With the 2012 presidential election less than a year away, everyone is looking for ways to turn around America with an array of promises on the campaign trail that seemingly give each politician added credence over the others.
Radical times may call for radical ideas. But for Jeff Monson and likeminded others, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to examine that society could better itself if it tried, in turn propelling America’s economy out of the dumps and towards a future full of prospect.“I think the first thing we need to do is socialize things,” said Monson, who calls himself an anarchist but is perhaps best known outside of politics but in the realm of sports. Monson, 40, is an American mixed martial artist that holds multiple titles across the globe for his athleticism. Currently, Monson holds the world heavyweight championship title in the International Sport Karate Association. To the fighter, if America reexamined entities made available to the public and offered more fair and affordable services, society would see an improvement. Roadblocks line the way to that future, however, and Monson says that one of the biggest is the role that big corporations play in the American way of live. President Obama may have campaigned on promises thought to be capable, but Monson says the commander-in-chief has since run into a brick wall. “Now he has to sacrifice a lot of his ideas,” Monson told RT. Although he may have had best intentions at first, politics in America are bought and sold by the corporations, said the fighter. “You have to get all those people out,” he said. “You have to get the people to make a decision. We live in a Democracy, supposedly, but it’s not really a Democracy—it’s a corpocracy.” Obama, said Monson, came into the White House with a lot of promise. Without the success of big business, however, the president’s campaign in 2008 couldn’t have come through. “He had to take a lot of heat (and) earn more money for his campaign than any other president in history,” said Monson. Now those big-money backers that helped put Obama in the White House “want something in return for their contributions.”“He was the best candidate for what the corporations thought they could get,” said Monson. “He’s in there and he owes them and he’s kind of running into a brick wall. The corporations really run this country.”Monson says that his ideas for America involve his personal ethos, anarchism, but the media often portrays such a notion as one too radical to be a reality. The wrestler revealed to RT, however, that “really, anarchy to me means everybody has absolute freedom.”“What I think is the worst thing,” said Monson, is “people in the United States and around the world can’t do what they want to do with their life.”“Actually contributing to society,” he added, “we waste our potential as human beings and I think that is the biggest crime of what we call capitalism.”Also going to waste, said Monson, is the voice of each American, a mistake that is made by voting in officials unrepresentative of what the country needs. “When you vote, you’re putting someone else’s idea of what should be instead of your own,” said Monson. “You are giving someone else permission to make decisions for me. It’s strange to me that people would give that kind of power to someone else.”