For those who are not familiar with the game of golf, a mulligan is a free do-over for a shot that a player does not like. And so the golf shot that went awry is not counted in the golfers score.
Atlas Shrugged is a book written by Ayn Rand who escaped from Russia during the Russian Revolution. Her book, which she saw as being the best of her novels, tells how business leaders who felt too controlled by government escaped the country and eventually started their own city..
What we are seeing today under Trump's second presidency is not the fleeing in horror by today's wealthiest corporate leaders to start a 2nd America. It is quite the opposite. What we are seeing is the wealthiest corporate leaders standing behind and supporting Trump as he replaces American Democracy with a kind of Russian oligarchy. That is the rule of a limited number of rich people under a wannabe dictator who employs a religious façade in order to secure the political loyalty of the predominant branch the Church in America. In other words, instead of fleeing, this small group of wealthy corporate rules get to impose their agenda on America. And that agenda includes cutting more and more social responsibility ties that they have with the nation that enabled them to become so wealthy.
Thus, what we are seeing today is a remake of Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged, where a group of the super wealthy come to rule over rather than flee from the nation. And when I say that they are here to rule over the nation, I am not just referring to the gutting of regulations governing business and manufacturing processes; via Trump's Presidency, they are looking to rule over many areas of American life. They are looking to control education including from grades K-12 to all levels of college and university educations. They are looking to cut social safety nets in order to help "fund" their tax breaks. Of course the projected increase to our National Debt shows that such cuts do not fund those tax breaks. They are trying to suppress the press and relegate the Judiciary Branch to a lesser branch of government than the Executive Branch.
And with the rejection of science and rationalism, as evidenced by most, if not all, of Trump's policies and Cabinet picks, Trump's attempted authoritarianism is becoming an American version of 1933 Germany when Hitler started to rule over Germany. Even the chaos that has a come with Trump 2.0 echos the chaos of Hitler's governance. And should anyone protest the comparing of Trump with Hitler, Trump was the first to suggest that comparison when he stated that he wanted the same kind of generals that Hitler had.
While Hitler had the Gestapo, many of the practices of I.C.E are starting to remind us of that secret police force. Conservative Evangelicalism, which is the predominant branch of the Church in America, is acting like it has its own Konkordat with Trump. Its support for Trump are primarily because of how his Executive Orders address enough culture war issues.
In the place of burning books, we have the banning of books and Trump's war against DEI.
In addition, while Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to seize absolute power in Germany, Trump is looking to relegate the position of the Judicial Branch to that of an advisory board so that collection of his Executive Orders and bills he has signed replace The Constitution.
And so while Trump is no Hitler of the latter 1930s, the similarities are growing between Trump and the 1933 Hitler. Those comparisons tempt many to see Trump as instituting Fascism. Personally, I believe that Trump wants his government to be very similar to the model of government employed by Putin. In either case, what we are dealing with is a wannabe totalitarian leader who can tolerate neither opposition nor even mere disagreement.
With the above focus on Trump, it would be fair to ask why bring in Ayn Rand's book here and mention the super wealthy. It is because they play a vital role in Trump's takeover as Elon Musk demonstrates. In addition, when Apple got a dispensation from Trump's tariffs on China, we should note how muc money that the CEO donated to Trumps inauguration.
Or perhaps the best example can be found when Microsoft blocked the email account of ICC prosecutor who is looking to prosecute Israel's Prime Minister, Ben Netanyahu for war crimes. In addition, Trump had his bank account blocked. It isn't just Trump and his Republican minions that is the problem here. It also includes those who financially enable Trump and sat where real dignitaries were suppose to sit during Trump's inauguration. They are not just using their wealth to support Trump, they are also using their businesses to support Trump.
If we are to resist, we need to PEACEFULLY protest certain individuals from both the public and private sectors. In other words, we need another Occupy Movement. Not that we need encampments, it is that Occupy protested against both Wall Street and the Federal government. In other words, it's like a Lite-Beer commercial that says that 'it tastes great' and that 'it's less filling,' it is both. But we need an Occupy that learns from the mistakes that the first Occupy committed.
From what I saw, the first mistake that Occupy committed is that it sought to use police interventions as an object for publicity. For the most part that I know of, Occupy used peaceful means to provoke police reaction, but we were hoping that the police response would get us the publicity that we wanted. If we are going to successfully oppose the Trump and the current oligarchy, it is necessary that we protest in ways that merit respect from the police as well as the military should they be called in. But we also need to protest in such ways because, despite all of their faults and bad apples, the job of a police person merits our respect. And so we should not use them as an object. Instead, beside earning their respect for how we protest, we need to show that we are defending their freedom and rights as well as our own. Here we need to study why one of the reasons why Otpor was successful in overthrowing Slobodan Milošević.
The second mistake that Occupy made is that we attempted to scapegoat the wealthy. And by doing so, we put the burden of proof for our claims on ourselves. Had we invited the wealthy to join the rest of society, to stop their societal apartheid that is enforced by laws, social values, and financial disparities, people would lean more toward looking at the wealthy to prove that they are not building a financial Berlin Wall that separates the economic classes with their wealth. And here, we must point people to the direction well described by Martin Luther King Jr in his speech against the Vietnam War (click here for the source):
'Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.'
In short, we need to passionately embrace a people-first ethic as a primary social value of society if we are going to successfully oppose the current oligarchy. For the oligarchy's current thing-oriented approach to life has been put on steroids. And so we need to push the oligarchy to also adopt a people-first ethic.
The reason why we should take at least some of the Occupy approach that was taken around 14 years ago is because we are dealing with the same kind of problem only one that is currently far more intense than what Occupy challenged. The past oligarchy was content to hide in the shadows so that claims of oligarchy had to be made by researchers (click here for an example). But now, run-of-the-mill news reporters can point out the power that wealth has over our government because this mulligan taken by Atlas Shrugged.
A good example of protesting oligarchy can be found in today's boycotting of Tesla vehicles. That boycott is one of the reasons why Musk appears to be paying more attention to his businesses and less attention to our government. Note here that we need peaceful ways of protesting. The deliberate burning of Tesla vehicles both is immoral and does not serve our protests against oligarchy. Such violence against Tesla vehicles actually fits the military definition of terrorism. And so such violent reactions serve the oligarchy and its leader.
And so the above describes much of the problems that we face now. We have an oligarchy that has come out of the closet via a President who knows little to no self-restraint and wishes to lead a government that provides little to no legal restraint on his Presidency. It's not just Trump and his new Republicans whom we need to protest, it is the whole oligarchy.
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