Fossil-fueled psychopathic planetary pollution. Sew dependence reap profit and power. Smiling politicians with Kennedy haircuts and earnest, rolled-up sleeves issue focus-group words and wet their beaks.
Temperatures ever more extreme. The land becomes brown not green. Smoke from fires clogs our lungs. Species go extinct. Crops won’t grow.
It’s OK both sides do it radical terrorists say it’s wrong. Divisions are stoked and they are conquered.
It will trickle down.
I was thinking about how most voters out there have no memory of all kinds of things people who are older remember.
Tax Cuts Will Pay For Themselves
They don’t remember Reagan promising that tax cuts for the rich will cause them to invest in the economy and bring all kinds of great things that meant the tax cuts “will pay for themselves.” They didn’t watch the resulting shift from government taxing the rich and doing things for people, into “borrowing” FROM the rich, doing nothing for the people, and paying massive amounts of interest TO the rich. AND the resulting massive inequality. They don’t remember that there weren’t billionaires. Now it’s billionaires with all the money vs people in food lines, etc.
Deregulating Corporations Will Unleash Growth And Bring Prices Down
They don’t remember Reagan promising that deregulation of corporations will “unleash” growth, causing them to provide more great things so we would all be so much better off. Now they pollute at will and scam everyone. They don’t remember the promise that getting rid of antitrust regulations would force prices down and make everything better. They didn’t watch as merger after merger transformed the economy into a few giant monopolies that charge whatever they want and make you pay monthly to use products you already paid for.
Elections Were Competitive
They don’t remember competitive elections before campaign finance was undone. Regular people could run for office. Now a few oligarchs decide elections with “dark money” so no one knows who pays for the ads and bots and propaganda.
They don’t remember the Democratic Party standing up and fighting for working people.
Before The Propaganda
They don’t remember that TV news used to have rules about serving the public interest. They don’t remember that commercials were not allowed to lie. They don’t remember when the benefits of belonging to unions was allowed to be discussed on the air. They don’t remember that “markets are better at making decisions than government (i.e. “democracy”)” was laughed at. They don’t remember that there was a fight to allow non-whites to vote. They don’t remember that women couldn’t get bank accounts or credit cards without their husband’s permission. They don’t remember that government existed to make people’s lives better.
There are all kinds of things they know nothing about…
For a lot of them ALL they are old enough to remember is Trump coming down an escalator and saying immigrants are all criminals who rape and murder, etc…
Let’s just say the Iran situation calms down, Iran sets up the toll system and the US just … leaves. Then the world has to sit and wonder what Trump does next. It could be literally anything. Back to Greenland? Cuba? Canada? Take the UK?
How did this happen? The disppearance of rule of law, international law, norms … we are now all at the whim of one madman with incredible power. The entire world!
After WWII the world tried to set up some structures to prevent another catastrophe. The US set up the regulatory state to prevent another depression and make people’s lives better. It was all systematically dismantled, piece by piece, with the effort hidden behind a fog of propaganda called “free speech” and based on “making some money.” Now a few people have all of the power and most of the wealth.
Will the world recover and do better next time?
The vast “immigration” apparatus is quickly migrating to a political enforcement apparatus.
The original excuse for building a vast “enforcement” apparatus was to deport “immigrants.” (People who are not white.) The pretense was “immigration” but the purpose was political — they sent them to “liberal” states and cities.
Now the right and their propaganda apparatus have drummed up a fake story about “fraud” in Minnesota. So guess what? They’re sending more agents to terrorize Minnesota over “fraud”, not “immigration.” NYTimes, Noem Says ‘Hundreds More’ Agents Will Be Sent to Minnesota Over ‘Corruption’,
Minneapolis crackdown: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Fox News that “hundreds more” federal agents were being dispatched to Minneapolis to uncover “true corruption,” citing a yearslong federal investigation into social program fraud in the state. The deployment, to be carried out Sunday and Monday, comes after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman, Renee Good, there on Wednesday. On CNN, Ms. Noem again claimed that Ms. Good had attempted to “run over” agents.
Building the vast apparatus was never about “immigration.” It was about building a vast apparatus to enforce fascism.
Polls measure one and only one thing: headlines. (Or however things are being circulating at a given time.) This is something the right’s apparatus of media outlets and lobbying/PR firms figured out a long time ago. This is why owning local news stations and bot networks and the control of the social media that amplifies them are now so important to the oligarchs.
People get worked up about what they’re TOLD to get worked up about. Marketing actually works.
Polls used to consistently show the public believe most of the US budget goes to “foreign aid.” Under Biden polling showed the public believed the “border crisis” was the #1 “problem.” Past top polling concerns have included “Obama phones,” jury awards to people harmed by spilling extremely hot coffee in moving cars, Satanic cults abusing children, “the national debt” (when Democrats want to spend money to make people’s lives better), … It comes down to whoever is paying big bucks to get the pubic to believe something. This is how politics works right now in the US.
Short statement on why people vote for Trumps and Farages and the like:
Tobacco companies figured out how to convince people to kill themselves slowly and painfully, and to pay them for the privilege.
When the govt started warning of the harm they caused they took their techniques into politics.
