The Evil of Mainstream Politics

I'm going to talk about mainstream United States policies today because there is a greater amount of progressive journalism that covers it, plus, the almost total hegemony of capitalist insanity in the USA means that the evil of it is so egregious that it's impossible to deny it.

The point of this little post is to try to convey to my more "centrist" or "moderate" readers that the system they support (while maintaining that it definitely needs "reforms") is irredeemably evil and antithetical to their self-interest.



As we all know, a viral pandemic (Covid-19) has spread around the world after having originated in China. It is highly contagious and probably anywhere from 2.5 to 10 times more deadly than seasonal flus. Despite what Donald Trump and his witless minions and deluded, cretinous supporters claim, it's pretty clear that Covid-19 has killed over 100,000 US-Americans since its arrival in their country. Without the 1/5th-assed [as opposed to Canada's 1/2-assed] response to the virus (some limited economic shut-downs, some social distancing, some wearing of masks, some testing and tracing) the death toll would have been even higher. It is doubtlessly higher than the official count because so many people died without having been diagnosed with Covid-19, especially those who could not afford to seek treatment due to the USA's appallingly evil health insurance profiteering system. Even still, 100,000 official deaths isn't anything to sneeze at.

Furthermore, as the virus continues to spread throughout the country (after first flaring-up in New York City, Los Angeles, and other of the USA's hubs for international travel), especially in those areas of the country infected with the disease of right-wing stupidity like Florida, Texas and Arizona, where Repugnican governments believe that wearing masks makes one a wimp and where ordinary people are so fucked-up that they can't process the dangers of microscopic organisms like a virus ("Duh, ... how could something so small be dangerous???") it's pretty clear that Covid-19 is going to kill a lot more people.

So, we've established that the viral pandemic necessitated an economic shutdown of some extent, as well as expenditure on healthcare and other public safety measures. This means that businesses had to close. Restaurants, stores, airlines, cruise ships, fitness clubs, etc., etc. Which means that some people would be laid-off. Which means that people can't work. They can't earn money. They need support or relief of some sort.

In Canada's half-assed response, the Liberal Party of Canada isn't as debased as the Democratic Party, and is nowhere near as bat-shit crazy as the Republican Party in the USA. And we have a Liberal minority government. Which means that shit-head Conservatives, under the leadership of the lame-duck embezzling shit-head Scheer, aren't in the driver's seat. The minority situation makes the Liberals dependent upon one or the other of the opposition parties to pass its legislation and the intransigent stupidity of the Conservatives has made the Liberals dependent on the more social-democratic NDP and Bloc MPs to stay in power. Because of this the NDP has been able to wring some minor concessions from the Liberals, thereby improving the stimulus packages that have been passed. Many individual Canadians have received $2000 a month in CERB benefits. Money has gone to employers to stay open and retain employees (while conforming to safety guidelines). And, federally and provincially, most governments (including Ontario's PC government under the boorish Doug Ford) have at least taken the need for social distancing somewhat seriously. (The exceptions are the thuggish, proudly ignorant governments of Alberta and Saskatchewan.)

The result has been for Canada to have a noticeably lower death rate from the virus than the USA has, and (for now) a clear success in flattening the curve of new cases (as opposed to the catastrophic failure to do so in the USA). The limited re-openings of many provincial economies is going to affect those numbers, so we'll see.

In the end though, by deliberately refusing to fund the stimulus with the Bank of Canada, opting for the more expensive private banks, and promising to claw back the CERB payments in 2021, the Liberals are setting us up for more ruinous austerity in the long run.

But the mendacity of the Liberals pales before the unholy behaviour of the Democratic Party USA. All of them (including Bernie Sanders and AOC) voted for the first stimulus bill that constituted the largest wealth transfer in their nation's history. And, obviously, the money went from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich. They rushed this legislation through without including proper oversight of who gets the money and what they can do with the money. (Of course, NOW the Democrats bewail the Trump administration's arrogant disregarding of their demands for this information.)

Final text of the bill has not been released, but according to a legislative draft, the new law would establish a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, with few substantive constraints. Some outlets are reporting this as a $500 billion fund, but $425 billion of that can be leveraged 10 times over by the Federal Reserve, resulting in a multi-trillion-dollar program.
The bill permits bailed out companies to lay off up to 10% of their workforce over the next six months, with no restrictions thereafter. Mnuchin would have authority to waive any upside for the public in its new investments, and the bill’s restrictions on stock buybacks at bailed-out firms are too temporary to be significant. Bailed out companies could even pay dividends to their shareholders.Bailout money will flow to the shareholders of large corporations, otherwise known as rich people. The oversight terms that Democrats secured are purely cosmetic, replicating the toothless provisions of the 2008 bank bailout that enabled watchdogs to report abuse but not actually prevent or rectify it....In exchange for this takeover, Democrats got four months of more generous unemployment benefits for the millions who will be laid off and a one-time check of $1,200 per adult, eliminating a Republican restriction that would have limited poor people to just $600 and phasing out payments for six-figure incomes. These are not bad provisions, but they pale in comparison to the handout offered to the rich.“$1,200 isn’t enough,” the Economic Security Project, a liberal think tank, tweeted on Wednesday. By agreeing to the deal, Senate Democrats in effect accept a horrendous future in exchange for a somewhat less burdensome present.

