I think we need another chat about societal embezlement

Drag up a chair, I think it’s time we had another chat about where your share of the nation’s wealth has disappeared to since the 1970’s, and how you still have the power to do something about it.

I have 2 episodes left in my ‘Palestinian Question’ series, but before I deliver them, I want to take a short excursion today to examine the power that the American people still hold to change everything. I want to explore a few fundamental facts for anyone who feels they are helpless right now.

In the dystopian nightmare we are being forced to endure in Trump’s new dog-eat-dog world, where social Darwinism rules, it would be easy to get swept away in the corruption and self-dealing, leaving you feeling helpless against the tsunami of hate promoted by this regime. I know from personal experience how mentally exhausting it can be to push the boulder of moral decency and fairness up a hill that seems steeper with each passing day.

Image AI-generated for illustration purposes

It doesn’t help when Democratic leadership and their corporate Democrat enablers simply sit around on the assumption that they will regain power. Not because they are presenting a better vision for America, but because the American people will hand them power through a protest vote. My friends, there’s the tragedy of US politics today. I still believe the only way America comes back from this is if, by 2028, the Democratic Party has undergone a transformational revolution to rediscover the values that once gave America hope. ‘Yes we can’ needs to become ‘Now we will’.

In the almost two years since Trump walked into the White House for the second time, we have learned that the political and judicial system has largely proven to be unfit for purpose. It has failed to deliver the much-needed checks and balances required to defeat an authoritarian hostile takeover. The end result leaves an opposition party powerless to defend democracy for fear of antagonising their corporate handlers and ultra-wealthy people who have stolen and hoarded the untold wealth generated over decades by the workers of America. It is a tragic tale of the Democratic Party's social abandonment, trading thirty pieces of silver from corporate and special interests to take their seats on the gravy train, abandoning hard-working Americans to a man for whom their presence is merely an opportunity for exploitation.

Image - Democracy Docket

You have to ask yourself some serious questions when the party in government wrote down exactly what they intended to do 18 months before the 2024 elections, and the Democratic opposition had absolutely NO PLAN to counter it. Instead of focusing on the threat of a dictator, the party, suffering a severe case of corporate Stockholm syndrome, is now too busy fighting those perceived to be a threat to their seats on the gravy train rather than the enemy of the American people; how totally Republican lite of them. It’s exhausting, infuriating, yet tragically predictable.

The midterm elections should be a no-brainer landslide, but indications are, it will once again be a tight race. The Democratic plan, is to hope people are disillusioned with a convicted criminal they couldn’t defeat in 2024. Unfortunately, hope is NOT a plan; it’s a failure of ambition inside a party which seems void of ambition and a hunger for change. There’s no passion, no audacity of hope, just an arrogant confidence that the American public won’t support a fascist and will come out in numbers to reject him. Call me old-fashioned, but didn’t that fail in 2024?

I have tried over and over to articulate the argument that, without a vision, how can the American people vote for nothing but Republican lite? Only to be told it’s counterproductive to criticise Democrats. It’s lunacy of the highest order, I’m afraid. However, the real kicker is that there’s no other game in town in November than a party that wants to blame everyone but themselves for their abject failure to counter the Trump threat. What an indictment of a Party for whom the most popular politician in their ranks is a Muslim Mayor of New York, that they did everything they could to stop him from being elected.

With less than two months to go before Americans go to the polls in the most consequential elections in modern history. A time when their government wants to select its voters by disenfranchising millions perceived to be a threat to them retaining power, the world is looking on in horror as democracy burns in real time in America. Meanwhile, the DNC floods their base with begging emails, having never apologised for flushing their money down the toilet in 2024. You really couldn’t make it up, yet they pull it off every day with aplomb.

Trump’s abuse and corruption have been normalised by a mainstream media that spends its time sanitising Trump’s ludicrous, insanity-dripping ramblings that amount to crimes against the English language, grammar and sentence structure. Half of America has bought into his made-for-TV fantasy world of fake prosperity to the extent that they no longer believe their own eyes when it comes to the endless crimes he’s committing every day he remains in office. The Nazis erected a sign above Auschwitz claiming ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work sets you free'); it was all part of the same type of illusion being sold to Americans who seem to be voluntarily marching into economic slavery with a smile.

I have said many times: the American people have always had it in their power to bring this government to its knees using direct action in the form of a strategic spending strike aimed at starving the corporations that have aided and abetted a corrupt regime in bringing us to this moment of economic peril. The problem is that in a world of instant gratification, there’s little to no appetite for anything that might cause discomfort or sacrifice to middle-income Americans who can sustain the hit from an economic agenda designed to only work for those at the top of the economic food chain.

The American people proved they could successfully pressure Disney when it cancelled Jimmy Kimmel. It was so effective that Disney had to back down because of the economic loss it would have caused. That was concrete proof that collective action can win out. However, even with that proof, there was no appetite to use economic disengagement as a tool to hold the government to account for the largest tax hike on Americans in decades: tariffs.

The reality is, even at this late stage, this type of collective economic action could bring this government and the whole system of economic oppression to its knees. It doesn’t have to be tainted by political dogma, and I absolutely guarantee you that it would shake the very foundations of both parties and the oligarchs to their core, because it would challenge an algorithm-driven financial system in which AI would, by design, play the key role in destroying it.

It’s all about organising and having what amounts to a weapon of mass economic destruction at the fingertips of an organised group prepared to use it. It’s not party political; indeed, politicians would be powerless to stop it. Nobody could be arrested or detained for what would be a totally lawful act of economic resistance. All you would need is a willingness to defer planned spending. Let’s call it ‘The People’s Economic Liberation Strategy’ (PELS).

I’ve often been criticised (unjustly, in my opinion) for being heavy on criticism and light on solutions. I’m hoping I can put that to rest in the second part of this post, which I’ll post very early tomorrow morning, as I won’t be around to post anything later in the day. Consider PART TWO in lieu of what would normally be my Wednesday piece. The aim is to spell out what I see as an option that, if implemented, could hit both the regime and corporate America in one coordinated and synchronised action. Neither the government nor the top 1% could do anything about it. It does NOT require participation from anyone in the top 10%; indeed, at a push, it doesn’t even require participation from the top 50%. It’s about understanding how algorithmic trading powers the financial infrastructure and how that can be weaponised to achieve the objectives.

The belief that the people are just passengers in this journey to economic slavery is unquestionably a myth. This psychology of helplessness, projected by those at the top onto those at the bottom, is just that: a projection. The US is a consumer-driven economy, with 68% to 70% of GDP coming from consumer spending. This gives consumers powerful leverage to effect change without support from ANY political party. It’s impossible to suppress using the existing legal framework, because you can’t prosecute people for not spending their money.

In PART TWO, I’ll walk you through all the angles and implications. There’s a very good reason why Republicans have defanged unions and collective organising, because it’s the biggest threat to their plans for total control of the economy and everything in it. They have spent decades de-unionising and creating a permissive environment in which to exploit workers.

The thought on which I’ll conclude this piece is to point out that if the share of the nation’s wealth created by American workers by the mid 1970’s had remained equal to the growth of corporate profits, American workers would be earning double the salary they do today. In 1975, workers' wages accounted for around 67% of all taxable income. By 2010, this had dropped to around 47%.

Here’s another interesting stat to sleep on: if workers' pay had kept pace with executive pay, the typical wage would now be $520,000. Research by the RAND Corporation shows that, over the same period, wealth has been redistributed upward by $79 trillion. Some might suggest this is the extent of the theft perpetrated by the top 10% against the bottom 90%, and it's hard to argue against this assertion.

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