House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had just caved to approving the so-called "humanitarian aid" package after Vice President Mike Pence promised he'd keep her in the loop on the refugee kids (whom she'd only that day described as her lion cubs in need of maternal protection) who die in ICE custody as soon as possible after they take their last breaths.
Or, as the New York Times blandly described it, putting the best possible face on some truly gruesome bipartisan collusion:
Her retreat came after Vice President Mike Pence gave Ms. Pelosi private assurances that the administration would abide by some of the restrictions she had sought. They included a requirement to notify lawmakers within 24 hours after the death of a migrant child in government custody, and a 90-day time limit on children spending time in temporary intake facilities, according to a person familiar with the discussions.The Democrats might have lost their Battle to send toothbrushes and soap to the traumatized imprisoned children at the border, but if they beat Trump next year they'll make damned sure that every non-criminal traumatized adult and child refugee gets a Medicaid card. Freedom might not be a basic human right any more, but health insurance will never die, especially if it's insurance that can't actually be used within the confines of cages or while hiding from a beefed-up border patrol. No place is safe, because the "border" is now defined not only as every state in America, but wherever American corporate interests and client regimes exist. In other words, the U.S.border comprises a major chunk of the planet.
This makes it so easy for Democratic candidates, especially the senators who conveniently didn't have to vote for the latest border aid package, to cynically promise a health insurance card for every undocumented pocket. What migrant in their right mind would risk everything applying for an I.D. card, thereby making it easier for ICE agents to locate them?
This horrible truth was the main switcheroo part of Thursday night's Debate & Switch spectacle in Miami. Nobody on the NBC moderation team and none of the candidates took so much as a swipe at Nancy Pelosi and her right-wing Democratic colleagues, who are grotesquely described as "moderates" in corporate media narratives.
Luckily for Madam Speaker, the fresh hypocrisy was conveniently overshadowed by California Senator Kamala Harris's withering and well-rehearsed attack on front-runner Joe Biden's sordid racist history. Rank opportunist and jailer of black mothers of truant children though she herself may be, Harris was the perfect prosecutorial attack machine, given that she herself had been bused to school as a child in Berkeley.
As is his wont, Biden only made his bad situation worse, stammering querulously that localities like Berkeley - and not the federal government - had the right to set integration policy. This made him sound just like George Wallace and the Southern racist's guide to "state's rights" as a means of keeping the institutional racism and segregation alive.
Although Harris prefaced her attack with the disclaimer that she doesn't think Biden himself is a racist, she couldn't have elicited his deep-seated racist mindset any better than she did.
We'll see how this plays out in the polls, and whether Biden's lead will be affected. If it's not, then there are more silent old white Deplorables out there in the Homeland than those who profess to be in Trump's base. There also might be more conservative older black voters out there who prefer the racist they knew yesterday to the racist they know today.
If anything, Biden could actually benefit from the Trump Effect: compared to the current psychopathic Oval Office occupant, Creepy Uncle Joe doesn't look quite as bad as he otherwise might have. Trump has set the bar conveniently low for him and for all of them. Voters have been effectively desensitized to a relentless and daily regimen of Trumpian shock therapy.
And Thursday night's debate performances from the other contenders always could have been worse. Bernie, for example, could have chimed in and announced that the country is sick and tired of hearing about Joe Biden's damned racism. As it was, he was probably wise to play it safe and stick to his talking points. These talking points were certainly amplified, if not outright plagiarized, by Harris and the other opportunists on the stage.
And in piling on Biden, Harris also obliquely threw the former Deporter-in-Chief, Barack Obama, under the bus. Even Biden indirectly criticized Obama's "Safe Communities" deportation dragnet, which caught up millions of undocumented but otherwise law-abiding people and foisted upon them one-way bus tickets back to hell before the Obama administration finally abandoned the program in the face of myriad court and municipal challenges.
