The Current Fragmenting of the U.S.A (and how the 2020 Election can stop it), Part 1
Prologue
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If there is any proof that at some point within the last few decades the United States vacated its title as the top nation in the world and may have even dipped in global status out of the top-tier bracket usually reserved for the Nordic countries, Japan, Germany, and Canada, it would be 2020.
2020 exposed and enhanced all of the weaknesses and setbacks and baffling inequalities that had been existing and growing within the United States in recent years. Social inequality, economic inequality, racial inequality, health inequality, lack of progress in a variety of fields that are happening in other developing and top-tier countries (transportation, infrastructure, environmental policies), reluctance to alter overly-longstanding policies and procedures (glares at the Electoral College), among other problems.
Oh and Nazis and conspiracy theory groups are suddenly thriving in politics.
Oh and the richest country in the world is also still struggling to contain the pandemic. We’ve been at this battle for over 7 months and we JUST NOW broke the record for most cases in a single day. ‘merica.
All these things we’ve always claimed that only WE have, like freedom, liberty, chance to prosper, opportunity to be whatever you want to be and all that jazz, exists elsewhere. This is not the 1930s. This is not World War II where we are battling to liberate other poorer war-torn countries. The United States is no longer the hero in this story, as they’ve spent the last few generations damaging the structure of a variety of countries out in the Middle East and ESPECIALLY in Central/South America. It is time we confront this reality, as 2020 did a fantastic job not only killing Americans but exposing Americans as being mistreated with the third-world conditions we used to criticize dictatorships and communist governments of maintaining. First-world countries are surpassing us every year, including the ones that were our enemy in World War 2. Other countries not as financially fortunate are starting to catch up. Mexico has illegal immigrants coming from the United States for crying out loud.
Now of course, this deterioration did not start with Trump, but became widely more accepted as part of the American process under this administration. Black Lives Matter is constantly countered with All Lives Matter as some stupid way to denounce the inequality, no matter how heinous the actions. According to the Trump Administration, immigration is suddenly the source of why Americans cannot find jobs (which is not true). Refugees are suddenly being treated just as poorly as the terrorists that were captured post-9/11, while being criticized for not sticking around in their homeland and attempting to improve their conditions there-----without realizing that most attempts at “progress” had been thwarted by the United States in the first place.
Calls for socialized health and education to try to improve the country as a whole is being countered with ignorant yells of Cuba, Venezuela, and Soviet Russia, without realizing that these sort of improvements already exists in other countries. A pandemic that has killed 230,000 people and counting is being considered a success story by the current president. In 2020, we are facing an economy that has slipped over 30%, an unemployment rate that remains high, homelessness and poverty on the rise, all this while billionaires enjoying recent tax cuts are actually becoming even wealthier even as the money has become difficult to find. It’s a mess.
As stated before, Donald Trump is not the source of the major problems plaguing the Americans in the middle and lower classes, but this is a man whose entire term has been consisting of dismantling all the forward (minimal, but still) progress that we had seen from previous administrations; from environmental progress (Paris Agreement) to pandemic prevention (cutting funding here), to being a beacon of hope for refugees (Muslim ban, The Pointless Wall, trying to kill DACA), to health care (Trying to kill ObamaCare), to foreign relations (Iran, Assassinations, China, European Union, WHO, Trump and his minions being a megaphone for Israel while ignoring their mistreatment of Palestine), to believe it or not police brutality and systemic racism (Trump Administration’s wild amount of deregulating) to even the rights of women (look at the upcoming nomination).
Even whenever he wasn’t simply trying to undo all the achievements, laws, policies, and guidelines set by a successful Black man out of racist spite, Donald Trump is a visual representative of everything wrong with America: Ignorant, racist, misinformed, untrusting, greedy, stupid, unhealthy, childish, oppressive, and a terrible representative of its people. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is definitely not going to solve all the problems, but at the very least he’s going to cut the bleeding and prevent the United States from becoming even more of a global joke.
This global joke following the United States began in the very start of this millennium with Bush Jr. and Cheney. After a wild election that was decided because of loose pieces of paper in ballots, we had the unfortunate terrorist attacks that would be immediately followed with two wars and multiple additional Middle East conflicts that we still haven’t fully finished---while the mastermind of said terror attacks was hiding in a different country entirely. Along with the fighting, a complete avoidance of an escalating war happening under the border (the Drug Wars), two economic crashes, a pandemic, an extreme growth of inequality between economical classes, the banks and corporations ruining the country and still getting bailed out, increased violence in the Middle East (the last SIX presidents are responsible for this category).
