Massive war crimes in 5...4...3...2...

"A civilization dies tonight?" And the entire Republican Party is fine with that, or at least enough of them to present absolutely no check on the upcoming abomination?

Of course Trump does have the track record of blustering and then backing down, but he also authorized the already committed and ongoing war crimes of his elective bombing of Iran, so we know he likes to see things blow up and people suffer.

You'd think that the plutocrats who have kissed his ass for tax cuts would want to curtail his destruction of the global economy that makes them wealthy. Maybe their accountants have already figured out that they can absorb some losses now to cement their position at the tippy top of the economic pyramid after Trump has died and left the machinery they put in place to run more smoothly in the background.

The ultimate goal of progressives is a long-term prosperity in which everyone does modestly well indefinitely. The ultimate goal of uber-capitalist conservatives, white supremacists, and aspiring cyborgs in the tech sector is much crueler and more exclusionary, not to mention fragile and self-destructive.

No long-term goal of humanity is served by bombing anyone. Few productive short term goals are served by it, either. Good luck getting that across to the vindictive bastards who hug their emotional support munitions before raining them down on selected targets.

We're in the mess we're in because the entire Republican Party and significant factions on left and right have devoted themselves to various forms of ethnic cleansing and philosophical purification by fire. Right now, the Republican congress is complicit in war crimes and in the abuse of power domestically. They could stop the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol in this country and the mass murder of Iranians. They don't, because there's something in it for them, regardless of who gets hurt. When it blows back on them they will act surprised and try to rally the whole country the way they did after September 11th. Blame radical Islam! Blame anyone but them.

Millions of us should be in the streets right now, converging on DC and surrounding congressional representatives and senators wherever they are, to proclaim in a massed shout loud enough to be heard over bombs detonating that we do not endorse this murderous, lawless regime. We won't, of course. It's too hard to arrange. Americans are always leery of mass gatherings. For any congregation of true believers, whether at a Trump rally or No Kings, or Black Lives Matter, or Woodstock, there are many more regular folks who just wish people would simmer down. They're embarrassed by demonstrations and focused on their own day to day needs. Indeed, the need to demonstrate against authority's excesses is a gross imposition on the people that authority -- particularly the government -- is supposed to serve. 

The Secretary of Defense has already purged senior military leadership of the officers who would respectfully disagree and advise against committing atrocities in the name of Capitalism and Jesus and the god-king Trump, under the hijacked banner of the US flag. Don't expect the military to refuse to carry out the orders that will mark our nation forever as one of the worst in history.

Trump Administration tries to turn the United States into New Hampshire

 The ridiculous trade war started by the Trump administration appears to be a federalized version of the contortions that New Hampshire goes through all the time in its efforts to fund government functions while raising revenue from anything but an income or sales tax.

While I love the simplicity of paying the ticketed price for an item with no mental calculation of the additional tax amount, and enjoy a slightly simpler tax season because I don't have to compile a state return on top of a federal one, I also have to put up with the absurdly high property tax rates. 

Tax rates vary from town to town based on what the real estate is worth, with poor towns often paying disproportionately higher mil rates because the property itself is not as desirable as in a more posh town. Because all funding -- more or less -- comes from property taxes, state aid to education, for instance, still comes out of your own local tax bill.

Education in particular is chronically underfunded. Federal money is welcomed to help smooth out the shortfalls in multiple areas of state funding. But hey: "live free or die," we don't have broad-based taxes. It's a bit like a rich kid sponging off of their parents while bragging about their wildly successful independent lifestyle.

Desperately seeking to offset the disastrous consequences of his handout to the rich in the form of existing and proposed tax cuts, Trump is engaged in the same withdrawal of services to ordinary citizens while seeking alternative funding. It's appropriate that in so doing he will withdraw some of the federal funding that New Hampshire has used to make its policies look successful for decades, but that's no comfort. By devastating our country's trade relationships and raising costs to consumers and producers alike, Trump is going to screw up the economy bigly, like no one else has ever screwed it up before. Tariffs are paid by consumers. 

