The Blog Years: Writing From The Early Years Before The Pod

Written work from Gavin and Zac from before the podcast.

Bernard’s Surge:

Will the Media Take Him Seriously, and Does it Matter?

Following a strong December debate performance, endorsements from ¾ of The Squad, and yes, his heart-attack, Bernie Sanders’ campaign is finally experiencing the upward momentum it needs to carry him over the finish-line in this primary. But by no means has his “surge” come overnight; no isolated event has triggered this, but instead the work of millions of activists across the country, consolidating behind the man who increasingly represents the Progressive Left of the Democratic party.

And that’s what his recent surge is really all about - consolidation. The 2020 Democratic primary was fun--it was savage, revealing, sometimes infuriating--but it’s almost over now. And two clear figures have emerged as “serious” contenders: Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Representatives of two diametrically-opposed visions for the Democratic party, these two men have been challenged from all sides over the course of this primary, but both have come out of the frey surprisingly unfazed and undaunted, and I predict that second-tier candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg are only going to flail from here on out as voters come to terms with the real choice at hand: Biden’s promise to return us to the politics of the Obama administration, or Bernie’s promise to bring us into the future with a bold new vision and no love for the neoliberalism of the 2000’s.

Although Bernie Sanders has really been solidily in second place (according to polling aggregates) for almost the entire primary, you wouldn't know it from consuming mainstream media. He’s consistently ignored and smeared by elites on TV and in the papers, and rarely do they treat his ideology or movement as any more than a fringe group of socialist extremists. But the momentum experienced recently by the Senator’s campaign has grown to the point of being undeniable by the very media companies who have so willingly dismissed him up to this point. Recent articles by Politico, Newsweek and the New York Times ponder the same question: Does Bernie Actually Have a Chance?! To which the correct answer is “Well, no shit” -- to anyone actually paying attention or in-touch with the non-Boomer voting bloc.

Regardless of whether or not cable news takes his campaign seriously, Bernie Sanders has an increasingly high chance of winning the nomination. He seems to have benefited from Warren’s falter in the polls, and could very well continue taking votes from her. Also, he is benefitted by the fact that Biden is not nearly as popular in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two voting states, as he is in other Biden-strongholds like South Carolina. If Sanders can pull off victories in the first two contests, his momentum would literally become impossible to ignore, which in turn would lead to more hype and a further boost in popularity and name recognition. From there, he could easily win Nevada and California, all but guaranteeing him the primary. It’s a very achievable strategy, and his campaign has reached this position with no help from the media, proving that his support is purely grassroots. As they say, the revolution will not be televised.

Obama's 8 Years of Inaction Sowed the Seeds for the Democratic Party's Civil War--And The Rise of Donald Trump

Just as they love to pretend that corruption in Washington began on January 20th, 2017, the Democratic media class also loves to pretend that the ideological fracturing of the Democratic Party began the moment Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton in 2016. But the fissures in the party long predate that primary. With the election of Barack Obama the public was clear: they wanted out of the Middle East, they wanted job creation, better healthcare, and to punish whoever was responsible for destroying the economy and squandering their life savings. In fact it was speaking to these very frustrations that allowed Barack Obama to transition from a fresh-faced long shot to a serious competitor when he squared off with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Primary.

Obama sailed into office on a progressive, change-based message, something the public was desperate for after the doom and gloom of eight long years of Bush. But after seizing upon the country’s desperation Obama quickly changed gears. He stuffed his cabinet with fatcat Wall Street aristocrats and hawkish foreign policy advisors, who then in turn advised him to bail out the banks instead of the public, and to keep the war machine humming in the resource-rich developing world.

He passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, aka the bailout bill, that amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist for the very institutions responsible for the collapse to begin with. Now it would turn out that there are consequences to betraying your base, but when the boot finally dropped for the Democratic party, Obama’s bags would be long packed. By the time his replacement arrived in the oval office, Barack was well on his way to collecting on eight long years worth of favors.

As Obama kept his sights set on appeasing the grifter class who would finance his re-election in 2012, discontent lingered in the minds of Americans. The disappointment brought on by just the first two years of Obama’s presidency resulted in enough voter apathy to turn the tides and cost the Democratic Party control of Congress. Ultimately stripping the ability to pass any of the progressive promises other than a watered down, corporate-friendly healthcare bill that left millions uninsured. After losing their Congressional supermajority in the 2010 midterms, the Democrats squandered the rest of their time in power making excuses and blaming Republican obstruction, fanning the flames of the very nation-wide frustration which led to Obama’s rise in the first place.

Mitch McConnel’s Senate and Paul Ryan’s House provided Obama with the cover to due the bidding of the grifter class with a proper scapegoat. Even with Democratic majority Congress during his first two years in office, Obama chose not to pursue the bold policy his campaign rhetoric would have suggested. Instead opting to do the bidding of the elites he packed his cabinet with.

After 8 years of the Obama administration, voters were looking for an alternative to the mainstream. While Hillary Clinton was a beloved figure among Democratic leadership, she remained vastly unpopular with large coalitions of voters, for reasons very much connected to Obama’s tepid legacy. After all, Obama’s victory in 2008 was already a repudiation of the Clintons, Sanders simply capitalized on that same frustrations.

For all of the media’s theories as to Bernie’s sudden rise to Democratic fame, the most obvious answer is simply that voters were tired of neoliberal policies and milquetoast reforms offered by the Obama administration, which improved their lives in no tangible way. In the shadow of the disastrous Bush administration, it is easy to compliment the Obama administration for what good was accomplished under his presidency, but it was his incrementalism and compromise with the corporate class that lead to much of the duress we are seeing today; his administration’s refusal to meaningfully address the cultural, economic, and environmental issues plaguing the country left a bulk of the country completely without trust in either party.

During the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both ran as outsiders to the establishment of their respective parties, each the perfect foil of the other, Sanders and Trump both uniquely understood the power of populism in America. Trump soaked his campaign rhetoric in racism and hyper nationalism, Sanders with unity and collaboration.

To the disbelief of first the Republican and then Democratic establishment, Trump’s promises actually resonated with much of this country. Particularly in swing states in the Rust Belt that had been ravaged by decades of disastrous trade policy, voters simply didn’t trust Clinton to improve where Obama had failed, with 4.4 million Obama voters opting to stay home. Of those who did turn out in the critical states, many of whom voted for Trump despite his crassness, hateful rhetoric, blatant bigotry and profound lack of class, because they hoped would bring a change to the sorry status quo.

Now, as they prepare to face an incumbent Trump, the Democratic establishment’s support is clearly divided, unable to settle collectively on a candidate to oppose Bernie Sanders--who intends to oust Wall Street from the bed of the Democratic Party like a scorned lover. Even in the face of opposition from a Republican party bent on destroying economic and social progress by any means necessary, the Democratic establishment seems determined to cut the legs out from underneath their best shot at the White House. Populism will always prevail in a fair contest with corporatism and incrementalism, which means only one thing--it’s about to get dirty.

The Iowa Caucusus: An Abortion of Democracy

Almost an entire week has passed since the Iowa Caucus, and the Democratic Party has yet to release the final, official vote count. Apparently due to massive, unprecedented technical failures involving a shady app, the incompetence on continual display is an embarrassment the Democratic party simply cannot bare to brace at the moment, as Donald Trump takes his extended victory lap over acquittal from the Senate at the conclusion of a lengthy, bungled impeachment that has somehow managed to increase the President’s popularity.

Seemingly right on time for the President, the disaster that unfolded Monday night at the Iowa caucuses couldn’t be a more perfect target of the for the recently acquitted Trump. In fact, the entire Right Wing has seized on this abject failure of what should be, and has been up to this point, a perfectly straightforward contest. This massive malfunction has proven to be apt fodder for the likes of Sean Hannity, who gets to accurately point out how undemocratic the Democratic party actually is. This sort of malfeasance drives voters away from the left, and the worst part is, it could have all been just an attempt to slow the momentum of Bernie Sanders, who was an easy favorite going into Monday, and who appears to have indeed won the State’s popular vote as more results trickle in.

To make the situation even worse, the Iowa Democratic party released a partial vote count of 62% of the precincts on Tuesday, which showed Buttigieg with a miniscule lead, further validating his premature victory lap, and cementing in the minds of the cable-news watching public that he had won. Releasing a partial vote count over 12 hours after 100% of votes were cast is a questionable, suspicious decision to say the least, especially considering who the recipient of all the favorable media has been (Buttigieg). As the hours and day went on, the debacle only became more embarrassing as the Iowa Democratic Party released more results--results that were quickly pointed out to be incredibly flawed.

The slow, multi-day rollout of results has been incredibly untransparent, and with memories of the DNC tampering in the 2016 primaries fresh in the minds of voters, this couldn’t be a worse look. The lack of real explanation or insight into the process of vote counting and the release of said findings has infuriated the electorate, fueled paranoia of another rigging, and provided endless fodder for the incumbent Repubican party. It's an abortion of Democracy so profound that Tom Perez and everyone else running the Democratic party should resign in shame, and a disaster of such magnitude that it should force a reconsidering of how we conduct our elections, for the sake of protecting our democracy from corporate interests, Washington elites and oligarchs who would rather destroy their party’s namesake than allow the people’s will to be reported accurately, let alone enacted.

Obama Can Save His Legacy--And the Democratic Party

At this point, Barack Obama is as much a creature of the Establishment as any swamp monster in D.C. Having put his eight years as President behind him, Obama has turned to new hobbies: starting a media production company, giving speeches to Wall Street–normal elitist things that are taken for granted by most and rarely ever questioned in mainstream circles. This is, of course, a fitting path for the man who sailed into office on a platform literally centered around the world “change”, only to barely change anything once in power. In promising the country’s most desperate the big change that they needed, and then failing to deliver on it, Obama left the electorate vulnerable to an unhinged, pathological liar who was able to harness a similar “change”-based movement behind him, just from the opposite side of the aisle.

Despite his disappointing tenure in the White House, Barack Obama has continued to enjoy high favorability amongst Democrats, and his presence has loomed over this primary like a cloud. While he’s remained silent about his personal preference, his potential endorsement promises to shift the dynamics of the race in a big way, at any given moment. Hilariously, Barack has distanced himself from his own Vice President, Joe Biden, who was once considered the race’s frontrunner before finishing fourth place in Iowa and then fifth in New Hampshire–two embarrassments that shattered Biden’s veneer of “electability”. The fact that Obama not only foresaw that collapse, but also refused to intervene in any way, is proof that he remains politically savvy, and has begun to read the tea leaves.

Even though he’s become more deeply ingrained into the Establishment mindset that he ran against in 2008, Obama is not stupid, and he knows as well as anyone that the exact same grassroots energy that propelled him to the White House now lies with one candidate and one candidate only. It’s not Joe Biden, and it’s definitely not Elizabeth Warren (who Obama apparently voiced support for behind closed doors)–it’s Bernie Sanders. And, with the entire establishment media wailing from the top of their lungs about all of Sanders’ supposed faults and electoral issues, Obama must be reminded of his own ascension to front runner status in 2008 when it became crystal clear that the voters wanted his brand of progressivism over Hillary Clinton’s milquetoast neoliberalism.

Some of the very voices railing against Sanders on cable television, like Clinton-associate James Carville, routinely trashed Obama on cable news as well. And in 2016, how many Republicans came out to brandish their moral superiority against Trump, only to make him stronger and all the more resilient? Obama understands that in the 21st century, the best, most dynamic candidates for President are often those most despised by the party establishment. It’s why the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney were met with apathy from actual voters–they were clearly propped up by party insiders, and didn’t speak the language of the working class. Obama successfully channeled this energy against Clinton in 2008, Romney in 2012, and then watched Trump do the exact same to Clinton again in 2016.

