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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nPhotograph Source: Derek Simeone \u2013 CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Those who own the country ought to govern it<\/em>. \u2013 John Jay<\/p> You have owners<\/em>. \u2013 George Carlin<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Nobody Said Biden\u2019s Name<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I walked up to Chicago\u2019s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG\u2019s chart-topping hit \u201c(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,\u201d and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky\u2019s description<\/a> of him as \u201cthe most dangerous criminal in human history.\u201d A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyone on the \u201cthe left\u201d who wouldn\u2019t like to see Trump removed from the world\u2019s most dangerous job is morally and intellectually comatose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I say \u201clike to see\u201d because Trump is challenging the election with the backing of much if not most of the Republican Party. A Trump coup seems<\/em> like a bridge too far to me but so did a Trump presidency and I see little basis for confidence in the supposed \u201cresilience\u201d of America\u2019s \u201cdemocratic\u201d and constitutional institutions and values in light of recent history. I\u2019ll believe the orange beast is out the door when he gets flown off the White House Lawn for the final time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contrary to news broadcasters who called the demonstrators \u201cBiden supporters,\u201d there were few Biden-Harris signs on display. There were lots American flags, Mexican national flags, and Black Lives Matter banners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t hear one person say Biden\u2019s name. Not one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStop Counting\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Assuming he is ushered out of power next year (sooner would be better), the wannabe fascist dictator Donald Trump will be remembered, among other terrible things, as the one-term president who wanted the country to stop counting<\/em>. Stop counting COVID-19 cases and deaths Americans needed to keep track of because they made him look bad. Stop counting poor and nonwhite people in the U.S Census because completing a credible count and categorization of the populace would hurt the white-nationalist agenda. Stop counting the disastrous amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And, of course, stop counting the millions of mail-in ballots required by the pandemic he spread.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n How pathetic. A letter writer in last Saturday\u2019s New York Times<\/em> puts it very well: \u201cTrump\u2019s early claim of a victory on the night of the election and his news conference Thursday night reminded me of playing Candy Land with my 5-year-old nephew. It only counts if he wins<\/em> and forget about the rules. If disappointment ensues, the whole board will be flipped upside down. Is this what the United States of America has come to? When is the intervention<\/em>?\u201d (NYT<\/em>, November 7, 2020, A18).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe Are Still in a Very Dangerous Moment\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When indeed. The orange-brushed authoritarian man-child will never willingly concede. As his psychologist niece Mary Trump warned and has been saying the last few days, acknowledging defeat is simply not in Trump\u2019s make-up. The Narcissist-in-Chief is incapable of humility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the fact that 71 million people voted<\/a> to give this lethal fascist lunatic a second term, this nothing to laugh about. \u201cHe still has the power of the presidency for 76 days and we need to be prepared for anything that he might have in mind,\u201d <\/em>Ms. Trump told an interviewer<\/a> five days ago.\u201d If he thinks he\u2019s going down, he\u2019s going to try to take the rest of us with him.<\/em>\u201d Trump is engaged in \u201can attempted coup. \u201cWe can\u2019t be delicate about this. We need to be very straightforward about what\u2019s going on here,\u201d Ms. Trump said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump and his dead-enders \u2013 his two demented sons, his personal attorney general William Barr, fascist propagandists Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, the re-installed Nazi Senator Lindsey Graham et al. \u2013 are apparently playing along with his effort to use Republifascist control of the Supreme Court and some state legislatures to reverse the will of the voters. Along the way, Trump is trying to spark his hard-core Amerikaner base \u2013 including the near-third<\/a> of U.S. citizens who would welcome a right-wing military dictatorship in the U.S. \u2013 to rush into the streets and wage \u201ccival war\u201d on the \u201cradical Left Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Tuesday, the nefarious white nationalist neo-McCarthyite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) endorsed Trump\u2019s refusal to concede. The Republifascist Party is aligning