The result of the U.S. presidential election marks the triumph, not of the Democrats and a senile senator, but of the Puritan current over the Jacksonians. It does not reflect the political views of American citizens and masks the crisis of civilization in which their country is sinking.
Continue reading U.S. Presidential Election: Open your eyes!Tag Archives: us election 2020
America’s Election Debacle Highlights Anti-Democratic Hijinks of Both Parties
It’s been days since the U.S. election, and there is still no official winner. But no matter the result, President Trump is determined to stay in office. Behind The Headlines correspondent Dan Cohen explains how the bipartisan foreign policy establishment cheers on anti-democratic action abroad but abhors it at home.
Continue reading America’s Election Debacle Highlights Anti-Democratic Hijinks of Both Parties
POTUS Punk vs. Dem Dementia
The whole planet is enthralled, appalled, shocked and awed by the spectacle of democracy as enacted under the shadow of messianic imperialism – complete with a slew of slimy, smoking gun October Surprises.
We’re in total Frank Underwood territory. And as befits the ultimate “society of the simulacrum” pictured by Baudrillard back in the swingin’ 1980s, all those similarities with a Wrestlemania spectacular are obviously not mere coincidence.
Let’s start with the polls.
All manner of polls are circulating like whirling dervishes. Most highlight myriad Dem paths to victory and an inexorable Highway to Hell for Trump. A poll by The Economist gives Joe “Walking Dead” Biden a whopping 91% chance – remember Hillary in 2016? – of winning the Electoral College.
A Dem-fueled consensus is emerging that Trump – relentlessly depicted as a deranged, lunatic proto-fascist who’s bad for business worldwide – will dispute results in any Republican-led state which he may narrowly lose, as in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Yet on the campaign trail, it’s a completely different story. Evidence shows that on The Walking Dead’s rallies, there are more people from the Biden bus and reporters than flesh-and-blood Dem voters. The Biden-Harris campaign, demonstrating its matchless P.R. skills, spins these rallies as campaign secrets.
Team Trump’s long-shot strategy seems to have been unveiled by the President himself: “We are going to be counting ballots for the next two years (…) We have the advantage if we go back to Congress. I think it’s 26 to 22 or something because it’s counted one vote per state.”
That was a reference to the 12th Amendment to the Constitution: if state electors can’t agree on a president, the decision goes to the House. And then each of the 50 states gets one vote. So picture small GOP-controlled states such as Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming (each with one Republican in the House) having the same weight as California (52 members in the House, 45 of them Democrats.)
Advantage Trump: as it stands, it’s indeed 26 to 22, with two – Pennsylvania and Michigan – basically tied.
Ask the quant
Internal GOP polls show that while the Biden-Harris campaign is not knocking on any doors, Trump volunteers have actually swarmed no less than 20 million homes in swing states.
Combine it with a new Gallup Poll showing that 56% of Americans state they are better off now under Trump than four years ago under Obama/Biden. Call it the return of “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The Trafalgar Group – which correctly called the 2106 election – bets that Trump narrowly wins the Electoral College with 275 votes.
JPMorgan’s top quant Marko Kolanovic has exhaustively mapped changes in voter registration to dismiss virtually every poll showing a Dem sweep. This implies that Trump may well end up winning the Holy Trinity: Pennsylvania (20 votes), Florida (29 votes) and North Carolina (15 votes).
And to top it off, something more exotic than a black hole eating a star has happened in this October Surprise-laden week: CNN decided to practice real journalism and eviscerated Nancy Pelosi on camera.
That may be quite a bad omen for President-in-Waiting Kamala Harris, who very few remember was forged as the heir to the Obama-Pelosi axis in a secret meeting in the Hamptons way back in the summer of 2017.
Follow the money
Now let’s Follow The Money.
That’s a slam dunk. For Republicans, the top bagman is casino schemer Sheldon Adelson – who literally bought Congress.
for a paltry $150 million. For Democrats, it’s Haim Saban – who owns his own think tank and is Hillary’s go-to moneyman. The Dem dementia is essentially a bagman op.