Enter Mike Bloomberg. As he spends millions of dollars blanketing the airwaves with his slick ads in an obvious last-ditch effort to stop Sanders, he has risen in the polls by harnessing the exact opposite of the kind of coalition Obama built in 2008–by appealing to Boomers, not doing any grassroots fundraising, totally self-financing his campaign with his own billions of dollars, he’s in many ways the real anti-Obama. And his rise in the polls has come mostly at the expense of the other moderates in the race, namely Joe Biden. To make it even worse, Bloomberg has been heavily featuring Obama in his ads, tricking voters into assuming they were ideological allies during Obama’s time in office–a falsehood recently pointed out quite effectively by Biden’s own campaign. There’s also the fact that Bloomberg is a notorious bigot and lifetime Republican who accelerated and celebrated the racist stop and frisk program in New York City, and has a history of opposing basic Democratic policies like healthcare expansion, minimum wages increases and basic social welfare. It would hardly be a good look for America’s first black President to traipse around the country stumping for and defending a racist oligarch, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Obama, it’s that he’s obsessed with his own image and legacy.

Given all of these factors, the only intelligent move for Obama would be to endorse Bernie Sanders and his people-powered movement. At this point, he can either continue waiting in the wings, only to campaign for Sanders anyway if he does win, or watch Bloomberg get just enough delegates to somehow try and steal the nomination at a brokered convention. Obama must know that that would be the worst possible outcome for the Democrats, and much like the Democratic electorate at large, Obama’s priority is most likely to get Trump out of office. As with Obama’s ascension in 2008, the completion of Bernie’s rise will require moderate voices to give “permission” to their supporters to get behind the Democratic Socialist. We’ve already seen this begin with current NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio’s endorsement of Sanders, and Obama’s support would totally complete the process.

In addition to being a part of the winning team and winning back the favor of America’s youth, Obama could even steal some credit for the popularity of Senator Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, which Obama could spin as a “natural extension” of his own Affordable Care Act. He would once again be seen as an exciting and bold voice in politics, instead of the representation of the Establishment that he’s become, and it would return real influence to his voice at a pivotal moment in the primary,

Bernie and his supporters should not hold their breaths waiting for this to happen. It likely will not, because, as previously stated, Barack Obama is as much a creature of the Establishment as any swamp monster in D.C. What he has that they don’t? A degree of political savvy.

There's only one "electable" candidate.

Just over a week ago 5 of the 6 Democratic candidates on the debate stage in Nevada proposed to the American people-whose vote they by and large are still vying for- that they would rather see the nominee selected by unelected superdelegates than the public they seek to represent. Even NBC, embarrassed by the utter disregard for democracy and doing their best to mitigate the public backlash, excised the final question from its final upload of the debate.

The irony, of course, is that many of those advocating for a contested convention never missed an opportunity to remind the public that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and was robbed by the undemocratic electoral college. This blatant hypocrisy feeds into the exact narrative Democrats need so desperately to rewrite during this election cycle: that they are self-righteous and only willing to take the higher ground when it benefits them. Why would 5 of the 6 candidates say they don’t want the public to choose the winner? Because they all know the public ain’t gonna be choosing them.

To the surprise of no one, and the chagrin of many, there was no follow up or challenge question posed to the candidates regarding their positions on a possible contested convention in last night’s debate. Instead, the candidates took turns throwing temper tantrums on stage with their mixed bag of tired red-baiting attacks. The candidates clamored over one another about how Sanders had not adequately condemned the authoritarian rule of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and squabbled over whether or not it was fair to categorize Medicare For All as a Communist policy proposal.

And if one example of blatant hypocrisy weren’t enough for the establishment to parry, they are now facing a second. Every Democrat has been hammering the fact that we, as a party and nation, must stop at nothing to overcome the great evil and threat that is Donald Trump. Their incessant vilification of the president and their resolve to oust him from office has backed them into an uncomfortable corner though, now that the candidate best positioned to defeat him is the ideological opponent of much of the party leadership.

In spite of the narrative being peddled to the public on major news networks, that Sanders’s label as a Democratic Socialist is a disqualifier, making him, as they love to say, “unelectable”. The evidence on the other hand would suggest otherwise following the South Carolina Debate YouGov conducted a poll showing Sanders was the favorite to beat Trump according to debate watchers. In the Nevada caucuses the Senator outperformed his opponents amongst every demographic group with the exception of voters over the age 65+, and remains the only candidate, Republican or Democrat, to win the popular vote in the first three early state contests.

Senator Sanders’s outsider status is what is fueling his movement,and it is resonating with first time voters and igniting a multiracial, working class, base, something no other candidate has been able to in the race. Much like Trump was able to benefit from his outsider status in the 2016 Republican primaries, Sanders benefits from his position as a challenger of the establishment status quo.

To hammer a boxing analogy, last weekend’s Fury v Wilder 2 perfectly captured what is unfolding in the democratic race. Gunning for a victory after a robbery in the first fight Fury was initially written off after weighing in at a career-high 273 pounds. But Fury had learned something deep into round 12 of the first fight after Wilder had nearly turned his lights out: he realized Wilder couldn’t fight moving backward. In the second fight, Fury picked Wilder apart until his corner was forced to throw in the towel. Just like Fury, Bernie Sanders learned a great deal from his first bout with the Democratic machine and is now systematically breaking them down round by round. Bernie has the Democratic Party fighting off its back foot, and just like Tyson Fury knew Saturday night in Vegas, Sanders knows he can’t afford to let this one go to the judges.

Super Tuesday: The Establish Strikes Back

Monday was a turning point in the race that was always going to come: the party united against Bernie Sanders. The Democratic establishment learned from the mistakes made across the aisle and united behind their last hope--this time around, that candidate was Joe Biden. There are no two ways about, Joe Biden cleaned up on Super Tuesday. After spending no time campaigning, building no organization infrastructure, astroturfed or otherwise, had no funding for ads in spending a paltry “six figures” and still dominated not only in the south, but in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s own backyards in the northeast.

There is no doubt that this was an orchestrated maneuver, but it is disappointing that nobody seemed to be prepared for it. In between Joe Biden’s dominant victory in South Carolina on Saturday the 29th, and Super Tuesday, Joe Biden’s polling skyrocketed thanks to the endorsements of former candidates Buttiegieg, Klobuchar and even Beto O'Rourke. Their constituencies seemed to have obeyed, giving Biden a burst in support from suburban voters that were probably on the fence about Sanders. Amy Klobuchar’s endorsement propelled Joe Biden from the distant 3rd place he was polling in her home state of Minnesota to a dominant finish.

Last night it became clear that Sanders and the left flank of the Democratic party need to seriously reconsider their pitch to voters, specifically the more rural voters he courted throughout the 2016 primary who then switched to Trump in the general election. His campaign also needs to start making the electability case against Biden. The gloves have got to come off, and if Sanders thinks he can forgo the discomfort of exposing his supposed friend on the debate and laying his record out publicly he will likely lose the primary. He must make it clear to the public that Joe Biden stands absolutely no chance on the debate stage against Donald Trump; it will be a massacre conducted with ease. With Biden for an opponent, Trump would have nothing but ammunition, and an opponent who has proven himself woeful incapable of forming coherent sentences on the debate stage, let alone parrying attacks from an incumbent president.

But is it too late? Did the Sanders campaign take their eye off the ball? Was the billionaire curveball candidate enough of a distraction to keep Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental condition and atrocious record out of the news cycle? Apparently so, and the fundamental miscalculation of the Sanders coalition was the fact that it was obvious enough to the public that Joe Biden couldn’t do the job. They misjudged how much of the Democratic electorate looks at Joe Biden through the same rose colored glasses they view the Obama era, especially in the aftermath of the Trump presidency. Many voters, so depleted of faith in their government, just want a candidate who will return us to the status quo, before the beast of populism was stirred in 2016. Joe Biden said it himself, if he’s president, “Nothing will fundamentally change”. Sanders also struggled with older voters and also voters who wanted to “unite the party”. Turns out a lot of staunch liberals were happy to take that deal--after all, their lives aren’t so bad. To them, Trump is just a bad look, a blemish on a mostly great nation that needs to be removed before we can return to a civil status quo.

Sanders and his coalition must make a clear case that this is not an option, and that this strategy will lead to electoral disaster in November for the Democrats. Biden’s “Nothing will fundamentally change” sentiment is akin to Hillary’s “America is already great”, in that it either ignores or outright denies the systemic flaws in America’s economy. The capitalist takeover of basic human rights and services in this country that have rendered the lower class exceptionally vulnerable to financial ruin. The fatal flaw of this strategy, and of Biden as a candidate, is the failing to offer an equal but opposite vision to Trump’s for this America, in particular, America’s working class.

Trump’s election was a repudiation of Obama’s presidency, and to restage the same philosophical battle in the 2020 general election and expect different results would be insane, especially with Trump’s advantage now being the incumbent, and especially with a candidate as vulnerable as Biden. The American working class will not turn out for neoliberal Democrats, and they’ll make that clear again if Biden is the nominee by reelecting Trump in a landslide.

This isn’t to say that Sanders’ campaign is dead in the water, far from it. By the time California's vote count is final he’ll likely be within close striking distance of Joe Biden. But if he is to recover, he needs to make his case quickly to the working and professional class voters in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri and he needs to make it now. If Bernie endures another beating next Tuesday like the one he did yesterday, we’ll likely soon see Sanders standing behind Biden, just like Amy, Pete, and Mike. And they’ll all be standing across Trump for another four more years after that.

Joe Biden is a Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldier

Among the general electorate, Joe Biden is not an unlikable character in American politics; in fact, he remains quite favorable to those who came to know him during his time as Barack Obama’s ice cream-cone eating Vice President. His affable presence and folksy demeanor are authentic, and by that virtue, appeal to working class Americans in a way politicians of the D.C. establishment simply can’t muster. Biden’s greatest strength as a politician--his ability to paper over his record with an affable personable nature, and it’s a big part of the reason that he was finally able to overtake all the other moderate candidates nipping at his heels over the past year in this primary election.

But unfortunately for Joe, the attributes which fueled his success in electoral politics and may get him through this primary will not be nearly enough to save him when his true record is fully examined and excoriated by the Right. In Joe Biden, the Democrats find themselves uniquely vulnerable to Trump: Any charges lobbed at Trump related to sexual malfeasance or shameless bigotry will ring hollow when he redirects the attention to Biden’s long history of inappropriate behavior with women. Nor can the Democrats take the high road on policy, as Biden has been central to the passing of the most calamitous legislation in modern American history. Nominating Joe Biden for president exposes the utter hypocrisy at the heart of the pearl-clutching Demacratic establishment, and if there’s anything Trump understands how to weaponize masterfully, it’s hypocrisy.

First elected into the Senate at the ripe age of 30, Joe Biden has been a lifelong creature of the establishment, with a record to boot. To call his past checkered, would be all too polite. Since taking office, Joe Biden has been consistently on the “wrong side of history.” In fact, it’s often forgotten that the reason Barack Obama even selected Biden as his running mate in 2008 was to court Democratic voters who were uncomfortable with a black president. Biden’s own comments describing Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary are caked in racism, saying “you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy… I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Selecting Joe Biden as Vice President was a conscious decision to ease the skepticism of those racist white voters. Take his position on desegregation bussing back in the 70’s, when he called it an “asinine policy” and argued that “the one way to ensure that you set the civil rights movement further back is to continue to push busing.” Just recently on the campaign trail he declared that “poor kids are just as smart as white kids.”

In 1988, when Joe made his first run at the Oval Office, his campaign was an absolute disaster. Biden was forced to bow out embarrassed and ashamed after blatantly plagiarizing a speech delivered by British Labour Party Leader and former challenger to Margarette Thatcher Neil Kinnock, going so far as to mimic the mannerisms of Kinnock in the campaign video he lifted it from. This was not the first nor last time Biden was caught pilfering his material, he was also dogged in the ’88 race by leaks showing he was caught hijacking an article from Fordham Law Review and submitting it as an essay in law school. In addition to the multiple instances of appropriating others' work on the campaign trail, Biden also sprinkled in a good deal of outright lies; most notably those regarding his civil rights record.

