This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What makes people elect candidates for influential government positions while knowing them to be corrupt?”
Sadly, corrupt agents in government and media have succeeded in appealing to cynical minds enough for a significant proportion of people to believe everyone is corrupt, that there is no difference between parties or people in each party.
Misanthropic cynicism has always existed, but it began to define politics when Ronald Reagan claimed the government was the enemy.
It was a half-truth which appealed to enough people to begin choosing political leaders based less on who they supported and more on who they disliked.
As our societies have evolved from primitive states, most people have consistently found themselves at odds with those wielding the most powerful in society. Before arriving at our current state of global reach by a handful of centibillionaires and multinational corporations, the most powerful in society were always represented by the governing body of a society.
It has been relatively easy to convince people that the most powerful enemy in their lives is the government they comprise as individuals in a system of democracy. It is nearly impossible for people to grasp how a lone individual with a global reach can pull the levers of many governments worldwide. Even though this has been happening for decades now, we have been fortunate to have been given a glimpse behind the curtain when news of Musk’s meddling in the affairs of multiple nations around the globe reached our attention.
On a “quieter level,” Canadians have been experiencing the corruptive influence of oil billionaires such as the Kochs, which has resulted in the creation of an almost national crisis with a separatist movement in Canada originating within the province of Alberta.
Canada is not the first, but only one among many nations around the globe that have been assaulted by mostly American billionaires seeking to extend their reach and control the resources of other countries.
Example upon example of this corruption endorsed by the most powerful among us who transcend governments and destroy governments can be found almost everywhere, from Venezuela, to Iran, Iraq, Panama, and Vietnam.
Understanding how democracy is a system of the people remains challenging for a significant proportion of the population, who also remain susceptible to propaganda through their ignorance of governance today.
Many people still think of government as a ruling authority rather than a servant of the people.
The complexity of the dynamic and its layers throughout society, such as the distinctions between federal, municipal, and state/provincial governments, create barriers to understanding. Meanwhile, our corporate environments have grown to such degrees of influence that they, more than governments, shape our daily lives.
They have, since being permitted to rule by corporations supporting right-wingers throughout the world, defined life for all of us, and that has meant stealing the necessary time, resources, and education the people need to understand how our world functions.
The harsh reality of electing puppets to enable the corruption of the powerful among us is as simple as participating in an auction to establish ownership of a politician who wins their election primarily based on how much funding they get.
When 80 %+ of election winners win because they raise more money than their competitors, we create a feedback loop of corruption in our electoral systems. If winning a cushy job that one can leverage to become a millionaire is as simple as catering to billionaire whims, then we are inviting the most corruptible citizens among us to benefit from screwing us all over.
This dynamic, in turn, reinforces the perception that all candidates are corrupt.
By creating a two-party dynamic, the wealthy and powerful billionaires among us establish a see-sawing dynamic of opposites in our elections that makes it easier to manipulate the people while creating a horse race for their entertainment as they compete among themselves instead of allowing the people to exercise their democratic rights to self-governance.
Their deliberate manipulations of electoral dynamics turn political gamesmanship into a sporting event where those lacking the time, education, and energy to be vigilant dominate the political landscape. This leaves us all to be led by the whims of the most cynical, undereducated, and emotionally unhinged mental health patients among us.
Unless we change this dynamic on a fundamental level by eliminating the influence of the powerful among us, we will continue a trajectory of increasing conflicts, such that we will no longer be able to ignore the widespread destruction of modern society.
We are on a path to chaos, and the people standing in our way are the people we must retrain, but won’t because too many among us envy their wealth and power to such a degree that they fantasize about acquiring such wealth for themselves to empower them in acts of retribution toward their neighbours.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If the top one percent create jobs aka businesses, then without the everyday worker it would only be pipe dream right? Does money drip down not bottom up?”
That certainly is the myth perpetrated by the one percenters, but that’s just a narrative they have invested millions in convincing the gullible to support their hoard-growing efforts.
Anyone who spends even just minutes thinking about how the working class is the engine of the economy knows that’s just bunk — simply due to numbers and how no business can survive without market demand, because you can’t force people to buy your product, no matter how much Elon Musk wishes it were the case.
The job creators in society are the mass of consumers who create enough demand within any market niche, which justifies hiring staff to meet demand.
Making matters worse has been how the one percent have perverted the capitalist system to reduce their tax burden and eliminate laws that would prevent them from indulging in job-killing initiatives like stock-buybacks that they then distribute to shareholders, board members, and executives.
Fifty years ago, under a system of higher taxes and greater regulations limiting corruption, the one percent were incentivized to hire more people to reduce their tax burden. Further to all of that, and before the one percent went on massive “union-killing sprees” with corrupt “Right to Work” laws, the middle class had disposable incomes that they then reinvested back into the economy at greater proportions of their total wealth than the one percent ever have to create the most significant economic growth this world has ever seen.
