It would have been unseemly, even for the feckless Democrats, for their strongest-ever Progressive caucus in the history of Progress to cave immediately to the designated useful idiots of the Oligarchy. Their Pyrrhic victory against the so-called Centrists is just the latest diversionary skirmish in the proxy class war game currently being played out in Congress.
The latest episode had a whopping nine rascally centrist corporatists demanding a vote on their corporation-friendly trillion-dollar infrastructure bill before taking up the larger bill which gives a modicum of relief to just plain Folks. Everybody expected the caucus of more than a hundred progressives to cave to the right wingers, like they always do. But lo and behold - they stood strong, even against the all-powerful Nancy Pelosi who, the official narrative has it, suffered the unheard-of embarrassment of having to cancel the infrastructure vote for lack of support.
Then there was the sight of Joe Manchin being heckled on his houseboat by a crew of kayakers and Kyrsten Sinema being chased into an Arizona bathroom stall by immigrant activists, and you could almost taste the progressive victory. If you didn't feel even the tiniest bit of smug schadenfreude viewing all this zany political theater, then you're even more cynical than I am.
But then Bernie Sanders went on Sunday TV to inject a tiny dose of pragmatic reality into the euphoric bubble. Only hours after railing that the $3.5 trillion (Build Back Better) social welfare package was already a compromise of its original $6 trillion form, Bernie did what the Democratic Party leadership always does best. He proceeded to compromise with himself.
"Three and a half trillion should be a minimum, but I accept that there's gonna have to be a give and take," Sanders told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
President "Joe is a good friend of mine" Biden, it turns out, had already decreed that although Joe Manchin's figure of $1.5 trillion was way too low, Biden can live with a package as low as $1.9 trillion. Once the haggling is all done, maybe they can pass it with a $1.65 trillion price tag, to be reluctantly oozed out over such a long period of time that it will end up costing the rich absolutely nothing in the way of taxes as people starve and the world burns all around them and their fireproof saferooms and mega-yachts.
The New York Times hilariously characterized Biden's posturing as "siding with the progressives" who had boldly "flexed their muscles".
You Go, Progressives!
What's the rush, anyway? The longer that the soap opera can be drawn out, the more revenue will be forthcoming from the corporate sponsors, and the more the scaffolding under Rosie the Riveter can be sabotaged by everybody from Bernie to the corporatists of the Problem Solvers' Caucus.
As long, for example, as there's even the faintest threat that older people will have their dental care paid for by the government beginning maybe five years from now, the lobbyists of the American Dental Association will pour millions in pocket change into the campaign coffers of cheaply bought-off senators and congress-critters. The more that corporate-owned pundits can pit old people with crumbling teeth against young kids having to learn in crumbling schools, the better it will be for the rich. Anything to take the minds of the restive public off the rich. But just in case, we will be carefully taught to hate only the bad rich and the foreign rich, such as in the recent blockbuster news about Putin and his offshore tax haven mistress and the king of Jordan and his stealthy purchase of almost an entire California neighborhood.
Biden and his good-cop henchman Bernie are simply doing their version of the old Clintonian triangulation tango. But instead of playing Republicans and Democrats off each other to punish the poor and reward the rich, they're pitting intraparty "centrists" and "progressives" against each other. This is the current de facto duopoly. Negotiating with the GOP is a tough sell, given that it's now acceptable to call them fascists and enablers of an attempted coup. So, unless the Dems can "compromise" among themselves, Trump will win again. Keeping the Trump-hate alive as they screw you over under heavy anesthesia and demand what little spare change you still have in your pocket is also an integral part of the plan.
Given that Halloween is becoming even more popular than Christmas, when Congress traditionally rams though its budgets and secret corporate giveaways, Crypt-keeper Nancy Pelosi has appropriately rescheduled the infrastructure vote for October 31st. I predict a booming market for Kyrsten Sinema fright wigs and public service announcements from the American Dental Association, warning little kids that selfish old people, not candy, will make the teeth rot right out of their heads.