To make it even more digestible, both Adelson and Saban are rabid Israeli-firsters. A dissident Beltway intel op cuts all corners: “The Mafia front man Sheldon Adelson financed Trump for Israeli insurance even though Israel was for Hillary.”
Four years ago, selected New York sources I was in touch with correctly called the election result at least 10 days before the fact.
One of these, a New York business tycoon intimate with assorted Masters of the Universe in control of Wall Street, once again goes to the jugular:
“The Deep State governs both Republicans and Democrats. Trump has to work within the system. He knows it. I am a friend of Donald and I know he wants to do the right thing. But he is not in charge. He certainly wants to be friends with Russia and China. He is a businessman. He wants to make deals with countries not fight them. We were among those who set the main campaign features for him in 2016: stop rigged currencies destroying domestic industries, stop unlimited immigration destroying the lower classes wages and encourage detente with Russia and China. Largely nothing has happened in four years.”
Still, adds another New York player, “Trump does 90% of what they want anyway. Better to keep a villain at the top to blame and keep the proles running in circles.”
On the financial front, that will never be admitted publicly: but Wall Street, while projecting a mere pro-Dem façade, is not interested in a Democrat “sweep”, because that would tank Wall Street stocks. A contested/protracted election would go the same way – with Goldman Sachs projecting a nightmare scenario of the S&P down to only 3,100 points.
Thus the preferred, hush hush, Wall Street scenario: a Trump win and more juicy tax cuts – in parallel with the sentiment that Wall Street’s priority is for the Fed to keep showering trillions of dollars in helicopter money whatever happens. After all the only “policy” in town is that Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund.
For its part, what Team Trump certainly does not want is the Great Reset – to be officially “launched” at a virtual Davos in January 2021.
And all this while Goldman Sachs, once again, is adamant that the only way to “save” the nation from it humongous, ever-exploding debt is to devalue the U.S. dollar.
Hillary wants a new job
In the shadow play – or Wrestlemania plot – of Trump’s face-off against the Deep State, another of those New York players confirms that, “Trump was not allowed to do much of his agenda. That shows you where the real power is. The military-industrial complex wants Trump in as he is giving them everything they want for a giant military buildup. But Biden will not make that commitment.”
Clapper, Brennan, Comey and Mueller “were just following orders and are being protected.” As for warmongering narcissistic hyena
Hillary Clinton, she needs a Biden/Harris win essentially to stay out of jail, a follow-up to a “secret” deal struck with Obama which had her bow out to the former President as the de facto leader of the vast DNC machinery.
Anyone with a brain across the Beltway knows The Walking Dead was chosen because he does not even qualify as a place mat. Assuming he would be elected president, the real power behind the throne will be the Obama-Pelosi axis – and their usual suspect masters. Welcome to the reign of President Kamala.
Hillary though is leaving nothing to chance, doubling down and taking no prisoners. She has just released a 5,000-word manifesto which reads as an application to become head of the Pentagon.
The fact that with all the plot twists key vectors of the Deep State continue to be untouchable should be read as the proverbial D.C. swamp protecting their flock. More than the possibility that Trump is unqualified when it comes to picking minions, more realistically he was never given any decent options: so he was stuck with nefarious specimens such as Gina “Queen of Torture” Haspel, The Warring Mustache John Bolton, and Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo.
Which bring us to Attorney General William Barr – and a persistent question across many Beltway corridors: how come there have been no indictments as evidence piles up of interlocking Deep State-related shenanigans.
Simple: Barr is CIA, part of the old Daddy Bush gang, recruited when he was still in high school, in 1971. When Daddy Bush became CIA director in 1976, Barr stepped into the CIA’s legal office and started his steady climb, culminating in 1991 as Chief Legal Counsel to Daddy Bush’s presidency.
Needless to add, Barr subsequently squashed every possible investigation on Bush, Clinton and assorted CIA ops, from BCCI to the theft of PROMIS software.
