Occupational Therapy For Democrats: Weaving a Basket of Persuadables

aHow can we be sure that those microplastics recently discovered in human brains aren't also caused by toxic overdoses of political propaganda, supplementing  a steady diet ultra-processed food and breathing air polluted by petroleum byproducts?

Studies show that plastic brain pollution is worse now, in the recently dead, than it was in 2016 cadavers. 

But you may remember 2016 as the year when the ultra-processed Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Her loss was blamed on, among other things,  her notorious Basket of Deplorables  remarks to a group of wealthy donors at Club Cipriani in the Wall Street district of Manhattan.

And that brings me to Bill Clinton's speech on Night Three of the Democratic National Convention. The words oozed like petroleum jelly on electroshock paddles for a real jolt to the Trump-deranged throngs in the convention center.

Clinton sold a placatory mind-bend to the liberally confused. He sagely counseled the hyperactive audience with their signs and their cazy hats  that vocal liberal disdain for the hinterlands is a recipe for another disaster.  He lectured them to "meet your neighbors where they live" and to not equate Donald Trump supporters with Donald Trump himself.

You can still, of course, insult Donald Trump all you want. Bill Clinton doesn't seem to realize that if you trash Trump, you also trash his supporters, if only by proxy. They know when they're being tolerated, condescended to, and obliquely insulted. People have been indoctrinated by competing corporate media siloes to  internalize their cult leaders, making them and their trials and tribulations  a virtual part of themselves..

Clinton set the cautionary tone the whole night. After all, with Robert Kennedy dropping out and fixing to endorse Trump, the manic joy must now be tempered by caution. Even Oprah Winfrey made a surprise appearance to magnanimously urge Democrats to be nice to their Trump-supporting neighbors. You can so folksily agree without being disagreeable. 

Please, people, try to pretend to be nice to the erstwhile Deplorables at least until after November election!

Of course, no soul-searching is  ever attempted by the liberal elites, who still haven't figured out that it was the Clinton and Obama administrations, and their wealth gap-enhancing neoliberal policies and job-destroying trade deals which paved the way for Trump in the first place. It still paves the way for Trump in the second place.

This is despite the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Kamala Harris's running mate. He embodies the tweaked Democratic narrative that despite being funded and controlled by corporations and billionaires, they have suddenly developed a soft spot for Flyover Country.

Bill Clinton himself bragged about spending time in "rural areas" of New York. He evidently considers  pricey Westchester County, where he lives, to be a rural area. Or maybe he's ventured even further north. His wife Hillary actually spent a week in my own town of New Paltz n late fall of 2016 , to help herself heal after she lost to Trump. She stayed at the exclusive Mohonk Mountain house, whose employees can't afford to rent a small apartment in a town where the majority of residents are in fact, renters and not owners. 

But I digress. Suffice it to say, though, that Kamala's solution to the housing crisis doesn't involve the construction of more public housing stock. Rather, she has merely called for cutting bureaucratic red tape and pesky regulations so that real estate speculators and developers will be more incentivized to build more "affordable" housing.

Compared to Bill Clinton's hour-long schmooze, the aforementioned Tim Walz confined his own remarks to an affordable 15 minutes. He fully embraced his assigned role as Coach. We're all supposed to take the field and win one for the Gipper - actually for the right-of-center Reagan Democrats descended from the Gipper. Walz did mangle his metaphor slightly by intimating that football fields also apparently have developed trenches that we must fight within to beat Trump. Or maybe even in World War III, which the still-sitting President Biden took to another level this week with his enhanced nuclear weapons deployment package.

This is truly a made for TV stuff, nostalgically evoking memories of the 90s TV sitcom "Coach." Although filmed in Hollywood, it was set right in Walz's own hometown of Mankato, where the leading character, played by Craig T. Nelson, was the sometimes hapless mentor to his small college football team and long-suffering family and friends.

It was truly another made for TV moment as the camera repeatedly panned to  Walz's real-life family weeping openly and copiously in the audience. It was almost good enough to melt brain-plastic.

