No, No, No (Step One)

 

We New Yorkers don’t attract any attention in the presidential sweepstakes as our 29 electoral votes are safely blue. But because we are getting pummeled by political ads for some hot congressional races—one in a Staten Island-Brooklyn district and another for a seat representing the Long Island suburbs—we get a chance to view what passes for political debate in our beleaguered nation.

It’s not an encouraging picture.

The Malliotakis-Rose slugfest on Staten Island pits a Blue Dog Democrat against a garden variety Republican. The advertising battle, which has cost some $7 million so far, is presumably aimed at some tiny slice of undecideds. The two candidates relentlessly and repetitively smack each other over who is more pro-cop, pro-military, and better able to pander to the fears of white conservatives who apparently anticipate hordes of dark-skinned gang members popping up in their back yards. Malliotakis’s ads show retired NYPD officers standing around bemoaning how much they suffer; Rose’s brags about how he fought to add a half billion dollars to the NYPD budget on top of the $6 billion a year they now get. Rose also appears in his service camos and showcases his support from veterans.

No one dares breathe a hint of criticism of the force responsible for the very public 2014 strangulation death of Eric Garner in that same district. Voters disturbed by that event are invisible.

A similar dynamic is at play in the Gordon-Gabarino race in New York’s 2^nd district, which now extends beyond Nassau County into exurban Suffolk. The district was reliably blue until going heavily for Trump in 2016. But it also consistently re-elected retiring Islamaphobe and torture enthusiast Peter King to Congress for more than a decade.

A TV viewer wouldn’t know much about Republican Gabarino since until recently he didn't promote himself at all but instead spent his campaign chest on trashing Jackie Gordon, the Democrat running neck-and-neck with him for King’s seat. For her part, Gordon foregrounds her stint as an army officer and flashes photos of herself fully suited up and ready for action wherever the Empire sends her. Any voter wondering if the nation’s treasure is wisely spent maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and intervening in every conceivable corner of the world has nowhere to go for a thoughtful discussion.

Speaking of thought or discussion, little to none of either is on display in these insanely expensive artillery barrages of jangling imagery. Whichever of these four candidates eventually decamps for Washington, D.C., it is fair to assume that those who provided the millions they just spent chewing up the psychic terrain will be calling the shots. So we can expect minor tussles over how much (or little) to regulate the plutocrats, how many overseas wars we need to engage in (not whether we need an empire), how cleverly to chip away at the Medicare/Social Security/food stamp safety net, what kinds of deficit-reducing austerity is needed to rein in the GOP spending spree, how much window-dressing will be required to cover up Trump’s onslaught on the environment, what soothing phrases are needed to resassure us of our “bold commitment” to fix climate change, etc. 

That is, given the total control of the process by the holders of the moneybags, how to keep things mostly where they are today while the masses, dumbed down by this fantasy wrestling match, remain enthralled.

That said, the significance of the imminent election is perhaps less about our vision of the future than mass dissatisfaction with the present. The residents and citizens of Chile, where I lived for two decades, had a similar opportunity in 1988 when the military dictatorship staged a plebiscite on Pinochet’s continued rule. The voting options were “YES” and “NO,” and NO won in a walk. Or as a saucy opposition newspaper headlined it, “Pinochet Runs Alone and Comes in Second.”

Trump isn’t running alone, but he might as well be. Biden, so undefined as to be virtually (and for a while literally) invisible, is a stand-in for “None of the Above.” Under normal circumstances, a good half of the population would have done the traditional thing and ignored the voting business entirely. But to know what you do want, it helps to know what you don't want. 

This time, people have realized that not only is the country’s policy direction at stake but also our ability to have anything at all to say about it in the future. Scroll down for a prediction in which I boldly risk total humiliation.

Whether you agree with me or not, political discourse remains woefully debased despite this glimmer of light. So what does it mean for the rickety ship of state plowing through rapidly heating oceans? 

I’d say that at the very least it means the imbalances, strains, and festering crises that produced Trump are going to be largely intact long after his departure. Instead of the urgently needed crackdown on financier looting of the economy, we will have more bailouts of zombie enterprises and more backstopping of corporate debt bubbles by Wall Street’s ICU nurses at the Fed. 

