
By Paul Street – February 7, 2020
Letâs not beat around the bush. The game is rigged. The fix is in.
Iâm not just talking about the neofascistic Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Republican-controlled United States Senate and the fake-impeachment trial that body just concluded. Iâm talking about their neoliberal enablers, the Democrats too.
Certain Depressing Things Explained
The deeply conservative corporate and imperialist Democratic Party politics and media complex is determined to deny the progressive neo-New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination.
So what if Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate most likely to organize the working- and lower-class the corporate Democrats â the nationâs Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance (IOPFR)â have been betraying demobilizing for decades?
So what if this makes Sanders the most electable candidate against an incumbent president and a party that pose existential fascistic and ecocidal threats to whatâs left of democracy, the republic, and life itself?
So what if Sandersâ key policy proposals, including Single Payer health insurance (health care as a human right) and a Green New Deal (to put millions to work trying to roll back the soulless capitalist destruction of livable ecology) are urgently required for the common good and human survival?
So what if Sandersâ proposals are conservative in relation to the savage scale of the inequality and environmental destruction neoliberal class rule has been inflicting for several decades on Americans and livable ecology?
So what if nearly half (47%) of Sanders supporters will not commit to voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if it isnât Bernie, making it likely that any other candidate is likely to usher in the tragedy of a second Trump term?
The Democratic establishment is determined to stop Sanders at all costs. As Iâve been saying for years, the corporate Democrats prefer to lose to the ever more viciously right-wing Republicans and the demented fascist oligarch Trump than to the moderately left wing of their own party.
This is why the establishment Democrats and their many media allies (at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and elsewhere) have issued repeated dire warnings over the supposed âradical Leftismâ and âextremismâ of the mildly social-democratic Sanders.
Itâs why Democratic Party-affiliated funders and media opened the campaign season by touting the clownish center-right dementia victim Joe Biden as their âfront-runner.â
Itâs why those funders and media shifted to the slimy Wall Street plaything Pete Butiggieg after Biden re-exposed himself and pseudo-liberal Kamala Harris proved unable to stand strong in the âpragmaticâ center-right Clinton-Obama-Tony Blair-Emanuel Macron lane.
Itâs why the establishment âliberalâ media harps constantly on Sandersâ supposed un-electability even as polls show him solidly beating Trump.
Itâs why former Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, former global derivatives trader and right-wing MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) host Stephanie (class-) Ruhle, and the noxious neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol recently joined forces on MSNBC to viciously denounce Sanders as âthe worst candidateâ to run against Trump.
Itâs why the Democratic National Committee is working to reinstate the authoritarian veto power of unelected establishment âsuperdelegatesâ on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention â a move clearly driven by establishment fears that Sanders could accumulate enough delegates to sweep to a first ballot victory under current rules.
Itâs the reason for the Elizabeth Warren-CNN hit job in the last Iowa Democratic presidential debate â the one where Warren and the cable network conspired to falsely smear Sanders as a sexist.
Itâs why MSDNC and CNN went into overdrive trying to portray Sandersâ campaign as âdivisiveâ after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Hillary Clintonâs malicious personal attacks on Sanders with an ill-timed reaction MSDNC blew up into âthe boo heard around the world.â
Itâs why MSDNC and CNN have played along with Hillary Clintonâs despicable and false claim thar Sanders didnât work hard to help Mrs. Clintonâs (horrific and depressing) campaign during the 2016 general election.
Itâs why the Democratic Party has changed its presidential debate qualification rules so that mega-billionaire and center-right Republocrat Mike Bloomberg can ascend to the top candidate stage on a magic carpet of money after skipping the campaign process in the early caucus and primary states.
Itâs why the insufferable MSDNC bully Chris Matthews (the Ted Baxter of cable news) lost what little composure he has when Sandersâ campaign co-chair Nina Turner accurately called Bloomberg âan oligarchâ (more on this amusing and revealing episode below).
Itâs why the New York Times has been running deceptive commentaries warning falsely about the supposed âradical extremism,â âfiscal irresponsibility,â ârudenessâ and ânonviabilityâ of Sanders and his backers.
Itâs why the California Democratic Partyâs centrist managers are doing their best to make it difficult for independents to vote for Sanders, the stateâs leading presidential candidate.
RELATED CONTENT: Media Darling Pete Buttigieg was in Unit that Worked with the CIA in Afghanistan
Itâs probably why the Des Moines Register Star (which endorsed Elizabeth âCapitalist in my Bonesâ Warren) strangely decided not to release its usual âgold standardâ Iowa poll of the stateâs first-in-the-national caucus-goers prior to the big (and shockingly wrecked) event last Monday.
Itâs why the Times, CNN, and MSNBC (the last outfit is broadcast mediaâs ground-zero for fake-progressive Wall Street centrism ) tout Butiggieg as the winner of Iowaâs spoiled caucus even though Sanders won the same number of state delegates and triumphed decisively in the popular vote (please see and disseminate Fairness and Accuracy in Mediaâs reflection on âHow Corporate Media Makes Pete Look Like Heâs Winningâ).
Itâs why CNN anchors smirkingly opine that Sanders âunder-performedâ and âfailed to meet expectationsâ even after he won the Caucus.
Iowa Black-Apped
And itâs likely why the Iowa Caucus got app-f*#^ed, with the contestâs results rendered unavailable to the public for days. The deadly Shadow appâs âfailureâ and the mind-boggling dysfunction and confusion of the error-ridden count that followed (so extreme that weâll probably never know the real numbers) robbed Sanders of a momentum-building election night victory speech â and gave Trump another reason to gloat about the pathetic nature of the Democratic Party.
It turns out that the Shadow app that crashed the Iowa Caucus and threw Sandersâ Iowa victory down the media memory hole was less than politically neutral. Hardly known for leftist conspiracy theorizing, USA Today offered some chilling reflections the morning after:
âWhatâs this about Shadow and where did the app come from? The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., and issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. A LinkedIn profile for James Hickey lists him as COO of Shadow and an engineering manager for Hillary Clintonâs 2016 presidential campaign. Two other former Clinton campaign workers, former Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, co-founded ShadowâŚThe New York Times has reported that ACRONYM â a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 âto educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,â according to its website â supported Shadow. Its founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obamaâs 2012 presidential campaign, The Los Angeles Times reportedâŚ.Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, who also worked as Clintonâs 2016 Iowa political director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expensesâŚâ
It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, in an article titled âTech Firm Started by Clinton Campaign Veterans Linked to Iowa Caucus Debacleâ: âAmong Shadowâs clients is Pete Buttegiegâs presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for âsoftware rights and subscriptions,â according to disclosures to the FEC.â
So, Shadow, Inc. got money from Wall Street Pete (from the financial sector via Butiggieg, that is), a former consultant with the infamously dark and globalist McKinsey Company and a onetime U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer.
Further feeding the sense of the Iowa Caucus Debacle as a CIA/military intelligence Black Op, Butiggieg proclaimed himself the Iowa victor with zero precincts reporting last Monday night! How Juan Guaido was that?
It worked. The fact that Sanders won Iowa was turned into a public non-fact. The confusion bought Mayor Pete a couple of days to take some undeserved victory laps across the âliberalâ media, boosting him in New Hampshire.
The Democrats Did âMore to Undermine Faith in Our Elections than Russia Ever Couldâ
No talking head has captured the evil of it all more effectively and bitingly than The Hillâs Krystal Ball yesterday morning. Her comments merit transcription and lengthy quotation:
âLet [this sink in]: Twitter is doing a better, more accurate job of tabulating the results than the Democratic Party. What else might be wrong through incompetence, malice, or a combination of both, God only knows. But as if thatâs not enough, after Pete claimed a fake victory thanks to the complicity of the Iowa Democratic Party and the media, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, they saved the best precincts for Bernie Sanders to be counted and included last, because of course they did. Iâm sure it was all just a coincidence, though, guys. And meanwhile, a new tracking poll shows that Peteâs fake win in Iowa has given him a big boost in New Hampshire, lifting him 9 points in 3 days.â
âWhat is truly criminal to me, though, is this: the people who gave Bernie Sanders this hard-fought and well-deserved win are people like this: immigrant workers at a pork-processing plant, who had to fight to even be able to cast their ballots in a caucus that conflicted with their work schedule. They were the very first to vote and among the last to be counted. For four days, their voice and their vote were completely erased, as were the Latinos who participated in satellite caucuses and went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. It is absolutely outrageous.â
âDo you remember the endless, three-year rant at RussiaGate and over how a foreign power spending a million or two over a month on lousy, ungrammatical Facebook ads inside a billion dollar election was the biggest threat to our constitutional republic and was material to Hillaryâs loss in 2016? Letâs be completely clear here. The Democratic Party in Iowa has done more to undermine faith in our elections than Russia ever could. Period. But donât expect a Democratic House to hold months-long hearings into the Iowa Caucus debacle. Donât expect any degree of self-reflection on the part of the party bosses and consultant grifters who deserve to be fired en masse. Instead, the same folks who think they should be able to take the nomination from Bernie with their Superdelegates, the same folks who tweak the process so it suits them, the same folks who are now leaking out partial wrong results in a mockery of manipulation masquerading as transparencyâŚthese people will continue to run the Democratic Party in Iowa and elsewhere until and unless an anti-establishment candidate like Bernie throws them all out. âŚ.â
â⌠Single moms arranged babysitters to participate in this caucus. Nurses gave up shifts, lost 12 hours of pay to participate in this caucus. People rolled in with their wheelchairs. They werenât with their kids or doing their college homeworkâŚVolunteers donated hundreds of thousands of hours of time. Banging on doors, hosting house parties, managing selfie lines, and all for what? So that all that time, all that energy could be turned into a giant joke that makes everyone who participated in the process feel like a foolâŚ.â
âPeople that we invite into this process are made a sacred promise that this activity s meaningful and necessary. And then to watch such manifest incompetence, cronyism, obfuscation, and selective disclosure in what is supposed to be the most critical election of our lifetime makes a joke out of democracy and spread cynicism like the Coranavirus of the civic soulâŚThis whole democracy looks like a Potemkin Village farce where the GOP and Democratic Party insiders seem to almost laugh at the rubes who take this whole thing as serious and sacred.â
Iâve never had the same degree of faith n U.S. electoral politics that Ms. Ball (who would likely and wrongly consider me a victim and purveyor of cynicism) seems to have had in the past, but that is an extremely powerful denunciation of what happened to Sanders and his backers â and the democratic ideal â in Iowa this week.
