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" Published in the October 2012 issue The American presidential election may be the most elaborate archaic ritual performed in the world today. No expense or effort is spared: unending debates, massively expensive advertising campaigns, an army of commentators, then a series of expensive parties to celebrate the inauguration of the new or rechristened president as a god among men. The spectacle&amp;#039;s fundamental assumptions are that the president is the most powerful person on the planet and that the mechanism he putatively controls, the government, is the dominant power in the lives of its citizens. Both assumptions are growing less reality-based by the day. The 2012 American election may well be the hinge between a world run by states and a world run by stateless money.  The power of national governments has been on the wane for decades, but only since 2008 has its claim to supremacy actually started to falter. Ironically, Obamacare was the clearest sign of the transformation. Leaked correspondence shows that what appeared to be a massive government expansion into ordinary American life was actually a stark exhibit of who really holds power: The president did not so much impose his will upon HMOs and Big Pharma as mediate between them.     Romney has or has had accounts in Bermuda, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, which is exactly why he may be most fit to be president in 2012.    Many spheres of influence that everyone thinks belong to the state turn out to be in the hands of private firms. The military has become a concatenation of contractors whose deals are negotiated by lobbyists. FedEx and UPS have made the U. S. Postal Service their bitch by essentially dictating to Congress the types of mail services the government may and may not provide. Even the basic interest rate isn&amp;#039;t in the hands of elected officials. The Libor scandal, which is worming through the United States after shredding British banks&amp;#039; reputations, is like the ravings of a conspiracy-theory kook, except this time it happens to be true. The rate you paid for your mortgage was determined by an unsupervised group of unaccountable scumbags who rigged the game in their favor.  The state is being hastened into oblivion by hypercapitalism and technology. A recent study by Britain&amp;#039;s Tax Justice Network estimated that offshore accounts worldwide contain more than $21 trillion, which is more wealth than the United States and Japan collectively produced last year. Half of that money is handled by a few dozen large banks, locked away from all taxation and oversight behind private accounts, foundations, and trusts. The other half \u2014 $10 trillion \u2014 belongs to just ninety-one thousand people, or 0.001 percent of the world&amp;#039;s population. This fluid secret money lusts always for more secrecy and fluidity. The plan of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel for a libertarian colony off the coast of San Francisco \u2014 a floating city without federal regulation, law, or tax \u2014 is being outdone by Honduras, which is going ahead with creating new &amp;quot;free city&amp;quot; zones. The development of bitcoin, a species of Internet money, could fundamentally challenge the capacity of governments to distribute money. And that will be the end of the state as an instrument of power.        The e-mails from the Libor scandal read a bit like notes passed in high school: &amp;quot;If you know how to keep a secret I&amp;#039;ll bring you in on it...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If you breathe a word of this, I&amp;#039;m not telling you anything else...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Dude, I owe you big time! Come over one day after work and I&amp;#039;m opening a bottle of Bollinger.&amp;quot;   If you think this is overdramatic, look at Europe, where many ancient democracies have been taken over by unelected technocrats. Certainly no political figure is even remotely as powerful as the credit-rating agencies. European states remain democracies in name and in practice, but they are incapable of determining the economic order of their peoples. So what exactly are elections for?  Americans have always been suspicious of any international agreements or global financial treaties that infringe upon their country&amp;#039;s ability to regulate its own business. The year 2012 is the challenge to that beloved sovereignty. Money has no country and American elections have become almost entirely about money \u2014 the better-heeled candidate wins 93 percent of the time in the House and 88 percent of the time in the Senate. Mitt Romney represents that transcendence of money over the state more completely than any candidate in history: He is an American, but his money is not. The Obama camp is trying its hardest to paint the discrepancy as a moral failure, but the truth is that money simply does not belong to anyplace anymore. In 1979, GM employed 618,000 Americans, the majority at union rates, and paid a corporate tax rate of just under 46 percent. GM was an American company, in every sense of the word; it built and employed and contributed to the country of its origin. By comparison, Apple currently employs 43,000 Americans, many at low hourly wages, and it paid a 9.8 percent tax rate on profits last year. It&amp;#039;s a ridiculous habit from a previous era to think of Apple as an American company. Apple is money and money lives in numbered boxes in Delaware, or on the island of Sark in the English Channel, or in the Caymans, or in Luxembourg. It lives in the floating smoothness of London&amp;#039;s City. It lives everywhere and nowhere at once, answering only to itself.    The only reason we know about the exact size of the Fed&amp;#039;s full commitments during the 2008 crash is that journalist Mark Pittman had the grapefruit balls required to sue the Fed. So profound was the desire for secrecy on the part of the financial institutions involved that the case had to go all the way to the Supreme Court.    The 2012 election is a turning point, but it&amp;#039;s not a choice. The current relationship between globalized money and nation-states is like that between abusive, ungrateful sons and their mothers. When financial institutions are up, they threaten to move across borders, dreaming up floating cities in the ocean where they don&amp;#039;t have to listen to anybody&amp;#039;s rules. But when their checks bounce, they run home begging for help. Taking into account all commitments from the government to U. S. banks in 2008 and early 2009 \u2014 not just the $700 billion in TARP money but all the other loans and guarantees \u2014 American taxpayers committed $12.8 trillion to the bailout. That&amp;#039;s $42,000 for every American man, woman, and child. The financial elite come to nations either as overlords or as beggars. In either case, presidents and elected officials are all but powerless. The best they can do is manage the fallout.    Occasionally the post national life can provoke outrage, as when Eduardo Saverin abandoned his American passport presumably for the tax benefits of life in Singapore. He&amp;#039;s Facebook. What would he care about borders?   This may be the best reason to vote for Mitt Romney. Obama&amp;#039;s time in office has made it clear: Americans need a negotiator who will barter for them with the institutions that really decide things. And as a negotiator you could do far worse than Mitt Romney. Empty and rich is the future, the real future \u2014 whether or not it&amp;#039;s the one we want. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15820/who-is-commander-in-chief-1012/>