The Marketing of "Mamala"

She's a tough prosecutor who will eat Donald Trump for lunch!

No, wait. She's also the fairy godmother who will swoop into our lives to rescue us, the same way she swooped into her now-husband Doug Emhoff's lfe to rescue him, his kids, and even his ex-wife. That is exactly what he told us Tuesday night, anyway.

In other words, she is the authoritaran "strong Black woman" stereotype who balances strict discipline with loving-kindness.  These are just the qualities that the consumers/spectators making up the US electorate apparently crave in a leader. Someone who can bomb Palestinian mothers and babies to death while at the same time projecting an empathetic maternal persona.

 Barack Obama gave a speech Tuesday night with that same implicit theme. He made a big gallant show of allowing himself to be upstaged by wife Michelle, who totally eviscerated Donald Trump in her own barnstorming performance. Obama even pretended to cower behind the ghost of his late mother-in-law, in a cartoonish effort to show that only the strong matriarch of the family could protect him from being regularly hen-pecked by her daughter and his wife.

Taking the emasculation trope  a step farther, Obama mocked Trump's obsession with the size of his crowds, making a hand gesture to hint that Trump's manhood will absolutely shrink once he is faced by the candidate whom  Mrs. Obama called "my girl  Kamala." 

The crowd in the arena was already "all fired up and ready to go" before the Obamas took the stage.

No matter that Kamala Harris already had clinched the nomination withou ever winning a single primary. They staged a ceremonial roll call vote anyway, just for the spectacular fun of it. 

Lacking, as it did, the suspense of an actually democratic and competitive roll call in an open convention, it was staged as a glitzy game show, complete with strobe lights and even a professional D.J. to provide musical entertainment as a substitute for democracy. This forced the reps of the states and the occupied territories to scream their support for Kamala into the microphones. Sure, there was a handful of "present" votes in the mix to mar the joyful forced unanimity, but those results were uttered in comparative cowed whispers.

The fake roll call culminated with the arena going completely dark. And then came a  mystical cascade of thousands of tiny floating lights. It was fairy dust, the all-encompassing presence of the Fairy Godmother herself, whose actual corporal body was off campaigning in Wisconsin. Even so, her image magically appeared on the screen, even better than Glinda in Oz in her floating bubble.

This spectacle carried a  vibe creepily similar to what the Marxist critic Ernst Bloch observed in an essay titled "Dust," about pre-Hitler Germany in the 1920s:

"Even those who are not listening take notice of the bourgeois  conversations of the conformist; so propping up the table remains the gossip, the visitors, the false laughter and the real poison they strew amongst each other. The close, stale air greets even those who are not breathing it. It seeps down to the young man, and up to the beautiful people. Keeps him good and quiet, them good and deaf."

Thankfully, though, the propaganda fairy dust has not infiltrated every brain. Goodness and quietude are not universal. Anti-genocide protesters have mostly be barred from the DNC arena,  but they did succeed in interrupting a live televised interview between Stephen Colbert and Nancy Pelosi at a different venue a few miles away.

The 84-year-old Democratic matriarch was there to pump sales of her new book on "The Art of Power" - despite the mosty artless power she wielded in the ouster of Joe Biden. All she could lamely tell Colbert was that Israel has a right to defend itself... presumably against all those dangerous mothers and infants. 

Her party's definition of reproductive rights for Palestinian women is to keep the American weapons flowing. Bombs are  such a foolproof method of birth control that even Republicans can accept their use as population control of those they deem undesirable and less than human.

Despite all the angst about Trumpian hatred for women, misogyny is absolutely and disgustingly bipartisan.

Opening Night at the DNC: Passing the Cudgel

In the same speech in which he once again decried Donald Trump's infamous remark "there are good people on both sides" in the wake of a far-right rally that ended with the death of an innocent bystander, Joe Biden proceeded to both-side the genocide by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza:

"Those protesters out in the street, they have a point. A lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides."