Then once Obama got elected a wild re-emergence in racism, white supremacist groups, hate crimes, terrorist attacks, and that would all be accelerated once Trump started running in 2015 and the Republican Party sold their souls to the Devil to ensure a surprise victory in a hotly contested election. And I haven’t even gotten to the part about mass shootings, drone strikes, secret coups, no accountability for the housing market crash, us STILL (STILL!) having to battle for equal rights for Black Americans and even women in general, (and this bears repeating) the emergence of modern Nazis (NAZIS ARE BAD, GUYS, STOP GIVING THEM A VOICE), and how this current generation of kids and teenagers are going to somehow end up being even poorer than previous generations despite the U.S. economy remaining on top of the world. A lot has happened, obviously.
Can the United States recover? Of course it can, it has the money, resources, and people to accomplish the turnaround and secondary attempts to be in a constant state of improvement. Yes, there is plenty the United States is good at and there are plenty of positive things about living in this country. I’m not saying we’ve dipped into countries with serious ongoing struggles like your Haiti, or Libya, or Venezuela. But it is going to take a ton of work, a ton of structural changes, and many radical ideas to un-do the damage of decisions made in this administration as well as administrations of the past.
But it starts with voting for Joe Biden. It STARTS right here, non-negotiable. He definitely isn’t my first pick, and I’ll explain why we’re at this point in the near future, but before we dive into the four major pillars of the downward spiral of the United States, I have to be extremely clear about the fact that the solution to at the VERY LEAST stop the struggles happening in the midst of this pandemic is to ensure that the Democrats gain full control of the White House to begin cleaning up the disasters caused by the Trump Administration. And with an emergence of a faction of the Democratic Party ready to battle Biden, it won’t be the same ol’ Obama Administration that also cut the bleeding from the Bush years despite hostile pushback from the recently-tyrannical Republican Party.
The United States has slipped in global standing. This country is no longer the beacon of inspiration that it used to be, its no longer the model country to imitate in order to succeed. Coming up I’m presenting the four major reasons why, and how each of these issues can be fixed and/or eradicated.
But first things first, vote Biden.
Chapter 1: The Green God: The United States’ Deadly $pirituality
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It is extremely easy to paint the Republican Party as the party most associated with its obsession with money and wealth.
And…well, its quite accurate.
After all, in 2016 the Party decided to back the horse with ZERO experience in politics simply because he’s a savvy businessman (which…even then is slightly questionable considering the rumored debt Trump is currently engaged in). As a matter of fact, we can go back to 2012, when Mitt Romney’s business-mindset attracted the Party enough to nominate him to go up against Obama. And of course, there’s Ronald Reagan, who saved a sluggish economy with giant tax cuts and tax breaks----and in turn by crippling the middle class entirely and turning the wealth distribution into the shape of a clogged funnel. To this day, there are many basic rights constantly threatened in order to appeal to the rich and give them more ways to save/make money (the current Supreme Court nomination is being shoved through only to save money via elimination of ObamaCare with removing abortion rights as a consolation prize).
Part of what made Donald Trump the unexpected-yet-definite choice was his rock star status and how the Midwest and emptier portions of the country had this celebrity to look up to, this person they’ve seen on television going to THEIR town and spouting HIS wealth and how HIS changes will make them just as successful as he is. If it wasn’t the racist rhetoric and supremacist dog whistles attracting crowds, it was definitely his ability to attract those not usually invested or interested in politics but interested in $$$$$$$. Trump catered to all the strengths of the Republican Party marketing: money, freedom to make said money, and ensuring the least amount of restrictions to create opportunities of growth.
But funny story…the obsession with money swings on the other side of the pendulum as well.
From most of Wall Street on the east coast, to the Silicon Valley titans on the West, many of the more notorious wealthiest Americans are Democrats or supposed liberals. So unlike what the stereotypes suggests, we have obscenely wealthy people on both sides of the plate and they ALL contribute to one of the biggest issues facing America: we have lots of money, but we want more, and we don’t really want to share our wealth, but we also don’t want to make the necessary changes to give the less-fortunate a proper chance.
