May 8, 2025
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It would be helpful if we stopped pretending this terrible chapter in American history won’t close without bloodshed …
It would be helpful if Americans, and our feeble Democratic politicians in particular, stopped implying by their comatose actions that Democracy is some damn American right and has no end date.
America very well might be arriving at hers, because, yes, it really is that bad right now.
Rather than bringing Ping-Pong paddles and groovy, little signs to a fascist hate-fest disguised as a State of the Union speech, it would be helpful if our meek, out-of-touch Democratic politicians at least pretended they understood the perilous moment we are standing in right now.
We are in deep, deep trouble, and now would be a wonderful, necessary time to step in front of your favorite mirror and honestly ask yourself what you are willing to do to fight for our country’s survival.
We are but six-plus weeks into the repulsive, wannabe-king’s second term and the damage he and his party are causing are already at catastrophic levels.
Our air, water, earned benefits, peace, public safety, civil rights, and human rights are all under immediate threat. Worse? This is only the first course of many that will be served by the vindictive, orange madman, and his pathetic party of supplicants.
The insults, the attacks, endless provocations, and thrashing of our Constitution will continue daily. All this carefully planned evil will be aimed at exactly one thing: breaking us.
Everything he is doing is designed to pound us into submission, and he’s having a grand damn doing it.
This was entirely his aim when he and his pet mutt, JD Vance, double-teamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the behest of Boss Putin in the Oval Office on Friday. The idea was to publicly humiliate the man who has done more to defend America’s interests across the globe than any Republican in memory.
Because Zelenskyy has tasted gun powder and breathed the odious smell of death on the battlefield, he wasn't about to be pushed around by some morbidly obese, 78-year-old yacht club bully and his toady, who think swinging a sand wedge to free a golf ball from some bunker is dangerous business.
Zelenskyy punched back and wasn't having it. He told the truth, and didn't back down. The future of his country is on the line right now, and he acted like it.
And therein lies the playbook for dealing with this sadistic bastard — if only the cautious, too-clever Democratic Party and their weak leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, bothered paying attention.
While Rome burns, they dither.
They act as if we have all the time in the world, when time is something that is not guaranteed right now. They seem to somehow have no idea how bad things are about to get, or most certainly will be when elections they seem to be pinning their hopes on roll around next year.
Everything changed on November 5th, but by the looks of it, very little has changed in the Democratic Party.
This country will never be the same, and the sooner we come to grips with that, and start acting accordingly the better.
What would you do if everything you had and everyone you loved was threatened? Would you act like Zelenskyy or Schumer?
One of the big mistakes of Joe Biden’s presidency was this notion that everything was going to be OK, and that his idea of America matched the actual circumstances of America.
If I had a dollar for every time he said this, I’d fold up shop and move to Tahiti:
“We are the United States of America – there's nothing we can't do if we do it together. We just have to remember who we are.”
It was a noble statement and magical thinking that would have worked great pre-2016, when we could still believe without being laughed at that our two parties could work together in a crisis to protect America.
When we were attacked by the terrible human being who is now somehow leading us January 6, 2021, that magical thinking needed to go out the nearest window.
Instead, our Justice Department twiddled its thumbs and allowed the America-attacker to build himself back up, so that WE would have to deal with him AGAIN.
I seethe just thinking about this, but it is where we are right now, and the sooner we all understand this the better.
The clock is ticking. The bomb is in place.
Which brings me back around to my original premise: At some point, he will do something so heinous … so anti-America … so dangerous … that the people who truly love our country will be forced into the streets to take a life-or-death stand. Sadly, this is actually the best-case scenario, because the worst case is we just go quietly into the dark, gloomy night and become an authoritarian country, where we have zero rights or say in how we are governed.
Yesterday under the cover of his blankets, the America-attacker shared this with us:
Now read the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; OR THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, AND TO PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES."
He is telling us what he thinks of America and silly things like the Constitution. Kings don’t pay attention to that kind worthless drivel.
And, really, end of the day, it not him who we have most to fear. It’s the stupid, goddam Republicans who are stubbornly in all of our lives. These are the people who have illustrated there is no known pain or sacrifice to our civil liberties or pocketbooks that they won’t absorb just for the satisfaction of watching some poor kid of color going without something they didn’t think she should have.
So the choice is yours: You can continue thinking there is some magical way out of this, or you can begin to take the threat to everything you hold dear seriously, and ACT accordingly.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.
Trump's weakness wasn't the only thing exposed at Saturday's protests | Opinion
Yesterday, I talked about how the No Kings rally exposed the regime’s weakness. Donald Trump wants the common folk of America to surrender i
Have you noticed gas prices are rising? Get ready: you ain’t seen nothing yet.The bloodthirsty leader of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia loves h
Saudi Arabia is scheming with Russia to reduce oil production to drive up gas prices before the 2024 election.
They both want Traitor Trump back in office to do their bidding. Putin has undue influence over Trump for reasons yet unknown. Saudi Arabia spends very large sums on Trump properties and businesses and has "invested" billions with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Even more reasons for the one man crime spree to never get anywhere near the Office of the President of the United States of America ever again!
