Fuck you, fuck America, fuck Americans.
Yanks out!
That’s how democracy works though! It will take many generations of active work to change how the rest of the world sees USA let alone how USA sees USA
Until you get rid of trump and the republican party I am not interacting with the usa in any way. I have not spent one penny on anything from usa since he stole the election.
Okay Mr. Reich, present to us, the rest of the world, with how America will restore its reputation post-Trump, and rid of the tree that flowered and produced the fruit of cruelty?
- How will the “good people of America” deal with money in politics prioritizing financial needs over people’s needs?
- How will the “good people of America” remedy the corrupt Supreme Court that has all but enabled lawlessness of the President and executive branch?
- How will the “good people of America” deal with Congress that has completely absolved themselves of their Constitutional duties, and cede that power to corporate interests, the executive branch and partisanship?
- How will the “good people of America” deal with corporations that have consolidated and made the country into an oligarchy controlled by billionaires and shadow private equity?
- How will the “good people of America” re-assert the necessity of an independent news media?
- How will the “good people of America” reverse the brainwashing of the right-wing machine (religion, radio, TV, social media influencers etc.) causing us to forget about how to care for each other?
- How will the “good people of America” ensure that they are serious about international co-operation, and whatever pledges and promises made can’t be suicide bombed by the next geriatric narcissist?
- How will the “good people of America” reverse the dismantling of education that got them in this position?
While very difficult, it appears possible to address all of these non-violently, but we need more than strongly worded letters. The point is the world needs to see your quarter-millenial house-cleaning before we can even think about trusting you again.
They won’t and I don’t believe it is possible to do without violence, that’s the problem.
Your spokesperson represents you as your voice and your image abroad.
And your image abroad is …not good.
As an American, fuck this cowardly shit. Enough people voted for this or didn’t vote at all to make it happen. Americans walked right into fascism through laziness or complicity. Democrats in Congress are doing next to nothing to fight back against this regime because they don’t want to upset their SuperPAC donors. They’re relying on a windfall during the midterms so that they can get into power and then still do nothing like they have been doing since Reagan. A government is a reflection of the people in a democracy. We made our bed and now we have to lie in it. We cannot expect others to clean up the messes we create or to excuse our bad behavior when it’s inconvenient for us. This “but I’m one of the good ones” take isn’t good enough. Resistance has to be more than op-eds and impassioned speeches. We bombed a school. We killed innocent children. I have not heard a single other person in my life try to cope with the guilt of that. Our discussions lasted as long as the news cycle and everyone just moved on. My tax dollars help pay for a bloated military budget that was used to end the lives of little kids on the other side of the planet who were just trying to go to school. We as a people need to sit with the reality of that and process the guilt instead of immediately finding reasons we should be excused. Maybe after some self reflection on actions and consequences, will we make better choices.
I love Robert Reich, but he should know better. The world needs to deal with the US skeptically from now until we clean up our house. Until we get rid of Citizens United and big money in politics. Until we shore up our gerrymandered districts. Until we deal with healthcare in our country in a real, meaningful way. Until we start taking care of those who own the least and stop catering to those who own the most, we should be handled with a ten-foot pole by the rest of the world. How can we say anything about the splinter in any other country’s eye while we have a log in ours?
We are trying our best to resist him, contain him and remove him from office as quickly as we possibly can
No you’re fucking not.
If what they are doing is really “their best” then they are truly fucked.
And, frustratingly, they’ll take the rest of us down with them.
We are trying our best to resist him, contain him and remove him from office as quickly as we possibly can
No you are not. You’re eating fried chicken and attending sports events. The Indy 500 has now turned into the Nuremberg rally.
No one even questions why tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are pissed away on car sponsorship while toilets don’t even work in theatre of war.
You elected him twice. Feel bad? Do something about it
Yea it’s the second election that gets me. That was the exact moment it was “majority of Americans are stupid”.
Don’t overestimate the legitimacy of US elections. Voter repression is rife, before even getting into media ownership laws.
