Fires, Floods, and Fear
California Faces Disaster and a Political Storm
The tools of Disaster capitalism
“The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from its government.” – Thomas Paine.
The winds of the Santa Anas stormed down the San Gabriel mountains with hurricane force at the beginning of January. We were warned about them coming and the inevitable fires erupted causing massive destruction. Loss of life and destroying heritage and culture. It didn’t end until the rains came but then there was another storm, the chaos of the Orange felon blew into Los Angeles. With the bully pulpit and bluster, he wanted to appear bigger than he was.
Always with someone to blame, never really understanding water supply, climate change nor the immense collaborative effort it took to fight the fires. He wanted to make this a transactional deal, to extract something from California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and LA Mayor Karen Bass, in exchange for federal disaster relief. Neither of them was buying it and yet they were frustratingly cordial. And then the rains came.
The rain fell almost like the tears of those who lost their homes and loved ones. Perhaps the tears of those who feared the tyranny of the one who hates immigrants, that calls liberals “radical extremists”, that defunds agencies without legal authorization and illegally fires government employees who aren’t loyal. This is the man that our founding fathers warned us about– a man of low moral character, motivated by greed and power, corruptible and vain. In a word– a tyrant–the one who destroys a democracy from within– not one to defend the republic against enemies from within. He is the enemy!
The fascist playbook is to first control the judiciary, which he did by stacking loyalists to the Supreme Court and the lower courts, then attacking the media ABC and now CBS’s 60 Minutes. The attack on the media is to extensively muzzle and intimidate any critics and then to elevate those like Fox (so-called) news, Newsmax, and OAN to being legitimate news sources– they are not–they are propagandists for right-wing billionaires. The GOP is now funded by these very same oligarchs and is feckless to resist this takeover.
A free democratic nation cannot remain free without a free and unfettered press, the founding fathers warned. And yet we are on the verge of now fettering the press and what we are in the throes of is an unregulated free-for-all on social media where all voices are equal and viral rumors rule before the truth gets its pants on in the morning.
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost” -Thomas Jefferson, 1786
What Jefferson and the other founders didn’t imagine was the amassing of media monopolies used as political purveyors of tribal partisan talking points. The truly independent media is under attack even as the Republicans go after National Public Radio and Public TV corporations who have for generations been trusted content providers. The issue at this point is that they don’t reiterate the extremist talking points of MAGA, the billionaires, or the Orange Felon without asking intelligent questions. Does being politically liberal make you an extremist? Under this regime that is supposedly so.
What Elon Musk (I’ve always thought it sounded like a bad man’s cologne) and his cronies are in the process of doing now is a kind of coup to dismantle the most of the most effective agencies of our government, under the cloak of “efficiency” Department of Government Efficiency.
Charlie Warzel of the Atlantic writes:
Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he—a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress—is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.
What comes next is that they will come after your Medicare, Social Security, public education funds, and Obama Care, which are the most popular and by the way progressively liberal, programs in the nation. The question is whether progressive ideas can win out to defeat this attempted coup and tyranny or if this republic, like many before it, fails to protect itself.
A caller on the Hartmann Report the other day asked, “Isn’t the pardoning of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists treason in and of itself?” His response was, “None dare call it treason but I will.”
The disaster playbook for fascism is to create so much chaos that the normal functioning of the state can’t handle or respond quickly and then in the vacuum while the populace is overwhelmed the unimaginable can be accomplished. Thus, attacking the 14th amendment, suddenly cutting all government spending without review by Congress, justification, or rationale except to dismantle the democratic republic piece by piece and make it bend to the will of the sole leader.
Sic semper tyrannis is a Latin phrase meaning “thus always to tyrants.” In contemporary parlance, it means tyrannical leaders will inevitably be overthrown. Until the inevitable happens just be prepared to resist as the ICE agents come for your immigrant family, friends and neighbors, for who knows who will be next on the “enemies list” and end up at GTMO?
Editor’s note– for references in this article see On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, a historian of 20th-century Europe. And the Shock Doctrine-The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein.