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US Politics

How can you witness billionaires accumulate $10,000,000,000,000 in wealth during an economically catastrophic pandemic and not conclude that the system needs to fundamentally change?

Robert Reich

What we’re witnessing is a global phenomenon, something big has changed. The oligarchs have discovered the formula for persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich and that formula includes massive lying and cheating on an unprecedented scale. Mobilising social media particularly to generate mendacious, manipulative adverts and memes and conspiracy theories in order to swing people round or to turn them off from voting all together. Pushing forward killer clowns like Johnson, like Trump, like Modi, like Bolsonaro, who will do whatever the oligarchs want but present a sort of almost amusing face to the public and so we laugh along with them and then they learn from each other, they teach each other. In fact very often the same political operatives will hop from one campaign to another, constantly refining the model, refining the formula.

George Monbiot

He [Trump] allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realise people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives. The hatred – what is that about? It’s a fear of your own weakness.

Fran Lebowitz

[on the USA] Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you need to know how silly you look if you post some variation of, “Welcome to Socialism…”. You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people. This crisis is not about the virus. This crisis is about the massive failure of our, “Booming economy,” to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending, and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates. This crisis is about corporatised healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate. But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicisation of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.

Paul Field

Toy soldiers

By US PoliticsNo Comments

The second amendment to the United States Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and…

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

So what motivates this swell of right-wing support for Trump? At this point, though many people on all sides still refuse to acknowledge it, the evidence is overwhelming: It was cultural backlash, against immigrants, minorities, uppity women, liberals, and all the other forces seen as dislodging traditional white men from their centrality in American culture.

David Roberts

Deep poo

By US Politics5 Comments

I had an interesting discussion with someone online in which I attempted to explain how deep the poo is in which the United States finds itself. I initially reiterated the…

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He can stay, he can go. He can be impeached, or voted out in 2020. But removing Trump will not remove the infrastructure of an entire party that embraced him; the dark money that funded him; the online radicalisation that drummed his army; nor the racism he amplified or reanimated.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez