The Koch oligarchy machine, for example, has branches in every state, and pretty much every county. Oligarchy-supporting media are ubiquitous.
And now Very Serious People are talking about the possibility of a second Civil War.
What they're not pointing out, though, is that it won't just be a war of white supremacists and Trump cultists against the rest of us, as they generally narrate, but a war between those comfortable with oligarchy (indeed, embracing it, as it promises them safety and stability) versus those who believe in democracy.
This is a crisis point for our nation as real and critical as those we hit in 1776, 1861, and 1932. In each of those three cases -- roughly four generations apart -- the oligarchs lost the battle. This time they could win.
America needs an honest discussion of what's really going on in this country right now, what the real conflict is, and who the real players are (and why they're playing). The conflict is playing out on a series of meta-layers (race, class, religion, regionality), all designed to conceal the real war the oligarchs are waging against democracy itself, and those conflicts will continue to intensify until one side or the other has won what is now still a "cold war."
Then comes the threat of a real Civil War breaking out, and an informed populace is the best defense against it.
If the forces of democracy can succeed in seizing enough power to temporarily hobble the oligarchs, then they need to immediately restore local control to the media (undoing the 1996 Telecommunications Act and breaking up the media conglomerates) and reinstate a ban on the "right" of oligarchs to own politicians and political parties by overturning several Supreme Court decisions since 1976. Repairing the damage done to our court systems will take longer, but needs to begin immediately.
On the other hand, if the oligarchs decide to promote an actual "hot" Civil War on the forces of democracyas Southern oligarchs did in 1861then parts of America that are still functioning democracies (California comes to mindthere has been discussion of various "compacts" between the three West Coast states, possibly joining with a few Eastern Seaboard states) must consider some form of independence, whether it be "soft independence" like California declared when they established their own air quality standards or some form of partial independence or succession.
This moment of oligarchy-caused crisis is a time of great danger to America, and, thus, also to still-functioning democracies all over the world.
As oligarchs reach out and extend their control over nation after nation (now having seized, in just the past few decades, either soft or hard control over Russia, India, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and dozens of other nations) the battlegrounds are shifting to Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France.
Because the oligarch's campaign is now international, a third world war is not impossible, particularly as China allies itself with the oligarch-controlled nations against those that are still functioning or nearly functioning democracies.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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