2020

The fat old guy claims he's a "young, vibrant man" compared to the fit old guy.

With the neolibs once again up top, the opportunities for the left are down ticket

Joe Biden might want  to tell us what he's going to do as president. From 2016 the regulars should have learned that "Not Trump" is not enough. If Biden is so electable, a big if, it won't matter what progressives do. But it is disheartening that once again the two major parties are offering a miserable choice. A lot of folks who care about issues like climate change, economic justice and endless war have serious doubts about Biden's candidacy that are not going to appeased by platitudes and generalities. My guess is that many activists will find their energies better spent on local, state and congressional races where they'll be able to find candidates more in tune with their concerns. 

Press Note:

If only the American media would approach celebrity news with the same sense of proportion and relevance as West Highland Free Press on the Isle of Skye:

The opposition needs to become fierce.

Only one political division matters, that between the 1% and the rest of us. 

2020 will witness the culmination of a political counter-revolution that began with the Barry Goldwater campaign and came to power with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. If Bernie Sanders had won, he would have faced a corporate-dominated congress that would have resisted his every policy move. For real change to have happened, a people's movement of enormous scope and power would need to have been organized. 

Not much is changed by his loss. We still need to build people-power from the ground up. We still need to create or restore institutions that represent the majority -- labor unions, community groups, co-op businesses and services, independent parties, international alliances. 

Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go

It should be the active position of the left that, though the Democrats have dealt the country a bum deal over the last half century, progressives are going to go all out to defeat Donald Trump. But in doing so they shouldn't lie about Joe Biden and corporate Democrats. On the contrary, this is an opportunity for the Working Families Party, DSA, and anyone else organizing against the duopoly to raise consciousness, recruit new members, and fill their coffers. Trying to paint Biden as an acceptable nominee won't work; disgruntled voters will see right through it. But his election can be sold as a necessary first step on the way to a living wage, universal health care, fair taxes and economic security.

Covid

"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it." -- Arundhati Roy

Poet and he don't know it

I never understood wind.
You know, I know
windmills very much.
I have studied it
better than anybody
else. It’s very expensive.
They are made in China
and Germany mostly.
—Very few made here, almost none,
but they are manufactured, tremendous
—if you are into this—
tremendous fumes. Gases are
spewing into the atmosphere. You know
we have a world
right?
So the world
is tiny
compared to the universe.
So tremendous, tremendous
amount of fumes and everything.
You talk about
the carbon footprintv — fumes are spewing into the air.
Right? Spewing.
Whether it’s in China,
Germany, it’s going into the air.
It’s our air their air
everything — right?
A windmill will kill many bald eagles.
After a certain number
they make you turn the windmill off.
That is true.
—By the way
they make you turn it off.
And yet, if you killed one
they put you in jail.
That is OK.
You want to see a bird graveyard?
You just go.
Take a look.
A bird graveyard.
Go under a windmill someday,
you’ll see
more birds
than you’ve ever seen
in your life.
~ D. Trump 12/21/2019

After November

Win or lose the presidency in 2020 election, the Democrats are failing as a political party. They're headed for the same encyclopedia entry as the Whigs.

Getting rid of Trump is essential, but it is only a first step. After Nov, we have to come to grips with the reality that the Democratic Party's allegiance to corporate power is unshakable. New forms of political action are necessary. New organizations have to be created to represent working people and the middle class. As much as possible, Sanders' "revolution" must be formalized. There are models for what might happen next: from the militant labor action of the sort that created the vibrant middle class, the civil rights movement and the Mobilization Against the War to the Occupy Movement, the Women's March and the children's fight for gun control

Whether Joe Biden wins or Donald Trump does, we can't return to the neoliberal governance that made Trump possible in the first place. Trump may be gone but the need for universal health care, the housing catastrophe, decaying infrastructure, failing welfare state, endless war and climate change will still be with us. On their own, corporate Democrats cannot be counted on to do anything about any of it. It's up to us.

Chomsky on Neoliberalism

"Scientists have been warning of a pandemic for years, insistently so since the SARS epidemic of 2003, also caused by a coronavirus, for which vaccines were developed but did not proceed beyond the pre-clinical level. That was the time to begin to put in place

rapid-response systems in preparation for an outbreak and to set aside spare capacity that would be needed. Initiatives could also have been undertaken to develop defenses and modes of treatment for a likely recurrence with a related virus.

"But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe. The government could have stepped in, but that’s barred by reigning doctrine: “Government is the problem,” Reagan told us with his sunny smile, meaning that decision-making has to be handed over even more fully to the business world, which is devoted to private profit and is free from influence by those who might be concerned with the common good. The years that followed injected a dose of neoliberal brutality to the unconstrained capitalist order and the twisted form of markets it constructs."

The rest of the story:
Chomsky: Ventilator Shortage Exposes the Cruelty of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou (Truthout)