A small subset of those tens of thousands of protesters, converging on the Democrats' nominating convention in Chicago, had just managed to break through the barricades guarding Biden and assorted dignitaries, factotums and celebrities all gathered to witness "the passing of the torch" to Kamala Harris. Although the protesters were stopped by police before they could enter the building, a group of delegates from Minnesota pointedly turned their backs on the president as he spoke.

Actually, Biden yelled his whole speech. Highly touted by the mainstream press as a "bittersweet moment" for him, he sounded a lot more bitter than sweet. For one thing, the producers of the event had delayed his appearance until close to midnight e.d.t. rather than the prime time slot usually given to the designated "keynote speaker."

Biden had to wait for a whole slew of party functionaries had their moment in the limelight before he was allowed to shuffle onstage. He delivered his remarks in his usual style: belligerent, boastful and slurry.

He sucked the carefully manufactured joy right out of the arena. Thousands of blue-and-white "We love you, Joe!" signs began to visibly wilt. The frequent camera pans to Kamala caught her in a visible wince. Maybe she was still smarting from the kiss that Jill Biden blew to her from the stage just moments before.

All the happy vibes that her marketing team and media sycophants had worked so hard to create seemed in collapse into one last atonal mess that was Biden's unfinished symphony before he blew the joint for a California vacation.

There's a good reason why they delayed his closing act until near midnight. I can't imagine that many people at home stayed up to hear the end of a five and a half hour-long slog. 

The theme of the evening (and the whole convention and campaign) was happiness and light and hope and no change .If I'd taken a drink every time some pundit uttered the word "joy" I would still be drunk now, the morning after. The convention actually evoked in my brain the scene of the Nuremberg rally from the Leni Riefenstahl film "Triumph of the Will," that's how joyful it was. I wouldn't be surprised if the Harris campaign dredged up the Nazi motto "Strength Through Joy" to replace the banal "When we fight (insert heavy pregnant pause here) we win! 

Or maybe it was all those "force the enthusiasm"  high school pep rallies that we had to attend prior to our football classmates getting permanent brain damage out on the field. Or maybe it was the satiric old Ren and Stimpy song "Happy Happy Joy Joy."

USA! USA! USA!

I get the creepy vibe that this presidential campaign is at its core the drama of two dueling fascisms. (or cartoons). The corporate sponsorships, the heavy reliance on emotions to replace thought, the demonization of others, and celebration of militarism are the hallmarks.

 When Biden bellowed out that "there is no place for political violence in America," he was talking about desperate freelance violence - not about his endless wars and occupations abroad. Not about the heavily armed police guarding him from the anti-violence peaceful protesters.

When he bragged about trying to enact gun control at home, he didn't mention that his administration has just quietly loosened controls on the international arms trade, via new trilateral agreement with Great Britain and Australia. America simply cannot manufacture bombs and ammo fast enough to meet the demand for mass death worldwide!

As reported by the New York Times last week,

"While some details are still in flux, equipment removed from the licensing requirements would likely include traditional munitions, like the artillery shells Australia is already producing to help replenish stockpiles that have been depleted by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Some technologies that have both military and civilian uses, such as sensors and propulsion systems, will also get exemptions across all three partner countries."  

Lest folks be worried that this accelerated global free flow of deadly weapons for endless wars might end up "in the wrong hands" the agreement states that abusers will be punished, even for sending a "stray email" that is susceptible to interception by bad actors. Also, any concerns about migrants crossing borders as easily as guns and bombs do will be allayed by treating the transfer of weapons and technology to any foreign worker as the same thing as transfer to that worker's country of origin. So it's all good. Not to mention joyful. 

They are letting their smiles be their umbrellas, shielding them (or so they think) from all those pesky storms of mass public protest.

+++++++

The raucous ovation for Hillary Clinton went on so long that it messed up ABC-Disney's whole primetime schedule. They shockingly cut to commercial break right in the middle of her cracked ceiling speech. But no worries. When they resumed the broadcast in five minutes, she was still at it. The ceiling had developed even more cracks. And when the crowd later erupted into  Trumpian calls of "Lock him up!" during Biden's stentorian diatribe, the camera panned right to Hillary, chuckling with all the grim joy at her disposal.

