Scenarios for America’s Political Future

Hey Ian, a small correction. I’m sure you meant 2024 and 2028 versus 2004 and 2008.

My take on your latest blog post aside from agreeing with it for the most part. It’s a thorough & expanded way of saying “we’re f*cked any which way it goes.”

One thing to think about is how Republicans will react to a Trump loss. There is still a faction of the Republican Party that wants to return to something closer to George W. Bush-era conservatism and if Trump loses they may try to win back control of the GOP. This goes to the issue of right-wing totalitarianism.

Maybe I am too optimistic but I think there is enough infighting among conservatives that this could prevent the rise of a right-wing strongman. For example, I suspect that large segments of the American capitalist class are not happy with Trump over trade and immigration and favors neoliberal Democrats or a more conventional Republican as better managers of the system. My guess is that if totalitarianism ever comes to America it will be via a military takeover in some sort of crisis scenario.

More generally, there is the question of whether major legislation can even be passed in our polarized and dysfunctional system. No political faction has enough support to impose a new ideological order on the country in the way that FDR and Ronald Reagan did. Obama possibly had a chance because of the big recession but he blew it.

As for the environment, I don’t think anything serious will be done no matter who the president is because nobody wants to touch the American lifestyle. Jimmy Carter tried to tackle the issue in a mild way and he was rebuffed by the public in favor of Ronald Reagan who promised more uncontrolled growth in the name of the American Dream.

Maybe people are wising up now in the face of near-certain calamity but I doubt it. It is easy to mouth green platitudes when your lifestyle is not on the line and the stats on consumerism show that most Americans are not interested in a greener lifestyle. For example, people want bigger cars (SUVs and trucks) and bigger houses and those who can afford it do buy bigger. Is this a population that can do what it takes to avoid climate catastrophe?

Inslee won’t win, but he will be good on Climate Change.

About that image in that Big Brother Award . . . I think the exact quote where O’brien was inviting Winston Smith to imagine the future was . . . ” Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

Some years ago I saw an image which was an even more compelling illustration of what the OverClass wants for us. I will provide a link to the image. But first, try changing the O’brien quote around just a little bit in your mind. Make it say . . . ” Imagine a dirty fat person sitting on a human face, forever”. Then imagine the image I will link to saying ” Imagine a dirty fat person sitting on a human face, forever” instead of what it really says.

That said, here is the image.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=kliban+images+dirty+fat+person+sits+on+president%27s+face&fr=sfp&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F_NPeIdlHaoaQ%2FTLMStFxKyAI%2FAAAAAAAAHlo%2FHSPlGjC3-J8%2Fs1600%2FFat%252BPresident.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F_NPeIdlHaoaQ%2FTLMStFxKyAI%2FAAAAAAAAHlo%2FHSPlGjC3-J8%2Fs1600%2FFat%252BPresident.jpg&action=click

Well, if a win for Trump in 2020 means we have a chance for someone to emerge in 2024 that might give us a genuine chance, this should cheer us up:

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2019/07/dont-take-the-bait/

MSNBC was touting a recent poll that showed that Biden beat Trump by 9 points, Sanders beat him by 7 points, Warren I think by 5 points, and Harris was 1 point up on Trump. So the two big takeaways for MSNBC were that Biden was still on top and 4 Democrats “beat” Trump. Sanders was barely a blip on the screen. But the thing is that Sanders is within 2 points of Biden on Biden’s main issue of who can beat Trump. For me that is the real story that is being studiously ignored. Despite all the non-coverage of Sanders, the treating him as a non-person, he still does essentially as well as the Democratic frontrunner. Other than that, I agree with NR.

My take on Warren vs Sanders is should Sanders win the nomination the DNC will burn everyone in the upper levels of the party to the point of damaging control of Congress. This will be abetted by Bernie partisans conducting a wholesale purge and making it impossible for the few progressives that have been slowly acting to break the neoliberal hold from within to continue their work. The passion of Sanders supporters make this likely.

Warren on the other hand is likely to be accepted by the party, albeit reluctantly. And the party under control of Warren gives the existing progressive staffers real power, with an honorable retirement possible for the sell outs.

Warren is already working to develop state legislative candidates ahead of 2020 redistricting.

