People only vote against

The Republican Party figured out decades ago that people don't vote for things, they vote against them. What is conservatism but the commitment to hold back change? What is bigotry but the insistence that a particular group should be prevented from taking a full and equal place?

The opponents of this exclusionary point of view vote against it at every opportunity.

Voting for civil rights was voting against firehoses, and police dogs, and police with teargas, and lynch mobs. Look at how progress on civil rights slowed and has reversed when the tools of oppression became almost invisible except to the people on whom they were used.

Voting for environmental protection was voting against brown air, and rivers that catch fire, and polluted groundwater, and pesticides sickening and killing humans and wildlife alike. And so much more. The idea of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has been a harder sell, because they are less obvious. Are we against an earlier spring when winter is so damn dreary? How bad is it really? Maybe we won't get devastating super storms this summer. And aren't the early crocuses a welcome sight?

The Democratic Party has been rightly inspired and energized by Cory Booker's historic marathon speech in the Senate on Monday and Tuesday, and with the resounding defeat of billionaire Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election. I have received a blizzard of fundraising emails and seen a barrage of social media exhortations to rally the faithful with the idea that "we can win elections!"

Here's the thing: Neither party can win an election with its base alone. The margin of victory always lies with the unfaithful. I can't speak for elections before I was born, or old enough to understand, but you could say that Franklin Roosevelt came to power because the voters were rejecting the Republican mismanagement that had wrecked the national economy. They continued to support him because they liked what he was doing -- so they voted for it, but by extension voted against letting the screwups who had wrecked things in the first place get control again. Then, through World War II, FDR remained at the helm because voters didn't want to disrupt leadership.

Truman won his election in 1948 basically on voter complacency. All the experts had stated pretty strongly that he was sure to lose. Come 1952, the voters voted against letting the Democrats continue their hold on the White House after 20 years in power.

Policies are important. Our economy has been mutilated and our elections sold out by the policies championed by Republicans. They have been largely unopposed by corporate Democrats, but corporate Democrats are a product of the corrupting influence of big money on elections. I apologize for my generation, but I think that a great many of the Baby Boomers believed that they (we) were not only going to enjoy the most protected childhoods any generation had received that far in history, but that we were also somehow miraculously going to become rich. It should have been obvious by the late 1980s at least that we were wrong, but faith is persistent. That's what makes it faith.

The bigotry just came along for the ride.

Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976 because voters voted against Nixonian shenanigans, which slopped over onto Gerald Ford by association. Reagan won in 1980 because voters voted against what was seen as Carter's weakness in the face of global threats, and the faltering economy as the country as a whole was deciding what to do with itself after partying for most of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton won in 1992 because the Reagan recession had eroded faith in the Republican brand. You could say that we voted for youthful enthusiasm, but that also means that we voted against stodgy old men. But then in 2000, voters voted against Clinton's sexual escapades, which stuck to Al Gore like a suspicious, waist-high crust on the Oval Office drapery.

It seems like the thing that the uncommitted voters (and the Republican base) seem to like to vote against the most is their own interests. That's a tough one, because they're also voting against "socialism," "terrorism," "lawlessness" (particularly hilarious), "tyranny," "government overreach," "globalization," all of which need to be addressed with counteracting negatives. Because they're never going to vote for you.

Voters in Wisconsin voted against Elon Musk. They might have voted against what the MAGA candidate for the supreme court seat represented, but Elon really crystalized it for them. That jackass is so despised, people are setting fire to his cars even in other countries. He's living proof that you really can be too rich. It's encouraging that enough voters wanted to prove that democracy was not for sale on that day in that state in that race. Now let's see them bring that same energy to every other election in every other place.

As much as we all want to be positive and live in a supportive environment, we can never escape the essential negativity that goes into choosing our elected champions. As a representative -- rather than a direct -- democracy, we have to pick people who will defend our position up where the decisions finally get their legal weight. We the people do have the power, but that requires us to exert it every day, not just on election day or -- worse yet -- only on occasional election days. This ain't your church. You can't just show up on Christmas and Easter, have a slug of wine and a piece of bread and call yourself right with the Lord. The politicians need to hear and see what we are against, every day.

Negatives can be positive. I'm against bigotry, persecution, environmental destruction, sprawl, overpopulation, anthropogenic climate change, moto-centric transportation planning, and so on. That means I am for the policies that act against these things.

