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[misko27]

Presume they're going to continue trying to fuck the population to enrich their donors and you're probably in good shape. Maybe they'll get around to screwing the national parks so that protected lands can be torn to hell in search of profit? Iirc the GOP was starting work on something along those lines earlier this year.

If you're looking for chucklefuck territory, apparently some GOP critters are on record saying they expect to fix their tax scam next year, so maybe we get to see that particular clown show kick off/continue. And there's always continuing to dismantle our diplomatic capabilities, welfare, infrastructure, etc. They've gotta' start trying to actually build that wall sooner or later, too. Plenty of ways to cultivate the enmity of the majority of the american population and supermajority of the rest of the world left to take a swing at.

My impression is that that stuff falls under the "do, but keep quiet about" category. They've done a lot of that while pushing their big legislative failures, and one of the advantages of pushing something big is it takes oxygen out of the room for their other activities. So I'm wondering what's the next big public thing they're going to push. Maybe, since they passed tax reform, they don't think they need one of those anymore, but I would think that Trump would want something to salesmen over, and the GOP wants to keep him focused on something that isn't Russia.

[sluissa]

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16792162/trumps-tax-cuts-wont-be-repealed

I'm at the point where I can only imagine that the tax cuts do almost as much for Democratic donors as they do for Republican donors.

I don't think we'll see a repeal of it. Country's getting bled dry, and I just don't see anyone beyond Bernie(to the extent he stands his ground and doesn't let advisors manipulate him.) and a handful of other well meaning people who somehow made their way in, willing to do anything to change it.

The people certainly aren't willing to change it. There might be a few crazies out there who have an idea and maybe even are willing to follow through on it, but individuals don't make a revolution. As long as people have their TV and Internet, nobody's going to bother getting out of their chair for a real fight.

All I know is it's frustrating to watch and kills any sort of feeling of participating in society as a good thing beyond simple survival.

[SalmonGod]

As long as people have their TV and Internet, nobody's going to bother getting out of their chair for a real fight.

We've had people do this, though.  But Occupy got violently shut down by militarized police, surveillance, and media control.  Same with Standing Rock and a whole bunch of others.  What you're talking about is all over the place, but the powers that be are really good at successfully marginalizing and making you forget about them. 

The stock response I'm expecting is that type of activism is worthless and the political arena is where we need to be fighting.  But on the federal level, we know that the two major parties are effective at abusing their power to protect their dominance.  On the local level, I absolutely agree that we need more challenges there.  But that's part of activism's purpose.  To energize people to take it to that level.  Without successful activist movements, there is less opportunity for people to build a sense of community around shared goals, build alliances, learn organizational skills, and spread a message that challenges cultural complacency.  Occupy led to the formation of a lot of successful political challenges on the local level, and splinter organizations that developed to tackle single issues.  But they couldn't build into any larger momentum, because there's no avenue for promotion of those successes beyond social media.  To have successful activist movements, we have to de-construct the militarization of police, corrupt surveillance practices, and shitty media.

But to do that, we either have to bide our time until... well... in my personal opinion until baby boomers die off, or there's a general shift in the oppressiveness of our politics by some other means.
Or what you're talking about is a *real* fight.  Like with large amounts of blood spilled.
Or maybe somebody just needs to set themselves on fire in the right place at the right time.

Edit:
Of course, I'm also leaving out just how goddamn busy people are made to be these days just to get by.  It's kinda hard to be involved in making change under these circumstances.  Not only are people working more jobs/more hours.  The nature of our jobs is changing such that you can never completely "switch off".  I've seen it discussed in more tangible terms recently, where the challenge for Gen Xers was establishing work-life balance, Millennials are trying to manage work-life integration instead.  I would love to be more involved in activism and politics, but I work literally all the goddamn time.  Even when I'm not exactly working, I'm keeping one eye out for things that could happen or monitoring ongoing situations.  If I have a solid block of time when I'm sure it's safe not to be paying attention and all necessities are caught up to their minimal level, I'm using it to sleep or do other work.  It's Saturday of Christmas weekend, and I've taken maybe a couple hours for myself today.  I'm on here posting now as I'm drinking a cup of coffee in preparation to go out driving for Uber for the next few hours.  Tomorrow I have a lot of work to do, too.  On Christmas Eve.  Not because it's scheduled.  But because I'm salaried, and I have a lot of shit to catch up on that I'm just not able to keep up with between late-night emergencies and the generally being understaffed that plagues everyone everywhere as executives squeeze blood from their labor pools.