I’m not happy with her love of markets, but I think it i tempered by her experience with bankruptcy law and cases – she knows viscerally that markets can exacerbate rather than solve problems.

1) A Biden nomination would be an outrage, and if the Party hadn’t lost me already, that would drive me to demand a Sanders independent run.

2) I am still guessing that the Sanders organization is running a little under the polling radar, and expect Sanders to outperform expectations. Waiting on California to prove me wrong. With a win or strong 2nd, Sanders would then have to deal with the older black women in South Carolina etc (Tx?), I also thing Sanders is showing signs of age, getting tired.

3) My expectation is Harris, or doubling down on the idpol with Harris/Buttegieg. I don’t know how to fight that, which is why I’m reading Lenin. The nations of America could disintegrate.

4) I expect Trump to get reelected.

5) But everywhere Sanders goes he finds people to march with. Extinction Rebellion is a couple climate catastrophes from going viral. 115 in France was the news this year. India. Midwestern floods. Do not underestimate the streets. The climate and the economy also get a vote.

@Dan Lynch, I don’t see how Warren could possibly beat Trump. He would absolutely destroy her in the debates, just like with HRC. Warren’s voice isn’t loud and she goes hoarse really easily.

Harris might have a chance against Trump because she’s a prosecutor. Of course I would rather see Bernie face off against Trump because he’s a cranky old man who won’t back down.

What so said. I’m done with electoral politics as a possible means to a solution if a solution is even possible at this point. I’ve been done with it for quite some time now although I do still comment on it as though it’s some sick form of a parlor game.

I won’t be voting and I have no prediction on the outcome and really don’t care about the outcome because it won’t substantially change a thing and right now humanity needs much more than substantially.

The progressives to include AOC & Co. have yet to accept and/or admit that growth is what ails us. Every single problem they endeavor to address and resolve is predicated on growth. The answer to the cancer that is growth is not more growth in other forms.

Once we achieve

DJIA 00,000

if we ever do, we may just be making some progress if we’re open to redefining progress as contraction to steady state. If we can put a man on the moon surely economists can devise a system that incentivizes this as the ultimate goal.

That means Wall Street must be eliminated and financiers like Jeffrey Epstein and his sordid ilk, metaphorically at least, must hang from soon-to-be defunct & irrelevant traffic signals like Christmas decorations.

As for a totalitarian demagogue (someone who sees what Trump did, combined it with Bannon’s politics, and is disciplined and charismatic), well, the risk is there, but odds are the next President will be Democratic.

If the next POTUS is Biden and/or Harris, you may be right. But who would this mystery demagogue be? Can we start identifying potentials now so we can mentally prepare for what’s to come? We know the deep state has.

Obama/Biden gave us Trump on an orange day-glo (versus silver) platter. Biden/Harris would give us much worse.

I keep coming back to Spain before Franco’s coup and the ensuing civil war before he consolidated power. Texaco, and Wall Street in general, funded and backed Franco. Who will fund the demagogue lurking in the shadows awaiting the zeitgeist to fully manifest? Gazprom? Rosneft? Lukoil? All three and more where that came from? Maybe. Maybe.

Here’s more where that came from. Gee, how convenient to use special interest politics to suppress any meaningful discussion of the most pressing issues confronting humanity and the planet. It’s so obviously transparent. This is the true purpose of special interests. It’s yet another tool in their prodigious arsenal to factionalize and preclude solidarity.

Climate Change Forum Loses Sponsor After Dispute Over Story

A planned forum on climate change for Democratic presidential candidates lost several major sponsors on Saturday in the wake of the left-leaning magazine The New Republic publishing — and later retracting — a vulgar and homophobic story related to gay presidential contender Pete Buttigieg.

The New Republic was slated as a chief sponsor of a September event designed to spark climate change discussion among candidates during a U.N. climate summit. The magazine pulled down what it called “an opinion piece” about Buttigieg soon after its publication on Friday, citing “criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content.” But The New Republic as well as three top sponsors bowed out of the climate change event.