We the people are the power in the economy and in politics. Most of us are too numb to realize it and take part. I count myself in the numb category for many years. My excuse is that I was gaining life experience and observations in order to decide where I wanted to put my support. I was too numb to figure out that I needed to be supporting the lesser of two evils -- usually clearly identifiable -- to slow the progress of the forces that were bent on eroding democracy as far back as 1980. Their camouflage was much better back then. And their marketing has been powerful all along. I was deeply afraid of turning out to support the wrong side. What if the party that I had a visceral repulsion from turned out to be right?

Decades later it's obvious how wrong they were. But their propaganda machine has gone from effective to ubiquitous. They get considerable help from semi-smart people who roam the Internet, most of them too young to have lived through the process of degeneration. Their sense of the good old days was already a lot worse than my base line from decades earlier. I got to see it unfold. Younger people have to get it from history. That history comes with the storyteller's bias.

The current regime seeks to make the very rich even richer, while going through motions that it hopes will convince its base that the regime is making calculated, good faith efforts to control the deficit. Those tariffs are going to bring back American manufacturing, by golly. A lot of poor and elderly people are going to die miserable deaths as a result of the destruction of social services, but no one needs those losers. It's a much deadlier analog to New Hampshire starving its public schools as it turns to vouchers, tuition systems, and homeschooling. Doll it up as "choice" and "liberty."

Recession as a tool of oppression

 In an economic downturn, rich people lose a little value. Poor people lose their homes. When was the last time a solidly wealthy person was ruined by an economic collapse? 1929?

The safeguards put in place as a result of the Great Depression have been an enormous blessing to the middle and working class, whose savings evaporated as a result of irresponsible investing by bankers in the late 1920s. Never again, said the government. So we got safety nets.

The nets protect your savings if you have any. This is an important detail. If you're too poor even to have savings, the FDIC means little to you.

The nets also protect the trapeze-swinging investment adventurers, partly because they were coupled with regulations to beef up the trapezes themselves and limit the ambition of the stunts, but also by allowing the aerialists to plunge, bounce, pull a stylish backflip and land on the solid earth with a flourish before clambering up to try again. This has ultimately led to such things as a US President who has come back from six bankruptcies with a reputation as a keen businessman, and a financial sector that fucks around constantly and never seems to find out for more than a brief interlude of minor shame. It's still better than when the trapeze accidents would pull down the whole goddam tent, but it has made recession into another tool, rather than an unquestionable mistake.

I'm not the only one to have pointed out that savvy investors exploit economic fluctuations by buying the dip. If they have the funds -- and they have powerful incentive to dig them up -- they can buy low. Later, they can sell high.

It's risky business to push the whole economy down on purpose. The plutocrats probably haven't been so bold as to try to pull it off. Then again, recessions serve their power in more ways than setting up a quick little killing on whatever market has dropped.

Grass roots organizing has been a considerable annoyance to the entities who believe that the wealthy really are much better than the rest of us and deserve to rule without question. The best way to control grass roots organizing is to kill the grass. The right wing machine is lavishly funded by plutocrats flooding every information channel with their version of why life is so tough for the numerous regular folks who do the initial voting in this country. We vote -- or should -- to elect our representatives who will be our champions in this government of the people, by the people. Controlling that decision is crucial to the wealthy maintaining their image as the best of us.

It helps the rich when times are tough because they can direct the fear and anger of the voters at targets the wealthy choose, who are anyone other than themselves.

Organizations opposing that corporate consolidation of power depend on small donations. Anyone with an email account and a scrap of conscience and empathy receives dozens of fundraising appeals a day, sometimes dozens an hour in times of crisis. And we've been in crisis for almost ten years now. The grass is thin and dry, on packed, trampled soil.

Voices on the progressive side have been saying for months that anyone who opposes the authoritarian rule of the party currently in power needs to drop everything and devote all attention to protesting, organizing, and witnessing to their neighbors about the dangers of the current crisis and the dire need to get out and vote in massive numbers to oust them in 2026 and 2028. Go door to door! Talk to people on the street!

Yeah, about that: raise your hand if you, too, will shut off all the lights and lie on the floor so that a religious proselytizer on your doorstep will think that no one is home and go away. Canvassers swear that it's effective, but it takes a special kind of person, which I am not. Raise your other hand if you've ever crossed a street to avoid someone handing out leaflets.

