Is COPE a Trojan Horse

Can Cope cope?

The beloved country [SA] is holding its 4th post democracy general election at the end of April and for the first time it is believed there is a possible alternative to the current ruling party in the offing. There are more than 150 parties standing at national and provincial level, most consisting of a kind of 'one man and his dog' affair. Some even get seats in the main parly; which means that from a salary perspective democracy costs the fiscus about a dozen or so party leader salaries.

I do not believe the new party will pose any remotely viable alternative to the present order at this time.

For the past fifteen years one party had about two thirds of the total seats and the mob shared the rest. So we have been a de-facto one party State for a considerable time. They [the ruling party] have become openly contemptuous of all opposition groups and their rising hubris is beginning to show, in a range of neglectful instances; compounded by the country’s inevitable drift into recession, with our own looming [potential for a] “sub-prime” meltdown and looming issues with electricity, water and road infrastructures nationally.

On the plus side you can get your car registration licence renewed in less time than it takes to walk from the car park to the licence renewal desk [On the corner of Loveday and Plein for those who care], and … and … there may be some other things that I can’t think of right now.

Oh… when the vast ocean of present State sponsored infrastructure-spending runs its course, hopefully by early next year, we will have a rapid bus transit system in place, and evolving, in all the country’s major cities. We’ll also have a high-speed intercity train linking Jozi to an elegant northern city called Tshwane [pronounced Chwaanee], and also a number of problematic highway choke points are apparently to be remedied… it wont do much for the overall national road system but it will make our lives in Jozi a little more efficient..

So you’d think that for the party that has 66% of the votes that re-election should be a shoe in, and 12 months ago it would have been. However as we all now know the ruling party got into a feud and people who had become used to wielding almost unlimited power with almost larcenous access to untold wealth, which could be spirited away and stored; were suddenly bumped off, and shouldered aside from the trough, by hungrier supplicants shouting the ancient “Iwanniitall” war cries practiced by redistributionists over long eras.

And voila: COPE is born. And with COPE has been a media frenzied assault on our credulity as the so-called ‘chattering class’ launched an all out war to assure us that this was the great promised rift: and of course it should have been. But it is increasingly obvious to even those most enthusiastic that it has run its course… had the election been last month perhaps. Now the errors are compounding faster and faster.

Interestingly these so-called COPE “heavyweights”, who were deposed in an in-house putsch, were the same persons, who ran the show for years and have firmly laid the ground for many of the major obstacles that lie in the way of the country’s success over the next two decades. We are now faced with the knowledge that those who have “learned their lesson” will not leaven those obstacles; they shall simply be mowed over in the feeding frenzy that will follow the inevitable victory of the New Left, Communist controlled ANC party that emerged from the radical revolutionary overthrown\ called Polokwane in Dec 2007.

How have they not “learned their lesson”?

Having come to existence on a “moral” resurgence lever one of COPE’s first acts was to declare a convicted former fraudster and criminal [now pardoned] to be their candidate for a premiership. The same tenuous legalistic arguments honed over decades of suborning conscience to struggle imperatives have been trotted out to defend the indefensible. It is hard to shrug off old habits.

Personally this blog is sceptical that the new party COPE can cope with the task of gaining victory. Nonetheless they should take a few percentage points off the ruling party. It is also still vaguely possible that they can wrest complete control away from the ruling party, in respect of certain key urban centres, either by themselves; or in coalitions with other less dramatically radical elements.

There have been a number of high profile persons who have joined them and there are indications of leadership tussles. It is also possible that the hands of the new leaders are not too clean. To compensate for this they have appointed a cleric as their Presidential candidate, breaking with the traditional African [Feudal]custom of having the head of State being the same person as the Party leader.

I don’t share the general unhappiness with this arrangement, although it is entertaining; I think many centres of power are a greater defence against Autocracy than a single one. Our recent experience with a President who had to be “recalled” was a reminder of this.

NO, my own concern is more with the non-secular nature of the contestant, who I understand has otherwise impeccable credentials. Tony Blair admitted last year that he didn’t tell people he was religious because he didn’t want people to think he was a “nutter” [a mad person]. This bloggist considers all [offensively] religious people to be “nutters”. It is possible that a large part of that population that would have supported COPE have thought so too, because the latest survey put the likely support at under ten percent which is what I predicted last year, when I started writing about this, but which the press has been trying to talk up..

Apparently many people, me included, would never vote for a man who talks to imaginary constructs, and bases his philosophy on the ramblings of other madmen, who not only claim to talk to imaginary entities but are visited by and allegedly lectured to by such imaginary things. One simply cannot trust people who bow to, and pay obeisance to, imaginary powers… their track record over many centuries has not been good.

It’s Hobson’s choice really and fortunately he [Mr Dandala] is unlikely to win. Unfortunately those who are likely to win are in a similar league: paying homage to another imaginary world based on “shoulds” and “oughts”…. I refer here to those proponents of the completely, utterly and overwhelmingly discredited philosophy broadly called communism. The perennially failed economic philosophy of the so-called “left”, newly laundered by the Chavez group in South America./ The same philosophy now providing the opportunistic fall-back position for the collapsing western economies, whose banking systems were subverted by socialist thinking that called for cheap loans to poor people, that lacked the means to service them.

We could be watching the shutters of economic freedom shutting down on us, if it wasn’t that we are watching the oligopolies contrived by collectivist thinking implode and disintegrate in a glorious cornucopia of Shumperterian Chaos.