[wierd]

Considering that a guy did that in front of the damn whitehouse, and little came of it...
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/man-set-fire-national-mall-critical-condition/story?id=20476949

I would say that short of a complete implosion of the 1984 surveillance state, A radical shift in population demographics, or an outright bloody uprising, you are not going to see a major shift in status quo politics in the US.

On the pyrrhic side of things-- A major financial collapse in the US will cause massive dieoffs of the boomer generation, as a good many are now in nursing homes or otherwise totally dependent upon social security and medicare.  With a major implosion of the economy, that will not be sustainable, and those institutions will not be able to care for those people; They will die, horribly.  Again, we are poised for that to happen now that this tragedy on paper is doing cartwheels over trump's desk.

However, if that is the case, expect the incumbent establishment to dig trenches and hunker down in bunkers until it blows over, rather than dieing off and sparing us their continued assholiness.

[wierd]

And now for something completely different!!

Merry Christmas Mr Mnuchin!!

[SalmonGod]

Right place/right time is key.  Self-immolation is what formally kicked off the Arab Spring, and was effective in improving human rights for whatever Buddhist sect it was in Vietnam, among other cases I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Rosa Parks refusing to move seats on a bus was a key point in the Civil Rights movement.  Occupy started with a picture of a dancer posing on top of the Wall St bull statue.

Every major counter-culture/protest/rebellion event kicks off with some small thing that's totally unpredictable.  It's usually something that's been done many times before, and usually whatever underlying tensions get ignited by that spark were there for a long time and there's no obvious change in popular readiness to explain why that specific spark is the one that did it.  And it's usually not anyone especially influential that makes it happen, either.  It's just that elusive trick of resonating in that perfect way at that perfect time.  Having just the right image or slogan that spreads like wildfire.

Who knows.  There could be a self-immolation that genuinely triggers something.  Or someone could just randomly get fed up and punch a police officer on video, and suddenly 100,000 people all go out and punch a police officer, just like a handful of people camping in Zucotti Park turned into hundreds of thousands around the world within a couple weeks.

Memetics is messy and weird.

[sluissa]

Self immolation is a singular crazy. Unlikely to change anything on its own with a sedate culture like ours. The Arab Spring was a powder keg ready to go off at just about any provocation with a culture less sedated and governments more prone to violent reactions to rebellion.

Occupy was more or less peaceful and not even really aimed at the government specifically, although they definitely got in the crosshairs a few times. While there were a few violent encounters between police and Occupy members, the whole movement more or less died because people stopped paying attention and the protesters lost the will to protest or lost the message altogether, often diverting from the main message onto road blocks thrown in their way or whatever the side agenda that local group was trying to push.

The civil rights movement was explicitly a minority group that had been pushed to the breaking point, another case of a powder keg that could have been started by almost anything, and while able, after enough persistance and trouble was able to exert SOME influence over political decisions, was far from the sort of "revolution" we need.

The thing is now, there is no powder keg. We've been flooded with entertainment to keep us calm. We're worked to death to keep us exhausted. We've been instilled with patriotic desire to "support" various things and shame those who don't. There's no time or energy or capability or even desire for any sort of mass uprising. And you need a mass uprising for this to work. Not some minority. It needs to be a popular decision supported by a majority big enough there's no doubt it's the will of the people.

I'm just imagining the Pax chemical from Serenity. 99% of us have been subdued. The last 1% will be the violent rebellious types that actually do something... but they'll just be looked upon as criminals, monsters, troublemakers, when they're no less victims than anyone else.

[SalmonGod]

Occupy was more or less peaceful and not even really aimed at the government specifically, although they definitely got in the crosshairs a few times. While there were a few violent encounters between police and Occupy members, the whole movement more or less died because people stopped paying attention and the protesters lost the will to protest or lost the message altogether, often diverting from the main message onto road blocks thrown in their way or whatever the side agenda that local group was trying to push.

