{"id":179,"date":"2026-04-15T13:11:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/?p=179"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:11:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:11:16","slug":"the-united-states-is-being-murdered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/the-united-states-is-being-murdered\/","title":{"rendered":"The United States Is Being Murdered…."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026 and it\u2019s an inside job. Rebecca Solnit nails it<\/a>: \u201cEvery department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.\u201d She continues:\u00a0<\/p>\n

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It is striking that the Trump team\u2019s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.<\/p>\n

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump\u2019s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.<\/p>\n

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: \u201cWe can\u2019t take care of daycare. We\u2019re a big country … We\u2019re fighting wars … It\u2019s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.\u201d Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The whole thing is worth reading because it distills what is happening into a brief summary. The scale of the madness and destruction makes getting the full sense of it difficult, which makes a short article like this so valuable.<\/p>\n

The U.S. is being murdered and it\u2019s an inside job. Now what are we going to do about it? Solnit points at some big picture answers to that, too:<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen \u2013 the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us \u2013 and nature and future generations too \u2013 rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The November mid-terms are now a little more than six months away. If we can learn the lessons from Hungary<\/a> and put sane majorities in both the House and Senate, the madness will not stop, but it should slow considerably<\/a>:\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Should Democrats take the House, they will gain the power to issue subpoenas as they investigate his administration, and can block the president\u2019s legislative agenda. Should they wrest control of the Senate from the GOP, Democrats could stop Trump from appointing nominees to cabinet positions and the federal judiciary, including the supreme court.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That Guardian analysis from February looks pretty dated since it was published just before the start of Little Donnie\u2019s illegal war against Iran, but sadly, even with that incredible disaster figured in, everyone in the prediction game still thinks the Demorats will win the House<\/a>, but not the Senate<\/a>. Only the Kalshi gamblers<\/a> think Democrats can win at the moment. Although I\u2019m not a fan of turning everything into a bet, here\u2019s hoping the money currently being placed on the Democrats turns out to be correct.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026 and it\u2019s an inside job. Rebecca Solnit nails it: \u201cEvery department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.\u201d She continues:\u00a0 It is striking that the Trump team\u2019s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-coup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theimbroglio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}