In the film Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey's character suddenly gets to receive the prayers of everyone in the world. It's an overwhelming flood of messages asking for benedictions or divine wrath. This is basically what an elected official faces. We owe deep gratitude to them and their long-suffering staff members who get buried in this avalanche. However, every contact shapes political decision making. They have to hear it everywhere they go. It doesn't have to be obnoxious direct confrontation, although sometimes that is warranted and makes highly entertaining video. It just has to surround them. While you live as you believe people should live, narrate it to no one and everyone. Make no secret of it. Drop them a note from time to time. Keep it short and courteous. Just try to remember to be there, in their inbox or voicemail or even an old fashioned paper letter.

Citizen government is hard. Benjamin Franklin didn't know the half of it when he said, "A republic...if you can keep it." We have way more to keep track of than he ever imagined. But it is more important than ever to pay attention. I know it's hard. We can't know everything. We have to trust office holders and civil servants to take care of the sensitive stuff in a way that will promote the general welfare and not reflect badly on our national image. We're certainly not getting that now.

The big challenge for a party interested in ultimately positive goals is to find the right negative approach to gather in the fearful and pissed off to support them for more than one lousy election cycle at a time.

The United States is an occupied country

We are under occupation by hostile forces, and have been for a while. Ordinary citizens are held hostage by a cruel minority that does not care who gets hurt by their abuse of power.

Our economy and the industrial system already held the people as economic hostages. The citizens of the United States have been the victims as well as the beneficiaries of its economy since the beginning of industrialization. The original investors in factory-style manufacturing took advantage of the prevailing modesty of most people's expectations, and the desperation of some of them, to keep wages low and hours long, while newly discovered pollutants poured into the environment.

Every problem turns into another industry that creates jobs addressing the problem and creating new problems. As the profits of the industrial system spread to the lower classes through determined and sometimes bloody insistence, consumers prospered and desired more things. The proliferation of automobiles led to the spread of junkyards. The time-honored practices of throwing our rubbish into a hole in the ground or shoving it down the nearest riverbank became serious public health issues.

Until 1980, American problems seemed to be American problems. We did not progress rapidly, but our society absorbed women and minorities into more complete participation as if it was inevitable and ultimately good. There was always an element of strong resistance to this, but those voices seemed to be fading as the 1970s ended. Inclusion was better than exclusion for the economy and national identity.

As the Reagan administration introduced the era of hard-core partisan conflict, the edge of the blade was lubricated with oil and honey. Conservative revulsion against anything outside of their concept of normal did not manage to snuff out a popular culture that continued to love bright colors and weirdness. However, that same culture began to rehabilitate the idea of militarism.

Through the 1990s, the partisan divide became a muddy field crisscrossed with barbed wire. Conservatives became increasingly truculent about working with liberals. Liberals became increasingly concerned about funding, leading to corporate alliances that undermined social progress.

Nothing is simple. The actual events of those decades are more complicated at ground level than this flyover summary relates. Bear with me. The Republican tactics of the Gingrich era began to identify the Democratic Party as not merely mistaken about policy but as actual enemies of the country. At first it was done just to put the party in power, where they planned to govern in the ways that had worked for decades. Foreign policy might shift slightly, but the overall tone was consistent enough to make the USA a trustworthy ally. Domestic policy was marching steadily toward oligarchy, but the oligarchs still thought that they needed American consumers to have some money. 

The attacks on 9-11-2001 split the country between the warlike and the thoughtful. The vengeful warriors who sought approval to unleash hellfire on the Muslim world said, "If you're not with us, you're against us." If you did not line up and cheer to support their every move, whether it limited civil liberties at home or scorched earth abroad, you were a coward, a traitor, a suspect.

Political conversation since 2001 has only gotten worse.

The demonization of the Democratic Party is so complete in at least 25% of the population that they will never ever trust a Democratic official, elected or otherwise. It's completely protected as their religious belief. They have every right to vote their conscience, no matter how poorly educated their thought process may be.

It has always been popular to say that all politicians are completely full of crap and are basically interchangeable and disposable, but it's not true. People are imperfect. People who seek power probably have at least some ulterior motives. But others who accept power do so out of a sense of responsibility. Governing is largely thankless work, especially in a country that allows unlimited dissent. Anybody with a gripe can sound off, sending nasty messages by whatever means they have. The Internet has made this extremely easy to do in large volumes. Your average comment thread is never a reasonable exchange of well thought out ideas discussing the pros and cons of a particular policy position.

With the election of 2024, the United States came fully under occupation by a hostile force bent on its destruction. They landed initially in 2016. They were pried out of office in 2020 and contained only until 2022, when the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives. The mechanisms intended to prevent a coup like theirs moved too slowly to bring them to justice. We were not liberated. 