with the final madness of their Dear Leader, who has 70% (!) of the nation\u2019s Republicans<\/a> behind his baseless claim that Biden\u2019s victory was fraudulent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Axios\u2019s Alayna Treen reported<\/a> Monday that \u201cTrump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead \u2014 plus hold campaign-style rallies \u2014 in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThese actions could amount to inciting insurrection,\u201d a friend writes me: \u201cHe\u2019s not done, and we are still in a very dangerous moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGod Help Us\u201d: Fired for Failing to Crush Civil Rights Protest with Federal Troops<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Consistent with these warnings, Trump on Monday Twitter-\u201cterminated\u201d Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Trump nearly fired Esper last June 3rd for publicly contradicting the fascistic president <\/a>over the possible activation of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military units against protests in Washington and other cities. Esper said the circumstances did not merit use of the act, which Trump had threatened to invoke two days earlier. It was widely understood in Washington that Esper would resign before he would agree to deploy U.S. troops against U.S. citizens protesting the theft of the 2020 presidential election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an extraordinary move for a president to fire his Defense Secretary just days after losing an election. Esper\u2019s replacement, Christopher C. Miller, is head of the National Counterterrorism Center. It is reasonable to guess that Miller is a racist Trump-fellator who will be more amenable to using military personnel to quash \u201ccivil unrest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Esper firing could just be payback for his earlier public contradiction of Trump and his determination to move ahead with stripping of Confederate names from U.S. military bases. Or it could be about something more ominous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You never really know with a frenzied, power-mad maniac like Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Esper offered some interesting commentary to Military Times<\/em><\/a> on his potential firing just days before it occurred: \u201cWho\u2019s going to come in behind me? It\u2019s going to be a real \u2018yes man.\u2019 And then God help us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA System of Governance That\u2019s Been the Envy of the World\u201d for 240 Years<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n With the December 8th \u201csafe harbor\u201d deadline for states to choose Electoral College electors just one month away, millions of Americans should prepare to stop all paid work and take to the streets, town plazas, public squares, and central cities and highways to make it clear to the American ruling class that this nation will be ungovernable and unprofitable if the terrible tangerine-tinted, tiny-fingered, Twitter-tantruming tyrant insists on trying to stay in office past his formal expiration. (My own preference is for Trump and Pence to be forced out now, before the orange monstrosity can do any more damage).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t look for Joe \u201cNothing Will Fundamentally Change\u201d Biden, a died-in-the-wool defender of the status quo<\/a>, or any of his fellow corporate and imperialist Democrats, to spark or endorse such mass action. Keeping the people off the streets is very much at the heart of their core institutional and ideological mission. The corporate-captive Democrats<\/a> are about conciliation, pacification, and inauthentic opposition<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Thursday night, the soon-to-be President Elect told Americans to cool their jets while Trump tried to invalidate the election. \u201cDemocracy\u2019s sometimes messy,\u201d <\/em>Biden said, in words that could easily (and may well) have been written by Barack Obama or one of Obama\u2019s speechwriters[1]<\/strong>. \u201cIt sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that\u2019s been the envy of the world.<\/em>\u201d (NYT<\/em>, November 6, 2020, A1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n What an offensive and idiotic comment \u2013 nothing new for Joe Biden, who said earlier this year<\/a> that Trump was \u201cAmerica\u2019s first racist president.\u201d There\u2019s little real and functioning \u201cdemocracy\u201d in the United States. And there was <\/em>never supposed to be as<\/em><\/a> far as the U.S. Founders were concerned \u201cmore than 240 years\u201d ago.<\/em> Popular self-governance, the rule of the people, was the last thing the new nation\u2019s aristo-republican slave-owner, merchant capitalist, and publicist rulers wanted to see break out in their \u201cinfant republic.\u201d Popular sovereignty was the Founders\u2019 nightmare, a threat to their wealth and proper class rule in their militantly propertarian world view<\/a>. Leading Constitution advocate John Jay put it very well: \u201cthose who own the country ought to govern it.\u201d<\/a> The new nation\u2019s leading intellectuals and politicians were very explicit about this in The Federalist Papers <\/em>and in the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, where the framers constructed a government dedicated to keeping We the People at bay<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The openly anti-democratic Electoral College, required to appease southern slaveowners<\/a>, was just one of the many ways in which the Founders\u2019 holy parchment was designed to check the power of the people. Under its openly absurd reign, Americans still don\u2019t elect their president through a national popular vote and presidential elections come down to winner-take-all Elector slate contests in a small number of contested states. Constitutionally speaking, by the way state governments are technically free to send to Elector slates that contradict the popular presidential vote in their jurisdictions (more on this below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n How enviable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s Like You Want to Stop People from Voting\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A New York Times<\/em> editorial published last Saturday reflected on the curious difficulty of getting one\u2019s tally properly taken and tabulated under Biden\u2019s \u201csystem of governance that has been the envy of the world\u201d for 240 years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFrom the endless lines to the pre-election legal wrangling to the president\u2019s constant effort to undermine the process, every ballot cast this year was a leap of faith: Would it get there in time? Would it get there at all? Would they try to toss it out because you voted from a car? Would they throw it out because you signed your name carelessly? Would judges be called upon to alter the mail-in deadline after the election had already begun? Would you ever be able to find the one drop-box in your sprawling county? And, after all that, would anyone believe the count, anyway? All of this uncertainty is unworthy of the \u2018world\u2019s oldest democracy.\u2019 American elections are broken, and because the legitimacy of the entire political system rests upon our votes, their brokenness mars every other part of our democracy\u201d (NYT<\/em>, November 7, 2020, A18).<\/p>\n\n\n\n A short Times <\/em>video on \u201cHow U.S. Elections Look Abroad\u201d<\/a> showed people from other nations reacting to various pathetic aspects of the United States\u2019 bizarre and byzantine voting system(s)\u201d \u201cFrom gerrymandering to voter roll purges,\u201d the Times <\/em>reported, \u201cwe showed people around the world how the American system works. It didn\u2019t go well.\u201d The foreign interview subjects shook their heads and rolled their eyes in disbelief over numerous voting rules and practices that plague elections in the nation that calls itself the homeland and headquarters of democracy: partisan gerrymandering, replete with bizarre \u201cJackson Pollack\u201d voting districts; absurd voter registration deadlines; absurdly low voter registration; rampant non-voting; voter purging; absurdly long lines at minority polling places; the failure to make elections a national holiday and to otherwise make voting convenient; discriminatory and unnecessary voter ID laws; felony disenfranchisement laws and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The judgement of a New Zealander: the American voting regime \u201cis just not acceptable in a democratic country.\u201d A woman from India said, \u201cit\u2019s like you want to stop people from voting<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s not exactly \u201cthe envy of the world.\u201d More like global laughingstock. Or worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More Fully Constitutional Absurdity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sadly, the Times <\/em>video and editorial said nothing about the Electoral College, the systematic disablement of third and fourth parties<\/a>, and the United States\u2019 preposterous and only plutocratic campaign finance laws and (see below) rulings. Even if voting itself was made more suitable, practical, and efficient in the U.S, these authoritarian characteristics of America\u2019s supposedly grand \u201csystem of governance\u201d would continue to badly dilute the supposedly sacred power of the American ballot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 State with 40 Million People and 2 U.S. Senators v. 22 States with 37 Million People and 44 U.S. Senators<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Another anti-democratic legacy of the Founders\u2019 supposedly glorious \u201csystem of governance\u201d ignored by the Times<\/em> video and editorial is the assignment of two U.S. Senators to every state regardless of state population size<\/em>. California has nearly 40 million people. Wyoming is home to less than 600,000 citizens. Both have 2 U.S. Senators \u2013 a brazen violation of the elementary democratic principle of one-person one vote. As the Atlantic<\/em> noted last year<\/a>, \u201cToday the voting power of a citizen in Wyoming, the smallest state in terms of population, is about 67 times that of a citizen in the largest state of California, and the disparities among the states are only increasing.\u201d The nation\u2019s 22 least populous states are home to roughly 37 million people and 44 U.S. Senators. On top of this grotesque absurdity (from a democratic, one person, one vote perspective), neither the U.S. taxpaying province of Puerto Rico (more populous than 20 U.S. states!) nor the U.S.-taxpaying District of Columbia (home to a total population greater than that of 2 U.S. states \u2013 Wyoming and Vermont) has a single representative with voting power in the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The nation\u2019s small-population states are disproportionately white, rural, and Republifascist. This abjectly authoritarian set-up grossly overrepresents the nation\u2019s most backwards and racist, right-wing regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to this open violation of democracy\u2019s most elementary principle \u2013 one person, one vote \u2013 the Senate stands far to the portside of the U.S. populace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How enviable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Never forget the absurdly venerated U.S. aristo-republican Founder James Madison\u2019s case<\/a> for the U.S. Senate (originally beyond any popular election) at the 1787 Constitutional Convention: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority<\/em>. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Senate Confirmation and Judicial Review\/Veto<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To make things yet more egregiously reactionary, the Senate holds confirmation power over the president\u2019s appointments to the federal judiciary, including the absurdly all-powerful appointed-for-life Supreme Court, which has (under the 1976 Buckley Valeo<\/em> and 2010 Citizens United<\/em> decisions) granted giant corporations unlimited financial input on the American candidate selection and election processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 6-3 right wing Supreme Court crated malignant sadist Trump could soon end American women\u2019s right to an abortion and remove millions of Americans from health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. It has the technical power to invalidate Biden\u2019s election, something the Trump administration says it\u2019s still counting on while ginning up its ugly, heavily armed Amerikaner Death-Cult base with the evidence-free charge that the election was \u201crigged against Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Supreme Court\u2019s power of final judicial review \u2013 established as American legal doctrine in the 1804 Marbury v. Madison<\/em> decision \u2013 effectively gives the right-wing the power to veto any policy it sees as antithetical to its white nationalist and oligarchic world view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Envy that, world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another Ghost of 1804: The Twelfth Night Amendment<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yogi Berra was right: \u201cit ain\u2019t over \u2018til it\u2019s over.\u201d One scheme for Trump staying in power is fully constitutional. It was explained concisely by the insufferable neoliberal Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post<\/em><\/a> five or so weeks ago:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cImagine the scenario during election week: Trump is leading on Nov. 3, but Democratic nominee Joe Biden gains ground in the days following. Republicans file objections to tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. Democrats file countersuits. Taking account of the confusion, legislatures decide to choose the electors themselves\u2026Of the nine swing states, eight have Republican legislatures. If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marred by irregularities, they could send what they regard as the legitimate slate of electors, which would be Republican\u2026Democrats may object and file lawsuits. In some of those states, Democratic governors or secretaries of state could send their own slates of electors to Washington. That would add to the confusion, but that might well be part of the Republican plan. When Congress convenes on Jan. 6 to tally the electors\u2019 votes, there would be challenges to the legitimacy of some electors. Congressional Republicans would agree that disputed states should not be counted. That would ensure that neither candidate would get to 270 electoral votes\u2026At that point, the Constitution directs that the House of Representatives vote to determine the presidential election. But it does so with each state casting a single vote. If the current numbers hold, there would be 26 state delegations that are Republican and 23 Democratic (with one tied), so the outcome would be to reelect Trump. Trump does not need to do anything other than accept this outcome, which is constitutional.