The entire nation’s obsession with the almighty dollar is a definite setback and contributes greatly to the inequalities that we see today. The changes we need to see here starts with the culture: American culture has to completely change their mindset towards the way things need to be run. Is this achievable? Of course, but it’s going to require a complete mental retooling of the American consensus towards success, money, helping the less fortunate, and just how much money is enough to be comfortable.
The richest country in the world, a country where one of their STATES by themselves is a top 10 economy globally (California), has enough money to help literally every poor and struggling person within their borders. Through amazing marketing and propaganda, the highest-ups want you to believe that certain things like affordable health care, free education, housing for everyone, and even in the most extreme cases a universal basic income are nothing more than pipe dreams.
The propaganda that is scattered in this country wants you to believe that it is better for the country to have these 1%-ers owning most of the country’s wealth than it would be for the amount of billionaires to be limited through higher taxes that can be used to pay for many of the problems that need to be solved. The propaganda of being rich is always louder than the propaganda of being charitable.
This is why socialism ideas are drowned in anger, disgust, and screams about Cuba, while the media doesn’t bat an eye when companies like Disney, Wal-Mart, and Amazon can strongarm local and state governments, not provide proper pay considering their profits, and also cut tens of thousands of jobs when they want to give those pointless fat bonuses to their executives. This is why drug dealers get more negative press than companies that cut tens of thousands of jobs just to main well above profit----which scenario hurts more lives overall? This is why looters and rioters that separate from peaceful protests cause more negative press than the rich companies that requested millions in unnecessary financial aid and made it difficult for small businesses to obtain the same loans.
America’s propaganda about the almighty dollar wants you to believe that you have to earn your wealth, that people that ultimately become psychotic billionaires earned their way to the top. The sad truth is, every major billionaire maintains their status of being billionaires by cutting corners while simultaneously making it more difficult for the majority of Americans---whether it’s through avoidance of taxes, appealing to politicians that can cut their taxes, not paying their people enough, not being charitable enough, not spending enough money to pump money back to the economy that made them rich, overwhelming the competition, shifting their money so its untraceable and untaxable, (worthy of repetition) being in the pockets of politicians through secret deals and Superpacs, or a mixture of all this. And, sometimes they’ll even join politics directly to improve and/or save their fortunes—-Trump, Bloomberg, and Steyer being examples.
How are we okay with a country full of homelessness and poverty AND a man that inching closer towards being a trillionaire---and this is AFTER he split half his money during a divorce and making his ex-wife instantly the richest woman in the United States? MacKenzie Scott is worth 60 BILLION DOLLARS obtained nearly entirely through a Jeff Bezos divorce. Just ten percent of that money can pay for one MILLION families’ low-income rent for an entire year---which would nearly cover everyone who is homeless in America. That’s insane. Mike Bloomberg was a last-minute addition to the Democratic primaries, and spent 500 MILLION DOLLARS on his campaign, just to drop out quickly. And he only joined because of Bernie Sanders, but more on Bernie later. In my eyes, its inexplicable for a country to have a billionaire that imported the sand outside his beach house from a completely different country because he preferred the texture of said sand (Bill Gates).
You know we have a major gap in income and actual economy when during a pandemic the billionaires have become richer, and the underemployment numbers remain unfortunately strong. You know we have a problem when the income gap when the three wealthiest people in the U.S. own more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans – 160 million people. What stings more is that I can guarantee you that nobody on the top 10% of the United States (who by the way own about 70% of ALL U.S. wealth) pays a higher percentage in taxes than people like you and me reading this. How are we okay with this? How are we okay with hard-working Americans busting their butts and making sacrifices to save whatever pennies we haven’t given to taxes, expenses, and a more expensive country overall when there are people and companies that profit greatly off said work without any effort?
Take Google for example. Google owns YouTube, and has a net worth of over $600 billion (would probably be worth more if they had not messed up the Google Stadia so badly). This is thanks to crafty marketing, a good assortment of product and services (except for the Stadia), and also destroying the competition and legally monopolizing the search engine concept while extending their reach to phones, games, and other products. $600 billion in value, and YouTube by itself is worth about $160 billion. A big reason for YouTube’s success is because of the content creators and the companies that invest time and material to the video-sharing app. What if I told you that none of these content creators even makes a PENNY per view of their material?
