- cross-posted to:
- us_news@lemmygrad.ml
- usa@lemmy.ml
Congress has made no efforts to secure more disaster relief funding... Congress is now in recess until November 12, and while Biden had considered calling Congress back into session early to approve more FEMA funding, there has been no progress.
I love how both parties are like "Sure, there's an election in a month. But fuck anybody who needs help. What the fuck do we care? People will vote for us just because they hate the other party."
Congress is now in recess until November 12
Is this effectively a 6 week paid vacation?
They hardly work at all. It's amazing how powerful simple propaganda can be - phrasing for example. They call their paid vacations "recesses" and Americans don't even pay attention.
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Ninja edit
I did a little googling.
How Many Days Congress Is in Session
According to federal records, the House works about two days a week and the Senate works a little more than that.
Well duh, when are they supposed to go on extravagant outings with all their lobbiests
As If legal insider trading isn't enough of a perk - they can have a working dinner and chomp on a $300 meal on the lobbyists dime. And they travel to Paris or London or wherever for free. They pretend they actually go to lectures on climate change when they sightsee. Meanwhile Evil Corp is greenwashing and their execs are laughing.
When else are they supposed to impregnate their mistresses... Or get an abortion for the last one for that matter?
They get this constantly.
Ideally it supposed to be so they can go home and meet with their constituents, but that never happens. They’re afraid of us.
In Ireland, before every election, we have what's called a "giveaway budget", where whoever is in government will give a bunch of random discounts and supports on stuff like electricity and college fees. They're supposed to make the government more popular before the election. They don't do anything to make economic conditions better and they're a pathetic attempt to make people like the government.
It's pure cynical politics, where for a month the government pretends to care. The USA can't even do that. They just let people in their country die, because they're spending all their money and time killing people abroad
In Poland we call that "election sausage" because in 90's it was literal sausage few times. The tradition is a lot older here though, around 400 years to the time of Commonwealth when magnates launched parties for nobles gathered in the election day.
Just 20 years ago a similar hurricane by the name of Katrina rocked the nation and was part of the 24 he news cycle for months. Katrina was (and rightfully so) a huge deal in America, and recognized as a mega traumatizing event.
It’s amazing to me how jaded the American public and media have become in that time, to where this disaster hardly even makes the news and is forgotten before it’s even joever.
I’m honestly not quite sure what to think of it. Have we become so calloused to the idea of climate change that this isn’t newsworthy? Is this more reflective of the corporate capture of media, and insurers not wanting to pay out for destroyed homes and lives? Or is this just secondary to the overriding effort to further a new war in the Middle East?
I think people no longer have the same expectations for the government to help them. The US government has told the public to go fuck themselves at every possible opportunity.
I think investors and the US government got a lot better at controlling the news during the Bush administration, and in the intervening 16-20 years, media people have built their entire careers in that environment. The state department gives the juiciest war news to people who parrot their press releases, so those people advance. The news companies are owned by billionaires with other more profitable investments than the news, who can block advancement for anyone who pushes a story that'd hurt one of those, including talking about climate change. People who do well in this sort of environment have had 20 years to float to the top, and don't need any special coercion to keep pushing the latest war and ignoring something that might be inconvenient to an investor.
The fact that these kinds of events are barely hitting the news cycle really shows how far we've progressed into a dystopia.
Like fuck the death toll, it's horrendous but regardless of how many people died, these are towns and cities that have literally been scoured off the fucking map. People need help, fuck
These stories are so sad to me, but also very interesting. A lot of people I think go through life thinking that if something like this happens, the system will work-- insurance will cover the losses, and if nothing else the government has their backs, when nothing could be further from the truth. These are honestly golden radicalization opportunities.
It's pretty bleak to see though, when people have to realize they have been thrown to the wolves
Unfortunately this usually gets them to go right, not left. And support the party that makes their lives worse.
You're presented with a major failing of government like this and then given two options: One party that expresses anti-government sentiment, and another party that currently presides over the agencies that failed and tells you that everything is fine and to not believe your lying eyes when you ask what they're going to do about the six feet of water in your basement.
Which way do you think people are going to go, and at what point does it no longer matter that the first option is defunding agencies that don't accomplish anything? The Democrats cannot blame Republicans for voting against their own best interests when they can't offer a worthwhile material alternative.
Did the hurricane victims even bother to hire lobbyists? How primitive.
Better to make more death in the world than to try to stop death, apparently. At least according to both parties in the US government
Whelp, I'm definitely predicting a Trump victory now. Time to place a bet and win some easy money.
I've seen bigger numbers as well, but I guess 200 is the official tally so far.
Whatever they're telling us you know it's gotta be way, way worse. They had to canvas all the houses in NOLA before they could get an accurate count. Not sure if that's been done yet, or being undergone
It’s currently ongoing. Same as Katrina they spray paint an X on the house with the number of dead and survivors they find.
It doesn’t, and notably there are a decent number of people who are still classified as “Missing” from Katrina. We’ll probably never know the exact number of people killed by this, it’ll be a range
My aunt worked for fema and resigned after spending a year of her own time data cleaning and annotating an image of the disaster damage database, only for HQ to go "thanks" and leave it to gather dust in archive.
Right now the missing count is in the thousands. And at this point with service restored to a lot of places a missing person is a dead person.
Many will never be found because they were buried under tons of debris and mud as the dams overtopped and filled the usually small streams and rivers with 100x more water than they've had in them in centuries.
Many bodies will only be recovered years from now as areas are rebuilt and the mud and dirt washed into the riverbanks is graded or eroded away.
Very real Tweets I have received:
Why is the government responsible for an act of God? Call your insurance company. Get what youre owed. Why is this confusing?