Instead of emergency alleviation of human economic distress, we will have slavish attention to stock prices. 

Instead of Medicare for All, complex new means-tested partial repairs of the damage done to Obamacare; instead of infrastructure stimulus spending, piecemeal public-private partnerships designed to buy off this or that lobby; instead of a living minimum wage, “bipartisan” bonuses exchanged for corporate immunity from COVID lawsuits. 

Instead of the Green New Deal, the same old deals for the green.

Could anything interrupt this discouraging scenario under a President Biden? Yes: sustained, militant mobilization by large numbers of people immune to bullshit promises. There are several elements contained in that phrase.

“Sustained”: Mobilization doesn’t mean a big march, even a gigantic march. Those are easily ignored with some calming rhetoric, at which Democrats are expert.

“Militant”: The demands have to be practical, focused, and radical. The usual timid reforms should be rejected as woefully incommensurate with the gravity of the situation on all fronts.

“Large numbers”: We need people to refuse to go back to sleep just because Trump is finally not in our faces any more. This is a tough one given the desire of so many to do exactly that.

“People immune to bullshit”: Even tougher. Democrats love to convince us that they are on our side and that we should just trust them and wait. Many cautious liberals want nothing more. Success requires that we refuse on both counts and say so clearly. Results are convincing; cordial tea parties aren’t.

It is popular to say that the Democrats are craven, weak, or incompetent. This is false. They are extremely skilled at doing what they want to do: pretend to side with popular demands, neutralize them, and protect the status quo. What looks like failure is actually its exact opposite. Their role is to soothe the populace into passivity with promises of a bright future on a “someday” that never comes. Once in power, they’ll call for “coming together,” “reconciliation,” and renewed “bipartisanship” because their class interests are fully compatible with most of the Trump program, and they will only overturn it at the point of a spear. We, the abused majority, have been bullied for too long.

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P.S. My prediction for Tuesday (once all votes are in): Biden carries all the swing states, plus Texas, and amasses 413 electoral votes.

The King is (or will be) dead; Vive le Roi!

 

Trump has outlived his usefulness, will be jettisoned

The plutocrats have amassed such vast wealth and such a tight grip on all the levers of power and influence that they need not jimmy the electoral college again to shoehorn Donald Trump into a second term. Had they been facing the prospect of, say, a Bernie Sanders presidency, the calculus would have been quite different. But with a lifelong defender of elites standing by promising to do essentially nothing once Trump goes, they can watch benignly while the Donald blows up his campaign and himself; they can welcome the Blues, count their fresh billions, and start the process of wiping their fingerprints off the weird Trumpian interregnum. The next period will be for consolidation.

The insanely rich must have been just as surprised as the rest of us at Trump’s bizarre march to the White House, but he offered them a chance to loot the nation’s wealth unparalleled in history and probably even in their wildest imaginations. Corruption and self-dealing are not just permitted during Trump’s pathetic reign; it is state policy. Taxes were long ago dismissed with a sneer. Environmental protections have been gutted; regulatory restraints are smashed far beyond even what Reagan and the Bush duo engineered. Financial manipulation, stock-price inflation, private equity looting, pension theft, contracting boondoggles—everything was and is there for the taking as long as you’re clever enough to make sure a Trump relative or surrogate is riding along on the gravy train. Anyone unable to salt away a sweet fortune under these conditions just doesn’t have the heart of an oligarch.

Trump’s smash-and-grab style was certainly nontraditional and probably, for some of the classier crooks and war criminals, distasteful. But it was deadly effective, and business is business (Meyer Lansky). The Democrats largely stuck to their assigned role of staged indignation and outrage calibrated to always fall short of effective resistance, except when Trump proved unenthusiastic about aggressive posturing for future wars. Much has been written about Trump’s eager packing of the federal courts with ideological hatchet men (long before the latest Supreme Court drama) though considerably less about Chuck Schumer’s complicity in facilitating it. Trump does the dirty work; the Democrats collude and avoid blame.