Every occupied country has had resistance movements and collaborators. The collaborators in our occupation are the voters who remain loyal to the hostile force, the functionaries of the hostile force, and the uncommitted voters who will not declare themselves part of the resistance. We are not quite at the point where the occupying force will seize "normal" (i.e. white) people for expressing dissent. This makes it overwhelmingly important for those "normal" people to declare that the occupying government is wrong, and to refuse to comply with its demands. And, when the next election comes, vote against every member of the party that supports the occupation. We told you that 2024 was the last chance, and it may well have been. 2026 is definitely the last chance to install a Congress that will reclaim its Constitutional authority and slam the brakes on the destruction of our citizen government and the devastation of our once-respected position in the world.

Yes, our foreign policy depended on our military might. We did export predatory capitalism mislabeled as democracy, and topple foreign governments to suit the desires of corporate leadership. It was bad, and needed to be reformed, but now our actions are nakedly and anachronistically imperialistic. Russia is not an evolved nation. Their -- really Vladimir Putin's -- obsession with claiming actual territory is so 19th Century. Why should we play an old, discredited game, while China and the other adults move forward with soft power? Soft power is much better for business. We're supposed to be pro business, aren't we? Instead, we are held hostage by a madman and his followers.

As hostages, we're all just trying to stay alive until we escape or are rescued. This means staying housed, fed, and employed, if possible. Retirees depend on their pensions. Workers depend on their jobs. Low level workers -- the working poor -- depend on the programs funded by taxpayers to make up for what their employers have refused to pay them. On top of this we're asked to go out in public to join protests, and to dig into our meager coffers to support the independent media who report the news, the candidates who promise to represent us rather than corporate donors, and the nonprofit organizations that protect the environment and other interests deemed unimportant by corporate leadership.

In any conflict, the poor do most of the dying. It takes a long time to get the rich to the guillotine. Sure, the sons of the privileged have also died in the cause of liberty, but as the conflicts became more focused, on labor rights, or Black rights, or women's rights, or indigenous people's rights, the ones with "less to lose" economically are pushed forward with what they do have: their lives. Even now, when we all have a lot to lose, too many don't recognize that we are in a real crisis, because they can still get gas and groceries, and no one has kicked down their door yet. Action now will definitely save bloodshed later. The longer we wait, the less we commit, the greater the cost.

But what does commitment look like? Stickers on your car? Flags on your house? Signs waved by the roadside whenever you can fit it into your schedule? I do not mock the schedule. We're all coordinating variables. We're told that we must sacrifice. The nature and timing of that sacrifice depend on your individual ability to let things go. That which is sacrificed is gone. Are we to the point where a terminally ill person needs to volunteer to quit being treated, or a seriously ill person with long odds needs to give up their chance and just get out of the way? Are we on such a war footing that anyone with a modest income needs to go on subsistence rations and siphon off every other spare dollar to fund the war effort?

How bad is it going to get? And can we do anything to keep it from getting much worse than it is now? You can find a lot of conflicting opinions, ranging from guardedly optimistic to flat out hopeless.

I can tell you this: if it is hopeless, do not expect anyone to rise up and fight back. Why should we? We're doomed anyway. Party like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't. Indulge yourself to the limit if your budget. Become lawless, because you really have nothing to lose. Go on a murder spree, or see if you can find enough partners to fuck yourself to death. Finally start trying to learn to play a musical instrument and torture your neighbors with it, or take up painting, not because it will do you any good, but because it doesn't matter anyway.

Except for the murder spree, that might actually be the best form of resistance: if we all become terminally lazy and utterly useless, who will carry out the dirty work for the overlords? The problem is that the forces of oppression are following their bliss just as much as the hippie dropouts are. We are under the heel of the percentage of people who like to hurt others. So far, their efforts scorn the law, but stop short of opening fire on dissenters. The pain is inflicted by pulling back the helping hand, not by swinging a clenched fist. Slap the bowl from the begging child's hand, but don't slap the child yet.

Far right groups march, but have not indulged in vandalism or violence. Will they, or have they fallen to the level of cosplay? They imply that they look forward to direct conflict, but have not initiated it. 

The thing is, the real destructive forces do not need their amateur bully boys to bust heads. ICE acts as the Gestapo, snatching undesirables off the streets and sending them to detention camps and foreign prisons. DOGE demolishes every department of the federal government without regard to its usefulness or popularity. The mad king raves about tariffs, churning the economy whether he ever actually enacts them or not. We'll know tomorrow (Wednesday, April 2, as I write this). Will they be on or off?

