The First Quarter of the 21st Century is Done

I Give it One Star-Would Not Recommend

It is simple enough, but it feels like it snuck up on us: We are a quarter of the way through the 21st century. It has not gone well. I write from an American perspective, but the damage is global.

In my America we have seen one disaster after another as climate disruption, growing poverty, and the specter of fascism has done its work to weaken our social fabric.

The century opened with the Supreme Court wrongly deciding the results of the 2000 election in favor of the barely competent Republican, young George Bush. Instead of forcing a re-vote in Florida they overstepped and made Bush president. This hurt our electoral system and tainted the court. It may have been the first step in the current corruption in our highest court. This marks the first time in the century that a Republican ascends to the White House by questionable means. It would not be the last.

The second year of the century brought 9-11, followed by two useless and costly foreign misadventures—the Bush Wars.

Moving forward, the removal of regulations in the financial sector led to the inevitable collapse of the housing market, followed by a collapse of the rarified financial markets. What followed in 2008 was called the Great Recession. It sounds better than depression. But to the mid-manager now seeking food stamps, that is a distinction without a difference.

The markets recovered. A lot of citizens did not. The entire mess allowed the mega-corporations in the banking and housing sectors to start buying up all the housing stock, charging outrageous rents, and withholding the opportunity to buy for first time buyers. Nobody even tried to stop them.

As the years wore on, the political polarity rose to a level that was destroying families and friendships. Fueled by an out of control right wing propaganda machine and a very real diminishment of well-being, the body politic split into two camps, with the rhetoric growing ever more violent, the lies ever more bold, and the official ideology ever further to the right.

The election of Barrack Obama to the presidency in 2012 LOOKED like a huge step forward, but it also gave the Republicans a “wedge issue” they could really run with. It did nothing to stop the real problem, which was a return of the gilded age, this time hiding behind corporate identities. And it did not rein in the increasingly rogue Supreme Court, which proceeded to give the oligarchs the power to buy elections in Citizens United (2010) and then gutted the voters rights act a couple of years later, effectively disenfranchising a swath of the poor and vulnerable.

At the end of the Obama era, the country was roiling. Social media had joined traditional media as a resource for the far right. The first female candidate stepped up. A 30 year veteran of public service and solid Democrat, she had been a first lady, a senator, and the Secretary of State under Obama. Her opponent was a dissolute old libertine real estate mogul who once had a hit reality TV show. Donald Trump.

It is clear that the 2016 election was not a fair one. The content of the Mueller report was too heavily redacted, once we were allowed to see it. If it had truly exonerated the Trump Campaign I am sure it would have been published everywhere. But it instead condemned him. He did not win the election honestly. A hostile foreign power gave him the Oval Office, and he used it like the good Russian Operative he is.

Those years were a living nightmare. Children in cages, Grift. A firehose of lies.

Then came the Pandemic. It shut down the entire world, but no country lost more that the United States, as the Trump Gang used the tools needed to fight it like a casino, and spread insane medical theories while silencing legitimate medical experts. The result was a huge backlash among the ignorant over masking and, eventually, vaccines.

2020 saw the death of over one million Americans. Some were unavoidable, no doubt, but at least 800,000 were preventable if we had a sane immediate federal response.

Then came the 2020 election, where Biden prevailed, in spite of the Republicans, now called MAGA, using every trick to try to steal it. After the loss and the six or seven recounts to verify the loss, the Trump Gang tried to overturn the election by force. They failed, but the top level organizers of the attempted coup were never brought to justice.

The Biden presidency was exceedingly successful in most ways. He joined with the moribund unions to bring prosperity back to average Americans. He attempted to pass a voter’s rights act to make sure the suppression and manipulation would stop, but it failed. The Supreme Court, now packed with followers of Donal Trump and utterly unhinged, overturned Roe v Wade. Women of childbearing age started dying of preventable causes. They die in hospital parking lots where the doctors within are too afraid to treat them.

Biden’s Department of Justice also failed to prosecute Donald Trump timely for his crimes, allowing him to squeeze himself in a the 2024 candidate. We all know how that turned out. Welcome to the New Fascist United States.

This is a bare bones political assessment of this century from the American viewpoint. It did not touch on the ecological problems or the damage to natural systems. For that, I must go to the global level.

It is not just the United States. The underlying fault is predatory capitalism, and it is global. Capitalism exists to serve a small group of obscenely rich predators. These predators have created a system where money is divorced from value, and financial capital is divorced from production. The chief products are sickness, war, and death.

I am not referring to small “c” capitalism involving private ownership of property or small business. What we have is global big “C” capitalism which has the force of religion and which is dismantling the earth upon which we all live.

Many of us have been worried about the effects of the modern world on natural systems our whole lives. I was born in 1956 and by the time I was 13 we were being warned. One would think that this would spur international cooperation on real solutions. One would think that fossil fuels would be outlawed as we find species-wide means of adaptation.

Not only did this not happen, instead we saw the opposite. A huge ACCELERATION in the use of fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and plastic, combined with a population on a J curve of growth and now treated as nothing more than fodder for cheap labor and subsequent consumption. All of this after 2000.

This planet is a CLOSED SYSTEM except for the gift of incoming solar energy. The conditions set by the Capitalist Overlords is simply unsustainable. The inevitable crash is underway. And that is the final aspect of the first quarter of this century that I will discuss here. The climate and ecosystems collapse.

The activities of post-modern capitalism have laid waste to thousands of ecosystems. It has interfered with the natural systems upon which all life depends. Now, instead of ceasing the behavior and starting to repair what can be repaired, the oligarchs are doubling down, all while totalitarian regimes grow in strength the world over. This is no accident.

There have been other bad periods in our United States history and in the history of the world. Humans have survived all of it. Perhaps we will survive this as well. But there is no doubt that the world is enduring a monumental shift with unfathomable problems. It is bad enough to have a name: the polycrisis.

We are 25 years in and everything is pointing to a hard crash. It may take another 25 years. If enough of us say NO and refuse to participate we could tip the scale, but we too must eat and have shelter.

Whatever the second quarter brings it looks to be “interesting”. As in, “hold on to your ass”.