In January, activist and Bernie Sanders surrogate Sean King penned a devastating compilation of Joe Biden’s long history of rewriting his past and misleading voters about his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a list that continues to grow, as just a few short weeks ago Joe Biden was caught with his pants down claiming he “had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robbens Island (where Mandela was imprisoned).” There is of course no evidence of this occurring, it wasn’t documented in any newspapers in the United States or South Africa at the time, and Biden eventually fessed up.

As frequent as the lies and stolen valor from the true heroes of the civil rights movement were the instances in which he turned his back on the communities whose vote he’d lied for, quickly selling them down the river in DC. Joe Biden cut his teeth in the Senate working closely with the arch segregationists Strom Thurmond (who Biden referred to as his “closest friend”) and James O Eastland, and together the three lobbied their demands for mandatory minimum sentencing during Biden’s freshman term. These are truly unfathomable friendships for a man who claimed to have been molded by his time in black churches during the Civil Rights movement.

The true “piece de resistance” of Biden’s tenure as a Senator of Delaware was The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or as Biden himself refers to it, the “Biden Crime Bill.” This mammoth piece of legislation was a culmination of Biden’s decades of clamoring for Democrats to get tough on crime and played a critical role in expanding the prison industrial complex by increasing funding for prison construction nationwide. It was responsible for riddling communities with police forces who did not care about or represent them and codifying the three strikes law that sent thousands of nonviolent drug offenders to prison for life with no chance of parole. The bill did just about “everything but hang people for jaywalking” he boasted. Joe Biden not only wrote this legislation but was among the most outspoken Democratic cheerleaders of the crime and punishment political era that dominated American politics for the tail end of the 20th century.

It is not the case that Biden is solely responsible for the problem of over-policing and mass incarceration--as he’s quick to point out, state laws are indeed more responsible by the numbers. However, his bill included state-level funding for states who adopted TIS or Truth in Sentencing legislation mandating inmates serve at least 85% of their sentence. This prompted 9 states to adopt TIS legislation in the 5 years after the bill was signed into law along with 21 states who modified their existing legislation to qualify for the $12.5 billion in funding. Legislation like this is just one of the many examples of the fearmongering perpetrated by politicians like Joe Biden, fear-mongering that molded popular opinion and corralled voters behind policies of over policing that decimated low-income black and hispanic neighborhoods nationwide, exacerbating the issues he supposedly set out to solve.

Only slightly less bountifull than the lies regarding his involvement in the Civil Rights movement are those regarding his involvement in the Iraq War. His vote to give George Bush sweeping authorization to use military force in Iraq, a country that had never attacked us, was not one cast in ignorance. as the New York Times reported, Biden, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “had been scrambling to draft a bipartisan resolution that would grant Mr. Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq.” He then spent the next decade alternating between defenses for the matter either arguing he was too trusting of George Bush, or just flat out lying and saying he opposed the war “from the moment it started.”

Not only has Joe Biden consistently mislead the public about his relationship with notable Civil Rights leaders in order to make himself seem closer to the fight for social justice, he has also lied about his time spent with troops overseas. Just last fall The Washington Post reported on a touching speech delivered by Biden about how he navigated the “godforsaken country” of Afghanistan to pin a Silver Star on a soldier who had valiantly retrieved the body of a fallen comrade. He resisted, Biden recalls. “He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing! ‘Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!” a truly moving tale, or it would be had it happened, it didn’t. It was just another of the litany of examples of Joe Biden blatantly misrepresenting himself in a positive light to gain the favor of his audience.

These are not isolated instances that can be considered slips of the tongue or mind — Joe Biden has demonstrated a consistent behavior of rewriting his personal narrative to make himself easier to market to whichever voting bloc he is courting. How then can Joe Biden take the position of moral high ground against Donald Trump when he himself is guilty of so many of the same faults? He can’t.

Plata o Plomo: The Trap of Electoral Politics in America

It is never the suburban moderate voter who is called upon in times of crisis to rally behind a progressive candidate offering real change for working people. Instead, time and time again, the party's left flank is caustically ordered to take its place in the center and bite the bullet for the “less harmful” candidate. It’s what they were told in 2004 to back Kerry after he adopted none of Howard Dean’s positions to court his base, it’s what they were told in 2016 even after Hillary belittled the entire Sanders movement. And it's what they’re being told today.

But how many voters can be convinced that there’s enough distinguishing the candidates to make an effort to get out and vote? And will the party’s left flank be convinced they’re “reducing harm,” rallying behind a racist corporatist, pathological liar, like Joe Biden? Perhaps that is the case, but the argument smells a little Orwellian to me. After all, it’s not the first time the left has arrived at this crossroads.

Progressives now possess two options, assuming Bernie Sanders will not be the presidential nominee (he won’t be). Whether he takes it to the convention in Milwaukee this July or calls it quits early, in light of the pandemic and in the interest of public safety and unity and all that, when his campaign is finally suspended Sanders will certainly endorse Biden enthusiastically and implore all of his voters to get behind him in the party’s mission to defeat incumbent Trump.

Let's assume that as in 2016, 74% of Sanders’s supporters pull the level for Joe Biden in the general election and oust Trump. It isn’t inconceivable he would be able to pick up the Rust Belt during the midst of a pandemic, especially considering the last shreds of the automobile manufacturing industry shuttered production domestic because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But would Biden be able to survive the barrage of attacks that will be hurled at him throughout the election? Trump will relentlessly hammer Joe Biden for his corruption just like he did Hillary Clinton, and he will in no way spare Hunter Biden from his public attacks. He will also blatantly and poignantly point to Joe Biden’s deteriorating mental health, he’ll hammer him for his Iraq War vote, just like he did Hillary Clinton, and he’ll even come after Biden from the left for his horrendous crime record. Trump also comes into the election with all of the advantages of incumbency.

In fact, historical examples of successfully unseating incumbent presidents are sparse. Bill Clinton ousted George Herbet Walker Bush from election, but Texas Independent Ross Perot pulled in nearly 20 million votes in his third party run, eating away at conservative voters who resented Bushfor bucking his campaign pledge to not raise taxes. Had the billionaire Perot not run third party, Bush could have certainly defeated Clinton. Previously to that, we must look to GOP poster boy Ronald Reagan, who ousted Jimmy Carter after a single term, in large part due to the Iran Hostage situation and because Americans had changed their minds--they now wanted structure and order, and the Republican Party had absolutely decimated President Carter over his inability to negotiate the release of the hostages.

Is Coronavirus going to be Trump’s Iran Hostage situation? I think a far more apt counterfactual would be if Hurricane Katrina had happened in spring 2004 during the Democratic primary season, only instead of a hurricane that was isolated to an impoverished area of the country, the natural disaster affected the entire country and ravaged our healthcare system and economy.

Fortunately for Trump, it doesn’t seem Joe Biden even has the political wherewithal to fill the leadership vacuum during this total disaster. Instead of seizing the opportunity to show his presidential leadership, Joe Biden has not only failed to release a plan for the pandemic, he’s failed to even be seen in public.

The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill joked on Twitter, “We were all told that we desperately need Joe Biden’s leadership and experience. Now all we have to do is find him.” In light of all the pandemic pandemonium, few have seemed to notice that the presumed Democratic nominee is nowhere to be found. It’s like after his public appearance on the debate stage, he was whisked away and kennelled from the public eye.

One botched Facebook livestream aside, Joe has been almost entirely out of the public eye in a time of crisis. Offering no clear plan He should never let a day go by without hammering Donald Trump for his unconscionably poor handling of the entire crisis. Biden needs to be clamoring on behalf of the working people, calling for public bailouts, and putting his money where his mouth is. Instead, he has offered the people nothing but silence. Maybe that’s all his senial mind can muster.

Perhaps this is a crisis so great that it will be the electorate that Trump’s leadership was unforgivably poor, and the presidency is almost handed to Joe Biden, if that is the case, it is likely the only situation in which Joe Biden is able to secure the nomination. Recent polls, however, show that the President’s popularity has only increased since the coronavirus pandemic occurred, proving the president’s popularity is stickier than many gave him credit for. Even after the stock market was completely ravaged and he’s offered no clear path forward, his relentless obfuscation and offloading of the blame seem to have paid dividends.

On the other hand, progressives could take this moment to buck their historical tendency to fall in line and tell the Democratic Party establishment to eat shit. Declining the bribe and opting instead for the bullet: Donald Trump for four more agonizing years. Surely there will be much grandstanding and finger wagging, but then what? Tensions with Iran will continue to escalate, he will almost certainly appoint at least one new neoconservative Supreme Court Justice, and of course he will continue his abhorrent tyrade against the undocumented.

It is not entirely clear just how different this would be from a Joe Biden presidency, setting aside of course the Supreme Court nominee which the former Vice President has assured us will be a “woman of color” who will uphold Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to access safe abortions, an issue Biden has consistantly dropped the ball on throughout the years, only as recently as 2019 changing his position on the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting federal funding from going to abortions.

A war hawk in his own right, it is still likely a Biden administration would attempt to mend relations with Iran and return to the previously brokered Iran Nuclear Deal, which was ushered in during the Obama administration. However, it would not be inconceivable for him to continue to impose the sanctions set in place by the current administration, perhaps to some relaxed degree. Biden’s pathological lies, like Trump, make it difficult to distinguish between what he actually believes and how he’d govern behind closed doors.

If Joe Biden is able to make it through the Milwaukee convention and come out of it the Democratic nominee, he will be faced with a new challenge entirely. Instead of onboarding the consistent Democratic primary voters whose support he inherited, this next group of critical non-partisan voters will take convincing. That's a tall order for Joe, who’s back pocket maneuver throughout the primaries was to tell fence sitting voters to “vote for Trump.” Well come general election, swing voters just may take his advice.

Even if he does overcome insurmountable odds (perhaps the coronavirus will be enough to erode Trump's support heavily), it's unlikely Joe Biden would pick up these voters. What’s more likely is they join the other half of America in dropping out of electoral politics entirely. Unconvinced any of the options are up to the job, why get your hopes up for something that always lets you down?

Given the option between two leaders who refuse to lead, where are voters supposed to turn? Uppity technocrats love to scratch their chins and postulate about why nearly half of Americans don’t even cast a ballot when the answer couldn’t be more obvious. If you offer people two shit sandwiches, no matter how they’re dressed, they're gonna choose not to eat.

The Left Must Be Bigger Than Bernie and The Squad.

In a recent interview on The Rolling Stone podcast Useful Idiots, filmmaker Adam McKay, never one to mince words, blurted out an obvious statement many on the left are too polite to say. “What a pathetic state the real left wing is in, in this country.” he began. “The only real guy you can find is a 75-year-old Democratic socialist from Vermont, who just had a heart attack.” Make no mistake, this was not a critique of Sanders, who has for decades carried the torch of progressive politics in America, but rather a broader critique of the progressive movement.

The great achievement of Sanders’s movement was taking vanguard political ideas like single-payer healthcare and tuition-free college, and thrusting them from the fringe to the forefront of the American political conversation. His flagship Medicare for All policy is now rated favorably amongst Democratic voters in every single state to hold a primary election, even those he lost by double digit margins. Now the left is forced to look toward life after Bernie, who at 78 years old is almost certainly too old to continue leading the movement after the conclusion of his presidential bid.

The left must now harness the activist energy that was seized by the Sanders campaign and repurpose it for public protest. For the last four years, the energy on the left has been consumed by electoral politics and the single goal of getting Sanders into office. This priority has got to evolve moving forward — it’s now too late to play within the framework of the system.

Progressives must capitalize on the popularity of these ideas and lead a movement outside of electoral politics. As Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski noted in a recent segment of his YouTube show, Lyndon B. Johson, a lifelong racist and habitual user of the “N” word, signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, certainly out of no virtue of his own, but because millions of Americans marched in the streets across the nation and demanded it, forcing the President to take action. If Biden is elected President, the activist left must look back to the techniques pioneered by the Civil Rights protesters as influence to continue resisting the neoliberal establishment in a meaningful way.

So what are the demands of the left? Is the goal of the new left to make the Democratic party a Socialist party? Is it to make it a party of Democratic Socialists? Or Social Democrats? Are they all united under the umbrella party of Democrats? At this point it remains unclear. If there were any area the political left can learn a great deal about from their opposition on the right, it’s messaging.

