It turned out that they have something much more valuable than money, talent, or resources. Something that’s devalued in

As has been so often the case in recent weeks, these recent revelations have served as yet another sobering reminder of just how fragile what’s left of our democracy really is. We may have defeated the fascist this time, but who’s to say we can rely on a few wealthy men to pressure the next one who comes along in the right direction? Are we really prepared to exit this moment, go “back to brunch” like it never happened, and pretend as though there’s no reason to be concerned any longer? As I have said now countless times before, for a multitude of reasons too numerous to list, all signs point to the country being in for some dark days ahead.

These questions are as old as time. And so far — if you ask me at least — the answers that we have aren’t really working. The human race remains as violent and predatory and stupid as it has always been. But don’t call me a pessimist. Think with me, my friend. Learn. Let us reflect and contemplate together, like fellow travellers on this dusty and strange road.

There are a handful of societies in the world who managed to beat Covid. What’s remarkable about them is that they’re not the ones you might expect. At the beginning of this pandemic, the predictions went like this: the pandemic would ravage the poor world, and spare the rich, powerful West.

We all want this miserable year to be over. For this miserable plague to go away already. And after Donald Trump, then Covid. But let us first learn the lesson of the last year. It goes like this.

“More than 100 business leaders who plan to ask the Trump administration to immediately allow the presidential transition to begin have also discussed cutting off donations to Senate Republicans facing runoff elections to force the party’s hand.

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was pretty sophisticated but the active day-to-day implementation of AI or Machine Learning was quite old. Highly sophisticated algorithms looked a bit more like Kalman Filters, Support Vector Machines, and maybe even a Random Forest.

As has been so often the case in recent weeks, these recent revelations have served as yet another sobering reminder of just how fragile what’s left of our democracy really is. We may have defeated the fascist this time, but who’s to say we can rely on a few wealthy men to pressure the next one who comes along in the right direction? Are we really prepared to exit this moment, go “back to brunch” like it never happened, and pretend as though there’s no reason to be concerned any longer? As I have said now countless times before, for a multitude of reasons too numerous to list, all signs point to the country being in for some dark days ahead.

Joe Biden won the election in what even Donald Trump would have referred to as a landslide, considering that’s what he called it when he won the electoral college vote by the same margin in 2016. It should also go without saying that Joe Biden also won the popular vote by a comfortable margin, earning more votes than any other Presidential candidate in U.S. history. Is it not even just a little bit disturbing that a letter and some phone calls from a handful of executives threatening to pull funding from two Senate races in a single state carried more weight than a multi-million popular vote victory and sizable electoral college lead in the decision to begin the transition of power? Am I the only one finding it ominous that a few wealthy executives hold the stability of the entire country’s democratic process in their hands? Should we not be concerned that what’s left of the nation’s stability all depends on what Wall Street determines serves their best interests?

The executives plan to send a letter on Monday demanding that Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, stop blocking President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team’s work, according to The New York Times.

The world’s top performers against Covid? Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea. They’re not just mostly Asian — they’re also far, far poorer and less powerful than the West. Even Africa, blighted by centuries of enslavement, has done better than the West. Why? How did this come to be? After all, these societies have a) less money b) less “talent” c) fewer resources. Everything you can imagine was stacked against them.

Putting aside how this probably had everything to do with preserving their stock portfolios from the volatility that a constitutional crisis would create, and not “preserving democracy” as the article went on to state that they had claimed, it seems fairly clear that this was in fact the underlying motive for Trump’s decision to waver.

And yet — strikingly — just the opposite has been true. The West is the one that’s been ravaged by Covid, and it’s most powerful nation, the USA, is the society with the worst outcomes on the planet. Nine of the world’s top ten Covid hotspots are American states.

There’s a lesson that we should have learned from Covid. The big We. As a world, as societies, a human beings, as inhabitants of planet earth. It goes deep. All the way. Past politics, economics, all the superficial dross that surrounds us, deficits, left, right, budgets, cuts — the nostrums shouted at us by a hundred pundits a thousand times a day. So deep that it cuts to the truth of who we really are, when you take away the labels.

…The group includes executives at many top financial firms, including Accenture, Blackstone, and KKR. Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzmann, a loyal Trump ally who spent $27 million this year backing the president and the Republican Party, did not join Blackstone President Jon Gray in signing the letter. He has issued a separate statement urging Trump to move on and accept defeat.”

At the end of the day, can any of us really be surprised that it came down to this? After all, in American politics, there is little that concerns our lawmakers more than their money, and preservation of power. Donald Trump’s antics were only going to be tolerated as long as the donor class determined it was not going to cost them, and the moment they decided they were tired of it, the game was effectively over. After all the blustering, the court cases, the vehement assertions that he was the true winner of the 2020 election, and the unapologetic bending of democracy to the brink, all it took was a few phone calls from their donors, reminding Republicans who owns them to get them to essentially roll over.