When the middle class had disposable income, they would also have resources to create businesses and employ more people than is possible today. In today’s corporatist world, the only real employers of note are corporate employers who, when they have a bad quarter, make minor budget cuts that force hundreds to thousands at a time onto the unemployment line.
Fifty years ago, a business could fail, and fewer than one hundred people would be unemployed, with the economy easily absorbing that without a downturn. There was also enough diversity and opportunity for the recently unemployed to find new employment within one or two weeks.
In today’s world, corrupted by the one percent’s greed, people going years without finding suitable employment is not unheard of.
Money in the hands of the gluttonous never drips down. It collects in hoards to cater to sociopathic egos who regard those less fortunate with the same disdain many today consider the poor and homeless.
An economy is like a garden that relies on a strong root structure before flowering.
Economies grow from the bottom up.
Supply-side economics is a wealth redistribution scam responsible for putting the middle class on life support and making home ownership an unattainable dream, fifty years after Reagan betrayed the working class and changed the direction of the ship of state to become a tool of the oppressive class of one percenters.
Economies grow from demand.
No flower can survive without roots, just like no economy can be sustained without demand.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think of the Justice Department planning to clear homeless camps and involuntarily hospitalize the mentally ill on the streets?”
This sounds very much like a typical MAGAt CONservative brain child. It’s precisely what Pierre Poilievre suggests as a solution for Canadian tent cities.
Poilievre promises to let police break up tent cities, arrest occupants
It’s precisely the mindset of MAGAt CONservatives everywhere:
The irony in this thinking is so dense it generates a gravitational field.
“To fix a government failure, we’ll sweep it out of sight so that you don’t have to be visually confronted by government failure. You can wait until it escalates into increasing crime waves that we can use to leverage your fear and elect us to solve the problem we created.”
It is precisely this mindset that births abominations like hostile architecture.
It’s always the same heavy hand that creates problems to give them excuses to indulge in their misanthropic treatment of the vulnerable people they victimize into early graves.
No example of this kind of monstrous thinking is an attempt to solve a problem. It’s an excuse to get off on perverted Machiavellian desires.
If they could legalize fights to the death among the homeless, they would.
If they could legally implement a Squid Game television show, they would.
Within the misanthropically short-sighted mindset of reactive thinking that MAGAt CONservatives wallow in, the idea is to pretend to solve a non-problem by punishing the victims of systemic problems they create, creating the non-problem.
I am deliberately describing tent cities as a “non-problem” because they’re not the problem, but a symptom of the problem.
To solve problems, one must look to their causes and address those issues before the symptoms of those problems can ever be addressed.
It’s like affixing a bandage on an open wound while expecting to stem the internal bleeding of a patient.
Making matters even more surreal in the incompetence driving these problems is how the MAGAt CONservative mindset fixates on scapegoats that are part of a comprehensive solution, the non-problems they create with their short-sighted and misanthropic thinking.
In this case, PP blames the “lax liberal drug laws” while completely ignoring how their draconian attitudes toward drugs in society have resulted in an entire host of expensive and socially destructive problems, including punishing the victims of horrible policy while creating an underground growth network for criminal enterprises.
One would think decades of failure in an old problem created by the same thinking which made the same criminal incentivizing problems with alcohol bootlegging about 100 years ago would result in some lightbulbs going off within the dimmest of minds. Still, they seem completely inured against learning from their mistakes.
The kind of self-destructive stupidity that CONservatives perpetually indulge in is like a never-ending nightmare of a Groundhog Day repetition.
The MAGAt flavour of CONservatives wonder why their opposition thinks of them as stupid, and they never stop to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they choose reactionary and destructive approaches toward problems in society. It’s not like the information is unavailable or that educating oneself on issues is impossible. They can’t work through their biases to question their logic.
The mentally ill on the streets has been a problem created by CONservatives to begin with, when Reagan shut down institutions and forced them onto the streets. The homeless issue has grown because people who work full-time can no longer afford to house themselves. At the same time, the billionaire class buys up residential property and inflates prices as their government lackeys continue to refuse to raise minimum wage.
Then they whine that reduced birth rates are an existential threat without putting two and two together to realize they created that dynamic with their misanthropic policies.
The self-destructive stupidity is beyond mind-boggling.
MAGAt CONservatives don’t seem to care about solving problems as much as they prefer to focus on destroying the most vulnerable humans on the planet. Ironically, they often cite how much more money Conservatives donate to charities as they indulge in the same overcompensating behaviours that criminals indulge in when they create laws to ban gay marriages or abortions.
The CONservative mindset seems far more driven by hatred of one’s fellow humans than by working together to build a better society for all.
