I'm back...

Black Cow - NYC fall 2019

I'm back. A little shakey from the hospital after having my spleen removed and experiencing shit that teaches one what's really important, BRT will continue to comment on the world with whatever wisdom this old writer has to offer. To you my loyal readers, for sticking around, tears come to mind in copious amounts without a doubt. Thank you.

Best

Robert E. 

Ding Dong ...

The Donald is gone, We will endure two+ months of Aging Orange raging and trying everything possible to stay as President but in the end, he may be dragged out of the WH to face the Southern District of New York for money laundering, tax fraud and influence peddling along with other crimes and misdemeanors we don't know about. In a truly excellent article from The Guardian titled Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus by Thomas Frank as his piece eloquently extends the thoughts of BRT's An epic CF for the ages ... regarding what Biden has to do if this nation is to survive.

Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. Finally, we have come to the end of Donald Trump’s season of extreme misrule. Voters have rejected what can only be described as the crassest, vainest, stupidest, most dysfunctional leadership this country has ever suffered.

Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security.

What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.

Beginning with Clinton and Obama and losing with Hilliary, the dem's switch worked well until it didn't.

Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.

However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. 

But the biggest consequence of the Democrats’ shabby experiment is one we have yet to reckon with: it has coincided with a period of ever more conservative governance. It turns out that when the party of the left abandons its populist traditions for high-minded white-collar rectitude, the road is cleared for a particularly poisonous species of rightwing demagoguery. It is no coincidence that, as Democrats pursued their professional-class “third way”, Republicans became ever bolder in their preposterous claim to be a “workers’ party” representing the aspirations of ordinary people.

Endgame

I have been narrating our country’s toboggan ride to hell for much of my adult life, and I can attest that Biden’s triumph by itself is not enough to bring it to a stop. It will never stop until a Democratic president faces up to his party’s mistakes and brings to a halt the ignoble experiment of the last four decades.

Should Joe Biden do that, he might be able to see that he has before him a moment of great Democratic possibility. This country has grown sick of plutocracy. We don’t enjoy sluicing everything we earn into the bank accounts of a few dozen billionaires. We want a healthcare system that works and an economy in which ordinary people prosper, even people who didn’t go to a fancy college. Should Biden open his eyes and overcome his past, he may discover that he has it in his power to rebuild our sense of social solidarity, to make the middle-class promise real again, and to beat back the right. All at the same time

Does he have the smarts and guts to do this, only time will tell.

 

An epic CF for the ages ...

 A dear friend sent me this gem, proving the 2020 election was an epic CF for the ages.

Final thoughts on the wonderful election of 2020 and how the Democrats blew it yet again. As a result, nothing will change. We will still continue to love Israel. We will still continue to wage never-ending war to feed the maw of the MIC. We will continue to demonize Russia and ... we will still be under the control of McConnell, the de facto President of the United States with term limits remaining but a dream and the monstrosity known as the tax code will continue to game the system for the rich and powerful while increasing inequality to levels far beyond the the Gilded Age. Oh, I forgot, Glass-Steagall will never come back.

Backgrounder: Bernie was screwed twice by queen Hillary, first with help from Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the second with the DNC even though Bernie won the right to be the Democratic nominee to be President both times. In 2016, the entitled queen lost, running a horrible campaign while the party ran on celebrity endorsements and no coherent policy iniatives set in place to explain to people why the should vote democratic. In 2020, complicit with a corrupt press, the strategy comprised of bashing Trump 24/7, spouting never ending slogans and again, no viable policy initiatives put forth. What comes to mind here, the dems knew Bernie would win but Wall Street and the despised super delegates denied him a second time as a traditional candidate was considered to be the better choice as the elite only care about ... their money and not the welfare of the country.

Now think Bernie, Mr. Policy incarnate and ... respect from Trumpers and The Donald himself as they knew he was the real deal. With him as candidate, the senate would have gone blue and the house would gain more Democrats. 

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive,’  - Sir Walter Scott 

Bernie’s denial, the work of corrupt and inept fools running things, disallowed a politician who’s competent and actually honest with the guts to discuss the 3rd rail issue of Israel, going after taxes of the power elite and challenging the MIC’s policy of never ending war.

2016

  Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC - Donna Braazile

 ... The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

It gets way better.

The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

2020 

     Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) flashes a victory smile March 12, 1952, in Concord, N.H., as he reads a newspaper account of his victory over President Harry S. Truman in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary. (File/AP)

Before ‘Stop Bernie,’ a brokered Democratic convention stopped Estes Kefauver

In 1952, Kefauver, a U.S. senator from Tennessee, won 12 of 15 primaries. But it didn’t matter. 

He was wrong. The upstart senator’s rise sparked a “Stop Kefauver” movement by Democratic Party leaders and led by sitting President Harry S. Truman that resulted in the nation’s last convention that wasn’t decided on the first ballot.

The resistance foreshadowed the current “Stop Bernie” fervor in the Democratic establishment about Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the democratic socialist who has emerged as the front-runner for the nomination. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that dozens of Democratic Party officials said they would oppose the nomination of Sanders if he arrives at the convention in Milwaukee in July without the majority of delegates needed.

Biden won, thank god. I'm praying he will do well, the nation's counting on it but I still say it's time for the progressives to take over now, beginning in 2022. As a note of real hope, many more  repugs in the senate are running for, of course, reelection than the dems in 2022, thus making it  possible for the party of the donkey to take back the senate and eliminate Mitch as the retched de facto  president of the United States.