So it appears that one bitter enemy of the working folk and the marginalised of the world has been replaced with yet another. So much was clear from at least April. The challenge for those of us who stand with all of those who lack agency will be to avoid repeating the last four

decades of humbug and brutality with its ugly climax in 2016 but instead build the vehicles needed to rewrite governance in America and elsewhere as an instantiation of informed collective agency manifest in policies that maintainable meet the human need.for wellbeing in all

the senses covered by the famous Maslovian Hierarchy. As things stand, governance is at the pleasure of the 0.1%. The current ‘choice’ of the common folk is to choose their preferred modalities of misery and risk. This reflects the absence of any vehicle through which other

claims can be put onto the agenda. In America, neither human safety nor biological need are assured for most people and so whatever we create must begin with addressing those fundamental needs around physical wellbeing. Too many go hungry and lack shelter, have limited effective

access to basic health care, have to pay too much for pharmaceuticals. Clearly, policies of securing access to quality public housing and health care should be key discriminators of the worth of any new political formation that arises from the wreckage of the last 40 years.

The DNC has repeatedly shown its incapacity to address such matters and so the time has come to prise its cold clammy fingers from the necks of rational and communitarian folk and to caucus with those who see these as key. There is no ‘lesser evil’ that ignores such matters.

Equally though, humanity currently faces two existential crises both of them touching us all today. Most obviously on short timelines there is #Covid19 which is cutting a swathe through human populations (including but not limited to) those of the richest countries on Earth.

America has suffered roughly 237k Covid deaths since January of 2020 — nearly five times as many Americans killed as it lost killing 2 million or so in the war on Indochina of the mid-60s and 70s. Some time next year America may have lost a further half a million or so.

Losses on this scale utterly dwarf the losses in past disasters on US soil, yet even this understated the problem because as these lines are written there is no evidence that humans can acquire enduring immunity to the virus and even those who survive are blighted in ways likely

to prejudice seriously their quality of life and longevity. Halting community transmission is an existential challenge and the burden of this challenge must not be settled significantly on the three lowest quintiles of the population. This is a challenge that the richest 40%

of the populace must embrace as their own and compel the infamous 1% to implement because sadly, they are going to be with us for some time. We ought to have a far more equal society and Covid, which is like a barium meal highlighting social dysfunction forces us to look on them.

One key tool in ensuring that the costs of Covid are not significantly settled onto the bottom three quintiles of the populace comes in the form of a federally funded #JobsGuarantee aimed at meeting unmet need in public goods. Not only is this insistently and progressively

redistributive — an intrinsic benefit but properly specified, it underpins incomes in the non-state tradable sector and directly and quickly addresses areas of poor capacity in public services of vital interest to those in the bottom 60% of the population. A #JobsGuarantee can

get housing built, staff aged care, provide clinics for small children, accessible child care, build the infrastructure for meeting #GND targets and do it in a way that lessens spatial income and asset maldistribution between rural and urban areas. People talk a lot about

‘freedom’ in America but the freedom to work as little or as much as you need while living in quality housing anywhere that suits you while being protected by a robust health system sounds a lot more appealing to me than the right to strut about public streets bearing a weapon

of war and cursing humanity more generally. A #JobsGuarantee ought to guarantee you the right to work as many as 40 hours per week and as few as four if you prefer. It ought to guarantee you quality workplace training in areas of your interest which training would be part of your

worked hours. The hourly rate you get ought to be commensurate with the relevant skill set you bring to the job benchmarked not by American standards alone but by reference to other economies with similar per capita GDP. If this standard applied the flow on effects in the private

jobs markets would be considerable. Who would work at minimum wage who could work a better job with better training and better pay locally? Very few. I do not doubt that such a program would rapidly be embraced by everyone fearful of redundancy and would underpin those wanting to

start their own niche businesses, because they could do this at a fraction of the risk. Really, even the usual enemies of ‘socialism’ ought to love this. If you want people to see themselves as be,ongoing to a community, then underwriting their capacity to live the life they

choose and having them feel valued by their peers snd families sounds a pretty good place to start.

The second existential threat to human wellbeing of course is anthropogenic climate change — the terraforming of the biosphere with the industrial effluent CO2 and other human sourced or released greenhouse gases. This threatens the entire basis of human social organisation

on timelines reaching from now to the end of the century and depending how we respond, perhaps the next few hundred years. This is a bitter legacy we are leaving to our heirs including those not yet conceived. The prejudice to the climate will hurt us both directly

in catastrophic weather events and increasing crop failures but also through the breakdown of governance as the chaos worsens. We really have no choice but to act robustly now to decarbonise our activity to the greatest extent technically possible, to rapidly draw down and

permanently sequester about 1500GT of atmospheric CO2 (roughly the amount emitted since 1850, plus what we cannot abate at comparable cost) and in the interim pursue solar radiation management to protect the ice masses at the poles and therewith their albedo. This is a project

in which America should be leading rather than spoiling. Much of the drawdown could be undertaken in the LDCs but funded by the west, effectively beginning to correct the global maldistribution of wealth. America should not only want such programs to work but should want to

approach global equity. Countries where the folk are living well are less likely to trouble their neighbours. If their institutions are sound then dealing with crises becomes easier. In short, the current politics on climate change — ad not, beggar thy neighbour, patronage for

polluters and so forth must be replaced by robust policies that address the weight of the human footprint on the planet’s ecosystems because these support us all and their breakdown threatens nearly everyone’s wellbeing. No political vehicle that soft pedals this issue should

be endured. We simply have no time left to argue about whether we should pull out all stops to get this done. We simply must proceed and hope we are not too late.

The time to end coal mining (and rehabilitate the sites) decommission coal and gas plants, end fracking re-wild non-urban farm lands carrying herbivores, restore river systems and to build near zero carbon public transport, facilitate e-vehicles and so forth is now.

This thread is already quite long, and I haven’t mentioned carceralism in the US or the shoddy, corrupt systems of executive and judicial governance selection, but there are things I still need to do, so I will return to this thread later.