Let's help advance democracy and social progress!

Never since the rise of Nazism in the early 20th century has democracy and social progress all over the world been so seriously challenged as in these last several years. In the 80’s we saw the virtual freezing of real income for working people in the Western world as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl took the helm and, with the aid of market fundamentalist economists like Milton Friedman, began to separate the haves from the have nots, those who “belong” from those who don’t.

The results have been boom-and-bust cycles resulting in low overall GDP growth, willful ignorance toward climate change, a shift of power from elected institutions to corporate entities, a wealth, income, and opportunity gap between rich and poor not seen since the Gilded Age, massive homelessness, and the suppression of natural talent by the privileged few for the sake of their own children.

In America, Donald Trump's reign of hatred and ignorance has finally been defeated. His career as a politician of national significance is over. Brazil's military goon Bolsonaro is just the next election away from disappearing. All over Western Europe, the right-wing populist parties are losing the momentum they won from the Protected content crisis and Trump's Electoral College victory against the express will of the American people. Their influence is waning. Russia's Vladimir Putin is coming under pressure from young people who are no longer ready to accept widespread corruption and incompetence from a pseudo-democracy, while the generals in Myanmar are finding that it isn't as easy to maintain a military coup as it was back in the '80s.

Now that America has returned to the world stage by rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and reaffirmed our commitment to NATO and multilateralism, the free countries of this world can work together once again to contain the Chinese Communist Party until democracy and freedom can begin to grow there, too. There's a tremendous amount of work to be done.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss what we expatriates — as multinational citizens of the world — can do to keep up this pressure and make sure that history's natural development toward a better, safer, and more humanistic world continues.