This is good Robert Reich clip. "To the conservative mind," he explained, "the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet, that's exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich. Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism. They need stronger safety nets, and they deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this 'socialism,' fine."This week, the AP sent out a preview of a book, We Are Indivisible-- A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, coming out this fall by Indivisible founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg. AP reporter Elana Schor writes that it zeros in on issues such as the overhaul of Senate rules, gerrymandering, the electoral college and automatic voter registration "which they see as necessary to achieve the sort of big policy shifts that Democratic presidential candidates are campaigning on... 'We’re not just interested in getting rid of Trump,' Levin said. 'We’re interested in getting rid of Trumpism.'"
The Indivisible duo aims to speak to both the dozen-plus Democratic candidates vying to take on Trump next year and the tens of millions of voters who will choose the party’s nominee. As Democratic White House hopefuls line up behind ambitious policy ideas, Levin and Greenberg want to prod the candidates to explain how they would steer their ideas through a Congress often crippled by partisan stalemates.“I don’t think we can hear from somebody about their plan for climate change or gun violence until we can hear about their plan for making that happen,” Greenberg, 32, told the Associated Press in a joint interview with Levin, 33. “If you’re refusing to take on things about our democracy that make that policy proposal impossible to pass in our system, then that’s not a real proposal.”
The real rot is certainly being exacerbated by Trump and Trumpism but, that rot didn't start with Trump and it won't end with excising Trumpism. America is in deep trouble. Ian Welsh termed it a failing state. When stuff that should work," he wrote, just keeps getting worse and worse, you know your state is failing." He offers his readers this chart from Texas:But he isn't talking about the state of Texas. He's talking about the United States of America. Ergo, these 2 charts:
People who are happy and have hope for the future rarely become drug addicts.Adam Smith wrote that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”That amount is not infinite.The U.S. is not keeping up its infrastructure. It is not building important new infrastructure, as anyone who has seen high speed trains overseas (or good airline terminals) knows.The U.S. is losing wars. It is losing in Afghanistan. When it left Iraq it had to pay local militias not to attack as it left. It arguably won in Libya, if you call contributing to a refugee crisis destabilizing its main strategic partner, the EU, winning, which anyone sane wouldn’t.The US has turned, in large part, against the World Trade Organization, which it created. Even before turning against it, the WTO failed in its latest round of trade negotiation.The prices of basic medicines in the U.S. are soaring. (The price of insulin has tripled) and there is an actual decline in life expectancy, the first since the Spanish Flu.The U.S. is alienating its most important allies, like the EU. Increasingly it uses financial sanctions to punish nations, leading to talk of creating a financial network without the US at its center.Core manufacturing (for example of computer chips) has moved offshore, and the US is no longer the key manufacturer of electronic goods, nor is one of its allies (Japan controlling this wouldn’t matter much, China doing so, does.) The most advanced 5G technology was created by China. The most important technological city in the world is in China.China now manufactures more than the US, and in purchasing power parity terms, has a larger economy.Core nations like Italy (a member of the G7) are beginning to look to Beijing. Italy has signed up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is, among other things, a rival to the WTO and the American lead trade order. Non core nations are increasingly turning to China for loans and development, which China is willing to lend them the money for, often at better rates than the IMF and WTO with less demands for internal controls.The U.S. military is showing signs of being unable to create effective advanced military equipment: as with the F-35, which basically can’t fly. It is showing signs of intense incompetence, as when it let multiple planes be destroyed on the ground by a hurricane rather than, uh, fly them out or get them under effective cover.The U.S. is led by Donald Trump, a reality TV star, who was made to look like an effective billionaire mogul by clever editing. While Trump is not without his competencies (he did spend his life shitting into a gold toilet and screwing models), he’s clearly a few screws lose and a flaming narcissist.Meanwhile the opposition party, faced with an extremely unpopular president, mutters about coming together and how they would never impeach a weak President.The U.S. is a gold flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.There is a lot of ruin in a nation, but for almost 40 years now America’s elites have treated the U.S. as something to loot, and assumed that the good times would keep rolling. They were uninterested in actually governing. They were happy to move much of America’s core manufacturing overseas, to the most likely nation to replace America as a hegemon, because the Chinese were smart enough to make American elites rich.And so, today, large parts of America are shitholes, which the residents hate so much they are consuming record amounts of drugs and committing suicide, because who the fuck wants to live in a nation with no hope, shitty bosses and no hope.Oh, of course, there are people doing well. There were people doing well in 400AD as the Roman Empire collapses. There are always some people doing well.But the number of people doing well keeps getting less and less, and the decline keeps getting worse and worse.But the top is doing fine, so they see no reason to do anything.Heck, Trump just gave them another tax cut. Everyone they know is doing great.And so the decline goes on, because until the elites are made to feel the pain of the majority, they will not change.And so far, no one is willing or able to make the elites pay.