Brave Old World Meets Hot New Planet

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Will the Divided States of America Add or Subtract to the Future?

In 1937, English writer Aldous Huxley published his novel of the future “Brave New World 632 A.F.” (after Henry Ford), a world restricted by a shortage of essential resources to two billion people. Now born and raised in human hatcheries, the amount of oxygen provided in a birthing bottle determines where you will spend your life, whether in a leadership role as an Alpha, or in menial roles such as maintenance and maid service roles as Gammas, Deltas, or Epsilons. It’s against the law for people to get pregnant, but each female always has birth control pills on her person so people can have all the sex they desire. Citizens must not fall in love, marry or have children.

If these conditions are violated, citizens are transported to distant reservations to be treated. In a sense, Big Brother is everywhere. In the brave new world, there is no empathy or sympathy, no artistic creativity, no intellectual excitement and individualism is always suppressed. All are conditioned, indoctrinated and brainwashed while in the hatchery bottle.

Because of conditions in the present world — wars, famine, climate change, torture, racism, autocratic religions, deleterious myths and legends — we have hundreds of social scientists studying why past civilizations such as Mayan, Easter Island, Genghis Khan, Rome, and hundreds of others have failed. Professor Danilo Brozovic of the University of Skovde in Sweden has examined civilizations which have failed, and in looking at what is happening in our present world, states “More and more academic articles are mentioning the threat of collapse because of climate change. We need dramatic social and technological changes. Pessimists believe what we are doing will eventually cause the extinction of the human race. Optimists say collapse for us will just be the end of life as we know it today. There will be less globalization and a lower standard of life, affecting public health very negatively.” He is working on a project that is studying business “sustainability.”

There are signs planet Earth will not be habitable for Homo sapiens

Thousands of New Guinea coastal citizens are running to (and building on) higher ground as the seas rise to levels never seen in modern times. According to climate change experts, 2024 is the hottest year in at least 125,000 years, give or take a few if you’re a believer. The Divided States of America are experiencing more than a hundred tornadoes a day in areas where it often did not have a hundred in a season. How many Category 5 hurricanes will end up on our shores in 2025? Last year major storms cost us $229 billion to repair the damage.

The common man around Planet Earth “employs” politicians to ensure they have the four freedoms as expressed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The common problem in the world today is we have millionaires and billionaires who have rented, leased, and bought politicians to make themselves richer and to keep the common man poorer — on at least five continents.

An example of how politicians violate the common good: The George W. Bush administration violated the Geneva Conventions and International Treaties to build a prison with torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to house “detainees” captured after the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.More than two decades ago we held 780 detainees who allegedly had planned the attack or had attacked us around the globe after 9-11. Many could not be tried in our courts because our CIA psychiatrists and psychologists had tortured them. Some very innocent men spent decades there because we had offered a bounty of $5,000 for terrorists.

While stationed in the Caribbean in the 1950s courtesy of the U.S. Marines, I had the opportunity to visit Gitmo, a beautiful harbor. It should be an international resort, not an international hell-hole. We spent $540 a total of $540 million and $13 million per prisoner in 2023 to keep Gitmo open and house 36 prisoners. President Joe Biden recently lowered the number to 26 by sending ten prisoners back to their home countries. I suppose that raised the prisoner cost to $18 million or $19 million per. If imprisoned at one of our securest federal prisons in the Divided States of America, the cost would be $78.000 per prisoner. In order to keep Gitmo open, we have stationed 6,000 military personnel there. We also operate a K-12 school, a hotel for visiting lawyers and a bar to keep them happy. For some unfathomable reason, Republicans have fought to keep it open for decades while Democrats have tried to close it down for decades.

Gitmo has been a propaganda-laden albatross around our democratic necks, damaging our reputation for truth and justice around the world. Trump wants to fill it up with undocumented immigrants right now… How many billions has it cost to build and operate the Gitmo Project? Even the Pentagon doesn’t know! Gitmo might make a terrific movie if one could believe the plot.

How do you defeat more than 765 billionaires? A general strike!