The incoming Democrats can spend at least one full presidential term pretending to repair the damage and wishing upon a star for the bipartisanship unicorn to reappear. A lot of anticipatory articles are couched in the language of restoration along the lines of, “Will a Biden Administration be able to repair the damage to [fill in the blank]?” This rhetorical construction assumes they actually want to, a fact not in evidence. Look no further than the campaign ads put out by our local Blue Dog Democrat, Max Rose, who urges his Staten Island neighbors to vote for him because he “supports Trump” and hates the city’s (Democrat) mayor. Rose’s campaign chest is bursting with $5.7 million, 70% of it from “large individual contributions.” Cue Nancy Pelosi telling us next January that her new majority backed by a Democrat president can’t possibly do very much because of foot-dragging by members like Rose, eagerly promoted by the corporate Democrat mainstream. 

*

Electoral fiddle-faddle at home and abroad

Though Biden’s accelerating lead may preclude any election night funny business, Trump is obviously capable of declaring himself the winner and setting loose a horde of lawyers to block the counting of mailed-in ballots likely to favor Democrats. There are certainly precedents. For example, back in January (yes, this year, though it feels like a century ago) try if you can to remember that there was a primary race among a slew of Democrat candidates for president. One of them had a slight lead just as the fancy new Iowa Democratic party-financed app broke down in mid-count; he declared himself the winner. Turned out that Sanders had actually won more votes, but that crucial next-day headline awarded the win to Mayor Pete Buttigieg who took advantage of the completely coincidental snafu. The Bernie-block favor surely merits Mayor B a cabinet post in a Biden Administration. 

Of course, that was just an early fight over front-runner status in a primary, but what about a contest where actual state power is at stake? We have another recent example that Trump could imitate, the intervention of the Organization of American States almost exactly one year ago to declare Bolivia’s presidential vote count suspicious and spark the coup d’état that ousted Evo Morales from the presidency and the country. The OAS, with a U.S.-friendly diplomat at the helm, jumped the gun as the pro-Morales vote trickled in from districts where he was stronger, calling it vote manipulation when it was probably simple voter dynamics. The country has been ruled by a fanatical Christian autocrat ever since who has conveniently flipped Bolivia's foreign policy positions to great satisfaction in D.C. 

What goes around, comes around. Americans shouldn’t be surprised if Trump sees how the U.S. jiggers elections overseas and decides to try the same here at home.

*

“America is not a democracy.”

Thanks to Utah Sen. Mike Lee for saying the nasty part out loud. Of course, people who had that illusion should get out more—what part of the electoral college, statehouse gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mass bribery in the legislative process did you not notice earlier? Not to mention slavery, Jim Crow, and the last 40 years of Republicrat cooperation to ship our industrial base to China and leave Youngstown an Amazon warehouse and a supply of oxy.

The Trump gang has done us a huge favor by ripping off the fig leaf that has lightly covered the unlovely junk of modern financier capitalism, the profoundly undemocratic system now fully installed and dominating our Second Gilded Age. As Lee tweeted, “rank” democracy can thwart what he calls our shared objectives: “liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic].” All those smelly citizens just don’t understand how lucky they are as we march steadily toward ever more prospefity, defined among Lee’s GOP mates as “more wheelbarrows full of cash for us and our friends.” The rest of you can piss off up a rope and die of starvation (or Covid). Installing the Conehead woman on the Supreme Court is of a piece: they don’t even pretend to care that she represents nothing but their narrow class interests.

*

Hunter Biden’s emails 

The entire liberal-ish media universe has its collective BVDs in a major knot over whether anyone should breath a word about this story of Biden fils and his shenaningans in Ukrainian fossil fuels, given their suddenly high evidentiary reporting standards. This is the same passel of Beltway ho’s who have pumped up every fact-free accusation emanating from the security apparatus from the pee tape to the bogus Novichok poisonings and the Russian bounty for killing innocent Americans wearing military uniforms in a foreign country. Whispered rumors from “intelligence officials” get blown all over the front pages, but possible dirt on the anointed candidate’s family is suddenly off limits. Then again, what possible journalistic protocol could matter to a political system that impeached Donald Trump for allegedly bribing the Ukrainian government for policy favors while ignoring Biden’s proud public statements that he did the same? The only difference is that Biden got what he wanted, and Trump didn’t. 