(At least we know for certain that voters are ready to pull the rusty chain on Joe Pool Chain Biden. Too bad for the companies who were gearing up to mass produce record players for the poor in response to Joe âRecord Players for the Poorâ Bidenâs promise of Vinyl New Deal.)
This is Who the Democrats Are
Butiggieg knows heâs never going to be president. âAlfred E. Neumanâsâ role is to muddle public perceptions, screwing Warren and Sanders in the early states to help set up âMini-Mikeâ Bloomberg (I am borrowing Trumpâs frankly clever nicknames for these right-wing candidate), who is Wall Streetâs next Great Stop Sanders Hope in the wake of âSleepy Joeâsâ predictable (and widely predicted) collapse.
MSDNC is cable news central for the IOPFRâs Campaign to Stop Sanders and Re-Elect the Neofascist Trump with Yet Another Centrist Neoliberal Creep. Two days ago, the networkâs âMorning Joeâ hosts used the very Iowa fiasco that their on-the-ground ideological comrades created to promote Bloomberg and Super Tuesday as the alternatives to âradicalâ Bernie and the early caucus and primaries. The âprogressiveâ Kissingerian network (Iâve heard MSNBC hosts praise the blood-drenched war criminal Henry Kissinger on numerous occasions) didnât try hide its corporatist agenda to any serious degree.
âDemocrats,â a popular Internet meme featuring pictures of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi runs, âare afraid that American voters are going to interfere in the 2020 election.â
Thank you. Exactly right.
Surprised? You shouldnât be. The Democratic Party isnât about social justice, democracy, and/or environmental sanity. It isnât even primarily about winning elections. âHistoryâs second most enthusiastic capitalist partyâ (as former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once accurately described the Democrats) is about serving âeliteâ corporate and financial sponsors above all, and those sponsors prefer a second fascistic Trump term to a mildly progressive first Sanders one.
Oligarchs âTake Advantage of a Broken and Dysfunctional Systemâ
In an amusing and telling episode on MSNBC prior to the Caucus, Nina Turner told Chris Matthews that voters worry about âthe oligarchsâ who buy American elections. âDo you think Mike Bloomberg is an oligarch?!â an outraged Matthews asked. âHe is,â Turner retorted. âHe skipped Iowa. Iowans should be insulted. Buying his way into this race, period. The DNC changed the rules. They didnât change it for Senator Harris. They didnât change it for Senator Booker. They didnât change it for Secretary Castro.â
Thank you. Exactly right.
RELATED CONTENT: The Myth of Incompetence: DNC Scandals are a Feature, Not a Bug
Matthews then incredulously asked Turner is she really believed Bloomberg purchased his way into the presidential debates â as if there is the slightest hint of a scintilla of an iota of a sliver of a wisp of a rumor of a scent of doubt about.
After Matthews finished idiotically interrogating Turner, MSDNC anchor Brian Williams turned to MSDNC pundit Jason Johnson. Johnson also disapproved of Ms. Turnerâs description of the oligarch Bloomberg as an oligarch.
âOligarchy, in our particular terminology,â Johnson intoned, âmakes you think of a rich person who got their money off of oil in Russia, who is taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system.â
You canât make shit like that up! No, Jason Johnson: imperialist, Russophobic, and American Exceptionalist doctrine and bad reporting make you think that way. Merriam-Webster defines âoligarchyâ as: âgovernment by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.â Thereâs an abundance of solid academic research showing that the United States today fits the definition very well. Here are four for Johnson to start with: Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What we Can Do About It (University of Chicago, 2018), Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with the United States as a leading case study); Paul Street, They Rule: They 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014).