I'll take an imperfect democracy over a dictarship [SIC] every time and call it a win
Stein? Man, if I wanted a MAGA putin puppet I'd just vote for trump
Explain to me how student debt is somehow different from car debt, mortgage debt, and medical debt (!!!) such that borrowers should just be allowed to not pay it? Why is student debt special—especially when having a degree makes you MORE financially mobile.
So funny that a Trumptard is talking about being duped. The MAGAt cult is a sight to behold. [Response to a suggested 3rd party vote]
Why is the government responsible for an act of God? Call your insurance company. Get what youre owed. Why is this confusing?
Why is the insurance company responsible for an act of God? Call the government. Get what youre owed. Why is this confusing?
what do you mean? people living in the mountains of NC definitely had flood insurance.
I was pointing out how stupid the argument of the highlighted tweet was.
It's a non argument and the opposite can also be said about the government.
In this case, both insurance and the government have the duty to help their customers and citizens.
Heard a pretty harrowing story from my family there that a group of about 20 people came in for funeral, rented a big house in a rural area, and then the house was destroyed with them in it, killing them. Hearing all sorts of other things too, people being found dead in mud, under debris, etc. Everyone knows the death count must be much higher than just 200
Israel is just an arm of American military, not some independent actor.
"Just following orders" is not an acceptable defense. And people who make those orders should be shot too.
Both things can true at the same time. The system ear marks groups like this, arms them, and cultivates these beliefs.
The beauty of this particular scheme is that there's a whole history of doing this with these particular people in the west. A dynamic that has shaped both that culture by magnifying it's features as an ethnoreligion, and the surrounding culture by providing a release valve for internal contradictions without completely implicating the ruling class structure. As such, the reality is blended with "tropes" that can be used as an instrument in whichever way is convenient.
When this geopolitical blunder becomes too much to deny, expect them to tell you to hate Jews.
I hadn't even considered how jarring the political switch to antisemitism will be. Dems through a lens of nauseatingly misused left-adjacent points, and Reps with more overt racism and exciting language. If the NYT runs an article called "Were the Alt-Right right about Israel?" I'm putting my fucking head right in the lathe next
That's what has prompted my ruminating about this whole situation. My husband is ethnically Jewish, by 3rd Reich standards so is my son. We have had strained family and friend relationships as a result of the whole ordeal. I have nothing to do with any of this. I could tolerate a situation where I am a political prisoner, but anything with my child I just can't fathom.
And of course, I can't talk to any of my in laws or estranged Jewish friends because they are just conditioned to be like "yeah that's why we need Israel at all costs" while they just further dissociate and double down and contribute to fomenting a situation that affects me and mine. It's maddening.
Ok, so what do you mean by the US is cucked then? Your contempt is justified, I am not implying you're antisemitic.
Doubling down doesn't make your bullshit antisemtic trope look any better
This is antisemitic trash. The power dynamic is the other way. Don't fall into this shit
I don't think the power dynamic is the other way. Netanyahu, Biden and every other American politician are just conjoined in their principled zionism and genocidal tendencies. The US has some interest in keeping the entire region destabilized, yeah. But that's hardly the point.
I'd argue that the power dynamic is the other way, but the more important fact is that "Manifest Destiny" and all the other genocidal tendencies of the west cannot be untangled.
Zionism is the expression of "Manifest Destiny" (and "Rule Britannia" and other European imperialism) in west Asia; it is part of their larger system of global imperialism, genocide, and destabilization. The US and the collective west does not have "some interest" in keeping the region destabilized- it has its entire interest there (while also having its interest simultaneously elsewhere), because it is pursuing global domination and hegemony, a hegemony that will only ever be secure if they were to genocide off or enslave and cull much of the entire rest of the planet. The US (and the collective west, all of which also is banking on the Eurocentric/Atlanticist system of genocide and imperialism remaining) cannot hope to maintain global hegemony if west Asia- the crossroads between Africa and east and west Eurasia- falls out of its grasp. They also cannot hope to maintain global hegemony if the Pacific does, or Latin America does, or the natural resources of Africa does, etc- or if large nations like China, Russia, India, and the rest of BRICS are allowed to develop such that their peoples have the same means, the same dignity and opportunities as the west- well, you get the gist. They require dominance (and that dominance can only be secured through mass destruction/genocide) and destabilization across the entire globe, or their free ride off the rest of humanity's backs is over.
American Manifest Destiny may have had its differences with Zionism in the early days- and it had its differences with Nazi Lebensraum, and Rule Britannia, Francafrique, and the Spanish/Portuguese empires and their worldview of the "treaty of Tordesillas" dividing the world between the respective nations- but eventually, they all coalesced together (with the US championing and marshalling the western nations in trying to maintain their dominance over the majority of humanity).
But that's hardly the point.
Okay, what is the point? If you're saying Isreal controls the US i can't see how your point is anything but antisemetic
If you're saying Isreal controls the US
Netanyahu, Biden and every other American politician are just conjoined in their principled zionism and genocidal tendencies.
It's pretty obvious what I actually said. Nobody 'controls' anyone. The zionist political project is something that unites all sorts of american politicians, be they the President of the US or a brooklyn born Prime Minister of Israel. There's no seniority between neighbors. Which is why, for an example, John Mearsheimer only argues that the american president needs to be more forceful towards Israel in the preservation of of the Zionist colonial project. That's the greatest divergence you can find in US politics.
You have it backwards though, the US does this because it finds the destabilization of the middle east convenient to its strategic interests. Israel is the US's rabid attack dog that the US has given a very slack leash. Materially there's no way for Israel to control the US's actions. BurgerPunk is correct.
