Index

We’re Number One

The United States once again leads the industrialized nations

On June 24, 2012, HBO aired the first and most important episode of The Newsroom series. In it, Jeff Daniels gives a speech that eloquently said what many knew for a long time - the U. S. is not the greatest country in the world. Not at anything. We were well on the way to becoming a third-rate also-ran.

After a decade of the fascists’ running rampant through the pillars of our society, we have once again assumed the world’s leadership. We are now the most corrupt post-industrial pseudo-democracy on the planet.

Let’s parse that last statement, easy parts first:

• “Post-Industrial:” We have moved far beyond industry as the primary means of creating value. We have been in the process of doing this since the 1960s, so this idea is nothing new. The wealth that the industrial age concentrated is part of the corruption, though - the remaining “industrialists” aren’t willing to let go of their billions and their power. These are the same group who financed Hitler, so their tactics and lack of principles are well known.
• “Pseudo-Democracy:” The orange toddler and his cult proved that we are no longer a democracy, not even vaguely. George W. Bush and Trump got into the Whitehouse despite losing their elections. The orange cult is still trying to steal the last election from Biden despite all the facts being against them. Now the fascists are finishing their takeover of the election process so they cannot lose again. We are joining Putin’s Russian, Xi’s China, and Orbán’s Hungary in holding fake elections and ending any semblance of democracy.
• “Most Corrupt:” We have been moving towards a corrupt fascist government since at least Ronnie Raygun, so this is nothing new. The orange cult is the endpoint of their process of removing any truth or reality from the political process. Big Money completely controls Congress and, more recently, the SCOTUS. The regular citizens have lost all of their ability to fight back. The next election will be a farce, and the fascists will completely control the country.S

Some of the most obvious examples of corrupting Big Money:

• The medical system: The unregulated monopoly of the pharmaceutical companies, medical insurance companies, and hospital corporations control all government decisions on healthcare. The citizenry is not involved except by paying for it and dying early because of it.
• The carbon industry: Another unregulated monopoly is all of the “energy companies” that take the various forms of carbon out of the ground. They have many members of Congress that they blatantly own and control. Any attempt at dealing with the global warming crisis is quashed by this group.
• The NRA: It has managed to completely block any and all attempts to prevent the kind of massacres we keep seeing more of. This unregulated monopoly has repeatedly blocked the common-sense gun controls that worked in many other countries, and we can count the cost in dead children alone.

How did we get here:

• The fascists have been systematically destroying the public education system. My first experience of this was Nixon criminalizing the free-thinking academic community, calling them “hippies” and criminalizing their activities as far as he could reach. The multinational “drug war” and its incredible body count started with Nixon’s grudge against academics and thinkers. People who think for themselves will always make trouble for autocrats, and this campaign has been largely successful at stamping out any sort of real thinking as part of education. This continues with the current attempts to take microscopic-level control of children’s education. They are eliminating any ideas that might make the autocrats uncomfortable.
• Starting with Ronnie Raygun (or maybe further back) the fascists have constantly lied. Following the teachings of Joseph Goebbels, they lied constantly and loudly on everything from economics (“Supply Side”) to politics (“Government is the problem.”) A lot of people knew from the start that these were lies, but, per Goebbels, the drumbeat of lies made them seem like the truth to many people. Murdoch’s Faux Noise continues and amplifies this, telling bigger and uglier lies every day.
• The fascists have taken advantage of the uneducated people left behind by vanishing no-brain industrial jobs. They merged them in what the fascists originally called their “southern strategy.” Scraping together the KKK, the Nazis, and the lunatic far-right (including the John Birch Society and the various religious cults) allowed the fascists to create an easily conned voting block. This became the orange fascist’s “base” and the club he holds over the rest of the fascists. The destruction of the public education system has increased the size of this group and made them more susceptible to all of the lying.

Some hope, maybe

With a couple of notable exceptions, the new tech billionaires have succumbed to the amoral “all profit all the time” industrialist logic. They have added their money to the destructive forces above, creating another crashing wave of “bad capitalism.” That said, the future may not be completely hopeless. These guys depend on the creativity of their employees for profit. There are enough free-thinking people there to perhaps moderate the worst excesses of their amoral bosses. We have seen a few hopeful examples where this has happened.

The post-industrial economy depends on far more individual thinking and creativity than the industrial economy did. Those employees are less likely to roll over and stop thinking in human terms, much to the dismay of the money-grubbers. The amoral business types haven’t figured out how to destroy them yet - they have the fundamental problem of “the goose that laid the golden eggs.

This problem is getting worse for them as profits increasingly depend on the intellectual content of the product, with the most obvious example being software. With the exceptions of Microsoft and a few other big names, software really sells purely on its ideas.

Another small ray of hope is the weak-but-strengthening wave of unionization. With service and warehouse employees getting the idea that maybe they have some power over their pay and working conditions, perhaps this idea will spread to the rest of the almost-slave working economy. They have at least four decades of worsening working conditions to roll back, so I don’t have much hope for change in my lifetime.

I made the mistake of bringing children into this hell of a world, and now I have a grandchild to add to my pain. I can only regret that I cannot leave them a better world than what I came into. I just hope they are more effective fighters than I ever was.