In a recent, highly circulated piece for Politico, Alex Thomspon and Holly Otterbein noted the shift that was taking place in progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political campaigning style, alluding to a fracture in the left. Thomspon and Otterbein contrasted her immediate support for Missouri Congressional candidate Cori Bush in 2018, to her more detached support in 2020 despite Bush’s bigger platform, funding, and chance at winning the election this time around. In a live stream video response, Ocasio-Cortez said “If anything, I've only gotten more ardent in my positions, but I do think it's funny that all these folks that one day are like, 'Keep your third eye open, manufactured consent,' are the same ones who fall the fastest for these ploys to demoralize the left.” But really, what’s more demoralizing for the left, watching a candidate they’ve staked their faith in falter at a critical moment, and buckle to the establishment the moment they need them most? Or reading about it? Power is useless unless wielded properly, and the progressives in Congress seem to be dropping the ball.

As it stands, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains one of the left's most powerful assets in office, whose popularity transcends her policy positions, and is one of the few examples of strong messaging in the party’s progressive flank. For young people who consume their news exclusively through Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez is someone they can see themselves in: a struggling, overly-qualified bartender who ousted a longtime Democratic incumbent against all odds. Since her landmark victory in 2018, the establishment has wised up. No longer are they sleeping on the insurgent left the way Joe Crowley did. Two years on, however, AOC appears to be done using her national platform and extreme popularity to help challengers oust corporate Democrats — instead she’s opting to play party soldier and fall in line behind “Mama Bear” Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic party at large.

We saw this bowing to authority again when AOC stood on the floor of Congress and delivered an impassioned condemnation of The CARES Act, before she then turned around and voted for that very bill. Apparently, after steeping in the swamp of Washington for just a few short years, even the left's most ardent politicians will shed their coarseness towards their own party’s establishment. In this sense she is not diverting from Sanders, but following painfully in his footsteps. Despite what has been parrotted ‘round the clock for much of the last 4 years, Bernie Sanders is not a radical, and his willingness to play inside baseball with the establishment Democrats in the Senate for years demonstrates that fact. Even in the midst of a presidential primary, he has refused to call his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, a lying, corrupt, career corporatist — the embodiment of everything Sanders has stood against his entire career. Instead he calls him a friend, and went out of his way on multiple occasions to let everyone know he thought Joe would make a fine president.

This kind of action, however calculated and strategic, feeds into the narrative that Democrats are a party of finger-pointing hypocrites. If Bernie Sanders truly believes in the sweeping corporate corruption he claims to, how could he possibly not see it in the likes of Joe Biden? No matter how you work the math, it doesn’t add up, and pretending it does has cheapened Sanders’s authenticity.

Bernie Sanders should have been using his massive campaign events and infrastructure around the country to rally support for insurgent leftist candidates who campaigned on passing Medicare for All, Free Public College, and Debt Forgiveness. He constantly hammered home his stump speech lines about building a movement and a revolution, but for Sanders and his squad, the rubber never hit the road. Even in the midst of a pandemic, they have refused to put their revolutionary rhetoric into practice. Just the other day, The New Yorker ran a piece with the headline “Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders” which argued that there is no better time for sweeping healthcare and housing measures than during a public health crisis that has highlighted their grave necessity.

If the left is to succeed moving forward, they must move past electoral politics and put their revolution rhetoric to practice, seizing upon the unprecedented moment our nation finds itself in to implement the changes necessary.

Now that the policy proposals the left is advocating for have gained national popularity, it is imperative to orchestrate the next “Occupy” style mass mobilization on the streets of Washington DC, demanding the passage of legislation that will guarantee health care, housing, food, and all other basic necessities. Obviously, there are limits to what can be accomplished during the midst of a global pandemic, that is clear. Now is a time for organizing, planning, and getting the entire movement on the same page. There are examples to look to for guidance: the French, a society of model protesters, has been in a state of civil upheaval for the past two years, thanks to the Yellow Vest Protesters.

During the 2018 presidential election in France, the French electorate faced a similar situation as the one presented to voters in the States two years before, in 2016. Corporate centrist Emmanuel Macron was pitted against ultraconservative Marine Le Pen. In France, the people narrowly opted for the centrist, whereas Americans elected Donald Trump. Since then however, major parts of the French electorate remained unsatisfied with Macron’s paltry, unsatisfactory responses to the problems facing the French working class. The Yellow Vest Movement erupted as thousands upon thousands of unsatisfied French men and women stormed the streets, demanding a raise in the French minimum wage, and calling for an end to wave austerity that has battered their working class. To this day, their struggles continue in the streets of France.

International movements are far from the only example to look to for guidance. In fact, just two years ago, one of the most successful worker actions in recent American history, the Red for Ed movement, swept conservative states in 2018. What began as an organized strike amongst teachers in West Virginia quickly inspired a wave of similar strikes in places like Arizona, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Their demands were largely the same, they wanted better pay and more funds allocated for classroom resources; as budgets were consistently slashed, the onus fell more and more on teachers to furnish, decorate, and supply their classrooms with educational resources. In nearly every state where strikes forced school closures, teachers won a salary increase. Arizona, a particularly successful case, secured a 20% salary increase for teachers before returning to work.

This serves as evidence that even in the most deep red, conservative states, the left can find common ground with workers, when they put money in the forefront of the conversation. To be clear there are certain positions the left must be morally unwavering on, such as immigration policy, reproductive rights, etc. But in order to successfully gain power in the United States, the crux of the message must be directed at addressing the class divide. Too often candidates run campaigns on identity issues alone, without understanding or caring that these issues are all also economic issues, and because of that they can be used to unite the working class, regardless of their background. It is unfortunately true that Americans have proven time and time again that when given the choice between a candidate with neoliberal economic policy and “woke” positions about identity, and a cultural bigot with a similar economic agenda, the public nearly always opts for the chest-beating conservative.

If there is one thing every voter does understand however, it’s their own self interest. Instead of making moral arguments that voting a certain way is the right thing to do, to convert voters, the left needs to convince them of the economic incentives of supporting these progressive policies. When money talks, people start to listen. The left must root each of their issues in an economic appeal to the working class.

Voters have been clear on both sides of the aisle: the bipartisan consensus of endless war as a means of sustaining the defense contractors, oil companies, and other war profiteers has been resoundingly rejected. The case must now be made to voters that we can bring home the dollars once pissed away in senseless conflicts and acts of barbarism and invest it in our crumbling infrastructure, while simultaneously putting our nation back to work. The left will face a greater challenge when it comes to building voter support for taking measures against climate change, but those efforts are gaining steam. It is evident that if we are to mitigate the severity of climate change and assuage its impact on human life, the United States must abandon its growth-based economic model due to its inherent unsustainability.

It is imperative the left understand in advance that this plea to reduce economic output will be weaponized by the establishment, to create a wedge between the activist left and the working class; there will be numerous traps set by the establishment to beguile the left and stall the progress of the movement. Instead of letting the media control the narrative and demagoguing against the left for trying to kill jobs in coal, the left must make the case for jobs guarantees in clean energy, with better paying, safer employment. Drawing this connection will allow progressive candidates to rebuild relationships with rural voting blocs who were once dependable Democrats and have been lost to the Republican Party in the wake of Trump’s election.

Without Bernie Sanders' name on the presidential ticket this November, a non-trivial portion of his supporters will be inclined to protest the election. In order to succeed moving forward, leftists must compel voters to protest with intent. Protest votes, without organized intent, are as meaningless as abstention. We must instead band together as outsiders of the system and cite demands for the establishment to earn our vote. If 30% of the Democratic Party threatened to withhold their vote from the general election until Joe Biden changes his position on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and agrees to appoint a progressive Vice President, the Washington insiders would then have to decide between acquiescing to the demands of the left or losing every single future election to their Republican adversaries.

The future of the American Left must be anchored in class struggle, uniting workers of all backgrounds, but it must also return to the issue-based strikes that have proven to be effective in the past. It is obvious that there are numerous benefits to having leadership that is amenable to the ambitions of the movement. It is imperative, however, that the movement does not hinge itself on elections alone.

The broad infrastructure erected by the Sanders coalition must evolve from a campaign into an issue-based, activist organization. In the aftermath of a pandemic, the electorate will be much more receptive to new ideas; this creates an opportunity to turn tragedy to triumph and demonstrate just how imperative things like universal access to healthcare and worker rights and protections are. While a pandemic is not the time to orchestrate the gathering of thousands of bodies in the streets of Washington, it is the perfect time to strategize, and organize. Each day Americans are forced to shelter in their homes away from the threat of the coronavirus is an opportunity to unite people who are isolated around their shared strife. The time for the left to move beyond Bernie and the Squad is now, it must be seized.

Joe Biden Needs to Drop Out

Though the Democratic primary has not technically reached a conclusion, the 2020 General election is already looking particularly grim. Donald Trump, the incumbent president, seems chiefly concerned with Tweeting and blathering his brand of unmitigated insanity, making a daily farce of the office of the presidency and exposing the house of cards for what it is. Though he could still easily win re-election, Trump’s job performance grows more embarrassing with every passing day, and his erratic behavior is making himself extremely vulnerable to a serious challenger.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, and those of us who desperately want to see Trump ousted from office, the only serious competition at the moment is Joe Biden–a incoherent, babbling shell of the former Vice President who is either enduring chronic sleep deprivation or severe cognitive decline. And not only does the left have to reckon with voting for a Presidential candidate who may or may not be in the early stages of dementia, but also one who has been credibly accused of rape: the allegation came from a former Senate aide to Biden, Tara Reade, and was initially reported on by Ryan Grim at The Intercept, the very same journalist at the same publication which broke the story of Brett Kavanaugh’s accussor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford–an accusation that was seized upon by the Democrats as well as the media in a weeks-long, doomed attempt to prevent Kavanaugh from being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Reade, who initially came forward at the beginning of 2019 to allege that Biden had touched her inappropriately, has now further expounded on her experience as an aide to Senator Biden in the early 1990’s, claiming he penetrated her nonconsensually with his fingers. Recently, a Larry King interview from 1993 has resurfaced wherein Reade’s mother calls in to complain about her daughter’s problems working for a “prominent Senator”. This recent evidence has bolstered the credibility of Reade’s allegation to a degree that cannot be ignored.

A shocking percentage of high-profile Democrats have stayed silent on the allegation since Tara Reid went public with her accusation. Senator Kirsten Gilibrand, who was paramount behind the ousting of Senator Al Fraken, has been remarkably silent. Senators like Kamala Harris, who attempted to use the Brett Kavanaugh hearing as an attempt to grandstand their way into the White House, have been noticeably quiet on the allegations as well. And let’s not forget Elizabeth “Joe Biden shouldn’t be allowed to sell out women” Warren. Apparently, they’re not only okay with the fact that their party’s new face is credibly accused of forcibly penetrating a female staffer with his fingers, but they’re willing to support him openly anyway. Blue no matter who, right?

And it’s not just mainstream Dems who have been unfortunately silent on this increasingly uncomfortable situation. Bernie Sanders, who suspended his campaign on April 8, needs to rescind his endorsement in light of these heinous accusations, certainly if we are to “believe women” as Sanders has implored us all to do. In addition to rescinding his endorsement, Bernie should also consider un-suspending his campaign. In the event that Biden is replaced as the nominee, Bernie should be waiting in the wings as the obvious and only alternative, the sole other Presidential candidate to win a state in this primary cycle.

But despite the collective effort of the Democratic elite and the media to ignore and silence Tara Reade, the allegations don’t seem to be going anywhere, and the online debate surrounding the situation rages on, with people across the internet demanding Biden step down. Biden’s campaign certainly hasn’t been one to capitulate to Twitter mobs or online outrage, but this time the mob has a real, unignorable point: nominating Biden completely exposes the Democrats’ hypocrisy, giving Trump endless fodder for effective attack against the ailing pillar of neo-liberal politics. Because the Dems have leaned so heavily into identity politics in their attempts to distinguish themselves from Trump’s rampant bigotry, it now makes them look like total hypocrites as they nominate a man accused of forcibly penetrating a former female staffer. And even if the allegation were fabricated, there’s a multitude of photos and videos floating around online of Biden touching, sniffing and grabbing women in inappropriate and frankly gross ways that should completely disqualify him from leading the party that defines its opposition to Trump not with policy substance but by characterizing him (accurately) as an unruly, piggish bigot.