No one will volunteer to be on the record showing how Trump selected Barr – or how the Deep State made it happen. The fact is Barr was appointed shortly after the death of Daddy Bush. It’s unlikely that Team Trump have “turned” CIA asset Barr away from the swamp – with or without Hillary’s 33,000 deleted emails.
And that’s what leads those New York players to bet that Barr won’t go after any star in the Deep State galaxy.
Still the fact remains that the NSA has stored every possible call, chat or email on its massive server farms. Trump has the power to order everything to be released – as he did. Yet, as it stands, the proles have only been offered a WWF-themed sitcom.
“I’m back” on steroids
The total balkanization of culture in the U.S. into bulletproof containers of irrationality is precluding any possibility of civilized debate. What’s left is an endless proliferation of fake actors, paid troll armies, bots, mob outrage packaged as chocolate bars, all out hysteria.
Whatever happens, get ready for some major Kill Bill mayhem ahead.
And into this shooting war – not only metaphorical – steps John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, Sex Pistol legend and a millionaire resident of the tony parts of Venice beach in L.A. He’s voting Trump.
That’s the ultimate crowning of POTUS Punk – except that Trump is more Village People (“Young man/ there’s no nee to feel down”) than the Sex Pistols in Holidays in the Sun or the Dead Kennedys in Holiday in Cambodia.
Cue to POTUS Punk in Florida, “I’m back” on steroids, working an excited crowd of thousands like a pro, complete with YMCA dance moves at the end: “I’ll kiss the guys, and the beautiful women…”
Now compare it to “Sleepy Joe” in Ohio, in front of, well, nobody really: “I’m running as a proud Democrat…for the Senate”.
Last week an astonishing eight people showed up for a Biden-Harris rally in Arizona.
And the racket goes on while a pandemic with an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of roughly 0.14% – according to the WHO’s own estimate – has cost the global economy no less than a whopping $28 trillion, according to the IMF.
Oh yes: it ain’t over till slim Britney “I Did It Again” sings.
Don’t Be Fooled: The 2020 Election Has Already Been Decided
Voting booths have already been hijacked by a political elite comprised of Republicans and Democrats who are determined to retain power at all costs. The outcome is a foregone conclusion: the Deep State will win and “we the people” will lose.
Continue reading Don’t Be Fooled: The 2020 Election Has Already Been Decided
A False Flag is Biden’s Only Chance to Win
The Black Revolution is in full swing in the U.S. Over the next sixty days we will be treated to the greatest political show on Earth as the Democrats and their handlers in The Davos Crowd pursue the biggest lie since Climate Change.
The events of 2020 are lining up for a climax to this story that ends with only one outcome, a contested election which fuels a coup attempt after the election results come in on November 3rd.
And because of this now obvious plan, setting up a false flag around the election is the most likely means to produce election results close enough to support this course of action.
I’m not the only one thinking in these terms at this point. Joaquin Flores, writing for Fort Russ, mused similarly last week. As the polls shift towards Donald Trump and the Democrats run around concocting fairy tales after allowing Joe Biden out of his gimp cellar long enough for people to see how far he has fallen mentally, I’m nearly convinced this is likely.
Color revolutions unfold in predictable stages. The first stage is destroying the local economy. Usually this means the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury pull back on available dollars through tight monetary policy and sanctions to create mass unemployment in the target nation.
Then foment violence from the youth who are disproportionately affected by the economic destruction after NGO’s lay the ideological foundation for revolution. Use the most convenient pretext. In the U.S. it means stoking racism and hatred of ‘the rich.’
Pick a color under which to unite them, in this case black and blame the leader for every single bad thing that happens, which is usually the work of agent provocateurs who amplify the organic frustration into targeted attacks which are then amped up by the media into a news story.
If the leader is stupid he acts like any garden-variety paranoid dictator by clamping down on the violence making him easy prey for the media to brand him a dictator.
Then bringing a mob to the capital is easy, because now there are too many people to be effectively policed and the potential for violence to boil the whole thing into a coup is very real.
All of this works if the oligarchs who run the political system of the target country are on board with this. In the U.S., it’s obvious from the response from all major corporations they approve this message. Note how it failed in Belarus recently for lack of this corporate sponsorship.
