Done, Done, So Done With Duopoly

What a bleak November for the USA. It would be easy to throw in the towel. Then again…

Look to the colonized people. The people our taxes oppress. They resist, resist, resist. Decade after decade and day after day.

Look to the living communities—the other ones. Driven to the edges of habitat by our kind, as a battered, desperate climate burns out the few viable places left. Struggling to live, despite our incessant manspreading into the spaces their evolution requires.

No, it’d be hard to give up.

We resist.

Oh, George.

After the election, some Trump voters told reporters they don’t pay much attention to what Trump says. They pay attention to their bank accounts (if they still have them). And they think groceries were cheaper when Trump was in office, and maybe remember the stimulus payments Trump signed. (Yes, Biden’s administration sent stimulus payments too—but remember the facts. Trump set a $2,000 figure and Biden’s additional payment—a promised $2,000—turned out to be $1,400, added to a $600 payment that Congress signed off during Trump’s term.)

The Democrats could have homed in on a lingering and widespread sense of financial alienation. The polls showed it simmering. So did the housing charts. Home prices have more than doubled in areas of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Housing costs are rising everywhere—but especially in swing states, said The Washington Post on October 20.

Friday after the election, I listened to Trump-turned-Harris-supporter George Conway tell Sarah Longwell that inflation wasn’t really a thing, so people’s economic concerns must be “a proxy for something else that bothers them.” Oh, George. Do you know for every home for sale there are 30 households that rent? Do you know what they pay their landlords? Do you know how “the economy” suffocates people’s dreams and betrays entire generations?

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell came out and said it. Inflation is going down (for now) but prices are not.

Under Biden and Harris and Obama for that matter, many of us have lived one unexpected medical event away from a financial calamity. The LGBTQI+ community implored the Democrats to actually defend medical care. Instead of more bread and less circus, the Democratic presidential campaign leaned into jet-setting celebrities. And the Cheneys.

As Joshua Frank put it, November 5th brought “blowback for 30 years of neoliberal capitalism.”

Two-Faced Coin

The cryptocurrency PACs supported political campaigns in a slew of states. Turns out the Coinbase CEO has designs on federal financial policy—or at least boosting Elon Musk’s designs on it.

Crypto spent millions in Massachusetts, trying to oust Elizabeth Warren, and injected more than $40 million into Bernie Moreno’s Ohio campaign, which unseated longtime Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown.

Brown understood the Democrats’ election outcome as primarily a class issue. Especially since NAFTA, Brown told Eugene Daniels at Politico, working-class support for the Democratic party has faded, “because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years.”

Granted, the Harris campaign promised mortgage assistance. Great, but we need zoning allowances that support density rather than sprawl, and we need support for barely waged renters, and the end of this system that forces large segments of U.S. workers to try to live off starvation wages. And to that point, the rise of cryptocurrency highlights class issues. It was conceived in the throes of the Great Recession, just after the government bailed out the major U.S. banks, while millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures. Their adult children remember.

Yes, crypto would create its own class of high-emitting, jet-collecting oligarchs. As with the broader economy, crypto inequality is now horrendous, with less than 2% of wallets holding more than 90% of bitcoin. After the pandemic rocked corporate balance sheets, the denizens of Wall Street sidled in, smelling profit. By that point, many ordinary folk had downloaded crypto apps, looking for some bit of relief from a financial setup that erodes people’s dreams. It’s not surprising that underbanked households are particularly drawn to bitcoin. That has to be understood by anyone watching Trump jump on the crypto train, and crypto’s post-election rally.

I downloaded the Coinbase app in 2017, when I was teaching law as an adjunct, scouring online agencies for writing gigs, and working a nighttime grocery job. My co-workers at the store and I were the typical holders, with just a few hundred dollars’ worth, if we could keep it. This was our decentralized lottery, our whimsical hedge for wages in decline, in a world where landlords were keener on collecting rents than fixing roofs.

In October, the Harris team nodded to the pro-crypto pressure to replace Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission—without pointing to the economic context in which that pressure arose.

Reality of Plunder

In the summer of 2021, defying the IMF, El Salvador’s government made bitcoin a legal alternative to the U.S. dollar, and required businesses to accept it. Here again, context matters.

Rich countries and firms control World Bank and IMF trade policies. And those policies benefit rich countries and firms disproportionately. The racial imbalance in trade advantages is heavy.

