Category: 2020 American Elections Page 2 of 3

Biden was one of the key architects of the bankrupty bill, which made it impossible to declare bankruptcy on student loans.

The result of the bankruptcy bill is that millenials and zoomers who went to university and don’t have rich parents can’t own a house and many have decided they can’t afford families. They expect to live in poverty for decades as a result. (Not going to university means you can’t even apply for good jobs.)

Biden pushed hard for three-strikes laws, the drug wars, and so on. He is responsible for completely destroying entire generations of poor black men and gutting inner cities.

Biden has repeatedly tried to cut social security. He didn’t just vote for war with Iraq, he pushed the lie that Iraq had WMD, and worked hard to promote approval for the war.

He actively helped repeal Glass-Steagall, setting up the 2007/8 financial crisis that caused a ten-year long “recession” for ordinary people.

We live in Joe Biden’s world. Joe Biden was there every step of the way, creating a world in which young people live in poverty, poor black (and white) men are in prison, and in which the rich get richer and everyone else scrambles to even keep up.

By any rational consideration, Biden is a bad man. Evil, even.

Let us move briefly to Sanders. Bernie’s key planks were Medicare-for-all and student debt forgiveness, with a large climate change plan.

There are now great cries that Sanders supporters should support and vote for Biden.

People supported Sanders so ferociously because his policies meant they could actually have health care they could use (Medicare-for-all) and might be able to not spend decades in debt, and thus start families and maybe even own a home.

In other words, Sanders policies would make them more likely to NOT DIE and to be able to live a decent life.

Biden’s policies do not do that. Period. So when you see upset Sanders supporters, understand that they’re angry that people who voted Biden don’t seem to care if they die or live in poverty.

Biden, even if Sanders likes him personally (a fact which should have had no effect on his strategy, and is one of Sanders ethical failings), is one of the top fifty or so people in the country responsible for how shitty the US is to so many people. That is Biden’s legacy. He’s a warmonger, and someone who has favored rich people over the middle class and poor all his life, and made sure that the poor and young were hurt–and hurt badly.

Trump may be worse, but this a case of Beelzebub vs. Satan.

The Left is not Democratic. It does not have the same beliefs as Democrats. It does not believe in war. It does not believe young people should be poor. It does not believe in increasing fracking and destroying the climate (which Biden/Obama did–and do). It does not believe that whether you can have health care should depend on how much money you have.

The two are not friends–they’re not even allies, because allies don’t make separate peace.

The entire argument for voting for Biden rather than Trump, if you’re left-wing, is, “We’ll throw you some scraps, and kick you slightly less often.”

I mean, OK, I guess?

But don’t act like it’s some great moral argument, or that the Left and Democrats are friends, or allies, or even exist in the same moral universe.

Democrats like Biden are people who have done literal incalculable harm to both Americans and foreigners throughout their careers. Those who prefer Biden to Sanders are people who want more evil done than good, claiming that it is less evil than Trump would do (which it may well be, especially if you’re American). But they don’t actually want good. They aren’t, on the whole, in favor of doing good. They are, on the whole, in favor of doing evil. (No, no, don’t tell me about Biden’s platform. His record is what matters.)

So, yeah, Bernie losing matters, and Americans will pay the price. Biden is evil, there is no question about that. He is so far from being good that he’s somewhere around the sixth circle of hell. The argument is, yet again, simply about voting for the lesser evil.

But a majority of Democrats did want the evil guy rather than the good guy, and that’s what they have.

So be it.

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Bernie Sanders

Will Sanders be the Democratic nominee for President?

Probably.

Barring something very unexpected, he’ll have the most delegates. His polling in the big super Tuesday states is ahead of all the other candidates. Right now, all Bloomberg is doing is harming the other “centrist” candidates; he’s actually helping Sanders.

The risk is that Sanders doesn’t have enough delegates to win the first ballot, and that delegates from other candidates would then combine with super-delegates (put in place precisely to make sure a Bernie doesn’t happen) and give the nomination to someone else. Warren, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg. (Biden is too clearly senile, and I think insiders get that.)

If this happens, Trump will then win re-election, which is a win to Bloomberg, who got into the contest to defeat Sanders, not Trump.

But be clear that it might also be a win for Democratic insiders. If Sanders wins the nomination and the election, insiders will be replaced over time; they will lose their power over the party.

For Democratic party insiders, then, a Bernie win in the election may be worse for them, personally, than a Trump win. As long as they control the party, they will eventually get back into power, and will be fine financially.

If the current Democratic establishment loses power to progressives, well, their lives aren’t so good, are they?