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While they maintained a total majority of individual representatives in the U.S. House, the Democrats failed to win a majority of the state delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is true that most states have passed laws committing their Elector slates to the candidates who won the popular vote in their jurisdiction. But those are just state laws that have never ruled as federally constitutional by the Supreme Court, which is currently under the command of the right after Trump\u2019s three appointments (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The specific part of the Constitution that would send the election to the House is the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804. \u201cBut in choosing the president,\u201d the amendment reads<\/a>, \u201cthe [House] votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not saying that the election is going to the U.S. House of Representatives. But I\u2019m also not ruling out the possibility and cannot help but sadly register some agreement with the title of Zakaria\u2019s reflection: \u201cTrump could stay in power even if he doesn\u2019t win the election. The Constitution allows it<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wow. Something to make the world green with envy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether five Republican-appointed justices (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett) have the courage to spark a mass popular rebellion by backing Trump\u2019s Ahab-like war on the electoral process is another question altogether. They probably do not have the guts to pull something as fascist as that (part of me hopes they do: it would put millions in the streets, where they belong until racist, sexist, eco-cidal, capitalist and imperialist American regime is overthrown). But maybe they do. Never say never.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe General Public Has Been Virtually Powerless\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What \u201cdemocracy,\u201d Joe Biden? Where is it, New York Times<\/em>? Twenty-three decades after the Constitutional Convention, the Founders\u2019 nightmare has yet to break out and take over in \u201cthe world\u2019s oldest democracy.\u201d University of Kentucky history department chair Ronald Formisamo\u2019s published a book titled American Oligarchy<\/em><\/a>. By Formisamo\u2019s detailed account, U.S. politics and policy are under the control of a \u201cpermanent political class\u201d \u2013 a \u201cnetworked layer of high-income people\u201d including Congressional representatives (half of whom are millionaires), elected officials, campaign funders, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists, university presidents, and executives at well-funded nonprofit institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This \u201cpermanent political class,\u201d Formisamo warns, is taking the nation \u201cbeyond [mere] plutocracy\u201d to \u201cthe hegemony of an aristocracy of inherited wealth.\u201d It \u201cdrives economic and political inequality not only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables, emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent,\u201d creating \u201clevels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed almost all advanced nations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Formisamo is one of many astute and mainstream U.S.-American experts who understand that the U.S. is an oligarchic nation. <\/em>As the distinguished liberal political scientists Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book Democracy in America?<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cthe best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy<\/em>. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups \u2013 especially business corporations \u2013 have had much more political clout\u2026[so that] the general public has been virtually powerless<\/em>\u2026Majorities of Americans favor\u2026programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut \u2018corporate welfare.\u2019 Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even conservative elites like the veteran federal jurist and economist Richard Posner acknowledge this elementary reality, which is well understood and relished in ruling class circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A perfect example of American oligarchy was the arch-regressive Republican tax bill signed by Trump in late 2017. Predictably enough in a nation where the top tenth of the upper One Percent already possessed nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, the tax law was opposed by three in four U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what? Who cared? The oligarchy wanted a tax-cut the nation hated. Money talked and bullshit walked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seven in ten Americans back Single Payer<\/a> health insurance, Medicare for All (M4A). Super. So what? Who cares? M4A wasn\u2019t on the 2020 presidential ballot and barely made it into more than a tiny percentage of Congressional races, thanks to the longstanding capture of the Democratic Party by the nation\u2019s unelected dictatorship of capital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Money screams, quietly, behind the scenes, rendering the mere citizenry \u201cvirtually powerless.\u201d As George Carlin used to say, we don\u2019t have \u201cchoices\u201d in America, we have \u201cowners.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How enviable. How jealous people outside the United States must be!