Looking at the way the Democrats have positioned themselves for this election it is clear that they are preparing the field for this outcome after election day.
They used the lockdowns to create an army of ready-made protestors with nothing else to do and little hope for the future.
They structured all aid to the middle class the run out during the height of the election campaign while blocking any further assistance even though the Treasury Dept. raised nearly $2 trillion to deploy as support and stimulus.
The media endlessly stoked fear over COVID-19 to push as many voters to consider mailing their votes in (or create the illusion that is what will happen) to delay certification of the election on election night.
But to his credit, President Trump hasn’t acted the way he was supposed to. He has governed this chaos exactly the way a majority of Americans want him to, as a Federalist. Even though he has the authority to do so, he’s refrained from sending Federal troops into rioting cities, laying bare just how much local authorities are aiding the violence.
He didn’t institute national lockdowns and draconian restrictions due to COVID-19, instead offering aid and allowing the data to eventually vindicate him to the point where even the CDC is now backtracking on how dangerous the virus actually is.
And his opponents in New York, for example, now look like out-of-touch, lying grandma murderers.
Eventually crisis fatigue sets in, people adjust to the new circumstances and the worst parts of their fear abates. And even if they don’t look at the new data, they realize enough costs have been born and it’s time to move on with our lives.
That’s what is now showing up in the polling data, even though it is still highly suspect. And this puts Trump in the driver’s seat for the election on November 3rd. As of today, the election looks like it is his to lose.
And yet the Democrats insist that the election will not be resolved on election day. In fact, it’s obvious they are prepping the narrative that Trump will only appear to win on election night but, in fact, the torrent of mail-in ballots will change the outcome of the election over the next few days.
Of course, this would fly in the face of decades of electoral statistics where the outcome of the election is almost certainly decided by the time 25% of the votes have been counted and a run-rate to completion can be calculated.
A report from Axios outlines what we can expect.
A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.
Why this matters: Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night….
… By the numbers: Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted.
And that’s what concerns me most. Because if all of this prep work has failed and Trump clearly wins an electoral college victory, but they are planning to harvest votes for days afterwards, how do they shift the dynamic back in Biden’s favor between now and then to keep the election close enough for them to steal?
More violence is how.
We are two weeks away from White House Siege beginning on September 17th. Organized by Adbusters, which is a front for George Soros’ partner in crime, David Brock and Media Matters For America, White House Siege is a planned 50-day protest in Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., ostensibly to protest President Trump ‘stealing the election.’
This is a ready-made recipe for a Maidan-like orgy of violence in the nation’s capital to create a false flag event which reflects badly on Trump. Think snipers on rooftops shooting both protestors and cops similar to what happened on the Maidan square in Kiev in 2014.
D.C. is not a state. It’s not governed by the same rules as the states, where the Governors are in charge.
Trump can, and in my mind should, as a matter of strategy, take control over D.C. to keep to possibility of violence to a minimum. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is trying to walk back her support of the protests after the violence after the Republican National Convention by urging U.S. Attorneys in D.C. to charge the people the police arrest.
This is Bowser trying to publicly keep Trump from doing exactly what I just said he should do. Because with cities looted and burned, with Democrat politicians losing the respect of their constituencies they have no political legs left to stand on.
Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York said in a press conference Trump better bring an army if he plans to set foot in his state. This is tantamount to sedition, for which a case can be made by nearly every major Democrat for statements made in the past six months.
“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile Cuomo is now the target of a Dept. of Justice investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 crisis while Trump withholds Federal funds from the state, which prompted Cuomo’s bravado.
Between this and Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Republicans “domestic enemies of the state” is the kind of language you don’t come back from. The Democrats and the U.S. Deep State are all in on removing Trump from office by any means necessary.
I don’t think the worst of the violence is behind us after Kenosha. I think the worst is still in front of us.
Ghosts of the American Republic
Let us update the wisdom of Sigmund Freud to the Age of Marshall McLuhan and Philip K. Dick: Sometimes the image, or label of the cigar is far more important than any petty real cigar – especially if there are no cigars left in the world.
