National Politics

Gasoline Prices 1980 2022

I skim a lot of stuff on the internet and I think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on. To me, it looks like the Democrats are systematically destroying our country. I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like to me. I quit looking at any of the major media players because I kept coming across stories that sounded like bullshit. Maybe I'm just not looking at things the right way, or maybe I haven't seen the light, but here's where I am and to me it looks like the Democrats are just plain evil.

Now if a majority of the voters in this country felt like me, we could be sure that come the elections this fall the Democrats would be booted out on their rumps and a new batch of upstanding, Republican citizens would be sworn into Congress. But I'm not sure how much of the federal government's malfeasance is apparent to the average voter. About the only thing that is going to be apparent to everyone is that gas prices are now five dollars a gallon which seems outrageous when gas cost two dollars a gallon two years ago, but how many people remember that? It was so long ago it seems like a dream. People who live in big cities have surely noticed the increase in the number of homeless people camped out on city sidewalks, but again, it's been going on for so long it becomes hard to remember if there ever was a time when there weren't homeless people camped on the sidewalks.

I don't watch the news on broadcast TV, but a big proportion of voters still do. Digital is making gains, and while there is more diversity in the digital realm, I suspect there are a few big players who have the largest audience share and it probably mirrors what's coming from broadcast news. 

I'm not sure it matters, because the vast majority of news is propaganda, and propaganda is designed to tell people what they want to hear. If you think things are going great, you're going to listen to people tell you things are going great. If you think the world is going to hell, you're more likely to listen to people who agree with you.

Anyway, I don't know which way the wind is blowing. I hope it's blowing the right way, but I have no clue.

And what if the mid-term elections do result in the wholesale replacement of Democrat Congressmen with Republicans? Will we any better off? Maybe, Republicans seem to be slightly better grounded in economics, but given the quagmire we are in I'm not sure they will be able to stop or even slow our headlong plunge into catastrophe. And the Republicans are just as much in bed with the big industrial complexes as the Democrats, so we probably won't see any changes there. The Democrats have shown a big bias to the medical- and educational-industrial complexes. If the Republicans gain the upper hand we might see a shift toward the military-industrial complex.

We really need a new party that doesn't have these longstanding understandings with the giant corporations, but getting a new party off the ground, much less gaining a foothold in Congress is going to be a giant uphill battle that will take decades. You are going to need an army of dedicated true believers, and where are you going to find the financing to fund that? And who is going to decide whether your faith is pure enough? Gah. We're doomed.