Hate-Watching the Conention

  Yes, readers, I have steeled myself  - I have resolved to watch and report on all four nights of the Democratic National Convention  The only thing that will keep me from watching  is if yet another one of those increasingly common freak storms knocks out my electricity and/or internet again, preventing me rom watching the freak show.

Meanwhile, corporate media outlets are hyping the show so much that the performances and entertainment are bound  to be a letdown. I mean, we already know that there will thunderous applause and a zillion standing ovations for Joe Biden. That is how relieved the audience will be that they won't have to exert themselves any longer to praise him and damn him in the same hypocritic breath.

If the canned speeches and glycerin tears don't move the audience, there are always the fetishized props. The Republicans had the uniform and gear of the firefighter killed during the Trump assassination attempt. They had Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt. Best of all,  had the oversized blinding white bandage on the Trumpian ear. It contrasted nicely with his spray-on tan, if not with all the faces in the audience.

What do the Democrats have? Well, besides the fetishized prop of a brand new miracle candidate, they have erected a 20-foot high inflated I.U.D. (intrauterine device) named Freeda Womb. 

The sight of this T-shaped inflatable is bound to induce a massive cringe in many a woman who has undergone what really amounts to a minor surgical procedure without the benefit of pain relief and sedation.  Women  have been flocking to their doctors' office to get the device in the wake of the Supreme Court's barbaric decision overturning Roe v Wade. Although the procedure has long been acknowledged to be barbaric in its own right, it has taken years and much pressure from women's health advocates to finally get the CDC to offer mere "suggestions" for pain relief.

So the giant I.U.D. virtue-signaling fetish is also a reminder that they've even abandoned the old Clintonian joke about "feeling your pain." The Kamala fetish is all about women being strong and tough. Even tough enough to allow a genocide. You've come a long way, baby!

What I would like to see erected at the convention is a giant face mask to remind everybody that Covid-19 is still a thing. But the barbaric ruling establishment - and that includes the C.D.C. - no longer encourages wearing a mask , either to protect yourself or protect others.  Because you gotta Freeda Face. Because Americans are tough enough to show their faces to seurity cameras and best of all, to smile though your heart is breaking. If an Olympic sprinter with asthma can win a bronze medal while in the throes of Covid, then so can you!

If it succeeds in nothing else, maybe the convention will succeed in becoming one of those epic superspreading events.

I'm old enough that I remember watching the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, with the networks giving equal amera time to cops busing heads in Grant Park and Dan Rather getting all worked up about it iive on air, and Mayor Richard Daley acting like the fascist dictator he truly was.

Nowadays, the corporate media tends to ignore things like massive political demonstrations occurring right outside political events. But since they can't very well ignore this year's massive anti-genoicide protests, they're making sure to placate the audience by showcasing carefully selected Palestinian and Zionist speakers throughout their festivities. Good luck with that pitiful attempt at diversion. 

It seems that lecturing protesters that if they don't shut up and get with the genocide program they will be responsible for re-electing Donald Trump is falling on deaf ears.

The pundits are flailing between urging Kamala to heed the protesters and urging her to stand firm on Israel's ongoing rampage.

Their framing is not the fact of US complicity in genocide. It's that the protesters are implicitly part of the party machine whether they like it or not, and that their demonstrations are thus  "threatening party unity."