After watching the Democratic elite and the media consolidate behind Joe Biden in their ultimately successful bid to stop Bernie Sanders, it’s difficult to believe that they actually care about beating Trump. In Biden they have a woefully incompetent figurehead who’s already spent the last several years swimming through scandal: thanks to the Democrats impeaching Trump in the House, we got to learn all about the brazen, shocking cupporton that not only occured during his stint as Vice President, but that has been going on openly his entire tenure “serving” the public.

If the Democrats wish to save face and avoid seven long months of having their hypocrisies laid bare, they will do the right thing and call on Biden to resign, and either replace him with Sanders or restart the primary, entirely via mail-in ballot. It’s no doubt an unfortunate situation, but the reality becomes increasingly apparent with each day that Joe Biden cannot lead the Demcoratic party into the 2020 election against Donald Trump, especially not with a global pandemic going on in the background. Having already selected Larry Summers as an economic advisor, and having dropped hints recently about recruiting the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick into his administration, Biden’s presidency would no doubt usher in the final stage of corporate supremacy of the market, allowing Wall St. to set its own rules, the banks to get away with almost anything, and the multinational corporations to steal profits from small business, all while they export formerly-American jobs to the exploited developing world.

It is difficult to imagine a worse representation for what the Democratic Party ought to be than Joe Biden, but there ironically may be no better a representation of what the party has actually become: an aging, out-of-touch fixture of The Swamp. But for the people, Biden as President would be a disaster, and a portent of disaster to come for a Democratic party that is actively embracing corporate money over working people, distancing itself from the very working class and rural voters it once courted the most. Joe Biden, a lifelong puppet of the plutocratic elite and accused sexual predator, needs to drop out of the race, and do so now.

Politics is a Racket

In 1935 United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler delivered his landmark speech, War is a Racket. During which he posited that war was “possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable [and] surely the most viscous” racket of them all. But if there is a war, who has ordered our men and women to wage it? Politics both precedes war as a racket and rivals its profitability and perversion.

While it is the case that many politicians and their donors have been enriched beyond their wildest dreams through the racket of war, our public servants are quite eclectic in their methods for personal enrichment. In an oligarchic democracy, the opulent rule not by direct intervention-though that is sometimes the case-but by creating a system where survival is predicated on access to steady streams of capital of which they hold the lock and key. Politicians either conform to the politics of personal profit, or are quickly ousted from Capital Hill.

In a country predicated on protecting the interests of the opulent, it is no surprise that the ethic of enrichment is pervasive amongst those who execute the functions of government. Central to maintaining power and thus the wealth that comes from it, is maintaining a military. As Butler illustrated in his speech and subsequent book by the same name, there are plenty of ways to further financial and militaristic interests, simultaneously, and often those interests are one and the same. In the political debates proceeding the founding of our nation it was argued by James Madison in the Federalist Papers (A series of essays in which Madison and Alexander Hamilton argue for the ratification of the United States Constitution) that the government “ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” And who better to defend the interests of the wealthy than themselves?

America has a long-trodden history of being governed by the affluent elite, during the post revolution it was our so called “founding fathers”, better described as aristocrats dead set against paying taxes to a palace overseas. During the time of Smedley Butler, it was the Andrew Mellons and Herbert Hoovers pulling the political levers of profit, now they are pulled by Steve Mnuchin and Donald Trump. The patrician class has spent nearly a quarter of a millenium perfecting their racket of politics by instituting legislation that ensures our representative democracy dramatically over-represents the interests of the wealthy.

A study from Quartz found that the median net worth of a member of the US Congress in 2015 was north of 1.1 million dollars, with the net worth of the median net worth of a senator coming in at a whopping $3.2 million dollars as opposed to the $900,000 dollar median in the House. Making the Congressional median net worth more than 10 times higher than that of the median American net worth, of $97,000. And of course we needn’t look to history for examples of this rank profiteering from office

Recently, Republican Senator Richard Burr, who garnered national attention and a good bit of positive press from the Blue Dog media after indulging them throughout the red-baiting farce of Russiagate, was recently thrust back into the news cycle. This time the result of audio leaked to NPR from a private country club luncheon on Feb. 27 where Burr explained "there's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history."

In public however, his demeanor was much more reassuring “Luckily, we have a framework in place that has put us in a better position than any other country to respond to a public health threat, like the coronavirus” he said in a statement nearly a month after offloading massive amounts of stock. In March of this year, Propublica reported that Senator Burr “sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market declined, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb 13th in thirty-three seperate transactions.”

It was then later reported that Senator Burr’s brother-in-law, who sat on the National Mediation Board had also been unloading massive amounts of stock options during the same window of time. 3 months news broke from the Los Angeles Times that federal agents had obtained a search warrant for Burr’s personal cell phone and icloud account in an open investigation into whether or not he had profited off of privileged information, a violation of the Obama era Stock Act regulation that prevents congress from using government intelligence they receive for financial gain (Burr was one of only 3 senators to oppose the bill).

It is important to note however, that he is being investigated specifically for insider trading, not for misleading the public in a time of crisis or even for profiting off of the pandemic itself while holding political power. But because he executed the trades specifically while receiving daily private briefings on the looming threat of the virus. Senator Burr is also not the only elected official to come under fire for profiting from the pandemic, Senators Diane Fienstein (D) and Laura Loeffler (R) also drew criticism for offloading stocks following an all senate meeting discussing the threat of the virus.

In the same way a fish would ask, "What is water?" A politician asks, "What is corruption?" It is often most difficult to see that which we are steeped in. It is what allows politicians to blithely ask, “If Washington is corrupt, who are the corrupt politicians? Point them out.” As Mitch McConnel has done before. In many cases the people pointed to will be the Richard Burr’s on the Hill, who's blatant personal enrichment in a time of crisis, an action even Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson skewered Burr for, saying unequivocally that he was “betraying [his] country” during the pandemic.

Little was made however of the heist that was occurring before our very eyes, with the support of Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and even Bernie Sanders when they delivered what is perhaps the single greatest upward transfer of wealth in United States history with the multiple coronavirus relief packages that bailed out corporate America and big business, while only passing the remaining crumbs onto regular Americans and small businesses. The true grift of American politics does not come from insider trading, which is why it is acceptable to be punished. As Matt Taibbi writes in his 2010 book Griftopia, the bubble up and burst economy is “the long con that is breaking America”.

While it is the case that no single actor caused the coronavirus, the bubble system was by no means orchestrated to protect the interests of the poor man in the event of a bust. In fact, the burst bubble is bad for nearly all actors, including the rich. Which is why it is absolutely crucial that they remain in total control of the government and federal reserve. The real racket of politics emerges not from one singular corrupt legislator, acting in their own financial interests, but by a government that is so constructed as to prioritize the interest and well being of the moneyed elite. It is for this reason that after months of both parties publicly downplaying the looming threat of the coronavirus, Congress came to the rescue only when the stock market finally tanked. Suddenly, all of the concern with the deficit, and the protests of “how are we going to pay for it?” was erased and Washington lowered its knickers to let Wall Street run trains on the Federal Reserve.

Without hesitation when the market began to wane, the Fed was chomping at the bit to intervene. Following a sequence of capital injections hroughout the week, first $50 billion followed by another $25 billion 2 days later, when the stock market remained unresponsive The Federal Reserve Bank of New York pumped $1.5 trillion into major banks on March 12, the first multiple massive handouts straight into the hands of the grifter class, who had spent the past decade since the last crash, shoveling any cash on hand into inflating their stock valuation, and ultimately their executive compensation packages.

“Don’t worry”,the taxpayer was assured by their government–this isn’t taxpayer money–it’s simply the United States, a sovereign nation in charge of its own fiat currency, deciding to print more of it. Funny how Modern Monetary Theory only ever applies to the affluent;it would be considered absurd doing the same practice to finance something such Medicare for All, or god forbid eliminating the black cloud of consumer debt, a tremendous burden on the working class that could be settled for approximately $4 trillion dollars. Or conveniently, less than the take of Wall Street’s second heist.

Much was made in the news about $1,200 stimulus checks that were sent out to millions of Americans as a result of the CARE Act, yet less coverage however was devoted to the massive, multi-trillion dollar stock market bailout. A clever bit of legislative maneuvering allowed the Care Act to present itself as a modest, $500 billion bail-out of big business. Within the language of the bill however, is the allowance of $425 billion of the bailout, to be leveraged up to 10 times, bringing the true value of the bailout to over $4.25 trillion.

As David Dayen of The American Prospect writes, the bill’s value well exceeds that which was initially reported, “it’s not a $2 trillion bill, it’s closer to $6 trillion, and $4.3 trillion of it comes in the form of a bazooka aimed at CEOs and shareholders, with almost no conditions attached.” The “almost no conditions” comes in the same form of a lax oversight committee assigned to TARP, meaning if the public is lucky they’ll be able to hear about the massive unpunished fraud committed, well after the funds have been paid out. All the while, nearly 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment and there has been no push from either party’s leadership, to ensure they have access to basic human necessities like shelter and food.

This is a governmental failure on a colossal level, but the racket of American politics is perpetuated by structuring the government like a casino, where the rules of the house are applied only to the rich, leaving everyone else thinking they’re just no good at blackjack. This time, just like every other time, the house got paid, and the patrons lost their ass.

History has repeated itself for the third time since the turn of the millenium, with each economic crash more devastating to the working people, and each handout to corporations more generous. As the public grows more defeated, the rich become more audacious with their racketeering. With their pockets filled with government cash, the vultures of Wall Street have begun to circle their prey, salivating like Pavlov's dogs at the site of new reports that 40% of all small businesses will close as a result of the lockdowns.

Conglomerates that were able to access the hoarded bail out funds will be primed and ready to vacuum up what small businesses remained in an evermore corporatized America. That's not a bug in the bailout, it’s a feature. Once again, corporate America has been given carte blanche permission to begin reinflating their bubble, so long as they wait a mere 6 months to begin senselessly buying back their own stock. This cycle will continue perpetually as long as our representative government is bowed at the feet of donor class. Congress will continue to do the bidding of the hand that feeds them pints of artisanal ice cream and the working people will be left to starve.

Olivier Assayas' 2010 Epic "Carlos" Came A Decade Ahead of Its Time

Over the course of the last decade in America, the rise in the popularity of left politics and the fall in the allergy to subtitled cinema seem to be working in tandem. Considering that, along with the ascension of streaming platforms, it seems as if Olivier Assayas’ epic Carlos arrived a decade ahead of its time. The film functions on multiple levels, both as a character study of Carlos the Jackal as well as a history of the end of the Cold War, using Carlos as a vehicle to explore the zeitgeist and frustration among the far left after their efforts to resist the influence of capitalism had been foiled by the west.

The 6-hour piece was largely bankrolled by television producers–a medium loathed by Assayas–so he went to great lengths to make the film/miniseries as cinematic as possible. Shot on 35mm film, with widescreen formatting and a trend towards long, theatrical cuts as opposed to the more intimate shots with quicker edits in his more recent work, it is equally suited for theatrical presentation as it is streaming. An equally compelling aspect of Carlos is its soundtrack, which is entirely of its era. Assayas initially intended to use The Feelies almost exclusively for the soundtrack, but the band didn’t want their music to be associated with the leftist terrorist plot elements. Instead, the film is balanced with features from the British band The Wire, whose post punk Cold War attitude pays perfect compliment to the film’s stylistic sensibilities.

More of a revolutionary in rhetoric and playboy mercenary in practice, Carlos saw himself as a freedom fighter for the third world like those he emulated. Like many egotists before him, he wanted to mark his place in history, and his concern became his own mythology, his infamy in the press. Assayas described Carlos as “a creature of the media more so than a creature of politics.” However, once he adorned the costume of Carlos, he could never take it off. His fate was sealed after murdering 2 Parisian police officers and a former comrade of his cause.