Perhaps more shocking than Harris's attack was "moderate" Mike Bennet of Colorado lambasting Biden, and by extension Obama, for caving to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during 2012 budget negotiations. This was when the Bush tax cuts for the rich were made permanent, while even more austerity (the "Sequester") was imposed on government programs benefiting ordinary people. In a classic example of political bait and switch, Biden bragged that he got the GOP to raise taxes because a small proportion of the tax cuts did in fact expire... a feat for which regular people have been punished ever since.
Thanks to Thursday's debate, there is a slight chance that it will dawn on more people that Trump became president for a very good reason. He instinctively knows that the masses of people are feeling pain and anger, and he acknowledges that pain and anger while co-opting it in service of the extremely wealthy. The corporate Democrats who brag about "getting things done" in the interests of bipartisanship are not your friends. They're also not particularly good at pretending to be your friends.
It was almost a miracle. Obama, more skilled than most in his party at pretending to be your friend, came out of the debates with his carefully marketed reputation suffering some collateral damage. The bloom is coming off the plastic rose. And it's about time.
Kamala Harris might properly be called an "avocado". Dark on the outside, but clearly green -- the color of U.S. paper money -- on the inside. That is, defender of current power structures, including unfettered capitalism and U.S. moneyed interests.
ReplyDeleteIt has previously been reported how she in California failed to prosecute bad banks when she could have and should have. If that wasn't enough to disqualify her, see this recent revelation in The Intercept, about something completely different:
AS SAN FRANCISCO DISTRICT ATTORNEY, KAMALA HARRIS’S OFFICE STOPPED COOPERATING WITH VICTIMS OF CATHOLIC CHURCH CHILD ABUSE.
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/kamala-harris-san-francisco-catholic-church-child-abuse/
ReplyDeleteNote: the first two Democratic Party presidential contender debates on NBC & MSNBC were not available to view online.
I have not had a TV for three years, but do have an Apple laptop with internet connection.
But apparently to be an engaged citizen, the American way is pay to play, the 21st Century version of poll tax by privatizing the public airwaves.
"Streaming TV is about to get very expensive – here's why.
With Disney, Apple and others about to launch their own services, a lot of your favourite shows are likely to vanish behind paywalls.
The golden age of streaming is over."
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/27/streaming-tv-is-about-to-get-very-expensive-heres-why
27 Jun 2019 ~ by Stuart Heritage
ReplyDeleteOnce upon a time I put hope in Bernie, then Warren and, more recently, Gabbard. But over time the accumulation of inconsistencies, betrayals, ellipses, self contradictions, ambiguities and the subtle placement of modifiers to pledges have smothered hope. Bottom line: I don't trust any of them. Come November the real choices will again be reduced to the lesser of two evils or not voting.
Outside of the Select Twenty, Mike Gravel is a treasure, but he's only in it for laughs, a mighty pin popping the Balloons of Twenty (B-20) and the neocon-neolib project generally.
Ignoring the campaign does have its upside. I'll more closely be able to keep track of global warming, like the record-setting heat wave toasting Europeans this week.
ReplyDelete"When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met Greta Thunberg: 'Hope is contagious’ —
One is America’s youngest-ever congresswoman, the other a Swedish schoolgirl.
Two of the most powerful voices on the climate speak for the first time."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-met-greta-thunberg-hope-contagious-climate
29 Jun 2019 ~ by Emma Brockes
…
AOC I had a similar tipping point, although it had more to do with income inequality. Many people know that several years ago I was working in a restaurant, and I had gone to college, and I had worked on so many things, but my family had fallen in to a lot of misfortune – my father had gotten sick and so on. And I was working in this restaurant and I would go, day in and day out, and I was so depressed. I felt so powerless, and as though there was nothing I could do that could effectively counter the enormous number of societal structures that are designed in the US to keep the working class poor, and to keep the rich, richer.