Later, oil and coal companies took up the cause.
Public service is very different from the “private-sector.” It is about serving the public. (The clue is in the name.) People who go into public service do so with an expectation they will receive less pay but have a more secure position helping other people.
We have all been subject to decades of propaganda devoted to breaking down these understandings. Government is bad – all government. Government is inefficient and in the way of progress. People who work for the government are lazy and greedy and only out for themselves. Etc.
It really got going when the government tried to protect people from harm by tobacco companies. The companies developed ways to convince the public to let them keep doing what they were doing. They were convincing people to kill themselves – but also to pay these companies for the privilege of bringing them a slow, agonizing death. Other industries picked up these techniques.
Personal responsibility. Liberty to do what we want. Nanny state. Government interference.
The propaganda wasn’t enough; they also organized a political attack. Not a coincidence that a tobacco lawyer wrote the “Powell Memo,” launching the “Conservative Movement” and later, on the Supreme Court, “legalizing” bribery. (PLEASE please listen to the “Master Plan” podcast explaining how bribery became the way of business under the cover story “free speech.”)
Now we are living with the consequences of doing nothing about this “free speech.”
There will be a lot of finger-pointing but Harris ran a great campaign and there was nothing anyone could have done to change the outcome. Nothing. It was just too late to fix things.
Culmination
I think this election was determined some time ago. This election was the culmination of the long-term “conservative movement” strategic campaign begun in the 1970s. The country has been subjected to decades of unanswered, well-funded propaganda and it has had its way with people. One by one conservatives inserted the right people into the courts and those people chipped away at the guardrails. Piece by piece the billionaires gained control of America’s information ecosystem and far too many people now believe what they’re told to believe. (The podcast “The Master Plan” does a very good job of explaining how this happened, going back to the Powell Memo.)
Corporate Dems
They got rid of campaign finance limitations. That inevitably led to moneyed interests gaining control of and neutralizing the Democratic party as an opposing force. Those we called “corporate Democrats” blocked reform after reform. And when there were majorities for reform anyway they refused to eliminate the filibuster, preventing majority rule from restoring the Fairness Doctrine, voting rights, campaign finance, and many other popular reforms that would have prevented what happened.
Inevitable
So I don’t think it was even about Harris vs Trump at this point. It was inevitable. We had hope that we could overcome it, but this was set in stone some time ago.
Are you paying attention to the right-wing riots being staged in the UK? My opinion is that this stuff is probably why Musk and his international band of fascist financing partners (Quatar, Saudi, fellow-billionaires etc) bought Twitter. They did so in order to be able to incite this stuff around the world. They obviously never expected to make a profit (at least directly from the company. Maybe from eventually taking over the world.)
A Worldwide Coalition Of Fascists
It’s so clear that there is a coalition of some sort between the authoritarian petrostates, a number of US billionaires & various international oligarchs, authoritarian leaders like Putin & Orban, American & international right-wing movements — to attack and destabilize Western democracies. They are sick and tired of regular people being able to band together, implementing rule of law, taxes, unions, regulations and the rest of that stuff that gets in their way.
The Playbook
The playbook is to stir up racial, religious & nationalist division. Use social media & media outlets they own to spread victimization disinformation. Demand “free speech” rights to do it. You see the same stuff in countries around the world now. It’s like they are reading scripts prepared in “best practices” seminars. Use anti-refugee disinformation (“illegals”) to incite hatred, and “other” these vulnerable people who have nowhere to go. India’s authoritarian ruler is using anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism. Orban using Jews & other “others.” Etc etc around the world.
Pushing hated of refugees is a winning game because meanwhile the things that are causing so many refugees — war, climate, cartel, crime & others — get worse and worse. In fact, often this international coalition of fascists worked to make those causes worse.
The way I look at the election and in particular this debate is, “how the fuck is Trump even or ahead in the polls, and how does the voting public see things?” Not, “how do I see things?” How in the world does the voting public see their lives under Dems and Biden as worse than Trump?
So you look at the information environment that regular people are in. And you try to see what they see.
I know what the public saw in the first 15 minutes of the debate – which is all that matters. Impressions are set and no one cares after that.
I am of the belief that you have to vote for Biden anyway because of the existential threat of Trump or at this point any Republican. (I wavered because of Gaza but am still there.) And I was shaken by what I saw, wondering even if Biden can even stay alive until November, never mind another 4 years. And the brain was not functioning. I see no future in a Biden vote. No hope for more of what we saw that last four years, only a Harris ascension quite soon. But I still will vote Biden – only because of Trump.
Will the debate change things? The right-wing-dominated information environment regular people live in already had Biden as old and demented, so all that happened is that was confirmed. For people outside of that information environment, Trump is clearly understood as extremely dangerous, and that was confirmed if you could stomach even watching him which I could not and did not except for a bit.
Anyway what matters now is are the polls going to change? I think maybe not. I think enough people already had it in their mind that Biden is too old but Trump is too dangerous.
If we can change the information environment America could come back. At this point that means overcoming Murdoch, Sinclair, private equity, billionaires etc. Musk and his cohorts did not buy Twitter to make a profit.