The League of Conservation Voters said in a statement withdrawing from the climate forum that the magazine’s “offensive piece” about the Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, “and the choice to run it, are inconsistent with our values.” The Center for American Progress Action Fund said that while it “strongly supports the idea of giving the candidates a forum to address climate change,” remaining a backer of the planned forum “is not possible” following The New Republic’s decision to publish its Buttigieg story.

What did Sartre write? “Hell is Other people.”

i find i cannot quite penetrate what people i encounter in meatspace tell me about their visceral reactions to various candidacies plus Trump. i cannot quite make sense of . . . not the rationalization, but the gut reaction.

My own rationalizations seem so clean and neat to me. Like many of you writing here: Sanders, good; Sanders wants to help the working class, who are in deep trouble and wrest some power from the .01%. Warren, ok; Warren is against financial fraud and predation. Gabbard, anti-war — i am against war, at least completely senseless and endless wars, which is pretty much the only kind we have at hand; who isn’t? (Lots of people apparently — what did i just say about hell?)

But, people i meet personally keep telling me their visceral reactions. Gabbard is a tell — she has no profile; polling with the one percenters. Almost no one should even know who she is. like moulton or yang. But she gets surprisingly big negatives. a journalist i know — former la times editor and news junkie from way back told me after the first debates she “doesn’t trust her” because of the history on the gay issue. I was thinking, and you voted for Hillary? you really need to get your trust detector fixed, thought I. and priorities, straight; Gabbard has repented, gay marriage is settled and war is now (and war is, well, war)

i see in the media the Democratic establishment is making the usual soft, lesser evil arguments — “electability” — and they sound really hollow to me. a fissure opened up in the Democratic Party in the 2016 campaign; it is on display in the Pelosi vs the Squad feud, which Trump with his unfailing instinct just stepped into. Medicare-for-all is a winning issue, but a large part of the Democratic Party, base oddly as well as establishment is opposed. How many liberals even register that Pelosi works against Medicare-for-all and other “Sanders” issues day and night, all day long?

like several other commenters i imagine that the Democratic establishment would really like to nominate Harris: a photogenic fraud who ticks the identity boxes with intersectionality in aces and eights. She has been scripted to say the “Sanders” things, but she is in the race as the candidate of corrupt finance (as if there is any other kind), having won the Hamptons primary way back when. and she is a thoroughgoing authoritarian, with a prosecutorial record to prove it.

Harris makes me want to vomit. And, i feel really clear in my mind about why. my rationalization and my gut seem aligned. but for how many people likely to vote in Democratic primaries is that true? we have gone thru two years of Russia,Russia,Russia where reflection on how trying to elect Hillary Clinton (a monster in many ways) got us Trump should exist in people’s minds, but doesn’t

the official story on Trump is that he is a racist leading racists, his supporters are racists. that is all you need to know about why he accidentally got elected. an accident of the defective Electoral College. the rhetorical politics of “racism” is pervasive in the American political discourse and it is potent, and it is wielded almost exclusively to disable the emerging politics of class. ditto for sexism. i love AOC. i so admire her political talent and discipline for twitter. but, i talk to nice liberals all the time who tell me about their visceral ambivalence in reaction to her. and i can only guess at the reaction of the white (or not white) working class guys to her all girl posse.

I feel like i am thinking clearly about politics — my ego and id together — and it leaves me with serious doubts. politics is in the palsied hands of the .01%. i get that. how many people really do?

the centralization of the political economy has increased tremendously on every dimension — not just the political Media, or Banking or the Tech Giants, but certainly those. and that extreme centralization is making the whole system increasingly fragile or brittle — not sure of the right metaphor. NC had an essay on Deutsche Bank’s semi-collapse after years of epic dysfunction. And, there was a key insight that applies generally: as power has been centralized at the top in these organizations, all sense of responsibility for actual results and effects at lower levels has evaporated. Ethically and in every other way.

