It's Over

Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

After all of the crawlers at the bottom of TV screens, corporate news readers jawing for days with “reporting and analysis”, and some congresspeople playing “will they or won’t they” footsie with a worried American public, the deed is done. A budget bill that is both the most draconian cut to social net spending and the most lavish giveaway to super-wealthy people is passed. It’s now poised to receive the signature that most resembles someone failing a lie detector test to set it in stone.

Call your legislators, they said. People did. They inundated phone lines in a sustained way I’ve never seen for as long as I’ve lived.

Write your congresspeople! Loads wrote emails, physical letters, op-eds and more to appeal to their representatives.

Protest! Take to the streets!! People responded by the millions, with even small towns of a few thousand people getting proportionately large turnouts.

Use social media! Forward information to friends and foes alike! Maybe they’re not aware of what’s happening, and that connection could sway more of them to get out and make their voices heard to convince their legislators to vote against the regime’s billionaire giveaway. People tried that too.

Now, what do we have here? Did all of that work pan out and make a difference? No. Am I telling everyone who tried that they wasted their time and everyone should have rolled over, stayed home and saved their time and energy? No.

What I am saying is this: if you were against this bill, whether from the start or came around to hate it with others, you don’t have a voice in government and the decision was already made. Don’t believe me? Look at the results.

You clogged phone lines, mobbed town halls, hit the streets en masse, wrote letters to make Jefferson envious and more. In the face of confronting angry voters and enduring their withering barbs, insults, and threats to vote them out of office, legislators absorbed all that and still ignored you.

Who did they listen to? The Heritage Foundation, Walmart, Target, Musk, Bezos, Pichai, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg, Koch, Wall Street, energy companies, telecoms and other deep pockets who bought them. This scene with Kevin Spacey playing Frank Underwood in House of Cards sums up the whole thing:

The only part of this dialogue I disagree with is that nobody can hear you. You see, it’s not that they don’t hear you. It’s that they just don’t care.

Oh sure, they’ll give you expertly perfected puppy eyes to show they’re empathetic. They’ll tilt their heads angled down towards you, creating the effect of honing in on your pain, hearing no one else’s concerns but yours and committing it to memory for later legislation. They may even give you an anecdote about how the thing you’re making an appeal for saved their lives. If not for (fill-in-the-blank-concern), they couldn’t have survived as a kid, gotten nutrition, seen a doctor, gone to college, gotten a high-paying white-collar job or ascended to their seat without it.

The truth? It’s all bullshit. A ruse. A con. You’re a mark and you’re getting played. All that performance does is give the illusion they’re your champion, just to get your vote next cycle and keep them in place. As far as the things you and yours are worried about, they couldn’t care less. You’re necessary fuel to reach a destination and once you’re consumed, who needs you?

Republicans make this the clearest. They essentially fist-bump, high-five and jump in the air to chest bump whenever they pass legislation to make people hungrier, sicker, poorer and more miserable. Their glee is indescribable. I’d call it orgasmic, except I’m sure they look forward to hurting everyday working people with more passion and desire than even the most pleasurable, soul-shaking and spine-tingling intercourse imaginable.

They lie through their teeth about proposals not hurting constituents, but even when the jig is up, they don’t change course. Look at all of their recent town halls. Instead of facing the music or changing their vote, they shouted down voters, gaslit them, condescended to and ignored them. When push came to shove, they were pleasing the guy at the head of their party and all of the other rich people like him, come Hell or high water.

Democrats don’t escape my keyboard either. As a matter of fact, I placed hope for and in them, so my anger is hotter for them. Their policy positions align with working people, they say the right things about fairness, equality and the necessity to preserve people’s rights. I’ve voted for them for those reasons. However, with the exception of about fifteen or twenty of them combined between both houses, as soon as they get into that chair you can forget it. I’ll give Republicans this much: when they get in, they’ve got an urgency to get their plans done that Democrats don’t ever match. It’s like comparing the heat output of a toaster oven to being baked between two blue stars.

Immigration reform is so extremely important…that we need to not rush it and we’ll eventually get there, so give us time. Women’s healthcare is paramount…but these are difficult issues with strong feelings on both sides and we want to take time to get it right. Voting is a right not a privilege, and we will shore up voting rights for the traditionally disenfranchised…someday in the future when we can get our whole party to agree to support it. Wealth inequality is hurting too many Americans, and that’s why we’ll pass a higher minimum wage…eventually.

Yes, they’ve been undone by procedural slow-walks by the opposition when they’ve held slim majorities but they’ve also played a lot of grab-ass when they’ve had larger ones. Remember how long they played patty cake to get the ACA done, needing the “Cornhusker kickback” to get some conman rep to sign off? So much has been done in the name of comity and decorum, that they’ve Miss Manners-ed themselves out of getting the job done for constituents, over and over and over again.