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Democrats\u2019 corporate establishment is already launching rhetorical assaults on their party\u2019s small progressive contingent, accusing mild social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of supposedly evil purported \u201csocialism\u201d and other forms of alleged \u201cradical extremism.\u201d In the wake of its painfully narrow defeat of Trump\u2019s large and absurdly over-represented minority and with an eye to appeasing the right wing, corporate Democrats are already reaching out to the nation\u2019s reactionaries while playing along with the Republifascists\u2019 neo-McCarthyite rhetoric when it comes to demonize those who would seriously advance decent humanistic and egalitarian policies supported by most Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what if progressive Democrats like Sanders and AOC busted their butts to defeat Trump and elect Biden? Who cares?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Money talks. So does corporate media, where huge commercial revenues from the insurance companies mean that AOC and Sanders are considered to be wild-eyed \u201cbomb-throwing Marxists\u201d (to use the language of the insufferably arrogant CNN anchor Jake Tapper) for wanting to save the human race from climatological self-immolation with a Green New Deal. No wonder AOC is floating the possibility of getting out of American major party politics altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA Dark Cloud Enveloping Society and the Political System\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1932, during another moment of crisis, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that \u201cpolitics is the shadow cast on society by big business.\u201d Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in \u201cbusiness for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.\u201d Four and a half decades into the neoliberal era, the moneyed elite\u2019s domination of the nation\u2019s political and policy processes reached a level that almost defied belief. Noam Chomsky put it well during the first Obama administration, in the wake of the elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, when the leaders of both of the major parties agreed to slash government expenditures in defiance of majority citizen support for increased public investment to address mass unemployment and poverty. \u201cSince the 1970s,\u201d Chomsky observed, \u201c[Dewey\u2019s] shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Envy that, world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNothing Will Fundamentally Change\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Chomsky\u2019s \u201cdark cloud\u201d is how and why the fake-populist racist monster Donald Trump got elected in the first place [2] \u2013 <\/strong>and how he damn-near pulled off a second term with no coup required. The cloud darkened and grew during the Trump years. Fresh from a profit bonanza thanks to de-regulation, tax-cuts and bail-outs under Trump and Pelosi, the corporate and financial oligarchy eagerly anticipates a center-right Biden presidency combined with a persistently Republican Senate and a far-right Supreme Court. American \u201cdemocracy\u2019s\u201d owners will be quite content with that configuration. Investors are pushing the stock market up in expectancy of a \u201ccalming\u201d corporate president (Biden) who will be \u201cprevented\u201d by the Senate and judiciary from acting to any significant degree on progressive pressure from \u201cthe left\u201d and the technically irrelevant citizenry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not that Biden is a threat in that regard. He\u2019s a \u201creach across the aisle\u201d conservative Democrat in the Clinton-Obama mode. Like the last two Democratic presidents, Biden will be all about mollifying the ever more fascistic American right and corporate\/financial capital while dismissing and denigrating progressive Democrats. \u201cReaching out to your opponents\u201d means extending a hand of appeasement to the right-wing while refusing solidarity with the hated left inside your own party. Think Rahm Emanuel. If he becomes president, Biden he will be happily \u201chamstrung\u201d by a Republifacist Senate and Supreme Court. That will give him cover he wants to more easily be the center-right corporatist and imperialist he is: he can tell the populace and progressives that he can\u2019t act on their demands for urgently needed policies like Single Payer, seriously progressive taxation, a peace dividend, free public college, a Green New Deal, and the re-legalization of union organizing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what if those policies are backed by most Americans? Who cares? An open tool of big insurance capital, candidate Biden suggested that he would veto M4A<\/a>, extraneously backed by a super-majority of American citizens, if it if came to his presidential desk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was consistent with his promise to elite Manhattan campaign donors last year: \u201cnothing would fundamentally change<\/em>\u201d<\/a> in a Biden presidency<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right: nothing would fundamentally change<\/em>. He meant that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How about that great \u201cdemocracy,\u201d that \u201cenvy of the world\u201d for 240 years!