Cast to helm the daunting part with lines in 5 languages, Edgar Ramirez -- a Venezeulan actor best known before Carlos for his supporting role in Stephen Soderberg’s leftist epic Che -- was a dream cast. Carlos conducted his business all throughout Europe and the Arab world, and the role demanded someone who could convincingly interact with actors from countries on multiple continents. Ramirez's childhood as a military brat bouncing around Europe prepared him impeccably for the role; he is fluent in Spanish, English, German, French, and Italian. He also quickly learned to speak Arabic phonetically for the film, as it was imperative to Assayas that he sound fluent to a native Arabic speaker, as Carlos was known for his excellent Arabic.

The role required Ramirez to undergo extreme physical transformation. Throughout his life, whenever Carlos was forced to sit on his hands for a prolonged period of time, he was prone to spells of Orson Wells-level indulgence. As he notes in the film, idleness does not suit him well. Ramirez’s weight balloons as time passess and Carlos lets himself go almost in direct correlation to the abandonment of his leftist principles. The more his ethics deteriorated, the more he deteriorated physically, ballooning in size in the film’s latter acts.

In the opening act, we are introduced to Ilich Ramirez Sanches, a young, fit, and sharply dressed Venezuelan Marxist. In direct contrast with the leftist norms of the time, when anything opulent or flamboyant was criticized as “petit bourgeois,” his appearance was more playboy socialite than revolutionary, in silk shirts with big bold designer sunglasses. He arrived in Beirut, Libya fed up with the protesting and picketing that dominated the left; he was primed and ready for militance.

It is there he builds his relationship with Waddie Haddad, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization. After gaining the trust and respect of Haddad, Ilich sets out to assemble his own commando of communist revolutionaries in London and carry out attacks on behalf of the PFLP, initially with the goal of discouraging peace agreements between Israel and Palestine. It was during this time Ilich adopted the alias Carlos in honor of the Venezuelan President at the time, Carlos Andres Perez, who famously nationalized the Venezuelan oil industry in the wake of the oil boom of 1974.

Carlos earned the respect of the PFLP orchestrating operations throughout Europe and was tasked with carrying out perhaps the most audacious terrorist act of the 1970’s. In the aftermath of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, tensions were high and the Palestinian cause was in dire straits . Carlos enlisted his team of revolutionaries to take a stand as an act of rebellion for lifting the oil embargo, and to pursue peace talks in the Middle East. But in reality, this was an act of political revenge for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Hussein was allied with the PFLP and offered to pay them handsomely for the deal. Waddie Haddad then hired Carlos and his squadron to execute the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers as an act of retaliation for their country's support for the Kurtish uprising in Baathist, Iraq.

The mission was foiled after the crew was unable to find asylum in Algeria or any nearby friendly countries and the DC-9 jet they demanded could not reach Iraq. Instead of following the instructions from Haddad, Carlos negotiated with Saudi Arabia and Iran who convinced the Algerians to accept the militant’s demands, along with financial dealings to negotiate the release of Saudi and Iranian ministers that they’d set out to execute. He and his team were then granted cover in South Yemen.

It is at this point in the film that it becomes clear to the audience that Carlos is not an idealogue, but a mercenary willing to do the dirty work of any nation willing to cut him a check. Banished from the PFLP after disobeying Haddad, Carlos formed the Organization of Armed Struggle in Budapest, and began doing mercenary work for Iraq, then Syria who provides him and his team with cover until he loses his use to them. Expelled from Syria, he seeks shelter in Sudan, where inevitably he is nabbed by French authorities.

Fellow member of his commando “Arm of the Arab Revolution” Hans Joachim Klein told a French reporter years later that “[Carlos] may have had political motives in the beginning, over time I realized that there were hardly any political motives at all,” he would continue. It was all about building his own mythology, embodied by the media creation of Carlos the Jackal. The more violent an active of terror, the better for his image, thought Carlos. In the same interview, Klein explained Carlos’ theory of massacre: “Violence should be horrible the more violence comes from me [Carlos], the more I am respected and the more they leave me alone.”

Just like Kanye when he said, “Me found bravery in my bravado,” Ilich too found bravery in the confidence he drew from the character Carlos. The more infamous the legend of Carlos grew, the more it fed Ilich the confidence to fearlessly carry out his homicidal ploys. Also like Kanye, Carlos devolved into a figure of style over substance. He was more preoccupied pursuing the glory of martyr and wealth of a mercenary through progressing the Palestinian cause he paid lip service to. Ilich created Carlos with the idea that he would be more than an alias but an alter ego, a character to be played. Perhaps he set out as Ilich, a soldier without a country, and returned Carlos, a killer without a cause. He adorned the adopted costume of a revolutionary, emulating the aesthetic of world renowned freedom fighter Che Guevara, adorning herself in a beret, leather jacket, and growing a goatee. .

The contradictions that defined Carlos were endless. He constantly maintained that he was a freedom fighter against capitalist imperialism, declaring early in the film that his only religion was Marxism. However, not only did he eventually convert to Islam, he constantly abused prostitutes and his wife, and ultimately, he spent his life transporting arms and committing acts of terror to enrich himself, not progress a cause, regardless of the story he told himself. It's these inconsistencies and elements of Carlos’ life Assayas is most interested in.

In spite of this however, the film is presented almost as a line by line attempt at recreating the events that occurred. As a result there is no hand holding for the audience — the film spares no time explaining the geopolitics of the moment and expects the viewer to be familiar with the politics of the Arab Israeli peace process.

After aging a decade, Carlos feels just as cutting edge and exciting. Because of the explosive nature of the story, there was no need to alter the events from the way they unfolded, they were gripping enough. Assayas pieced much of the film’s dialogue together from transcripts of conversations, which is why at the beginning of each of the films’ three parts he includes a note that reads “this film is the result of historical and journalistic research.” Specifically because Assayas chooses to present the events as closely as he could to the way they occurred in history, all of the nuances in the tangled web of geopolitics are transferred in a way that could have never been woven into an original screenplay.

The story is one that is entirely unfamiliar to the American audience and it's not hard to imagine another reality where the nearly 6-hour feature had been cut into 50 minute episodes and would be thriving on Netflix. While it asks a lot of an audience who may not be familiar with the nuances of the politics of the time, the film functions just as well as an exhilarating ride alongside one of the most notorious international terrorists of the Cold War: Carlos the Jackal.

The Scourge of the Bourgeoisie: The Radical Leftist Surrealism of Luis Buñuel

Of the great filmmakers whose work could be considered surrealist–Fellini, Jodorowsky, Lynch–none were as acutely aware of nor as eager to address class in their work as Luis Buñuel. Known today as the father of cinematic surrealism, the Spanish filmmaker first rose to prominence collaborating with fellow enfant terrible Salvador Dalí to create the iconic short film Un Chien Andalou in 1929. Intended to be a shocking act of counter cultural art, it was ironically well received by the elitists it was meant to offend. When instead of being outraged, the bourgeois class was impressed by the avant garde techniques and dreamlike aesthetic conjured by the two young surrealists, Buñuel and Dalí were defeated, feeling that they failed in their mission to shock and offend the sensibilities of polite society. “What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or is about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?”, Buñuel wrote in an edition of La Révolution surréaliste, a popular publication at the time among Paris surrealists.

L’Age d’Or (Age of Gold) was Buñuel’s next film, which he again wrote with Dalí. However, before production began on the film, a rift emerged between the two artists when a stark difference in their politics became apparent. Apparently, Dalí was chiefly interested in offending the Church with blasphemous imagery, whereas Buñuel sought to criticize the entire upper class and make a leftist political statement with his film. Buñuel ultimately won out and directed the film, despite having little knowledge of filmmaking. The result was so shocking and bizarre that it caused extreme controversy at the time of its release in 1930; riots over the sacrilegious imagery erupted, led by right wing, anti-semetic protestors who chanted “kill the Jews” as they stormed the exhibition venue, destroying paintings by Dalí and other surrealists. The rioters ultimately got their way and the film was banned from public presentation, but Buñuel had no doubt succeeded in this latest effort to scandalize high-society.

The film was so controversial in 1930 largely due to its satire of the Catholic Church, but watching it in 2020, what stands out as equally relevant is its skewering of the upper class. A ruthless satire of modern society, specifically targeting the sexually repressive nature of the Church, Age of Gold is filled with imagery that makes apparent Buñuel’s distaste for institutions of power and the bourgeoisie. In a particularly memorable and darkly hilarious scene, a kitchen full of servants burns to death while a gathering of 1-percenters sips cocktails, barely moved by the sight of their servant’s fiery demise. This crude, unsubtle vignette marks an early example of Bunuel’s eagerness to visualize class relations, and though his technique as a filmmaker would evolve extraordinarily over the subsequent five decades, his main thrust as an artist never strayed too far from the political sentiments expressed in Age of Gold: a bitter resentment towards both the bourgeoisie and the Church, the two consistent targets of his caustic satire.

In 1931, Buñuel shocked the elite again with the release of Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread), a staged ethnographic piece documenting the people of the Las Hurdes region of Spain. The documentary showcases the extreme poverty of the region, openly depicting the disease, disfigurement, famine and desperation of its citizens. Political in its intent, Land Without Bread reads like a statement about how certain areas of Spain had been left behind, their residents abandoned by modern civilization. Like Age of Gold, Land Without Bread was banned from distribution, as it seemingly embarrassed both the Spanish government at the time of its release as well as the conservative government that later took over the country.

Buñuel’s politics and worldview were molded dramatically by the Spanish Civil War, which was going on concurrent to his own rise in artistic prominence. Moved by the rise of the far-right Falange party in Spain, Buñuel joined the Communist party in 1931 and spent the war years of 1936-1939 as a devoted employee of Spain’s leftist Republican government, honing his cinematic techniques by making propaganda films. Meanwhile, Salvadore Dalí found himself aligned with the far-right Falange. While Buñuel remained resolute in his opposition and eventually left Spain, Dalí had become a sympathizer of Franco and the Catholic Church.

Buñuel’s career spanned 5 decades, and would see him work in Spain, the United States, Mexico and France. He made films of all varieties and concerning many subject matters, perfecting his technique and ability to use film as a method of storytelling and political statement. Buñuel never seemed interested in surrealism as a form of fantasy or escapism from the realities surrounding him; for him, it was always a tool to illustrate his worldview and philosophy in a manner both strikingly explicit and uniquely his own.

In 1962’s The Exterminating Angel, made in Mexico, Buñuel returned to a thesis he realized many times throughout his filmography: that the rich are little more than primitive animals in disguise. In the film, a bougie group of aristocrats meet for a dinner party, but when the meal is over, they simply do not, and cannot leave. This goes on for hours, then days, then weeks, until even these aristocrats–society’s most elegant and sophisticated–are reduced to savage beasts, unable to control their primitive wants and needs. An allegory for the elite class of Franco’s Spain, The Exterminating Angel represents Buñuel’s satire at its very most savage and unforgiving.

Luis Buñuel never abandoned surrealism as a form of storytelling and expression, nor did he ever abandon his leftist values as a filmmaker. In the twilight of his career, Buñuel wrote and directed a series of masterpieces, including Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967), the iconic Catherine Deneuve-starring tale of a French housewife who becomes a daytime prostitute. In Belle de Jour, as most all Buñuel films, class dynamics lie prominent in the background of everything. The film’s ultimate point, that an upper class lifestyle is inherently a bit boring, and would leave anyone desiring escape, is one of his least scathing or sardonic. 1970’s Tristana, however, which likewise starred Deneuve, is one of Buñuel’s most overtly socialist and feminist films, and one of his works most due for a rediscovery. Notable for its provocative deconstruction of oppressive patriarchal structures prevalent in society, Tristana is one of Buñuel’s most unfairly ignored films.