The current regime could do much worse things than they're doing now, but what they've done so far has caused plenty of permanent damage to our standing in the world. The voters who put the regime in power bear the responsibility for its misbehavior. This government represents them. Some have recanted, but they have not given up the beliefs that made them susceptible to it in the first place. So the rest of the world is right not to trust us in our degenerated state.

Why cruelty always wins

 A piece I read recently lamented that when the Democratic Party is in power, they don't exert it to enact the full agenda that their base looks forward to, and when they're out of power, they don't use what leverage they have to restrain the merciless policies of conservative administrations.

The secret, as always, lies with uncommitted voters. Mostly white, mostly conservative, they're often assumed to be moderate. But some of these uncommitted voters might withhold their allegiance from the Republican Party because that party isn't heartless enough. If they swing to a Democratic candidate, it is a temporary protest vote to punish the Republican for some perceived inadequacy. The swinging voter doesn't support the Democratic position. It's strictly a temporary, punitive measure to slap some sense into the more conservative party. The moderate ones swing to the Democrat only if the Democrat promises not to act like a Democrat.

While there are plenty of conservative racists, the underlying principle that unites all conservatives of any color is contempt for the poor. Conservative voters who happen to be on public assistance can formulate some exemption in their minds to excuse their own temporary need. Or maybe they vote against their own interests out of self loathing, or a mistaken belief that if they destroy the support system their own fortunes will miraculously improve in the energized economy now no longer burdened with the dead weight of lazy scumbags who don't want to work.

A person I observed for a time was one of these conservatives temporarily receiving public assistance. She would go to the office to collect her dole. While there, she would point out and disparage other supplicants who were obviously dirtbag losers sucking on the public teat for as long as it will be offered. They could not possibly have mitigating circumstances of their own, because the system itself creates them. It's like poor people didn't exist in any significant numbers until a program was created to feed them. They're like raccoons in your garbage cans. Secure your garbage cans and the raccoons have to go fend for themselves.

I doubt if that particular conservative would ever vote across party lines, even to punish an erring official. But her analysis of her fellow poor people sums up the conservative dehumanization of anyone falling below the poverty line. It has to be their own fault in the vast majority of cases.

I get it. We're all a bit reluctant to get sucked into the sob stories of the disadvantaged. There are bullshitters and chronic losers out there. Is it better to yank the lifeline back from the ones who might deserve it in order to cut off the parasites dangling on the same line? Most uncommitted voters seem to think so. And that's why we can't have nice things.

The Trump administration is a teenage fantasy of a presidency

 The mental age of the Trump administration is about 14.

All that they know about government appears to come from shallow observations based on movies and television. They don't have the attention span to read a comic book, let alone a real one with no pictures.

When confronted with a crime or a mistake, they lie, make excuses, and pout. They clearly don't understand the complexity of governing an enormous world power. They screw things up because they're going through the motions of how they think it works. 

They're using the US military like characters in a game. They're using apps to circumvent parental authority. They're experimenting with juvenile delinquency, as if deciding whether they will grow up to be criminal masterminds. Only they're all adults, clearly criminal and demonstrably not masterminds.

They're in charge.

The Supreme Court gave the president unlimited power to commit crimes as long as it could be tied in some flimsy way to "official acts." The president can't be accused of anything worse than poor judgment, no matter how many people get killed and what gets destroyed.

Legal scholars debate whether the protection extends in any way to the functionaries carrying out the orders. The Nuremberg trials did not accept the "only following orders" defense from Nazis facing the consequences of their heinous acts, but that was a simpler time. Who knew that in the United States we would raise a generation that actually longed to look out over fields of corpses such as the liberators of the death camps found?

Fascination with the Nazis is another teenage phase. The sharp uniforms, the cool-looking ships, planes, tanks. The unflinching cruelty. What does it mean to be a man? Not every boy goes through it. I thought that most grew out of it, but clearly I was wrong.

Everything they do is a caricature. 

Look around your area to see who still has flags and signs out, supporting the idiot in the Oval Office. We have representative government. These are the voters that this government represents. The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the common people most directly. The GOP House members support the regime. We'll find out in 2026 whether they still represent the voters who put them in office, but in 2024 they did. Disillusioned Republican voters have confronted their elected representatives so forcefully that the representatives won't face them in public anymore. But where it counts, in Congress, where they could impeach the President and send him to trial in the Senate, they do nothing. No one wants a government-paid trip to El Salvador, I guess. They're afraid they'll lose. It's a national version of the rape victim who won't testify, or the organized crime witness who knows that they will die even if the mob boss goes to prison.

This is the difference between actual teenage fantasy and the nightmare we're in now. Voters who can't tell the difference put this regime in office. Now they're finding out. They voted for corrupt, greedy, cruel, lying, emotionally immature people to be in charge of every single department of the federal government.

