I wrote a post here recently called Losing Begins To Tune Up the Dems. It was about my observations during a couple of recent Friday round trip car rides from the Bronx to a rural area about 60+ miles from Boston and back. Long story short, I saw and heard intimations that the whole Russiagate thing was losing steam and that Dem voter types at the local level were beginning to look anew at the possibility of reforming their own party…cleaning out the leftish side of the DC swamp.
There were several reasonable comments, but at the end there appeared two snark posts…both from long-time supporters of the “Don’t blame us Dems, blame the Russians!!!” faction of the party.
One said “Russiagate is bullshit. It’s all just a huge conspiracy lunacy,” and the other…from our long-suffering host…simply said “On second thought, drop the Counterpunch and go back to porn.”
Sigh…
So I wrote a response.
It grew.
Here it is in full. Read on.
Russiagate is not bullshit…or maybe better, it’s one-sided, politically motivated, partisan bullshit. The partisanship is not as well or as clearly defined as usual because the DemRat and RatPub factions have somewhat united to get rid of Trump and whomever is really running him, a rival gang that is basically going after some important part of their currently shared territory.
The Trumpistas initially got their win due to the awful way(s) that the Rats and Dems have been running this country since Clinton I if not before, treating its workers as disposable, indentured servants for the corporate ruling class. The Trump win was a reaction to total, bipartisan incompetence at anything other than theft and propaganda in Washingtoon, DC.
We need to drain the swamp on both sides of the current contretemps, and there is no real movement afoot…no nationally publicized movement, for sure…to do this. Sanders/Warren comes close, but no cigar.
Why no cigar?
Because the corporate-owned and controlled media won’t cooperate in letting that cigar be lit, that’s why. The media will oppose any and all tendencies towards change…of any sort, from socialism right on through whatever is being plotted by the Trump controllers…aims which appear to me to probably be governmental collapse and some form of partially disguised totalitarian rule. Partially disguised at first, anyway.
And so…here we jolly well are, aren’t we. Deluged by the centrist media with all of the (at least partially true) info regarding the nasty machinations of the Trump forces to gain power.
That’s only going to stop the invaders…if it works, of course…from further polluting the DC swamp. That swamp will still be filthy.
What to do, what to do?
I’m pretty much in agreement with the prognostications of the scholar that Booman referenced in his latest post, myself. (Go to Booman’s post for links, please.)
Back in April, when the BBC talked to Thomas Homer-Dixon, chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, about the prospects for the collapse of Western Civilization, they were told that things do not look good.
The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
I guess you can call that an updated version of the four signs of the Apocalypse. These nonlinearities aren’t so much causes of our current problems as they are consequences of them. Many have noted how the invasion of Iraq cascaded into the Syrian civil war, and also how a drought brought on by climate change contributed to the disintegration of Syria’s political consensus. The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by relatively few experts but came about as a natural consequence of a failure to adequately regulate financial instruments. And both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are widely regarded as hard to foresee consequences of growing income inequality and anxiety about immigration and refugee patterns.
For Homer-Dixon, there are echoes in all of this of the end state of the Western Roman Empire:
Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.
—snip—
Booman apparently thinks that ousting Trump might slow this new nonlinearity down. I do not think so, myself. If successful, it will probably just prepare the groundwork for yet another nonlinearity, and on and on and on the nonlinearity circus will continue…gaining speed and torque… until it accelerates into some sort of cataclysmic collapse.
I personally do not know what to do to stop this acceleration, let alone how to do it. I spent last week in a rural area outside of a small city in eastern PA, teaching at a jazz camp that is run and administered by local, small-town people. Good people, well-meaning people, hard-working people. Besides an occasional shrug and raising of the eyes heavenward when politics was mentioned, they were almost totally clueless about what is happening in DC now. They were not only clueless, they were also eyes wide shut about it. They have been mediaed-out. They are exhausted. “Let the fools do whatever they’re going to do” was the prevailing attitude. “We’ve survived them before; we’ll survive them again.”
Like dat.
i felt pretty much the same thing in the diners, gas stations, markets etc. of the area.
Maybe they’re right.
I hope so.
Later…
AG
P.S. Bernie Sanders, yesterday:
Last month more than 4,000 people gathered in Chicago for the People’s Summit. Independent senator, former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered the keynote speech. During his speech, he repeatedly criticized the Democratic Party, calling it an “absolute failure,” and blaming it for the election of President Trump. “I’m often asked by the media and others: How did it come about that Donald Trump, the most unpopular presidential candidate in the modern history of our country, won the election?” Sanders said. “And my answer is that Trump didn’t win the election; the Democratic Party lost the election. Let us be very, very clear: The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure.”
Like dat, too.
Every time any one of you leftinesses support the current Dem machinations and line, all you are doing is postponing (or quite likely making totally impossible) the re-formation of the Democratic Party into a true, effective resistance party to the current neocentrist government.
Do not continue on this path until it is simply too damned late.
Please!!!