The Swamp (no offense to real swamps)

Here are some things you might not have known:

In the United States Federal Government, there are 115 separate "agencies."

96 are independent executive agencies; and these have 268 separate component organizations.

The Federal Government employs about 2.8 million non-military people.

I live in Michigan, a fairly average state, where the state runs 18 Departments.

The states together employ around 22 million people.

So, combined federal and state employees total around 25 million: about 1 out of every fourteen American citizens.

These Federal and State agencies and departments together employ more people than there are in the entire US manufacturing sector.

Around 2 million of them are in the armed forces, with 811,000 or so part-time.

Law enforcement, federal, state, and local, employs about 1.1 million people.

In addition to that, 1.6 million Americans are employed by "defense" contractors, paying out about a trillion dollars a year; and though private, they still depend on the armed forces.

The US houses 2,220,300 prisoners, whose families extend by a factor of X.

Without China to provide 79% of the US demand for rare earth materials, we would not be communicating like this on a computer.

The US imports around 5 billion barrels of oil a day.

The defense-ification and computerization of the US economy has made the US totally dependent on imports to meet its demand for what are considered four "strategic minerals": chromium, cobalt, manganese, and platinum.

Chromium, as one example, is now predominantly produced in Turkey, India, South Africa, and Kazakhstan.

In these importing activities, with very few exceptions, there is a demonstrable unequal exchange that takes place, which makes even the most granular aspect of the American economy dependent upon exploitative relations abroad.

Currency fluctuates. If you create destabilizations in the relations described above, you can also destabilize (devalue) your own currency.

Speaking of destabilization, the climate has been decisively destabilized, which inaugurated an indefinite series of "environmental" crises which will increase in frequency and severity.

Water loss, severe and protracted drought, uncontrollable wildfires, shifting pest populations and diseases, biome shocks, disastrously powerful storms, floods, frost-and-thaw crop losses, killer heat waves, fishery exhaustion, and the general microtoxification of the human ecosphere, will create concomitant social dislocations and crises.

I want to see a political program that talks specifically about how we even begin to tackle these obstacles and challenges. Instead, we have moral proclamations imagined as future decrees. And the bureaucracy is the Big One. They actually run the government; and they have immense power.