Democracy Does Die in Darkness

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Lennon: “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can!”

On January 8, 2025, Timothy W. Rybeck of “The Atlantic" magazine published “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days” with the opening line: “He used the constitution to shatter the constitution.” What immediately leaped into my mind? King Donald Trump. He is going to try to do what Hitler did, so I’m going to insert Trump’s name and some appropriate facts in Rybeck’s opening paragraph describing Hitler’s action:

“Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Weimar Republic. On Thursday, January 20, 2025, Donald Trump was inaugurated president of the United States. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of Democracy, Hitler (Trump) set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler (Trump) systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time — specifically one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we shall see, mattered.”

On February 1st, 1933, the newly appointed Hitler cabinet released the following proclamation: “The signs of disintegration are all around us. With unprecedented will and violence, Communists attempt with insane methods to poison and demoralize the shaken and uprooted German people. Fourteen years of Marxism have ruined Germany. One year of Bolshevism would destroy Germany. The richest and most beautiful cultural areas of the world would be turned into chaos and a heap of ruins.” What will Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and Fox News liars say about the Progressive administrations of Clinton, Obama, and Biden?

It’s quite evident Hitler’s cabinet is saying “Make Germany Great Again (MGGA)” while Trump’s cabinet will be proclaiming “America First and Make America Great Again (MAGA).” There is an old proverb appropriate here. It’s the Jamaican saying we borrowed in the 1920s: “Monkey see, monkey do!”

Senator Bernie Sanders: ‘It’s possible to get by on $999,000,000!’

When 10 Democrats stood on a stage for a debate seeking the 2020 Democratic Party nomination for president of the Divided States of America, I thought Joe Biden, because of age and lack of political platform supporting the poor, middle-class, and workers, was the worst candidate on stage. Yes, he had spent 36 years as senator and four years as vice-president, but he never really accomplished much in his long time spent in office. He concentrated on getting elected and saying nothing much using 5,000 words. He was elected in 2020 by using the platform of Senator Bernie Sanders, who attracted enough young voters to topple King Donald from his throne.

He lost the election in 2024 because he insisted on bragging that the DSA led the world economy while neglecting to push remedies to solve the major issue of economic inequality—like the price of eggs, milk, and rent. He didn’t talk about the problems of the more than 60% of the worker class living paycheck-to-paycheck who had less than $400 in savings to cover an emergency.

Sanders had gained the attention of many with his book “It’s Ok to be Angry About Capitalism” in which he claimed we didn’t need billionaires to have a “common good” economy. Bernie wrote: “A humane system wouldn’t produce such dramatic disparities in the distribution of resources.” It’s a way of saying “There are too many fat hogs at the country’s trough.” He calls himself a Socialist which the Trumplicans use against him. But he really is a Democratic-Capitalist who understands we need a blend of both ideologies to produce a “common good” economy. While Walmart pays more than a million workers poverty wages, it’s the economic system that creates obscene concentrations of wealth. The Walton family is the richest in the world. He often cites the economies of the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway that always end up at the top of the “Happiest” surveys that make them the happiest people in the happiest countries.

An economic analysis by Bloomberg reported that eight billionaires — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jansen Huang, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin — added more than $600 billion to their collective wealth in 2024, That’s a helluva lot more than $999,000,000 each. The world’s 500 richest people gained a $1.5 trillion increase in net worth. Bernie had suggested wryly, when chastised for his comment about billionaires, that “$999,000,000 was probably enough for anyone to live on.”

Why do billionaires think they have all the answers to everything?

It has come to pass that the American people will have two drunks directing our national security for the next four years, a Secretary of Defense drunk on booze who will have to be carried from nation to nation as he negotiates, and a King-President who is drunk on power gained by selling his office to a bunch of billionaires who have purchased the House and Senate. Donald Trump sold his office and sociopathic brain-spin to buy votes owned by evangelical and fundamentalist “Christians” who no longer believe what Jesus Christ preached to them about loving enemies and caring for the poor.

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize for Economics winner, has dealt with billionaires for much of his adult life. He has an interesting analysis of their character: “It takes considerable strength of character for a wealthy and powerful man to become and remain well-informed about policy issues. First, he must overcome the arrogance of success. In the academic world there’s a familiar phenomenon sometimes called ‘great man’s disease,’ in which a successful researcher assumes that he is so much smarter than experts in other fields that he doesn’t need to pay attention to their research. Physicians make confident, deeply ignorant pronouncements about economics; economists make confident ignorant pronouncements about sociology.