Continue reading Ghosts of the American Republic
Bloomberg is Trying to Take Down Bernie Sanders, Not Trump
Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has called on the other “moderate” candidates, such as Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, to step down and unite behind him as the only force that can stop Bernie Sanders, who, he warns, will soon have an insurmountable lead in delegates.
Continue reading Bloomberg is Trying to Take Down Bernie Sanders, Not Trump
US Election 2020: A Circus Then, a Circus Now | Chris Hedges
Here, in this reposted column from Jan. 7, 2019, are his thoughts about the then-nascent presidential election campaign.
It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits.
The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year’s football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.
It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige.
The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state. Maybe Hillary Clinton, who raised $1 billion in her 2016 run for president, will return for another season, although the Bill and Hillary tour is now a debacle with empty seats and slashed ticket prices.
Maybe Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders will make comebacks. And what about the new faces in the scramble for the presidency—Beto O’Rourke, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg?
It is a political version of the reality television show “Survivor.” Who will be the first knocked out? Who will make it into the semifinals and the finals? Who is the most devious and cunning? Who will come out on top?
We get to vote for the contestants that appeal to us most, or at least vote against those we hate the most. The cable news shows, in a prelude to the nonstop idiocy to come, have spent the last few days speculating about whom Mitt Romney will endorse in the 2020 race. Now there’s a burning question of national importance.
To take power in 2021 in lieu of any real policy changes, the Democratic Party is banking on the deep animus toward President Trump. It has no intention of instituting genuine populist programs, rebuilding unions, funding universal health care, providing free college tuition or curbing the criminal activities of the corporations and the big banks.
The war machine will continue to wage endless war and consume half of all discretionary spending. The vaunted new populist members of Congress will be no more than window dressing, trotted out, like Sanders, to trick voters into thinking the Democratic Party is capable of reform. Most voters, for this reason, are “voting out of loathing, against enemies and against the system in general, not really for anybody,” as journalist Matt Taibbi points out.
Working men and women especially despise the slick-talking politicians—including the Clintons and Barack Obama—and the “experts” and well-groomed pundits on their screens who sold them the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress.
Trump hangs on to the support of white working Americans because he expresses through his adolescent insults and dynamiting of political norms the legitimate hatred they feel toward the well-heeled, college-educated ruling elites who sold them out. The Democrats, at the same time, understand that it takes someone as revolting as Trump to fire up their lethargic base, a group in which millions do not vote. They cling to a tactic of “anybody but Trump” even though it did not work in 2016.
The corporate media ignores issues and policies, since there is little genuine disagreement among the candidates, and presents the race as a beauty contest. The fundamental question the press asks is not what do the candidates stand for but whom do the voters like. As for now, Warren—the only nationally known Democrat except Julian Castro to form an exploratory committee for a presidential bid—is not winning this popularity contest.
A CNN/Des Moines Register Iowa poll—yes, polling in Iowa already has begun—puts her fourth, with only 8 percent of support among the Democrats surveyed, behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke.
Our corporate rulers do not need to denounce democracy. Democratic laws, such as who can fund campaigns, have been subverted from within, their original purposes redefined by the courts and legislative bodies to serve corporate power. This managed democracy has transformed elections from the simple, straightforward process of voting for a party platform or party positions to vast, choreographed theatrical productions.
Politicians run on “moral” issues and use public relations experts to create manufactured personalities. Trump, his image constructed by a reality television show, proved more adept than his rivals at playing this game the last time around.
Politicians must stick to the script. They have well-defined roles. They express a suffocating, reality-defying positivism about the future of America. They are steadfast in their obsequious praise of the nation’s “heroes” in the military and law enforcement. They are silent about the crimes of empire.
They ignore the plight of the poor; indeed the word “poor” is banished from their vocabulary. They pretend we do not live in a corporate oligarchy, although they acknowledge amorphous attacks on the middle class and promise to stem the assault.