The Last Days (previews)

 

Dictated directly from my informants in The Beyond: 

Oct. 1 Both the Biden and Trump camps declare a crushing victory in the Sept. 29 debate. Reporters find voters in Utah, North Carolina, and Texas whose preferences were swayed during the event; two of the three promptly fall back into comas.

Oct. 2 Mitch McConnell shepherds Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett through the Capitol building in an attempt to meet with Democratic senators. A poorly dressed middle-aged woman resembling Chuck Schumer is seen ducking into the pages’ locker room.

Oct. 3 HHS Secretary Alex Azar appoints new communications staff with sweeping powers over all public statements from the CDC, the FDA, the NIH, the Indian Health Service, the Agency for Toxic Substances, and the Administration for Community Living. QAnon websites go dark; searchers are redirected to <www.hhs.gov/Rapture>.

Oct. 4 CDC chief Robert Redfield testifies at a House subcommittee on guidelines for the reopening of daycare centers; next door, an 8-member Supreme Court upholds a South Carolina state law prohibiting childcare by unrelated adults.

Oct. 5 A $1.2 billion no-bid COVID contract comes to light when a convoy of Chinese container ships carrying masks, gowns and plastic shields creates a bottleneck in the Cayman Islands’ territorial waters, headquarters of a logistics firm “owned” by a newsstand vendor in Latvia. Island officials row out to inform the Chinese captains that the purchasing company is actually a post office box.

Oct. 6 Georgia residents receive a mass mailing instructing them to be sure to vote on Nov. 4. Some are puzzled that the election had been changed to a Wednesday.

Oct. 7 Education Secretary Betsy de Ville Vos issues a nationwide New Common Core curriculum for all K-6 students with lessons on “lesser-known Americans,” including Andrew Mellon, Charles Ponzi, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Oct. 8 The Ohio legislature passes a law closing all state polling places at 2:30 p.m., except in rural counties “where the farmers need extra time.” The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agrees to hear arguments on a motion to halt enactment of the measure.

Oct. 9 Several members of the DC court mysteriously fail to arrive at their chambers. A Proud Bois Instagram account contains an obscure allusion to “study tours” of the Philippine legal system. Maine senator Susan Collins calls the absences “puzzling.”

Oct. 10 GOP-controlled Senate convenes a lightning session to confirm 12 Senior Fellows of the Federalist Society to fill unexpected vacancies on the DC Court of Appeals. A vote is scheduled for the afternoon.

Oct. 11 President Trump announces a breakthrough vaccine that will prevent Coronavirus infection, boost liver enzymes, and cure scabies. All Federal employees will be given the injection “unless they are Deep State saboteurs trying to undermine our brilliant scientists.” Government workers break into the embassy of Azerbaijan and request asylum.

Oct. 12 Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski asks the Federal Judicial Police to open an investigation into the disappearance of appeals court justices but says she will vote to confirm the president’s replacement nominees. “The sanctity of our judicial system must be preserved,” she says.

Oct. 13 Trump orders the Federal Judicial Police to ignore Murkowski’s request. “Some of these guys were so old they probably wandered off.” Open-carry supporters arrive en masse at Murkowski’s office in Anchorage to remind her of their Second Amendment rights.

Oct. 14 Joe Biden comments on the Appeals court disappearances. “I call on my Republican colleagues to do the right thing and help us look for these guys,” he says. “They can’t have gone far.”

Oct. 15 Absentee voters in Iowa receive ballots accidentally saran-wrapped with Trump campaign literature. Officials blame a glitch by an out-of-state vendor. Reporters find the beneficial owner to be the same newsstand vendor in Latvia who ordered 8 million face masks. Helmuts Blovanis says (through an interpreter) “I just signed for a registered letter, and then all these people started calling me. Where is High-owa?”

More urgent messages to follow!