One day, we might be lucky enough to realize that the mentally ill are not those coping with life on the streets, but are those who walk among us, spreading hatred and voting to destroy lives, only to find the consequences mean destroying their lives as well.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Are factory jobs the jobs of the future in the United States? How would that work?”
Factory jobs will mostly go the way of blacksmith jobs worldwide as “Dark factories” become the norm.
Here’s a video introduction to a massive change that is already transforming the factory landscape on an enormous scale to displace over 10 million factory workers in China alone:
Below this bit of my two cents is a long assessment by AI that will give you an overview of the reasons driving this transformation.
How that affects us as individuals is another issue altogether.
Much of what we can do as individuals is determined by our resources. As individuals or small groups of friends, we can focus our resources on investing in small business ventures that can generate profits by producing custom solutions, services and/or products that will still be in demand.
Almost all mass-produced products in society will be handled by automated systems with minimal human oversight.
Smaller markets will emerge, however, as 3D manufacturing matures enough to create local production facilities for customized products. As 3D matures, we will likely see growth in creative design areas where people will buy product designs or templates rather than products, which they then print with their in-home 3D printers. These will, of course, be limited in their capacity as they become more available to consumers, as laser printers have, which will create cottage industries for a higher production level.
In essence, I can envision three levels of production: large-scale factories producing for a global market, local factories producing for local municipalities (which begs the question of raw materials like PLA, along with a radical evolution of printable materials to expand production choices made on a global level), and home-based production.
Factory jobs and jobs where people go to every day by the hundreds or thousands to perform functions for a large organization’s profits are disappearing. That type of work dynamic is vanishing, particularly on a production floor.
We may see organizations grow out of opportunities for innovation, where, instead of going to a job to perform mechanical functions in a production process, we will see large groups emerge in an innovation-driven enterprise model. Hundreds of scientists, engineers, electricians, programmers, etc., will collaborate on new technologies for space exploration, for example, or medical advancements.
Companies specializing in material sciences will emerge to create new printable materials to advance 3D printing technologies, for example.
At any rate, here’s the screen grab of an AI overview of dark factories:
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Isn’t it important, and even necessary to have presidents with morals? Regardless of party affiliation, or none, religion, or none, can an ethical America ever be restored if truthful leaders, and humane officials are elected?”
People will elect leaders who echo their standards, and that leader will validate those standards. That dynamic becomes a feedback loop that pushes a society to evolve in a particular direction.
A political duopoly creates a dynamic of competing standards that pulls a society in opposite directions.
In the case of the U.S., and the emergence of a Neo-Liberal sensibility, the nation’s standards toward the accrual of material wealth put the oppositions in alignment, and the consequence has been a nation that has become increasingly sociopathic over the decades.
Since both Republicans and Democrats embraced power through wealth, there was no room for any competing morality to maintain any semblance of a compassionate society.
This dynamic is how they managed to create such moral abominations as instituting privatized prison systems, blocking universal healthcare, and eliminating the right to claim bankruptcy on student loans.
The U.S. morality has evolved completely around the veneration of wealth and the worship of greed. Due to that perversion of humanity, they have evolved into a corporatocracy to become a kleptocracy on the way to becoming a full-blown fascist state whose national character is defined by gluttony and an attitude of entitled expansionism.
“Greed is good” is the morality that the U.S. has embraced and the character that its leaders cultivate within the people.
The morality they have embraced throughout the decades since Ronald Reagan has put them on a path of becoming a nation defined by a narcissistic character, and that makes them an enemy to the world. Even their current “friends” aren’t actual friends but fellow sociopaths who will exploit them for their benefit.
The record-breaking “gift” of a $400 million plane that would require up to $1 billion to inspect and convert into an appropriate means of air travel for the nation’s leader is a manipulation tactic by those the current American leader views through envious eyes.
Although this question presumes “morality” to describe a state of being beneficial to all citizens, that’s not the case with what the word means. People do vote for and elect a president with morals. Those morals, however, are entirely self-serving for the current American president and would make people consider him “amoral” or “immoral,” but that’s because the nation has lost track of which morals they value.
Currently, the opposition to the extraordinarily corrupt Republicans who enable and empower the malignant narcissist in charge is also struggling with the same form of corrupt morality as they deny the truth of being lulled by their failure to represent an opposition to a materialistic morality adequately.
The DNC’s old guard is as responsible for the monstrously corrupt morality ruling the nation as the RNC for installing Trump as their party leader. The DNC continues to show that they have not learned their lessons, and because they’re not as willing to “join the dark side” as the RNC, they suffer internal struggles which turn their supporters away.
At the moment, there exists a younger sensibility of opposition toward established morality within the DNC, and the old guard seeks to excise what they view as a threat rather than a necessary evolution for their party to survive.