<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has worked out nicely for America\u2019s oligarchs. The masters of capital preferred the stable Goldman Sachs neoliberal Hillary Clinton to the destabilizing fascist oligarch Trump in 2016 but they got a sweet deal from the tangerine hate machine: a bunch of deregulation and tax cuts along with huge military budgets and a populace ready for \u201crelief\u201d from a malevolent, pandemic-spreading provocateur in the form of a sleepy corporatist like Grandpa Joe<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Patience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine how Frederick Douglass would have responded to Biden\u2019s claim that Americans\u2019 \u201cpatience\u201d with their propertied masters\u2019 \u201csystem of governance\u201d has been \u201crewarded for 240 years.\u201d Black chattel slavery lived on for nine decades after the American Revolution, which was driven in no small part by North American leaders\u2019 desire to preserve and expand slavery<\/a>. Slavery was deeply protected in the Founders\u2019 holy charter, which continues to cripple American \u201cdemocracy\u201d well into the 21st Century. Black slavery came back with another name<\/a> after another contested election \u2013 1876, which finalized the death of Reconstruction<\/a>, of the nation\u2019s final retreat from any lingering commitment to freeing and empowering the Black masses of the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe one of Biden\u2019s staffers can get him a synopsis of historian Edward Baptiste\u2019s prize-winning study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism<\/em><\/a>. Baptiste\u2019s remarkable volume shows that the cotton slave system that thrived in the South a half century after the American \u201crevolution\u201d was a forced labor regime of pure racist terror and murderous torture. Just exactly how was Black Americans\u2019 supposed \u201cpatience\u201d rewarded under the American \u201csystem of governance\u201d during the long nightmare of slavery and its horrific Jim Crow aftermath, not to mention up through contemporary mass ghettoization, mass incarceration, and persistent race-class residential and educational apartheid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n How is patience <\/em>is working in regard to the capitalogenic climate crisis<\/em><\/a>, the biggest issue of our or any time, slated to cancel hopes for a decent future and organized human existence in the near future? The officially unchallengeable, growth-addicted profits system, the underlying cause of the COVID-19 crisis<\/a>, is hard-wired to poison livable ecology<\/a> beyond repair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s good that Trump, a malignant fascist, may<\/em> soon be removed from the world\u2019s most deadly office, but his nightmare presidency is a clear outcome and reflection of an underlying and insidious, bipartisan, corporate, imperial, patriarchal, white-supremacist and eco-cidal authoritarianism. The \u201creal issue to be faced\u201d remains, in the words of the democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., \u201cthe radical reconstruction of society itself.\u201d That will mean a thoroughgoing overhaul of the nation\u2019s \u201csystem of governance\u201d in accord with the Founders\u2019 ultimate nightmare: popular sovereignty. And that will mean tearing down the corporate state<\/a>. It is a matter of life and death for the whole species<\/a> now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We must do what young Frederick Douglass did: rise up against our owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Endnote<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Consistent with my suspicion, Biden in his Saturday victory speech<\/a> stole a moronic but emotionally potent line from Obama\u2019s instantly famous, career-making speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: \u201cthere\u2019s no Blue State America and Red State America, there\u2019s only a United States of America.\u201d Really? Sleepy Joe might want to take another look at the 2020 Electoral College map<\/a>: there is a clear division between blue and red states. Biden has received congratulations for his clear election victory from a grand total of four <\/em>Republican U.S. Senators as the GOP has rallied around the absurd claim that his victory was fraudulent. There\u2019s a Red State America and a Blue State America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Please see Chapter 3 (titled \u201cBarack Von Obombdenburg\u201d) of my new book Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement<\/em><\/a> (CounterPunch Books, October 2020)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paul Street\u2019s <\/strong>new book is The Passive Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" November 11, 2020 (counterpunch.org) BY PAUL STREET Photograph Source: Derek Simeone \u2013 CC BY 2.0 Those who own the country ought to govern it. \u2013 John Jay You have owners. \u2013 George Carlin Nobody Said Biden\u2019s Name I walked up to Chicago\u2019s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday… Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2020\/08\/Hollow-Resistance-1.png\")
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