The Bright Side of Despair

The Democrats have been so caught up in the witch-hunts of RussiaGate and selective #Me-Tooism that the blitzkrieg known as The Great Tax Heist of 2017 has them looking more like castrated deer in the headlights than usual. Far from erupting into a state of rebellion over the passage of the bill, they're cowering in a state of mass confusion when they aren't alternately complaining and seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

"Just you wait, you nasty Republicans, until 2018 or 2020, or the next century, when people will finally -finally! - wise up to your shenanigans!" is the common refrain echoing from the Democratic leadership and their all-too-complicit co-dependents in the mass media.

In a clueless nod to Stanley Kubrick's satiric masterpiece about bumbling Russophobes in high places, New York magazine chirpily offers "6 Reasons For Progressives To Stop Worrying and Love the GOP Tax Scam."

They are so very heartening that I'm sure you already know them all by heart. All together now:

1. It's so horrible, all that Dems need do is to sit back and relax and a restoration of "power" shall be theirs due to a mass outpouring of ruefully grateful voters. You can literally run as John Q. Generic, and you'll be a shoo-in.

2. When they do take back power, they will immediately expand the welfare state! ( just as Obama did back in 2009 when he had a Democratic super-majority in Congress and still rewarded Wall Street to the detriment of Main Street, and refused to use budget reconciliation as ruthlessly as the GOP has done this year.)

3. Trump raised taxes on everybody and therefore social democracy is inevitable! (um... large chunks of the middle class, unless they reside on the expensive coasts, will not realize they wuz robbed until about 2027, when their tax cuts are due to sunset even as the corporate rates remain permanent.)

 4. It should mollify Democrats' fear of deficits! (as we all know from our study of recent history, Obama's first reaction to the Bush administration's trillion dollars' worth of war debt and tax cuts for the rich was to delay sunsetting the Bush tax cuts for the rich as payment to his own donors, as he offered a tepid stimulus package hiding even more tax cuts and gifts to high finance. He refused to consider Medicare for All,  a guaranteed federal jobs program and living wage legislation, at the same time his Justice Department vigorously exonerated all the Wall Street malefactors. And then he used his supermajority to seat his infamous Deficit Reduction, or Cat Food, Commission.)

5. Blue states will be able to shield their own safety nets from GOP depredations! ( How? by raising state taxes, which have now been deemed non-deductible under Trump's federal codes? by taxing high-speed Wall Street trades, and Hollywood, and Silicon Valley to the hilt and thus do away with all the money that cash-needy Democratic candidates count on?)

6. Republicans probably won't have the votes for spending cuts! (But not to worry - there are always Democrats ready to play. If they were able to help put an end to long-term unemployment insurance benefits while they still had their majority during the Obama years, anything is possible.)

Now, if you still persist in seeing the light at the end of tunnel as the blinding glare of an oncoming locomotive ready to mow you down, rather than as a beacon of hope, then Frank Bruni of the New York Times has some strange love of his own to offer. Democrats should simply yank the Republicans' "values" talking points right out from under them, and make them their very own! (while still yammering away on Russia and partisan #MeTooism, of course, to show how original and bold they truly are.) They especially should not abandon the Clinton-Obama-Third Way lie that Deficits Matter and therefore give ammunition to the plutonomy's propaganda that social spending cuts which hurt regular people will have to - just have to! - offset the tax windfall for the obscenely rich.

Bruni gushes forth with a noxious blend of market-beholden neoliberalism and war-mongering neoconservatism:

Democrats are the party of fiscal responsibility because they don’t pretend that they can afford grand government commitments — whether distant wars or domestic programs — without collecting the revenue for them.

Democrats are the party of patriotism, because they’re doing something infinitely more urgent and substantive than berating football players who kneel during the national anthem. They’re recognizing that a hostile foreign power tried to change the course of an American presidential election. They’re pressing for a full accounting of that. They’re looking for fixes, so that we can know with confidence that we control our own destiny going forward. The president, meanwhile, plays down the threat, and Republicans prop him up.

Democrats are the party of national security. They don’t taunt and get into Twitter wars with the rulers of countries that just might send nuclear warheads our way. They don’t alienate longtime allies by flashing contradictory signals about their commitment to NATO. The leader of the Republican Party does all of that and more, denying the G.O.P. any pretense to stewardship of a stable world order.

Democrats are the law-and-order party. While many Republicans and their media mouthpiece, Fox News, labor to delegitimize the F.B.I. and thus inoculate Trump, Democrats put faith in prosecutors, agents and the system.

Where do I sign up for my admission ticket to the Big Tent? Do I interpret the light at the end of the tunnel hopefully, pragmatically or despairingly?

My (Times censor-proof) published response to Bruni: 

Moving the Democratic Party further right and claiming the moral high ground won't win elections. The dubious virtue of austerity for Main Street helped lose them a thousand seats in the past decade - a decade that saw the largest transfer of household wealth to the top 1% in our country's history.

