Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Count Your Damned Blessings

It's a testament to how low we've sunk as a country that the defeat in Alabama Tuesday of a homophobic xenophobic white supremacist fundamentalist fanatic pedophile came as such a huge shock to most pundits and prognosticators.

Much to our wondering eye does appear the reality that yes, Virginia, there is a limit to the awfulness that voters will accept in the politicians they choose to faithfully serve the oligarchs under the pretense of representative democracy.

The Democratic victor, Doug Jones, is still too much of an ideological "blank slate" for us to predict whether he'll try anything radical to improve the lives of the poor and Black Alabama voters who turned out in record numbers in an off-year special election to push him over the finish line. He'll actually get one more year (until 2021!) than a mere House representative would get to master juggling his good legislative stuff with the need to work the phones for campaign donations. So I'll give him the benefit of my many doubts in the hope that he proves my ingrained cynicism to be totally misplaced.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress are taking no chances in getting their massive gift to the rich passed just in time for Christmas, before Doug Jones is sworn in to potentially jam even the tiniest wad of gum in their nasty works.  It bodes ill for them that despite his blank slate politics, Jones is very popular among black voters, not least because he successfully prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan terrorists who bombed a Baptist church in 1963 and killed four little girls.

New York Times pundit Paul Krugman drearily ponders the tasteless haste with which the robber barons are cramming coal into the stockings of 330 million Americans, or at least the bottom 90-99% of Americans. We still don't know exactly how severely the lesser millionaires and multimillionaires may be punished, especially those residing on the Blue State coasts. For example, although the mortgage deduction has been raised from $100.000 to $750,000, the tax bill will not allow a similar deduction for state and local taxes if the merely well-to-do choose the former option. This, from first appearances anyway, is a big slap to people who own luxury homes in New York's Hamptons enclaves.

  It might all seem moot to ordinary people when Congress reconvenes in January to begin its attack on the great social insurance programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. That's when real democracy should rear its righteous head and show that representative democracy is nothing but an oxymoron. It's nothing but a feel-good story that media and political propagandists have been telling us for more than two centuries now. So with any luck and lots of organization, the watershed #MeToo movement will quickly evolve from outraged protests against sexual assault and harassment to outraged protests against the social and economic assaults committed against us every single day by a tiny cabal of oligarchic predators.


These predatory rulers do, despite all their greed and venality, still require "the consent of the governed" in order to operate. It's why the oligarchs didn't fight back too hard against FDR's agenda during the First Great Depression. The continued existence of capitalism depended on him saving them from themselves, as well as from the sit-down strikes and rent riots.

So to Krugman's smug conclusion that the tax bill is just so horrible that it will send a delicious thrill right up the osteoporotic spine of the Democratic Party, I responded: 
  Those Democratic strategists might be gleefully thinking "Make My Day", but I suspect that those of us not making six figures a year as consultants are thinking more in terms of "Our Days Are Numbered."
Sorry, but the realization that the GOP mobsters are shooting themselves, and that the Dems look good in comparison doesn't put food on our tables, pay the rent, make doctor visits feasible even with "affordable" coverage, or ease whole lifetimes' worth of crushing student debt.

With the election of a monumentally incompetent criminal to the White House, the Republicans are newly emboldened to act out the darkest fantasies of the malignant Donor Class, a/k/a the Owner Class. The defeat of good ole boy pedophile Roy Moore does indeed spell the eventual doom of Trumpism and possibly the GOP majority. So they'll grab while the grabbing's good.
Plus, all the really nasty bad stuff is traditionally rushed through during the joyful winter holiday season. They count on most of us being either too busy consuming, or too depressed about our already-strapped existences, to make much of a stink. Furthermore, since we don't know exactly what is in this piece of malignant legislation, and the entire media-political complex will have made their quick holiday getaways, by the time we find out it'll be a done deal.

Then we'll be told to "adapt" and to practice "resilience" as we wait to vote the good guys back in to, at best. only partially undo what the Sadism Party has wrought.

Representative Democracy: The Fluff That Hides the Bad Stuff

4 comments:

Mark Thomason said...

"The defeat in Alabama Tuesday of a homophobic xenophobic white supremacist fundamentalist fanatic pedophile" was a very near run thing. He almost won.

Also, the voters picked him over the guy Trump supported, the guy the Republican establishment wanted, Luther Strange. Voters picked Moore in defiance of the Republican Party. Only then did the party rush to get to the head of the parade that had left despite it.

There is a lot more to this than just voters could not stomach the guy supported by Trump. The simple answer is also the wrong one. This has layers.

I suspect voter rebellion is key to understanding this. That makes Bannon half right despite the wrong candidate. It makes wrong the excuse-making holdovers from Team Hillary doing its outrage on behalf of narrowly defined minority groups. Only 25% voted in this special election, so a general will have a different group of voters too.

I see many explanations gleefully simplified right down to absurdly wrong.

The Joker said...

"Jones is very popular among black voters, not least because in 1963 he successfully prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan terrorists who bombed a Baptist church and killed four little girls" -- K.G.

If Doug Jones had prosecuted in 1963, he would have been quite precocious, as he was born in 1954. The bombing occured in 1963. Indictment was in 2000, with the trials in 2001 and 2002.

Otherwise, I generally agree with your column. I don't think the Democrats as a party under their current leadership have either a bona fide serious philosophical belief in wide-ranging progressivism or the spine to truly fight for it. Not sure which deficit came first, they probably declined together. Unless the Democratic Party (as a whole, not just isolated individuals) can quickly and genuinely remedy both deficits, they are destined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as during the Obama years.

Karen Garcia said...

@Mark,

Yes, the vast majority of white voters, both men and women, opted for Moore. It was the Black vote that nudged him to victory. Agree, the Democratic Party's Alabama Jubilee is premature re national prospects. As noted in one of my links, the Party had better start coming through for poor, black and working people and stop taking their vote so much for granted if they expect to keep winning elections. (cynically sticks tongue firmly in cheek). I can hardly stand to read the "explainer" articles about the earth-shattering ramifications of these rare victories any more, although I do tend to agree that Trump is on the descendant... which is not to say he, and especially his party, can't and won't do a lot of damage in the interim.

@The Joker,

Thanks! That was careless and clumsy writing on my part. Correction made to the effect that Jones prosecuted the 1963 Klan bombing - a far cry from the trial actually happening in '63. That would have been some amazing swift justice, especially in the Deep South!

Comrade Pinko said...

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'Guess Which Schools and Degrees Produce the Most Student Loan Defaults? Hint: It’s Not the Humanities'

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/12/guess-schools-degrees-produce-student-loan-defaults-hint-not-humanities.html