In his “Search for Truth” trilogy, the director came into his final, most absurdist form. Hungry for answers and eager to offend, Buñuel made The Milky Way in 1969, a cinematic pontification on religion which completed his career-long obsession with satirizing the Church and questioning the every inherent value and cultural tradition of Chrisitianity. Then came The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972 and Phantom of Liberty (the title of which is a reference to the Communist Manifesto) in 1974, two career-defining masterpieces which serve as syntheses of Buñuel’s favorite themes and ideas. This trilogy of subversive classics, in addition to his final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, comprise a final act of Buñuel’s career that perfectly concludes the director's body of work. In these films, the rich and “sophisticated” are lampooned to no end, painted as dumb, out-of-touch elitists whose servants refer to them as “master” and whose affairs Buñuel finds endless joy in probing and deriding. Though many of these later-period films seem more concerned with pontification and searching for answers than they do in casting judgements or making bold moral declarations, Buñuel’s politics were always at the forefront of his cinema, and color the moral fabric of his art to a foundational degree.

From his years as a Paris surrealist provoking the elite to the end of his career making distinguished fine-art films, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist cinema was always defined by an overtly proletarian perspective. It’s this class-conscious lens, as well as his relentless satire of the Church’s relationship to culture, which makes Buñuel’s work so enduring to this day, especially in the United States, where economic disparity between classes is at outrageous levels and the ruling class wields increasing power over a working class no longer able to determine their own livelihood or future. Surrealism was a radical artistic movement, and it’s fitting that one its founders was likewise a revolutionary, always aware of and eager to destroy society’s most oppressive institutions.

“Spring Breakers”: Harmony Korine’s Intoxicating Vision of the American Dream

Korine’s wild tale of debauchery exposes, and revels in, unbridled excess and capitalism

In Spring Breakers, the American Dream is envisioned as a hazy, neon-lit, Floridian fantasia where lost souls embrace the allure of excess and the culture of hustling at all costs. Harmony Korine’s 2013 modern classic takes on the meaning of entrepreneurship and capitalism in an intoxicating and often ugly way that only the Gummo director could muster, and it’s precisely his penchant for sun-soaked debauchery, radiantly shot on 35mm film by Benoît Debie, that makes the film so unforgettable and addictive.

Starring Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens of Disney Channel fame, as well as James Franco and Gucci Mane, the film is quite meta in its examination of American pop and celebrity culture, especially as it relates to youth and the experience of growing up. Gomez and Hudgens, along with Ashley Benson and Rachael Korine comprise the central quartet of college girls stricken with wanderlust — the four characters are seemingly representative of different personality types, or components of the human ego.

James Franco’s Alien, a Southern Florida rapper and gangster who takes the four spring breakers under his wing, is the personification of unfettered capitalism. Garish in appearance and unapologetic in his personality, Alien explains to the girls at one point in the movie, “This a dream y'all. This the American dream... that's it, I did it. Most my brothers and sisters... they dead. They got murdered. I'm the last one standing. I'm as bad as they is. This is my dream. I made it come true. This is the fuckin' American dream.” Alien is just as pure a capitalist as any Wall St. banker, and is just as savage in his efforts to get ahead. But he’s also more noble, in that he embraces the sinful, and has clearly come to terms with the human suffering that comes in the wake of his success and excess. “Some people? They wanna do the right thing? I like doing the wrong thing! Everyone's always tellin' me, ‘yo, you gotta change…’ I'm about stacking change ya'll!”

With the borderline sociopathic and hyper-consumerist Alien, Korine perfectly personifies American capitalism, and visualizes the belligerent and unforgiving reality of the American Dream. Never one to be subtle, Korine ratchets up the insanity and makes his point in a blatant, but not entirely un-nuanced manner: what makes Spring Breakers so pleasurable and fun is that is refuses to outright condemn its ridiculous characters, or even the very spirit of capitalism that it’s so clearly pointing out. Instead, Korine dives head first into the debauchery and wallows in the excess for the film’s entire runtime, rarely ever letting up. To watch and enjoy Spring Breakers is an experience sinful in-an-of-itself, and as Korine oscillates between critiquing hedonism and celebrating it, many viewers have reported a somewhat icky feeling following the film, feeling they’ve experienced something out of their moral comfort zone.

It’s this feat which makes Spring Breakers such a stunning cinematic achievement, despite masquerading as a shallow rauch-fest.. Upon its initial release, the film was met with more derision and misunderstanding than the appreciation it deserved, as many viewers unaware of Korine’s style/sense of humor probably just saw the film as an indulgent, exploitative mess. Knowing Korine’s comedic sensibilities leads one to conclude this mismarketing was less of a misstep than it was an artistic decision, and he probably relished in the apoplectic fury that the film triggered in the more puritanical audience members.

Still as unapologetic as he was after being caught rifling through Merly Streep’s purse red handed backstage on David Letterman as a 20 year old, Korine has no problem with his art being severely misunderstood and misinterpreted. He’s always been more than comfortable to sit back and watch the critics and audience alike try to make heads or tails of his work’s meaning, and try to determine exactly where the auteur himself stands on the moral issues called into question by his work.

It’s precisely this attitude which makes his work so fascinating, and his habit of embracing seedier characters and environments keeps his work unpredictable and thought-provoking. Depending on your own personal tastes, Spring Breakers is either an acid-trip to heaven or a slog through hell, and Korine has no interest in dumbing down his unfiltered vision of the cut-throat, blood-soaked American Dream, regardless of what side of that line you may fall.

In a Time of Outward Chaos, The Midnight Gospel Looks to Comfort from Within

With The Midnight Gospel, Netflix makes it clear they’re willing to take chances, and who better to take a chance on than Duncan Trussel, a comedian who rose to prominence as a regular guest during the golden era of the Joe Rogan Podcast? The new series, a collaborative effort with Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward, seems like the natural creative progression for Trussel, the dreamy, stoner comedian who’s found a following online in his own right for his metaphysical brand of drug-induced humor and trippy conversation.

Structurally, there are few shows like The Midnight Gospel. Dialogue is hyper-conversational, with the show itself participating in the evolution of the oral tradition it reveres. A televised stream of conscious animation, each episode functions like a philosophy crash course dreamt up by TA’s on acid. In the way that stream of conscious music produces a flow of feelings that are delivered in an uninterrupted current of thought. It directly challenges what television is as a medium by abdicating any allegiance to a fourth wall and blurring the line between creator, cast, and character.

At times it is even unclear whether the guest on the “spacecast” is addressing Trussel as Clancy the character, or Trussell the actor and show's creator. Throughout the entirety of the season's final episode, in which Trussell interviews his own mother, she repeatedly refers to him as Duncan. This violation of character and storyline would’ve seemed unthinkable in the past, but because of the show's free flowing, avant garde structure, it feels natural. All bets were already off.

The plot of each episode serves more as a set table than the main dish, which is the dialogue between the protagonist and his guest. Each episode of the series begins with the protagonist Clancy, an adventurer and host of the spacecast, Midnight Gospel. The show's eight episodes revolve around the spacecast interviews Clancy conducts via his cheekily named used universe simulator, where he travels to different realities with his guest, ranging from celebrity addiction specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, to Trussel’s own mother.

The show greets even the most dire of human foibles with an ear of understanding instead of shame. Each episode as Clancy searches for places to visit, more and more have been destroyed due to “operator error”. Throughout the entire season, Clancy is constantly being warned by his “used universe machine'' -itself a tongue in cheek reference to climate change- that he is slowly dying. Clancy’s response “you’re not dying, you’re a machine” indicates that Trussell himself recognizes his own reluctance to accept the earth is collapsing.

In a time of perpetual confinement The Midnight Gospel grants its audience permission to consider the vast possibilities, be they probable or not. Life is hard, and it’s getting harder. In the midst of a pandemic, eluding the interminable racket of the news cycle, while confined to your home with what seems to be necessary information being spat at us constantly. Part of the beauty of the show is it’s lack of concern by anything that could be described as a current event, instead it occupy’s it’s mental space with the vast wonders of eternity.

What’s made long form podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience and Trussel’s own Duncan Trussell Family Hour so popular, are the large swaths of Americans who have been starved of interpersonal connection. Millions of people have religiously begun tuning in to listen to a group of buddies smoke joints together and talk shit. This should serve to all of us as a deep reminder of what is lacking in the lives of so many. Something as simple and as human as conversation has become a coveted commodity, and is so essential to each of us that opting for an artificial substitute is favorable to abstention.

In the same way that it’s unsurprising that those who can’t get laid are drawn to pornagraphy, people who are lonely are drawn to podcasts.Trussel is acutely aware of the fact that we use our conversations and connection with our friends to escape the chaos of our reality. "Meeting Reality on Reality's Terms" as the protagonist Clancy prognosticates. The beauty and brilliance of the series stems from Trussel’s ability to seize that extremely human element of podcasting and transpose it into animated television. Just as his good buddy Rogan was a trailblazer in podcasting, Trussel may find himself a trailblazer in animated television. His first effort is truly one of a kind.

Democracy Dies without Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked-choice voting is the pro-democracy electoral system America needs to break the two-party duopoly, and Lisa Savage’s Green bid for the Senate in Maine illustrates its viability.

Voting is as sacred an American right as any, and is probably the most important step in participating in a democracy. Politicians like Stacy Abrams form PACs and organizations dedicated to protecting the right to vote, often fueled by multi-million dollar cash infusions from oligarchs like Mike Bloomberg, and endlessly profess about the importance and value of voting. Yet here in America, we ostensibly are forced to choose between two options time and time again when we go to the ballot box, regardless of whether or not said options are compatible with our personal politics or even our moral compass. A system that forces this binary perpetuates an illusion of choice; the two party system is simply not an instrument of a healthy democracy, it is the active and intentional opponent of one.

Luckily, there is an antidote to the rigid, seemingly insurmountable-by-design two-party stranglehold on our political system: ranked choice voting. Though the concept has gained some popularity in recent years, its Democratic value is actually playing out right out, in the Senate race in Maine to potentially replace incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.

Susan Collins, a so-called moderate Republican who has grown increasingly more conservative since Trump took over her party and proved that many Republican voters actually reward hardline conservatism: candidates who spew brash anti-immigrant rhetoric, riddled with vulgarity and a disdain for progressive social values are actually preferred by many Republicans, especially in Maine, over the “polite” conservatism of past GOP candidates like Mitt Romney, the current crossover darling of MSNBC from the corporate right-wing. Despite maintaining a facade of “concern”, Collins has voted in line with her colleagues to fulfill Trump’s agenda, including voting with her fellow Republicans to appoint Brett Kavaunaugh to the Supreme Court, destroying any notion of Collins being a “feminist” Republican.

Maine is a unique state electorally, and with a potential change in tide looming on the horizon as the President’s approval rating tanks in the critical months leading up to November’s election, Collins is among the most vulnerable Republican Senators. Many Mainers are fed up with her faux-concern about the President’s vulgar, bigoted behaivor, and some genuine centrists were lost by Collins when she sided with Trump in his worst moments, like the Kanvanaugh appointment.

Considering just how vulnerable the Senate seat is, mainstream wisdom would say to vote blue and replace Collins at all cost—“any Democrat is by definition better than a pro-Trump Republican”. But in Maine, voters sick of Susan Collins don’t have to “vote Blue no matter who”. They don’t have to plug their noses and vote for someone who might be funded by some combination of big pharma, the health insurance industry and the military industrial complex. Someone who was likely handpicked by Chuck Schumer (names like Amy McGrath, John Hickenlooper and Elliot Engle are the first to mind) and was propped up by DSCC cash at the expense of anyone else in the primary who’s not already entrenched in corruption or isn’t an established fundraiser. Because in Maine, they have Ranked Choice Voting.

“The votes are tabulated in rounds, with the lowest-ranked candidates eliminated in each round until there are only two candidates left. The one who is determined to have received the majority of the votes (more than 50%) in the final round is declared the winner” according to the Maine Bureau of Corporations, Elections & Commissions. Unfortunately, state Republicans seem to have successfully blocked RCV from the Presidential ballot, so it will only be in effect in the Senatorial, Congressional and other down-ballot races. But for independents, Libertarians and Greens running in those down-ballot races in this election and future elections, it’s what could enables their victory.

