One thing we all must admit: Donald Trump continues to drive the news cycle, day in and day out, like no other. It can be exhausting at times. News outlets, bloggers, and vloggers must decide what to cover, and they tend to follow the same stories. Unfortunately, they tend to ignore the same issues, and those issues are often more important.
Many bloggers and do vloggers attempt to fill that gap. But it is not easy, as it’s the big networks that have the resources to drive their coverage offline and online. Unfortunately, that coverage is shallow. And except for a few good print journalists, newspapers are also severely lacking.
This week's news cycle is all about a potential President Oprah Winfrey after she gave a great speech at an awards show—another celebrity to the rescue. America does not need Oprah or any other media star to solve its problems right now. America needs a politically and policy-experienced technocrat as president, one who also boasts charisma. Why? I touched on that in my post "No to President Oprah! She would just prolong the country's economic dysfunction."
Oprah would just be another billionaire or celebrity leading a country where the wards of the plutocracy would have their technocrats roll her. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Donald Trump were all rolled. President Obama, while suffering some of the same circumstances, understood the plutocracy and played it the best he could under dire circumstances.
It is doubtful that Oprah understands the systemic failure of our economic system. After all, it has allowed her to amass several billion dollars.
An economic system in which a marginal effort or idea relative to others and implemented by others can create such a disparity in income and wealth is a failure. Would president Oprah sign a bill that restructures out economy to redistribute ill-gotten gains? She likely would not.
It is time to disregard the traditional mainstream media and the stories they push as being the most important. We must keep our eye on the ball, engaging poor and middle-class America, and ensuring we are addressing their issues.
Recently U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin started a concerted effort within his party to do that, a focus on organizing with communities and groups of employees, helping them to campaign on local and workplace issues. He is meeting resistance from his party establishment. Just like our Democratic Party, his party maintains the insanity tenet, doing things the same way over and over again and expecting a different result.
There are severe problems in America that need to be addressed by serious leadership on all levels. There are three challenging steps to achieve that.
First, it requires the dis-indoctrination of Americans who believe our economic system is divine. It is not. It is human-made, and from the inception of this country was designed to enrich a few. It maintains a preordained pecking order that allows a type of inconspicuous slavery. We must remind Americans that business and commerce is a two-way street, with no one holding the trump card. As such, corporations should not have pre-eminence over the masses.
Second, we must elect informed Congress members and senators who are willing to buck the system. They will face many headwinds. After all, the implementation of the Powell Manifesto has caused a near total indoctrination of many Americans and the political class.
Third, we must elect a president who is different from everyone we have chosen so far. We need a charismatic person who understands the economic system and its inner workings to ensure that the wards of the plutocracy are unable to snow her or him into policies that maintain the status quo.
It is now time that we start asserting the worth of every American. It is now time that we ensure every American is getting "we the people's" fair share of our entire economy. Americans must understand that is it a two-way street, and the wealthy owe us much.
If we keep our eye on the ball, if we stay away from petty fads and distractions, we can get the job done. Our empire is running out of time, and unless we attenuate our hubris, it is not the wealthy who will be going down. They are citizens of a still-functioning world order.
The ones who will go down are the rest of us.