The Class Divide in the US:
Stephan Schwartz: "Seventy percent of Americans are feeling financially stressed. One in seven American children has hunger issues. But for the oligarchs times have never been better; they are almost a third richer than they were three years ago.
Because of our grotesquely skewed tax system, the United States has become two very different countries. Not the Red Blue schism, although that is part of it, but wealth inequality so great that it has created a wealth aristocracy made up of the 5.3 million millionaires who represent the gentry, and 770 billionaires who have become a financial nobility. And then there is a shrinking middle class and several hundred million peasants. If that sounds medieval financially it is.
As the deadline for Americans to file federal income tax returns fast approaches, Oxfam America on Friday renewed calls for taxing the ultrarich while publishing an analysis showing America’s growing number of billionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly one-third since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and by nearly 90% over the past decade.
“Wealth inequality in the U.S. is more extreme and dangerous than income inequality; and we need to change our approach, so we effectively tax wealth as well as income,” the charity said in an introduction to the report, Tax Wealth, Tackle Inequality.
Based on Forbes data, the report found that “U.S. billionaires are almost a third richer (over a trillion dollars, in real terms) than they were at the onset of the pandemic in 2020,” while overall U.S. billionaire wealth has soared 86% since 2013.The number of U.S. billionaires—of which there are now more than 700—is also nearly 60% higher than it was a decade ..."
[Alter Net]
President Donald Trump encouraged voters to cast two ballots on Wednesday while in North Carolina, suggesting that this would test the system to see if it is robust against such illegal acts. However, such a "test" would itself be a crime, and it's possible that the president's open encouragement fo
President Donald Trump typically goes to Fox News to be treated with deference, but in a Thursday interview with host Harris Faulkner, he became clearly uncomfortable when she uncharacteristically challenged him. Faulkner usually promotes the party line on Fox News, rarely deviating from standard
Oooohh Harris!
Now you know Ms. Candace Owens ain’t gonna invite you to her cookout this year.
And after all she done to get her potato salad together.
From medicine to education, market imperatives rule public life: how neoliberalism undermined the idea of professionalism.
The young doctor was desperate. ‘I need to talk to my patients,’ she said, ‘and give them time to ask questions. Some of them are foreign-born and struggle with the language, and all of them are in distress! But I hardly have the time to explain the essentials to them. There’s all the paperwork, and we’re constantly understaffed.’
Such grievances have become sadly familiar – not only in medicine, but also in education and care-work. Even in more commercial environments, you’re liable to hear similar objections: the engineer who wants to deliver quality but is told to focus on efficiency only; the gardener who wants to give the plants time to grow, but is told to focus on speed. The imperatives of productivity, profitability and the market rule.
Complaints come from the other side of the table as well. As patients and students, we want to be treated with care and responsibility, rather than as mere numbers. Wasn’t there a time when professionals still knew how to serve us – a cosy, well-ordered world of responsible doctors, wise teachers and caring nurses? In this world, bakers still cared about the quality of their bread, and builders were proud of their constructions. One could trust these professionals; they knew what they were doing and were reliable guardians of their knowledge. Because people poured their souls into it, work was still meaningful – or was it?
In the grip of nostalgia, it’s easy to overlook the dark sides of this old vocational model. On top of the fact that professional jobs were structured around hierarchies of gender and race, laypeople were expected to obey expert judgment without even asking questions. Deference to authority was the norm, and there were few ways of holding professionals to account. In Germany, for example, doctors were colloquially called ‘demigods in white’ because of their status vis-à-vis patients and other staff members. This is not exactly how we might think that citizens of democratic societies should relate to one other now.
Against this backdrop, the call for more autonomy, for more ‘choice’, seems hard to resist. This is precisely what happened with the rise of neoliberalism after the 1970s, when the advocates of ‘New Public Management’ promoted the idea that hard-nosed market thinking should be used to structure healthcare, education and other areas that typically belonged to the slow and complicated world of public red tape. In this way, neoliberalism undermined not only public institutions but the very idea of professionalism.
This attack was the culmination of two powerful agendas. The first was an economic argument about the alleged inefficiency of public services or the other non-market structures in which professional knowledge was hosted. Long queues, no choice, no competition, no exit options – that’s the chorus that critics of public healthcare systems repeat to this day. The second was an argument about autonomy, about equal status, about liberation – ‘Think for yourself!’ instead of relying on experts. The advent of the internet seemed to offer perfect conditions for finding information and comparing offers: in short, for acting like a fully informed customer. These two imperatives – the economic and the individualistic – meshed extremely well under neoliberalism. The shift from addressing the needs of citizens to serving the demands of customers or consumers was complete.
We are all customers now; we are all supposed to be kings. But what if ‘being a customer’ is the wrong model for healthcare, education, and even highly specialised crafts and trades?
What the market-based model overlooks is hyperspecialisation, as the philosopher Elijah Millgram argues in The Great Endarkenment (2015). We depend on other people’s knowledge and expertise, because we can learn and study only so many things in our lifetimes. Whenever specialist knowledge is at stake, we are the opposite of a well-informed customer. Often we don’t want to have to do our own research, which would be patchy at best; sometimes, we are simply unable to do it, even if we tried. It’s much more efficient (yes, efficient!) if we can trust those already in the know.
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