Had they not been so corrupted as a party, they would not have prevented Bernie Sanders from having his opportunity to lead the nation back from the brink of a sociopathic morality. They have not yet learned their lessons and seem to presume their Neo-Liberal beliefs are still sustainable in a world that crumbles around them.
One-third of the electorate stayed home and abstained from voting because they saw no difference between the RNC and the DNC. To some extent, that’s very much true because both parties continue to embrace a materialistic morality that has been responsible for the destruction of the middle class throughout the last several decades.
Many people have reasoned that if both parties are the same, the only solution is widespread chaos that causes their society to crumble. By refusing to vote, many voted for the current state of protesting nationwide in every city every day until the problems they see being ignored begin to be addressed.
The DNC is undergoing internal strife, and the more the old guard resists giving way to the new who fight for a morality that represents the people, the more that party will become fractured and ineffectual against the trajectory of a nation becoming a full-fledged fascist state or autocratic rulership.
People like Chuck Schumer need to be pushed out of the party, and the DNC must start paying attention to the goals that David Hogg has been promoting. They desperately need a cleansing of the morality that fully characterizes their opposition’s morality of being sycophants to the wealthy in society if they want to preserve some form of dignity as a party that can install leaders who have enough backbone to lead the nation out of a dark morality and toward an enlightened one.
The notion of a “dark enlightenment” currently characterizing the RNC and Conservatives worldwide is a morality of misanthropic cynicism which embodies an Ouroboros that ultimately consumes itself. Adherents of this worldview of rulers and serfs are so primitive and barbaric in their thinking that they cannot fathom a world not characterized by a zero-sum game of winners and losers.
We are all responsible for allowing this sensibility to become a threat to the world order because we have worshipped the wealthy to such a degree that when the term “centibillionaire” was first coined, we celebrated it instead of becoming horrified by the abomination we allowed to come into being.
In short, having presidents with morals is neither essential nor necessary because they all have some form of morality, even if it’s considered an “anti-morality” or destructive morality. What matters is selecting leaders whose moral fibre is such that they place the good of all people above the whims of the few.
The morality we all desperately need now to lead us out of our darkness is the morality that acknowledges the necessity of placing upper limits on wealth and power. The morality we must embrace to restore sanity to this world is to recognize how, if someone possesses the wealth of a small nation and can afford to buy themselves a private army, they are a clear and present danger to society.
We must establish a rational and community-based view of social engineering rather than allow a chaotic approach toward our social evolution. We cannot afford to continue allowing the wealthy to shape our morals as a people while empowering the most psychopathic among us to define our character as human beings.
If we want an ethical society to re-emerge as our guiding vision for humanity, we must cleanse the misanthropic darkness clouding our sight.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Are there any political parties in this world, who not only defend their country, work to improve social and material wellbeing of citizens, but also aim to improve spiritual wellbeing of citizens?”
Any political party that focuses on the material well-being of the citizens while acknowledging how industry is intended to serve, not rule them, is a party that defends their country and works to improve their overall well-being.
No political party can “improve the spiritual well-being of citizens” because that’s a responsibility each citizen holds for themselves. Governments are administrative bodies that regulate the pragmatic activities of a society.
“Spiritual matters” are neither pragmatic nor quantifiable in any way that any administrative body can directly address. However, by facilitating the development of a socially and economically stable and harmonious environment, a government frees the people up to address their personal “spiritual” issues.
In this case, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can illustrate these parameters for a government’s responsibility to its citizens.
Governments are responsible for ensuring the first two tiers of needs are accessible to all citizens. By addressing these basic needs, the community can adequately address the following two tiers of needs. When a government provides the stability of the two bottom tiers, then a community can become stable and supportive of its members, which then encourages each member of that community to pursue matters at the top of their hierarchy of needs.,
When the bottom of the pyramid begins crumbling, like it is now with extreme income inequity, the entire edifice of meeting needs crumbles and civilized society is then lost. We are seeing the cracks throughout governments worldwide as widespread disinformation by toxic parties disrupts our systems around the globe while they vie for power.
If we want to avoid system-wide collapse, then we must each reaffirm our commitment to the social contract while recognizing we are all in this together, and only by working together within the context of mutual respect, can we resolve the problems arising from the chasms we have been creating between us to sow division around the globe.
Either we learn to “voluntarily see the light” and choose better for ourselves, or we continue to allow the toxic members of society to direct our species toward a systemic collapse. If we fail to resolve our political issues, future existence on this planet will be threatened by our ecologically destructive activities. Our environmental irresponsibility will catch up to us and cull our species at rates exceeding hundreds of millions per year until the Earth can reestablish a new “normal” for itself.
Governments worldwide must reassert their commitment to ensuring the bottom two tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are adequately addressed if we are to restore global stability and secure our future. Individuals’ “spiritual needs” will naturally be addressed if we can accomplish that.
