The last 30 days have validated the need for Strike-to-Amend perhaps more than any other period in the last century.
Trump’s 2025 Presidential Inauguration showcased American oligarchs. From front left to right, with net worth: Mark Zuckerberg ($246 billion; Facebook CEO); Lauren Sánchez with husband Jeff Bezos ($242 billion; former Amazon CEO); Sundar Pichai ($1.68 billion; Google CEO); Elon Musk ($400 billion; Tesla and SpaceX CEO). Those outside the frame include Miriam Adelson ($31 billion), Tim Cook ($2.2 billion; Apple CEO), Rupert Murdoch ($23 billion, owner of Foxnews, Sky News, etc.), Shou Zi Chew ($1.5 billion; TikTok CEO); Sam Altman ($1.2 billion, OpenAI CEO) (Photo credit: Shawn Thew-Pool/Spencer Platt/Getty Images).
Nobody has summarized this first month of Trump’s oligarchical reign better than Chris Hedges:
The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg monarch, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society...
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.
They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism…
When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”
“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
This kind of take-over has long been in the making, indeed. But people are inquiring more than ever: “What do we do now? What options are left?”
The doors to parliamentary reform have been shut. The meager checks and balances of the American system have been gutted. Raw corporate power has ceased the reigns.
Exceptional circumstances requires exceptional action.
Oddly enough, the answer to America’s ills are in America’s history itself: organizing mass movements and strikes to amend the United States Constitution. As pages on this website demonstrate, it is the only proven method to work when it comes to essential and lasting political reform in this country.
“But, what good is the Constitution when it’s being ignored?” That’s a fair question.
But this cynicism ignores three things:
- Revolutionary potential and change happens in the interim. Radical political change accumulates and then erupts – and then the world is in a different place. Many slave revolts have failed. But they built a movement that put fear in the ruling class so much that it eventually forced them to concede, ending the Atlantic slave trade. In the story of history, constitutional reform may be an essential step if not an end in itself.
- Debates and mass movements about constitutional reform will likely stir states to write their own constitutions and secede. If nothing but the Pentagon is left after the federal government is gutted, then the responsibility of governance and societal support falls on the states. The states will have to enforce the law, provide medical care and welfare supports, so that their own territories don’t fall into chaos and civil war. This doesn’t meant they will all be successful or take the risk of declaring independence from the failed United States. However, some will. Will it be Minnesota? California? Other states that have a history of dissenting political opinion? It’s hard to tell. What isn’t hard to tell is that peoples’ expectations of survival will likely be transferred from a failed federal government to state level government. And if such states choose to secede, that means they need new constitutional laws.
- Revolt is likely if new constitutional reforms aren’t enforced. If the people are willing to risk their jobs in a general strike to amend the constitution, I don’t think they’ll be any less angry if the government chooses to ignore those constitutional reforms–which include such essential steps as forgiving medical debt.
In short, even if Strike-to-Amend succeeds but its constitutional reforms fail to be consistently enforced, it can serve as a catalyst for either related kinds of political and social change, or paves the way continued disruption that demands real enforcement.
Regardless of the outcome, the days ahead of the American working class are bleak. Mutual aid networks, cooperatives, religious communities, and strong local governments with an interest in their communities are more important now than ever. And if local organizing takes place, the fires have been lit for something bigger and better.