This article appeared in my feed just above another article about how China has the world’s first operational thorium reactor. Meanwhile, the US is about to fight a civil war over whether vaccination causes measles and stripping away the last of our social programs in order to get our wealthiest people another 2% subsidy.
Well, it’s only constitutional this one time. Every other time, it isn’t.
It fucking kills me how judges will absolutely fuck every day people up, but then when it comes to the wealthy and well connected, it’s suddenly “oh, well, they only murdered two people, I think a fine is kind of crossing the line here, let’s be reasonable about this”.
It’s not that they’re strip mining it because the value proposition isn’t there. Generations past, towards the end of the guilded age, we saw that the wealthy could meaningfully invest in and elevate society and still be fabulously wealthy. We see as much in the modern day with McKenzie Scott. It’s more that ripping out the plumbing and wiring is quick and easy, and that’s all anybody cares to do anymore. Why make $100 in ten years when I could make $3 right now? This is the natural and probable outcome of the way we’ve allowed our economic system to run, especially but not exclusively since Reagan embraced supply side economics and rejected the Great Society view of America. It’s a race to the bottom, and always has been. That’s what’s always been lurking under the “bring manufacturing back from China” narratives, since Chinese factories have such fabulous features as unknown chemicals that make you just drop dead sometimes (electronics manufacturing), on-site bunk houses, and suicide nets.
The empire’s been slowly eroding since the Vietnam war, and especially since the end of the cold war was apparent. It finally ran out of other places to fuck up for cheap gains, and it’s turned in on itself to try and keep those cheap gains coming. We all know you can’t survive, let alone thrive, by eating your own flesh, but the wealthy are all so goddamn short sighted that they’re quite happy to try feudalism part 2: surveillance state boogaloo.
The thing that kills me is that we were the wealthiest nation on earth, we had it all, we could have had an absolutely outrageous standard of living for everyone in terms of healthcare, education, scientific advancement for the benefit of all mankind, etc. and we literally blew all of it out of our ass blowing up brown people and giving it away to like ten of the wealthiest people. It’s such a disappointment to think of what could have been.
The cruelty is the point. I know you’re probably used to seeing that in some kind of melodramatic context, but that’s actually what it is in this case. The government’s narrative is that the people that they’re grabbing are all insane and violent gang members and that they all deserve life in the harshest conditions possible- conditions that, I presume, are not possible under the already barely enforced eighth amendment. The Trump administration already tested those waters in Trump I with refusing to give detainees such luxuries as beds, blankets, soap, toilet paper, and lights that turn off at night, and got shut down; if they send them to El Salvador, there is no constitution (or pretense thereof) to step in and say “no, you can’t do that”. They’ve said repeatedly and out loud that the terror is the point.
Here’s the big, huge, glowing hot problem that remains, even with news media now reporting that Kilmar’s wife sought a restraining order or something in 2021:
A bunch of these folks were NEVER charged with a crime. The government never had to prove their case to a jury, never got a sentence from a judge, and never even attempted to say what crime these folks committed. They just scooped them up and sent them to a life term in supermax for ??? That’s bad, like really, really, really bad. This puts us squarely in dictatorship territory, and let me be totally unambiguous here: when the government can arbitrarily sentence people to life in prison without even claiming a crime or trying the case before a jury, that is a dictatorship. We are living, right now, in this moment, in a dictatorship. If they can do it to them, they can do it to you-- and they will. In fact, they’re currently discussing avenues for stripping citizenship from US citizens so they can “deport” them to El Salvador, and they’ve confirmed to the press that they’re having those discussions. So, yes, they’re coming for you, too, just not quite yet.
P.S. if you think you’re safe because you’re not political, that doesn’t matter, because they’re political, and they think that sending you to die in an El Salvadorian prison for being gay/atheist/furry/said anything bad about Trump ever/whatever is just dandy.
Central America, and technically North America since it’s north of Columbia.
We’re literally paying El Salvador to take these folks. We hold the purse strings in this case.
I wonder if he’s part of that Quiver Full cult
That’s a lot of index files
Oh shit, glad to hear it. May the spirits be ever in your favor.
The FOIA staff got DOGEd real early on. They were one of the first people to get it.
Thank you!
Oh, shit! I’d really appreciate a source for that, if you have it handy
Damn, when did Jacobin get soft?
Look, there’s no use crying over spilled milk. We can either sit in the dirt and pout that the democrats lost the election while people catch life in prison without even being charged with anything, or we can keep moving forward. Which do you want to do?
You got a fuckin time machine, pal?
A whole lot of somebodies need to send that message to the Trump administration
Well, we do, but it’s for everyone else.
There is a way to remove congress people ahead of their term.
No, he’s fired an IRS director because one of the other members of the legion of doom pointed out that Elon’s pick investigated J6ers or something