Really, what is so bad about child labor (now seemingly championed by business interests)? Or prison labor? Or other kinds of forced labor? Hey, why don’t we arrest a bunch of people, like let’s say millions, and then put them in camps and then force them to work and then tell them that work will set them free?
That would mean a bunch of free labor for rich capitalists like Elon Musk to exploit and then he could be even richer than the richest man in the world. I bet if I pitch the idea to EM, he’d go for it. I mean, those people, any people really, aren’t worth as much as he is.
It’s not that big a leap from exploiting immigrant children to uh, Nazi concentration camps. The US used to have child labor (back when the USA was great, a couple of centuries ago, in the era Trumpsters inhabit in their minds). I mean, really, wasn’t it when we got rid of child labor and tariffs and financial panics and slavery and all that shit – isn’t that when America stopped being great?
Isn’t it true that it’s mere coincidence that the US became the dominant world power and basically kicked evil’s ass in World War II after we ditched all that shit? It surely isn’t the case that widespread evil made the US less powerful than it could otherwise have been. Right?
Huh. To hear a bunch of Trump loyalists explain their policies, they’re pretty sure that doing the wrong thing leads to power and power – well you gotta have power if you want to do what you want to do. Ya know? Ya gotta have power. Having access to power is worth sooooooo much.
The thing is, the people who are selling their souls for power aren’t actually getting any.
Trump is getting power. They’re not. Trump is the law; Bondi is not.
Remember the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. French people lopped off the heads of a lot of other French people.
You might think they lopped off the heads of the rich, since inequality was a big spur to the French Revolution. Nope.
The French, after a modest round of royal decapitation, started lopping off the heads of their fellow revolutionaries for being insufficiently loyal to – well, to the French revolutionary Trump of the time.
Bondi, with her proximity to power, is a lot closer to the guillotine than those child laborers. Which doesn’t make child labor safe. What it means is that Bondi, subject as she is to the magnetic sway of Trump, is being pulled toward her own demise. Whatever form it may take.
See, one of the things Trump recently did was strip protections from people he wasn’t in a good mood with. Secret Service protections, security clearances and so on. Some of those people are facing death threats from Iran. Because they followed Trump’s instructions during his first term.
And pissed off the Iranians. Forever. So ha ha.
Ha ha if the Republicans can strip children of their protections against oppressive labor –
– well they can strip MAGA enthusiasts from their protections too. MAGA deaths are not a problem for a person with as much power as his loyalists are giving him.
It’s easy to get muddled, shocked, and awed in Trump’s royal court. It may seem like things make sense that don’t. Power, or the trappings of it, can be a very potent intoxicant. It can make moral compromises like child labor seem not so bad. At least not right now.
I mean, does it really make Zuckerberg complicit in things like child labor and the ‘very fine’ Nazi sympathizers Trump sympathizes with, if he gives Trump lots and lots and lots of money and and metaphorically sucks his dick in public?
Yeah. It does.
Hard as it is to say, just staying in America makes us all complicit in our own ways. I’m not saying other countries have lined up to give asylum to US political refugees, but unless you actively resist the creeping authoritarianism, then you’ve been forced into a moral gray area from which you may not escape. Leaving the country and not coming back until justice and freedom are restored in the USA (at least to what they were in the 20th century) may not be heroic. But it does keep you from being a professional dick-sucker like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.
There’s no redemption for Bezos and Zuckerberg. They’ve been infected, along with the rest of the billionaire class, with the sickness spread by a mercurial clown. Trump jerks about in one strange contortion after another (e.g., tariff policy) and and they follow suit jerking in their own peculiar contortions. They’ve gone dead inside, if they were ever actually alive. The zombie apocalypse has arrived and the billionaires are the zombies!
The powerful are the zombies.
The rule of law can stop the madness.
The rule of law can stop the chaos; the death march. The rule of law can stop the child labor and the Nazi wanna-bes.
But the rule of law depends on people willing to stand up for it. Abide by it, enforce it, fight for it, advocate for it, sacrifice for it. And that’s not likely to happen in the corridors of power in Washington and New York, where people already have too much money and no appetite for losing one thin dime of it. People trapped by their own success.
Four years from now, everything may be different. Trump may lose bigly and a new FDR-like figure may rise in his place, his path to democratic reform eased by Trump’s destruction of the limits on presidential power. Hard to tell.
It’s not that the jury is still out. No one has assembled the jury yet and none of us knows how far things will go in any direction.
I’ll just say that Trump always seem to be on the hunt for a deal. Don’t take it. Instead, hope that you and I and all the working stiffs who can protect democracy do the right thing and remain pretty fed up.
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