Many of us on the progressive side are further hampered by the fact that we're not interested in wealth for its own sake. I started asking years ago, "Who is enslaved on my behalf? What person or country's poverty is indispensable to our prosperity?"

The poor aren't a uniformly virtuous, big-eyed bunch of noble souls. There are dirtbags and screwups, and failed start-up villains who didn't manage to crack the code to become commercially viable. But people of conscience are on average going to be much less wealthy in money than the people who set few or no limits on how much they will take, and from what sources. Being a shit is way more lucrative than being a decent person.

Take this opportunity to point out your favorite example of someone who sort of accidentally became super rich. Should this happen to you, know that there are simple, immediate steps you can take to start redirecting those funds to a wide array of worthy recipients. Back before JK Rowling revealed her hysterical aversion to trans women, she was a fantastic example of the accidental billionaire taking immediate steps to deflect the bulk of it into helpful endeavors. And she made a point of not bitching about her taxes. It was a beautiful, brief time.

I understand the temptation to settle in on easy street, especially if you hadn't had an exceptionally easy life beforehand. In 1996 I became an unexpected thousandaire after the death of my grandparents. The bequest was in the form of stocks, which I was tempted to liquidate immediately, but didn't. I thought I would try the supposed smart thing to do, and remain invested. Every year I would get the ballots for corporate meetings. After a couple of rounds I noticed that the altruistic shareholder proposals to make the companies more socially responsible always failed, and that the statement from the board of directors was always the same boilerplate about remaining competitive in the business environment as it exists, not hobbling the company in a way that would surely cut off those dividends to shareholders. I divested gradually for a while, as crises in my poor people life called for infusions of funds, and liquidated the last of it in 2011 to invest in a music school. Support the arts if it kills you!

On a much larger scale, a retired professor in the Bronx made a big splash when she donated a billion dollars to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to subsidize tuition for all future students there. A billion dollars is a lot of money, and quite admirable. However, she still has seventy-five percent of the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who racked it up in the financial sector. Not to put too fine a point on it, but financial sector fortunes are all blood money. Money made on money and money changing hands has nothing to do with productivity and the general quality of life for the majority of people. Again, I totally understand the temptation to keep the big chunk. The idea that the rich don't sleep well is complete bullshit. Their bedrooms are cushioned and soundproofed with bales of cash that most of us never see. The only thing the rich lose sleep over is the fact that they aren't doing better at getting even more wealth. That and the fear that the poor will finally rise up in sufficient numbers to overwhelm their private security forces and drag them out into the street. But we're actually too nice to do that, and too many of us can imagine how nice it would be to have that kind of wealth ourselves. We'd be one of the cool ones.

Billionaires are a sign of a sick economy. Multibillionaires are a massive symptom of a sick economy. They're a natural consequence of unregulated capitalism. Your free market proponents say that they're self limiting because they could lose it all on a bad gamble, but that assumes that a large percentage of them will make these bad gambles, and that the fragments of their fortunes will scatter out to the rest of us rather than being sucked up by the remaining billionaires. Guess what really happens. All you have to do is look at who owns the whole federal government right now: a whole bunch of rich people who suck.

A Long-Term Plan for Debt Elimination

 In the USA, we've been hearing about "the deficit" for decades. Any nation has to figure out its cash flow to finance all of its domestic and international activities. The not-yet United States came out of its war of separation from Great Britain with a mountain of debt. The amount has gone up and down, but never gone completely away.

For those of us in the lower tiers of the economy, the economics are clear: you need a definite amount of money to service a definite amount of debt. I don't mean people on public assistance or evading social safety nets. I mean the working and lower middle classes. As you go up from there, the lines become blurrier. The more money you have or can make people think you have, the less you have to make every equation balance all the time with solid cash or collateral. Once you reach the status of a billionaire or a nation, it gets very mumbly. 

Large financial entities with whole departments of lawyers and accountants can play off perceived assets against negotiable debts for decades or, in the case of nations, centuries. Somewhere in the US deficit is probably a line item for cannonballs bought with French funds in 1779. Allied nations have been helping each other out in various conflicts throughout history, with the ledgers balanced by returned favors as well as money. As with any friend to whom you owe money, it only becomes a problem if you have friction. These times come and go. The international community bumps along.

Bankruptcy ceased to be the kind of shame that would drive a tycoon to suicide by the mid 20th Century. Now it's just another device in the corporate toolkit to avoid paying back the full amount that you owe. Sometimes it means liquidation and the corporate equivalent of death. Other times it just means a restart with the pesky loans and losses recalculated.

For individuals, the process is a bit more dire. Individuals can declare bankruptcy, as can small businesses, but the consequences weigh on them more heavily and for longer than would be the case for a massive corporation whose collapse sends shock waves through the global economy and plunges thousands of people into unemployment, poverty, and fear. We must be stern with our erring children, and force them to learn from their mistakes. Keep the little people in line.

Starting in 1980, Republicans instituted policies that favored reducing government income. This has had the predictable effect of raising government debt. The other half of the Republican equation was their drive to make government smaller, releasing the controls on businesses, especially large and powerful corporations, while slashing and burning the social safety nets that they asserted were just making hammocks for born losers, and tangling the feet of an agile economy just waiting to sprint to nationwide wealth. In order to get into office at all during these dark times, the Democratic Party has been forced to play along. The players have been more or less reluctant depending on how susceptible they are to the lure of investment income.

Step one was to vilify government. Step two was to elect officials who would make government ineffective. The GOP called for unity above all else. There were plenty of disaffected constituencies that could be pulled together with promises to address their particular grievances. Most people have a jaundiced view of the government because, right or left, we've all been let down in one way or another. Find the right framing and you can create party loyalists for life.

At first, the proponents of trickle-down economics may actually have believed their silly theory that increased economic activity would follow when taxes on the top brackets got smaller, and that this would generate the needed revenue. If they really did think that, it wasn't for long. The real long-term goal was to consolidate private wealth and make it the dominant force in government policy. The rich wanted to get richer. It's only natural. Give them the freedom due to all people created equal. Let them use that freedom to become emperors. Equality under the law is a fairy tale you use to get poor people to fight your wars for you.

Modern media made it increasingly difficult to operate the government to the advantage of concentrated wealth without any scrutiny at all. Occasionally, idealistic principles won a round. Overall, however, the trend has been toward feeding money upward and hardship downward, flogging the tired myth of upward mobility to a more and more jaded audience.

Part of the audience has been dragging student debt for years, because a college education was supposed to be a necessary rung on that upward climb, as well as just a nice thing to have for your own intellectual expansion. The encumbrance became a drag on the economy as those workers were less and less able to participate fully in the consumerist gorge that sustains the modern world. While the gorge is itself a major threat to our survival as a species, it remains necessary to the individuals of each generation as they try to extract sustenance from the world they're thrust into. So the current administration in the US decided to extend to the student debt bloc as a whole -- or at least in large part -- the same courtesy extended to major corporations and allied nations, of just writing it off. Let the liberated wallets frolic among the retailers, the real estate market, and the service sector.

The opposition refused to see the student debt population as a large blockage in the national cash flow, and instead continued to see them as little people who needed to live with their mistake of seeking higher education that didn't pay off adequately. Hey, we've all made bad investments! Suck it up! They haven't noticed yet that student debt forgiveness is the perfect metaphor for their plan to shrink the government and drown it in a bathtub. I will explain:

Cutting taxes was supposed to make voters automatically favor politicians who cut government expenses. They've tried, but certain expenses are very hard to reduce, and other categories attract the support of lobbyists to keep the money flowing. Penurious voters keep sending angry representatives to Congress, hoping for the glorious day when the IRS finally falls like a statue of Saddam Hussein, and everyone gets to take home every dollar they earn. But it keeps not happening! Meanwhile, economists look over their glasses at us and tell us that this deficit thing is going to keep two, three, twenty, a hundred generations enslaved just to the interest payments!! We have reached the point now where a functional percentage of voters might be convinced that the best way out of the mess is just to collapse the government and walk away from the wreckage. It's a young adult fantasy novel come to life. John Galt and his rich buddies hang out in their luxurious compounds waiting to stride out over their newly conquered world after convincing the majority of underlings that democratic government is just too complicated and difficult for them. Y'all couldn't handle the expenses. And yet those expenses miraculously disappear once the nanny state is replaced by the boss state.