Concerned about rich people âtaking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional systemâ? Look no further than the worldâs self-proclaimed âgreatest democracyâ! No other âdemocracyâ in the so-called developed world remotely matches the United States of Dark Money when it comes to giving big donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system â winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the âfederalistâ decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process â this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 9 Asian-Pacific countries, 2 countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and 6 African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among âWestern democracies.â
Donât take it from a radical eco-Marxist like me. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Page (Northwestern) and Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book mentioned above:
âthe best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups â especially business corporations â have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless⌠Majorities of Americans favorâŚprograms to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut âcorporate welfare.â Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).â
The Table is Tilted: Beyond the Cynical Brilliance of George Carlin
It was nice of the professors to quantify and document what working-class Americans have always known: money talks, bullshit walks. My old Finish socialist Aunt Mary (a high school graduate who worked for decades as a department store clerk in downtown Elgin, Illinois) understood Page and Gilensâ point very well. In the famous words of George Carlin:
âThereâs a reason education sucks and itâs the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. Itâs never going to get any better, donât look for it, be happy with what youâve got. Because the owners of this country donât want that. Iâm talking about the REAL owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions â forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You donât. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; theyâve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; theyâve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.â
âThey gotcha by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying â lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want â they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But Iâll tell you what they donât want. They donât want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They donât want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. Theyâre not interested in that, that doesnât help them. Thatâs against their interests. Thatâs right. They donât want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly theyâre getting f***ed by the system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They donât want that.â
âYou know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. âŚAll day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe â what to think â and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.â
ââŚThey donât give a fuck about you, they donâtâŚThey donât care about you â at all. At all, At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care ⌠thatâs what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d**k thatâs being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth â itâs called the American Dream ⌠âcuz you have to be asleep to believe it.â
The problem with Carlinâs brilliant rant is of course itâs extreme, well, cynicism. Millions upon millions of Americans do notice and do care. They arenât asleep. They are capable of critical thinking. They very much want to un-rig the game, level the table, and change the system â make a peopleâs democratic revolution and save humanity. I run into and talk to and try to energize and learn and get energy from these people regularly. They havenât surrendered to the American authoritarian-sexist-racist-nativist-nationalist-fascist nightmare yet.
I share with many of these people a basic underlying spiritual sense that giving up and letting the owners â our financial and political owners, yes â win is irrational and indeed morally corrupt. Letâs say the chances of collapsing the nationâs un-elected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, white-supremacism, and patriarchy are just 3 or 2 or even 1 in 10 (I think the real odds may be much higher). Why bring them down to zero by giving in to fatalism â to âitâs never going to change?â It makes no sense to give up: you lose nothing by believing in the possibility of democratic transformation and revolutionary change; you lose everything by not believing. Try some radical existentialism!
Tactical Support
Should people caucus and vote for Bernie in the rigged Democratic Party nomination process? Sure, for three reasons. First, thereâs a(n admittedly slim) chance Sanders could prevail and lead the enactment of changes that would make a very positive difference in peoplesâ lives and capacity to fight back against American Oligarchy, which is now taking significant steps towards openly authoritarian rule.
Second, doing some work with the Sanders campaign puts you in contact with masses of people who are changing all the time (like all phenomena), people-in-process who are capable of engaging on the critical topics of how and why we must move beyond the rigged games and systems that capture and depress our energies and how and why we must begin to organize for a real revolution.
Third, even if he doesnât win, itâs good to make the screwing over of Sanders as transparent and instructive as possible. This could help motivate millions of Americans to break in revolutionary fashion from a âbroken and dysfunctional [American] systemâ of class rule. It could help spark millions to join a peopleâs movement that works beneath and beyond the rigged elections cycle and system to heroically reclaim the commons and save humanity.
Thereâs a lot of good and potentially radical energy out there. It needs to go somewhere positive once the âcoffin of class consciousnessâ (in the words of the radical historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box fails to deliver yesâŚyet once again. The capitalists hardly restrict their political pressure to the electoral process â just wait to see what happens if Sanders (somewhat miraculously) makes it into the White House. We must and can develop an anti-capitalist (and now anti-fascist) politics that fights back in ways that transcend those savagely time-staggered moments when our owners permit us to make marks next to the names of politicians who can generally be trusted to put their own interests above ours and those of the common good.
âExcept for the rare few,â Howard Zinn once wrote, âour representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ârealistic.â We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.â
Featured image:Â Office of Public Affairs â CC BY 2.0
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