There are literally decades of news stories about people in majority black areas waiting hours to vote, even 11 hours. Imagine trying to do that if you’re sick or disabled, which is more likely when you’re a minority. Or if your job can fire you at will because there are no protections. Then there’s the gerrymandering to make that vote worthless anyway. And the voter ID laws, which again are harder for people from minority backgrounds to comply with. The corruption is systemic and started in the foundations.
The Obama and Biden administrations also chose not to pursue these problems. They didn’t want to set the “political witchhunt” precedent that conservative media were warning about.
Next election, I expect to hear about huge quantities of ICE “observers” at polling places.
I remember him abandoning an entire event on the campaign trail for an interview or something.
Another where he had them hit the music and he just swayed silently on the stage.
Watching him win again was surreal, even if we can ignore his entire clusterfuck of a first term.
Overthrow him and his whole crooked regime, then we’ll talk.
As an American, this gives me the ick. We can’t just go back to the way things were when Trump is gone and expect the world to be cool with us. We need some serious systematic reform before anybody should dare trust us again.
The Republican party and its enablers should be dismantled.
From a foreign point of view, your entire political system needs to be dismantled. It’s very obviously broken.
Exactly. The Democratic party is just as corrupt and beholden to special interests. Nothing is going to change until money is removed from politics and media owners removed, it’ll never get better.
As an American, fuck us. Trump is just a symptom of the disease, if we get rid of him and “go back to normal” then the world should expect someone like him to appear again, for all the same reasons.
We need your help fighting the global climate crisis.
I don’t like the framing of this because it makes it sounds like we’re somehow the leaders on this when we’re putting out 285% the per capita carbon emissions compared to the global average. It’s the same for the other stuff.
We have no grounds to ask anybody for anything until we get our shit together. And that means, at minimum, dealing with the far right and removing the influence of money on politics. We do not need anybody’s help projecting the influence of our diseased system globally.
Frankly, the fact that Trump has managed to convince the world not to support us in Iran the way they supported us in Iraq and Afghanistan is not an entirely bad thing, because we don’t need to be fucking around in any of those places and we don’t need anybody enabling us. Please don’t ever bail us out of anything we get into because of our stupid, evil military adventurism. We need to start feeling the consequences of our actions, or we’ll never learn.
100% agree, Americans are not blameless in this at all and they need to realize that. Respectfully, we’ll take your country seriously after you reform your democracy into something more robust and stable.
we’re putting out 285% the per capita carbon emissions compared to the global average
That’s probably discounting what it took to produce all the tsatskes in the first place, since the US pays China to eat that statistic.
Trump is a symptom of a sickness that has been brewing in the US for decades. The problems haven’t started with him and they won’t go away when he’s gone. The US is a nation of shadow kings built on a foundation of slavery and slaughter. The pieces on the board have changed over the years but the game plays the same.
A fight to restore the status quo is not going to bring the US’s spurned ex-allies back.
Americans elect their president to represent America. Sure, everybody might not fully agree with him, but democracy (if there’s some left) speaks for itself.
If POTUS is unhinged, whole America is unhinged. If POTUS is corrupted, whole America is corrupted. If POTUS can’t be trusted, whole America can’t be trusted. I could go on…
Mistakes can happen. People can be hoodwinked to vote for a snake.
The problem here people are still in full support of the snake while the snake is devouring them whole.
The author completely misses the point. Trump does in fact represent you. That’s how your system works.
But beyond that, the problem is deeper than him. He’s a symptom, not the disease. If the vaunted checks and balances worked, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. If there were a meaningful opposition, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. There were countless failures along the way that allowed the situation to get to where it is.
Even if you elect someone sane next time, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again.
How can anyone ever trust us as a country again? We’ve proven that every 4 years is a gamble where an insane moron could be put in charge. We’ve gone back on our word and betrayed our allies multiple times. If I were another country, I wouldn’t trust us ever again either.
