Probably my last post for quite a while, possibly forever. I have come to realize I need to care more about my own inner peace and relationship with Spirit than about any of this politics stuff that once upon a time so preoccupied me. Here's my take on where we are now, posted as a comment to John Michael Greer's recent post, "Present At The Death":
You mentioned solutions to problems that really just schemes to benefit the salary-class more than they are the people supposedly being helped. I think I don't even need to say that "Obamacare" is the exemplar of such schemes. I'm pretty sure it will go down in history as the thing that killed the absolute power of privileged progressives visa-vis the Democratic Party. Of course, try to say that on Reddit.com, and you will be pretty much automatically downvoted into oblivion. And what is the most heavily represented demographic on Reddit.com? Why, millennial members of the urban managerial/ professional salary (MPS) class or children of that class.
That also brings to mind why my home state of Wisconsin would appear to be firmly in the hands of hard-right Republican ideologues: We just don't have enough jobs here for aspiring members of the MPS class, so they move to the Twin Cities, Chicago, or some urban coastal privileged-progressive enclave. The only reason Scott Walker was just barely ousted as governor last election was that the Wisconsin Democratic Party's desperation-move of coming out for marijuana-legalization was marginally successful. There were so many advisory referendums in various "bluish" counties on legalizing medical or recreational marijuana that it made the loutish party-animal types (or at least the ones more likely to vote Democratic when they bother to vote, and as a drinking state, we have more than a few of those) get up off the couch to show up at the polls. But I am very hard-pressed to imagine the loutish party-animals as any sort of force for change of the political landscape of the state, not in the least because legalizing cannabis is at best a "window-dressing" change, as much as I might personally support it.
Those kids on Reddit.com probably expect me to continue voting for a vapid and clueless Democratic Party even though they moved away and left me and my immediate family to fend for ourselves against the plunder-freak Walker Republicans. They just might be disappointed in that expectation, and considering that our structure of national government puts its thumb on the scale to give more weight to lower-population, more rural areas (think the Senate, the Electoral College), that doesn't bode well for those kids and their expectations at all, does it?
Of course, the Republicans have the state so well gerrymandered that they retain a disproportionate amount of control of both houses of the state legislature. It seems very unlikely to me that this situation will change, not in the least because the loutish party-animals couldn't be bothered to show up to vote for Lisa Neubauer instead of evangelical-Christian homophobe Brian Hagedorn in last month's state supreme court race. You see, there is a lawsuit underway challenging the gerrymander, but the state supreme court when dominated by conservatives has a history of giving the Republicans exactly what they want. And as most observers of state politics already know, Republicans responded to losing the governor's office with a blatant legislative power-grab right after the election.
If you follow economic developments via collapse blogs, you probably know that the reason the financial indexes such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average have been so enthusiastically frothy lately is because certain central banks have been using printed money to buy various financial instruments as though these instruments were going out of fashion. According to Chris Martenson writing at his website, these central banks largely stopped doing this during the summer of last year. The result was the market-earthquake the reader may remember from the end of last year. So what happened, of course, is that those central banks resumed their frantic, desperate printed-money instrument-buying. The financial markets have become so dependent upon this practice over the past three years, that the big central banks simply can't stop doing that now or else the markets will tank. And the markets will tank much harder and do much more damage to the real economy of goods and services than if things had been allowed to take their natural course back in 2016.
But of course, at some point, these interventions will experience what we collapseniks call "diminishing returns on investment". Once these returns become negligible, these interventions will of course cease. But what will be different as a result of all the instrument-buying is that the ultra-rich will control much more of the real economy and whatever claims on real wealth that remain outstanding when things start really falling apart.
Human nature can be very sad-making and scary, sometimes. :-(
ETA: It turns out that the gerrymandering case I mentioned was in the hands of the Federal Supreme Court and not the state supreme court. Man, I must really be getting old. And of course, our current US Supreme Court is pretty much in favor of gerrymandering.