The Damage Done by Democrat Elites to Fly-Over States and Cities

Chris Hedges:

I rage against this demonization of the working class because it’s a very dangerous cop-out. The Democrats had this term to essentially enact the kind of New Deal reforms that might’ve been able to save what’s left of our very anemic democracy. And they didn’t. And why didn’t they? Because figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer would not have political power but for their corporate backers. I mean, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wanted Biden in the primaries. It took the Democratic establishment to force everyone else out. The guy’s not even sentient. But they don’t want to lose their positions of privilege and power, and they’re really willing to take the country down because if they pushed for these kinds of reforms, then Goldman Sachs and Raytheon - and let’s not forget the Israeli lobby - wouldn’t fund them. They are creatures of this system, so that’s the problem. They will blame people who don’t rush out and vote for them. The liberal East Coast establishment, the college educated, the quote-unquote “knowledge industry,” they have no contact with these people at all. And that isn’t to excuse some of their opinions. . .

Reagan started it, but Clinton was the Democratic impetus for this, where they talked in that “I feel your pain” language of liberalism but thrust a knife in the back of the working class. So are there irredeemable racists and bigots? Of course there are. But to write off the entire working class like that and essentially blame them for their own, I think, very legitimate rage has been a way for the Democratic Party and the liberal establishment to wash their hands of culpability.

. . . They packed the equipment up and shipped it to Monterey, Mexico. And the plants, they’re just empty lots now, but they’re massive and they’re surrounded by cyclone fencing, weed-choked lots, a kind of painful reminder of the jobs they used to have. What happens in Anderson? Well, it’s completely predictable: opioid crisis, diseases of despair, massive numbers of suicides, and so on.

You can find the full interview of Chris Hedge's (by Matt Taibbi) at Racket News.

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Totalitarianism / Authoritarianism versus Democracy

Excellent list by Caitlin Johnstone. Here is an exceerpt:

In totalitarian regimes they have massacres and wars. In free democracies they have humanitarian interventions.

In totalitarian regimes they use torture. In free democracies they use enhanced interrogation techniques.

In totalitarian regimes they fund extremist groups to create instability. In free democracies they fund extremist groups to create stability.

In totalitarian regimes evil dictators bomb their own people. In free democracies we do it for them.

In totalitarian regimes a single party upholds and enforces the status quo. In free democracies, two parties uphold and enforce the status quo.

In totalitarian regimes the government controls the press and determines what information the public is allowed to have access to. In free democracies it is billionaires who do this.

In totalitarian regimes you know exactly who rules over you. In free democracies the true rulers hide behind fake puppet governments. . . .

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The Democratic Party to the People: We’re in Charge, not You.

If the DNC is so confident that Joe Biden is the best choice to be President again, they should brush off his cobwebs and roll him out to debate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson. It would be revealing to hear the two challengers discuss the issues, but equally important to see whether Biden could make sense for more than five minutes without a teleprompter.

But does the DNC think that the People should have a meaningful say in determining who will represent the Democrats for President? The answer is no, based upon a 2016 lawsuit against the DNC:

Update: A federal judge dismissed the DNC lawsuit on August 28. The court recognized that the DNC treated voters unfairly, but ruled that the DNC is a private corporation; therefore, voters cannot protect their rights by turning to the courts:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary."

Rather than reflecting on the consternation everyday voters are having over the conduct of the Democratic presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee is doubling down on the assertion that the primary election belongs to the people who control the party -- not voters.

In the transcript for last week's hearing in Wilding, et. al. v. DNC Services, d/b/a DNC and Deborah “Debbie” Wasserman Schultz, released Friday, DNC attorneys assert that the party has every right to favor one candidate or another, despite their party rules that state otherwise because, after all, they are a private corporation and they can change their rules if they want.

From the Chicago Tribune:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary," Judge William Zloch, a Reagan appointee, wrote in his dismissal. "To the extent Plaintiffs have asserted specific causes of action grounded in specific factual allegations, it is this Court's emphatic duty to measure Plaintiffs' pleadings against existing legal standards. Having done so . . . the Court finds that the named Plaintiffs have not presented a case that is cognizable in federal court." ...

Bruce Spiva, representing the DNC, made the argument that would eventually carry the day: that it was impossible to determine who would have standing to claim they had been defrauded. But as he explained how the DNC worked, Spiva made a hypothetical argument that the party wasn't really bound by the votes cast in primaries or caucuses.

"The party has the freedom of association to decide how it's gonna select its representatives to the convention and to the state party," said Spiva. "Even to define what constitutes evenhandedness and impartiality really would already drag the court well into a political question and a question of how the party runs its own affairs. The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way."

This was news to me in 2017 when the DNC took this position (for more on the DNC arguments, see the Plaintiff's appeal here).  How many times has DNC rhetoric suggested that the DNC looks to the People to make this decision? But they clearly don't care about our opinion.  This, the party that made repeated dramatic false claims that  "Russians" cheated them out of winning even when the DNC itself cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination in 2016, as exposed by Wikileaks.

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About our Increasingly Visible Political Realignment.

Matt Taibbi has such a way with words. This is an excerpt from his most recent article, "Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else: The realignment of major parties away from blue against red and toward a rich versus poor dynamic is America's most undercovered political story."

"People like to say nothing matters anymore,” Greenberg said. “But the conversation that you’re not having actually does matter.” Try saying that one three times fast.

A lot of coverage of Campaign 2024 is going to be like this, in which aides, pundits, and pollsters speak like fridge-magnet haikus or Alan Greenspan pressers. There are now so many taboo subjects in American politics that even data journalists, whose job is to give us the cold hard facts, are forced to communicate in allusions and metaphors, because what’s happening can’t be discussed.

American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges. A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side. That’s your “15% strongly approve” group, the Marie Antoinettes who’ll go to the razor pledging loyalty to the regent, even if he’s a loon in a periwig, or Joe Biden.

The inevitable other constituency is just everyone else, which should be a larger demographic. The only reason polls are at 43-43 (or perhaps slightly in Biden’s disfavor) is because the other actor is Donald Trump. If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset, and a reason the realignment seems to be proceeding even with him around."

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Matt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange

From Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed."

[S]ecrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.

I’m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we’re building skyscrapers and huge new complexes to store our secrets, because we don’t have room to keep them all as is!

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote:

'Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.'

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of Wikileaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like “conspiracy to receive national defense information,” or “obtaining national defense information.”

What is “national defense information?” The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It’s whatever they say it is. It’s any information they don’t want to get out. It doesn’t even have to be classified. What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It’s called journalism.

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.

If you’re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you’d better be okay with it happening to many others. That’s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.

Don’t let that happen.

Free Julian Assange.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi: Free Julian Assange