Lindsay Ellis, one of the better video essayists out on the internet, has created content that has resulted in nearly, get this, 100 million views overall---and this is on the lower end among successful content creators because she doesn’t output as much (being a quality over quantity essayist, her work is very good). Now remember, thanks to YouTube becoming an ad-friendly website, this means at least over 50 million pocket-sized advertisements her material has generated for Google—whether through her videos or pop-ups within the site pages. Her channel’s net worth? Only $250,000. Thanks to these clearly unfair practices, Lindsay has to rely on other methods to ensure that she pays her employers and contributors enough money and have enough for herself. She has made YouTube at least $50 million guaranteed, yet here she is not even halfway to a million in net worth via her videos.
Let’s go to the extreme side, PewDiePie. Like him or not, he’s built a very successful following which has led to 26 BILLION views and 107 million subscribers. These types of numbers easily generate at least $5 billion in ad revenue for YouTube/Google (and this is me aiming low). His net worth is nonetheless between $30-$50 million, earning around $7 million a year. Now, he’s living comfortably so its hard for some people to garnish sympathy, but this man literally has videos nearly every single day. PewDiePie works 90% of the year in marketing, planning, filming, editing, publishing, posting, and in a variety of mediums in order to achieve these stats, but is making a mere quarter of what he should be earning. This is the sort of inequalities that flies under the radar and goes unreported or doesn’t quite garnish the rage of other controversies.
But everything stupid and unacceptable involving money has come to a head with 2020’s pandemic. All of the flaws and glaring inequalities has come this year. Trump Administration’s tax cuts, combined with his pumping of a trillion to a sputtering stock market, a salvation of many industries that had been successful for a generation leading up to a world-stopping event (looking at you airlines and cruise industries) has allowed for the United States’ economy to temporarily appear stable to appeal to Trump’s fans and closest Republican allies (all in the rich side). But eventually that image crumbled over the summer as the economy collapsed nonetheless. But instead….the blame shifted to China, the virus, the lockdowns, and Democrat governors and mayors enforcing the very same restrictions and guidelines provided by the Trump Administration.
Yet instead of re-accessing the situation and providing additional help to the most vulnerable, the storyline about how we have to re-open the economy instead took shape. Before you know it, the United States pretended like the pandemic was over and re-opened as if we can go back to normal. Because of this, layoffs are continuing, evictions are going up, poverty numbers are growing, mental health in the country is shredded, drug usage is up, suicides have gone up, and in the midst of ALL this, we STILL don’t have a second coronavirus relief package, and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk regained all their income lost when the stocks crashed---and became even richer after that.
The coronavirus exposed this country as one that literally cannot handle itself when money isn’t flowing as much as they’d like. As a note, we can lose a few percentage points of our GDP and we’d STILL be leading the world. The solution here is simple: we have to stop believing that redistributing the wealth to better serve not only this country but neighboring countries in need is a pipe dream.
If they were pipe dreams, then why so much work to downplay the rhetoric of a more progressive and socialized America? Facebook’s Zuckerberg was revealed to have approved a plan to toy with the algorithm of Facebook and its partner apps to ensure that progressive websites and articles are limited in its traffic. The 2020 Democratic Primaries, from the media coverage, to the DNC was against Bernie; it became Bernie vs. Everyone Else, and it was so bad that even the progressive Elizabeth Warren was distancing herself little by little from the Bernie Bros. label despite having similar policies. So even though Bernie Sanders had a definite lead early into the primaries, it wasn’t long before the tide turned against him.
There’s a wild rise in democratic socialism within the Democratic Party and the independent voters scattered across the country. The Squad has gained so much power than even Nancy Pelosi, who is supposed to be on the same team, has spoken like a threatened woman when discussing the policies of the Bernie Sanders chapter of the party. Nancy Pelosi herself, one of the more prominent Democrats, is also on the crosshairs just as much as the Republican senate when discussing major changes in the coming years to stop the bleeding affecting tens of millions of Americans.
Side-Note: So before we go further, I’m going to announce that this will have a far-left bias because I am a democratic socialist with a strong appreciation for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This doesn’t make me unable to listen to opposing views, but this is the defining proof that my solutions to the money culture problems is definitely more Che-Lula and less Obama-Clinton.
