Marc Murphy and Dan Canon on Tuesday's election.

Marc Murphy is an attorney, freelance cartoonist and the editorial cartoonist for the Louisville Courier Journal. His comment appeared at Facebook.

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Broken.

Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, America is broken in a way the removal of Donald Trump alone cannot fix. In the way cell phone video has exposed the brutal racism of our nation to those who are finally willing to believe with their eyes what our black neighbors have been telling our ears for generations, the pandemic has exposed our economic and social infrastructures for the wealth-serving, draconian frauds they have been at least since the rich convinced the white poor that taxes exist only to build a road to communism. The so-called political “division” hasn’t for a long time been between citizens of good faith with differing strategies to create a better country, there is in most respects now simply a right side, and an irredeemable wrong side.

Even if he loses - and in the unlikely event he concedes without trying to finally execute our democracy - millions upon millions of Americans will have voted for a man who has moved past pretending to care about the truth, about the Constitution, about the world, or about anything other than his own immoral interests. These millions, many of whom you know, work with, attend soccer games with, and even celebrate holiday meals with, will have voted for him for reasons well known and well-explained elsewhere. For some of them increasing their own wealth through the stock market, by lowering taxes, and even by protecting their suburban property values is the limit of their interest in the “politics” they otherwise sneer at because they are insulated from the cruel world for others they help build.

Far more of those millions of Trump voters, however, are either the unwitting victims of the very economic and social strategies they support, or have decided that protecting what has become their white Christian (in name only) world is worth the sacrifice. These are broad descriptions but more detailed analyses paint these voters in no better light: The Catholics, for instance, dishonoring the Church’s social justice - truly Christ-like - tradition by supporting a man and a party who violate the Commandments and The Beatitudes daily in exchange for a so-called Pro-Life vote.

The pandemic rolled into the United States like the Germans into Poland because this nation - without universal health care, without guaranteed basic income, without even a national impulse to care for others institutionally - was quite literally the least-prepared and most vulnerable allegedly developed country on the planet. Not only was there no national strategy there were lies, disorganization and self-interest in its place. The states were left to decide that, ultimately, families and business could ironically only afford to survive the virus financially if they were forced to risk surviving it medically by “opening up”. The simple act of wearing a mask became weaponized and used by the President himself as a way to identify the weak, and his enemies. The United States of America in 2020 decided, quite intentionally, that hundreds of thousands of deaths of mostly old and disproportionately non-white citizens were acceptable collateral damage. Like it always had.

America isn’t great. In its history when it was doing great things it had its foot on the necks of the descendants of slaves and 155 years after the end of the Civil War and even after these last months of marching we expect gratitude because *maybe* there will be revised Use of Force standards or some such thing for the police. The Democratic Party spent hundreds of millions of dollars this campaign cycle supporting candidates who can’t really distinguish themselves from their Republican opponents and even hope to appeal to Trump voters. America doesn’t have a tradition of a true opposition party and that’s why we live less in a democracy and more in an oligarchy, in which power and wealth continues to be more consolidated in the hands of a few, and the systems are perverted to serve only their interests. Interests that pay no taxes, because their private helicopters and 3-ton SUVs don’t need new roads, they pay for their own healthcare and private schools, and they don’t give a shit about you. We should eat cake, they would say.

There are no gallows outside our Bastille. But fundamental change can come through non-violent means and there were candidates this cycle willing to take the first steps down what will be a hard road. “Decency” is nice, but it doesn’t buy a child’s surgery, it doesn’t fix her school, it doesn’t pave her road or provide— how is it I’m writing this in 2020? - clean drinking water. “Decency” doesn’t remake our militarized police departments from the ground up. “Decency” doesn’t make the minimum wage a livable wage. “Decency” tells everyone to be patient. We’ve been patient too long. Hundreds of thousands died because of it, and hundreds of thousands more will. Tuesday has to be a beginning, not the end.

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Dan Canon lives in the neighborhood. He replied, also at Facebook.

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Every last word of what Marc Murphy says here. I'm an avowed optimist, but that optimism is very big-picture these days - like, humanity's probably gonna be okay. But America is probably not. I'm looking down the road and trying to spitball outcomes that don't leave us a third-world country with a strongman dictator in another decade (at best), and I don't see very many. Murphy's no cynic. Both of us have had up-close looks at the institutions that run our lives, and they are very, very fucked.

I predict Trump loses on Tuesday, but what happens as a result? What comes after Trump? What happens when the GOP comes up with a younger, healthier, fascist pig - one who's capable of tying his shoes and speaking above a third-grade level?

Rough seas ahead, mates.

ON THE AVENUES: I'm voting for Biden. Otherwise it's Trump's burgeoning fascist GOP death cult.

photo credit

It’s bizarre the way that memories can stay with us for decades, and then we awaken to find it's hard to recall what we had for lunch yesterday.

For instance, I still remember watching a very scary B&W horror flick when I was a little kid, so terrifying that it still resonates decades later.

In one of the pivotal scenes, a scientist is attacked in a cave by his own mutant creation, a gigantic monstrous blood-sucking vampire spider, which drains the man of all his bodily fluids, leaving him shriveled and bleached out, pasty pale, suitable for nothing except empty calories for the carrion flies.

But let’s not dwell on Mike Pence’s deathly pallor in his debate with Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

I hear the fly wants his money back: "Where's the beef?"

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And so finally the election draws near.

Don’t worry.

I’m not about to climb down from the dizzying heights of the hill upon which I am fully prepared to drink (to die? Seriously? I wouldn’t consider DYING for these amoral, greedy schmucks – and that’s just the NFL owners), this looming height being my deep, pervasive and abiding disgust with America’s fraudulent two-party political duopoly.

As a genuine social democrat trapped in an anti-intellectual milieu filled with progressive poseurs who can’t muster the chutzpah to contest the dimwits on the other side, my hostility to the Democratic Party peaked in early March, when the capitulating centrists pulled every last string, called in all the necessary markers, and vanquished the party’s left wing.

Had I chosen, I might have devoted this column’s weekly inches ever since April to the myriad failures of the Democrats, beginning with our vacuous local party elites here in the New Albanian swampland, then scaling the slimy pole of unprincipled aff/inf/luence until the Democratic National Committee itself came into view, at which point I would be compelled to excuse myself, step away from the laptop, and slip into a Hazmat suit.

Of course, as damning as the indictments capable of being made against the Democrats, the Republicans have devolved spectacularly from merely objectionable into a drain-circling death cult, of which I’ll have more to say in a moment.

In the sense of our hallowed two-party system of spoils, irrespective of which “side” one chooses to inhabit (to squat?), politics today is a dismal, depressing and depraved journey into the very dark heart of human dysfunction.