And for many Democratic insiders, their own comfort and power will trump beating Trump. Oh, they’ll say, and many will believe, that they are acting from principle, but the base motivation will be fear of loss of power, money, and livelihood.

From now until the election, the greatest danger will not be Trump, or Republicans, it will be Democratic insiders who stand to lose much more under Sanders than under Trump.

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Michael Bloomberg

So, Michael Bloomberg has spent $300 million, and, by some polling, is now tied for second place in the Democratic primaries with Joe Biden, whose numbers are collapsing.

Bloomberg is worth about $63 billion.

He entered the race to defeat Sanders. He considered entering the race in 2016 until it became clear that Clinton would be the nominee.

This makes perfect sense, because Sanders tax plan will cost him billions. He can spend ten times as much as he has, and it will still be a good investment.

The thing about Trump was always that he was a symptom of a disease. It’s hard to say exactly when the disease started, but serious symptoms started showing up after the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. Wage increase rates collapsed, stock markets and other asset prices rose much faster than inflation, regulations were gutted, people were thrown in jail at a ferocious rate, and unions were smashed.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Inequality took off, and over time this created “multibillionaires.” They used their money to buy politicians, and, through those politicians, they bought policy. They slashed tax rates on corporations, rich people and their estates, and so on to the bone. They increased subsidies for the rich, while they cut subsidies for the poor and middle class, in relative terms.

The Federal Reserve (all of whose governors are political appointees), acted aggressively to keep wage increases at or under inflation, and targeted inflation rather than job growth. Good working class and many middle class jobs were off-shored and outsourced. Some of these processes had started before Reagan, such as offshoring and cutting top marginal tax rates (JFK foolishly did so, but then he was the son of an oligarch), but they went into overdrive after 1980.

From ’33 to ’68, the general trend was for the percentage of income controlled by the wealthy to decrease relative to the percentage controlled by everyone else. In 1968, that reversed, but 1980 is when it was locked in.

Money is, of course, power. Anyone who denies this is tediously stupid, given that almost all of us have spent most of our lives doing shit we wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to to get money. (Getting other people to do shit they don’t want to do but that you do want them to do is the very definition of power.)

So, the oligarchs, aided by the huge concentration of companies into oligopolies, have come to own or control vast amounts of wealth. They passed a law that defined money as free speech, and now that the political class has proven incapable of handling a left-wing populist, an oligarch is stepping in directly, because his class’s lackeys, like Biden and Buttigieg (and indeed most of the field), are incompetent.

Bloomberg is an oligarch. He’s racist, sexist, and arrogant. He had New York’s laws changed so he could have a third term. He is competent and ruthless. In most respects, he is far more dangerous than Trump–even though he is for some things the left likes, like birth and gun control. Trump is good at demagoguery, but he isn’t a competent executive.

Bloomberg IS a competent executive. As he joked when asked about having two billionaires in the election, “Who’s the other one?”

(He also has massive interests in China and has done their bidding in the past, a fact the hysterical Russia-Gaters might note.)

My guess is that Bloomberg can’t win except through a brokered convention. The plan may be to deny Sanders an outright majority, then combine against him. Doing so will break the Democratic party. Remember that the Clintons still have the most power over the Democratic establishment, and Hilary hates Sanders with a vindictive passion, while she is on good terms with Bloomberg. Obama, who also still has power and influence, seems more ambivalent, but he’s never liked the left. On the other hand, reports are that he’s dispassionate and recognizes that denying the vote leader the nomination will damage the party.

If Bloomberg does get the fix in, who will win in a Bloomberg/Trump match? I don’t know, but while Bloomberg is more competent as an executive, my feeling is that Trump’s unique strength as a demagogue will be the deciding factor in outmatching Bloomberg. The question then becomes whether Bloomberg’s money and organizational abilities can outweigh that.

Trump has increasingly been acting against the rule of law. He always was, starting with emoluments violations, but now that he was impeached and not convicted, he feels immune to Congress’s censure.

Trump also HAS TO WIN. If he loses, he will be destroyed by his enemies in New York, in various criminal investigations. They will take him down and destroy him. He understands this.

So, it’s oligarch vs. left-wing populist to see who gets to take on the minor oligarch, criminal, and current president Donald Trump, who knows that a loss means the end of his good life and the destruction of the minor empire he has built.

The only possible good outcome for most Americans is a Sanders win. No other path leads anywhere decent.

This is likely be the nastiest election cycle since the Democrats deliberately sabotaged McGovern.

For approximately the same reasons.

It’ll be horrific, and the outcome will control whether many people live, die, or have good or terrible lives. I suggest getting some hot dogs. If Rome is going to burn, you may as well roast wieners.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.