Elon Musk has brought in actual sociopathic teenagers to help with the destruction. Why not? They fit right in.

We're rapidly approaching the "or die" part

 As the current regime sprints toward totalitarian control, its agents have seized and detained legal permanent residents as well as immigrants and visitors either with visa issues or simply suspected of them. Plane loads of people have been sent to prison in El Salvador without due process. Citizens of other countries have been held in ICE facilities and US prisons without explanation, or with flimsy ones.

The wrecking crew of DOGE continues to demolish the professional portions of government agencies, while executive orders illegally halt funding to entities that the regime considers a threat to their authority. In other words, the Bill of Rights is being canceled. As long as white supremacists can say ignorant things, and no one comes for the guns (yet), the mainstream media and the loudest voices on the Internet insist that everything is fine. Freedom of speech and the right to bear arms are the only things that matter to people who specialize in hurtful speech and violence.

Major corporations and even law firms roll over for the advancing dictatorship.

The connect the dots diagram of the Turd Reich takes ever more obvious shape while legal remedies bog down in the courts. Protests gather. The regime ignores both. Once a person has been disappeared, they're hard to bring back. Gone is gone. So the regime can continue to sweep up people while the opposition fumbles for a response.

When situations like this in the past finally led to war, the "bad guys" always scored early victories. The Confederacy won all of the early battles of the Civil War. Germany and its allies entrenched themselves across Europe in World War I. Most dramatically, in World War II, the Axis powers took control of Europe, and the Japanese took control of most of the the Pacific, and required years of bloodshed to dislodge.

War has changed since the Second World War. It's unlikely that the major nuclear armed powers would unleash the full murder-suicide firestorm of a full exchange. But there could be limited strikes, and plenty of drones and conventional munitions that can kill lots of small, squishy humans thoroughly enough.

Meanwhile, on North America, the budding fascist regime in Washington envisions the empire that the enslavers imagined when they launched the Civil War: white supremacy from Cape Horn in Chile to Nunavut, Canada. Maybe they haven't thought it through that far, but I'll bet that someone at the Heritage Foundation has.

The problems with that come down to personnel. There simply aren't enough white people to dominate all of the non-white people that stand in the way of that fever dream. Enthusiastic breeders are doing their best, but it's not going to be enough.

Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a "national divorce" in 2023. She suggested that the country divide up by red and blue states. Various ideologically fractured maps of the United States have circulated for years. Because the United States itself was formed by carving out territory and choosing an ideology for it, the idea seems feasible. However it ignores factors that made the American experiment possible in its day. Everything took longer. Distance mattered more. And the abundant resources of the land area funded the independent existence of the country in a way that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. This is especially true if those resources are divided up among hostile smaller countries carved out of the corpse of the once-great nation.

The opposition to the Lands of the Free -- formerly the singular Land of the Free -- are unified groups under Russian and Chinese control. Both of those countries and their client states make no pretense of valuing the individual lives of their citizens or offering them much in the way of freedom. And their citizens are accustomed to this. Guided by fatalism, they go along, get along. Large numbers may be expended in military and industrial actions that their governments choose. They may not like it, but they can't imagine life any other way. With the United States gone, the last beacon of hope goes out.

If the United States holds together as a fascist state for the sake of the survival of its brand name without any of the signature freedom and democracy that had made it attractive to free thinkers the world over, it might hold its place in the uneasy triangle of hostile posturing that would shape reality for the generations born into it. If the country breaks up into little countries, each defining freedom in their own way, all of those countries will face diplomatic pressures from Russia and China. Each one will have to fund and equip its defenses and manage its economy. Each in turn will be easily picked off by the unified forces of the larger powers, no matter how unhappy the citizens of those powers might be. The self-proclaimed "free" will most likely be the ones doing the bulk of the dying.

Efforts to oppose the regime now might succeed. Some opponents of the current fascist coup will probably die. Some in custody probably already have. That death toll is nothing compared to what will happen if the situation here festers into actual revolution. And breaking into smaller nations will inevitably lead to either the end of freedom in them or their eradication.

Freedom for all ultimately comes down to mutual consent. We decide that we want that, as a species. Anything short of that sets the stage for endless war and the ultimate defeat of freedom as a concept at all. It ends either with the victors marching in lockstep to whatever goals their leaders assign, or everyone gone. As long as we're willing to kill each other, killers will always win. Maybe they're the "good killers." Maybe they're the "bad killers." In either case, the dead are still dead. The murderer always gets away with the crime, because the victim is still dead even if the perpetrator stands trial.

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.