I'm not sure where the super rich think their wealth will come from once they have all the money. Huge dollar figures will become even more meaningless than they are already. The key becomes an economy based on job satisfaction rather than money. Tyrants need jobs done. Individuals need intellectual and emotional gratification. And because gratification is itself an emotion, it's all about emotion. Feelings, nothing more than feelings. Put sadistic bastards in charge of security. You don't have to pay them anything. Just make sure that they have the equipment they want, and whatever food, shelter, and company they require to keep them happily on task. Find workaholic drudges for your necessary tasks. Find sycophantic suckups to be your property caretakers and household retainers. There are endless ways to create a barter economy from tendencies already easy to see among people now handled through the cumbersome intermediary of pay rates. Still, the super rich will have to measure themselves against each other somehow. Oh well, I guess that's their problem to solve. We too dumb down here.

There is no Davos for workers

It's a lot easier to organize a small number of rich people than a large population of workers. The rich have the advantage of not having to work. They may put in long hours, but those hours are devoted to  consolidating and exerting their power. The actual workers have to put in their hours at toil they mostly did not choose. Then they have to be their own servants to maintain whatever sort of home they have.

There is no Davos for workers. Organized labor needs preparations as if for nuclear war, or a famine, or a catastrophic storm: shelter and sustenance for all, ready to deploy on short notice when a collective action cuts off everyone's income.

We don't have massive strikes and demonstrations in this country because our population is so dispersed. People would have to get to the nation's capital to swarm it. We've had a few, but they require extreme provocation. Movements are hard to sustain. Swarming in your own area is only as effective as the media coverage of it. And a mess in any major city is only a mild curiosity to anyone 15 miles away. Simultaneous actions in many cities might draw notice, but would further alienate the rural populations that control the US Senate. And before too long you have to get back to gainful employment: that thing we call work.

From the standpoint of the wealthy, our greatest age was the Gilded Age, when we emerged as a global power. Only when a member of the privileged class finally came down with an advanced case of noblesse oblige did we manage to get FDR's New Deal, and its struggling descendants into the 1960s. The 1970s were the neutral moment in the swing of the pendulum, as its return began almost imperceptibly. It has been sweeping back as a wrecking ball since 1980.

Social movements develop their own internal logic. The movement back toward centralized authority controlled by the wealthy will not stop until that status is achieved. And the pendulum may stop right there as the petty kings of corporatocracy metaphorically stop the rotation of the Earth. They will have vastly more advanced weapon and surveillance technology than their ancestors had, with which to quell uprisings. Good, obedient citizens will applaud the mass murder of dissenters. Because the internal logic for this has been building for decades, we can't vote it away. Its supporters will vote their beliefs, their feelings, their desires for a strong hand. Sure, they want a small government, but that government will still have the job of crushing dissidents. Among the free and armed citizens, the plutocrats will smile indulgently as their unofficial enforcers do the wet work. Freedom is for those who conform.

This could be stopped by peaceful means if enough swing voters would realize -- and care -- where things are headed, but they don't.

The occupant of the Oval Office from January, 2017 to January, 2021 was the greatest thing to happen to the right wing since Ronald Reagan. Indeed, he is the logical heir. Along the way have been many contributors to the rise of the right. Listeners to right-wing talk radio can feel like badasses without having to do anything. The minority who do want to do things can join militias and maybe some day get to shoot some people or blow something up. But the movement is mostly supported by chickenshits who want to make lots of money, pay little in taxes, and take no real risks.

You want common ground to build a coalition? That's it right there. Those same desires have fueled corporate Democrats now labeled as neoliberal. Make lots of money. Don't get shot at.

I'm with you when it comes to not getting shot at. But we diverge over the money. The pursuit of wealth automatically destroys the environment and the well-being of the ecosystem. It tramples on the rights of indigenous peoples to live in their environmentally balanced ways. You may destroy slowly, thoughtfully, and with a measure of regret, but you will destroy. And competition -- a cornerstone of the capitalist philosophy -- guarantees that the destruction will be neither slow nor regretful. Too many people will be shoving and grabbing to get their pile.

I'll still dangle the hope that a slim majority will vote together to put the brakes on what looks like a killer avalanche. Even then, that alliance will have to hold its ground and defend its perimeter long enough for the benefits to become obvious to a more reliable majority. And every generation will have to have the same arguments over and over.