Quadrennial Follies: Pandemic Edition

I've been offline for a second entire week this month, due to a combination of a tropical storm, neglected infrastructure and the typically shoddy customer service from the Spectrum monopoly.  So I apologize for the radio silence and for my inability to moderate and publish the handful of reader comments that were lost in the ether for the past seven days.

Not that I was totally disconnected from the world of manufactured opinion, consent and news, mind you. I still was able to get NPR (National Public Radio), so I learned on the morning after the big event that Joe Biden had chosen Kamala Harris to be his running mate.

After listening to NPR for days on end, I remember why I'd stopped tuning into it a decade ago.

With its combination of Trump disgust and associated Russophobia brought to the level of barely contained hopeless and helpless hysteria, sponsored by more craft beer microbreweries, sustainable gourmet food emporiums, artisanal coffee roasters, Ivy League tutoring services and more pretentious New-Agey stuff than I ever knew existed in upstate New York and adjacent New England, it was, in fact, a virtual teaser for this week's Democratic National Convention. With very few exceptions - notably,an excellent "Fresh Air" interview with human rights activist Sister Helen Prejean - I found NPR to be just as off-putting in its own smarmy way as any drivel belched out by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

During one call-in segment on the locally-produced "Round Table" breakfast show, a woman describing herself as the manager of an upstate New York trailer park described her tenants as "lovely people" who, despite their hard-knock lives, are still true believers in Donald Trump. Why oh why do "these people" always vote against their own interests? And why oh why do they resent the well-meaning and earnest and fact-based NPR crowd so much?

"Racism" was the unanimous verdict of the panelists, who proceeded to lambaste Trump's stereotypical misogynistic characterization of Kamala Harris as "nasty." One panelist had a thesaurus magically to hand and proceeded to properly enunciate all the synonyms for "nasty." Another panelist decried the media's disrespectfully sexist habit of referring to the candidate only by her first name. This is so unfair, she said, because they call him Biden rather than just plain Joe, and they always call him Trump instead of Don. There were also the requisite quotes from Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

God help me, but I found myself commiserating with the elite-hating trailer park folk as my own bile rose in response to the limousine liberalism of the NPR experts.

The emphasis on identity politics serves, of course, to shield Harris from such legitimate critiques as her prosecution of the poor parents of truant children and her use of prisoners as unpaid or barely paid firefighters. her prosecution of low level drug offenders and her refusal to prosecute Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin or his California bank for foreclosure fraud.

Mass liberal hatred of Trump fills the vacuum of the Democratic Party's having no agenda of its own to make people's lives better. "Remote" describes both its convention broadcast method and its relationship to the non-wealthy.

Desperate Housewives actress Eva Langoria glamorously and seamlessly took over last night where NPR left off, acting as the hostess of the Democratic Party's quadrennial national convention. I very naively thought that absent incessant chants of "USA! USA! USA" brayed out by delegates decked out in their garish hats after every sentence by every politician with a speaking role, the event would be more palatable.

How wrong I was. This convention is not a celebration. It offers no hope. It should actually be called Quadranimus, because it is nothing but four years of elite #Resistance and moneyed hate and fake despair and rancid concern-trolling all rolled up into four days.

I should have taken a drink every time that Bernie Sanders uttered the word "unprecedented" and Michelle Obama used the word "folks," and when each of them mentioned "shtruggle." If I had, I would be having one heck of a hangover right about now.

While the Democratic Party has been moving inexorably to the right over the last four or five decades, the 2020 convention was the first time they've totally come out of the closet. Former Republican governor and presidential candidate John Kasich, awkwardly playing the role of Dorothy, was filmed literally standing at a fork in a road. Some brainless talking scarecrow had apparently whispered in his ear and instructed him to take the route all the way to Oz and to Joe  A trio of Republican women (former New Jersey Gov.Christy Todd Whitman and CEO Meg Whitman and Staten Island GOP machine politician Susan Molinaro) were granted more speaking time than progressive dynamo Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Those GOP mavens admittedly were hard acts to follow, but Bernie Sanders did his very best, lauding Joe Biden's gracious gesture of lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 as another magical fork in the road to the Emerald City of true guaranteed single payer health care. This tortured detour is certainly better than Trump defunding the Post Office so that your Amazon package arrives in two weeks rather than within the promised two days. Isn't it? Isn't it? 

The situation is so dire that Nancy Pelosi is going one step beyond praying for the low-status victims of the Covid-19 crisis currently being co-opted by the Dems for their Quadranimus show, and is actually calling her members back to Washington to block Trump's wholesale destruction of the US Postal Service for his own crass political purposes. In order for Pelosi and the Democrats to return to power, voters must not only be shamed and terrified into picking Biden, but they must also have the option of using the mail to do so. This is especially true for those vulnerable uninsured voters who are being told by Bernie Sanders that they must survive until the age of 60 to get a slim chance of access to guaranteed government-run coverage before they die of their untreated diseases. Because it seems that even the much-ballyhooed public option promised by good old honest, decent, empathetic Joe Biden has already been quietly tossed down the memory hole.  