Th indomitable Kunstler, he of the Classic Rant against the American Clusterfuck, pointed to the fracking revolution as a masterpiece of post-GFC financial engineering: a vast “industry” of nominally small and corporately independent operators have made the U.S. in the twilight of empire the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world, relieving the tremendous pressure of the trade deficit on the reserve currency status of the dollar. None of these guys have made dime one, mind you, in conventional corporate accounting terms. In the decentralized “market economy” of economists’ imagination, their uniform unprofitability would have prevented any of this insanity from happening. But, their decisions are not their own responsibility, are they? The people who run them get paid salaries and probably performance bonuses for achievement. The finance is there, just as it is for, say, Uber which will never make a dime or any number of “private equity” schemes to demolish Sears or Toys-R-Us or Hostess Twinkies (the company not the “food” designed to survive the apocalypse). The frakkers will end as empty corporate shells, looted and empty — bad debts to greater fools somewhere i guess and pollution left to posterity. And, in the meantime, the can has been kicked down the road for the oil giants whose pipelines have been filled and the global banks managing the carry trade of dollar reserves.

i know this comment is already ridiculously long, and may seem rambling, but it is all one simple argument, i promise. to be tied together in the sequel.

Ian, I concur with most everything you wrote. However I differ a bit on Trump–he may not be the one who converts the US into FascistLand, but he may be the one who sets everything up for the one who follows.

The answer to the rhetorical question of “Why don’t Republicans oppose Trump?” on centrist Democrat MSNBC-land, is that ‘they know they’re getting what they really want from him”. And what they and their funders want is minority rule. By a combination of judicial appointments that will bless whatever gerrymandering and voting rights repeal that will be needed, they will achieve a state where only 20 % of the population rules. In essence, only white “Christian” (TM) votes will matter. We already have states that strongly lean Democratic in presidential elections, like Wisconsin, that have Republican near-supermajorities hardwired in.

So while I will not vote for Biden for sure, and maybe no Democrat other than Sanders or Warren, and I agree that a Biden/Harris presidency might lead to a bigger R backlash in 2028 and will for sure quell any progressive changes until then–you’re all right about this–having Trump in another 4 years might lead to a state where no progressive President could ever enact anything because Congress will have veto-proof R majorities due to gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Coupled to that, the power we have given the rich means that they might be able to do what Enron did to Gray Davis–deliberately tank the whole US economy during a progressive president’s tenure to get him/her out of office (again, to “prove socialism fails”). After that we’d get even a more rabid rightist.

The indomitable Kunstler…..

More like the insane & psychotic Kunstler. He and his psychotic friends have themselves a gay old time in his comments section. They have the disposition of fifteen-year-old high school freshmen. The question is, how many socks belong to Kunstler? I’m guessing at least ten. I don’t even read him any longer. He and his gang of geriatric goobers are broken records.

I do not think you can underestimate the damage that Trump could do with another 4 years.

I’m not advocating for Trump by any means, but one positive thing that can be said about him and his tenure with a year and a half left for his 1st term is that he hasn’t yet failed a foreign state. That can’t be said for many of the preceding presidents, meaning Clinton, Dubya and Obama and we know if Biden or Harris were to win, Assad is going down and maybe Kim Jong-un & North Korea too.

Have Bernie and/or Warren promised no more forever wars and failing of states? Have they promised to cut the military back by 70% in 8 years? If not, why not?

If not, why not?

any salesman knows that you have to initially join your customer where the customer is. then by persuasion you may lead the customer where you want them to go.

I think some “Sanders” issues and “Warren” issues, too, are nearly no-brainers, but when i talk to real people, even those basic points seem confusing and confused.

The shared mindspace created by mainstream media makes people really stupid about politics and leaves them without good models for rational thought or humane judgment.

Ian started the OP with an exploration of how what you might call the political narrative may evolve in response to the back-and-forth partisan electoral contest. I suppose the implicit assumptions are that people en masse vote essentially at random but politics evolves according to narrative principles of action and reaction and blaming incumbents and only indirectly from success or failure in solving collective problems.

The background reality is that the class of people from which any kind of leadership would normally be drawn is “complacent”. This is true even on the left in a critical way, i think. People think the world they know can continue. And basic structures of the neoliberal world system with the U.S. at its center are failing.

The extreme centralization of the political economy is paralyzing in itself, but is also making popular politics dumb and dumber by making so much of journalism irresponsible.

So, sure, a politician with her head on straight can try stating simple, basic truth as a starting point in a conversation with a voter. But where is the voter’s head? Will basic truth be recognized?

It is no small challenge to navigate a contested, polluted discourse where it is hard to know who to trust, and the guidance you are likely to get from professional pundits and journalists is . . . irresponsible if not actually deceptive crap.

