We need to organize twelve million Americans under a common manifesto.
If the Democrats don’t take power in 2029 (both houses of the legislature and the executive), if they fail to move quickly, overhauling SCOTUS and ironcladding elections to stop tampering and voter suppression cold, then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.
Or general strike.
Or riot in multiple municipal areas hard enough to overwhelm responders.
Or go on a billionaire assassination spree.
If we cannot do that, then we’re all going to be packed onto the cattle cars. Not necessarily all together, but the US will fall to one-party autocracy.
This tbh. I’ve got very little faith in politicians to do something at this point. I would have been happy if 2022 Democratic senators and Biden did nothing and refused to get involved with the rail strike. Yet in another display of solidarity with corporations and billionaires they moved quickly to pass a bipartisan bill to block the rail strike. Wild.
Yeah, busting the rail strike really tipped the hand of the establishment Democratic party to show they still are captured, and the blue-dog ranks are in office not to serve the public or to make specific changes but to get rich by peddling their political power. Given they’re negotiating with MAGA more than they’re coordinating with progressives and DSA, I’m really expecting some Democratic officials will flip so they can continue exploiting their positions for personal gain.
Heather Cox Richardson notes that this sort of thing has happened before, in which business interests dominated the government and enacted policies that wrecked the economy, but got magnates very rich, but the backlash was a revival of public serving interests. In the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, there was the threat of communist revolution, as we were also watching what was going on in the Soviet Union, and even communism had to be better than living in homeless encampments and barely surviving on flour paste.
We already have a conspicuous number of homeless encampments, and while we’re not yet living on cups of noodles, we can’t afford food and fuel at the same time, we’re skipping meds, and we’re also suffering from food poisoning while watching corruption and money getting poured into an unpopular war where our soldiers and sailors are being unnecessarily treated like shit.
Hopefully things don’t have to get much worse before the mischief begins. I suspect we’re all hoping the midterms turn out well (and we survive to the new Congress) which might save us from getting our hands dirty. But when there’s no hope at all, some of us may realize we really don’t have anything else to lose.
I’m totally game. Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption.
Otherwise, we’ll just be here again in a decade or two, and they’ll have the experience of this time to guide them.
For one thing, Citizens United only scratches the surface of money in politics. How Money Works did a video about just how entrenched it is. (Here on YouTube). And presently, politicians at the state and federal level expect to be able to enrich themselves by using the power of their office.
This is why it’s way beyond my pay grade. We need historians to remind us how systems failed in the past, so we assure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We need legal scholars to check how our terms could be misinterpreted by bad-faith judges given authority, while making sure the language is plain enough that high-school students can understand what it means.
Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption
There’s the problem, it always comes down to someone else. So long as we keep waiting for someone above our pay grade to do the work, we’ll keep waiting.
Find a group and get involved. Figure out what your pay grade is, and contribute on that level. This kind of organization doesn’t just happen, it takes people doing things. It’s why I joined the DSA. They aren’t perfect, but they’re a relatively large organization working on exactly these things.
Maybe you can help organize events or recruit those legal scholars. Maybe you can put up posters or try to recruit members. Maybe you can donate to help retain legal advice. Just do something, don’t fall into the bystander effect.
then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.
I wish. But honestly, look at us. We don’t have it in us. We’re currently being abused (Constitutional violations left and right) and we haven’t dragged them into the street yet.
We’re weak. We can’t get on the same page. We can’t mobilize.
Or general strike.
You can definitely forget about that. If we aren’t occupying D.C. there’s no way a general strike is happening. Generally speaking a general strike is just not something that would happen. You aren’t going to convince a nation full of people living at the edge of poverty to stop going to work. Not happening.
I’m not trying to dissuade people from doing things, I’m just making realistic observations. And realistically we’re either voting our way out of this or waiting until everyone is starving to fight our way out of it.
I, too, am pessimistic about our chances. But some folk who are more read up than me about it (e.g. Jamille Bouie, Helen Cox Richardson) express more optimism, citing trends and moments in history that rhyme.
Although, I am worried that our ultra-wealthy are exponentially richer than the robber barons ever have been at any other time in history. Once they’re done financializing the US into a wasteland (of quarries, oilfields and data centers), they’re going to move onto the rest of the developed world, and they are rich enough to buy all the elections and control all the governments.
So if we can make our stand here, and recognize our billionaire class as the existential threat that they actually are, (and as Paul Krugman suggests, tax them out of existence) we’ll be sparing the entirety of human civilization a lot of devastation.
We need to organize twelve million Americans under a common manifesto.
If the Democrats don’t take power in 2029 (both houses of the legislature and the executive), if they fail to move quickly, overhauling SCOTUS and ironcladding elections to stop tampering and voter suppression cold, then the US public needs to occupy Washington by multiple millions with a list of demands.