By extension, this same old song and dance in American idiocy would have remained roughly the same as always in 2020 if not for the emergence of the COVID-19 virus and the pandemic that followed. Literally for once in our lives, there was a new twist in the tale.

One “side” is failing this test far more spectacularly than the other, and they're the ones I'll be voting against.

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We’ve observed previously that the COVID-19 virus opportunistically targets vulnerable human physiologies. But the extent to which it has done precisely the same in terms of weakened human psychologies and belief systems simply cannot be underestimated.

We’ve seen already thin remaining layers of civility and sensibility stripped away. The science deniers have “enchantingly” multiplied not unlike Pence’s spider-victim-fly diet of pure excrement, waxing orgasmic as they’ve urged old folks to take one for the greater glory of the stock market. The owners of capital meanwhile have used the occasion to double down, while for the rest of us the economy seized up.

Then the deeper ugliness came forward, the accumulated bile, conspiratorial gibberish and raw hatred, much of it borne of generations-long cognitive dissonance, exploding from the ranks of the right-wing’s white know-nothings as Black Lives Matter demonstrations explicated the systemic persistence of racism and absence of social justice.

Through it all, numerous previous unaddressed crises – climate change, health care, income inequality, basic human rights – didn’t exactly disappear.

To be sure, not every Democrat got the pandemic response memo, and even a few Republicans quietly sidestepped their own party’s institutionalized inadequacies, but the primary outcome of the virus’s own truth-revealing capabilities has been the surgical exposure of the GOP’s fundamental(ist) fascination with dying for the “cause.”

And the cause itself? Someone else’s, as it always has been. Mostly the “cause” of bigger money, with a jot or two of apocalyptic religion, wrapped in a flag, although it’s never clear with these retrograde fantasists whether they mean an American or a Confederate flag.

The Republican death cult is the inevitable outcome of five decades spent busily espousing and later gleefully implementing neoliberal, survival-of-the-fittest economic orthodoxy, as abetted by hypocritical end-times Christian theocrats, and washed down with enough white supremacist Kool-Aid to float a fleet of oil tankers.

We should hardly be surprised at this acceptance of death as inevitable. For years, conservatives have responded to gun violence with angry renunciations of any links to gun proliferation or lax gun control laws, offering instead “thoughts and prayers.” The one exception where Republicans express outrage is over the “death” of fetal cells inside women’s bodies—indicating that the fight is less about “murder,” as the anti-abortionists like to call it, than it is about controlling women’s bodies. By and large, the nation’s right-wing factions have for years wanted us to accept mass deaths and preventable mortality as a price for our “freedom.” They expect the same during a pandemic.

But the Republican death cult truly pole-vaulted over the tipping point, and left Democrats in the dust, when BLM became part of our daily discourse, illustrating that James Baldwin’s words ring more presciently than ever before:

When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says “give me liberty, or give me death,” the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

Structural racism, white fragility, white supremacy – all of it tied neatly together over a period of four centuries.

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As malicious and looney-bin ludicrous as Donald Trump most surely remains on an everyday basis, allow me to remind you for perhaps the last time that he’s merely a symptom, and symbolic of the rotting disease within.

Trump’s a salesman with only one product, himself, and one true skill, which is enabling the truly dangerous fascists to worship him as an “answer” and purchase the snake oil.

Bullshit.

If it makes sense to you, as it does to me, that to be white is to be racist by nurture, and if whites as yet are the majority in America, if inexorably declining in terms of raw numbers compared to non-whites – and if whites overwhelmingly support Trump in 2020, as in 2016, then logically, Trump is the fruition of American history to the present time, not an aberration at all.

And, if American history since the Reagan era has been an exercise in unfettered capital accumulation by wealthy elites, enabled by neoliberal economic policies on BOTH sides of the duopoly’s aisles, but as always the very heart of the Republican Party’s preference for oligarchies and extractive, robber baron capitalism as its worst, then once again, Trump is a culmination of sorts.

Guns, money and Jesus; that a majority of white “Christians” find it expedient to indulge the worst demons of their nature with respect to racial and cultural distractions merely suggests that Abraham Lincoln’s conception of “better” angels was wishful thinking at best.

Trump’s siren call is for whites to reaffirm their superiority, the supremacist snowflakes having been shaken to the core by the Obama presidency. If lots and lots of us, up and down the spectrum, can make a blood sacrifice of death via COVID, that’s just icing on their cow pies.

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Yes, I dislike the DNC, the Democratic Party’s hawkish warmongers, its centrist "liberal" cowardice, the neoliberal economic gutting, and the sheer volume of hypocrisy existing on the left side of the aisle.

Why, then, am I voting for Biden and Harris?

Because of the GOP’s death cult.

Because there comes a time when triage is paramount, and the bleeding must be stopped.

Because while there is no guarantee matters will improve with Biden, there is no chance of improvement with Trump, only further degradation.

Electing Biden and the Democrats won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult.

(The short answer involves racism/caste, a misplaced sense of powerlessness, and no more comprehensive an education than an ordinary house fly.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering buffoon from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead for self-deception.

Personally, up ticket, it will be all Democrats for me. Locally, in spite of the GOP’s ethical chasm, a precious few Republicans will nonetheless receive my vote. One is an incumbent who’s right for the job. Another is a protest vote against the prevailing NAHS student council nepotocracy.

The third is Greg Roution, a man I've never once met. He’s a Republican running for coroner against Anthony Oxendine, a funereal circus-master who once tried to sneak a crematorium through the back door into my neighborhood and became all doofus petulant when his bluff was called. 

That's all, folks. Go out and vote, vote against the death cult's vulgarians, and don't forget:

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October 1: ON THE AVENUES: Welcome to the last will and testament of NA Confidential. 

September 24: ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss. 

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

Keith Olbermann is back: "The Worst Person in the World 10/07/2020."

 

It's nice to have Keith Olbermann back. 

Fire Donald Trump: "We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win."

There are times when it's necessary to stop the bleeding first, then determine what's to occur next. This triage scenario is peak 2020. 

I may, or may not, return to this depressing topic in this week's ON THE AVENUES. It's an article in the works for almost two months, with the lightning speed of daily news cycles rendering moot every effort at topicality.  

But I'm not sure it's necessary to know any more than we do already. Electing Biden won't resolve the fundamental problem of why 60+ million Americans have alchemized a narcissistic con man into a deity, and come together to fluff his personality cult. 

(Short answer: racism/casteism and a misplaced sense of powerlessness.)

It will, however, remove at least one blithering idiot from the daily news cycle, so maybe...just maybe...we can convince 10% of the 60 million that the issues go far beyond the charlatan-in-chief, who is little more than a figurehead.   

Fire Donald Trump: We have no illusions about Biden, but we need him to win, at The Nation

 ... Voting Trump out of office will not in itself heal the terrible wounds inflicted on our body politic over the past four years. But it is the absolutely necessary first step. That means voting for Joe Biden—through early voting wherever possible or by absentee or in-person voting when necessary.

We have no illusions about Biden, who—as we reported here last November—removed bankruptcy protections from student loans, helped write the bill that barred states from capping interest rates on interstate banking, and spent a career in the Senate carrying water for Delaware’s credit card industry. The idea that Biden is some kind of sleeper agent for socialism is a cruel joke, as is the claim that he is a closet radical.

The Democratic primaries did include some candidates and ideas that truly are radical. Bernie Sanders—The Nation’s preferred candidate—articulated a vision of Medicare for All and an America where health and education and economic security are human rights. Elizabeth Warren opposed Biden’s favors for the banks and ran on a platform of taking on the monopolist millionaires and robber baron billionaires who have rigged our economy. Yet both of them are voting for Biden.

So are Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky, and Jesse Jackson ...

Hold On, I'm Comin'.

It's where my head is heading.

We have the ability to have those fights on offense under a Biden presidency while we are likely to be almost entirely on defense under a second Trump adfarm-near-me/">ministration.

It's a sensible plan, seeing as for a lefty like me, there is nothing whatever to recommend Biden apart from who he is not. Honesty is good policy in such an instance.

A Militant Union’s Strategic Case for Joe Biden, by John Nichols (The Nation)

Instead of portraying Biden as “a savior,” the United Electrical union argues for beating Trump and then pressuring the Democrats.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, an 84-year-old independent union with a history of prioritizing working-class solidarity over party politics, has come to the conclusion that the best strategy is to level with the 35,000 workers it represents in manufacturing industries and public- and private-sector jobs.

UE is not feigning enthusiasm for Biden. Instead, in a stark assessment of the race issued just before the traditional Labor Day pivot into the fall campaign, the union’s general executive board acknowledged that “working people deserve a government, and a president, who will stand up for them against the corporate onslaught of the past several decades. Under both Republican and Democratic adfarm-near-me/">ministrations, greedy corporations have destroyed good jobs, attacked our unions and devastated our communities. We have to be honest that the 2020 elections will not deliver that president.”

Unions often go overboard when it comes to talking up Democratic nominees. But UE officials are taking a different tack as they communicate with workers in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania.

“We are clear that Biden is no savior, and will likely seek to implement the same kind of corporate-friendly policies as previous Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton,” admits the union statement. But, it adds, there is also clarity about something else: “The working class cannot afford four more years of Trump.”

That’s not a typical union endorsement. In fact, says UE general president Carl Rosen, “We do not consider this to be an endorsement of Joe Biden by UE but instead that it is a strategic recommendation to our members and to working people in general that they vote for Biden to remove Donald Trump from office.”

Walk On By.

Whatever Democratic voters think — and most of them like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to combat with Republicans.

This strikes me as a detailed and balanced assessment. Long, but essential.

If you cared not for Bernie Sanders as a Democrat, you should read the essay anyway; there's plenty there for you. If you were a Sanders backer, as I was, it's very important to absorb this.

Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War, by Matt Karp (Jacobin)

How he lost and where we go from here.

... First, (Bernie Sanders' campaigns) demonstrated that bold social-democratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in today’s United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government to provide essential social goods for all Americans — from health care and college tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at the heart of the Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and conducting two presidential campaigns almost entirely on the strength of this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in modern history.

Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan, or California.

Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.” It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,” driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it.

Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated American social democracy’s unknown political resources, they also revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the second practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to the essence of his platform.

It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday.

In an article this long, it's hard to find a pull that summarizes the gist, but I've chosen a single sentence. It's a long read, and worth the extra minutes.

‘The President Was Not Encouraging’: What Obama Really Thought About Biden, by Alex Thompson (Politico)

Behind the friendship was a more complicated relationship, which now drives the former vice president to prove his partner wrong.

Biden aides acknowledge that Obama didn’t do nearly as much for Biden in 2020 as he did for Clinton in 2016.

Joe Hill.

When the Kamala Harris announcement was made last week, one of the first tweets I saw (Twitter being my de facto news feed) was from Bernie Sanders, in support.

My view is that after we elect Biden, what we’re going to do is everything that we possibly can to move his adfarm-near-me/">ministration in a progressive direction. Biden has told me, and I would not say it if he hadn’t made the same statement publicly, that he intends to be the most progressive president since FDR. That’s a noble ambition, and our job is to hold him to that goal. I think millions of people are prepared to do that.

This week or next, maybe I'll be able to finish a particularly vexing, ongoing ON THE AVENUES column draft, in which I've been trying to sort through the arguments and counter-arguments running through my brain with respect to my choices in this year's presidential election.

I'm not there yet. But you can see where I'm headed.

Bernie Sanders on How He’ll Rally Progressives Tonight, by John Nichols (The Nation)

In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the Vermont senator says backing Biden/Harris is the start of their work, not the finish.

JOHN NICHOLS: When you were campaigning for president, you spoke quite frequently about the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights.” It was part of your effort to frame the 2020 election around fundamental issues and the need for structural change. Obviously, you didn’t know at the time that Covid and mass unemployment, and a rising demand for racial justice, would heighten the sense of urgency. But even before the crisis unfolded, you saw a need for a politics that was focused on transformative change.

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is imperative that we not only deal with all of the injustices and inequalities that exist in our society today, which of course have been made worse by the pandemic and the economic meltdown, but it is also imperative that we start, in the 21st century, to rethink our value systems.

What Roosevelt did in his State of the Union speech in 1944 was really quite extraordinary. For whatever reason—we were in the middle of a war then and, of course, he died a year later; the media was not particularly sympathetic—what he said back in 1944 has been largely forgotten. But what he said was extraordinarily profound and revolutionary.

What he said is that, yes, our country has political freedom. We have a Constitution. We have a Bill of Rights. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc., and that’s all great. But what we have to do is go beyond just political rights and into economic rights.

In other words, it’s not good enough that you just have the constitutional right to vote (that’s good!), to protest (that’s great!), to assemble (that’s wonderful!), and freedom of religion (great!).

What we have got to be talking about, Roosevelt said in 1944, is that economic rights are human rights, and that means you are entitled, as an American, to decent housing, to decent health care, to a decent job, to a decent retirement. Economic rights are human rights, and you’re not going to be a really free person unless we guarantee those rights. That was an extraordinarily profound statement!

What I tried to do in the 2020 campaign is talk about Roosevelt’s 1944 speech and how we make it relevant to the year 2020 ...

Thomas Frank: "I came here to understand the Biden mystique, not to bury it."

How can self-styled progressives overlook Joe Biden's long legislative career of anti-progressive measures?

Because his name isn't "Donald Trump," and of course the usual left-wing delusion that leads to all genuine precepts being thrown away so the common threat can be met head-on, and then unceremoniously appeased owing to neoliberal donor cash.

The author Frank is no fan of Biden, but he gives it the good old (non)college try.

What's behind Joe Biden's mystique?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

It was once a no-brainer among DC pundits that, in an electoral match-up between a friendly centrist and a bitter polarization-machine like Donald Trump, the guy who was closer to the middle would automatically win. And in the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, that conventional wisdom would seem to have found its man: he stands on behalf of no great causes, just a return to the consensus days of yore.

The flaw in this viewpoint is that the consensus days of yore were a dreadful time. What bipartisan centrism meant, in Biden’s heyday, was deliberate, state-sponsored cruelty on a scale so vast it is difficult to comprehend. It meant baked-in racial discrimination. It meant imprisoning enormous numbers of our fellow citizens for using drugs – especially crack cocaine, whose users (disproportionately African American) were singled out for horrendously harsh retribution. It meant three-strikes laws. Mandatory minimum sentencing. Unlimited funding for police departments. A boom in prison construction. And, as it pleased Joe Biden to say on the worst of these occasions, “the truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress – every minor crime bill – has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, on that bill.”

Biden has tried half-heartedly to walk back the decades he spent transforming America into a penal state. He may succeed in persuading voters to forgive him. But he’s not going to win because the old centrist strategy has worked and Republicans are fatally outmaneuvered by his clever triangulations. These days even the Charles Koch Institute is to the left of where Biden was back in the crackdown era.

You can say something similar about Biden’s famous rapport with the working class: it is badly compromised by his actual political record ...

So, how does Biden do it?

 ... Catering to society’s well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he “had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values”.

“I said I’ve never found a distinction,” Biden claimed he replied. “Never found them hard to sell.” He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: “We treat them like they’re stupid. They know they’re in trouble, and nobody’s talking to them. Nobody’s talking to them. That’s what we used to do. That was our base.”

It is a point in Biden’s favor that he understands this problem. But is he the man to resolve it?

Will it work?

Frank concludes: "My own hope – and it is merely a hope at this point – is that somewhere in the soul of that tongue-tied, old-school Delaware pol flickers the forgotten core value of the Democratic party: solidarity."

"Progressives don’t trust Biden. They trust history. History proves Biden isn’t one of them."

The 1117 E. Spring Street Neighborhood Association tallies two Indiana primary votes for Bernie Sanders -- and against the prevailing inanity of the local DemoDisneyDixiecrats.

If Trump Wins Again, Don’t Blame Progressives, by Ted Rall (CounterPunch)

The corporate conservatives who control the Democratic Party are suffering from cheaters’ remorse.

The DNC and their media allies (NPR, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Vox, etc.) subverted the will of primary voters, undermining initial frontrunner Bernie Sanders in order to install the worst candidate of the 20 centrists in the campaign.

Now the power brokers are worried that the befuddled Biden, whom they touted as the Most Electable Against Donald Trump, will lose to him. Rather than take responsibility for their idiocy and force Biden to pull out of a race for which he is obviously physically and mentally unprepared, the corporatist sellouts are preemptively blaming the progressives who warned them about this exact scenario.

Sorry, right wingers. Biden is on you. You made him the presumptive nominee. If Trump wins again, it’s your fault.

Just as it was last time ...

Sow's ears, silk purses, and devising a way to make Joe Biden palatable.

I might be able to get drunk enough to vote for Biden, but caution is merited, because if I begin drinking too soon, it won't be easy staying drunk enough to vote for Biden.

I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him, by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

Pundits are panicking about whether the Left will help Joe Biden defeat Trump. The former vice president probably doesn't want it, but here's some advice for him from the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

For at least the last two years, the Left has been imploring the Democratic Party and its loyal voters not to choose Joe Biden as their nominee. I even wrote an entire book about it. The argument against Biden is well known and easy to find, and I’m not going to bother repeating it here.

Unfortunately, Biden is now indisputably the Democratic nominee, and will be facing Donald Trump in the general election. As inadequate as Biden and the conservatives who are propping him up are to handle this moment in history, no one reading this wants to see a second Trump term. But despite what polling currently shows, it is far from assured Biden will deliver even that result, and he is entering the race in a weaker position than Clinton this time in 2016, after she had already weathered months of criticism and press scrutiny — the kind to which Biden has so far not been treated.

Already, some members of the liberal pundit-sphere are calling for a moratorium on criticism of Biden. Besides being a repugnant idea for any journalist, this is not sustainable: though liberal news outlets might view their top priority for the next seven months as getting Biden into the White House at all costs, there’s no guarantee mainstream news outlets will see their jobs this way, and they will almost certainly start applying serious scrutiny to Biden again now that Bernie Sanders is out of the race.

So as someone who literally wrote the book on why Biden would not be a great nominee or president, let me give the Democratic Party and Biden’s campaign some free advice ...

ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

155 years ago today in the front parlor of Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, a nattily attired Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to the commander of all Union armies, mud-splattered Ulysses S. Grant.

Lest there be any doubt, Grant was the genuine military genius of the two. Grant saw the whole of the strategic picture and effectively used the resources at his disposal, applying them remorselessly along the pathway to an outcome he foresaw quite clearly.

Grant was not without flaws as a human being, but he was mercifully immune from self-aggrandizing bull’s excrement. Tellingly, if reincarnated in 2020, Grant wouldn’t have a chance whatsoever of making a difference.

McLean, a wholesale grocer by trade, lived in Manassas until Bull Run, the Civil War’s first great battle in 1861. McLean’s house was used as headquarters by the rebel commander General Beauregard and damaged during the fighting, so subsequently he moved his family 120 miles west to a place he reasoned would be safer.

It was, right up until it wasn’t. Immediately upon the conclusion of the surrender conference, Union officers denuded the parlor in short order, pressing money into McLean’s hand (hundreds of dollars, in fact) as they carted away tables, chairs and bric-a-brac as souvenirs.

McLean moved away after the war, unable or unwilling to capitalize on his house’s singular legacy by converting it into a roadside tourist trap. Maybe this was because no “authentic” furniture remained, or more likely, owing to the hostility of defeated Virginians toward northern visitors.

Shortly thereafter, the utter fabrication of “Lost Cause” mythology provided the necessary value in memoriam, although too late for McLean. It is alleged that McLean conjured one quotable observation from his personal Civil War: "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."

Today he’d be on all the late night shows and probably practice punditry on one or more of the news channels.

---

Meanwhile, a distinctive feature of that first Battle of Bull Run in 1861 was the crowd of groupies it attracted.

Union troops bound for certain glory were accompanied on their march toward the enemy positions by wagon loads of Washington picnickers, sure of a wonderful day in the countryside watching their favorites dispense with the confederates. It all came to a premature and unpleasant end when the visiting team was ignominiously routed, sweeping the party goers along with them, straight back to the safety of the capital’s fledgling fortifications.

The victors were content to snack on the leftovers.

Indeed, war is hell, and the scene in 1861 reminds me that so are most of the elections of our lives in postwar L’America. The COVID-plagued primary in Wisconsin earlier this week was merely an extreme example of the norm. Chads are left hanging, voting is suppressed, courts are rigged; the pillage of oligarchs and evangelists proceeds as we binge-watch dystopian drama.

Like those hangers-on making for Manassas with their watercress sandwiches and cider, we keep coming to the polls in our dashing finery, hoping for a miracle of political intelligibility -- outright statesmanship obviously lies beyond the pale -- and if we’re lucky the reward is dull, plodding mediocrity, but usually our reward is garish spectacle at the expense of substance, the sheer underachievement fixed as if by constitutional mandate.

Paraphrasing H.L. Mencken, we get exactly what we vote for -- good and hard. Not unlike Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., we pay our money, take our chances and spin the DemoDisneyDixiecratic wheel of ill fortune … and every second Sunday, Biden remembers exactly how many grandchildren he has.

---

That’ll show those horrid Bernie Bros; Sanders is out, and my new "choice" is Biden's dementia versus Donald Trump's depravity.

Red or blue?

I say: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho.

“In reality (Bernie Sanders’ campaign) it gave voice to the voiceless, raised people’s sense of what’s possible through collective action, and refused to accept that exploitation and the fear of economic devastation should be the lot of millions.”

Ah, of course the soulless right-of-center “Democrats” have their answer at the ready: it’s all about being realistic, or at least as it pertains to their selective, generally white-washed version of reality.

That nasty too-damn-left Bernie was selling a bill of make-believe goods to the guileless youth, the wooly radicals, the blue-wing’s version of numb-Trump-skulls; those naïve neophytes just need to abandon their idiotic hopes and dreams, get realistic and embrace reality.

As if their lives weren’t realistic enough already.

And what exactly is being realistic in this context? It’s beating Trump, of course, even if every other office in the country from Senate to dogcatcher remains in Republican hands, just so long as we have no ambition grander than assuring money and power remain the exclusive province of two political parties, each taking their turn suckling the teat.

When the centrists wag their finger at me and pontificate about shutting up and accepting what’s realistic, it kills me as dead as Sullivan Ballou, a Union officer who lost his life at Bull Run.

I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and sufferings of the Revolution. And I am willing — perfectly willing — to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt …

Yes; that was different. We could debate the remainder of the pandemic about the specific circumstances of Ballou’s death as a soldier, and how they vary substantively from those of a voter in the 2020 presidential election, but to me the divergence is striking in terms of the concept of sacrifice.

Ballou was willing to make one. Most of the purported Democratic centrists dispensing holy writ about reality aren’t.

If they were, they’d not be so flippant about everyday REALITY on the part of the voiceless, who have seen in the Sanders campaign the possibility (reiterating) “of collective action, and refuse to accept that exploitation and the fear of economic devastation should be the lot of millions.”

They’d not be supporting the prevailing kakistocratic, catastrophic socio-economic “realities” with their wallets, every single day, only pausing from the endless consumerism when it’s time to denounce what Republicans are doing to wreck the system, although most of the “opposition” is as fully invested in its disproportionate excess as the MAGAtites.

When are any of the faux “left” centrists going to risk any aspect of their well-ordered existences, cease fluffing and buttressing the forces that oppress others more so than them, and make a sacrifice of any appreciable magnitude as a downpayment?

Be realistic, they repeat over and over like a mantra. Now’s not the time for pie in the sky, Roger.

Really? When the hell in human history has the time been "right" for aspiration?

How realistic was the Magna Carta, the Reformation, or our own American Revolution, even as imperfect as these milestones were?

How realistic was it to break the four-minute mile, to cure polio or route sewage underground rather than let it flow through ditches in the street?

How realistic was it for sensory-deprived Helen Keller to be an author, former slave George Washington Carver to be a scientist, or dirt-poor Abraham Lincoln to be president?

When are the centrists going to withhold assent from American-style injustice, go on strike, hit the streets -- show some effing solidarity for something and someone else apart from their own scolding virtue-signaled ostentatiousness?

Sullivan Ballou? He actually stood FOR something.

Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.

Listen up, centrists. You've slain the Bernie dragon, now here’s the reality. If you want to be rid of the orange menace, it’s time to dismantle his habitat, and commence some adaptive reuse of your own decaying political worldviews.

Take your eyes off Red Bernie and listen to what he actually says … and observe who else has been listening to him. If learning is truly the objective, there’s a chance you might, and still be able to speak with people who are extremely disappointed in disgraceful timidity. You're now being paternalistic with regard to the people who suffer most, when their preference is to DO SOMETHING.

Notice I wrote "speak with," not "speak to."

Our system has been made gloriously efficient for the haves, the accumulators of capital, and the hoarders of corporate profits, but it’s not resilient at all for ordinary human beings. The coronavirus is proving this abundantly, right now. It’s bigger than The Donald. Democrats are complicit in it as well. Shouldn't one of the two political parties articulate a viable alternative in terms of programs and policies?

There’s yardage to be gained, and there’s no turning back to the halcyon days of Obama for the simple reason that they weren’t.

Sacrifice something, centrists -- anything will do -- and instead of blaming the phantasmagoric imagined Bernie Bros for your own distemper, muster the grace sufficient to credit those principled people on your left for having the hopes, dreams and cojones to be FOR something, rather than merely against, and who see power in the realism of good ideas, not capitulation to capitalism in the throes of cancer.

Ah, but I’m so forgetful. You centrists are going to need someone to blame if it doesn’t end well this November, and Bernie’s supporters can be so very easily scapegoated. After all, you're already quite proficient at the practice.

Shaddup, already. Are we on strike yet?

---

Recent columns:

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

March 12: ON THE AVENUES: Keep calm and carry on.

Democratic primary coverage is why WE cancelled OUR New York Times subscriptions.

Given the results on Super Tuesday, the following critique -- published almost a month ago -- obviously doesn't take the most recent Democratic primary evolution into consideration (read: it preceded the DNC's recent "Dim-pire Strikes Back" pro-Biden shenanigans).

However, as an explanation of why I recently severed our household's ties with the New York Times after more than a decade of subscribing, this essay does a fine job, indeed.

We're just one of many, and I really enjoy reading a tactile Sunday newspaper, but I could no longer in good conscience give money to a newspaper prone to running "hit pieces" (the author's term) against Bernie Sanders. One can only speculate about the newspaper's activities behind the scenes.

The author appears to have had a digital subscription. Our was Sunday delivery with digital access included. That's $12 a week, or a honking $624 a year. I can think of far better things to do with that kind of money than pay Thomas Friedman to write his dirtbag bilge.

For now, here's David Blass: Why I just cancelled my New York Times subscription: Democratic primary coverage as “fit” to print as Trump is to serve.

... Unfortunately, though some of the examples I’ve cited are particularly transparent, this type of reporting is the rule rather than the exception for Sanders in both the press and in cable news coverage. I used to think the New York Times was above the journalistic chicanery I saw elsewhere in the media, but the facts speak for themselves.

Coming to terms with this made me a more cynical person. Perhaps that’s a good thing; seeing grays between black and white can make us more tolerant and empathetic. But for now, my biggest unanswered question is for the Times’ board of directors: Is this your best attempt at self-preservation? ...

... I’ve subscribed to the New York Times since 2016. That might not sound like a long time, but it’s most of my adult life. As of today, I’ve lost my trust in the Times and have neither a use for its coverage nor a desire to support a thinly veiled purveyor of the propaganda Noam Chomsky described in Manufacturing Consent. In fact, in a 2010 interview, six years before the New York Times would all but write off Trump’s chances at the presidency, Chomsky offered the following:

If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? […] [That enemy] will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. […] I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.

Before abandoning all hope, our clairvoyant also had some thoughts about Senator Sanders:

Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower.

And in the wake of the 2016 election, he offered an antidote:

[If] the Sanders movement offered an authentic, constructive program for real hope and change, it would win […] Trump supporters back.

You'll be tested: GREEN MOUSE presents NAWBANY WEEK IN REVIEW for 6 March 2020.

Here's the thing about jokes: it helps when they're actually funny.

But enough about Uncle Joe. In fact, the two most popular posts of the week were about politics. In the top slot was a fond goodbye to Pete Buttigieg.

Good riddance, Mayor Pete. Let's celebrate with Buttigieg's high school essay praising Bernie Sanders.

Of course Super Tuesday proved to be a cinematic train wreck called "The DNC Dim-pire Strikes Back," and seeing as I don't much care for dystopian epics in fiction because they seldom compare to reality, I was compelled to seek solace in liquid form.

We can depend on the DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party establishment, because it ALWAYS lets us down -- both near and far, and speaking of closer to my home, it's only March and already Squire Adam has egg dripping from his face.

Madam, I'm Adam: Local Dem's latest revolving door candidate for District 72 House makes the news.

Perhaps this is an opportune juncture to remind readers that counterpoint is welcome at NAC. No anonymous submissions, please. I'll publish your viewpoint straight up, without commentary of my own. Leave the memes behind, and let's chat.

Meanwhile Mayor Jeff Gahan had a productive week. We looked on reprovingly as Deaf went shopping for state of the art, water-closet-powered timekeeping technology ...

ROGER'S DIARY OF THE END TIMES: Nawbany is losing the Toilet Race to the Japanese.

  ... then found himself in the uncharacteristically supine posture of keeping his boastfulness tethered in the lordly presence of Dr. Tom.

COVID 19, HIZZONER 1: If Gahan’s willing to meet with COUNTY officials, the pandemic panic’s already started.

This week's column was about high school daze.

ON THE AVENUES: I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling.

I'd already selected the title (a Joy Division lyric), then found myself enduring yet another flashback from the 1970s -- although this one's from chorale, and thus actually a pleasant memory.

Substitute the word "drink" for "pray," and you'll understand my current worshipful posture.

Good riddance, Mayor Pete. Let's celebrate with Buttigieg's high school essay praising Bernie Sanders.

They don't come much phonier than Squire Adam. What's he prattling on about?

Probably the big-money donations accrued by Buttigieg at California wine caves. After all, Dickey's only genuine superstar is Jeff Gahan (sorry, Jason), who has hyper-monetized New Albany politics with fat cat special interest money. Principles? Those can wait -- forever if necessary.

Dickey's friend Buttigieg will make a fine ambassador to Malta. Too bad we can't ship Gahan to Pitcairn Island.

Did you known that Mayor Pete used to be a fan of Bernie Sanders -- you know, back before the moneyed interests began lining up with their checkbooks? Here's the scoop.

---

Pete Buttigieg on Bernie Sanders, by Pete Buttigieg (The Nation)

When Pete Buttigieg was a high school senior, he wrote a prizewinning essay praising Bernie Sanders. Here, we republish the essay in full. This essay was first published in 2000 by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. That year, Buttigieg was the winner of the library’s annual Profiles in Courage Essay Contest.

In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation. Each must be addressed thoroughly and energetically. But in order to accomplish the collective goals of our society, we must first address how we deal with issues. We must reexamine the psychological and political climate of American politics. As it stands, our future is at risk due to a troubling tendency toward cynicism among voters and elected officials. The successful resolution of every issue before us depends on the fundamental question of public integrity.

A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that it is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush uses the centrist rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” while Pat Buchanan, once considered a mainstream Republican, has been driven off the ideological edge of the GOP. Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run “test platforms” through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on a major issue. This disturbing trend reveals cynicism, a double-sided problem, which is perhaps the greatest threat to the continued success of the American political system.

Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power. Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world. Such an atmosphere inevitably distances our society from its leadership and is thus a fundamental threat to the principles of democracy. It also calls into question what motivates a run for office — in many cases, apparently, only the desire to occupy it. Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only independent congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.

Sanders’s courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “socialist.” In a country where “communism” is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed. Here is someone who has “looked into his own soul” and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.

After numerous political defeats in his traditionally Republican state, Sanders won the office of mayor of Burlington by ten votes. A successful and popular mayor, he went on to win Vermont’s one congressional seat in 1990. Since then, he has taken many courageous and politically risky stands on issues facing the nation. He has come under fire from various conservative religious groups because of his support for same-sex marriages. His stance on gun control led to NRA-organized media campaigns against him. Sanders has also shown creativity in organizing drug-shopping trips to Canada for senior citizens to call attention to inflated drug prices in the United States.

While impressive, Sanders’s candor does not itself represent political courage. The nation is teeming with outspoken radicals in one form or another. Most are sooner called crazy than courageous. It is the second half of Sanders’s political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.”

Sanders has used his unique position as the lone independent congressman to help Democrats and Republicans force hearings on the internal structure of the International Monetary Fund, which he sees as excessively powerful and unaccountable. He also succeeded in quietly persuading reluctant Republicans and President Clinton to ban the import of products made by underage workers. Sanders drew some criticism from the far left when he chose to grudgingly endorse President Clinton’s bids for election and reelection as president. Sanders explained that while he disagreed with many of Clinton’s centrist policies, he felt that he was the best option for America’s working class.

Sanders’s positions on many difficult issues are commendable, but his real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system. His energy, candor, conviction, and ability to bring people together stand against the current of opportunism, moral compromise, and partisanship which runs rampant on the American political scene. He and a few others like him have the power to restore principle and leadership in Congress and to win back the faith of a voting public weary and wary of political opportunism. Above all, I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption. I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.

"I’d love, in other words, some journalism."

"I have my own theories. Primarily that this is a delayed reaction to the financial crash of 2007, which showed so many Americans that the system was rigged against them. When nobody in power paid a price, they lost faith. The election of 2016, and now 2020, is the outraged response, a decade in the making."

The one way Sanders is the new Trump, by Kyle Pope (Columbia Journalism Review)

THE WEDNESDAY MORNING AFTER THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, I wrote a piece for CJR criticizing the American press for its coverage of the rise of Trump, which I argued would “stand among journalism’s great failures.”

In the second paragraph, I wrote:

Reporters’ eagerness first to ridicule Trump and his supporters, then dismiss them, and finally to actively lobby and argue for their defeat have led us to a moment when the entire journalistic enterprise needs to be rethought and rebuilt. In terms of bellwether moments, this is our anti-Watergate.

Thought exercise: substitute “Sanders” for “Trump” in that first sentence. Here’s another paragraph:

Too often, the views of Trump’s followers … were dismissed entirely by an establishment media whose worldview is so different, and so counter, to theirs that it became chic to belittle them and wave them off. Reporters’ personal views got in the way of their ability to hear what was happening around them.

It is now obvious that we as an industry have learned nothing from the fundamental failures that led to the election of 2016. It is so apparent in the coverage of Trump, and has been from the beginning of his presidency, that it almost needn’t be said again: The hyper-partisanship, especially on cable news. The lack of follow-through from one outrage to the next. The willingness to let Trump, and his surrogates, set the news agenda again and again. The lack of creativity in covering a president who brings a destructive new imagination to the running of the country.

I am resigned to these shortcomings when it comes to Trump. A journalistic reckoning I hoped would materialize never did; Twitter, outrage, and a million arbitrarily urgent news cycles got in the way. My hope, more recently, has been that the 2020 Democratic primaries could help atone for journalism’s political sins.

It is not going well, as the recent coverage of Bernie Sanders shows ...

Dunman nails it: Bernie Sanders' agenda is "pretty much just 'catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.'"

More steaming turds from the screaming skull, but first, you may recall Joe Dunman as one of the attorneys who worked on a fairly important case involving same sex marriage. For those of you doing Twitter, he's a great one to follow.

Here is a typically incisive tweet from Dunman, which needs to be repeated again and again.

“Amazing to me about the anti-Sanders panic is that he’s only slightly center-left, globally-speaking. His agenda is pretty much just ‘catch us up to where Western Europe has already been for 40 years.’”

Yep. Dunman's comment is occasioned by yesterday's good news.

After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now, by Dustin Guastella and Connor Kilpatrick (Jacobite)

Bernie Sanders’s decisive victory in Nevada today shows that he has a working-class base committed to fundamentally transforming our radically unequal political and economic system. He’s on his way to not just the nomination, but the White House ...

... The New Deal was made possible with a new electorate. And just as the mass entry into politics of first- and second-generation Eastern European immigrants brought Roosevelt (and the CIO) to power, Latinos — who are solidly behind Sanders — could very well be the force that helps bring social democracy to America.

Bernie’s staunch anti-establishment outsider appeal and his platform focused on workers’ issues is winning non-partisans, new voters, young voters, and working-class immigrants. That’s not just a savvy coalition for winning the Nevada caucuses, it’s how Bernie Sanders becomes president.

Face it, establishment Democrats — it’s his party now.

Maybe this time we can get the Sanders post-primary (Indiana) victory meal at Pints&union.

"Bernie Sanders isn’t a radical — he’s a pragmatist who fights to un-rig the system."

It's so very tiresome having to explain these matters again and again -- to Democrats, whose prefer keeping the system rigged, and whose idea of "resistance" is to become as much like their opposition as humanly possible while expressing dismay that nothing ever changes. Then it's back to the imaginary Star Wars and Marvel canons, and another half-decade of decline.

Opinion: Bernie Sanders isn’t a radical — he’s a pragmatist who fights to un-rig the system, by Mark Weisbrot (Market Watch)

 ... He is a “socialist,” his opponents cry, leaving out the first part of the term “democratic socialist” that Sanders always uses when this issue is discussed. There is much room to induce confusion here because the term “socialist,” in English, has a number of different definitions that have all become common usage over the years.

It can be used to mean anything from “communist,” as in the former Soviet Union, to the European social democratic or socialist parties that have governed for much of the past 70 years in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries.

It should be clear to anyone who is not trying to frighten voters that Sanders is a social democrat of the latter, European variety. There will be no U.S. government takeover of the means of production under a Sanders administration.

The biggest expansion in government will be in public funding of health insurance. Like traditional Medicare, where less than 2% of expenses are administrative costs, public health insurance will be much more efficient than the current six times as much spent by the private insurance industry. And we won’t have 8 million people falling into poverty every year due to medical expenses, or worse, tens of thousands actually dying because of lack of access to affordable health care.

Sanders’ program is targeted at correcting a very harmful transformation of the U.S. economy that has taken place over the past 40 years ...

"From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare."
-- Gore Vidal (1987)

If you identify as "Democrat" and are enamored with Bloomberg, you're just running scared -- and you're not a "democrat."

"Swapping kakistocracy for oligarchy will not undo the damage of the Trump presidency. It will merely calcify the rot."

Kakistocracy via Trump: "government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state."

Oligarchy via Bloomberg: "a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution."

ABAT: "As bad as Trump."

It isn't only that moderates identifying as "liberal" really aren't liberal. Apparently they're also clueless and terrified, positing that "liberalism" is devoid of meaning, and something to be discarded because after all, it isn't as if there exists reasons to be "for" something instead of merely "against" something else.

Inequality borne of capital accumulation is the problem. There are far more withouts than withs. Pitchfork lube?

Now you're talking.

Michael Bloomberg Isn’t a Smug Technocratic Centrist. He’s Something Far Worse, by Ross Barkan (Jacobin)

An admirer of dictators, a lowbrow misogynist, an unfiltered bigot — Michael Bloomberg is the only Democratic contender who might actually be worse than Trump.

... Oligarchy Personified

The best way to understand Bloomberg is to study his twelve years leading America’s largest city. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: there were things to like about Bloomberg’s New York, particularly if you were white and carried a degree of wealth. He was, to his credit, an early supporter of same-sex marriage. He cared about protecting the environment. It was a good thing when smoking was banned from restaurants and bars. Bloomberg stuck up for pedestrians and cyclists. The 311 system simplified the process of lodging complaints.

All of this is easily negated by the pain and terror he wrought. If you were a Muslim in Bloomberg’s New York, the NYPD was deployed to spy, without cause, on your mosque. Bloomberg’s police infiltrated Muslim student groups and put informants in mosques. The blanket surveillance, the NYPD would later admit, didn’t produce any tangible leads. Three lawsuits were eventually settled after Bloomberg left office.

Around the time Bloomberg announced his presidential campaign, he cynically ventured to a church in a black Brooklyn neighborhood to apologize for his police department’s maniacal abuse of stop-and-frisk tactics. Under Bloomberg, police stops — which overwhelmingly targeted black and Latino men — increased from 97,296 in 2002 to a peak of 685,724 in 2011. The stops, for these young men, were traumatizing, as heavily armed police officers stalked and then aggressively searched their bodies for no justifiable cause. In 2013, a federal judge ruled the practice unconstitutional.

Rather than accept responsibility, Bloomberg fought back, appealing the ruling. “There is just no question that stop-and-frisk has saved countless lives,” Bloomberg thundered in 2013. “I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids.”

Bloomberg was unrepentant. Police power could do no wrong. In 2011, armed police stormed Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night to forcefully break up Occupy Wall Street, a movement that kicked off a public reckoning with America’s surging income inequality. The protest ultimately offended his sensibilities. “I don’t appreciate the bashing of all the hard-working people who live and work here and pay the taxes that support our city,” Bloomberg said at the time.

Bloomberg’s total lack of interest in staunching his own city’s spiraling inequality fueled homelessness and displacement. Rezonings in formerly working-class neighborhoods spurred luxury development and increasingly unsustainable rent hikes. His lavish donations to Republicans in the State Senate ensured New York’s laws protecting tenants would remain in a weakened state as long as he remained in office. Public housing further crumbled under his watch. And in 2011, Bloomberg killed a housing subsidy program for homeless families, directly triggering the homelessness crisis New York is still grappling with today ...

Bernie Sanders is "the only authentic voice for change."

The morning's Economist Espresso e-mail provides this update of yesterday's New Hampshire primary on the Periodically Democratic side.

Democrats voting in New Hampshire’s presidential primary picked Bernie Sanders as their favourite candidate, giving him more than a quarter of their ballots. Pete Buttigieg, who pipped him in Iowa’s caucuses last week, took nearly as many and Amy Klobuchar finished a respectable third. Joe Biden trailed badly, again. Andrew Yang and Michael Bennet dropped out of the race.

Time, then, to dispense with the Twitter-driven "BernieBro" myth and focus instead on reality?

Why does the “BernieBro” myth persist? Because pundits don't understand how the internet works, by Keith A. Spencer (Salon)

A misunderstanding of social media is driving media elites to keep pushing an easily disprovable stereotype

... Why do some myths persist, or remain uncorrected by the media, while others dissipate? The short answer seems to be that when they serve a media narrative, or play on existing stereotypes, they grow to possess a power that goes beyond fact or truth. To this list of indefatigable myths, one might add the pernicious "BernieBro" — so ubiquitous a concept that it has its own Wikipedia article. The self-explanatory neologism was coined by Robinson Meyer in an Atlantic article in 2015 before being distorted by the Twittersphere and the punditry — something that Meyer later came to regret, as he felt the term he reified suffered from "semantic drift."

But that was five years ago, before we had as much data on Sanders' support base — which, as it turns out, should be sufficient to debunk the stereotype that Sanders' support base consists entirely of a mythic tribe of entitled, pushy young millennial men. To wit: young women make up more of Sanders' base than men. He polls especially high with Hispanic voters, far more so than with white voters; Hispanic voters also donated more money to him than any other Democratic candidate. Polls consistently show that nonwhite voters prefer him over the other candidates. Notably, the demographic group that likes Sanders the least is white men.

Moreover, of all the candidates, Sanders has taken in the most money from women. Many of Sanders' female supporters bemoan how they are ignored by the mainstream press. "The 'Bernie Bro' narrative is endlessly galling because it erases the women who make up his base," writer Caitlin PenzeyMoog opined on Twitter. "To paint this picture of sexism is to paint over the millions of women who support Sanders. Do you see how f**ked up that is?"

Of the three, only Sanders follows the money to show how the Money defeats ordinary Americans every single day. Time yet to stand for something, DemoDisneyDixiecrats?

Three Old White Guys: Bernie, Biden and Bloomberg, by John Davis (CounterPunch)

... The DNC itself has inaugurated a kind of junior league plutocracy whereby its presidential hopefuls must be validated by their supporters sending them cold hard cash. Money as a proxy for voting is the oligarch’s foundational gambit and the anti-democratic forces of the DNC have now substantiated it in their farcical presidential primary process.

Just as the elite in Britain use the emotional ballast of royal regalia to deter rebellion, the wealthy ruling class in the U.S. call upon the trappings of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the flag – all conflated in the notion of American democracy – to quash radical action that might challenge them. Even as its universality has been squeezed hard, the sop of voting – the lure of having one’s voice counted – has been remarkably effective in guaranteeing the quiescence of the people.

The bastion of capital, which affords a dictatorship of the rich and the immiseration of its subject population, is supported by the twin pillars of neo-liberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties. Its walls are battle-hardened against rogue outliers such as Bernie, while the likes of Biden have spent their careers augmenting its fortifications. But there have been moments in that dictatorship, when chinks of humanitarian light have shone through its fortress walls. Its hostility to the wellbeing of its subjects is not necessarily guaranteed. Enter our third old white guy, Mike Bloomberg, flying the standard of the Democratic Party, but refusing to play by the DNC’s rules.

At least since Jackson, America has been built on just enough democracy to ensure that the masses retain their Horatio Alger dreams – believing the myth of equal opportunity and the chance to strike it rich – but never enough to challenge the power of the wealthy. Hard work has been replaced by education as the base material of these dreams, but the latter obscures the debt peonage its achievement often requires and the low-level work it typically enables. Trader Joe’s, the supermarket chain, requires all of its staff to have a college degree. Hard work counts for little in an age when the buying power of minimum wage has atrophied into insignificance. Voting, despite the purging of the rolls and other impediments to its practice, remains for many a feel-good way to connect to the grand mythos of America, inflating the self-worth of those who are otherwise victims of its deceits.

Material wealth, first as stolen land, then as industrial capital, and now as control of information (which today drives the forces of production through algorithms fed by real-time consumer desires, or clicks) is at the heart of the American pathology of exploitation, extraction, subjugation, oppression and the devastation of the natural world. Our putative democracy has been entirely enfolded into this ongoing historical project. It is an enabler of these crimes against humanity. It is an ideological co-conspirator.
His is the only authentic voice for change.