I remember feeling like I do right now back in 2012. I was in my rig (a white gov't 4x4 pickup truck), listening to AM talk-radio following the presidential election.
"Fuck 'em", I thought. "If this is the will of the people, let 'em come on and do what they're going to do. We'll see what happens after."
Trump happened after.
So now we have this here. One of the most instructive utilities of the Trump administration is the true exposure of how deep the establishment "swamp" runs.
Definitions are important, so let's get into the "Swamp" in this context. "Swamp", can be defined as the established global corporations who funnel billions of dollars worth of lobby money into the legislature, and even more billions of dollars worth of graft into paying off bureaucrats in the executive branch to serve their interests at the detriment to the electorate. While I have no readily available data indicating that such remarkable amounts of money are making it into the pockets of judges, to think that those worthies are immune to such graft is to deny a reasonable appreciation of human frailty in the face of overwhelming corruptive influences. Suffice to say that I will conject that the judiciary is in on this too, if only because I'm not naïve, and I've observed judicial behavior.
The Swamp could not allow a second Trump administration. They've pulled out all the stops since the day he was inaugurated. On that day, numerous sages in the corporate media actually compared Trump to Hitler. You can't do that again. That's "11" on the volume knob, and they went there on DAY 1. They created a Russia narrative. They weaponized both the DoJ and the Intelligence Community to convince us that Trump was a Russian Asset, or to impeach him for doing something with the Ukraine which was actually true of his accusers.
They've emptied their vaults. They got in bed with China, allowed China to cultivate a virus and destroy the working class, and covered for China at every turn. This was the only course of action available to them in December of 2019.
In December of 2019, the GDP was somewhere around 3.9% (remember, we were told by the last President in 2011 that 1.8% growth in the GDP was "the new normal"). Working class wages, job availability, and minority unemployment were at the best that they ever had been. We have not deployed in support of a new war since Trump took office. The inner-cities were blooming unlike anything we'd seen since Eisenhower.
Then it all turned to shit. Wuhan Flu, George Floyd, manufactured crisis, anarchy and war in the streets...
And yet the Dow/Jones still thrives. Daily trading hit 30,000 in one day several weeks ago.
Small businesses crushed. Whole towns effectively destroyed. Local governments allowed their citizens to fend for themselves while being attacked in their homes and businesses. District Attorneys in every Democrat-majority city are allowing criminals to go free for almost anything short of class "A" felony. An electorate denied their relief through the social contract.
Yet Silicon Valley thrives. Amazon crushes all-time shipments. Netflix and streaming services flourish. Wal-Mart and Home Depot are killing it. Local stores are dying. Local restaurants and bars, bakeries and gyms, all of them are being crushed by government fiat. Think about that. Not because the people don't have the money or the desire to go there, but because the government has not favored them. How pissed would you be if that was your business? Where is the social contract here? Why did you pay taxes and pay for licenses for decades, if this was your end?
While the rich and powerful dine in comfort in trendy restaurants, I can't go with my wife when admitting her to the hospital for an afibrulated heart condition. She and I have to wait while she sits in the ER with no food and no rest for more than twelve hours, until they take her to a room. So that I can then talk to her through a closed window as she cries and suffers.
I walk through a small town that I've lived in for almost twenty years. I know it well, and yet I can't recognize folks whom I've known for years because we're all in masks to protect us from a virus that is fatal in less than .05% of those effected under the age of 60. (We joke at work that you're more likely to die from a shark attack in a port-a-shitter at Checkpoint 35 in the Prospect Training Area than from this.) Social distancing holds us aloof from one another. Masks rob us of our individuality. We default to suspicion of one another, resentment, mistrust.
Yet China had one of the best quarters in the past three years by exporting masks and medical equipment to the world that they infected.
There is one public figure who brought this about by pointing out that America was being cheated of her potential. To bring him down, they have crushed the working class, again, the same as they've done since China was allowed into the World Trade Organization in the early 1990s.
On my news feed, I see Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and each talking head (employed by one of the multi-national corporations that own every news outlet) telling me that all of this is necessary. Just like NAFTA was "necessary". Just like JPCOA, the Paris Accords, and TPP were "necessary". Just like everything the establishment has ever done to us to sustain the impression that they know better than us, while taking what we have and are capable of making and sending it overseas.
That illusion was destroyed in 2017.
