At 9.50pm AEDT yesterday, there was a sudden spike in trading on the oil and S&P 500 futures market.
6.50am New York time is an unusual time for a rush on trades on West Texas Intermediate May futures.
But it showed that all of a sudden, a substantial sum of money was bet on oil prices dropping and the stock market rising.
It’s really remarkable how blatantly corrupt a government can be. Well, not really, because it’s just the logical consequence of the fact that even the most serious crimes go unpunished in the U.S.
What’s almost funny is that so many U.S. citizens still insist they live in a country governed by the rule of law. I have no idea how they can still believe that, given what happens there every single day.
But then it’s not funny anymore, because the consequences for the whole world are so dire.
Only the most serious crimes go unpunished. The little people get abused, killed, or just disappeared for doing things like protecting each other.
We now live in a country of Contract Law. If you manage to get someone to sign a contract and fuck them over then you are golden within the US court system. If you want justice or a fair settlement against a corporation … that is like a legal unicorn when it happens.
I have been saying for months the laws are dead. The social contract has been incinerated. Our nation is dead, irrecoverable.
Never say never. In 1986, it was utterly unthinkable that the dictator of my country (Romania) would ever be overthrown. 3 years later, he fails a mad scramble to get out of the country and ends up being executed.
Might not be visible now, might not be for years, but there’s always possibility.
Well yes we’re gonna need an entirely new constitution, and because the US is so geographically spread out will probably end up with a few nation states. The US as a nation is dead, we don’t knw yet what new nations will arise from the ashes.
If that were to happen, the laws that govern this nation would need rewritten entirely. The regulations that govern business need rewritten. The foundations of our social contract must be renegotiated.
I don’t want to live in a nation populated by Nazis or their supporters. If there is no punishment for them, the nation remains dead permanently. Nazi Germany did not go far enough in punishing the perpetrators. Japan did not go far enough in punishing the perpetrators.
I don’t think it is safe for society to allow them to simply duck their heads and be folded back in. These are dangerous, selfish, hateful people who will do everything in their power to undermine society and to teach their children to do so after them for decades after this.
Everything happening now is directly trackable to the civil war and the sabotaged/failed reconstruction that allowed hatred, racism and resentment to fester. It was never dealt with in government, in fact, the government often encouraged it.
I do not want to repeat history. I want a society of people who want to be a part of that society. Not forced into it by exploitation and coercion. I don’t want society to be more akin to a back alley mugging where most of us are unable to leave, despite desperately wanting to.
I fully agree with your goals (last paragraph). Literally all I was disagreeing with was the finality of it, that your country is permanently wrecked. It is currently wrecked, but nothing is fully permanent, and with enough time (talking a decade at an absolute minimum, more likely multiple decades) and people commiting real effort, this is fixable.
We have different meanings of the word country, is all
The United States is dead. The people where it once stood could make a good society again, it will just not be anything like the one before.
Rump is quite old and has health problems, he can’t have many years left. Meanwhile this has all the appearance of a personality cult, with no obvious successors: we can’t afford hope it all falls apart and we can begin to recover
The problem is he unified all the scammers and abusers. Even if he dies all these losers are still together and will continue to be a scourge.
American culture created Trump.
When he’s gone, the rot will remain until your Nazis are sufficiently afraid or sufficiently dead.
I can’t deny that but I can hope that they’ll no longer have a golden idol to rally around or an authority telling them it’s ok.
We need to at least get back to the point where these behaviors are not socially acceptable, are not encouraged by elected officials, and ARE legally accountable
You need to understand that there is no longer any legal way to make them “not socially acceptable.” MAGA trash needs to be genuinely afraid.
They don’t know. The sort of info they get either leaves out such things or twists them in a way that makes MAGA look good.
And if something still gets through it can be dismissed as “probably fake, created by haters”.
But all this is - well, I’d be too optimistic if I said “crumbling”, but it’s becoming so transparent here and there that even (some of) those propaganda-fed thought-resistant fools can see it.