The neoliberal framework enables the erosion of workers’ rights in financially struggling countries. As noted by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala:

For every dollar of aid the South receives, they lose $14 in drain through unequal exchange alone, not counting other kinds of losses like illicit financial outflows and profit repatriation. Of course, the ratio varies by country—higher for some than others—but in all cases, the discourse of aid obscures a darker reality of plunder. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.

Rich countries got rich in the first place through a pattern of colonial extraction. They used the extracted resources to build some sort of European descendants’ industrial complex template (EDICT?), leaving hunger, diaspora, abiding poverty, violence, and human rights abuses in their wake, and making it all seem normal and inevitable, so the struggles continue. Demand for computers and cars keep surging, at the expense of human lives and natural habitats. All oppressions are linked, dear friends.

To its credit, El Salvador was first in the world to ban metal mining, in an effort to stop ecocidal gold extraction. Nayib Bukele, alas, wants to end the ban — subjecting environmental and human rights activists to new rounds of state violence. Yet Biden and Harris recently saw fit to “dampen” their critiques of Bukele, catering to anti-migration sentiment in the 2024 U.S. election.

Frick and Frack

Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear the Harris campaign talk about dealing with the emissions from bitcoin mining. That could have started important conversations. But today’s Democrats have a dangerously inconsistent take on greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes, Trump and Pence bullshat us about Covid—and the Biden-Harris administration bullshat us about the climate crisis, just as Trump did.

Trump & friends like to scare climate scientists—and Harris likes to boast about having opened new leasing for fossil fuels when casting the tie-breaking vote on the Democrats’ climate law. What? In 2020, candidate Biden vowed to bar new oil or gas drilling on federal lands. But the Democrats would never put a phase-out plan in place.

Then, Harris campaigned in let’s-frack mode.

Trump is pushing for maximum fossil fuel extraction; but the Biden administration couldn’t stop turning federal lands into oil fields. Trump confuses sea level rise with “more oceanfront property”; so as a matter of course natural gas spiked after the U.S. election, and solar energy stocks wilted. But both money-driven parties keep the United States among the ranks of procrastinator nations on meaningful climate action.

If a house were burning, we’d put out the fire. When our collective home is on fire, we add more fuel to it. Our capitalist leaders’ promises of cheap oil and gas exacerbates the ever-worsening hurricanes, floods, droughts and killer crop failures. We’ve never witnessed a deadlier form of political malpractice.

Party Line

The USA has never played well in the sandbox of international law, policy, or just plain co-operation. But that doesn’t mean its people gave anyone a green light for war crimes.

Pro-Palestine protesters had been shouting Come November, we’ll remember all year. Large segments of poll responses in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona showed more interest in voting for a Democratic candidate who would promote an arms embargo on Israel—and also showed that such a candidate wouldn’t hurt the Democrats’ chances. Who knew? A lot of voters resent investing in Israel’s military campaign of genocidal violence. And yet, Tim Walz backed out of meeting with Gazan families who wanted to press these same points. The Democrats wouldn’t even let a Palestinian endorse Harris on stage. And when Palestine supporters disrupted Kamala Harris’s Detroit speech, the now-infamous retort was “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that; otherwise, I’m speaking.”

Harris kept playing Beyoncé’s Freedom. But what of their freedom? Freedom, Freedom, where are you? Cause I need freedom too.

There was a vague sense of abusive parenting in it all. Harris promised a government that would to treat us well; meanwhile, the other child, Palestine, was taking the abuse—not us, so OK for now. We’d deal with those atrocities later. Or would we? Through social media, VP Harris’s national security adviser flatly said Harris wouldn’t support an arms embargo. Harris’s take on pro-peace protests as a gift to the Trump campaign was chilling. So much for keeping empathetic, energetic people engaged in current human affairs. So much for respecting the people who asked them to stop murdering children.

And this is the other blowback that overtook the campaign. A map of countries that recognize Palestine speaks for itself. And the refusal to listen contributed to the election of a tyrant.

Hillary, Bill, and Obama, and the whole campaign consultant circle proved willing to shame potential voters, leveraging race and sex to extract votes. Their logic had limits. Female candidates from swing states did manage to win seats in Congress. Reproductive rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 state ballot measures, including Arizona’s and Nevada’s—yet the Harris-Walz ticket didn’t get that same strong support. Party leaders themselves came under scrutiny for never having codified Roe v. Wade.

