Anora is the Future of the USA

First of all, the good news is that spring is coming. I saw an Eastern Bluebird at the mountain biking trailhead behind the community college, one of the places they like to congregate. They always make me smile. We can all use something like that, these days. I was pleasantly surprised when Anora swept the Oscars, and Flow won Best Animated Feature, and I’m Still Here won Best Foreign Film. All excellent and worth your time (as is Nickel Boys, which should have won best Adapted Screenplay, in my opinion.)

There’s typically a backlash against the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. Anora is no exception; to the loudmouths of the Internet, it is either exploitive, “woke,” reactionary, overrated, oversexed, or all at the same time. A young woman winning the Best Actress award for a daring, bombastic role as an unapologetic sex worker is bound to be attacked by misogynists and prudes alike. Mikey Madison was amazing in the role. I know two former exotic dancers and she played the role with authenticity.

Why do some Americans hate this movie? Because they see their future.

Anora is about a hard-working young person who makes the best of the ugly capitalist system, who is lured, betrayed, beaten, and used by a rich family who has enough money to ignore the rule of law. If you read the news, this is what we are all experiencing right now.

They are selling off federal buildings, national park land, forests, and other assets to build a “Sovereign Wealth Fund,” a private equity firm that won’t be answerable to voters, despite being built with our stolen wealth. They want to privatize Amtrak and the United States Postal Service, and the latest mass firings are at the Veterans Administration, where they want to unemploy 80,000 people. The executive administration has ignored court rulings and laws passed by Congress, because they control the Department of Justice and the U.S Marshals Service, who would enforce the laws and rulings. Here’s to seeing if they ignore the Supreme Court ruling that says they can’t freeze funds allocated by Congress.

If you read the news and wonder if the Republicans know that tariffs, mass firings, and making enemies of our trade partners will crash the once booming economy, the answer is: YES.

That is their intention. Look at the 2009 bank crisis and the recession during the Covid pandemic; the ultra-rich benefited from both, as big companies gobbled up smaller ones, private equity bought up properties—which is why the administration obsesses on “Returning to the Office,” because equity bought up real estate—and the little people, us, lost billions in collective wealth. This is called “disaster capitalism¹” and they used it to push charter schools after Hurricane Katrina, create the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, and so on. They can’t wait for the next disaster, so they are creating one.

Jess Piper hits the nail on the head; they know what they are doing, and it is a mass redistribution of wealth to give the oligarchs even more of our money:

I Know Exactly What They Are Doing

I found Jess Piper via Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson. Her daily newsletter can be a lot, but it is an excellent review of current events through the lens of American history.

The Project 2025 plan is to return us to a pre-New Deal country where the oligarchs, or to use the American preferred term, robber barons, are given free rein, and small businesses and working people pay the majority of taxes, whether through income, sales tax, tariffs, or all three. You see, paying a measly average of 11% tax—about three times what us little people pay—is too much for these greedy gluttons. They have been destroying the public education system for decades, so that we won’t miss it when they do away with it. The Russian oligarchs looted their own country and made elections a joke, where Vladimir Putin gets 94% of the vote every year, and they provided a blueprint for the Republicans and the Robber Baron class to bring that here: through culture wars.

Wait, won’t they suffer, too? The very rich have methods of insulating themselves from the effects of mass poverty and infrastructure decay. My friend Josh told me of when his brother visited a rich family in Mexico, who were followed by armed guards in black SUVs whenever they left their gated and armored compounds. We already have gated communities and private security in the United States, private schools, and they can fly to countries that administer vaccines, on private jets, if they like. The yearly flu vaccine looks to have been cancelled, so expect more deaths of the vulnerable from influenza this year. With the vaccine, 47,500 die on average in the U.S., annually, according to the CDC (which apparently forgot to delete that webpage.)

The tariffs will hurt small and local businesses most, and they will be bought up. People who can’t pay mortgages, and small landlords, will sell to private equity. Retirees who can’t survive on reduced Social Security will work until they die; desperate people will take the underpaid jobs the deported immigrants were doing. We’ll fight each other because there will be no way to change things within the system. Social media will ensure that.

I don’t believe the parties are “the same” at all, but the Democratic politicians are playing it safe because they know they are safe. They’ve all got a cushy gig pretending to fight back right now, and are tired of us asking them to do something. We could take back the House, but it will take more than holding up tiny signs. They ask us to vote—and there are three special elections in Republican-held districts that we could flip—but I don’t hear anyone asking their billionaire pals to flood those districts with ad money. We need to ask our Congresspeople why they didn’t join Representative Al Green in actual protest, and who the Democratic candidates are in these flippable districts, and why they aren’t campaigning for them.

Remember that they want to crash the economy, so when you blindly follow “no buy” days from questionable social media accounts and grifters, you are playing into their hands. Buy from local and small businesses, always. I’m still buying from Costco, and a local grocery franchise. The farmers markets will be open soon. Find a local newspaper that isn’t owned by a billionaire. REI has been stifling union activity; I use BackCountry now. These choices are exhausting, when you can only vote every four years, it’s something to do. When they dissolve the FDIC, you may want to ensure any savings you have aren’t in one basket, especially if it’s a small, regional bank that may fail. Find local mutual aid groups before you need one. As for protests, I’m not here to tone police anyone. They will use the Insurrection Act no matter how polite and milquetoast the protest is. It’s why they hired a Secretary of Defense who would not answer when asked if he would use the Armed Forces against American citizens.

Despite all of us, I am hopeful. People are standing up. They know now what is at stake, from National Parks, to civil rights, to a rollercoaster economy with a sabotaged safety net. Stay safe, and take care of each other. No one else will.

1. I first read about in The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.