Thursday, June 22, 2017

Some People "Would Rather Have 1st Class Seats on the Titanic Than Change the Course of the Ship"

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(Click to see original tweet.)

by Gaius Publius

"Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown[.]"
—Paul Craig Roberts, quoted here

Read the quote in the graphic above again. Insider Party consultants made millions off of Jon Ossoff's loss. Would those insiders take an Ossoff win if it meant no money for them? These people, Democratic Party elites, are not your friends and they're not the nation's friends. They are their own friends, period.

This is the other problem the nation faces. This is why the nation can't have nice things, like Medicare for All:
Hillary Clinton: Single-payer health care will 'never, ever' happen

Clinton stressed how difficult it is to stand up to the existing health insurance industry ... "I think it's important to point out that there are a lot of reasons we have the health care system we have today," she said. "I know how much money influences the political decision-making..."
an economy free of predatory monopolies:
Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly that also includes Google and Walmart.... In its pursuit of bigness, Amazon has left a trail of destruction—competitors undercut, suppliers squeezed—some of it necessary, and some of it highly worrisome. And in its confrontation with the publisher Hachette, it has entered a phase of heightened aggression unseen even when it tried to crush Zappos by offering a $5 rebate on all its shoes or when it gave employees phony business cards to avoid paying sales taxes in various states.)
and bankers who got to jail when they steal money ("The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions").

This is a large part of why the worst political party in 100 years — the Republican Party, if you're wondering — holds so much power. The other resistance is against Democratic Party policies like these. Democrats will have a very hard time winning until they change.

Which means, I think, that we'll have to make them change. It should be clear by now that the next revolution must be inside the Democratic Party, unless one wishes to scale the mountain of deliberate, structural impediments to forming a viable, 50-state third party.

No Time Left At All

Moreover, we don't have time for a 30-year project of reform. We have two years, maybe four, at most — après ça, le déluge. Here's why:

a. Climate change won't wait 30 years while we elect sufficient climate-friendly Democrats and build sufficient Democratic political infrastructure to deal with it.​ Mother Nature is on the very verge of shrugging her shoulders at last and sloughing us to the floor of the historical past. Once that moment occurs, once we cross that line, we're doomed to end as a memory, though none will be left to remember us.

b. Nor will all the pissed-off, angry, dying middle class voters wait 30 years, those who live in states where pissed-off dying voters are most concentrated and who chose the worst presidential candidate in modern history, Donald F-ing Trump (yes, that's his middle name), over the "You can't have nice things" Democratic candidate our Establishment elites cleverly offered them.

Those people won't wait at all. They've totally had it. Students drowning in debt have totally had it. The jobless and homeless — and soon-to-be jobless and homeless — they've had it as well. Every independent ("I hate both parties") voter in the country, or most, have had it too, and every study says so.

How many "I hate both parties" voters are there — or would-be voters if someone would just give them something to vote for? This many:


What does "they have had it" look like in practice? It looks like anything that looks like rebellion against a hopeless life, including putting a fool like Trump in office. It also includes horrors like these. (Nicole Sandler and I discussed this very topic, the collapsing social contract, recently. Click here for the interview. Start at 42:00 for that part of the discussion. Or start at 31:15 for the whole interview, where we discuss what's going on with Trump-Russia-Comeygate as well.)

"Tick-tick-tick," says the world-historical clock on the wall. By my count, with the Georgia election Democrats have just blown their fifth chance in a row to make a new first impression — all so that its entrenched politicians, consultants, service-providing infrastructure and media surrogates can make a larger pile of money, grease the skids on their own and their children's careers, and swan about DC like the minor-league queens and kings they think they are.

"We may be on the Titanic," I hear them all say, "but the service in First Class is to die for! Check out the lobster in the Oh It's You, Senator lounge."

Protecting Their First Class Seats on the Titanic

The quote in the title of this piece is from Bernie Sanders, said in a recent interview with David Sirota. Here's just a part (emphasis and paragraphing mine):
Sirota: The Democratic Party leadership has lost the White House, Congress, 1,000 state legislative seats and many governorships. Why is the party still run by the same group of people who delivered that electoral record?

Sanders: Because there are people who, as I often say, would rather have first class seats going down with the Titanic, rather than change the course of the ship. There are people who have spent their entire lives in the Democratic Party, there are people who've invested a whole lot of money into the Democratic Party, they think the Democratic Party belongs to them. You know, they own a home, they may own a boat, they may own the Democratic Party.

I mean, that's just the way people are, and I think there is reluctance on some, not all, by the way — I mean, I ran around this country and I met with the Democratic Party leaders in almost every state in the country. Some of them made it very clear they did not want to open the door to working people, they did not want to open to door to young people. They wanted to maintain the status quo.

On the other hand, I will tell you, there are party leaders around the country that said, “You know what, Bernie? There’s a lot of young people out there who want to get involved. We think that’s a great idea, and we want them involved.”
Those who said "You know what, Bernie? There’s a lot of young people out there who want to get involved. We think that’s a great idea" — they don't run the Party when it comes to its top layers of leadership. Not by a very long shot.

For the Message to Change, the Leadership Must Change

So what's a progressive to do? It should be obvious. The Democratic Party has to change its policy offering, from "You can't have what all of you want" to "If the people want a better life, we will give it to them."

Yet this is not so easily done. For the message to change, the leadership must also change.

Which raises the critical question: How do we depose Chuc​k Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and the rest of their kind and make people like Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley the Party leaders instead?

After all, if someone like Bernie Sanders isn't Senate Majority Leader, if a Sanders-like politician (Ted Lieu perhaps) isn't Speaker of the House, what's the point of electing more back-bench progressives, more "supporting cast" players? ​

If there's no way to do that — and soon, given the ticking clock — we're Sisyphus pushing the same heavy boulder up the same high hill, year after year, decade after decade, till we die or the game is finally truly over. 2018 is around the bend. 2020 is coming. Après ça, le déluge. Not much time to solve this one.

Completely filling the Second Class cabins on the Titanic with our people (that is, populating Congress with progressives who are nevertheless kept from leadership and control) won't change what goes on in the Captain's cabin and on the bridge.

Put more simply, we need to control the Party, or when the clock truly runs out, all this effort will truly have been pointless. I'm not fatalistic. I assume there's a way. So here's my first shot at an answer.

Elected Progressives Must Openly Rebel Against Their "Leaders"

In order for the revolution inside the Democratic Party to work, our elected progressive congressional representatives and senators, must work to depose Pelosi and Schumer (etc.) and take power. More — they must do it visibly, effectively and now, in order to convince the 42% of voters that someone inside the Party is trying to knock these people out of the Captain's chair.

We voters and activists have our own challenges. This is the challenge for the electeds we've already put in place. If our elected progressives don't do this — or won't do this — "tick-tick-tick" says the world-historical clock on the wall. And we can all go down together, steerage and First Class alike.

It's time to step up, elected progressives. It's also time to be seen to step up.  Read the Paul Craig Roberts quote at the top again. If the Party's failed leaders aren't deposed, the revolution will have failed.

It's a moment for real courage, and moments of courage bring moments of great fear. I understand that this kind of open rebellion, open public confrontation, a palace coup in front of the TV cameras, is frightening.

It's also necessary.

My ask: If you agree, write to your favorite elected progressive and say so. No more gravy train for Democratic elites. Meat and potatoes for voters instead. Complete the Sanders revolution by changing House and Senate leadership — now.

I know this puts some very good people on the spot. But maybe that's a feature, yes?

GP
 

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5 Comments:

At 11:18 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jimmy Dore znd friends blast the dompocrats on their terrible choices in GA6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--hoskx8tC8
Here's Why Ossoff Was Beaten Worse Than Hillary Clinton

As Graham Ellwood says in the piece [paraphrasing], "Ossoff isn't offering me the working class voter anything, so I might as well vote for the lady who will let me keep my guns."

WHEN DO WE SAY ENOUGH IS ENOUGH AND DUMP THE DEMOCRATS???

 
At 1:02 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Right on 11:18!!

