Stay Loud
by Debrianna Mansini
What if we were a country that took care of the working class, the working poor, those less fortunate? What if we were not dependent on churches or the benevolence of the wealthy to take care of the needy or made sure our seniors could retire with dignity or made certain no child went hungry? What if it was a position we ALL took, and we did it together, because we know government CAN do great things—like put men on the moon, create national highways, and find cures for disease.
Often the great things are much larger than what “business” will do, because profit is not the goal, investment in our people and communities IS. Also, it is the right thing to do morally and actually is for the good of all of us financially, and you know, for general happiness because when we lift all boats, all boats rise. I often remind my rich business friends that the government is not a business— it is not there to turn a profit, so change your focus. It’s about long term investment. In existential terms, it is a question of lack vs abundance. Lack is easy. It’s fear based and causes feelings of separation, so the “business” class, generally the GOP, push that feeling of lack in their messaging, (i.e. welfare queens) instead of celebrating our abundance and encouraging ways to share it. And one way of sharing is done by paying TAXES, which creates the pathways for expanding abundance, not concentrating it.
For generations we have been sold on this idea of “productivity” being the goal, rather than our well being. Our workers are so productive is code for the top is making more money faster off the backs of the worker, who now, in our current environment, has to work many jobs just to stay afloat. The new con job is focused on AI increasing “our productivity.” Make no mistake, AI is theft— it is theft of our jobs, theft of institutional knowledge by people, theft of our “bootstraps” (entry level jobs), theft of our creativity/originality, theft of our human connection and all of it to make less people uber wealthy. It is the same sleight of hand Reagan used when he sold US on trickle down. NOTHING GOOD OR OF SIGNIFICANCE HAS TRICKLED DOWN to make our lives better—or maybe it’s true—all we have ever had is a GD trickle and it is so tiny of a trickle no one can actually identify it. Not for the last 40 years. All while those at the tippety top have a deluge, and under this regime, it is on target to be a tsunami. “In the past year, the wealth of the 10 richest U.S. billionaires surged $698 billion, as Oxfam warns Trump administration policies risk driving U.S. inequality to new heights.”
This reduction in our goal toward a robust middle class began during the Reagan culture that drove us from a “we” focus to a “ME” focus. We went from a “Hands Across America” culture to the scare tactic of that famous Reagan saying “The nine most terrifying words are I’m here from the government and I’m here to help.” They pushed the concept that the more money wealthy people have, the more they would help us down here. The messaging was stealth—we left labor pages behind in our news and follow the stock market instead. How is that working out? Currently, wealth inequality has reached its widest gap in over 30 years, with the top 1% of U.S. households owning 31.7% of all wealth. And it is dangerous.
I am actually thinking about a wealth cap—not out of demonizing or punishing, but out of protection. No one should have more money than a small country—moral authority is not inherent just because of wealth. Evil exists— we are seeing its ugliness in the open now and because we didn’t regulate, because we didn’t hold wealthy people who break the law accountable with punishment—I don’t mean fines, I mean prison. Because evil is running free, so there is no possible way the Epstein class will EVER care about our children when they only see them as sex toys or fodder for making money. Their abandon is clear because THEY ARE THE SWAMP—THEY ARE PIZZAGATE. Don’t believe me? In the last few days alone, Alex Karl, the CEO of Palantir, actually said out loud that he would “love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.” He said this because his evil has no fear, so much so that he is not even hiding his hideous thoughts anymore. When you have that kind of endless wealth, something like this can happen. This is the kind of revenge thinking of guys who ruffi their dates. The American voters are basically being ruffied by major corps like GM, State Farm, Delta and Microsoft who are currently backing a KY Senate candidate open white nationalist Andy Barr, whose campaign slogan has been deemed a “hate slogan” by the Anti-Defamation League, but he doesn’t care—he doubles down. Nick Fuentes thinks women are an abomination and only good for sex and babies.
Seriously though, this wild evil became obvious to me when Tr said he could shoot someone on 5th Ave. and not lose a voter (he meant that he’d see no punishment.) No one says that unless they have already been able to get away with it. It’s the Epstein class, the uber rich, who can play the system and beat it because of their extreme wealth. Fines? Whatever. Court? They’ll drag anyone they want because money to pay for lawyers doesn’t matter. They have plenty to spare. And those lawsuits usually bode well for Tr. He sues, then “settles.” He has a long history of that and of not paying workers—who have to sue for their wages, then “settle” because they can’t afford the legal fees— many end up closing cup shop or bankrupt.
And since we have no laws with teeth regarding the amount of frivolous lawsuits one can bring, Tr and his Epstein billionaire cronies clog up OUR courts with vindictive abuse. We need new laws. This MUST be on the democratic agenda when this reign of terror ends. And for those who say laws won’t work, most people would not rob a bank, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have laws against it to protect everyone from potential harm. But most importantly, it is on US to push our elected lawmakers. The kind of engagement we are seeing should be a baseline for our democracy—a successful democracy REQUIRES the participation of its people. There are no “both sides.” It’s democracy or not. Are democrats perfect? Absolutely not, but the two sides are far from the same. ‘Both sides” serves to deflect where the blame for a failing middle class, among other failures, lies squarely on the shoulders of the GOP and the uber rich—especially in the lying failure of trickle down economics, or of “picking yourself up by your bootstraps” while the GOP quietly takes away the bootstraps… and then the boots. The facts about the economy and which party runs it better are clear—it’s the democrats.
But more than that, the democrats are the only bulwark that stands between us and wild oligarchs who are literally raping, pillaging and harming our country and its people. So stay involved—WE are part of the government because WE VOTE. If we weren’t an important part of the government the GOP wouldn’t be trying so hard to regulate it away from us more than guns.
Stay loud. And make No Kings on March 28th bigger than we could ever imagine.
Watch or listen to Debrianna reading Stay Loud:
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