Bruce: “while the 10% run the machinery with no sense of personal responsibility for outcomes from the working of the neoliberal system. ”

Here is case 00, an ICE officer working in the detention centers for the kids, trying to block it all out and make it to early retirement age.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/somewhere-people-just-accepted-whats-going-on-as-normal/

How about the people in health InsCos, who spend their days defrauding paying customers out of the health care they paid for, and condemning some to death?

I don’t think (I hope) I could do that. I’d go be a barrista

We are very deep into the business cycle. Employment is a lagging indicator. Large commercial/institutional construction lags so much, it is almost counter cyclical.

Making no claims based on merit what-so-ever, it is unlikely that our current cycle won’t be going into or already in the trough by 2020.

This means that whoever is president is going to have a skunk sandwich to deal with. The timing makes it likely that Trump will get the blame for this. Likely, but not a sure thing.

Biden and Harris do seem to be the most likely to bail out the banks. Maybe even more so than Trump. Not my favorite move, but I will say that it is easier said than done to kick start an economy while the banks are going down the toilet.

Bruce Wilder

I do not think you remember how much damage Obama did in eight years. (Or how much damage was done under his aegis by the Clintonistas who staffed his administration.)

Ahh, but whatever evils the Obamacrats and Clintonistas did, and I heartily agree that the did, what they did could be undone. In fact, the Rs gaining the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the election of Trump was largely due to the backlash created by Obama spitting on the D base plus the neglect of large paths of the electorate done in order to ‘foam the runway’ for the banks.

The ultimate goal of the Republicans, by contrast, is not just policy, it’s to set up a system of minority rule that *cannot be undone by elections by design*. That is a more serious threat, because if they succeed there will be *no* chance of progressive government even if a progressive becomes president.
Trumpism didn’t start with Trump, it started in California, where conservatives looked at more ethnically and racially diverse state that held views they found unpalatable and said in essence, ‘crap, this is what the whole country is headed towards’:

https://www.vox.com/2018/11/19/17841946/trump-conservatism-california-gop-shapiro-midterms-2018

This, to conservatives — and particularly to California conservatives — is the nightmare scenario: an America in which they are powerless, demographically swamped, where the particular virtues and ideas that made America great for so long are uprooted by a surging left. Trump speaks for, and to, this conservative movement, the one that sees demographic changes as a “national emergency.” As Fox News host Laura Ingraham put it in August:

“In some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love.”

And thus, the only way to combat this is, ultimately, to devise a system and put one’s thumb so heavily on the scale of gerrymandering, voter suppression if not outright disenfranchisement, to do whatever it takes, where the 20 -25 % of voters who identify as Republican cast the only votes that matter. This is the real reason that Mitch and the others take Trump’s insults and endure his tantrums, because their political future and the passage of the rightist agenda depends that elections be essentially rigged (if it hasn’t been done yet, ballot box tampering will be next).

It’s only a few short steps to outright authoritarianism from there. We’re already essentially at banana republic status now.

As I said, even if real lefty gets in (insert your fav candidate here) it will be an exercise in futility, because he/she won’t control Congress, and if she/he tries to maximize executive authority you can be damned sure the next R president will up that precedent to the nth degree which will be yet another step for full-blown authoritarianism. I agree with Ian on the dangers of a Biden/Harris presidency producing yet another backlash and a worse version of Trump in 2024 or 2028, but I think you guys are wrongly dismissing the dangers of Trump continuing to be president. It’s not just about bad policy decisions, but one’s ability to change *any* decision at a later date or thrown any of the bums out.

@ StewartM: . . . whatever evils the Obamacrats and Clintonistas did, and I heartily agree that the did, what they did could be undone.

by who? when?

you are waiting for the Republicans to responsibly undo bad Democratic policy?

Trump is very unpopular, but he remains more popular than any of the Democratic party servants of capital. He is a talented politician. If he faces a neoliberal Democrat, he will most probably be re-elected. Polls do not reflect this now. I predict that they will in 2020.

