Ice on the Moon

He is likely the real President.

Genius rocket scientist richest man in the world was not really doing a nazi salute. Twice. Why would he do it? Free speech absolutism….and he might want a “white planet” with all non-whites exterminated. There are, and you better believe it, a couple million white supremacists who do.

Fascism and Oligarchy will effectively take over the planet tomorrow night. It is going to be horrible. I am terrified. Those of us… 1. with critical thinking skills, 2. who have been paying attention, 3. who are not borderline sociopaths…know how bad it is going to be. I am happy to say I am closer to the 2-digit IQ half of the population and still managed to NOT become an agent of evil. But I have absolutely nothing else to be happy about in regard to what is coming at me and those I care about. I used to care about everyone but never again. I can only keep thinking if the 3-digit IQ half of the population had immediately stomped MAGA into oblivion then America would not have ended. I will never forget or forgive those who are responsible for this catastrophe.

11:15 “-because what people like this lot want is chaos. – it’s what Musk wants, it’s what Trump wants; unpredictability. Because there’s an enormous amount of profit and power in that for them, and we’re just the pawns, you know, manipulated people that give them access to that. – if we all refuse to take part in it their power would dissolve into nothing.”

He called us suckers and losers. Hegseth and Collins, his cabinet picks for DOD and VA, both have worked to end the VA. Are Veterans such fools they voted for him? The majority of Americans have been brainwashed to believe the right are like everyone else. The right represents a tiny minority who don’t want to be taxed or regulated and don’t need any social safety nets like social security and medicare. They want everything, EVERYTHING, “privatized” so the rich can make a profit off it or not pay taxes for it. Money is the god of their world, and they believe people who are useless eaters should die. The useless include veterans since they already served their purpose.

They have spent hundreds of millions over the decades, just pennies to them, to con the public into believing the world will end if the rich are prevented from becoming richer and richer. Money above human life. Mark 12:27 “So he is the God of the living, not the dead. You have made a serious error.” This is the fundamental basic message of the right; the rich are the people who own the world and the rest of us must obey them or the world will end. Unregulated wealth inevitably concentrates upward to the few until a very few own everything and think they own everyone…till the guillotines roll out.

This con is why Reagan got away with his insane inauguration speech inferring the government was the enemy. Government in the form of a democracy is the ENEMY OF THE RICH. They have managed to change the definitions of almost everything over the years including democracy by endlessly insisting a republic is not a democracy. A republic is made up of representatives elected for a limited term by the people. All the people…democracy. Western democracy was created to prevent oligarchs in ancient Greek city states from exploiting, impoverishing, enslaving, and making war to steal from other oligarchs. The only way beside the guillotine to do that is taxation and regulation, which can only be enforced by government honoring the rule of law. We are reminded of this when we address judges as “your honor.” Except, now Supreme Court judges are bought by the rich. The government is not the enemy….oligarchs are.

Which is why America ended on election night and we are now faced with ending an oligarchy if we want any form of democracy to ever return———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

January 16, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Jan 17, 2025
In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

What money does to the minds of these people is completely obvious. Now they own what was America and believe they own us.

Like most people who start saying it out loud….I get all choked up about the end of America and cannot talk about it. It is too much. The worst moment of the 21st century….so far. Much, much worse may soon follow.

In a week the funeral ritual for America will be performed and then the fireworks start. It is going to go bad quick.

5:43 “The social order is collapsing.” Their first act Reagan and Thatcher took was to destroy the one way people have to defend themselves from tyrannical corporations….unions. After forty years of Neoliberalism we have seen 50 trillion dollars transferred from the lower 90 percent of the population to a fraction of a percent at the top. Now it is falling apart, and the empire is collapsing.

The list of people I have followed and admired over the years and watched them fall from grace is long and sad. Sometimes their transgression can be forgiven to a degree and mostly not. In my view it is related to fight or flight. This is a well-known concept but is actually not true. There are four…fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fawning is when you simply give up and submit. If something is trying to eat you it does not work but then neither does fist-fighting a lion. But anyone who has submitted to bullying can tell you, fawning will keep you from getting beat up. That these celebrities are trying to fawn their way out of being put out of business is obvious.

My wakeup call was a shop where I worked in the 90’s that played Rush all day loud. Made me dem for life. The reality is MAGA strong men and tech-bro’s are sociopathic bullies and are instantly recognized and adored by men who want to continue to bully or be the buddy of the bully like they were in high school. You know what they say; high school never ends.

I remember that article from 2018. It has proven true for the last 7 years.

He is the richest man who ever lived not by serving others but only by serving himself. This is the transactional world of Trumpism. Everything, EVERYTHING, must generate profit for a seller. No breakeven, no “giving”; no commons free to all. Except for the air we breathe nothing is for free and the owner must be paid at a profit. Someone must get more from less. As wealth concentrates upward with no redistribution there are fewer at the top with everything and more at the bottom with nothing. And this is of course the frequently observed flaw in neoliberalism and Market Fundamentalism: There must be a loser, and those losers must fall out of the bottom of the system into destitution. To “give” them anything is simply not acceptable and heretical to the god of the market. No “free”….the only freedom is found in freedom from taxation and regulation enabling unrestrained greed and exploitation.

This very simple truth about making money the god of this world is not talked about in public. Ever. Because it is essentially about glorifying the predator and the people who rage at sharing anything; selfishness that treats selflessness as stupidity. Only greed matters in the end. This ideology is, right now, at this very moment, taking absolute power over the world. The result can only be a new dark age of death and destruction. The fundamental golden rule to do unto others is denied and called a lie while the one with the gold makes the rules is called the truth. That is the grift, that someone must get more from less is the Market Fundamentalist version of creation, of God creating something from nothing. Except that for Mammon worshipers, it is not a God of the living, it is a god of amassing power over what is, and this god is divorced from life as the fundamental meaning. It is anti-life and evil.

There are no “useless eaters”, there are only human beings and none of us can be priced in value millions of times higher than others. The simplest truth of all can be found in understanding the only reason anyone owns anything is the rest of us let them. The only reason money becomes a god is because we let that god be worshiped. WE, collectively…. we the people, have the power and give limited authority to ideas and individuals for the common good. The lie that our collective is evil, that actually only the strongest apex predator should have authority and not being loyal to that strong man is some kind of “slave morality”, this is the evil that creates death camps and mass murder.

Not much time left to decide what each of us worships.