No.  All the major camps were forcibly removed, usually after media presence was also forcibly removed.  Riot police rampaged through by the hundreds and confiscated/destroyed everything, and mass arrested people by the hundreds, in some cases multiple times before protesters would stop coming back.  People were sprayed down with rubber bullets or even shot point blank with tear gas canisters.  People who supported the movement from their own homes had their homes raided by police and stuff confiscated for doing nothing other than offering shelter and a place to store supplies or set up media hubs.  This same story played out in Portland, Denver, Phoenix, New York, Oakland, and that's just off the top of my head.  I watched all of them live.  Surveillance was abused to identify participants and find ways to harass or legally attack them.

Occupy was shut down by force.  It would have gone on for much longer.

[wierd]

Of course it was.

It DARED to hold big money accountable.

[sluissa]

Occupy was more or less peaceful and not even really aimed at the government specifically, although they definitely got in the crosshairs a few times. While there were a few violent encounters between police and Occupy members, the whole movement more or less died because people stopped paying attention and the protesters lost the will to protest or lost the message altogether, often diverting from the main message onto road blocks thrown in their way or whatever the side agenda that local group was trying to push.

No.  All the major camps were forcibly removed, usually after media presence was also forcibly removed.  Riot police rampaged through by the hundreds and confiscated/destroyed everything, and mass arrested people by the hundreds, in some cases multiple times before protesters would stop coming back.  People were sprayed down with rubber bullets or even shot point blank with tear gas canisters.  People who supported the movement from their own homes had their homes raided by police and stuff confiscated for doing nothing other than offering shelter and a place to store supplies or set up media hubs.  This same story played out in Portland, Denver, Phoenix, New York, Oakland, and that's just off the top of my head.  I watched all of them live.  Surveillance was abused to identify participants and find ways to harass or legally attack them.

Occupy was shut down by force.  It would have gone on for much longer.

Occupy did go on for longer. Hell, there's still a cafe in Switzerland that claims to be a place where Occupy can meet and organize. But nobody cares. Occupy died out because people stopped paying attention and without the attention nobody felt like camping out in parks. Pure and simple. You can blame the lack of attention on the organized media, that's fine. You can even say there were instances of violence that cleared people out from specific locations, but none of that would have been enough to end it if anyone cared. The message broke up, there was no coherence to the protests, and once it "stopped being fun" it was over.

There was no end goal there. It was just attention grabbing and complaining. Even the attempts made to organize nationally, came to nothing. Everyone had their own goals, their own complaints, their own agenda and it's typical of protest movements these days. Loud, annoying, and ultimately useless.

[wierd]

Not entirely true.

The occupy movement was started because of the massive bailout that walstreet got, basically.  There were people who are saddled with undischargable debts that wanted relief from them, people who rightly asserted that walstreet should not get bailed out like that, and the like who all showed up to protest how walstreet went merrily along after soaking up government money to cover its own bullshit that it knew about for over a decade, and kept kicking around, causing mayhem everywhere they punted it.

Then on top of it all, you had people like Bernie Madoff, who made off with people's retirements and ruined lives, all the while Bank of America was trying and in some cases, SUCCEEDING in foreclosing on people WHO DID NOT HAVE DEBT, AND OWNED THEIR HOMES.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/mortgage-mess/Error-Claims-Cast-Doubt-on-Bank-of-America-Foreclosures-in-Bay-Area-204764581.html
http://lastbestnews.com/site/2014/05/fraud-and-foreclosure-couple-takes-on-bank-of-america/
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130421557

I would say they had pretty specific things they were protesting about, but the really rich did not like being told that they needed to be accountable for their actions, and sent the riot police to tear gas them repeatedly instead.

[SalmonGod]

Occupy did go on for longer. Hell, there's still a cafe in Switzerland that claims to be a place where Occupy can meet and organize. But nobody cares.

I agree.  Although I don't think it's that nobody cares, so much as the encampment phase was the only thing recognizable to the vast majority of people who weren't participants.  So I often don't bother trying to point it out.

Occupy died out because people stopped paying attention and without the attention nobody felt like camping out in parks. Pure and simple. You can blame the lack of attention on the organized media, that's fine. You can even say there were instances of violence that cleared people out from specific locations, but none of that would have been enough to end it if anyone cared.

If by "specific locations" you mean every location with a steady camp population of more than a few dozen people, and tons of collateral damage besides.  If you think that riot police rampaging through and destroying then throwing away everything on site, spraying everyone with rubber bullets, and arrested half the people present in some cases two or three times before they stopped coming back isn't significant, then I think you're delusional.  Sure, if it just kept being fun, then people would keep coming back forever, even when they're covered in baseball sized welts, tied up in court, and don't have any money left for equipment.

Occupy was a call for transformation.  There was as much coherence as there needed to be, in my opinion.  Protest movements aren't meant to be about calling for a specific piece of legislation or some shit.  The only example of something like that I can think of is Woman's Suffrage.  I'm sure your criticisms would sound familiar to someone who participated in the Civil Rights movement.  I'd say "End institutional racism" is only slightly more narrowly focused than "End corrupt relationships between financial and government institutions".  And it was compromised of many things that I'm sure seemed disparate and chaotic at the time, and we only label as a whole "The Civil Rights Movement" in retrospect.

I'm not saying that Occupy was or ever will be as successful as the Civil Rights Movement, but I'm only trying to offer some perspective on the nature of protest.  I'll also reiterate this...

Without successful activist movements, there is less opportunity for people to build a sense of community around shared goals, build alliances, learn organizational skills, and spread a message that challenges cultural complacency.

In other words, being specific isn't necessarily the point.

[McTraveller]

So on this fine Christmas Eve, reading here many complaints about American society... what would you folks envision as a more desirable end state, specifically?  What would make you all feel at peace with yourself and your neighbor?

More relevant, perhaps, what can you do, today, to help bring peace to your neighbors and yourself?  Even if only in small ways.

[wierd]

1)
Actually affordable nationalized healthcare. The real thing, not this "Let's give money and an enshrined monopoly with government enforcement to ensurers!" shit.
Pay for it by making "Legal tax avoidance" illegal, and imposing single payer rules, while telling pharmaceutical companies that they have to allow foreign drug purchases from within the US, and thus letting out a shitload of air out of the system.

2)
Make domestic spying fucking illegal again, and hold the people who consistently allowed it to get this bad accountable. (as in, JAIL.)

3)
Legislation to force employers to STOP abusing degree holder status as if it were a proxy for "Being able to finish what they start" and other such hooey, and to crack down on fraudulent misuse of H1B and other work visas-- and ACTUALLY HIRE PEOPLE, and ACTUALLY TRAIN PEOPLE. (This would reduce a lot of the pressure on higher education to mass-graduate people, and all the inefficiency that this causes the higher education system, which results in endlessly rising tuition.)

4)
Revisit the student loan problem, and impose STRONG changes to prevent the kind of crippling debts it is causing, with STRONG penalties for lenders that engage in predatory loan making, and return to offering federal grant money instead to boost graduation metrics. (See again, item #1.  I see companies like Google and Apple hoarding billions of dollars, while students get loan sharked and tuition going into fucking orbit, while again-- apple and google, demand ever higher levels of education from their prospective hires to even say hello to them as a SERIOUS problem, M'kay? They don't get to demand the sun, the moon, the stars in the sky, and a bag of potato chips while refusing to pay for those things.)

5)
Stop assisting union busting at the federal level.

6)
Federal employment regulations that place restrictions on politicians becoming lobbyists, and vise versa, with mandatory a mandatory cooloff period.

7)
Too big to fail needs to not be a thing; If something is too big to fail, then the market has defacto become captured, and Sherman act needs to be invoked. (possibly RICO too!)

I have others, but I dont want to pontificate endlessly.

As for what individual people can do?  If you know somebody that suffers crippling life circumstances, and you have the disposable money on hand, get them over the hump so that they do not go into a debt-cycle crisis, then petition for changes in legislation to make forcing people into that condition illegal, or at least uncommon.

[SalmonGod]

I can go for everything weird said.  As a reform list, it's pretty good.

But I'm of the opinion that those kinds of reforms will not happen without some kind of overwhelming pressure driving them.  Something more than what can be done by voting.  We're near the end of a cycle that always ends with either some sort of conflict or some disaster of a scope that makes even sociopaths reel.  As long as wealth is power, this will be inescapable.