They’re too good to go low. Too lofty to get down in the mud, pull hair, rake eyes, kidney punch and give kicks to the balls to win. Their opponents aren’t, however, and they’ve continued to outwork, connive, cheat, lie, steal and loot to get their agenda passed, including now. All of the above comes at the expense of constituents of both parties but is usually drafted to hit Democrats first. Hey, Dems can at least look in the mirror and be proud they didn’t fight dirty. They can comfort women bleeding out in parking lots without necessary healthcare, people of color being kidnapped and sent to death camps, seniors losing healthcare and life preserving stipends, and hungry low-income children in their districts, and tell them that their suffering was earned honorably. That should be a worthy salve.

They also vote yes for things they should all lockstep say no to. They voted to confirm people who they knew weren’t qualified and dangerous to the nation. They voted for funding to keep running DOGE and continue the assault against communities of color by ICE, now bolstered with local cops, national guard and marines. They’ve helped pass legislation to drag suspected undocumented people away, without cause, charge or due process of law.

Some voted to censure fellow Democratic Rep. Al Green for challenging the regime leader’s claim that he won a mandate in his State of the Union address. Many more refused to join him when he filed articles of impeachment against this regime’s head, voting against it. We know the likelihood was low that those articles would pass, but at least Dems could have shown a united front in agreeing this man rightly deserves to face impeachment for his disobedience to the Constitution. At least an actual motion has more substance than talking forever to hold up votes. We already know this party can talk without action; it’s what they’ve done best. Why do they vote this way? Many of them are twerking for the same corporate wallets as Republicans to make it rain campaign money.

People should be able to depend on the judicial system, topped by the Supreme Court, to interpret the Constitution fairly and consistently. Every grade school taught that SCOTUS has the nation’s most serious legal scholars, hewing to carefully established methods of applying law. Nope. It’s also bought. Its reactionary majority continues to weave a convoluted legal framework out of thin air, often without precedent, lots of assumptions and in some cases, quoting the medically deficient thinking of misogynists from the 17th century to determine current healthcare needs. Wealthy men like Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo and others reportedly bought this court and their money appears to keep reaping excellent ROI.

I keep hearing and reading more appeals to keep fighting, contacting the legislature and planning for elections in 2026 and 2028. That tactic is debatable. Look, I’m still going to vote given the chance, but right now I’m not convinced the nation will hold elections again. It sounds nuts, but if I told you that ICE and cops would be dragging innocent people away two years ago, many of them citizens and legal residents, and deporting them to death camps abroad, you’d say it would never happen. Is that scenario not currently our reality?

The facts are these: the current regime head has an iron grip on the party he leads. That party has clear majorities in both houses, and the nation’s highest court is composed with a two-thirds majority of right-wing justices to rule in his and his party’s favor. They’ve already done so many times, with each ruling removing more of the firewall holding back an all-powerful presidential god-king. If he decides that those pesky elections shouldn’t happen, his lapdog party will dutifully follow and the court will give him cover.

This country is over. It’s a dictatorship and a nuclear armed failed state. There is nothing protecting the citizens of this country from the mercurial and temperamental whims of the man sitting in the Oval Office. He is doing the bidding of wealthy and privileged people like himself, and to Hell with anyone else. Nobody is listening to you and nobody cares.

The deep pockets have total control of the nation. While kids starve and granny dies without nursing home care and meds, they’ll take our tax money and bundle it with the money we’re all reflexively spending without thought with Amazon, Target, Walmart, Apple, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Exxon, Shell and others, tightening their already suffocating grip on our government, income, health and privacy.

The nation began in slavery and has almost completed a full revolution back to it, except this time the enslaved aren’t only Black. They’re Brown, White, Asian, South Asian, and all with working people’s incomes. The illusion of choice and freedom are almost gone, and soon you’ll grow accustomed to the undisguised normalization of constantly growing debt, longer workdays, worse health, poorer nutrition and fewer days off.

You’ll keep spending more for basic needs, while hungrily swallowing the messaging that you need more of all the gadgets, trinkets, baubles and beads the companies sell to you. The volume of their messaging will increase and the repetition more frequent, telling you their product, that trip, this car, that hotel are worth it, even if you can only afford it by charging it, to make your crushing existence feel worthwhile. The reality is that it won’t. Nothing will taste as good and as sweet as civil liberties, rights, freedom of speech and dissent, the ability to criticize political leaders and pursue happiness as long as it isn’t harming someone else. Unfortunately, in the words of Talib Kweli, you’ll be, “too early to mourn, too late to ride.”

Happy Fourth, America. You had a good run and now it’s over. Downer? Maybe. Or maybe this is the realest splash of cold water you’re ever gonna get, and you’re the smartest man sitting on the cinder.