As one recent New York Times editorial so smarmily put it, the issue is not whether Harris should condemn the genocide. It's that Harris should combine telling hecklers to be quiet with going through the motions of listening to them. She should take "divisions" seriously, is all. My published response:

The time to put pressure on politicians is while they are ;campaigning for your votes. If you wait until they are safely ensconced in office, they will have little reason to listen to constituents - other than, of course, the war-profiteering donor class and corporate lobbyists. So I hope that the anti-genocide, anti-apartheid protesters will continue making their voices heard. They shouldn't be cowed into shutting up, for fear they'll be blamed in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump wins this election. I get that nobody wants to risk that. But the hard truth is that both of our war-hungry political parties are in full support of what most of the rest of the world views as crimes against humanity. So what if Kamala Harris offers to "listen" and mouths whole volumes of empty platitudes of how heartbreaking it is that so many tens of thousands of innocent people are being killed by American bombs. Her spokesman just said she supports the continuing transport of these bombs. Put the pressure on her now and throughout the campaign season to take a principled stand against our current foreign policy. Before it's too late. Before any more innocent people die.

Slam, Bam, Killer Kam

When Kamala Harris equates the anti-genocide protest movement with support for Donald Trump, I think it's safe to assume that under her reign, Biden's mindless ironclad support for Israel would continue with a vengeance. The de facto state of Amerisrael will continue as AIPAC money continues to punish the few semi-progressive politicians still remaining in congress and elsewhere.

Kamala Harris's Manichean mindset and her false equivalence didn't seem to upset the crowd at her campaign rally in Detroit on Wednesday. On the contrary: her fans loved the way she tried to infantalize and diminish the pro-Palestinan demonstrators interrupting her spiel.

In its own glowing review of her performance, the New York Times reeprts:

"But as the disruption continued, her patience ran thin. 'You know what?' Ms. Harris said, with the sudden force and  resolve of a parent in the driver’s seat who has had it. 'If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

 Her threats of either you shut up or no TV sure beats the hapless responses of the doddering Grandpa Biden when protesters screamed "Genocide Joe, you got to go!" practically everywhere he showed up. Kamala Harris, unlike her putative boss, struck quite the contrast,  what with her "set jaw and fixed stare" as the prelude to a tongue-lashing for the ages.

Sadly, the protesters' refrain of "Genocide Kamala" just doesn't have the same alliterative ring to it. The most I can come up with right off the top  of my head is "Killer Kam Don't Give a Damn" But even that moniker is ambiguous, since "killer" is also a synonym for really, really cool . And that is exactly how the Harris campaign and supportive media are marketing her in the absence of any actual platform.

It's all style over substance. That seems to be what voters want - or to be more accurate, what the media tells voters  to want. They want people to remain in their lower station as passive consumers.

The Times as much as admits that it's all performance art:

"The Detroit stare-down was the latest reminder of how Ms. Harris has been able, with an almost theatrical flair, to turn efforts to undermine and rattle her into her own political weapons."

And that's a good thing, the Paper of Record continues, because the worst part of the Israeli government's genocide is that it's dividing the Democratic Party against itself!   The not-so-subliiminal message is that Harris losing to Trump would be even worse than the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of people of Arab extraction in Gaza, the West Bank and beyond.

Ignoring the fact that the Biden administration has continued Donald Trump's tax cuts to billionaires and that corporations pay little in taxes, Harris shrilled "Look, if he is elected, Donald Trump intends to give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations!"

All the pregnant pauses, all the icy stares, all the finger-pointing  gestures s in the world cannot make up for the fact Kamala Harris is sorely lacking not only in substance but in intelligence.

But when her media cheerleaders review her performance as top-notch courtroom drama that would put Perry Mason to shame, what do substance and intelligence matter? She can act, by golly, as The Times breathlessly concludes:

Finally Ms. Harris delivered her ultimatum. The crowd erupted in cheers, but Ms. Harris remained still, staring down her detractors.

"After 10 seconds, she lowered her chin and her eyes grew wider — yes, she meant it. More than 30 seconds passed before she allowed her smile to return. A chuckle rippled through her body, and she returned to her speech."

I am still trying to figure out how a chuckle can ripple.

All the political world's a stage, and all the men and women in it are being played. And immiserated, degraded, and murdered by the investors and producers paying Kamala Harris a fortune to obfuscate this truth.

