Factoid: A billion dollars is 1,000 million dollars.
If you ask me, and nobody has – in fact I’ve been asked not to talk about it, but that may just be my wife – how and why Trump won the election it now seems glaringly obvious that it was two things:
The massive amount of disinformation, deception and propaganda showering the American people like a bomb cyclone deluge. We’ve never lived in a time when there was more distrust and hostility towards facts, experts and authorities or proven science. And that’s not by accident.
It came from foreign enemies like China, Russia and Iran and domestic actors who have a very vested personal interest in fueling our #AgeOfStupid for their profit purposes. So if it seemed like nothing Trump did could lose him votes and that no facts or truths seemed to matter it’s because they didn’t.
Today, while the ultra rich are doing better than at any time in history, 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and weekly wages for the average American worker are lower now than they were 50 years ago. No wonder people feel like the economy sucks.
Not since the infamous robber barons of the late 1800s have we suffered more obscenely wealthy men owning and running the American government and our biggest businesses, while our massive income inequality screws and enrages the vast majority of citizens.
This is governing by greedy immoral oligarchs and they have only one goal – to enrich themselves with more and more power and to flex both in the faces of workers and those at the bottom of the food chain.
At the same time these billionaires use the justified anger that inequality produces to blame the “elites” and “over educated” for the people’s financial failures and anxieties. Oh and don’t forget whipping up hate for the migrants to add fear and loathing to the mix. Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when you need him?
Meanwhile our once and future billionaire president-elect has lined up a billionaire education secretary, billionaire commerce secretary, billionaire interior secretary and billionaire buddy budget-cutter and phony efficiency expert, Elon Musk.
And if you don’t like it or complain about it, too fucking bad for you bitch. You’re going to find out who’s boss now.
The world’s richest man is showing us right now how a sadistic bully likes to intimidate, threaten and ruin people’s lives by using his X-Twitter platform to target women who currently work for the government.
Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts.
Although the information he posted on those government positions is available through public online databases, these posts target otherwise unknown government employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public.
Musk likes to use his X-Twitter like a cluster bomb munition with bomblets in the form of bros and bots spreading and exploding on unarmed citizens exponentially. And now he’s going to have the power of the US government behind him as he holds them hostage via contracts for Space X and Starlink. This is some James Bond level villainry, only on a more petty and personal level.
This isn’t new behavior for Musk, who has often singled out individuals who he claims have made mistakes or stand in his way. One former federal employee, previously targeted by Musk, said she experienced something very similar.
“It’s his way of intimidating people to either quit or also send a signal to all the other agencies that ‘you’re next’,” said Mary “Missy” Cummings, an engineering and computer science professor at George Mason University, who drew Musk’s ire because of her criticisms of Tesla when she was at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The one guy who has called this from the beginning and is still making more sense and is sharper than ever on the topic is Bernie Sanders. Bernie asks:
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
Me? I’m not a Democrat, although I’m usually forced to vote for them as the only alternative to Republicans. And I’m certain that “probably not” is definitely not. The Dems are every bit as corporate controlled and all-of-the-above as their opponents and they have no real plans to deviate from their status quo.
Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Post can see what Bernie and I see:
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake — for the party and, more important, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Milbank reports on one Dem Senator who seems to get it, but he’s a voice in the wilderness who does not inspire action:
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) issued a memo last week with polling from his home state showing that 82 percent of people — including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents — agree that one of the biggest problems facing the country is that corporations and economic elites hold too much power and government is doing too little about it. “Democrats have the opportunity to call Republicans on their bluff and prove to the American people that we are the ones on the side of the workers,” he wrote. “But that’s only possible if we have the courage to pick fights with powerful corporations and billionaires and fight against the status quo.”
Fat fucking chance of that.
Creative Greenius 