The Big Squeeze

in #politicslast month

bigsqueezeHive.jpg

The above image was done using stable diffusion using the prompt 'a giant hand squeezing red and blue bricks.'

The third party candidate I voted for didn't win and Donald Trump is going to be president again. Before the election, I put his chances of winning the Electoral College at about 80% and his chances of winning the popular vote at about 40%. So I was a little surprised when he won the race by a landslide, in part because he convinced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to join his team. Many former democrats now support Trump, not because they approve of the man, but because they've lost their patience with business as usual. Whatever Trump ends up doing, it probably won't be business as usual.

He has for starters promised to give Kennedy the power to end the chronic disease epidemic. Once the election results were announced, Kennedy tweeted:

Nominees for the People: RFK Jr. wants your help nominating people of integrity and courage for the more than 4,000 appointments for government agencies in a future Trump administration.

Trump has apparently asked Kennedy to do 3 things:

  1. Clean up the corruption in our government health agencies.
  2. Return those agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.
  3. Make America Healthy Again by ending the chronic disease epidemic.

Although this may all turn out to be toothless bluster, it's worth paying attention to for a few reasons. Most of the country supports Trump. The chronic disease epidemic is currently costing us dearly, both in economic terms and in terms of preventable human suffering. And whether or not you agree with Kennedy's more controversial positions, there's no one in the country better suited to begin addressing the root causes of this epidemic.

In my opinion, this election and its outcome finalized the death of the Democratic Party. Last century, this party did great things. It was the establishment expression of important democratic values. And there were enormous policy wins on social and environmental issues. Things like desegregation, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and worker protections.

Over time, the party became compromised, and then it became captured completely. I had a political science professor around the turn of the century who taught that the best hope for us to address our society's systemic inequality was to transform the Democratic Party using the primary process. Precisely this is what started to happen in 2016, and party insiders conspired with major media to prevent it from happening. After that, the Democratic Party became the party of war, censorship, and Pharma, so voters abandoned it in droves.

The Big Squeeze

It matters who is president, but it doesn't matter nearly as much as we're led to believe. The vast network of appointed officials and corporate decision makers operating our control regime advance their agenda of further power consolidation no matter who wins our national popularity contests. Where it does matter is in the cultural impact of a given administration. To some degree, the president and administration appointees set the tenor of the national conversation.

Legacy media has spent the last eight years vilifying Trump so everything he does will automatically be opposed by a very vocal segment of our population. The agencies and industries he promises to disrupt will back this opposition with large sums of money. At minimum, we can expect an endless parade of confusing propaganda campaigns. On some issues, there may also be large demonstrations with the potential for major disruptions.

My biggest concerns with Trump are environmental. I'm strongly opposed to opening up the Boundary Waters to foreign resource extraction companies. And this isn't the only natural area in peril. I doubt we'll see any major demonstrations to protect ecosystems from commerce, though. Most potential demonstrators have been inundated with messaging that sidelines both economic and environmental issues to focus exclusively on race, gender, sexuality, and other qualities of identity.

Even so, the problems with our economy could translate into various crises that are too big to ignore. We've been getting squeezed hard since 2020, with big business extracting an extra $1 trillion from us since 2021. The whole system has become grossly distorted. According to The Guardian, "two-thirds of the new wealth amassed since the start of the pandemic has gone to the richest 1%."

Food. Housing. Medicine. Entertainment. Nearly everything we need keeps costing us more and more. We've already tightened our belts. Our employers are already paying us as much as they're willing to. What comes next might not be pretty.

Our control regime has programmed us to imagine that resources are scarce and that everyone is in perpetual competition with everyone else for these scarce resources. Because of this, as the regime continues putting the big squeeze on us, many people will turn against each other, treating one another as adversaries in cutthroat competition for what little money remains in the parts of the system that are accessible to us.

A better alternative to turning against each other would be to turn towards one another in cooperation. Instead of working against each other, we could instead begin working with each other as never before. If we did this at scale, we could transform the whole economy in short order. Resources are abundant. Everyone has skills that could benefit society as a whole. The only thing really stopping us from shifting from adversarial to collaborative relationships with each other is a total system designed to keep us separated so we never challenge the powers that be in a meaningful way.


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