I was really wallowing in despair for a while: what do I do? Is this my life? Just showing up, working, knowing that things are so difficult, then going home and doing it again. And I think what was profoundly liberating was engaging in my first action – when I went to Standing Rock, in the Dakotas, to fight against a fracking pipeline. It seemed impossible at the time. It was just normal people, showing up, just standing on the land to prevent this pipeline from going through. And it made me feel extremely powerful, even though we had nothing, materially – just the act of standing up to some of the most powerful corporations in the world.
From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.
GT Yeah. I know so many people who feel hopeless, and they ask me, “What should I do?” And I say: “Act. Do something.” Because that is the best medicine against sadness and depression. I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone, because everyone went straight past, no one even looked at me. But at the same time I was hopeful.
AOC It’s true that people don’t know when those small actions can manifest into something. I’ve seen it even in office. There’s so much cynicism about, how powerful can this be? Just me showing up?
I think sometimes we’re so obsessed with measurement. What does me standing outside of parliament with a sign do? It doesn’t lower any carbon emissions immediately. It doesn’t change any laws directly. But what it does is make powerful people feel something, and people underestimate the power of that. It is becoming harder and harder for elected officials to look people in the eye.
…
ReplyDeleteI went around the block a few years ago with another commenter on the subject of hope. She hoped that Bernie would reform the Democratic Party from within. More correctly, she did not hope, she trusted. Unless she had a hand on the rudder of his soul, she trusted Bernie to fulfill her hope that the Democratic Party would be transformed from within.
Here's a recent article that explains why Bernie failed, as if he ever tried, and why Elizabeth Warren, a nuts and bolts person with an appreciation for detail, is a much better bet campaigning and (hopefully) in the Oval Office, because she knows how to get things done. Spoiler alert for Bernie bros: You'll switch to Warren after reading this. (Best of luck with her foreign policy.)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/06/26/warren-and-sanders-compare-and-contrast/
We have available to each one of us the gift of reason, the disappointments of experience, and the whole damn sweep of history to know hope delays action more than it prompts action. Hope, the secular variety, is just about as effective as religious hope, if you'll pardon my salute to Marx about religion serving the elites as an opiate for the masses. Hope, to be worth a damn, must not be patient and it must not depend on others if it is to be more than a pacifier. Hope untethered to bold action is nothing more than ... well, hope––useless. Nor is it a necessary ingredient for attaining the good.
The best I can do with hope is to see it as a half step more or less on the way, without delay, to something less wispy and unformed. Augustine of Hippo put it quite nicely: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” Once you've crossed the line into anger and courage, hope, somewhere in the dust behind you, is no longer relevant. Anger and courage are the real starting points towards the good; hope alone, never.
ReplyDeleteTo Jay-O, I say right on, exactly so!
Hope is something we bandy about as if it is some essential mindset holding the miraculous last straw that will keep us afloat.
Yet, as Francis Bacon quipped: "Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper."
To which Benjamin Franklin concluded: "He that lives upon hope will die fasting.”
Vaclav Havel clarified what it means: "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
Therefore, to have the courage to act on conviction is the crux of the matter.
As Edward Abbey asserted: “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
Regarding action, this passage I've held steadfast for inspiration:
There was now one outstanding Last Tale -- "Copenhagen Season" -- that she had promised Haas, which she very much wanted to include. But she had unusual trouble getting any work done. There were new severe pains in her back, which made it difficult for her to sit up, and periods of extreme weakness. Her doctors recommended a series of blood transfusions for which she entered the hospital in March. In the meantime she continued to dictate, sometimes supine on the floor. The necessity to speak her prose was tremendously discouraging, but as she would tell Marianne Moore a few years later, "It also taught me a lesson. When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope ... suddenly the work will find itself."
~ p. 401, "Isak Dinesen, The Life of a Storyteller", by Judith Thurman, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1982 / 1995.
And these I hold close like a guiding compass:
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potent than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death."
~ Robert Fulghum
"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
therefore we must be saved by love."
~ Reinhold Niebuhr