Follies of the Oligarchs

In today's exciting episode of canned political soap opera, Kamala Harris anointed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to become her viceroy. The intended message is that Harris has embraced liberal populism, in much the same way she embraced it during her ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign when she co-sponsored Medicare For All legislation with the then-ascendant Bernie Sanders. 

ut if you're the cynical type, her selection of Walz is simply a PR gimmick to attract voters who might otherwise pull the lever for the fake-populist Donald Trump.

To hear the mainstream media tell it, millions of disaffected and younger voters will pivot to the Democrats, all because Walz has so folksily described the Republicans as "weirdos." How cool is that?  It's so much more down-to-earth than the party's failed message of calling Trump an existential threat to "democracy."

It is designed to make the electorate forget all about such existential threats as both political parties being in full support of World War III, most notably of Israel's continued genocide of Palestinians and its provocations of Iran and Lebanon. So if the Democratic side of the duopoly can only put a folksier face on murder and misery, they will manufacture the consent of US citizens.

From all indications, liberals are so relieved to be rid of Joe Bden that they're flocking to Harris rallies and emptying their pocketbooks to support a candidate whose main selling point is that she doesn't shuffle or slur her speech. She enunciates her word salads loudly and clearly enough for everybody to hear, if not to understand.

The real test is whether she will heed the instructions of the Silicon Valley donor class to fire Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan if she is elected. So far, she hasn't said. Nor has she returned a recent hefty donation from tech mogul Reid Hoffman, who explicitly demanded that Khan be fired. He has since "walked back" his threat, thus at least temporarily relieving Harris of answering it while she is still only the unelected nominee. The selection of Walz is protective armor for her. Once she is safely esconced in the White House, Walz can be dismissed, policy-wise and influence-wise if not bodily. If he became too much of a renegade populist, they could always pull a Henry Wallace on him.

When an ailing Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term, his advisers moved to replace his prairie populist Vice President Wallace with Harry Truman. And when Wallace decided to defend his office and make an independent run, the Democratic machine actually took the drastic step of cutting the power at the 1944 party convention to prevent a delegate vote from even taking place. Of course there was no internet back then, so they couldn't avoid bypassing democracy by having delegates cast their votes remotely before the physical convention even took place.

So take Kamala Harris's choice of Tim Walz with a very healthy dose of cynicism. Her main advisor is her brother-in-law Tony West, the head legal honcho of Uber and the former Obama Justice Department official who gave Wall Street bankers a slap on the wrist rather than crimiinally prosecute them after the 2008 collapse. West has not resigned from Uber. He is merely taking a leave of absence from this predatory firm.

West and Uber are agents of work force precarity. exploitation and oppression. They are integral players in the Silicon Valley oligarchy which now equals or even surpasses Wall Street in political power.

So the fact that a federal judge has just declared the Google faction of this oligarchy to be an illegal monopoly should give ordinary people a reason to hope that at long last, a preliminary kick has been dealt to the tender butts of these arrogant overlords - the actual existential threats to what is still left of our democracy.

The antitrust ruling is of course coupled with Monday's Wall Street crash, further exposing the inherent corruption of late financial capital for anyone with the awesome ability to wrest their attention from the Coronation Follies show, which itself is competing for attention with the Paris Olympics.Tje crash itself originated in Japan and thenEurope, whose markets were said to be panicking at the latest US jobs report, which showed that late capitalism is not profiting as much as expected from an exploited workforce. The arrogant tech overlords are taking an especial hit, making their tender monopolistic fannies even more sensitive.  What an unexpected shock that A.I. might turn out to be just another big fat greedy bubble ready to burst. It might even put the kibosh on investments in Elon Musk's nascent brain implant franchise.

And that probably means that you and I will be told by Kamala Harris at another inauguration behind barbed wife that we all have to tighten our belts and share the sacrifice with the poor billionaires.

Not as likely to win the support Barack Obama momentarily enjoyed after he won office on that whole hope and change thing.

It's time to cure ourselves of the notion that any politician will ever save us. It's time to stop identifying ourselves as mere consumers and spectators ratherthan as active citizens and iindependent thinkers.

