Attention Bajoran workers: the recent debt ceiling bill was not a victory in bipartisanship or a saving roll against some nebulous, ill-defined financial crisis. The oligarchy, assisted by both political parties, pointed a gun at the U.S. and global economies, and at the concept of democratic state oversight of taxation and economic oversight itself, and said ‘give us even more, and others less, or we will declare total economic warfare on the precariat and on nation states themselves,’ and the political leadership in the U.S. accepted it. They gave the oligarchic terrorists what they wanted. We don’t tax them. We don’t regulate them. The state itself exists only at their leisure. There is no practical purpose to the motions of democratic governance when finance has this much power and leverage.