Bert Picard is an activist, having retired as a Teamster truck driver who has organized with various unions and a workers' center over the decades.
GUILFORD-So the coup has happened.
The form of government built under Franklin Delano Roosevelt is finally being dismantled. It was a long time coming. The "Reagan revolution" was a big step. Bill Clinton collaborated. And so it went. Biden could be said to have tried weakly to stop the train, but too late.
But what is the meaning of this "DOGE revolution"? What forces is it responding to, and why now?
Beyond Elon Musk and Donald Trump lies something bigger. These historic actors appear on the stage of a crumbling empire. They are swept in as manifestations of historic forces greater than they are; in this case, not only this crumbling empire, but the decline of the industrial civilization built on fossil fuels.
What brought us Trump? The Make America Great Again movement came to life when late capitalism was no longer able to provide a rising standard of living for the mass of its people. The MAGA call is one of nostalgia, a longing for a supposed idyllic time - all wrapped up in misogyny, racism, hate, and fear, but responding to a capitalist system that failed in its promises.
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The energy shock of the 1970s, as well as the debt for the failed war on Vietnam, caused the first calls for "austerity" and for "cutbacks."
We saw the New York fiscal crisis of 1975, President Reagan firing the air traffic controllers in 1980 and the ensuing war on organized labor; the creation of the Rust Belt, as industries moved first South, then overseas, to save their rates of profit. MAGA was a response to the slowly declining standard of living of the working class, a decline I have witnessed.
But to be clear: The Green New Deal was as well a reactionary call, more nostalgia for a supposedly better time. Instead of MAGA's 1950s iron rule by straight white men, the GND pines for the days of FDR, big government projects, and the ultimate government works program: World War II. Ah, if we could only be on a war footing, but this time, a technological war against global warming!
Equally unrealistic.
Faced with the fear of an uncertain future, right and left want to run back to a supposed golden age.
But you can never go back. There is no longer the capital accumulation there was back then, relative to the costs of investing in highly automated production. Look around and you will see all the big capital investment projects around the world - harbors, railroads, airports - they are all Chinese capital now.
The U.S. used to do that in its heyday, in the 1950s and '60s. No more - the capital is just not there. And the Chinese economy is also slowing down.
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Capitalism is in crisis around the world, whether in its free-market form, as in the U.S. and Europe, or its state capitalist form, as in China.
We have reached a point in industrial civilization where we can see the writing on the wall - the wall we are on course to hit. Thus, the malaise of nostalgia.
Resource depletion is real, whether it is rare earths for batteries and electronics, sand for concrete, fertile soil, even oil and gas (fracking opened up new supplies, but they are not infinite).
And we are drowning in our waste: carbon dioxide is heating the Earth, causing great destructive storms and fires; plastics are choking our oceans; forever chemicals are everywhere in the water.
And still, we only know how to keep digging and burning and razing more rain forest for more soy for more burgers - and on it goes.
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Yet we know, deep down now, that this cannot go on forever.
But how to stop the machine? When gross domestic product stops growing even a percentage point, workers are thrown into misery, and governments fall.
Never mind the madmen Trump and Musk. All the cuts in human services, in human needs, will not solve the crisis. They will steal the capital - from the workers, from the poorest - to fund Musk's mad schemes to populate Mars (and enrich himself and his cronies along the way); but that too is temporary.
All the capital in our Social Security trust fund will not be enough to keep the wheels of capitalism turning indefinitely. And never mind the "adults in the room," the politicians, United Nations heads, economists, and engineers. They are as lost as we are.
A sign of how deep their crisis is: in the old days of oligarchs, Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, Rockefeller, and other robber barons made huge fortunes building things: railroads, coal mines, steel, ships.
Look at today. Modern capitalism is about finance and social control - moving money around to make money, Ponzi schemes, cryptocurrency schemes, hedge funds, selling us lies, making money from nothing; and creating nothing. A casino.
One can study history and see that civilizations rise and decline, usually on a bell-shaped curve. Neither the Romans nor the Maya disappeared overnight. There are often periods of gradual decline, as we have experienced from the 1970s oil shock to today.
There can be moments of dramatic change - maybe what will happen with the DOGE coup, if it succeeds.
But we, the working people, will be thrown back to a lifestyle more like the 1920s (work till you die, no social insurance, repression of unions, general misery).
For our grandchildren, health care and clean drinking water may be more of a privilege. For their grandchildren, the climate disasters will have wreaked so much destruction that they will be unable to rebuild after each hit.
Remember: Mother Earth will be the determinant, and whether we decide to help, or obstinately continue our destruction, will matter.
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Because it is only fossil fuels, beginning with coal, that made this industrial civilization possible at all, not "ingenuity." And no, there is no replacement for the vast amounts of easy-to- get energy concentrated in fossil fuels, and it is no service to anyone to pretend "green technology" can solve that.
Yes, solar and wind can help us humans live a comfortable lifestyle at a lower energy level than we are used to, but humans do not need unlimited industrial amounts of electricity: Capitalism does.
Heavy industry needs much more than humans. Fossil fuels were a gift of millions of years of compressed solar energy, which capitalism squandered recklessly to create vast fortunes over several centuries.
That epoch is dying. That is what underlines Musk, Trump, and DOGE. That is what we must wrap our heads around, even as we oppose these oligarchs: Yes, we fight them, but they are but the symptom of a much deeper predicament.
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Community, sharing, mutual aid, gratitude for nature's gifts, learning from our Indigenous brethren, humility, respecting all life as reciprocal beings (not as "resources"), living a gift economy and taking care of one another - this is what we have to carry us through what will be a great transition, which we can make worse or better through our actions. But we cannot avoid it.
We have no choice. The old is dying - Musk and Trump are but a manifestation of that - and the new is not yet born.
But the seeds of the new are already in our small towns, our city neighborhoods, everywhere we form associations for mutual aid, everywhere we take care of one another.
We know what to do. No one else will save us. And we are in it for the long, long haul.
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