Of course they lie.

They lie because they want to. They lie because they can. They lie because it is second nature to them; it comes naturally. These people lack a conscience: they lack empathy, and they lack of any sense of responsibility for their actions. Dishonesty, arrogance, greed and corruption are hardwired into their neural pathways.

I don’t know if they began life as sociopathic monsters or if they became that way somewhere in early childhood; it doesn’t really matter. You can’t force sociopaths care about others. You can’t fix something that isn’t there.

Some people are apparently born without a soul anymore. It’s like they ran out of available human souls years ago. Just look at Donald Trump’s spokes-demon Stephen Miller: nothing but blackness behind those eyes…

As long as we have such a highly stratified society; as long as obscene wealth exists at all – we will always have these monsters in control. It is not simply the nature of power, as we have been told for centuries – it is the nature of these demons.

Sociopaths would still exist without wealth, so getting rid of that incentive won’t eliminate these monsters altogether. But it would remove their larger influence. It is our society’s critical moral failing that we desire outrageous wealth, or that we allow others to accumulate it.

Capitalism itself – or at least the uniquely American form of disaster capitalism – is the real problem.

The GOP told every lie in the book to get their evil tax bill passed. Economic terrorism is the worst form of terrorism.

No one deserves to own as much wealth as half the population. Not for any reason. Every single person deserves to have their basic needs met. No one should be excluded based on race, religion, social standing – or for any reason. That anyone believes otherwise is down to the fact that humans are really quite unevolved and actually profoundly ignorant. We ignore the biological world – the source of life itself; the only thing we really need to survive – at our peril.

Not smartphones or Xbox or TV or BMWs or Hollywood.

Stuff like: AIR, WATER and FOOD.

You aren’t gonna need GPS when the planet is uninhabitable.

Over the last decade we’ve seen record fire season, unprecedented flooding, heat waves, tornadoes and hurricanes.

The mega earthquakes and super-volcanoes are just around the corner.

The fact is, this planet is becoming uninhabitable sooner than anyone believes. The DoD sure as fuck knows how close we are, trust me. You didn’t get to see that presentation. It’s classified.

What we are witnessing is not “the new normal.” It’s the late-early stages of the ongoing environmental collapse that will continue unabated. It is already too late to stop it now. The time to start paying attention isn’t right now or last year or the year before. It was decades ago.

Meanwhile, the One Percent are killing everything. This GOP tax bill is not only is biased towards the parasitic class [the rich]; but it has provisions in it that defund public schools, and it contains provisions which will hurt grad students and colleges and universities’ ability to provide education to lower and middle income people for many years to come. It is obviously crafted to make sure that poor people stay poor, and uneducated people remain mired in ignorance.

The fact that it lowers taxes on the global parasites is probably less of an issue than the fact that it pretty much destroys education and upward mobility for people not born at the top. It also guts affordable borrowing for state and local governments, pushing the country toward more and more privatization of previously public services like water and sewers, utilities, roads, jails, etc.

Of course the GOP must engage in ‘brute force’ politics while their hopefully brief window of opportunity is open. Over the past 40 years the Republicans have exploded the deficit with regressive tax cuts, rampant deregulation, (which among other things shredded consumer/labor protections and made the economy more volatile) and they have acquired a very selective and self-serving attitude towards what kind of budget cuts they demand (Hint: it’s not defense spending).

At the same time, they have systematically attacked and undermined the bargaining power of labor unions, consumer groups and civic organizations.

That is beyond obscene. It’s downright criminal. How are people are supposed to live on ‘slave wages?’

And yet, the GOP’s ideals – ideals rooted in patrician elitism, misanthropy and a visceral hatred of the poor- have set the tone of political debate in this country.

The Democrats by and large don’t offer any real alternative vision for the country so much as a slightly watered down one. They’ve long since become neocons, too; just the ‘soft sell’ variety. Anyone who wants to be treated as a serious politician must sing from the same “the markets are God” hymn sheet.

Not even the biggest financial meltdown in decades was enough to break the spell. In fact, it made their neoliberal dogma even stronger. They’ve already reversed all the protections put in place following the financial collapse of 2008…

Look how many social democratic parties around the world have been forced to accept pension reforms, liberalization of labor markets, social security cuts and privatization of essential services. Look how much bolder the GOP have become in proclaiming that government services must be cut, regulations repealed, tax cuts enacted on a far grander and more decidedly even more regressive scale – and how Social Security and Medicare need to be dismantled.

They will continue to assert that these essential programs are the “drivers of debt” – never mind the two trillion-dollar Defense budget.

They’ve purposefully inflicted misery on the public for decades and they’ve been rewarded with some of the weakest opposition in modern political history coupled with an essentially unquestioning widespread acceptance of their noxious ideas. What reason has anyone given them to pause and reconsider, in this context?

My only hope is that by becoming so brazen, so terminally short-sighted and so indifferent and contemptuous of the tragic real-world effects of this disgraceful tax bill they will finally overplay what is a very weak hand and finally be recognized for the traitors and mercenaries they are.

But if that is going to happen, we will need to challenge some of the most basic assumptions which they have hammered into mainstream acceptance, rather than merely balking at the most extreme expressions of an ideology which is corrupt and immoral to its very core.

It’s time to break out the pitchforks and light the torches.

[Edited repost from 2017]