It’s that time of year again, this time with the pathetic spectacle of Trump-Amerika’s 250th birthday bonanza in the background. But rather than just taking the easy pot-shots at the absolute horror and humiliation on display, we discuss a few of the concrete failures of this “experiment” in “democracy” that inform our consideration of whether there is anything to salvage of the institutions atop this melting glacier of an empire. 

We begin, predictably, with the utter failure of the empire’s aggression against the people of Iran. Trump lives in a world where his say-so makes it true that the U.S. military “did an amazing job” and the like, and millions of people choose to join him there, whether out of old-fashioned greed, or out of some bizarre lust for humiliation, or maybe just because we are so conditioned to confer authorities unto the powers that be without question… Since Trump couldn’t defeat Iran in War, he tortured their soccer team. 

We also cover a few of the Supreme Court cases showing what a failure “the courts” are against abuses of power, both presidential and corporate. This term alone, the Supreme Court has (1) gutted the voting rights act, (2) aided in the mass expulsion of TPS immigrants, (3) expanded presidential control over regulatory agencies, (4) given (IG Farben) Bayer/Monsanto a licence to poison people with RoundUp, and much more. With checks and balances like these, who needs checks and balances?

We end on a positive note. Do data center protests - encapsulating so well the deserved sense of anger against tech-surveillance-pervert-billionaire freaks - light a path forward? Maybe, we’d like to think so.

Happy holidays, one quarter-century is quite enough, thank you. We need to start this thing over again, but this time NOT on the basis of genocide and slavery–on justice and liberation. We can do this; we can declare independence.