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The Fourth of July, a Recipe for Ruin [1]
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Date: 2025-07-04
As the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passes through the large intestines of our legislature and defecated onto the desk of the Oval Office for President Donald Trump to sign, it has turned the stomach of many who would otherwise be happy to indulge in the Fourth of July. The dream of the great democratic project authored by our Founding Fathers is dead, devoured by the oligarchs who bought this democracy as one would buy dinner on delivery. The crap on our plate is ours to eat, and the check is signed by the President. Obviously, there is nothing else to eat, as SNAP benefit and welfare cuts have seen to that.
Now, I had lost my appetite for the Fourth of July long ago, as I hope we all one day will. The US-American project has, and for as long as it lasts will be, a feast of famine for every corner of the globe our oligarchs exploit or embargo. It has been a hard pill to swallow for the First Nations (as much as he have tried forcing them to), and it has been a bitter meal for the people of color who have emigrated here by desperate decision, and in the descendants of those who emigrated here without any choice at all. It has only been sweet for the rich and powerful, the 1% that run the vast factories that they have made out of the rest of the world. They cannot get enough. And with the plating of the One Big Beautiful Bill, they no longer bother adding the herbs and spices to make this rotten mess palatable to even the ones that voted them in to begin with.
However, as our appetite dies to nausea, perhaps a new craving has caused the American people to rethink their palate. Not that I’m saying my statement is popular, but people are starting to catch onto what I’m saying. We’ve had to deal with Trump’s specials for six, nearing seven months now. What else could be on the menu for Americans to choose from?
We’ve heard it sizzle in the voices of those calling for ICE to leave Los Angeles.
We’ve felt the heat of hopeless anger as we watched Israel holocaust the Palestinians.
We’ve tasted a sample in the victory of Zohran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo.
I think we know that America is ready for something new to order.
On this fourth of July, I think it’s high time for those who call themselves even slightly progressive to question who or what they’re ordering in the midterms and the elections to come, and what they call attention to in regards to what’s coming out of the crude corporate kitchens of the White House.
The Democratic Party’s elder statesman Chuck Schumer cooked up a half-baked rebuttal to Trump’s foreign policy decision alongside other moderate Democrats, calling for Trump to stop attacking Iran… without gathering Congressional approval first. The problem is not the illegality. Iran should not be invaded at all. It is immoral to invade them for any reason. They haven’t had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003. The raw truth of the matter is that Iran is a thorn in the side of our total control of the Middle East through Israel, and the warhawks have tried manufacturing the consent of the people towards war with such alarmist statements as “Iran is weeks away from a nuclear weapon,” a statement repeated since the early nineties and mid 2000s. In all honestly, recent events have proven Iran should’ve spent its time developing a nuclear weapons program to deter attacks like that which has been done unto them in the past month.
Anti-War is Anti-War, one should not care if war has come signed and stamped by the appropriate bureaucrat or rushed through by some rancid racist who wants to play warlord.
The Democratic Party has soured on putting climate change back on the menu as a political message, and the money being put in their pockets is a large part of the reason why. The whole of the US Government, across party lines, is bought and sold to the service of the rich fat cats that run the most powerful industries in the world. It has increasingly become close to political suicide to discuss the real effects of a warming world caused by the very industries that want to keep producing the fuel of the world and run against their wealth and power to seek a better way. But too much oil is bad for you anyhow. We should swallow our fears of their money and not our pride. There is too much at stake for not only the United States, not only its territories in Guam and Puerto Rico, but for the entire world. Animals are dying. People are dying. The temperature is rising. The seas are rising. So must we.
We who have voted for Democrats, liberals and progressives alike, have feared that adding a healthy alternative to the oil industry would run the risk of an imperfect solution to climate change. Nothing is further from perfect than keeping it.
With the exception of a few, the Democratic Party has wrung its hands over the question of illegal immigration. Rather than confront the racism of walling off our borders to the desperate denizens of the countries whose resources we devour and deny to their own people, and embracing the fact that so many undocumented people are part of the breadbasket of many communities (all while getting little to none of the meager morsels we get as citizens), the Democratic party has always concurred with the GOP that the “illegal” immigrant is a criminal, but a pitiable criminal as opposed to the anarchic anti-citizen Trump always posits is true. The Democrats quietly punish the despised poor of the Global South who dare trespass into the Imperial Core (Obama and Biden each deported more than Trump did on his first term), but loudly promise reforms to the process of citizenship. Some have even decided to serve the same cold tripe as the Republicans, turning away the relatives of many of the undocumented underclass in disgust. We see that this has been ineffective, allowing Trump to demonize the undocumented immigrants and the documented refugee as the aforementioned anarchic park-animal-eating anti-citizen and has used them to deport the undocumented, the documented, and the citizen alike (most if not all a darker shade than pale) with sadistic glee. He has even threatened Zohran Mamdani with exile for daring to oppose him, and all that guy wanted to do was offer better food to people whose only options are McDonalds and Burger King. We should attack this evil, and call for amnesty.
I would rather struggle to learn Spanish than suffer speaking English with Trump’s rubes.
I have also noticed a trend among some of the party officials (not necessarily the Democratic voters), who have found it fitting to excuse not only the undocumented from the table of human rights and dignity, but also the others who find themselves marginalized and denigrated by the right and white wing of this country. Governor Newsom, a gruesome chef indeed, has served neglect and oppression as a sweet and savory concession in the hopes of gentrifying the wider party. He and a few others have ceased defending the trans community, and have outright attacked them. It should be apparent that trans people are just as deserving of the inherent right to dignity and happiness as the cis population, and that it is a moral imperative to fight to protect their rights. Its political inconvenience is irrelevant, and the people who care about this issue will vote Republican no matter how hostile the Democratic Party will get. This plays the same with black and indigenous communities as well. The rights of all people, and the fight for their equality, their ability to actively participate in society, should never be downplayed for the sake of clawing away votes from Republicans (which doesn’t work). That is not political expediency, that is political sociopathy. We must not forget the reason why the rich oligarchs start advocating for fascism, racism, and nationalism when they feel their wealth and power is threatened. If we are all too busy punching down and pushing away, we focus on what makes us different, and not the two common factors that make us the same, and that the rich and powerful do not want us to internalize: The working class is an international class and we all have the same core problems and the same core solutions, and there’s more of us than there are of them.
And this is where we finally circle back to what has been defecated onto the desk of the Oval Office, the One Big Beautiful Bill, that has been served to us as a fine meal to eat. The American Project now an overcooked eagle on the BBQ with is pretty feathers plucked and laid bare for what it is: food for famine for the poorest amongst us, sponsored by the rich and powerful ruling class. Should we dine in, and bide our time until the midterms and hope that the moderate Americans have seen sense and will vote back in the bland and boring Bidenist past? No, it’s high time we flip the table and build a better and brighter future. On this fourth of July we should reject the glorification of the slaver past and the capitalist present, and start working on the future: a country that can invite all people to the table without exploiting the world to do so. We can reject the call to war and accumulated capital, and accept a better message:
A better world is possible. A better world is necessary.
[END]
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