This post is a response to two questions posed in their complete formats as: Question 1: “To what extent can George Soros be termed as a political figure?” and Question 2: “Democrats, what would you say to a group of Republicans begging you to give them a chance to prove that they are good people?”
To no extent in “capital P Politics” and a limited extent in “small p politics.”
He mostly avoids public statements about politics, politicians, and political issues. He recently made a rare comment referencing tariffs as warfare when Trump began his tariff rampage, but that was the extent of his input.
It had bothered me for some time that he hadn’t been more vocal, but then I realized how anything he says can create massive ripples throughout the marketplace.
His voice is like Marvel’s Black Bolt from the Inhumans.
He has to be extremely careful about what he says publicly because a slip of the tongue can kill an entire industry and dramatically impact people’s lives.
It took me a long time to arrive at that realization and regret being so dense about it.
I wouldn’t want that kind of influence. It’s way too much stress and responsibility that few can handle, and even fewer can be trusted to handle it responsibly.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are excellent examples of being too incompetent to have as much power as they do.
He is a shadowy figure who quietly does what he can to leave a positive legacy for the world. That makes him a lightning rod for the toxic among us and an inspiration to those who value his contributions.
Question 2: What do you say to MAGAs who claim they are good people?
Stop begging and start doing.
Actions speak louder than words.
Republicans are being judged by their actions.
Remaining silent in the face of a fascist takeover of the nation is complicity with that fascism.
It doesn’t matter how much you beg, you’re still an ass, and a cowardly one at that if you don’t stand up and fight against it.
If you do that, you won’t need to debase yourself by begging. Grow a spine and take responsibility for the actions of the party you identify with.
Why do you think people are just as pissed off with the DNC?
It’s because they have been spineless while all this destructive nonsense has been happening.
People from all walks of life, except the privileged, demand a new world. The status quo can’t survive because we can’t survive it. We need to work together, and that includes the enraged MAGAts who need to stop attacking their neighbours and start demanding changes from the monsters they admire.
After all, you can’t seriously be okay with being told that you’ll have to cut back on buying dolls for your kids this Christmas, and then be OK with Mango Mussolini getting a half-billion-dollar gift from the people who financed the 9/11 tragedy to jet around the globe to visit his branded properties.
No one who can accept those two conditions can be a good person. Only a coward and a hypocrite who refuses to protect their family could accept that. If you want to be seen as a good person, then it’s time to do the right thing, not the Reich thing.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would Communism actually work if every nation on the planet switched to it?”
Making a switch to an entirely new system is never as simple as a change of clothes.
Every significant change to an extensive system, such as a complete switch to a new form of governance, always comes at the cost of widespread chaos and rivers of blood coloured by horrors of every shade of nightmare.
That people keep talking about switching to new or resurrecting old systems because they’re overwhelmed by how broken our current system seems to be is, on one hand, understandable in their frustration and desire to restore sanity.
On the other hand, it’s horrifying to contemplate how little people understand how our current system should be working and why it isn’t working as intended.
It’s frustrating that people can see why our system is broken, as they get slapped by those reasons every day and remain utterly blind to the simple fixes that would right the upturned ship of state we all depend upon.
It’s the same kind of broken reasoning that claims we should hedge our survival bets by creating extraterrestrial colonies instead of focusing a fraction of those resources on restoring our world to a sustainable balance for life.
The simple answer to this question is that we should stop thinking about throwing the baby out with the bathwater and fix the leaks in the tub to more quickly return to struggle-free baby bathing with far less pain and suffering.
We can borrow elements and concepts from communism (and other systems) to modify and incorporate into our current systems of democracy and capitalism. Hybridization of systems has already occurred worldwide and has proven itself a successful strategy without mass casualties.
The Social Democracies developed in the Nordic nations are prime examples of the superiority of evolving systems over replacing them wholesale.
Let’s take a moment to think about an analogy that might simplify the concept of evolution over replacement.
Redesigning and building an engine from scratch still requires a lot of after-the-fact adjustment. No new engine design is fault-free from its first iteration. There are always necessary improvements to make following its first release, if not outright fatal flaws that could end production altogether.
Software applications are generally considered immature and buggy until at least the third major release. As an analogy, software development is an excellent model for understanding how social engineering can work when deliberately planned to accomplish long-term goals.
Software applications generally begin by focusing on core functions to meet various needs for various use cases. Minor updates are made to improve operational efficiencies, while new versions expand on core functionality and incorporate new features that are usually the highest in demand.
Social systems are far more complex, while system crashes cost lives. There’s not much wiggle room for errors when hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of lives are affected by minor disruptions.
Have a look at these pictures:
Below are the same docks in L.A. that, currently, are mostly empty and without traffic. During the program this aired on (The Beat with Ari Melber — 2025.05.12), Representative Robert Garcia mentioned that before the tariff wars that Donald Trump (the deal-making artist) began, it would usually be too busy to walk where they walked without being run over by trucks due to a flurry of activity.
