The post below this one focuses upon factual reality that makes democracy largely absent in the U.S. of A.
It is a duopoly, with two business groups selling competing products. Then the major media cover a carping contest between the two factions as if it mattered. Most of what this blog examines is tied to the fiction of a democracy, and against the fiction by promoting progressives as the sole hope of reform.
It is sad because of the truth that the Chinese are better organized and will eat the USA's lunch, it being handed to them by empire destruction, done now by money divorced from anything the USA stood for after WW II where stability worries actually mattered.
Consider, the big time spenders, they front Trump and control the nukes that can destroy the planet.
And, readers, guess the likelihood that nuclear war is always near a brink, and those brinks involve very unstable self-centered posturing people in the U.S. such as Trump and Hegseth.
Not to say those governing Iran are super stable. Or that the Chinese are and will remain sane enough to not ever start a nuclear war. They have the weaponry. Trump spoke at the UN General Assembly and was so grotesque that numerous delegations had to walk out and others such as Venezuela should have.
The Irranians are resilient, which is something different than wise. Shia theocracy is an Iranian bedrock, regardless of what the Iranian people may want, just as a duopoly of wealth is US bedrock.
The Iranians appear to be winning Bibi's war, Trump having been conscripted by Bibi, while Trump blusters for his crowd as if the scenario were different. Oil interests bolster Trump, silently so, it seems.
Those sobering numbers that WaPo had courage to confront can gag a maggot, they are so gross and all that money goes to vile people called DC consultants, gumming up the works insufferably while paying out to who, Larry Ellison's child, who is scarfing up U.S. big media..
It is fucked. Tell me I am wrong.
UPDATE: One novel way to view those putting all that cash into hopelessly biasing the system - they are actually terrorists, causing more harm and terror to the bulk of the populace than a few somebodys randomly shooting up a street. The scale and kind of their harm to the nation, the suffering at their hands, the Angst and loathing caused, dwarfs all other "terrorist" actions.
Thinking them terrorists helps, but they'll never admit it other than maybe discussing their spending with cohorts, coordinating their great pecuniary raids and deeds. What you get, however, from calling them worse terrorists than conventional terrorists is attention, being noticed and giving a name to actions, and that is a first step toward wider awakening of a human will for reform. Luigi got that point across about UnitedHealth, and big media has since ceaselessly belittled him on behalf of their own status within the status quo.
If enough people would view wealth's war on everybody else as active terrorism, a need to rebut might be generated, vs an asleep public as now exists with wealth loving the lulled.
And at least a discussion may result.
Votes may look beyond duopoly politics, for redemption options. DSA or whatever. A true new third way. One beyond DSA, which in some tenets ignores human nature.
Whatever property ownership norms govern, elites will COALESCE to manipulate their way into a collective control power. It is in the DNA. Widespread property ownership has an inertial argument given that aspect of human beings.
All means of production owned by the proletariat, because of how humans have animal mid-brains has when tried segued into a more powerful and focused elite than if property is initially more stably spread and inherited. It is a conundrum socialists need to somehow resolve.