Warren is not progressive and is the worst match to beat Trump. At best, she would enact meaningless financial reforms that are heavily watered down from her campaign rhetoric. Her allies and staff are part of the neoliberal intelligentsia, Hollywood propagandists, intellectual property hounds, or bureaucrats and lawyers for capital. She is completely evil and mendacious on the subjects of empire and war. She is Obama 2.0, and should be treated as such. Do not expect anything of her, and if she happens to win, plan to have to drag her leftwards. IMO a Warren victory is the worst outcome for the so called left, because she has this air of being left, but will deliver nothing but more misery and failure.

Bernie is precisely who he says he is. He is a committed social democrat with a foreign policy slightly to the left of Jimmy Carter. He is a proven fighter for working class concerns. He opposes the current forever war. He is the only candidate in the Democratic party race, with the possible exception of Tulsi Gabbard, who would mop the floor with Trump. In my opinion, it won’t even be a close contest, if he can break the Democratic machine. And he can break that machine. He can mobilize popular movements to force Congress to enact his agenda. He can, as President, remove and destroy his enemies. It isn’t easy, or certain, or even likely. But it’s defeatist, silly claptrap to think that the DNC “won’t allow” Sanders to clinch the nomination, or the Republicans and their Democrat allies “won’t allow” him to turn his agenda into law. That is not how this fight works. They will try to destroy him, and he will try to destroy them. The outcome of that struggle is up for grabs, and we should all know which side to join. After decades of loss, too many American leftists have decided that losing is ordained by the Gods. Thank fate the kids don’t think that way.

I have been predicting a victory* for Kamala Harris since it became clear she was made “front runner” by high-end DNCers at a pricey Hampton fund raiser back in 2017. I stand by that prediction, Kamala has been chosen as the most useful tool by the rich & powerful, she will win the nomination, and I believe, will defeat Trump. This will be a godsend if you, like many, believe Trump to be worse than Hitler incarnate. And…if you thought Obama was great; at bailing out financiers, waging numerous [Libya; Ukraine; Syria] wars-of-aggression/regime-change and…postponing health-care reform indefinitely…then you are in luck, we’ll have 8 more years of Obamaesque rule**. BTW, the “come from behind” scenario rhymes well with the placement of Obama in 2008.

Crowding the field with candidates to drown out any true alternative has been very effective for the DNCers, Gabbard has been shut down even though her debate performance was exemplary given the pittance of time and triviality of her questioning. Bernie[?], well…the old man burned enough of his supporters back in 2016 to ensure his defeat, his remaining supporters will be portrayed as dead enders by the DNC media sycophants, which is the vast majority of what we call the “press”. And Pocahontas[?], wonky like Hillary was but, she is going to have a hard time getting by her ruthless use of racial quotas to advance herself and the fact that, like Hillary, her God given voice is, to put it kindly, lackluster.

Let me close by saying, nothing, and I mean nothing, will be done to advance, with the exception of financialization schemes, solutions toward global warming, or any other social concern, until the neocolonial wars come to an end. 4,000 BILLION was spent, that we know about, on the neocolonialist wars between the years 2003 and 2018, that’s 266.7 Billion a year !!! Until you get a handle on that kind of spending you are not going anywhere with any social concern you may have.

*This is a very effective narrative when you are the obvious pick of the rich and powerful…so long as low status [D] voters are willing to swallow the Kool-Aid flavored hornswoggle without question. So far…the acceptance of small status [D]’s would make Jim Jones proud. As for Kamala sleeping her way in to politics, [as did Hillary], if a tree limb falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it then…

**Hillary may be this nation’s sorest loser in presidential history but, she made an awful lot of money backing Obama and she will seek to return to those halcyon days where she made money hand over fist selling favors at the State Department.

While I agree overall with the political structure Tom is suggesting, I would say the Democrats need to start standing for something. It’s not just the Heartland. Democrats need to start standing for all the people whose support they want. In a lot of ways, I don’t give a good goddamn whom the Democrats nominate. It should be about what they stand and are willing to fight for. The idea that Democrats elect people who believe 60 different things, are all over the political spectrum, and can’t agree on anything, –and that this is a good thing is nuts. All it ensures is that we have an elected class who represent themselves and those who own them, and not us. It gives us people like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Manchin.