It is quite apparent we no longer have a political battle between political parties in the Divided States of America. At best we have a stalemate. We now have a Divided Peoples of America economic battle with the common people versus the billionaires. We presently have 22 millionaires, including the 765 — or more -— billionaires, fighting against 319 million Americans (Our population increased to 341 million in 2024!) who have made billionaires richer because they have denied the rest of our citizens a fair share of the wealth of the country. Many of those 22 million have been made millionaires by selling their political souls in Citizen United shares offered by the Republican Supreme Court.

We now have 38% of the millionaires in the world living in the DSA. One billionaire can buy ten million votes while one teacher has just one vote. Where did the Supreme Court Republicans get the idea that a president in a democracy is actually a king for his term of office? When in a democracy is any person immune to the authority of the state? The Roberts court has only 35% approval of the citizens who must live by its decisions. Supreme courts must be the living trunk of a tree, not a small, dead branch.

If the Democratic National Committee ever has an accurate story of why Joe Biden won the 2020 election and lost the 2024 election, they should discover that he won because the party adopted the progressive platform of Senator Bernie Sanders and lost in 2024 because it spent all of its money talking about the great economy created by Biden and never talking to real people who were buying eggs, bacon, fruit, gas, oil, electricity, and paying rent and mortgages while their paychecks got smaller and smaller and smaller.

I have been buying the house groceries for the last four years. When eggs go from $1.49 a dozen to $5.29 a dozen and gas from $2.49 a gallon to $3.99 a gallon, I know when I’m being gouged. Who was making all the bucks while more than 60% of the households were living and dying paycheck-to-paycheck and didn’t have enough money in savings to buy a set of tires? You know it, the billionaires! The DNC had Kamala Harris wasting time, money, and reputation by spending time with Liz Cheney trying to get “moderate” Republicans voters to switch. Total nonsense. Where are those millions of “Trumper Republicans?” Harris should have had “socialist” Bernie Sanders and progressives like AOC by her side to get young people to the voting booth. It was the economy for the poor and middle class workers, Stupid! Almost 90 million eligible voters did not vote in the 2024 presidential election. Bernie’s political platform would have “woke” many!

Sanders says, It’s hard to miss: our country is evolving to two Americas.

On December 27, 2024, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released a statement titled “Two Americas, the people vs the billionaires,” containing his political platform for the “common good” of all Americans. Here was his opening paragraph: “It’s hard to miss. Our country is rapidly evolving into two Americas. One America consists of less than a thousand billionaires who have an unprecedented amount of wealth and power and have never had it so good. The other America, where the vast majority (319 million out of 341 million) live, consists of tens of millions of families who are struggling to put food on the table, pay their bills and worry that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they do.”

In the balance of his article he gives concrete reasons for his analysis of ”two Americas.” I’m going to edit for brevity and add a few facts.

The billionaires buy $500 million yachts with helicopter pads and lots of water toys like jet skis and submarines, $270 million mansions with 30 bedrooms and a couple of guest houses, private islands with survival bunkers and air strips, private jets for world travel, and rocket trips to space to experience weightlessness.

They receive the best health care money can buy, furnish yachts and homes with complete medical facilities just in case, and often employ personal physicians.

They send their kids to the best, most expensive private schools with kindergartens costing $75,000 a year and colleges $100,000 a year.

The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 90% and the gap is wider by the second.

In the other America, the working class struggles to provide basic necessities, millions work for starvation wages with the federal minimum wage still at $7.25, 85 mill are either uninsured or under-insured for health care, over 20 million spend half of their wages on rent or mortgage payments, and 60,000 die a year because they can’t afford a doctor or hospital.

In one America, 25% of the elderly live on less than $15,000 a year, often die at 5-10 years below life expectancy — while many billionaires will live to between 95 and 100.

In health care, agriculture, financial services, energy, transportation a few giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for their products. Three Wall Street firms, Blackstone, Vanguard, and State Street, control assets of more than $22 trillion and are the major shareholders in 95% of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies, most of them being the largest corporations in the world.

To sum up what might have won the election for Harris, I’m going to use a quote from Romeo in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as he is buying poison in an apothecary for use in the love story: “There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls, doing more murder in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.” Even Shakespeare says gold kills a lot of people.