Hope for a New Beginning from a Very Bad End
We’re losing almost everything but we can still survive
by Mike Meyer
This is not going to end well. That has been understood for a long time now, at least since the end of 2016. But the need for closure of the US political disaster has reached a crescendo of longing. That need will be unrequited.
No action can be taken to end this because the end cannot be imagined. What would that end even look like? The Executive branch would suddenly disappear? The smaller national political party that is functioning as organized crime syndicate will suddenly repent? The larger national political party would suddenly begin focusing on something other than political positioning for minimum loss?
There really should be no argument to the statement that the damage done, to date, domestically and internationally is so extensive that a totally unified government may not be able to repair it before the climate crisis overwhelms us. The most practical question is where such a government would come from if it were to somehow appear?
The next question is what in the hell it would do? With half of the federal structure and a significant number of states in control of a criminal organization dedicated to exploitation, greed and the elimination of representative government as if these were legitimate political positions, there is very little positive that can be done.
The best that could be hoped for is to halt the most obvious criminal acts and remove incompetents and criminals from the federal positions to which they have been appointed. As to what can be done to fix the packing of federal courts and the Supreme Court, there is no real discussion at all.
The only action that I have seen suggested is to expand the Supreme Court, perhaps doubling the justices, to allow new, unbiased appointments to balance the court. Can that be done on an Executive Order? A Congressional vote? The reality would be that complete control, at least a supermajority in both houses of Congress would be needed. The commitment of one party to criminal sabotage of the constitution suggests that, unless they are completely removed and replaced, anything other than a token change would fail.
It seems clear to me that anything less than a major structural change to the national political structure will be a failure. The reality is that we cannot even get to failure.
To put this in a different light, it is not a good strategy to limit yourself to arguing formal points of order while the building your are in is being demolished by a criminal gang. A wrecking ball, and Trump is little more than the face on a wrecking ball, does not respect rules of order or laws. We know this. We see it everyday, now.
The rules are being used to cripple the majority that do not want all rights, protections, and Constitutional principles to be destroyed. The tools that did provide means of protecting the citizens and residents of the country have already been destroyed or undercut and our few legitimate representatives keep pushing buttons that are no longer connected.
This is a very human pattern. One of the sad components of human tragedy is that people act responsibly and will keep trying to get something to work even when they are doomed. The crew of the Challenger disaster were recorded as continuing to try to use the controls and switches in the long fall to their death. That is the situation we are now in attempting to make a collapsing political system work.
But we are not doomed by a launch explosion with absolutely no options. We are not already dead. If we give up the controls that no longer work and act to remove the agents of destruction from their positions we will then be able to build new systems and controls for the good of all residents. And I use resident with emphasis. All residents must be protected and supported. The term ‘citizen’ needs be consigned to the graveyards. Those times are past.
The real, planetary disaster means that the concept of nation states, primarily defined in 17th and 18th century Europe, needs to end. There is no longer any value to that concept. A planetary climate crisis requires planetary solutions with the ability for all people to react to the need to move in order to survive. We are all becoming refugees sooner or later. The nature of these diverse and interrelated disasters with the current, near complete, inability to organize anything beyond scattered token actions guarantees refugee status as part of each of our futures. The only exclusion are those that die before the time comes.
Government administration will be local or planetary. Local administration is already dominant as it is urban metropole based. The majority of us live in urban regions that manage the majority of our services, rights, and security. Those urban regions do that with much greater concern for unique local desires and the goal of protecting the growing diversity of the people they manage. National governments either add nothing or actively attack population groups while taking money for military and economic kleptocrats.
We don’t need those anymore. In fact we cannot afford the luxury of allowing fools to destroy regions of the planet for their own greed.
The planetary administrative challenges are carbon reduction, resource protection, public health, waste management, food distribution, population movements (refugee protection and management), ocean maintenance, and earth-moon space management. This should include universal rights consistent for the entire population on or near this planet.
The structure can be handled by all local governments as the representatives to the planetary administration as a full alliance. The United Nations is there and has many of the organizational structure already. Urban governments and remote states are already the effective administrators of most of the human population. Eliminating nations allows vast savings in the reduction of layers of redundant bureaucracy with even vaster savings in reduction or elimination of military forces.
Yes, I know that none of this can possibly be done because we are in the middle of a pathological retrograde lurch into antique nationalism and fascism. Besides a part of the population has bought into this and have been programmed to chant ugly memes as the answer to everything. But that gets old fairly quickly and the climate crisis reality is not some abstract academic idea as much as the criminals in charge are desperately trying to convince people of that. Floods, storms, and killing heat tends be more real than propaganda memes so we need to move on whether they come along or not.
Removing nation states from the organizational structure would eliminate most of the reason for serious conflict and human rights violations. Most of the greed in predatory capitalism is funneled through defense in nation states. Defense makes no sense on a planet facing environmental and climate disaster as that is based on mine versus yours. It is time to make this planet and all its resources and all its people, ours.