They exude a cloying feel-your-pain compassion that revolves around personal stories of the hardships they overcame in their own lives to become “successes”—the most ludicrous being Trump’s claim that he turned a “very small” loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar real estate empire.
They telegraph to us that they are one of us. We can be like them. They trot out their wives, husbands and children, even when a spouse like Melania Trump looks as if she has been taken hostage, to portray themselves as family men and women.
They claim they are outsiders, ignoring their long political careers and their status as members of the wealthy ruling elite. They are no different from the array of self-help gurus who ignore systemic injustice and social decay to peddle schemes for personal success. The formula is universal. It is the triumph of artifice, what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.”
Those who do not play this game, like Ralph Nader, or who like Sanders play it begrudgingly—Sanders refused corporate money, has called for reforming “the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual Pentagon budget” and addresses issues of class—are ridiculed and marginalized by a monochromatic corporate media that banishes qualification, ambiguity, nuance and genuine dialogue.
Trump’s success as a candidate came, in large part, because of the constant media attention he received. Those like Sanders who attempt to defy the rules of the game are punished. The goal is entertainment. Politicians who are good entertainers do well. The poor entertainers do badly.
The networks seek to attract viewers and increase profits, not disseminate information about political issues. Voters have little or no say in who decides to run, who gets funded, how campaigns are managed, what television ads say, which candidates get covered by the press or who gets invited to presidential debates. They are spectators, pawns used to legitimize political farce.
“At issue is more than crude bribery,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spector of Inverted Totalitarianism.” “Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quantitative and objective terms, whose interests have priority.
The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition.
While the tactics are not those of the Nazis, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered feckless.”
This process, Wolin writes, has turned the electorate into “a hybrid creation, part cinematic and part consumer. Like a movie or TV audience, it would be credulous, nurtured on the unreality of images on the screen, the impossible feats and situations depicted, or the promise of personal transformation by a new product. In this the elites were abetted by the long-standing American tradition of dramatic evangelism and its fostering of collective fervor and popular fantasies of the miraculous.
It was no leap of faith from the camp meetings of the nineteenth century and the Billy Sundays of the twentieth century to the politically savvy televangelist of the twenty-first century.”
The corporations that own the media and the two major political parties have a vested interest in making sure there is never serious public discussion about issues ranging from our disastrous for-profit health care system and endless wars to the virtual tax boycott that large corporations have legalized. The corporate system is presented as sacrosanct and the ruling ideology of neoliberalism as natural law. The corporations are funding the show. They get what they pay for.
Sanders, it appears, will run again as a Democrat, despite the theft of the 2016 nomination by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party hierarchy. His next campaign, to quote Samuel Johnson, will be the triumph of hope over experience. The Democratic establishment and the media sharks will, if Sanders uses the old playbook, devour him. They have already severely diminished his stature by turning him into Clinton and Chuck Schumer’s barking seal.
The differences between the right-wing media and the liberal media are minuscule. As Taibbi writes in “Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus,” they are “really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism.
The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it’s just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.”
“Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money,” Taibbi writes. “The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching banks, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, anti-trust waivers and dozens of other things.”
“They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about the money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population.
The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants down or Mexican babies at an emergency room.”
The Republican strategy of playing to the lowest common denominator ensured that eventually the useful idiots would take over and elect one of their own, in Donald Trump. Trump is the epitome of the human mutation produced by an illiterate, dumbed-down age of electronic images. He, like tens of millions of other Americans, believes anything he sees on television. He does not read. He is consumed by vanity and the cult of the self. He is a conspiracy theorist.
He blames America’s complex social and economic ills on scapegoats such as Mexican immigrants and Muslims, and of course the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, in turn, blames Trump’s election on Russia and former FBI Director James Comey. It is the theater of the absurd.
The childish gibberish Trump speaks is the new language of political discourse. His taunting tweets against his enemies are countered by his enemies with taunting tweets against him. These grade-school-level insults dominate the daily news cycle. The political process, captured by commercial interests, devolved to Trump’s imbecilic level. The presidential election of 2020 has begun. The circus, with its freaks, con artists and clowns, is open for business.
Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish’s work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…