Or general strike.
Or riot in multiple municipal areas hard enough to overwhelm responders.
Or go on a billionaire assassination spree.
If we cannot do that, then we’re all going to be packed onto the cattle cars. Not necessarily all together, but the US will fall to one-party autocracy.
US Dictatorship by 2033 is on the BINGO card.
This tbh. I’ve got very little faith in politicians to do something at this point. I would have been happy if 2022 Democratic senators and Biden did nothing and refused to get involved with the rail strike. Yet in another display of solidarity with corporations and billionaires they moved quickly to pass a bipartisan bill to block the rail strike. Wild.
Yeah, busting the rail strike really tipped the hand of the establishment Democratic party to show they still are captured, and the blue-dog ranks are in office not to serve the public or to make specific changes but to get rich by peddling their political power. Given they’re negotiating with MAGA more than they’re coordinating with progressives and DSA, I’m really expecting some Democratic officials will flip so they can continue exploiting their positions for personal gain.
Heather Cox Richardson notes that this sort of thing has happened before, in which business interests dominated the government and enacted policies that wrecked the economy, but got magnates very rich, but the backlash was a revival of public serving interests. In the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal, there was the threat of communist revolution, as we were also watching what was going on in the Soviet Union, and even communism had to be better than living in homeless encampments and barely surviving on flour paste.
We already have a conspicuous number of homeless encampments, and while we’re not yet living on cups of noodles, we can’t afford food and fuel at the same time, we’re skipping meds, and we’re also suffering from food poisoning while watching corruption and money getting poured into an unpopular war where our soldiers and sailors are being unnecessarily treated like shit.
Hopefully things don’t have to get much worse before the mischief begins. I suspect we’re all hoping the midterms turn out well (and we survive to the new Congress) which might save us from getting our hands dirty. But when there’s no hope at all, some of us may realize we really don’t have anything else to lose.
here’s a start:
Universal Healthcare
No Stock Trading
Term Limits
End citizens united
at most a 3 day work week
Severe punishment for oligarchs
Maximum capital of 10 million, anything after that is taxed 100%.
If the next elected officials don’t immediately start getting these things lined up they face treason charges.
I’m totally game. Someone well above my pay grade needs to organize a panel of legal and civic experts to hammer out a charter and make sure it’s got ironclad protections against corruption.
Otherwise, we’ll just be here again in a decade or two, and they’ll have the experience of this time to guide them.
For one thing, Citizens United only scratches the surface of money in politics. How Money Works did a video about just how entrenched it is. (Here on YouTube). And presently, politicians at the state and federal level expect to be able to enrich themselves by using the power of their office.
This is why it’s way beyond my pay grade. We need historians to remind us how systems failed in the past, so we assure we don’t repeat the same mistakes. We need legal scholars to check how our terms could be misinterpreted by bad-faith judges given authority, while making sure the language is plain enough that high-school students can understand what it means.
There’s the problem, it always comes down to someone else. So long as we keep waiting for someone above our pay grade to do the work, we’ll keep waiting.
Find a group and get involved. Figure out what your pay grade is, and contribute on that level. This kind of organization doesn’t just happen, it takes people doing things. It’s why I joined the DSA. They aren’t perfect, but they’re a relatively large organization working on exactly these things.
Maybe you can help organize events or recruit those legal scholars. Maybe you can put up posters or try to recruit members. Maybe you can donate to help retain legal advice. Just do something, don’t fall into the bystander effect.
I wish. But honestly, look at us. We don’t have it in us. We’re currently being abused (Constitutional violations left and right) and we haven’t dragged them into the street yet.
We’re weak. We can’t get on the same page. We can’t mobilize.
You can definitely forget about that. If we aren’t occupying D.C. there’s no way a general strike is happening. Generally speaking a general strike is just not something that would happen. You aren’t going to convince a nation full of people living at the edge of poverty to stop going to work. Not happening.
I’m not trying to dissuade people from doing things, I’m just making realistic observations. And realistically we’re either voting our way out of this or waiting until everyone is starving to fight our way out of it.
I, too, am pessimistic about our chances. But some folk who are more read up than me about it (e.g. Jamille Bouie, Helen Cox Richardson) express more optimism, citing trends and moments in history that rhyme.
Although, I am worried that our ultra-wealthy are exponentially richer than the robber barons ever have been at any other time in history. Once they’re done financializing the US into a wasteland (of quarries, oilfields and data centers), they’re going to move onto the rest of the developed world, and they are rich enough to buy all the elections and control all the governments.
So if we can make our stand here, and recognize our billionaire class as the existential threat that they actually are, (and as Paul Krugman suggests, tax them out of existence) we’ll be sparing the entirety of human civilization a lot of devastation.
Do you think people in the past did it from a Position of wealth…?