Failed Systems
The combination of
- a growing inverted totalitarianism in our political system as funded by our predatory economic system and
- a pandemic which has exposed the innate failures of both systems,
has nurtured a multigenerational group of Americans who now have “nothing left to lose” and are rising up.
These newly exposed political and economic system failures are on top of a decades long implementation of a stealth plan resulting in:
- stagnant wage growth and wage theft,
- families forced into multiple incomes just to eat and pay bills,
- growing tax breaks since the 70s for the excessively wealthy, and
- massive national, commercial and personal/student debt to make up for the loss of real income.
Our failed political and economic systems have moved from equally protecting and empowering all citizens to only protecting and empowering the excessively wealthy and their “qualified immunity” policing forces. Our excessive military budgets are replicated at the local level with excessive policing budgets. Right-wing authoritarians need such tools to keep their control over the less pure surrounding them.
Depression Maximizes Worker Abuse
We are at the beginning of this century’s Great Depression. Forty million unemployed and without healthcare during a pandemic. Half of commercial businesses were unable to pay their rent to the commercial property owners who in turn can’t make their loan payments to the banks that financed the property purchase. This depression has quickly reached levels of unemployment that took years to reach in last century’s Great Depression.
With such massive unemployment, the abusive employers have an unbeatable upper-hand. Employees going back to work will be seen as powerless and if an employee refuses to accept the new, less-supportive, circumstances, the employer will find some other worker from the new enormous pool of unemployed.
Just as the authoritarian police forces “kettle” citizens to teargas and pepper spray them at will, corporations will “kettle” workers into unsafe, unhealthy, work environments to abuse them with exposure to COVID-19, lower pay, and benefit reductions. It’s too expensive to create a safe and healthy workplace, but some might try . There is insufficient COVID-19 testing for anyone, much less employees returning to work.
Revolution Is All That’s Left
People with nothing left to lose are left with few options – taking to the streets, refusing the abuse of their labor, and voting. They feel, witness, and experience the abusive cracks of our failed systems. Cracks that protect the wealthy property owners with local police. Cracks that protect the police who are granted “qualified immunity” by SCOTUS. This gives them freehand to attack peaceful citizens, crack the skulls of old men, take personal property, and target, literally, the free press, after murdering another man for being black.
This revolution will grow as the failed systems take more and more desperate steps to stop it. Fearful abusers become more abusive when resisted – just look at all the videos of self-motivated police attacks on citizens. The Liar-in-Chief can’t control himself – two hundred tweets in one day. He and his lackeys will abuse as needed, stage property damage and blame citizens for it, and will attempt to divide this unified response with racial/political dog whistles.
Recent suppressive actions to quell the revolution were learned in our recent foreign wars. Police are not only equipped with military hardware, they are trained in military tactics to suppress unruly citizens – bring in the military helicopters to hover just overhead.
Don’t expect the local police to join the revolution. Their history as slave patrols and corporate goons does not give much hope for that. They know who protects/empowers them, have a military background that reinforces their authoritarian nature, and will continue to protect their right-wing authoritarian leaders: DJT and their city mayors who put curfews in place to provide cause for arrest.
The videos of police abuse we are now seeing is normal police practice. It’s only news to those of us who don’t live in the communities where police use these tactics on a daily basis.
Conclusion
To conclude, this rapidly growing depression (except for investors), the failure to minimize citizen deaths during a pandemic, state sanctioned abuse of citizens by extreme policing – including the free press, the massive unemployment, and over 110,000 premature citizen deaths, have exposed the massive systems failures and show that fixing what’s broken can only happen from the bottom up. Top-down approaches, like trickle-down, have failed fantastically. Our once democratic, now authoritarian, political system, empowered by our centuries-old authoritarian economic system, must be rescued by removing the billionaires as employers. Employees must become the owners/managers of companies. They will not decide to send their jobs out of country. They will not poison the communities they live in. They will not abuse their coworkers by exposing themselves to unsafe workplaces. They will keep profits in their pockets.
Tens of millions of citizens have nothing left to lose! The knee of our right-wing authoritarian oppressors are on the necks of all citizens/workers. Removing that knee of our failed systems requires historically massive public action (Revolution) and political participation.
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Five member panel discussion on the revolution/depression (skip ahead to about 2:55): https://www.youtube.com/embed/AQJkOl92sbw
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The Vote In November MUST Be Historic
We need democracy in the workplace to disempower the one percent.
Andy Hailey