offered the best chance in two decades to break the death grip of plutocrats on the neck of government. But now Zuccotti Park is cleared (or underwater). The drum circles are silent. And the hope is gone.

And so, facing near total despair, there seem to be only two paths for a moral person.

You can join James Carville in the Cocktail Party and drink yourself into an ongoing stupor.

Or, you can do whatever possible to try to hasten the collapse of the whole made-in-China and bought-at-Walmart monster of globalized plastic culture before it extinguishes birds, bees, flowers and everything else we love and then finally kills us all as a punchline.

That’s why, if you want a sustainable world, you need to vote Romney-Ryan this coming Tuesday, November 6.

Or just stay home and don’t vote for Obama, which will have much the same effect.

No more hopey and no more changey

Surely, the president has let down anyone who cares about the future of human life on Earth and especially climate change, today’s biggest threat.

And enough with the blah-blah about how Congress stopped all the good stuff Obama wanted to do to cap greenhouse gases, promote clean energy and conservation and cut subsides for Big Oil. Those are just excuses for the politically naive.

Anybody over the age of eight knows that if Obama weren’t a total tool of the kleptocracy, the president could’ve made it happen. Just as Ike ended the military-industrial complex, Ford whipped inflation now or George W. Bush brought democracy to Iraq.

That’s what presidents do — they take decisive action and get ‘er done — Congress, the Supreme Court, big business, the media and public opinion be damned.

It’s easy to decry Obama’s lack of achievement on the issues that threaten industrial civilization.

Back to climate change. Who cares about fuel efficiency standards for cars? Or trying to slow down the Keystone XL Pipeline? Or a bunch of little regulatory rulings from the EPA and other agencies to preserve species habitat or make offshore drilling a little less bad that nobody outside of wonky Beltway green groups can understand?

That sort of insider tiddly winks doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when it comes to the polar icecap.

So maybe it’s time to give up on the whole effort to reform industrial society and just make it a little less bad. That was Obama’s strategy and it didn’t work.

If you want to deal with climate change, it’s high time for Plan B — Total Collapse.

Sure, Obama pushes clean coal, but poorly. Romney’s heart is in it. Image: MrKite129.

Bringing efficiency to climate change

Romney-Ryan will melt the polar icecap, and I mean quick. They’re not the ones in this race who want to slow the rise of the oceans or heal the planet.

Passing policies to promote, rather than fight, climate change will create the conditions for hundreds more storms raining whoop-ass down on New York City and Washington, DC that will make Hurricane Sandy feel like a cool summer’s breeze.

In response, Romney-Ryan will pump up disaster relief — by outsourcing it to Halliburton — yielding both more human suffering and higher costs. Meanwhile, coastal states and localities will have to empty their coffers to build seawalls and relocate infrastructure inland, cutting budgets for schools and roads. Sooner rather than later, they’ll all reach the breaking point.

Now that’s riding on the highway to hell.

Romney-Ryan also won’t goof around about pulling subsidies for Big Oil. Like that was ever going to happen anyway. Pleeez.

Romney-Ryan know where America’s bread is buttered. Cutting Obama’s puny subsidies for solar and wind won’t save much money, but every penny counts if you want to increase subsidies for offshore drilling, onshore drilling and outer space drilling (the latter under the direction of Secretary of Galactic Resources Newt Gingrich).

Romney-Ryan will open up the spigot of crude so wide they’ll make Dick Cheney look like an energy conservationist. And after that kind of rapid production (i.e., depletion), then see if people still say that peak oil is a hoax.

Talk about accelerating on the highway to hell.

Species extinction, overpopulation, ocean acidification — do you think Romney-Ryan will have time for any of that stuff?

That’s what the Koch Brothers are for. If anybody can extinguish species quickly and cost-effectively, it’s the private sector. Just remove all the bureaucratic red tape and watch American ingenuity go into action. Government doesn’t create jobs.

Nonetheless, Romney-Ryan are going to be busy creating 12 million new jobs. And if those jobs in turn help create North American energy independence by 2020 through fracking under every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in the lower 48, then all the better.

And that’s building up some speed on the highway to hell.

You see that when it comes to bringing on society’s collapse, it’s clear that Obama is just a flip-flopper.

Says he cares about the environment but hasn’t saved it yet. How’s that hopey-changey thing goin’ for ya now?

Romney-Ryan’s position on the environment is clear. They don’t give a crap about it.

The final financial crisis

Frying the Earth is a good start. If humans even survive as a species, a changed climate will make it much harder for them to rebuild civilization and screw things up again in, say, ten thousand years. But you need a really big financial crisis to bring the whole thing down in the short term.

When it comes to helping the rich get richer and beggaring the middle class, Obama has been ambivalent at best. After banskters crashed the economy in 2008, he added piles of cash to Bush’s already generous bank bailout. And he has yet to prosecute anybody on Wall Street for breaking the law. But at the same time, Obama can’t help himself from handing out tax cuts to the middle class or trying to cut their healthcare costs.

Romney-Ryan is the only team with enough consistency to generate the kind of widespread financial distress, despair and resentment of the rich needed to bring looters into the streets.

It’s all about closure — more plant closures and home foreclosures but with a lot less disclosure. Romney-Ryan are committed to helping their buddies in the top 1% without having to answer to the freeloaders in the 47% or the 99%.

Secrecy, favoritism, a callous unconcern for the majority — There’s no better way to create distrust of government and undermine what’s left of the democratic process.

That’s really driving on that highway to hell.

The bottom line is that if you want society to collapse quickly, Barack Obama will always disappoint. Sure, always going on about increasing economic activity, he’s got one foot on the accelerator. But he just can’t keep his other foot off the brake.

Romney-Ryan will be pedal to the metal. You have their promise on that.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice