I originally posted the following as a reply to fladem’s comment on his own post, The May 2016 e-mail that predicted the loss of PA, OH and MI. He wrote:
—snip—
Is the system really in crisis? Not if measured by corporate profits that are near all time highs. Stock market: headed up. The top 20%: doing fine with rising incomes.
So the system is being run by the rich and it is benefiting the rich.
So where exactly is the crisis?
–snip–
This seemed to me to be so wrongheaded that it needed serious opposition.
So I wrote some.
Read on for more.
Fladem wrote:
So the system is being run by the rich and it is benefiting the rich.
So where exactly is the crisis?
That is the crisis, fladem. This general tendency has always been true in human history, but…as happens from time to time in all societies…the rich eventually get too greedy. When that level of greed reaches a certain point, a reaction sets in. It is not necessarily “reactionary” in the current use of the word, but definitely a pullback in some direction, away from any system that has been set up to benefit the rich.
We are reaching that crisis stage now.
You say below that you do not believe the Democratic Party is the enemy. If you consider the over-rich “the enemy,” then the Democratic Party is without any doubt whatsoever owned by the enemy, and as a result will not in any way take effective measures to alleviate this problem. The anti-Sanders inside game that played out during the primaries is ample proof of that, as is the continued presence of its major players in positions of power within the party establishment.
One of the real villains in all of this…for decades, now…has been Donna Brazile. She is a fine example of bureaucracy in action. It flatters its bosses and fights change with all the clomp, clomp, clomping power at its disposal. The fact that she is still there…still in the news, still clomping along…is sufficient argument all by itself that the Democratic Party is a lost cause. If someone who seems to mean to change things in a positive direction does manage to get nominated to be the Dem candidate for 2020…I am speaking particularly of Elizabeth Warren, here…that candidate will have been forced to make so many concessions to the corporate-owned power players in the party that he or she will enter the race crippled for the outset, and whomever the Republicans nominate will once again win.
Sorry, but there it is.
I am sure that you can gin up some “data” to support your position, but it will be just as flawed as was the data that said HRC would mop the floor with Trump.
Further:
That “May 2016 e-mail that predicted the loss of PA, OH and MI” to which you refer?
How about my own post two months before that? PermaFix Backfires!!! Blows Itself Up Real Good!!! in which I wrote:
I took a little (working) mini-vacation early this week. By car. Traveled west from NYC through the great state of New Jersey (You know, the one that elected Chris Christie?) into rural eastern PA, then up through “The Endless Mountains”…that’s what PA calls them…into the southern tier of western NY state, right on up to Rochester and then back southeast again to Ithaca (a little haven of safety) and further through what I call the Badlands of rural NY state on into the Paterson NJ area and then further (Safe at last!!!) my own bastion of (somewhat) sanity, the working class West Bronx. I stopped for gas, stopped for food, stopped just to stop. And…I left my radio (AM and FM) on through the long treks. Here’s what I heard and saw. (Felt actually, as much as anything.)
Trump gonna take about 80% of that trek no matter who opposes him.
Watch.
It’s a big U.S., but it ain’t that much different from the lands through which I traveled. Different weather, same socio-economic groups in about the same percentages. It’s all connected by the media, by the internet.
Watch. (Watch out, actually!!!)
The AM listeners are totally pissed off!!! Politically, morally, economically, in terms of so-called “religion”…pissed off like a mothertfucker!!!
The FM listeners?
About 35% of them are listening to country music. (Read “complaint” music.) Maybe 10% are listening to truly lame “PBS”-style shit, all the rest are listening to almost totally sexualized, drug-laden, totally non-political travesty music produced by robots. They’re not even listening to sports talk.(Too mixed-race in terms of content is my theory.)
Who do you think is coming out to vote this November?
Yup.
You got it.
The pissed-off ones.
And they are voting for Trump.
Watch.
Or…how about this from Ross Perot, twenty-five years ago!!!
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
He called it. He nailed it!!!
You continue to defend one of the two-headed, Uniparty entities that managed that change.
Thus…it is you who is the enemy.
Part of it at the very least, even without understanding your own part.
A well-meaning, self-justifying enemy. The most dangerous kind.
Thanks for all of your good work, podna.
Look where it has gotten us so far.
Thanks loads.
AG
A little harsh on fladem who doesn’t deserve it IMO. But spot on in your observations.
How many DNC staffers made a trip like yours and maybe talked to gas station attendants and coffee shop waitresses? Yeah. I just wanted to give you a laugh.
But really, that’s what the old precinct captains did, listened in the bars and barber shops.
They “…listened in the bars and barber shops.”
Yes.
That’s where they got their payoffs. Kept ’em in touch with their marks; made ’em better politicians.
Like good ol’/bad ol’ Tip O’Neill said:
Not anymore, though.
Now it’s more like:
No need to hang out in the barbershops. Now they have their own PayPal system.
The payoffs go straight to their offshore accounts.
Like in Delaware.
Bet on it.
AG
Fladem the person? The individual? Yes, you are quite right. He or she doesn’t deserve the blame. Certainly not the entire blame.
But fladem the cog in a huge political machine? A political machine that has gone so off the rails that it cannot beat back a second-rate challenge from an ego-driven carnival barker? A machine that has lost touch…the human touch…with all of the so-called “deplorables” of this society? And I include the racially-forced ghetto dwellers as well as the frightened white Trump voters in that “deplorables” group, because…although the ghetto dwellers have been targeted as an available identity politics group that will vote Dem…in reality those that were sittiing in that room when Ms. Clinton made that awful “deplorables” statement/gaffe/unconscious confession (the rich, white ruling class, Dem version thereof) find the ghetto dwellers and the rural/semi-rural/working class/lower middle class whites to be equally disgusting.
Bet on it.
I work for those rich.
In the Waldorf Astoria.
At their country clubs.
At their fund-raising dinners.
Not often…thank God…but often enough to be able to see their act.
Their disdain for anyone who is not a member of their class is palpable. All you need to do is to keep your eyes open while you walk though a crowd of them without the right markers…the right haircut, the right walk, the right suit, tie, shoes, etc…to see them clearly. They quickly measure your rank visually, and then their face changes.
“Oh…another servant. Not even carrying a plate of hors d’oeuvres!!!”
And then they go back to the important things.
Their hustle, mostly.
The only difference between their reaction to me…I am quite identifiably of Western European extraction…and their reaction to someone dressed exactly like me but not of their race is that they take a split second longer to figure me out. Believe it. I have walked in their midst hundreds of times, often with black or latino colleagues dressed exactly the same as am I…a tux that may have seen slightly better days, a walk that says “street” rather than “privilege” and so on.
They look; they measure and then they dismiss.
“Of no use to me!!!”
Until election time, of course.
So it goes.
This pic…barring the immediately recognizable faces…could have been taken after the wine and cocktails were consumed at almost any high-level society function that I have ever played.
Semi-drunk, white assholes hustling each other.
So that goes as well.
Dem functions, RatPub functions, golf club/country club/yacht club functions…the works.
They are the PermaGov.
And we…all of us, the 99.9%…are the deplorables.
The deplorable rabble, to go to the root of that “deplorables” word.
Deplorables.
The deplorable rabble.
If you do not think so…and do not believe that it is they that need to be culled, not us…then you are not a progressive.
You are just another willing servant.
Bet on that as well.
Work for the DemRat hustlers?
You should shoulder your share of the blame.
AG
Now a standalone post;
Deplorables? The Deplorable Rabble? That’s US, folks. Bet On It.
Please comment there.
Thanks…
AG
It is a bad sign that the rich need to cannibalize the rest of the society in order to keep benefiting.
A certain Archdruid wrote five years ago:
It appears that Trump is taking up a “necessary” dirty job.
Iirc, it was in the mid-1980’s my dad (a Democrat county chairman) told me that at the national level, the Dem elites started changing strategies. Emphasis was on using “professional consultants” and spending lots of $$ on TV ads. There was less communication between the Dem national level and the Dem state/local level. My dad felt like he and his buddies were no longer listened to and had no real place in the party. After a while, the Democratic party starting losing ground in these less populated areas. IMO the situation was exacerbated by the Repub talk radio, which was popular outside cities. Now in my home county and all the surrounding counties the majority party has switched from Dem to Repub. I have seen this dramatic change with my own eyes and it is disturbing. It is going to take a lot of work to alter this result. Traveling around my home area, I rarely see a county Dem headquarters; however, the Repubs have their offices in plain view.
It is worth recalling here this essay of the last year:
The smug style in American liberalism
Salon.com just revisited it.
And here are some picked-up cherries from that NRO’s Kevin Williamson:
Conservatism for Losers
It is only in retrospect that the New Deal looks like a time in which the Democratic Party was not of the rich and stood with farmers and workers. The statement that FDR saved pure capitalism (of the “return to normalcy” Harding-Coolidge variety and the Hoover “Oh scheiss” variety) from itself is largely true. But the sharpies have soiled the nest again and risk bringing it all down with no escape even for them, save they once again split and support a more equal distribution of wealth and an infrastructure that provides base services for all.
Yes, labor is the biggest cost, but it is also the means of recirculating cash into demand for goods and services. The cash expropriated by compound interest and set aside for a rainy day eventually shrinks that demand to nothing except the vanities of the rich. That by the way is what we seem to be subsidizing more than anything else at the moment. L’etat, c’est moi! rules the political reality. Uncle Sugar’s dime is subsidizing what the Trump family once had to pay for itself. And the public who voted for him has not yet begun to know the new US royal family (the old royal family has to be purged by National Enquirer first, all of them). But they will — and prime minister Pence. And all the courtiers of both parties of the
ParliamentCongress.William Buckley so much loved the British system of ideological alignment of political parties that the first effort of conservatives was to change the debate from non-definite Republican and Democrat to conservative and liberal and force ideological alignment of the parties. That was accomplished imaginally with the Reagan Revolution and practically in terms of power with the Gingrich Revolution. By the W accession, the ideological brew in the US had become complicated by the fact that the powers that be and the lobbying industry had captured both conservatives and liberals and those with the short end of the stick became restive. First the progressives during the W administration and then the “taxed enough already” conservatives, the anarchist left, he traditional left, and the neo-fascist right during the Obama administration.
In the 2016 election both parties fragmented. The Republican Party is incapable of governing even if it believed in governing, which the Freedom Party coalition is pushing it not to do. The Democratic Party is incapable of transcending its fragmentation to mount an opposition. The only voice of opposition to Republican non-governance that is getting an enthusiastic hearing at the moment is Bernie Sanders and his speaking tour. That is not a Presidential campaign for 2020 but a voice crying in the wilderness, and you know what eventually happens to those prophetic and popular voices.
It is not just the establishment Democrats who have brought electoral desolation to national, state, and through pre-emption to local politics.
In a way it is all of us who have not been paying attention to the trends, except there is a major industry devoted to feeding us false information. From Rush Limbaugh to the Democratic political consultants to the official media of every foreign country and our own.
Now that we know we are f*cked (to use an 18th century euphemism), as AG says, “What are we going to do?”
Damned if I know., Tarheel.
The only things that I know how to do are:
1-Do my part in the cultural wars by playing (and teaching) great music no matter at what cost to myself
and
2-Try to wake others up regarding how screwed we really are.
Not possessing either fame or fortune…I never really gave a damn about either and as a result made very few compromises past whatever was necessary for food and shelter…my voice is not widely heard.
So it goes.
I do keep trying.
So do you.
All thanks for what you do.
AG
Old school:
New school:
Like dat.
I’m beginning to wonder if we were not better off under the old guys.
AG
Indeed, hence the handle.
Just want to add that I admire and appreciate your knowledge of the sweep of history and what it tells us about today.
I was unemployed for three years in my late 50s. I’ve been retired for 8 years. I should have some time to catch up on reading history of stuff outside of war! war! war! There are some great and readable works on critical periods out there. With this being the centennial of World War I, there are some great books on early 20th century society, culture, and politics. Some good third looks at the Jacksonian period, and of course some hard looks at the immediate post-World War II period that shaped the age and values that are now in question.
Once you grasp that Wilson unleashed the rebirth of the KKK (not deliberately that we know of) and that the Palmer Raids set the bias toward business in a forceful way and the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, then you understand the Depression, the collapse of prohibition in a radically unequal society, and the desperation with which FDR faced his transition period.
Harding and Coolidge did not understand that the end of the war would mean more farmers returning to their farms and a boost in production that would depress agricultural prices for over 12 years. That cheap food at the expense of rural areas would create a bubble economy in the cities and especially in urban assets as rural bankers were eager to squeeze local farmers in order to put money in the go-go investments in cities. And that the glorious absence of regulations meant that Gresham’s law (generalized version) applied and the bubble burst on phony investments, bringing the entire economy to its knees and a bunch of angry voters. The luck of the draw put a Republican in the White House when the Bonus Army faced off with Gen. Douglas McArthur, his aide Dwight D. Eisenhower and the US Army. Persecuted as hobos and Hoovervilles might have been, their situation struck a sympathetic chord with white farmer and labor voters (the then electorate).
And FDR’s campaign spoke to those people. And then he fulfilled his commitment with the most frantic hundred days of any administration. The metaphor that comes to mind is sitting on the cowcatcher laying track immediately in front of the locomotive. (That motif made it into a lot of cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s.) Of course anyone who saw the cartoons from that period that were re-run to fill time in the early days of television knows that motif.
Think of it. A decade-plus honest-to-goodness rolling depression in agriculture and no one considered it worthy of addressing because “free enterprise” “laissez-faire”. Da bidness of America is bidness. And globally that attitude created the rise of fascism and World War II.
Two years for me, so I quite literally felt your pain.
Re Bonus Army, IIRC Patton was involved too. Commanded the horse cavalry that rode down on the camp?
Being a city boy all my life, I heard only about the Depression in the cities. But I read about the dust bowl and saw old film on PBS. Didn’t hear personal stories about the rural areas.
Business always wants Republican policies, but it’s like giving an alcoholic a barrel of booze. They want it, but it’s not good for them.