Barack Obama, meanwhile, emerged from his taciturn turn at his sprawling Martha's Vineyard estate to offer some "unusually sharp criticism" of Trump's attempted destruction of the Post Office and its resulting vote suppression.

“What we’ve seen, in a way that is unique to modern political history, is a president who is explicit in trying to discourage people from voting,Obama said on Cadence13’s Campaign HQ podcast in a discussion with his former campaign manager David Plouffe. “What we’ve never seen before is a president say, ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the Postal Service to [discourage] voting and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.’”

“That’s sort of unheard of, right?” he added. “And we also have not had an election in the midst of a pandemic that is still deadly and killing a lot of people, and we still don’t know the long-term side effects of contracting the illness.”

But back in 2009, his first year in the White House, Obama was singing a very different tune. In true Republican fashion, he defended his own abandoned promise of a health insurance public option by likening it to the "inefficiency" of the US Postal Service. He made the preposterous claim that in order for a thing to be efficient, it must be privatized, competitive and profit-seeking. Since the taxpayer does not fund United Health or Blue Cross, Obama suggested, then why should the public fund the postal service?

 "I mean, if you think about it," he said, "UPS and FedEx are doin' just fine.  It's the post office that's always havin' problems."  (Yeah, he was at one of those folksy, g-droppin' town halls).

Obama failed to mention that the Post Office wasn't doin' so good in large part because Congress had bipartisanly passed a bill requiring the USPS to fund its pension and health plans 75 years into the future - in other words, to pay for the benefits of future postal workers who haven't even been born. 

The destruction wasn't started by Donald Trump. He has simply revved it up to Mach speed and boasted about it more, while fully exposing the anti-labor machinations operating in both parties for the last 40 or 50 years.

The P Word

Deep within the bowels of the Democratic party platform are a few  gratuitous paragraphs about the need to eradicate poverty in America. The document also pays lip service to gun control and climate change, two other verboten topics in this year's presidential contest between the two apparatchiks of the One Percent.

But this political manifesto, like others before it, is more of a Christmas wish list than a literal agenda. Like the Bible, party platforms are cobbled together and hammered out over time by several different factions with diverse agendas. Also like the Bible, they shouldn't be taken literally. They're aspirational things, peppered with a lot of fiction. What is not in them is often more telling than what is.

But thanks in part to the Democrats' odd choice of Charlotte as its party city, that dreaded P word is in evidence right out in the open. That is because there is a dearth of hotels and motels to house all the conventioneers. So when the rich people came to town looking for lodging, the poor people previously housed in the city's temporary digs have been unceremoniously kicked out of them. Charlotte's homeless population skyrocketed an unbelievable 40% in 2010 and another 20% last year -- an increase caused in large part by impoverished rural families fleeing to the city to take advantage of its shelter system.

News reporters converging on the city can't help but notice all the poor people living on the streets. They are literally tripping over them on their way to the heavily policed elite events.

The New York Daily News tells the story of Lakia Ramsey, who was forced to take refuge in a church when her welfare motel jacked up its rates without warning. "They kicked us out like we were trash," the 28-year-old mother of two small children told the News. Another family had been renting a room and paying for it from the husband's low-paying restaurant job in Charlotte. They are now sleeping on a cement loading dock in order to make room for the out-of-towners.

Poverty is so rampant in what is known as Wall Street South that the Charlotte News Observer even has a specialized indigence beat. Fred Clasen-Kelly, the reporter who writes about poor people, was himself interviewed by Democracy Now! this week. He said that Charlotte is big on boosterism, trying to tout itself as a booming city in the New South. The propaganda campaign has been so effective that struggling people have flocked to this ephemeral Mecca hoping to find a better life. And the same big banks that caused so much misery and hardship in the first place now literally loom over hordes of people sleeping on the streets and waiting in bread lines.

The ironic part (he says) of being here at the convention is all these thousands of people going to very fancy parties with lots of suits on are really less than a mile away from the city’s largest homeless shelters, in places like Crisis Assistance Ministries, where people go for financial assistance to get—to stop eviction and to keep their power on. And so, it provides quite a contrast if you walk just a short distance from the convention site and the corporate towers that are downtown. Every morning, in these places like Crisis Assistance Ministries or the homeless shelter, you’ll see hundreds of people lined up outside waiting for food, waiting for money to be able to stay in their homes.

According to an Observer story co-written by Clasen-Kelly, members of the Occupy movement have been trying to recruit the city's poor people to join in their protests, without much success. The poor often have no faith in politics and may suffer from physical ailments preventing them from marching. Others have to work at more than one minimum wage job just to keep body and soul together, and haven't the spare time to demonstrate. The article didn't mention that the massive police presence in Charlotte also tends to put a damper on resistance by people for whom police brutality is an ongoing reality of daily life. After the Occupiers and conventioneers leave, they'll be stuck there. 

But they're still for President Obama, who despite their disappointment in him, is more palatable than Mitt Romney. For the marginalized minorities, Obama is the thin patina of aspiration covering their layers upon layers of despair.