this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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And where is the public uproar about this? I only hear crickets.
There are laws against insider trading not only in general but also specifically for Congressmen. Also, there have been (failed) bills to raise the federal minimum wage, including an attempt to add it into the stimulus bill in 2021 as a $15 Minimum Wage.
People like to ask "WhY iS noBOdY DoInG SoMEtHInG?!" while completely ignoring that one party consistently is trying but we never give them enough seats in the senate to actually do it.
there are two houses of congress.
And both are required to write and pass legislature, in many cases a 2/3rds majority votes depending on precedence of the legislature. Our system is built to make change difficult and progress slow.
The subject of the post is a direct example that action can be taken quickly and you can't just blame 'the ststem'.
We have to hold the legislators accountable and don't believe anyone trying to deflect their ineffectiveness.
Action that can be taken quickly on clearly partisan legislature with control of both house and senate, as well as cooperation from the POTUS and Courts so as to not be struck down after the vote like the Student Debt Relief was, is not easy.
You wanna know why freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are legal and encouraged? Because it does nothing. The American revolution wasn't a sit-in.
Yup.
Hence why I acknowledge the power of the Marsha P. Johnson brickthrowing wing of social advocacy.
Nah, revolution is what happens when protests are prohibited
We've had crowds in the street protesting social injustice practically every year since the Seattle WTO riots of the 1990s. If you haven't seen a public outcry, you haven't been paying attention.
The problem is that the outcries are fractured, the movements regularly subverted by a combination of con-artists and police, and a lot of the mass media ideology poisons people against one another by ethnicity, religion, gender, and locale. Folks who can all agree that the Sacklers deserve a long drop from a short rope will scream invective at one another because one of them showed up wearing a BLM t-shirt and the other finds it offensive. Folks who all agree de-industrialization was a nightmare for the midwest will tear each others eyes out over the abortion debate.
That's even before you get to the intense bombardment of mass media, fixating on everything from Ukraine to Crime Wave to razor blades in candy to whatever the hotbutton gaff of the evening happens to be.
I don't think anyone is hearing crickets. More that we're trying to hear a finely tuned orchestra under the sound of exploding bombs.
The uproar is.... we're powerless.