If there is any hope that decency might prevail in the world, then we are the eggs that must be broken to make that omelet. If instead we do prevail and remain dominant, then decency and hope have lost, once and for all.

Case in point is the Jeffrey Epstein business and it was and is a business. Social Media and so-called alternative conservative media sites were all abuzz about the obviously fake Pizzagate just a few years prior. So much so, the fake news prompted one of their easily-duped nutjobs to visit the establishment and threaten to shoot it up before being taken into custody. These same sources are now deaf & mute when it comes to the insidious Jeffrey Epstein business. Funny that, except it’s not.

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t even possess a college education when he was selected to teach calculus & physics to the progeny of the incredibly wealthy at the Dalton School in New York City, the alma mater of such fine folks as Anderson Cooper who interned with the CIA for two summers while in college before ultimately settling for a job as an anchor with one of many of the CIA’s media outlets, CNN. It’s probably safe to say many of Dalton’s graduates are CIA assets in one form or another and such is the case of most all progeny of the wealthy elite.

There can be no solidarity with the wealthy elite for this very reason. They are the enemy of the people. No exceptions.

What I would give to break every bone in Epstein’s body. No doubt the DOJ will visit me today for making that statement against one of their own. Fine. Bring it on, cowards. Child molesters. Apologists for child molesters and mass murderers. Protectors of child molesters and mass murderers.

How A Poor, Smart Boy Became A Depraved Billionaire

I’m guessing, and it’s a good guess, Epstein was always depraved every bit as much as Donald Trump is depraved and Howard Stern is depraved. He, like the others, is a psychopath, no doubt about it.

From the article.

Epstein is a fulcrum for the disease that is wealth. A disease that transcends and permeates both political parties as is witnessed by the diverse customers of Epstein’s underage prostitution ring. This should be what cable news programs are covering day in and day out ad nauseam for weeks, months and years even until every stone of depravity is turned over to see what’s under each.

Epstein, now 66, started his job at the Dalton School at age 21 without a degree and taught high school students only a few years younger than he was.

Students remember an informal personality, often joking with students. He was popular with female pupils, despite a mixed reputation.

“Epstein was considered a little creepy by the girls,” alumna Karin Williams said. “I won’t say that the girls didn’t like him. But they thought he was odd.”

Despite his short stint, Epstein left an impression.

“He’s the only man who I’ve ever met who had a full-length fur coat,” said Williams, who remembered the coat as Epstein’s flamboyant 1970s fashion statement at a school with a conservative dress code.

Student-teacher relationships were not unheard of at Dalton, according to several former students. It was a permissive time in the United States, and 40 years before #MeToo.

Well, here is a scenario for what may happen if Trump wins. I have not seen this information previously myself nor have I seen it mentioned here in comments. If this is a potential consequence of a Trump victory, as many people as possible need to know about it.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trumps-reelection-could-spell-the-end-of-american-democracy/

“Turns out, there’s an actual project to rewrite our Constitution, turning America into a corporate-run oligarchy.

They’d end the income tax, eliminate federal regulatory agencies like the EPA, end all labor protections (including laws against child labor), let states ignore anti-discrimination and other federal regulations, and impose term limits so the only “institutional memory” for legislatures will be the corporate lobbyists.

… With a big Trump win will come a rewrite of our Constitution itself, if the billionaires funding it have their way.”

I wonder if the good citizens of the Mayan city states debated so much which city had the best leadership and gods as their civilization fell apart from over population, resource depletion, and climate change (drought)? If some demagogue appeared with valid plans to alleviate the damage we’ve done to our planet I’d vote for him/her in a heartbeat. There will be no civilization for your grand- and great-grandchilren to inhabit unless we start taking care of our most urgent problems now. Both parties in this country appear like dim witted sloths, totally unable to change their ways. They are dragging us toward extinction, and we continue to support them. Pretty sure I’ll be voting green party again.

This is the real issue of our time.

https://www.amazon.com/Flame-King-YSN10LB-Cylinder-Protection/dp/B07Q5CP7WS/ref=sr_1_43?keywords=flame+king&qid=1563463603&s=gateway&sr=8-43

The sad thing is that Canada is only ten years or so away from the same state of affairs as the US, and you could also say that about most of the EU and they might even be closer than that.