Remember the movie “Network”? That was in 1976. Howard Beale, the opinion speaker on television, started his rant. “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter.” And suddenly everyone in New York City was at his or her window, saying the same thing.
When will that happen today?
We started in 2016. We elected Trump, and things have been going downhill. Since mid-March 2020, things have been going downhill even more quickly:
- The Democratic Presidential primaries have turned from victories for Bernie Sanders to victories to Joe Biden. In other words, from a move towards possible change for the better to a move towards a nominee who is now accused of rape and who definitely is not going to back change.
- Coronavirus has moved from China to Italy to Spain to everywhere to the U.S. And now it looks as though the cases and deaths in the U.S. will outstrip those in China and Italy. Why? Because Trump dumped all of the protections we had against such a pandemic.
- The only way to stop the pandemic was to social distance. And social distancing led to economic disaster. So an economy that was dipping suddenly tipped over. The number of people out of work surged. Congress tried a $2.5 trillion disaster plan. Who knows if it’ll work? More people have lost job in the past month than in all our history. “The last three weeks have marked one of the most devastating periods in history for the American job market, as first-time claims for unemployment benefits have surged more than 3,000% since early March.” And clearly it will add to the national debt.
And let’s not forget that hovering behind all of this is climate change: in another 10 years the planet will doubtless become unlivable. Not that it’s livable now.
Now personally, I’m mad as hell. I worked really hard all my life to try to help make a world that would be good for humanity. Most of the things I did that were any good involved words—saying things that would try to convince the rest of you to do things that would help the world. In 2016, I spent every Saturday down at the metro station in North Hollywood, California, passing out flyers for Bernie Sanders. I think a lot of you agreed with that (particularly in California). But it didn’t do any good. Why? Because the DNC cheated Bernie out of the nomination. Instead we got Hillary, and as a result we got Trump. And this year? We’re had a repetition.
Yes, I wrote an article about it. TDMS Research showed that there was cheating going on, even in Vermont, where Bernie won. I compared the Vermont results (where Bernie should have had a runaway victory) with the results in Dems Abroad (where Bernie did have a runaway victory). I was convinced that there was no cheating in the latter race, because the ballot counting was all by hand at 230 polling places all over the world. This made it very difficult to cheat, while it was easy to cheat State-side.
And since then Biden has surged, coronavirus has surged, and economic disaster has surged. And now we have learned that coronavirus may well last 18 months. Trump will probably win re-election, unless the combination of plague and economic disaster forces votes for Biden.
Not that I think Biden will really achieve real change. But he will have to, if we are going to survive. Because, as I said before, after coronavirus and economic depression comes climate change. And just waiting in our houses, apartments, shacks, and cars on the street isn’t going to make climate change go away. We need a real change in the way we live. We’ve known this for thirty years and done little about it. Which is why “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” I hope that you are. I really do.
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