This is today’s result of the trade policy changes implemented three months ago. It took three months for a simple policy change to filter down to the port level. It will take a few more months before this effect trickles outward to impact every home nationwide.
It was mentioned in this report that hundreds of dock workers were out of work or had their hours cut back. The problem is much worse than a few hundred lost jobs, though, and they touched on the implications without adequately explaining what this all means.
When I see these photos and hear them speak, I see a domino effect of thousands of bankruptcies picking up steam throughout the nation, to become hundreds of thousands of lives displaced and destroyed before escalating into millions of lives by next spring.
Donald Trump’s casual dismissal of the serious concerns of real people trying to survive while working multiple jobs to raise their families and pay for their living needs showed a sociopathic disregard for their struggles. When he responded with nonsense about parents needing to cut back on buying 30-plus dolls for their kids for Christmas, while he’s raking in hundreds of millions on cryptocurrency scams and spending $3 million taxpayer dollars on every day he golfs and another $100 million on a military parade for his birthday, it’s mindboggling how people can be so frustrated with their lives and not be livid with him.
Every callously self-serving decision he makes carries implications that dramatically affect lives for years. This is the impact one person can have on hundreds of millions of people in their nation. We may currently joke about memes like this. If the U.S. becomes his latest and greatest bankruptcy, very few people will laugh — and it won’t be the millions suffering the consequences of one man’s corrupt thinking.:
People worldwide will feel its impact even if it’s contained and doesn’t erupt into a global catastrophe. Millions will die. Some people still haven’t recovered from his first term in office.
This is the impact one person can have on a system that is so complex and tightly integrated that no one escapes the effects of its disruption. Imagine how dramatic the impact on people’s lives would be if, instead of a simple tariff war and an illegal immigration round-up to concentration camps orchestrated by one leader, chaos were ramped up to a full-scale restructuring of society as a whole.
If a simple Constitutional amendment requires decades of debate and challenges by competing interests, imagine how disruptive it would be to dismantle a centuries-old system and replace it with an untested one. You can claim Communism was implemented before, but it wasn’t. Perverted forms of it were implemented by despots who killed millions as they tried to remake their nation in their image, using that system as a tool for them to leverage, like Donald Trump and several others are doing today with capitalism.
There’s no way to ensure the Communism you or anyone imagines will be the Communism that would be implemented. Marx’s vision of Communism was never implemented before, and the perverted versions of his vision were worse than failures. Meanwhile, democratic governance with a capitalist system has already transformed the world. It has become so successful that several people have and do support Donald Trump’s perversion of it to become a monstrous betrayal of what it was designed to accomplish.
Changes to any system that hundreds of millions rely on for stability require predictability in their systems more than anything else it can provide.
Without knowing what’s coming next, when people don’t know what to do, they naturally do and risk as little as possible while rationing out reserves to ensure they can survive in a repressed state over an extended period.
Completely shutting down the tariff wars and restoring trade policy to where it was only a few months ago would still take several years to return the economy to a state resembling it only a few months ago.
Replacing an entire system with another system means several decades of adjustment would be required to arrive at a state of equilibrium where people could finally feel comfortable predicting their futures and making decisions with confidence in their predictions.
Several decades of adjustment would be required to switch from the current system to a system of communism that would be stable enough, where the cost in lives could be mitigated.
In the meantime, periods of chaotic transition create incentives for the parasitic predators among us to leverage the confusion in ways that benefit them at the expense of everyone else. This is precisely the dynamic we are struggling with today. Without addressing the core problem of a corrupting influence in society, we would simply be porting a virus that weakens us today to a new system to continue infecting our society while adapting their strategies to the new system.
The flying monkeys who enable their corruption would be ported along with them because that’s the nature of power. When power is concentrated in the hands of the few, they no longer need to act directly, while their supporters do all the heavy lifting of “massaging a system” to cater to their needs.
We can see that occurring primarily within the MAGA community as they’ve been frustrated with how much they’ve had to endure and are struggling ever more over the last few decades, instead of experiencing a general improvement in their quality of life, like their parents and grandparents before them. They are righteously angry because they have been betrayed. They can’t face the truth of who has been betraying them, so they accept easy targets to vent their frustrations onto.
We have all been violated on deep and visceral levels, leading us all to take desperate action to fix what we know is broken. The problem is that far too many people leverage their anger and ignorance of how systems work to further the oppression rather than mitigate it.