Of course it is also possible that COPE is a Trojan horse.

Should the ruling party get 60 %, which is more than likely [based on historical performance and notwithstanding the possibility of vote rigging] and COPE gets 10%: also remotely possible, based on current polling surveys, apparently, then together or in coalition they can do what they like with the Constitution, and rip whatever dynamic the place still maintains, with a number of inadequately leveraged blows.

Fortunately they are unlikely [again on the record of breakaway parties] to go better than three or four percent. I really don’t believe that the “people” will desert the party that brought them freedom and all the good things of life, for the mess of pottage that is this opportunistic approach at opposition, by the people we all know to have been part of the present economic circumstance as represented by SA… 15 years later. And this is notwithstanding: they were pretty good years mostly, for more people than ever before.

Nonetheless we face the rapidly unfolding probability that the world is entering a period of unprecedented economic depression: quite possibly an L curve depression in which the markets fall to about 40 % of their peak value and remain there for ten years while we [humans] turn the ship into the full glare of the knowledge economy that is unfolding with its huge collapse of value as the entire global production system commoditises.

As I have said on many occasions, over the ten years or so that I have been blogging, Physics rules that what goes up must come down. It doesn’t rule that what comes down must go back up. This idea, that things should go back up again, is an invention of economic theory and is based as much on the power of imagination as other less productive philosophies.

This means there is no more guarantee of successful emergence from this current global financial meltdown than can be drawn from mere hope in some eternal imaginary power.

Therefore the likelihood that the two parties will [when expedient] collaborate to further the aims of the developmental State and their own pocketbooks means that more and more will fight over a fast diminishing pie. We have already witnessed on morning talk radio [SAFM] how COPE’s presumptive Presidential candidate prevaricated over the Affirmative Action issue, which is generally assumed to be a [so-called] White issue, but with the ever escalating decline in service delivery is more probably a national issue, and which is insoluble due to the [understandable] emotional baggage laden myopia, of the new constituted ruling majority.

So it is that COPE seemingly can only Cope with being ANC Lite… and why vote the illusion when you can vote for the real thing. Given the present rate at which Cope is alienating prospective voters: e.g.: appointing a pardoned former criminal fraudster, jailed for stealing sustenance from babies, as its candidate for the premiership of the country’s most glamorous province … The Western Cape… prevaricating over affirmative action, and pissing off beneficiaries, my predicted three or four percent seems more probable than the current suggested ten, and for more reasonable than the twenty bandied about in the beginning.

These people were incompetent when they were in government… it is why we have a disintegrating road system, a rail system teetering on collapse, electricity in such short supply it facilitated a cut in our growth rate from a projected 6 % in Jan 2008, to minus percent in less than 12 months last year…. The list of compounding unresolved issues is multiplying at a time when revenue is under threat and our balance of payments problem could wipe out our non-commodity export industries, effectively reducing us to a bit part player in the new emerging global knowledge economy, if we are not careful..

They [ the New COPE Leadership] have demonstrated from their behaviour since their inception that they have learned nothing from their time in office and are surrounded by the same sycophantic hacks that remained silent until the last load of catastrophe came home to roost.

Frankly they strike me as being worse than useless: a Trojan horse diversion of the kind for which the disinformation specialists in the old communist parties, were infamous.

Oh yes I forgot… the ANC [ruling party] is now run by the Communist Party… isn’t it? It certainly would not surprise me to read soon that the ruling ANC party has embarked on a pacification campaign throughout places where it wields particular influence like for instanc e in the civil service. One reads about “purging”; and I would presume that the future of a civil servant that leans towards the new rebel party would get short shrift… said person may well have to search out alternative employments. That alone will remind many where their true loyalties lie.

So here’s my prediction [for the national Assembly.
COPE 4%
UDM 1%
PAC 1%
I F.M. 3%
DA 6%
ID 1%
Others random. 2%
ANC 82 %
%age Poll 61%

This is subject to the possibility of vote manipulation. There has always seemed to be a sense of manipulation in the perceptions one has during an election. It always seems prevalent in the numbers pouring out in the immediate aftermath of the election; before the compliant mass media carefully sweep things under the carpet with their uncompromising pursuit of the of newest daily crisis.

In addition; according to a webpage for the “Abolition Of Income Tax Party”, manipulation at the IEC level seems mathematically certain. They present an intriguing essay [they do disclaim any empathy with the political position of the authors as do I ] In the essay the writer produces a cogent and comforting range of evidence to demonstrate vote rigging. This means that the percentages may well be massaged to come more into line with historical trends; leaving us with a rump to deal with whatever a resurgent communist driven policy direction may take.

Of course they may not need to, since COPE is doing an excellent job of losing right now.

I have a feeling that we are about to experience we haven’t anticipated: or what we vaguely fear. The neo-redistributionists will govern after the election and the pace will have to hot up. Newly incompetent people will replace the presently incompetent people at the helm of the system and we could well set off on a tangential journey into the hinterlands of history… maybe: all forecasting is subject to the bullshit principle… ie how much the general public will swallow when the knob is hard against the uvula… or the Murphy factor in which all plans are screwed by something everyone forgot about. Whatever: the auguries are gloomy.

This COPE phenomena is turning out to be a piece of misdirection… A Trojan Horse.

You will remember that the result [for Troy] of the Trojan horse was the end of Troy.