We have to have to have to have to redistribute wealth much better. We have to close out all the tax loopholes that corporations and obscenely rich people expose year in and year out. We have to establish a base tax that must be paid yearly for those making specific amounts, so even if they STILL manage to cut corners they are still going to pay a substantial amount to return the favor to the country that made them rich enough so that they never have to worry about money ever again. First things first, we have to make sure that the additional money, the cash that’s so excessive the owner will never get around to spending it, is taken and used to help people, places, towns, cities, parks, environments, infrastructure, transportation, health, education, etc.
We have to tighten the difficulty in becoming mega billionaires, we have to exponentially increase the taxes towards that 500 million mark---because even that amount is guaranteed to set you and your future generations for life (barring stupid mistakes like the Trump family). First things first, money people don’t need has to become money that can be put to better use elsewhere outside a bank account for the rest of eternity.
We have to re-adjust our spending. We spend way too little on health and education, and spend way too much on military and warfare. We spend six times as much on military as China, who is second place---and on top of that we’re fourth in the amount of police we have nationwide (China is destroying us there, but the article is about us). In the past century we’ve been arguably involved in more military conflicts than any other major nation in the world. Since 1990 we’ve been involved with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Kuwait, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, and even Haiti---and this doesn’t include funding OTHER militaries like Israel and hidden incidents that we probably don’t even know about. We should fix ourselves first before trying to fix the farther reaches of the world (outside our hemisphere, but much more on that later). We have to pour money into health and education so that every American has proper opportunities to maintain their health and their pursuit of knowledge.
On that note, making college free and health care free and affordable for all is so that we can remove the stigmatism of profiting off of the sick, the poor, and those trying to better themselves. Education and health should NEVER be used for profit, its wild that universities can make their billions off of students and yet not be willing to pay the athletes that helps make them said billions before and during the semester. Its wild that we have companies charging thousands of dollars for medicine that can be found at a tiny fraction of the price in other countries. We are too rich to force Americans to spend intense buckets of cash on their health, its not fair to have such an extremely high GDP and yet still not reward the Americans that have helped establish such high profit margins with manageable expenses. I will not accept living in a world where a multi-billionaire buys 15 houses in the same zip code, while on the same country we have families living in motels, cars, old RVs, and sometimes in tents.
For the coronavirus, we have to pump billions into the working and lower class with the same vigor that the Trump Administration did for the stock market and large profitable industries that suddenly couldn’t handle a single year of money in the red. During this pandemic, every American making less than 500k a year should get a monthly check regardless of whether or not they are working, and we should increase the unemployment checks until the pandemic has been more handled. We have to find ways to move some of those excessive profits created because of a pandemic, and shift it to help Americans survive the virus and all the after-effects. Its unacceptable that at one point, Amazon was making thousands of dollars a second, yet there were hospitals struggling to maintain supplies needed to help the influx of sick individuals.
What is probably the biggest problem that has plagued the United States this millennium, has made the pandemic infinitely worse, and will continue being a burden that harms millions of Americans nationwide is the cult, the obsession, the religion of money that manifests itself in American culture, media, and mindset. We have to do a better job at working together, at not pointing fingers (because like I said, BOTH major political parties have people with extreme wealth and does not do enough to combat the problems), at finding solutions that can be achieved by additional wealth that is taxed, at ensuring that multi-millionaires and especially billionaires pay their fair share, and most importantly rigidly tone down our reliance and value on the idea of making as much money as humanly possible while stepping on smaller competitors on our path to the top.
There is enough money in the United States to fix nearly every problem (with a cost attached) that exists. We can have high-speed trains and subways nationwide. We can have free health care and education. We do have enough money to fix all the bridges and roads in need of repair. We can create a strong internet connection nationwide, even reaching into the deepest regions of Kansas and Montana. We can save the environment and battle climate change ourselves without going bankrupt. We can give everyone affordable housing and it won’t break the nation bank. Lastly and most importantly, we can severely tax the top-third wealthiest people of this country and they wouldn’t have to sacrifice a single thing, while giving us additional funds that can be used to improve the overall health of a country that’s rich in value, but poor in health.
But it all starts in devaluing money. Money has to stop being this country’s primary religion.