The people who are selling easy solutions are the same people who are responsible for creating the problems. Donald Trump embodies that scam. Many billionaires are billionaires precisely because of that scam. There isn’t one private prison billionaire who hasn’t specifically leveraged that scam. Insurance billionaires and weapons moguls are the most popularly recognized culprits of the fraud of benefiting from the problems they create. Elon Musk’s DOGE was an abomination of a scam that many still believe was an honest attempt at addressing waste and fraud rather than facilitating it all while giving Elon and many others an escape hatch from accountability for their criminal behaviours.
We can and should be fixing the bugs in our current system by eliminating exploits, such as placing a global cap on net worth and instituting UBI. No one should have more wealth and power than a small nation. If an individual can afford a personal army, then they are a threat to global stability. However, everyone in a system that produces more than what we can consume is entitled to the basics of survival while given access to whatever means are available to improve one’s status through tools of opportunity like housing, education, and healthcare.
That IS precisely what “promote the general welfare of the people” means.
What we can do is ensure distribution systems are equitable and maximize opportunity so that everyone has an equal chance to create some form of meaningful success for themselves. No one needs more than the basic implements to carve out a modest life for themselves by applying their efforts toward achieving goals. No one should be denied these basic tools in a post-scarcity society of abundance, particularly not when we’re on the verge of becoming a fully automated society.
No one should be permitted to hook up to major arteries in a system and drain wealth from it while doing nothing else but watch their hoards grow without restraint or limits.
People like Jeff Bezos and the Walton family spend hundreds of millions to thwart unionization efforts so that their underpaid people don’t have to rely on taxpayer dollars to make up the difference in being short-changed on their income.
We must restrain greed, not rebuild a new system for greedy people to continue exploiting the desperate and the gullible.
Changing our system doesn’t solve our problems when we’re not prepared to deal directly with the cause of those problems.
We still have time to address the causes of those problems before they escalate and find ourselves repeating a bloody history of correction.
Avoiding the cause of our problems by pretending we can gloss over the obscenity of gluttony with a rebuilt system from yesteryear means we’re just lying to ourselves and begging for chaos.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do MAGAts and so called ‘conservatives’ refer to sane people as ‘the radical left?’ Why don’t they just call them ‘radical centrists’ who rely on logic and facts?”
Hyperbole is a core part of the strategy applied to extremist dialectics. Referring to the left as “radical” allows them to position themselves as rational and puts the left into a defensive position where they are forced to justify themselves. Meanwhile, the extremist right continues its rage-farming activities to enlist more people to push the left to justify its existence.
As the momentum against the left grows, they are forced into justifying rational positions like universal healthcare, which benefits everyone, including the most vulnerable in society. Universal healthcare is increasingly viewed as radical, while the beneficiaries of a privatized system are increasingly positioned as victims of a dastardly socialist agenda.
All of it is based on empty slogans that the illiterati ignore because they’re more interested in feeding their addiction to rage than they are in thinking things through.
Thinking about issues in depth forces people to set aside their addictive emotions and calm themselves down enough to develop a comprehensive enough understanding of the conflicting positions and eventually prompts them to abandon their rage addiction.
The billionaires feeding the culture wars don’t want this to happen because they will lose their cash cows.
The ownership class has cultivated the extreme divisions we live with today to distract the public from their wealth-chasing priorities. The MAGAt movement could not otherwise sustain itself without the economic desperation created by the historic levels of economic inequity existing today, which fuel their rage-fests.
MAGAts are justifiably angry. Everyone has a justifiable reason to be angry today: the economic stability we once enjoyed has been stolen. The main problems with the MAGAts are not only that they are angry at the wrong people, but they are also defending the people they should be angry with.
MAGAts should be out on the streets today demanding DonOld’s head on a platter, and they would if they could get past the blinders of their hatred enough to understand how humanity can survive only when we unite in a common cause and not divide ourselves into warring camps.
Our enemies are the same people they have been throughout history and the dawn of human civilization. We have been at this crossroads many times throughout our history. Yet, here we are again as if human history were pointless stories we tell each other for entertainment, not lessons in survival for our species.
It is time again for us all to stand up and say, “I am Spartacus!”
It is time again to dethrone those who dare to be kings among us.
It is time to be radical with the few who have stolen so much from the many.
It is time to stop asking nicely for them to restore economic justice and start taking it by force if they insist on it as a survival necessity.
From 1932
Bonus Comment (A Response to a Related Comment from Another Thread): “I’m starting to see a second shift in MAGA responses. It’s a far more conciliatory tone.”
To borrow from a boxing strategy, don’t look at the opponent’s eyes, but their chest. Their eyes will misdirect your attention, while the chest cannot help but move in the same direction as the body.
If this were an eleven-dimensional chess game, they would not have needed to use a “flood-the-zone” strategy because the nation has been desperate for positive change… even the MAGAt army is angry because their needs have been overlooked.
Bernie Sanders has been the only prominent authentic leader pointing to a horizon with a better future for all. It’s not that there aren’t others in the offing, just that the DNC has been so polluted with conservadroids for so long that they can’t find their way to recognize how appeasing the right is the wrong strategy.