Know this: If you claim to know anything about politics, you have to understand negotiation. You have to understand give and take. You have to understand the concept of leverage. If US capitalism wanted/needed this money to deal with the pandemic, then the time to get similar bailout money for ordinary US-Americans was BEFORE you gave the oligarchs everything they wanted. Of course, calling the "oligarchs" is an admission that the USA is an "oligarchy" and therefore, by definition, they rule. And they rule through the politicians. The "representatives" who provide "representative democracy." In an oligarchy there is little that is democratic. So the representatives of democracy do very little for the people.

It's times like this when witless centrist supporters of mainstream Democrats (or mainstream Liberals), like, say MS's co-blogger, the unhinged "Jackie Blue" have to explain themselves. To hear some Democratic bloggers tell it (like the fraudster "Driftglass" or the less-objectionable but still partisan  "Lawyers, Guns, & Money"), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a brilliant legislator. She's a genius at playing hard-knuckle politics. She knows all the rules and the procedures and she's genius at getting under Donald Trump's skin and driving him to enraged tantrums.

To me, Nancy Pelosi appears to be a lazy, booze-addled mediocrity who has had too much facial surgery which makes her incapable of normal speech. At one point she couldn't articulate her own party's platform ("The Better Deal") even though that was sort of her fucking job.

But supporters of the Democrats have a problem. Either Nancy Pelosi allowed this abomination of a stimulus package to pass without adequate oversight and without having gotten more than peanuts for ordinary people, because she's an incompetent, or because she's a willing tool of the oligarchy (though with a household wealth of $100 million she's clearly a member of the 1% herself). Personally, I think it likely that she can be both evil and stupid. She's a mediocrity who has a knowledgeable staff who know how to push on open doors and get everything that the ruling class wants.

But, as with Dick Cheney or Stephen Harper, she's clearly unused to being challenged and doesn't have enough thinking capacity to respond coherently when that happens. When CNN's Jake Tapper relayed the concerns of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that there should have been funding for state and local governors in the initial stimulus package, and that, therefore, perhaps it was a mistake to kick the can down the road for later, Pelosi became visibly flustered and told Tapper to "calm down" and that they'd eventually get their money. In reality, the House passed an anemic bill and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has ignored it and has actually advised states to declare bankruptcy if they have to! (Earlier in that interview with Tapper, Pelosi babbled about how the first stimulus bill had "always been" considered an interim bill and that other good things would follow. As if saying that they'd "always" planned to give away the farm in the first bill and would attempt to get something for it later isn't ridiculous on the face of it.)

The USA faces an unprecedented moral and health crisis. A deadly pandemic is tearing across the country, people are being thrown out of work and losing their access to employer health insurance plans. They can't even afford to go to the hospital when they get the virus. Yes, Mitch McConnell is an insane monster. But stop pretending that Nancy Pelosi and the other scumbags in the Democratic Party leadership aren't equally complicit in the nightmare that country is going through.

It's a nightmare for all except a privileged few who are prospering like never before.

According to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies, America’s billionaires saw their wealth shoot up by $282 billion in just 23 days as the country was sheltering in lockdown. Overall, U.S. billionaire wealth grew by nearly 10% at the same time over 20 million people filed for unemployment, and by April 10 had passed $3.2 trillion—topping last year’s level.
To take just one example, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and already the richest person in the world, saw his fortune inflate by $24 billion in the first three months of the year, a surge the report’s authors say is “unprecedented in the history of modern markets.” Meanwhile, his workers have staged a series of walkouts and other labor actions to protest a lack of basic workplace protections as warehouse employees have fallen ill with the virus, and some have died.
As mass death overtook the country in April and the economy went into free fall, the U.S. stock market saw its best month in over three decades, a boon that has overwhelmingly benefited the richest people in the country. Private healthcare companies have seen major gains, boosting the fortunes of healthcare billionaires, just as an estimated 9 million Americans were booted off of their employer-sponsored insurance plans—a figure that could soon climb to 43 million.

This was no accident. It was planned. Wake up!!!