Democracy on the Ropes, Capitalism on Steroids - Mary Geddry

[dweller]

(snipped from NYT news digest)

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And while America was busy pretending socialism is a slur and extrajudicial killings are just “enhanced maritime operations,” Richard J. Murphy delivered a gut-punch of a lecture on the corporate-engineered poison we call the food system. Ultra-processed foods, as The Lancet now bluntly states, are not food. They are industrial feedstock shaped into edible pucks, engineered to override human appetite, strip nutrition, and maximize corporate profit. The result is a public health crisis we’ve been trained to blame on willpower instead of design. When Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, and Coca-Cola reorganized the global food economy, obesity rates soared, metabolic disease became a business model, cancer rates climbed, and the NHS, like American insurers, began footing the bill for the fallout. Meanwhile, low-wage workers, time-poor parents, and whole neighborhoods without grocery stores are locked into eating whatever the industrial food machine spits out. It’s not a personal failure; it’s a structural trap. It’s the sustainability crisis rendered edible, wrapped in plastic, and sold as “snacks.”

And this brings us to the pièce de résistance: Suri Crowe’s blistering takedown of the House’s anti-socialism resolution, a pantomime vote so cynically stupid it practically registers as performance art. Eighty-six Democrats joined Republicans to condemn “socialism,” a term they clearly do not understand and are terrified to define. Crowe reminds us, quite accurately, that the U.S. is already swimming in socialism, for corporations. Public power? Socialism. Deposit insurance? Socialism. Medicare? Socialism. The Pentagon? The biggest socialist enterprise ever created. But ask Congress to consider socialism for ordinary people, health care, affordable food, clean energy, collective bargaining, and suddenly it’s “tyranny.” Meanwhile, these same lawmakers enjoy fully socialized health care, taxpayer-funded salaries during shutdowns, and a food allowance larger than what a family of four gets on SNAP for an entire week. Crowe’s fury is righteous: capitalism is killing us, and Congress is protecting the corporations doing the killing.

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And if all of this feels like a country sliding into something darker, the warping of diplomacy into Kremlin fan fiction, the White House running interference for accused traffickers, the military quietly Googling “how illegal is my mission,” Congress panicking over the word “socialism” while corporate monopolies engineer our food supply, Ty Cobb, of all people, is here to tell you that you’re not imagining it. Trump’s own former White House lawyer went on television and calmly explained that the Constitution was never built to withstand a president as “evil” as Donald Trump. Congress, Cobb said, has “neutered itself,” handing its Article I powers to a man whose governing instincts run exclusively on revenge and violence. The courts, he warned, simply aren’t designed to rescue a country from a president who sees the law as a personal inconvenience. “The Constitution is not adequate to deal with a president as evil as Trump,” Cobb said, and it’s hard to argue with him when you watch Trump threatening lawmakers, denigrating judges, firing military lawyers for advising against war crimes, and celebrating National Guard deployments that federal courts have already ruled illegal.

Cobb didn’t stop at the structural analysis. He said out loud what everyone in Washington whispers: Trump’s instinct, when cornered, is not retreat but violence. “Fight by any means possible, legal or otherwise.” A president who cannot be constrained by Congress, who openly declares war on the judiciary, who turns the Justice Department into a bludgeon and the military into a stage prop, is not a constitutional problem. He is a structural failure the Constitution was never meant to handle. And when a former White House lawyer tells you, on camera, that “we may need to stop worrying about accountability and just get this over,” that the judiciary is the last pillar standing between this country and full authoritarian collapse, you should believe him. The people who saw Trump up close understand that the danger isn’t theoretical. It’s not academic, nor partisan, but it is ongoing.

So here we are, at the end of a week in which Europe tried to rescue diplomacy from Trump’s sabotage, DHS tried to protect evidence from Trump’s operatives, the military tried to shield itself from Trump’s orders, food experts begged politicians to stop corporations from poisoning us for profit, and Democratic lawmakers proved once again that they fear the word “socialism” more than they fear fascism. And into that chaos walks Ty Cobb with the simplest truth of all: our system wasn’t built for this. It wasn’t built for him. And unless the country wakes up to that fact, unless the institutions that still have spines left use them, the rest of us are going to be living on borrowed time.

https://marygeddry.com/p/democracy-on-the-ropes-capitalism



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