Say what you want about the man (but do it somewhere else, though. I've heard it all, and your narrow-minded disapproval of his reported flaws will not move me.) Trump showed us just how corrupt this establishment is. He demonstrated that we didn't need to make war in SW Asia for oil, because we have all we could ever need here, thank you very much, and all we really needed to do was to explain to the Middle Eastern potentates that we're done fighting their wars for them, and then come home and get rid of the internal regulation that was holding down petroleum extraction within the United States. Guess what? We became energy independent within two years of Trump's inauguration, and they've been fighting their own fights over there without us. We'd been lied to for fifty years. Now we know different.
What else have we been shown? Well, here's something. We don't need China, China needs us. The President dealt with China exactly how a sane businessman would, offering deals that would give mutual advantage. We were killing it. In December 2019, China had the worst sustained GDP development, bereft of our purchases, since the 1950s. The main reason for that downturn was because the President had created a normalized trade agreement, so of course their GDP would take a hit. Since they couldn't reap the profits off the backs of the American working class, the Chinese Communist Party came to the solution that they preferred to turn this around through actual biological warfare against the rest of the world. The Swamp signed on for that one, and it's still using it to attempt to convince us that China is blameless.
In light of this information, and given the reasonable doubt as a result of recent investigations that there is much to be in doubt with regards to the legitimacy of this election in at least five states, I think the working class is being sold down the river yet again. When Big Media, Big Pharm, Silicon Valley, the US Chamber of Commerce, the vast majority of Wall Street, and the Large Global Banking Interests all agree in their opposition to a single man, I start wondering: what is their unifying common interest? Further, those who claim to be part of the traditional left, in opposition to the "Man", the "Establishment", the "Reactionaries", why are you siding with the common interests of these mega-billionaires?
Jesus wept. Rage Against the Machine actually advocated using their lyrics to the song "Killing in the Name Of" as a mnemonic to recite while washing one's hands during COVID restrictions. (So you sing the chorus... "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"... while you comply with the wishes of the WHO)
So that's the world right now, as it seems to be arrayed against us.
What can we do in the face of this, you ask?
Get in the books. There's a ton of things that I don't know that I should know. I watched about a hundred MLB games per season since I stopped deploying. I have had roughly 300 hours between March and October given back to me to get smart on things. Over the past five years, I've read the "Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, "A Brave New World" by Huxley, "Maps of Meaning" and "12 Rules for Life" by Peterson, "Camp of the Saints" by Raspail, and "Winter in Moscow" by Muggeridge. I recommend all of them, though you'll need to hit me up if you want a copy of the last two. Amazon has paperback copies of "Camp of the Saints" available for $148 and those of "Winter in Moscow" available for $758. Good luck finding them in a library. (I managed to find a copy of them both on an online abandoned book auction for less than $100 each. Check those places out. That's the only way this information will survive. Silicon Valley is trying to kill it.) Read the Constitution, and know it. Read the Federalist Papers, where the founders explained their reasoning of arranging the government in the manner that they did. Those things are your responsibility as a citizen, a steward of this Republic. If you don't know these things and can't articulate a defense of them, then your children and grand-children don't have a chance in hell of living under such an arrangement.
Get local. You've heard me say this before. If Trump can't maintain office, and the incoming admin succeeds in packing courts and adding DC and Puerto Rico as States, this is not going to end well. Get local. If and/or when Federal and State governments start trying to flex their extra-constitutional muscle, the fella on the dime to enforce that bullshit will be your local leaders. When that happens, you're going to have a bunch of nervous bureaucrats, who have access to statute law and armed men to enforce it, at odds with angry armed citizens who don't like it. There needs to be a means of mediation that involves people talking to one another, and those people are us. Go find a VFW, and American Legion, or a Marine Corps League. If you're not former military, find a civilian group like the Elks.
In 2004, when J. Paul Bremer [spits between fingers] fired the Iraqi government and every member of the Ba'athist party (i.e. "every Iraqi who had a job"), what resulted was something that I'd read about, but never, EVER, thought that I'd see in this world: A Hobbesian State of Nature. Without a government to hold "All under awe. Where life will be nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes predicted that, in such a state, men would hole-up and defend their shit while slowly reaching out to their neighbors to effect "mutual protection associations". This is a contract. "If they come for your shit, I'm gonna roll in and help. You'll do the same for me."
That gets bigger and bigger. In Iraq, we saw the resurgence of the tribes in this manner. For us, the tribes will be communities, and the leaders will be those who can mediate between the bureaucracy and the citizens.
Get in there. Get ahead of this. Hope for the best and assume the worst. Noah didn't start building when it started to rain.
Folks, the Supreme Court just turned down an opportunity to resolve a case between states for the election of the Chief Executive. It's getting cloudy, and a flood is increasingly likely. By virtue of your experience and your training, you are the instrument in this situation. Get busy and start building those arks.
Unclean
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