Sure, blame gerrymandering. But Trump and the GOP will never be defeated if all that Dems can offer is "Incrementalism We Can Believe In." Trillion-dollar wars and world supremacy don't make up for the lack of universal health care and stagnating wages at home.

Even before Trump came along with his reckless tweets, America's "standing" was on the wane. Corporation-friendly trade deals and the global economic crisis caused by finance capital gone wild have destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods besides ours.

A new report co-authored by Thomas Piketty shows that the US is now the most unequal of all Western nations. This deliberately manufactured wealth gap will only intensify, as social and natural and political catastrophes become the new normal.

Our incarceration nation now imprisons one-third of all black men at some point in their lives, and on average, three US citizens are killed by law enforcement every 24 hours. Do you really think glorifying the FBI and the CIA, and scarifying about Russia, will fire up millions of oppressed people to come out and vote Democrat?

The Democrats don't need to be more like Republicans. They need to be more like New Deal Democrats.

Count Your Damned Blessings

It's a testament to how low we've sunk as a country that the defeat in Alabama Tuesday of a homophobic xenophobic white supremacist fundamentalist fanatic pedophile came as such a huge shock to most pundits and prognosticators.

Much to our wondering eye does appear the reality that yes, Virginia, there is a limit to the awfulness that voters will accept in the politicians they choose to faithfully serve the oligarchs under the pretense of representative democracy.

The Democratic victor, Doug Jones, is still too much of an ideological "blank slate" for us to predict whether he'll try anything radical to improve the lives of the poor and Black Alabama voters who turned out in record numbers in an off-year special election to push him over the finish line. He'll actually get one more year (until 2021!) than a mere House representative would get to master juggling his good legislative stuff with the need to work the phones for campaign donations. So I'll give him the benefit of my many doubts in the hope that he proves my ingrained cynicism to be totally misplaced.

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress are taking no chances in getting their massive gift to the rich passed just in time for Christmas, before Doug Jones is sworn in to potentially jam even the tiniest wad of gum in their nasty works.  It bodes ill for them that despite his blank slate politics, Jones is very popular among black voters, not least because he successfully prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan terrorists who bombed a Baptist church in 1963 and killed four little girls.

New York Times pundit Paul Krugman drearily ponders the tasteless haste with which the robber barons are cramming coal into the stockings of 330 million Americans, or at least the bottom 90-99% of Americans. We still don't know exactly how severely the lesser millionaires and multimillionaires may be punished, especially those residing on the Blue State coasts. For example, although the mortgage deduction has been raised from $100.000 to $750,000, the tax bill will not allow a similar deduction for state and local taxes if the merely well-to-do choose the former option. This, from first appearances anyway, is a big slap to people who own luxury homes in New York's Hamptons enclaves.

  It might all seem moot to ordinary people when Congress reconvenes in January to begin its attack on the great social insurance programs of the New Deal and the Great Society. That's when real democracy should rear its righteous head and show that representative democracy is nothing but an oxymoron. It's nothing but a feel-good story that media and political propagandists have been telling us for more than two centuries now. So with any luck and lots of organization, the watershed #MeToo movement will quickly evolve from outraged protests against sexual assault and harassment to outraged protests against the social and economic assaults committed against us every single day by a tiny cabal of oligarchic predators.

These predatory rulers do, despite all their greed and venality, still require "the consent of the governed" in order to operate. It's why the oligarchs didn't fight back too hard against FDR's agenda during the First Great Depression. The continued existence of capitalism depended on him saving them from themselves, as well as from the sit-down strikes and rent riots.

So to Krugman's smug conclusion that the tax bill is just so horrible that it will send a delicious thrill right up the osteoporotic spine of the Democratic Party, I responded: 

  Those Democratic strategists might be gleefully thinking "Make My Day", but I suspect that those of us not making six figures a year as consultants are thinking more in terms of "Our Days Are Numbered."

Sorry, but the realization that the GOP mobsters are shooting themselves, and that the Dems look good in comparison doesn't put food on our tables, pay the rent, make doctor visits feasible even with "affordable" coverage, or ease whole lifetimes' worth of crushing student debt.

With the election of a monumentally incompetent criminal to the White House, the Republicans are newly emboldened to act out the darkest fantasies of the malignant Donor Class, a/k/a the Owner Class. The defeat of good ole boy pedophile Roy Moore does indeed spell the eventual doom of Trumpism and possibly the GOP majority. So they'll grab while the grabbing's good.

Plus, all the really nasty bad stuff is traditionally rushed through during the joyful winter holiday season. They count on most of us being either too busy consuming, or too depressed about our already-strapped existences, to make much of a stink. Furthermore, since we don't know exactly what is in this piece of malignant legislation, and the entire media-political complex will have made their quick holiday getaways, by the time we find out it'll be a done deal.

Then we'll be told to "adapt" and to practice "resilience" as we wait to vote the good guys back in to, at best. only partially undo what the Sadism Party has wrought.

Representative Democracy: The Fluff That Hides the Bad Stuff