Destroying the Google empire's rotten, censorious search engine and knowledge monopoly will be an essential first step. 

Ain't Democracy Grand?

I was so relieved to learn that Democratic Party investors were so relieved when Joe Biden finally quit The Race. The poor things had been suffering a painful mass outbreak of Donation Constipation, having deliberately withheld their financial effluvia from his campaign receptacle.

Intestinal fortitude does have its limits. So it was good to know that all that bottled-up goodness was freely flowing again this morning to and through the throne of Kamala Harris.

Yes, fellow citizens, it is indeed a coronation in all but name. This is despite the Power Behind the Throne (Barack Obama) suggesting that the coronation be accorded a simulacrum of Democracy via an open convention with actual votes cast by various appointed delegates.

 This is disingenuous.  the fact us that Obama handpicked Harris years ago, when he told  a group of anal-retentive Donor-investors in 2013 that she was the best-looking attorney general in the country. He put her name and her face right up there in lights. She got even more star status when he subsequently apologized for coming off like such a sexist pig. 

This pre-coronation drama came in the aftermath of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, Obama's bailout of the banks, and the subsequent foreclosure fraud stampede - led by the very same banks that caused the catastrophe in the first place.

I doubt that Donald Trump will ever confront Harris's still-unexplained failure to prosecute Steve Mnuchin, his own former Treasury Secretary. when she had a golden opportunity to do so. You might remember that Mnuchin was the head  of the corrupt OneWest bank when investigators handed over to Harris a batch of about a thousand "fraudclosure" documents which illegally forced underwater mortgagors out of their homes.

Kamala Harris was a newly-seated Senator when that legislative body was mulling Mnuchin's conformation. But just as her political colleagues are protectively and prematurely circling the wagons around her now, so they were in 2017. As then reported by The Intercept, not one of her fellow senators brought up the leaked memo proving that Mnuchin had been in it up to his eyeballs. It might have implicated Harris, who already was being groomed for a  presidential future based entirely upon the identity politics agenda marketed by the party instead of an actual platform to make people's lives better. Even vocal anti-Mnuchin Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, themselves presidential contenders, refused to comment on Harris's refusal to bring Mnuchin to account.

Once we get past the nonstop accolades to the patriotism and selflessness of Genocide Joe by the very same hypocrites who pushed him out once their own cover-up of his mental health was exposed for all the world to see, it'll be interesting to watch, from a bemused distance of course, the next steps of the lockstep Duopoly.

One thing is for certain. With the mythology of democracy exposed as a sham to even to those denialists who didn't or wouldn't believe that billionaire donors are the de facto puppet masters and rulers, perhaps more people will simply refuse to engage in electoral politics to the exclusion of, say, taking to the streets and the corporate boardrooms to "make our voices heard." A mass strike would be nice, although I suspect the misery levels will have to rise a bit higher for that to occur. 

It's telling that Joe the Patriot literally put "the good of the Party" before the good of the country as the basis for his decision to end his candidacy.  It's also telling that despite his decision, he will continue to pretend to run things for the next whole half-year remaining to him as president. An embittered deluded commander in chief can still do a lot of damage in six months. Unless, of course, he is being operated by remote control. And let's hope that the Party at least is giving him a decent bribe parting gift. Maybe a pardon in perpetuity for Hunter. The least they can do is have one of their billionaire donors secretly pay off all those home equity loans he's taken out over the years.

As Simone Weil wrote in "On the Abolition of All Political Parties," the only reason for preserving anything is its inherent goodness.

 "The evils of political parties are all too evident; therefore, the problem that should be examined is this: do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?"

Joe Biden aw the writing on the Teleprompter. He is too decrepit to any longer "generate the collective passions" in the electorate for his own club/cult to retain its power - the ultimate aim of any cult or club. The good of the all-mighty entity called a country is purely secondary. 

And the good of the earth and all the living things inhabiting it? As far as they're concerned, the planet might as well be in the toilet.