America, the Pathocracy

When people repeatedly appeal to government officials, crying out that "the drug war is failing" and citing statistics showing that drug users are dying as a result of draconian drug policies, all I can think is:  THEY DON'T CARE.  

Similarly, when pro-choice proponents warn that banning abortion will cause women to resort to back alley coathanger abortions that will end lives in the most brutal way imaginable, I want to scream:  THEY DON'T CARE.

As we near 950,000 COVID deaths--the most of any nation on Earth--and our leading health organizations implement relaxed masking policies as those of us with even the slightest idea of how infectious disease works are filled with dread at the horror to come, I have to remind myself that THEY. DON'T. CARE.  

Evil Rises

Time to get real about who's running our institutions

It's human nature to look for the best in people, to believe that "At their core, people are inherently good."  And that is likely true when it comes to everyday middle class professions like teachers, nurses, firefighters & the well-mannered masses you meet on the street.  But when it comes to the "leaders" running our corporations and government, it couldn't be further from the truth.  You don't get to the top by being docile, generous and honest; you get there by being a cutthroat narcissist who's hungry for power.  That's a fact.  According to a 2016 study published by the Australian Psychological Society, 20% of business leaders are psychopaths.  That's 1 in 5.  Other leaders may exhibit traits of personality disorders like narcissism or anti-social personality (aka sociopathy).  That includes politicians.  

In truth, the drug war is a rousing success at what it's intended to do:  make a lot of money for a lot of entities while keeping undesirables in their place.  What began on racist premises has continued along those lines, locking up more Black and brown people than any nation on Earth & preventing ex-cons from getting decent jobs & voting after they've served their time.  But that was just a bonus.  

The real success of the drug war is the profit, which comes in the form of billions of dollars annually to the drug test manufacturing industry, private prisons, the DEA, alcohol/tobacco/pharmaceutical (aka legal drug) industries, the bail bonds industry, local police forces who make most of their income on civil asset forfeiture and drug raids & of course all the corporations that benefit from prison labor.  Take the example of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America which was ubiquitous in the 1990s:  they were actually funded in part by alcohol, tobacco & pharmaceutical interests.  So you can see what the actual purpose of the drug war is to these entities:  maintaining a monopoly on medicine (pharmaceutical industry) and recreational intoxicants (alcohol & tobacco industries).  

Likewise, banning abortion would achieve the government's goal of increasing the falling birthrate & appeasing the Christofascists on the Right who have been up in arms since Roe vs. Wade was passed in the early '70s.  Millennial & Gen Z women are purposely not having children due to the cost of living, student loans & lack of basic amenities like affordable daycare & maternal leave, which means those in power are getting antsy about not having enough workers to run the machines, soldiers to fight the wars & prisoners to fill the cells.  Rather than correcting these quality of life issues, it would be far easier & cheaper to just force women to give birth to unwanted babies like they did for hundreds of years prior to legalized abortion and like they're doing in many parts of the world now.  A similar policy was put in place by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1966 for this very reason and the result was a generation of unwanted, abused children living in subways addicted to huffing paint as seen in the documentary Children Underground (2001).  But the people at the top were not bothered by that just as they're not bothered by our ever-growing homeless population in tent cities across the country.    

And as for COVID, there's not much to say that hasn't already been said.  We can hopefully all see in real time that they don't care.  The government under Biden has been more concerned about not offending the Right than about protecting public health.  Their toothless mask and vaccine "mandates" have been a joke; kids have been at in-person school all year as have workers in the vast majority of states.  Literally nothing has changed since Trump's reign of terror except that the virus has grown more infectious.  Their only concern is about keeping capitalism up and running.  If not for that, they wouldn't even be pushing the vaccine at all.  See for yourself:  

Real Facebook ad by the CDC

Pleading with psychopaths and sadists has gotten us nowhere.  This cold capitalist society IS working for them as evidenced by the top 1% continuing to get richer while the rest of us die.  Laying out facts & figures is not going to win the hearts of our oppressors because they don't have any.  Passive measures like voting every 4 years is not cutting it, which is why they push it like it's a life-or-death civil duty.  Short of a violent revolution, I don't see things changing in our favor any time soon.  Violence is the only language they understand.  That, and money (which we increasingly don't have).  

P.S. - Trump just announced his intention to run for president in 2024 at a recent CPAC convention.  Not that it matters much: corporate fascism has been in motion since the days of Reagan or earlier.  He might be an accelerationist but he's just riding a wave that's always been there, bubbling beneath the surface of this social experiment of a nation built on racial oppression & genocide.  He couldn't have gotten where he's at without US.  And that includes the liberal elites who've failed us so badly as well as those who continue voting for them.