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US Politics

Republicans think that children being slaughtered in their classrooms with weapons of war is the cost of freedom but that wearing a mask to save lives during a pandemic is too high a price to pay.

Bradley Whitford

Call me a radical lefty if you'd like, but I refuse to accept a system that enables Jeff Bezos to grow his wealth by $66,000,000,000 in 5 months — during a pandemic that's left 40,000,000 Americans on the brink of eviction.

Robert Reich

Now that the stock market has reached an all time high, even as millions of Americans are in bread lines trying to fend off starvation during a plague, perhaps more people will finally get it that the stock market is not the economy.

Bill Palmer

How can you witness billionaires accumulate $10,000,000,000,000 in wealth during an economically catastrophic pandemic and not conclude that the system needs to fundamentally change?

Robert Reich

What we’re witnessing is a global phenomenon, something big has changed. The oligarchs have discovered the formula for persuading the poor to vote for the interests of the very rich and that formula includes massive lying and cheating on an unprecedented scale. Mobilising social media particularly to generate mendacious, manipulative adverts and memes and conspiracy theories in order to swing people round or to turn them off from voting all together. Pushing forward killer clowns like Johnson, like Trump, like Modi, like Bolsonaro, who will do whatever the oligarchs want but present a sort of almost amusing face to the public and so we laugh along with them and then they learn from each other, they teach each other. In fact very often the same political operatives will hop from one campaign to another, constantly refining the model, refining the formula.

George Monbiot

He [Trump] allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realise people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives. The hatred – what is that about? It’s a fear of your own weakness.

Fran Lebowitz

[on the USA] Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but you need to know how silly you look if you post some variation of, “Welcome to Socialism…”. You are not seeing Socialism. What you are seeing is one of the wealthiest, geographically advantaged, productive capitalist societies in the world flounder and fail at its most basic test. Taking care of its people. This crisis is not about the virus. This crisis is about the massive failure of our, “Booming economy,” to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending, and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates. This crisis is about corporatised healthcare systems being unable and ill equipped to provide basic healthcare, at the same time they post record profits. It is about crisis response depending on antiquated systems nobody remembers how to operate. But most of all, this crisis is a direct result of the politicisation of every aspect of our society for the benefit of a privileged few. The vilification of education, science, media, natural rights, rural lifestyles, urban lifestyles, charity, compassion, and virtually everything else for brief political gain has gutted our society.

Paul Field

Toy soldiers

By US PoliticsNo Comments

The second amendment to the United States Constitution states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and…

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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken