Yes, and I feel like I want to send it to everyone, especially my older
daughter who is really too busy to read it and probably wouldn't want to, even
if she weren't too busy. It's all there.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2020 2:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Alco Canfield <alcocanfield@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New Rules of the Game
From Prophet Hedges lips to our ears.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/17/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The New Rules of the Game
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The quadrennial political game of least worst, or how to scare the
public to vote for presidential candidates who serve corporate power,
comes this season with a new twist. Donald Trump, if he faces Pete
Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will
continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the
Antichrist. But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares,
traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites,
should he miraculously become the party's nominee, the game of least
worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit
Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of
Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven
into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment's
reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper.
The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did
in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to
George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states.
"If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to
reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as
polarizing as Trump AND he'll ruin our economy and doesn't care about
our military," former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (net worth
$1.1 billion) tweeted. "If I'm Russian, I go with Sanders this time
around."
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Blankfein, who calls for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and
Medicaid and who headed Goldman Sachs when it paid Hillary Clinton
$675,000 for three speaking engagements in 2013, laid out the stance
of the billionaire class that controls the Democratic Party. The New
York Times reported that Mike Novogratz, "a Goldman Sachs alumnus who
runs the merchant bank Galaxy Digital, said Mr. Sanders's oppositional
nature had prompted 'too many friends' to say they would vote against
him in November. 'And they hate Trump,' he said."
"Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.
He was a career politician. It's all just baloney, and I feel so bad
that people got sucked into it," Hillary Clinton says of Sanders in a
forthcoming television documentary.
The courtiers in the press, pathetically attempting to spin Sanders'
New Hampshire win into a victory for the corporate-endorsed
alternatives, are part of the firing squad. "Running Sanders Against
Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity" read the headline in a piece by
Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. "No party nomination, with the
possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a
presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a
Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane,"
he wrote. David Frum - now a darling of the Democratic elites, like many
other Republicans who morphed from George W.
Bush supporters into critics of Trump - announced in The Atlantic that
Bernie can't win. "Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of
dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot," Frum wrote.
"Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal."
Jennifer Rubin declared in The Washington Post that a Sanders
nomination would be a "disaster for the Democrats." "Sanders's
campaign, like all primary campaigns, is a preview of the
general-election race and, if elected, the administration he would
lead," Rubin wrote. "A nominee who insists on personally attacking all
doubters and the media might be a model for the Republican Party, but
Democrats are not going to win with their own Donald Trump, especially
one who has burned bridges and stirred resentment in his own party."
Thomas Friedman, in a column supporting Bloomberg, the newest savior
in the protean Democratic firmament, wrote of Sanders: "On which
planet in the Milky Way galaxy is an avowed 'socialist' - who wants to
take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million
Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All
program, which he'd also extend to illegal immigrants - going to
defeat the Trump machine this year? It will cast Sanders as Che
Guevara - and it won't even be that hard."
MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, descending to the Red baiting
employed by Blankfein, said that "if Castro and the Reds had won the
Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might
have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people
would be there cheering, okay?"
Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as Matthews and
Friedman, Sanders' democratic socialism is essentially that of a New
Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in
France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of
the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too
accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls
for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget,
for "Medicare for All," abolishing the death penalty, eliminating
mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of
Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum
wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral
College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not
qualify as a revolutionary agenda.
Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose
nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries. He
does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who
trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to
launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal
wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East,
resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and
displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7
trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and
businesses. He does not promise to halt the government's wholesale
surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations
that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes,
as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic
Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass
civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of
halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race.
On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate.
The vicious attacks against him by the elites are an indication of how
anemic and withered our politics have become.
The Democrats have, once again, offered us their preselected corporate
candidates. We can vote for a candidate who serves oligarchic power,
albeit with more decorum than Trump, or we can see Trump shoved down our
throats.
That is the choice. It exposes the least worst option as a con, a
mechanism used repeatedly to buttress corporate power. The elites know
they would be safe in the hands of a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama
or a John Kerry, but not a Bernie Sanders - which is a credit to Sanders.
The surrender to the "least worst" mantra in presidential election
after presidential election has neutered the demands of labor, along
with those organizations and groups fighting poverty, mass
incarceration and police violence. The civil rights, women's rights,
environment justice and consumer rights movements, forced to back
Democrats whose rhetoric is palatable but whose actions are inimical
to their causes, get tossed overboard. Political leverage, in election
after election, is surrendered without a fight. We are all made to
kneel before the altar of the least worst. We get nothing in return.
The least worst option has proved to be a recipe for steady decay.
The Democrats, especially after Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential run,
have erected numerous obstacles to block progressives inside and
outside the party. They make ballot access difficult or impossible for people
of color.
They lock third-party candidates and often progressives in the
Democratic Party, such as Dennis Kucinich, out of the presidential campaign
debates.
They turn campaigns into two-year-long spectacles that cost billions
of dollars. They use superdelegates to fix the nominating process.
They employ scare tactics to co-op those who should be the natural
allies of third parties and progressive political movements.
The repeated cowardice of the liberal class, which backs a Democratic
Party that in Europe would be considered a far-right party, saw it
squander its credibility. Its rhetoric proved empty. Its moral
posturing was a farce. It fought for nothing. In assault after assault
on the working class it was complicit. If liberals - supposedly
backers of parties and institutions that defend the interests of the
working class - had abandoned the Democratic Party after President
Bill Clinton pushed through the 1994 North American Free Trade
Agreement, Trump would not be in the White House. Why didn't liberals
walk out of the Democratic Party when Clinton and the Democratic Party
leadership, including Biden, passed NAFTA? Why didn't they walk out
when the Clinton administration gutted welfare? Why didn't they walk
out when Clinton pushed through the 1999 Financial Services
Modernization Act, which abolished the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act,
designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis that trashed the global
economy in 2008? Why didn't they walk out when year after year the
Democratic Party funded and expanded our endless wars? Why didn't they
walk out when the Democrats agreed to undercut due process and habeas
corpus? Why didn't they walk out when the Democrats helped approve the
warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? Why
didn't the liberals walk out when the party leadership refused to
impose sanctions on Israel for its war crimes, enact serious
environmental and health care reform or regulate Wall Street? At what
point will liberals say "Enough"? At what point will they fight back?
By surrendering every election cycle to the least worst, liberals
proved they have no breaking point. There never has been a line in the
sand. They have stood for nothing.
Bernie Sanders arose in 2016 as a political force because he, like
Trump, acknowledged the bleak reality imposed on working men and women
by the billionaire class. This reality, a reality ignored by the
ruling elites, was spoken out loud. The elites were held accountable.
The Democratic elites scrambled, successfully, to deny Sanders the
2016 nomination. The Republican elites squabbled among themselves and
failed to prevent Trump from becoming the party nominee.
The 2016 chessboard has reappeared, but this time in the Democratic
Party primary. The Democratic hierarchy, as horrified by Sanders as
the established Republican elites were by Trump, is flailing about
trying to find a political savior to defeat the Red menace. Their
ineptitude, Sanders'
primary asset, was displayed when they mangled the Iowa primary. They,
like the Republican elites in 2016, are woefully disconnected from
their constituency, attempting to persuade a public they betrayed and
no longer understand.
Joe Biden, long a stooge of corporate America, for example, is
frantically attempting to paint himself as a champion of poor people
of color after his defeats in the largely white states of Iowa and New
Hampshire. The onetime vice president, however, was one of the driving
forces behind the strategy to take back the "law and order" issue from
the Republicans. He and Bill Clinton orchestrated the doubling of the
prison population, the militarization of the police, and mandatory
minimum sentences along with juvenile boot camps, drug courts,
policing in schools and the acceleration of the deportation of
"criminal aliens." During Biden's leadership in the Senate - where he
served from 1973 until 2009, when he became Obama's vice president -
the Congress approved 92 death-eligible crimes in an almost identical
period. These Democratic "law and order" policies landed like hammer
blows on poor communities of color, inflicting untold misery and
egregious acts of injustice. And now Biden, who pounded the nails into
those he crucified, is desperately trying to present himself to his
victims as their savior. It is a sad metaphor for the bankruptcy of
the Democratic Party.
Biden, however, is no longer the Democratic ruling elite's flavor of
the month. This mantle has been passed to Bloomberg, once the
Republican mayor of New York and a Rudy Giuliani ally whose
indiscriminate stop-and-frisk harassment of, mainly, African Americans
and Latinos was ruled unconstitutional. Bloomberg, whose net worth is
estimated at $61.8 billion, said he is ready to spend $1 billion of
his own money on his campaign, what The New York Times has called "a
waterfall of cash." He has bought the loyalty of much of the ruling
Democratic establishment. He spent, for example, $110 million in 2018
alone to support 24 candidates now in Congress. He is saturating the
airwaves with commercials. He is lavishing high salaries and perks on
his huge campaign staff. Sanders, or anyone else defying the
billionaire class, cannot compete financially. The last desperate gasp
of the Democratic Party establishment is to buy the election.
Bloomberg is ready to oblige. After all, Bloomberg's money worked
miracles in amassing allies to overturn New York City term limits so
he could serve a third term as mayor.
But will it work? Will the Democratic elites and Bloomberg be able to
smother the Democratic primaries with so much money that Sanders is
shut out?
"As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020
Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field," Matt Taibbi
writes. "The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown
car afflicted this year's Democratic contest: Because neither donors
nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be
pretending to stand for, they couldn't coalesce around any one
candidate. These constant mercurial shifts in 'momentum' - it's Pete!
It's Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg!
- have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They
are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so."
If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops
ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that as Taibbi points out
replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this
time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once
divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites
preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back
Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now
directed at Trump, toward Sanders.
The Democratic Party's mask will come off. It will be open warfare
between them and us.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by
Rutgers.
