The Dark Age continues. Trump almost pulled off the insurrection, but the pandemic he boosted has lingering effects on supply chains and labor shortages. The huge corporations are price gouging, boosting inflation, so as to blame Biden. The fact that Trump, the worst president ever, a pathological liar and sociopath still has influence over politics at all, means we’re very much in a Dark Age…
Let’s examine the concept of democracy: “The Attack on Democracy” is the headline for attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021. “Democracy” is a useful euphemism for the predatory capitalists in charge of the de facto plutocracy for which “democracy” is a facade. The Jan. 6 attack on the capitol symbolizes the crumbling of this democracy facade. Democracy is an ideal, not a political system. The social welfare policies of our government had democratic aspirations and succeeded for decades, lifted many millions out of poverty into a huge middle class. This was in essence a brief quasi-democratic period in our history, but the plutocrats in charge have been dismantling it or decades. The wealth cabal created the system of neoliberalism, the de facto machinery or system of global governance by huge transnational corporations. Neoliberalism, seldom mentioned on our corporate funded MSM, has systematically offshored labor, defunded federal programs for the non-wealthy, deregulated government agencies charged with public health, safety, worker’s rights, and environmental protection. Democracy, if it has ever existed, depends on government promoting the rights and welfare of all citizens. When huge corporations are subsidized, allowed to evade paying taxes, allowed to offshore labor, to enrich an elite few, this is not democracy. Democracy has been dismantled for decades, long before the attack on the capitol.
As the House Select Committee investigates Trump and his crooked insurrectionist cohorts, we witness the ongoing descent into moronic socio-political divisive vitriol fueled by the social media. This Dark Age is merely the latest dark chapter of neoliberalism that has methodically constructed a predatory capitalist state in lieu of the once social welfare state.
The 2010’s decade is The Terrible Tens, marked by the Citizens United Ruling, Super PACs, and the concentration of political power into predatory capitalists. White nationalist extremists took inspiration from Obama’s victory in 2008, and Trump opportunistically fed off white anger, as he doubted in 2011 the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. While the Obama administration was attempting to recover from George W. Bush’s subprime crash, Fox News fueled outrage over Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Angry white conservatives gave Dubya a pass for tanking the global economy in 2008 via a real estate boom consisting on adjustable rate mortgages with no down payment. A NINJA loan is a slang term for a loan extended to a borrower with little or no attempt by the lender to verify the applicant’s ability to repay. It stands for “no income, no job, and no assets.” Lenders literally boosted their income by lending to people unable to maintain payments. Such is the recipe for an inevitable real estate crash. But it was Obama’s fault that he had to clean up Bush’s cratering of the global economy.
The Terrible 2010’s began with Dark Money Super PAC’s for old white male billionaires blaming Obama and setting the stage for the dimwitted despot Trump to take office in 2016. At the same time, social media surged as the primary “news source” whereby emotional triggering via algorithms took precedence over factual accuracy. Facebook did in fact contribute greatly to Trump’s victory via Cambridge Analytica and twitter circulated Trump’s moronic musings until Jan. 8, 2021. For all the ebullient optimism for the Information Superhighway, we are now afflicted by rampant algorithm-based discord, fragmentation of society into tribes arguing on the social media. No serious efforts towards a solution are apparent.
When Americans are divided as they are, it is easier for a fraudulent fascist, pulling the strings of white nationalists, to take office and spread lies to the extent where truth becomes a nostalgic artifact.