I think this analysis omits the obvious. The democraps CANNOT change. They made a choice back in 1982, at the urging of bill fucking Clinton et al, to forswear the working man and cleave to the big money.

At this point in time, all former FDR Democrats are gone -- purged/culled by the new sheriff in town ($MONEY$). All who are left are those who sold what micro-souls they may have had for the corporate/billionaire bribery and future compensation as lobbyists for same.

Not only can they NEVER return to advocacy for the commons, because the money forbids it, but they don't want to, because the money pays them obscenely not to.

So you end up with the Ds giving banks CFMA and GLBA, bailouts and NO INDICTMENTS; giving multinats xxFTAs, WTO and GATT; giving war street Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, etc; giving the deep state PATRIOT, FISA, torture, NSA spying, etc; giving insurance and phrma the ACA bailout; giving boner everything he wanted and offering MORE (SSI cuts and so forth).


 
At 3:36 PM, Blogger sglover said...

"It should be clear by now that the next revolution must be inside the Democratic Party, unless one wishes to scale the mountain of deliberate, structural impediments to forming a viable, 50-state third party."

This is ridiculous. The Democratic Party is ALREADY functionally dead. Look at how comprehensively it fucked the dog in Georgia -- $60 million spent on a guy who didn't even live in the district?!?!?!? (I'll bet lots of Dem "talent" made out like bandits, "strategizing" and "consulting" for Ossoff.) The "party" is nothing more than a gaggle of overpaid zero-talent hacks determined to hang on to their sweet gigs. No tick ever clung to its host more tightly than Dem "leadership". THEY WILL NEVER LEAVE. They must be left.

At this point the best thing Sanders can do for America is to get his coalition to walk away from the Dem zombie. Yeah, yeah, third parties, splitters, etc etc etc. Yeah, yeah, it'd have to get over the hurdle of getting on ballots in all the states. It's not a trivial task, but even the Greens have pulled it off in most states (so far as I know), and **nobody** would ever accuse the Greens of being especially effective. The point would not be creating a third party so much as a genuine, functioning second party.

By the way, we know that Dem "leadership" is quite capable of setting up its own intramural hurdles, and the end result of that is -- Trump.

Honestly, at this point, what is there to lose? Is gathering signatures and filling out paperwork really such a burden that we're better off relying on the proven incompetence and sliminess of Dem "leadership"?!?

 
At 7:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Truth spake Samuel.

Democraps are oh-fer the Drumpfsterfire so far.

Begs the question: How bad would a R admin actually have to be in order to get a democrap elected? I mean, sweet jeezis! If it has to be worse than this...

I've been saying "blow it up" now for 30 years (and all everyone hears is crickets). When Clinton nom'd Rubin and he was confirmed, I knew it was a lost cause forever.

Voters become the variable in this endeavor now. If US voters don't get smarter and more involved (and lose the pure evil streak), even a viable left party won't matter.

The other variable is fraud. A catch-22. If you don't get a viable left party, no fix for vote fraud. If you have vote fraud, no viable left party will win.

If we'd started 30 years ago, maybe we'd be somewhere along the path to healing.
But I have real doubts that, at this point in time, we CAN BE FIXED without blowing up the Constitution and maybe have the civil war flare up again.
About 30% of voters are so stupid and evil they can't be fixed. And they always vote for the worst of the worst they have. That leaves 70% of the voters have no skin in the game any more. Nobody to vote for so around half of them only vote against Rs. The rest don't bother, and why should they anyway?

Too much hate for which I see no remedy. WAAAY too much stupidity on both sides for which there can be no remedy until a true left party fixes education FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION. Corruption on both sides. Each cycle there is 11 figures to spend on keeping it that way. There could be 13 figures if that's what it would take... the money would happily "invest" that much to keep the status quo.

How can that be fixed without a collapse or a war? Either way, it has to happen.

If it doesn't, some day we'll be marching into the gas chambers or open pits.

Those who don't give a flying fuck about history doom themselves to repeat it, even though they'd never know they were repeating.

 
At 3:50 AM, Anonymous Hone said...

The French had it right, "Off with their heads!"

 

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