This kind of arrogance presumably comes even more easily in men of great wealth. After all, if these so-called experts are so smart, why aren’t they rich like me? Second, wealth and power attract hangers-on who will tell the great man what he wants to hear. In other words, they don’t have the character or strength to say: “Sir, I’m sorry you have the facts all wrong.”

So, Billionaires will Kill Us Because They Are Ignorant of Climate Change

In 2015, about 90% of the scientific experts in the field of “global warming (that old descriptive term that it’s too hot),” declared that the earth should not “warm” more than 2.7F (1.5C) in what is called the Paris Agreement. On Jan 9,2025, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported the world had already gone beyond 1.5C in 2024. The world has already suffered trillions of dollars in damages due to increasing temperatures, causing extreme weather events, from droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, fires, floods, and deaths by heat for millions of people in hundreds of countries. The fires in California have already caused $250 billion in damages—and many fires have not even been “maintained.”

Here are just a few facts gained from various investigations:

• A joint investigation by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute in 2023 found that the emissions from the One Percent (about 77 million people) alone “would be enough to cause the heat-related deaths of 1.3 million people over the coming decades.”
• The richest 77 million people are responsible for twice as much carbon pollution each year as the poorest four billion people on earth.
• The poorest people on earth live in the tropical zones. It is not possible for them to mitigate increases in heat—while the wealthiest people live in climate- insulated, air-conditioned lives mostly in the cooler north.
• Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy advisor Chiara Liguori: “The future of our planet is hanging by a thread, yet the super-rich are being allowed to continue to squander humanity’s chances with their lavish lifestyles and polluting investments.”
• The Walton family has three super yachts that create a total of 18,000 tons of carbon which equals the pollution by 1,714 Walmart shelf-stackers.
• In order to get back to an increase of 1.5C by 2030, the richest One Percent would have to reduce their emissions by 97%. Oxfam researchers report that the 1% are planning on reducing use by only 5%.
• Oxfam reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air in 2023, releasing as much carbon as one of his workers in the US would use in 207 years. Researchers said: “The very rich live lives that are truly profligate in the use of the world’s remaining carbon budget. Governments need to stop pandering to the richest polluters and instead make them pay their fair share for the havoc they’re wreaking on our planet. Leaders who fail to act are culpable in a crisis that threatens the lives of billions.
• A member of the 1% consumes in ten days more than two tons of carbon emissions. It would take a poor member of that society more than three years to create the same amount of pollution.

The Republican supreme court is creating the world’s first crematorium

The Federalist Society spent billions to buy a Supreme Court that would eliminate restrictions on political campaign spending through the Citizens United decision, thus allowing billionaires to rent, lease, or buy members of the Divided States of American government. It is only going to get much worse for the lowest 90%. Research on King Donald’s inaugural fund by Public Citizen indicates corporations and billionaires will contribute an unprecedented $200 million to Trump bank accounts by January 20 to buy favors from a Republican president and Congress.

Amazon, Apple, Chevron, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Google, Meta, Open AI, PHARMA, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Coinbase have put up the most of the $200 million in bribe money. Well-known billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos are buying access to the biggest grifter in the world who sells everything from Bibles to booze to bullshit.

North Dakotans should know that Harold Hamm, the fossil fuel billionaire who has bought the governor of North Dakota and its legislature, is hosting a big exclusive fossil fuel industry celebration on Inauguration Day that will hasten the construction of the World Crematorium for all life on Planet Earth. Among the major guests invited so far is the new Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. I don’t think we have to ask whether he will favor energy growth in renewables and reject the use of more fossil fuels.

If you wish to attend private inaugural events, get the checkbook ready. Access to events such as swearing-in ceremonies, dinners, and other events where King Donald and Vice-President J.C. Vance attend will cost a record-setting minimum of $1,000,000 for two tickets. That’s $500,000 more than the 2017 inaugural festivities cost. John Lennon in his song “Imagine” had a plea:

“Imagine no possessions/ I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger/ A brotherhood of man.”