This government is not designed to help people but to serve as an organ to redistribute the people's wealth from the bottom up.
Any gesture otherwise is only intended to keep people from understanding this and realizing how angry they should be.
It does not have to be this way. We can have an actual government for and by the people that serves public good rather than a system that plunders our wealth and sells out our well-being.
It can be different.
It has to be different.
For decades now there has been an economic consensus that wealth is best served being handed over to the wealthy and allowing the powerful to operate based on their own interests.
That consensus has to be broken. If it isn't, fascism and economic collapse are inevitable.
This austerity is artificial.
This suffering and inequality is by design.
We can live better lives than this. We can have a better society than this. And this current path is completely unsustainable anyway.
The pandemic made it very clear. The fates of the wealthy and powerful are vastly prioritized over the rest of us.
Heading into the new year, we have to recognize that ugly truth and fight to change things before it's too late.
It's not too late, but the clock is ticking.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The wealthy and powerful spent decades and billions destroying government as a public good and eradicating trust between Americans.
It’s no accident we have bought-off representatives, a violently divided citizenry, and a hapless infrastructure incapable of fighting a pandemic.
Reckless, thoughtless, humanless greed got us here. A society cannot function like this and America is sprinting headlong into decline and fascism because the wealthy have coopted everything. This always, always, always leads to disaster.
The wealthy undermined experts until we were lost in fascistic conspiracies, hollowed out our infrastructure and industry, imprisoned us for profit and kept us dependent using debt and insecurity, and captured our government and turned it into a wealth redistribution center.
To reckon with the fact that white people carry out terrorism is to begin unraveling the entire fragile mythology of white supremacy and the narratives that legitimize oppression.
That our media is incapable or unwilling to do this should tell you everything you need to know.
White supremacy isn’t just carried on by avowed white supremacists. It’s also served by people who are disgusted by those groups and yet continue to cultivate, protect, and maintain the stories and ideology of white supremacy in their journalism, art, and politics.
The difference between “disturbed, lone wolf” white terrorism and “organized, cultural” terrorism carried out by people of color is an unwillingness by white supremacist America to reckon with itself or disturb the brittle mythologies that lie under our facade.
The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office floating the idea of a full-scale military coup.
He probably won’t try it, but we’re primed for an authoritarian moment. If it was someone more competent or a closer election we’d be in a whole lot of trouble.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Trump is a precursor to a more competent, more ideologically-driven fascism. The GOP is enabling this, profiting from it, as are the wealthy and powerful.
Things are not okay. And they could get very, very bad.
Economic crisis, continuing alienation and radicalization, and shrinking resources from climate catastrophe will only worsen the situation. If we don’t recognize that fascism is growing every day and that this seditious behavior is real...there’s no telling what it’ll become.
Somewhere in town last night there was a huge explosion that rocked my house. This morning, I can’t find anything on it anywhere. Not a news item, not a tweet.
It’s making me think about decline of local news and local experience that’s contributing to our current crisis.
Beginning a few decades ago, with media deregulation and the Gingrich plan to nationalize all experience for the purposes of political power, the downfall of local media has created a perfect environment for alienation and radicalization.
In small towns especially the economies are nonexistent. Jobs have dried up. Monopolies like WalMart absorbed everything and lowered living standards. These people are frustrated and the lack of local voices explaining the moment left a dangerous vacuum.
Militias are out in the streets with semi-automatic weapons and busting into legislatures.
White-identity Christian fascists are praising the criminal president as a messiah.
Monied interests see the violence as a means for power.
It's bad.
People like myself have been warning you for years. It wasn't alarmism and it wasn't a grift.
This situation, this moment in American history, is rife for bloodletting and bad faith actions.
It's time to recognize the situation for what it is. We're in a burgeoning crisis.
Until people see just how bad of a place we are, that all the elements for a fascistic takeover and widespread antidemocratic violence and oppression are in place, it's just going to get worse.
Large scale action and a societal reckoning has to happen.
Trumpism is about using existing prejudices and distrust to enable the final stage of a decades' long project to dismantle government as a means of helping people.
Congress isn't going to help anyone besides the wealthy and powerful. It's there as an illusion.
We've seen this throughout our history. Representative government was meant as a means of channeling public sentiment into a body intended to either redirect anger or just disperse it.
That changed for awhile, but it's worse now than nearly any other time.
The pandemic has made it disturbingly clear that our government is not there to help anyone. It's there to oversee the redistribution of our wealth and to manage artificial austerity.
These stimulus packages are a joke, a distraction from the incompetence of government.