They need to strengthen their spines and be provocative right back while directly challenging the MAGAt shit. They still have too many spineless and ethically challenged NeoLiberals leading them. This may be primarily a war of words and legal jargon. However, it is still a war… until the Reich gets dialectically hammered into submission, they will continue to use whatever ruse they can to throw their enemies off guard, including feigning sincerity.
They won’t stop until they rule the roost with an iron hand. They have proven that time and again and for decades.
This is a real-life game of thrones, not a board game that resets after the match is won. If they succeed, America’s character will be defined by the defeat of democracy for well over a century afterwards.
Compassion is ultimately a human strength, but they have none and will use that against you. Reserve it for when they’ve been so defeated that they’ve given up fighting for dominion and are just begging to hang onto survival.
They’re addicted to power and, like all addicts, they’re manipulative on the most heinous of levels.
Conciliatory tones can’t be trusted until they’ve been demolished and defanged… and that won’t happen unless they lose every seat for at least the next two election cycles.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Wouldn’t a better option than tariffs be to have a corporate income tax system that would create incentives for companies that hire domestically and penalize them for hiring in other countries?”
A “better option” is an alternative strategy for accomplishing what tariffs are intended to achieve. Tariffs protect local businesses and industries that can be overwhelmed out of business by foreign exports, which would otherwise dominate market niches to evolve into monopolies without constraints.
Tariffs are not helpful for much of anything else. The way Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating strategy would be the equivalent of using a scalpel to carve up a side of beef. Inevitably, that scalpel becomes dull and easily broken. People unfamiliar with scalpels would at first marvel at how clean it would cut, then become frustrated with scalpels altogether from misuse.
That’s what’s happened with tariffs.
Trump has misused tariffs as a club for negotiations and, consequently, has created a misperception of their function in a reasonable trade deal that would otherwise be used to protect local industry. He has lied about tariffs stimulating manufacturing, or is so incompetent that he sincerely believes his nonsense.
What this question suggests was already in play during the Eisenhower years, when corporate taxes were high. See the chart below:
The tax rates highlighted by the red outline comprise the years in which the economy was most stable and grew steadily, while the middle class flourished.
The higher tax rates on the upper end incentivized corporations to reinvest in their operations by increasing their hiring to reduce their tax burden. (Other laws were also in place to support this economic growth, such as prohibiting stock buybacks to increase dividends, which were eliminated along with several protections throughout these last decades.)
This stable dynamic changed because the wealthy class wasn’t satisfied with being the richest. They wanted more and continue to want more, such that we have repeated the economic disparity that has repeatedly destroyed stable societies throughout history.
The problems we are struggling with are made incredibly easy to understand once one adjusts their perceptions to realize our struggles are the consequence of a centuries-long class warfare against the people by those who seek dominion in this world.
We will experience a correction in one of two ways:
1. Through a reasonable form of relenting by the wealthy class, who collectively restrain the twenty percent of them who comprise a psychopathic psychological dysfunctionality, and re-establish the rich and influential among us as ethical leaders for humanity, or
2. By continuing to allow the corruption to influence public policy in the way that has encouraged fascism to grow out of control and repress economies while stripping people of their rights, until a tipping point occurs and societies collapse upon themselves in such a dramatic fashion that chaos rules the day. At which point, the people will reassert their power over the powerful in the traditional manner established throughout history by violently deposing the corrupt among us.
We are very close to widespread chaos ruling the day around the globe, while the Canadian election has provided us with a slim glimmer of hope. Meanwhile, the corruption that has fueled this fascist resurgence continues to corrupt the best of humanity.
MAGA is the public face of organizations like the IDU, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and an ideological movement self-described as a “Dark Enlightenment” which feed the economic distortions that threaten the integrity of democratic societies worldwide by favouring corporate power and fascist governance through targeted disinformation to manipulate election outcomes based on negative campaigning.
Our best option today is to mitigate the corruptive power of these hatemongering groups and of the psychopaths within the one percent who seek to reestablish a two-class society of rulers and serfs.
Corporations are allowed to exist to serve the people, not rule them. We have eliminated kingdoms from our societies because they are toxic and destructive, limiting our potential as a species. We can restructure corporations into democratic institutions, and we must because the trajectory they are taking us all on is inviting us to repeat a blood-soaked history.
We are again at a crossroads that we have repeatedly visited throughout history because the corrupt among us have little to no respect for humanity. We now have the benefits of a long history and an established pattern, while the changes we need to make to rid society of this corruptive scourge once and for all are within our grasp. This will be our last time at this crossroads if we unite as a people and assert our power as individuals within a shared community that refuses to bend our knees to incompetent and cruel rulers.
thotbag 