Come on, Democrats. Even amidst your funding of war criminals, Bernie sent you voters. (Sigh.) Why couldn’t you have bothered to relate to those voters? And what about the contract workers, the gig workers, the nation of adjuncts and part-timers piecing jobs together, the people working on wealthy tech companies’ platforms who don’t even get minimum wage? Why couldn’t you have encouraged migrant workers and torture escapees, rather than taunting and frightening them? Where were you with the help that was and is needed? But you’ve got billions for the military industrial complex, even genocide?

What we needed from Harris wasn’t the spectacle. We needed less speaking and more listening. Less joy. More witnessing. We got Cheney endorsements when we needed a commitment to an arms embargo and Medicare for All. Israel provides free universal healthcare to its people. U.S. taxpayers who fund Israel do not even get that basic support.

Let me be clear: the Trump Republicans hold outrageous opinions of people on the left, workers, migrants, and LGBTQI+ folk. Trumpism’s hallmarks (aside from greed) are racism and misogyny. It’s poised to target people whose views, presence, or citizenship Trump and Vance resent. And now I hear people shaming their Republican peers for overlooking the vile speech and conduct of the Trump Republicans. The Dems can’t believe what Trump’s win says about who we are. For sure; yet I must ask: Didn’t it trouble you to know who we already were?

Enemies Within

To Republicans of the Cheney persuasion, Trump was a massive log obstructing the track. Republicans nostalgic for their pre-Trump glory needed to jump on Harris’s train to keep moving, and eventually wrest their influence back. So they bonded with Harris, who looked delighted.

Liz Cheney’s dad Dick designed the Iraq War after leaving the CEO post at Halliburton to come to the White House. As VP, Dick Cheney continued to enjoy deferred salary and stock options in Halliburton.

Halliburton became “the largest private contractor for American forces in Iraq, with $11 billion in government contracts,” as Peter Carlson described the company in The Washington Post. Its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root built the detainee warehouse at Guantánamo Bay.

A certain Yaser Esam Hamdi was apprehended and brought to Guantánamo after a prison uprising in Afghanistan in 2001. Hamdi, it came to light, was a U.S. citizen—born in Louisiana to Saudi parents. Thus, Hamdi’s detention was unconstitutional. It was, that is, until the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Bush-Cheney administration to push Hamdi’s citizenship aside, because “the review of battlefield captures in overseas conflicts is a highly deferential one.”

VP Cheney expressly recommended calling U.S. citizens suspected of supporting Al-Qaida “enemy combatants” who could be detained indefinitely. Defending military tribunals, Cheney stated: “This is the way we dealt with the people who assassinated Abraham Lincoln and tried to assassinate part of the Cabinet back in 1865.”

Due process be damned; the executive branch gets to decide who goes into storage in the brigs, the camps, or the dungeons.

We Resist

Nature runs the most adept anti-capitalist protests. Capitalism is no match for climate chaos. Florida is turning to “socialism” (Newsweek’s term) to try to keep homes insured, now that hurricanes are causing the profit-hungry companies to flee the state. This is only the beginning, Florida. Welcome to sea-level living in the midst of global heating. This is what Kivalina was telling you.

And now, Trump’s return to the White House brings global climate action to a head. When the basics of living are in jeopardy, who will this government sacrifice? Whose resources will be taken? Any groups or nations serious about climate will need to unite and isolate the U.S. And by the same token, we must sideline the usual suspects.

Xi Jinping is already seeking alliances with EU and Asian countries to offset Trump’s tariff threats. So there we have it. If countries can open networks for mutual assistance, so can NGOs. How about the non-moneyed political parties and movements uniting for mutual support and changemaking?

It’s good to see Trump Republicanism spotlighted in anti-fascism protests led by Just Stop Oil. No time like the present to discuss the colonialist, capitalist mindset, and how to get over it. The alternative is the endless warrior culture—whether the Commander in Chief pursues retribution or joy.

In our late stage as a hyper self-domesticated species, the most ethically unhinged people have nuclear weapons. We need to create an authentic alternative. That can’t happen when people keep electing champions of the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

We must press for a fairer global economy that stops replicating colonial-era exploitation. Challenge those who chastise third-party voters. Because we must cultivate alternatives to money-driven politics while our atmosphere still exists. It is well past time to sideline the hopelessly corrupt two-party duopoly.

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