These poor people want so desperately to be rescued by Trump, who gives less than 0 shits about them.
If only Joe Biden didn’t jack up their utility rates so high…! (/s)
“It’s breaking me. And there’s nothing that can be done for it, unless the president does something,”
This is a huge part of our problems right now. A lot of people look to the president to fix everything. The president is powerful, but they’re not that powerful. And thank god for that. If the entire US relied on just one person to fix everything, that would be absolutely terrible, and that’s even if that person were super smart and ethical, which of course our current president is not.
The people we should be looking to, at the Federal level, are Congress. But of course we all know how ineffectual they are. Feels like they might as well not even exist, sometimes. Though, there are some real structural reasons for their ineffectiveness: the incredible influence is moneyed interests in our politics, for instance, and the fact that a representative in the House represents over 700,000 people! For comparison, each member of the Canadian parliament represents about 120,000. Even that’s high compared to a lot of European democracies. Each seat in Norway’s parliament represents about 33,000 people.
But, the people of West Virginia have another representative body they can look to: their state legislature. Each seat in West Virginia’s House of Delegates represents about 17,000 people. You don’t have much of a voice at the Federal level, but you have much, much more of a voice at the state level. The people who can best help West Virginia are West Virginians.
The people we should be looking to, at the Federal level, are Congress. But of course we all know how ineffectual they are. Feels like they might as well not even exist, sometimes. Though, there are some real structural reasons for their ineffectiveness:
I love the detailed reasoning you’ve given to your entire post, thank you. The one thing I would add to your reasoning here is gerrymandering, which protects districts and allows Members to become ever more extreme, leading to increasing gridlock.
“It’s breaking me. And there’s nothing that can be done for it, unless the president does something,” Michalski said about her skyrocketing power bills, adding she no longer supports Trump. “And I don’t see him doing it. He’s had plenty of time.”
There it is.
And the article reads as a sad story of people from rural West Virginia who have such a hard life, so few resources for their needs, but continue to vote against their interests.
Against theirs and those of many people of marginalized communities, because of an incredible lack of empathy in the latter case, it seems to me.
you can have empathy or be fascist, not both. oligarch christotechnofascists know this. eliminate empathy (which entails deliberately dismantling education, particularly the humanities) in the bottom third of the population, and they’ll vote for you because they want to hurt people they don’t like–even if that means hurting themselves also
I don’t think that was always the case, most often people are only involved in politics on the financial level, how it directly affects them and aren’t educated enough on the subjects to know when someone’s fleecing them.
However recently you’re absolutely correct they are rooting out empathy and forcing people to engage with it on a social level. That is to say are you willing to disappear your neighbor over ideological differences.
The first step of the campaign was getting the average person to hate “politics” “the government” “Washington dc” etc., vague ideas instead of specific people and policies
Then it’s easy to sell people on the basic idea that “the government is too dumb and evil to help anyone even if it tried, but it can punish your enemies pretty good”
Meh. Then put up solar panels.
Anything that forces people to build the decentralized energy grid using renewables is good.
Trump made lots of promises. That’s the thing most people don’t seem to understand about liars, they lie. It’s ok though let’s vote for the lying liar that always lies, he won’t lie to me because he hates woke too so we’re on the same team.
…
Well that sounds like a promise we can definitely trust as it’s given to the people who put him in power and trusted him with their lives and welfare… /s
Dear Iran, do not count on any of Trump’s promises
