On Tuesday evening, a 1,500 page continuing resolution proposed to fund the government through March of 2025. As is tradition, rather than sit down and hash out the direction we might be heading for the long-run, it was yet another panic to avert a shutdown.
Our oligarchic overlords, the billionaire class, cried foul at the contents of the continuing resolution. Shortly after, the soon-to-be president Donald Trump chimed in to agree that the legislation should not pass. By Wednesday afternoon, the continuing resolution was dead, and by the end of the weekend, we will be facing yet another shutdown.
Elon Musk was the catalyst for this shutdown, and it was then exacerbated by Donald Trump so he could look tough to his favorite oligarch. All the while, they painted it as some wild spending spree proposed by Democrats, when it had a good deal of bi-partisan support, including from the speaker of the House. But Johnson got railroaded once again, and the confidence in him is at a new low, even within the party. His days as speaker are numbered, and the next one will be a 100% loyal plant of the MAGA faithful.
Democrats immediately pinned the shutdown threat on the Republicans, and we are once again back to business as usual in Washington. Nothing gets done, but they want a raise and a pat on the back for doing so much for all of us. Fuck all of these people.
The 2024 election cycle showed all of us how broken this system is, and that we shouldn’t place our trust in either one of these parties. As someone who spent the entire cycle on the left of the aisle, I saw how quickly the principles went out the window when it looked as though they might lose. When they did lose, they turned on the progressives for fracturing the vote and avoided the conversation about how the establishment plan was terrible. The establishment buddied up to the centrist Republicans in an attempt to sway them to the left, but it garnered nothing but a complete waste of resources. There was no way to win this one. The American public was concerned with the status of the economy, and they pinned every single one of their woes on the Democratic Party. Replacing Biden with Harris but offering no solutions for working-class people’s problems doomed the campaign and that is solely on the establishment.
The memory of this fickle population is incredibly short, and they couldn’t bother to remember that just four years ago, we had a world-stopping pandemic. The inflation that peaked in 2022 was a direct result of this pandemic, and the party that was in office at that time was going to feel the full brunt of it. If Donald Trump had won in 2020 and had to be saddled with the highest inflation in decades, he’d be out now and it would be a moratorium on the Republican party for an entire term. It would have been a blood bath. But that isn’t what happened.
Instead, Biden ran in 2020 and won and adopted a timebomb that would go off in 2022. He could have been fiscally conservative and even bordered on a traitor to his party and it still would have blown up in his face. The fuse was lit when the country shut down in 2020.
No one is to blame for the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of the origin of the disease, the world-shattering effects will resonate for decades through our politics domestically and internationally.
The most alarming aspect of the pandemic was not the death toll or the economic instability that still exists. It is the explosion in the wealth acquired by the highest net-worth class on the planet. Billionaires saw their fortunes explode during the pandemic, and with this explosion, the wealth inequality that followed became insurmountable. It was already a sickening gap between the haves and the have-nots, but now it’s hard to even comprehend the math at play. The ten wealthiest people on the planet have fortunes totaling just under $2 trillion dollars.
2,000,000,000,000 fucking dollars just in the top 10. The rest of the billionaire population push this number to 14,000,000,000,000. This is more than the individual GDP of every country on the planet except China and the United States. It would account for the full GDP of Japan, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom. Around 2,700 hundred billionaires are worth about 14% of the global GDP. They have the power to control more than they ever have before, and now the guardrails have been removed to give them direct access to the levers of power through bought and paid-for politicians.
Revolution isn’t optional now. Our hands have all been forced into action. So much so that we all celebrate when a vigilante guns down the CEO of one of the largest companies on the planet because he represents an evil we all know in this country. Luigi Mangione is hailed as a hero for executing a man, and no amount of browbeating by the equally bought and paid-for media on both sides is going to make us feel guilty about it.
A war is being waged against 99.9% of us, and this many people can only be trampled on for so long before using violence to solve problems. If we’re going to get treated like classless savages, then we should act accordingly. We aren’t influential enough to win through the legal or political system, but anyone can pull a trigger if they’ve reached their limit. Money doesn’t stop bullets.