We’ve been telling local police departments, we don’t like Flock cameras, and, poof, they’re gone, or at the least, going.
We tell our governor and state legislators that we don’t like data centers and, well, here in Virginia, our governor is still bending over backwards to help the people build them, with our dollars, but in other states, even MAGA governors are like, hey, the people have spoken.
ICYMI
Democratic Socialists across the map talking about Medicare for All and justice reforms are winning elections.
What the hell, right?
At the hyperlocal level, here in Waynesboro, hundreds of people are organizing themselves to fight back against a multibillion-dollar conglomerate that wants to poison our air and water.
Augusta County wants to close down a cherished local volunteer fire company; the community hijacked a Board of Supervisors meeting and said, no way.
So much of what we’re fighting back against still feels like a done deal, but, credit, folks are still digging in.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro leaders sold our clean air, water, for 300 low-tech jobs
- Tracy Pyles | Augusta County leaders making big mistake with Churchville Fire
Donald Trump won two elections by convincing a plurality of us that the system is rigged, and you know what, he’s 100 percent spot on – just, not the way he says it is.
It’s rigged toward people like him – and not just him specifically, though his family has made out like bandits the past decade, to the tune of coming back from the brink of yet another bankruptcy to being legit, if still only on paper, billionaires.
Elon Musk was, briefly, the world’s first paper trillionaire, on the strength of getting hundreds of billions in government contracts for his businesses, which have done nothing for the rest of us – Elon Musk didn’t invent or improve upon the electric vehicle concept, or the concept of space travel, as we were lining his pockets.
He just figured out, like the Trump Family figured out, how the game is rigged, and used that knowledge to his bottom-line advantage.
Democrats are in on the rigging, too – it was our Democratic governor who preserved the billions in tax breaks for data center developers in Virginia; it was Democrats in the General Assembly who put a NextEra Energy senior attorney in charge of our State Corporation Commission, which is now responsible for reviewing the details of a proposed $67 billion merger between NextEra and Dominion Energy that will tilt the scale even more toward the data center folks while raising our monthly electric bills once it is approved.
It’s corporatist Democrats who fail every time we give them the White House and both houses of Congress to bring universal healthcare into being.
We’ve had … how many chances … in the last 80 years to get that done.
For shame.
ICYMI
- Former NextEra attorney won’t recuse herself on NextEra-Dominion SCC vote
- David Colton | Why don’t we already have universal healthcare?
It was the disaffected on the right who put Donald Trump in power in 2016, and as much as the corporatists on the Republican side play nice now, think back to how the business GOP fought giving the keys to their political futures over to the carnival barker back in the 2015-2016 cycle.
It was the end of the world as we know it; until Trump won, and now they all feel fine.
The echoes of their lamentations are what we’re hearing now from the business Dems who tell you that the Democratic side is at risk of political suicide because the disaffected on the left are nominating candidates who are serious about universal healthcare, about justice reform, about undoing the massive tax breaks for multimillionaires and multibillionaires that are bankrupting the country.
We’re just as tired as folks on the right that the system is rigged.
The political suicide feared by the business Dems is a tide that is turning to the rest of us.
It can’t happen too soon.
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Chris Graham
