How long before we have another Mangione moment, when someone opens fire on a CEO, banker or politician?

How soon before some poor, desperate American, with nothing to lose, attacks one of the sociopaths who rule our country?

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are the kinds of people that American society rewards–scum. The more ruthless and duplicitous you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our system, with it’s perverse incentives, rewards and elevates sociopathy, which is why we find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

Many in our society are increasingly aware that our economy essentially exists to victimize them. It deliberately promotes inequality, exploitation of the most vulnerable through abusive employment practices, and preying on the least well off by excessive charges for interest and rent. Concurrently, the non-stop advertising depicting beautiful, happy people enjoying products and experiences that the average American can only dream of simply reinforces the vast inequality.

And now the beatings will continue until moral improves. The DOGE-bags, with their savage cuts, mass firings and threats to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are certainly stacking the kindling for the kind of conflagration that could turn the country into a war zone. In a move that portends future violence, DOGE is targeting the Veterans Administration (VA). Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the VA now faces disruption of its benefit claims handling, health care delivery, data security, critical medical research, and stable employment for one hundred thousand former service members.

Maybe someone ought to explain to the DOGE brain-trust that it’s not a bright move to target a demographic that was taught to close-with-and-destroy-the-enemy. Especially not smart to fuck with special forces veterans who were trained in irregular warfare and insurgency. America is awash with weapons and you’re giving veterans a reason to hurt you.

Most Americans living through the second Gilded Age don’t remember, but the first one was replete with violence. Labor actions and protests were met with armed strike breakers and corporate militia massacres. The Pinkerton Detective Agency targeted labor organizers and fought pitched battles with strikers. Workers and Anarchists responded with bombings and assassinations.

It’s ironic that Trump idolizes President McKinley, who was president during the first Gilded Age and the beginning of the American empire, while Trump presides over the second Gilded Age and final chapter of the American empire.

McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. And while history doesn’t repeat, perhaps it rhymes?

Fredrick Douglas wrote–“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Douglass’s statement, written in 1857 on the eve of the Civil War, is just as true today as then.  

What’s troubling is the glee some Americans are showing in response to the mass layoffs in government. The lack of solidarity among working and middle-class Americans points to the ease of divide and rule, but it will be interesting to see how MAGA-land likes it when the loss of the these government jobs impacts their businesses and local economies. Fifty odd years of neoliberal ideology has had a profound impact on Americans, but ideology certainly doesn’t clothe, house or feed you.

Nevertheless, I believe our future promises to be an era full of contradictions–where conservative, military types make common cause with leftist union members, in the face of poverty and destitution.

What’s clear is that the old Social Contract is being torn up before our eyes. Our feral elite no longer expect the co-operation and support of Americans, and are increasingly placing their bets on the national security state, with its surveillance and violence.

All of those militarized police are certainly going to be busy.

And this raises a larger question–Where is the inflection point, when Americans give up on politics and embrace violence as a solution?

John F. Kennedy wrote–” Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Update: Protestors from St. Louis to Charlotte, Tucson to Palo Alto, and New York City to Portland are raging against one oblong machine—and the guy in charge of it. In response to Musk’s growing power within the Trump administration—and that gesture he made at the inauguration—protests have targeted showrooms, dealerships, charging stations, and the Cybertruck itself in an attempt to meddle with Musk’s finances and highlight how he’s meddling with federal spending programs.