It’s only because of the ingeniously-designed electoral system of ranked choice voting that Lisa Savage, an anti-war organizer, former small business owner and recently-retired schoolteacher, decided to run for the Senate to replace Susan Collins. Savage isn’t a Democrat, and wouldn't run as one. But when the Maine Green Party came around to recruit Savage as their party’s nominee, Savage decided it was a journey worth embarking on—after all, Collins is the most unpopular Senator in the country. In any other of the 50 states, not only would running Green for Senate be an exhausting uphill battle financially, but you would also risk “spoiling” the race–allowing the Republican candidate to win by fracturing the leftist voting pool–and then incurring the wrath and blame from the pro-two-party media and the virtuous, loud-mouth Democrats who are quicker to shame third-party voters than those who don’t vote at all. But since Maine has ranked choice voting, none of this is a concern.

When you vote ranked choice style, you literally rank the candidates on the ballot in order of preference. So presumably, many Green voters would write in the name of the Democrat on the ballot after their number one option, which would of course be Lisa Savage in the case of the Maine Senate race. Then, if Savage falls short, those votes would instead go to the Democrat, preventing the leftist third party from “stealing” votes from the Democrat and “spoiling” the race. I put the terms “stealing” and “spoiling” in quotes, because they are elements of dumb, condescending framing that is used largely by pundits who shame third party voters.

If Maine didn’t have ranked choice voting, a lot of voters probably wouldn’t feel comfortable voting for Savage, because they’ve been so indoctrinated by the notion that doing so could only be counterproductive, for the aforementioned reasons. But RCV allows people to vote their conscience without having to fear hurting the causes they care to advance, and it allows people to vote for who they please without having to worry about “wasting” their vote on a candidate who probably wouldn’t garner more than a few percentage points in a traditional, non-RCV election. It liberates voters from the asinine and anti-democratic notion that they have to perpetually vote for one of two options in order to save the country for a greater of two evils.

Ranked choice voting is a danger to both Republicans and Democrat lawmakers, because it threatens to expose the whole false dichotomy that the two parties have been forcing on voters for years. It threatens the two parties because they are both extensions of the corporate establishment which rules this country with an iron fist and maintains power by maintaining the illusion of choice; if there’s always just two choices, then it doesn’t matter how rotten they are as long as the two teams can sufficiently get their respective voting blocks to keep believing that just this one more time they’ll vote for the “lesser of two evils”, and can keep hoping for a Bernie-style agent of change to come around next election cycle, infiltrate the party from within and save us all from the increasingly tight grip that the multinational corporate donor-class has on our government.

But as Bernie proved twice – even enough people-power, passion and enthusiasm to fill literal stadiums is not enough to overcome the machine that is the Democratic Party, working in tandem with the corporate media to smear, suppress and destroy the progressive, anti-corporate movement on the left. Even when Bernie decided to drop the “independent” act and play ball with the DNC – whole-heartedly endorsing Hillary, going on a “unity tour” with Tom Perez, etc. – they still worked overtime to propagandize voters against him and scare people when he ran again in 2020 – the Southern rural and black communities in particular – into voting against their own interests in fear of losing to Donald Trump.

When Bernie’s campaign was crushed, the Democratic establishment crushed the hopes of young voters across the nation along with it. Voters who believed that change via electoral politics was possible and that the rapacious capitalists profiteering off of health care, medicine and basic human rights would be forced out of business by a nationalized health insurance program brought about by a Sanders administration. The day Bernie dropped out, the stocks for major health insurance companies surged. Humana, United Health, CVS and their fellow corporate compatriots breathed a deep sigh of relief, knowing damn well that their inhumane, immoral racket would continue unchecked and unchallenged under a Biden administration — after all, they funded his pathetic campaign and stood by him even when his chances looked dismal and there were far preferable, more exciting and dynamic candidates in the field.

“I think the Green party is a much more comfortable home for the left… I would not be comfortable in the Democratic party, and nor do I actually believe it when they act progressive in the runup to elections to try to herd all the lefties into the fold,” Lisa Savage told us when she joined us in conversation on a recent episode of The Vanguard Podcast. Thanks to ranked choice voting, the Green party has a serious chance of gaining a presence in the United States Senate via Lisa Savage, which would be huge for the Green party’s visibility, and could also foster a national awareness of and conversation about third party politics. America needs ranked choice voting, or whatever semblance of a democracy we have left is quite simply a meaningless one.

We Can't Allow the Corporatization of BLM to Define the Movement.

Corporate America wants you to know that they support #BLM. But corporate capitalism is directly at odds with a vision of equality.

I want to admire Colin Kaeppernick, because Colin Kaepernick did something very admirable. He stood up to the NFL, one of America’s most beloved, familiar institutions, and caused a massive years-long scandal, but also a conversation, by taking a knee during the national anthem. It was a simple gesture, a peaceful protest against police brutality that was about as couth as could be in comparison to some of the more intense demonstrations we’ve seen lately, and the crazed reactions to his protest were gloriously ironic considering how the cultural right claims to uphold freedom of speech at any cost. By standing up to the NFL and being subsequently blacklisted from the league, Kaepernick became an instant martyr of sorts for the Black Lives Matter movement, and there is no doubt that his peaceful protest was highly effective in bringing attention to police brutality and speaking a national dialog around the existence of racism in all levels of society.

In 2018, when Nike signed Colin Kaepernick on as new spokesperson about 2 years after he was benched by the 49ers, it was a cool moment because of how Kaepernick had seemingly been jobless since the NFL debacle — it felt satisfying that at least one major brand in America had the back of this man who was clearly cast out of his preferred profession because of his speech. With all the sexy photoshoots and moody monochrome stills of Kaepernick, it was easy enough to push the thought that Nike is hardly an enterprise of equality, or even a business that adheres to any labor standards whatsoever, to the back of the mind. But in fact, it wouldn’t be exaggeration to say that Nike perputratres and benefits from slavery – yes, literal human slavery – to this day.

A recent report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute describes “A factory in eastern China that manufactures shoes for US company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences and police guard boxes” that employees Uyghur Muslims in China. The Uyghurs are among the most oppressed ethnic groups by the Chinese government, with many human rights groups even accusing the government of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing (many such allegations can be found in the ASPI report).

Clearly, though, it was easy enough for society to overlook this dark reality and celebrate on Kaepernick’s behalf anyway — surely he was just cashing out to make up for the lack of NFL money, and surely he was deserving of that, right? It is easy enough to see celebrity spokespeople as simply an instrument of a larger, more complex institution, which isn’t exactly inaccurate. It’s not like Kaepernick has any say over Nike’s horrific labor practices… Right?

Well, not exactly. But it does bring the conversation exactly back to where it began: human rights, specifically as they relate to a massive company. Colin Kaepernick protested the state-sponsered murder of innocent black Americans, and he did so resolutely, refusing to waver even when his career was in jeopardy. And mind you, this was while Obama was President, when it was slightly less obvious the extent to which racism still existed in this country and when many were pretending they lived in a post-racial America (at the time, BLM was not necessarily the safe, corporate-friendly position to take as it is now in the age of Trump). So, it does seem slightly hypocritical to go get paid by a company with equally problematic – albeit less domestic – human rights quandaries, without so much as a peep of protest directed toward said problematic practices.

With all that said, it was easy enough to overlook these uncomfortable details and move on. Nothing could take away the bravery of Kaepernick’s initial protest, and he was already quickly becoming the Most Handsome Man in the Movement. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder this year, which sparked a national uprising, some have even called Kaepernick a modern day civil rights leader, perhaps even akin to Muhammad Ali or even Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just yesterday, however, the news broke that Kaepernick has signed a massive “first-look” deal with Disney:

“Under terms of the pact, announced Monday, Disney and Ra Vision will emphasize scripted and unscripted stories that deal with race, social injustice and the quest for equity, and work to showcase directors and producers of color. Disney said the agreement would extend across its units, including Walt Disney Television, ESPN, Hulu, Pixar and The Undefeated, an ESPN venue that focuses on matters of race in sports,” according to a report from Variety.

This news was, of course, met with celebration and fawning praise from across the Internet. Praise not only for Kaepernick, but also for Disney. What a bold, progressive move from America’s biggest and most beloved mega-corporation! How exciting that black culture will soon be gobbled up by Mickey Mouse and digested through long tract of corporate boardrooms that will eventually result in the dumbing-down and gentrification of everything unique, sacred or artisanal about black expression — the same thing that happens to just about everything once-special that Disney gets its grubby hands on.

People celebrating this news are pointing to how positive it is that Disney, which controls around 40% of all seen media in America, will be telling Keappernick’s story and is committed to platforming black creators. But they point this out without a hint of irony—as if it’s totally acceptable or okay that any one company has become so dominant—as if it’s just how it's supposed to be that one mega-corp has the power to grant representation to an entire people.

And if you thought Nike was a problematic company… Disney is also not above sweat-shop labor to produce its cheap, plastic merchandise which you can purchase at exorbitant prices from their theme parks, as well as their garish Disney Stores in cities like Paris or Los Angeles. They do this while simultaneously destroying small businesses across the country, constantly threatening small cinemas and drive-ins by forcing them to play their terrible films for longer than necessary, by gobbling up beloved properties old and new, and by paying their workers not nearly enough to work in coronavirus-infested parks, or on movies and shows that only celebrities and producers will see any serious compensation from. The entertainment industry is notoriously exploitative, but Disney is a cut above the rest, perhaps the most innovatively cruel in their practices. They recently furloughed 100,00 employees, all while protecting $1.5 trillion of assets for bonuses for the top executives. Disney is a disgustingly bloated company that is a textbook example of what happens when a government allows capitalism to flourish unfettered, unchecked and untaxed.

It’s no wonder that companies like Nike and Disney are desperate to hire someone as supposedly progressive as Colin Kaepernick, someone who makes bold assertions such as likening the 4th of July to “a celebration of White Supremacy”. Multinational mega-corporations love to be associated with any movement that makes them look virtuous while allowing them to maintain their insidious business practices behind the scenes. In fact, such displays of virtue actually make it easier for them to continue said practices, because of all the praise lauded on them by influencers, celebrities, and by a culture at-large which rewards virtue-signaling over practically anything of actual substance.

And this is exactly why Colin Kaeperinick working for Nike and Disney is not only problematic, but it also makes Kaepernick complicit in their immoral capitalistic racket by helping them appear progressive and humanistic. By doing so, he is basically the token black man who comes into a racist company and “fixes” everything with corporate-approved techniques so that the company can say “everything’s fine!” and then go back to business as usual. And by doing so, he cheapens the entire struggle for human rights and solidarity amongst the lower classes, which are oppressed by a common oppressor: corporate capitalism and the caste system it has created of masters and worker bees. Essentially, and in a massive twist of irony, Kaepernick has gone from protesting the oppression of peoples to perpetuating it.

If you think I am going too far in my rhetoric, simply ask yourself: would Martin Luther King, Jr. or Muhammad Ali ever agree to work for Disney? These men devoted their lives not only to racial justice but also to fighting capitalism and the inequalities that it furthers: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.” Capitalism, especially multinational corporate capitalism, is simply antithetical to a vision of equality, and it has no place in any movement for justice.

By working for exploitive multinational corporations, Kaepernick not only hinders Dr. King’s own stated agenda, but also furthers the degradation of the American Dream itself. Over 40% of small businesses say they’ll be forced to close following the COVID-19 pandemic, and it seems people’s options are increasingly limited to working for unethical corporations like Nike, Amazon and Disney, companies that all claim to support equality. At least here in America we get to work in their sterile office building and marketing firms, instead of their filthy sweatshops in East Asia where slavery isn’t just still occuring; it’s the fucking business model.

Where The Fuck Is Our 15 Hour Work Week

In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that technological innovation and automation would lead to such increased productivity that the standard work week would be reduced from 40 hours to a mere 15 — a fantasy to the millions of Americans working multiple low wage jobs just to make it by. Instead, people are working now more than ever. What was the cause for this massive miscalculation? Was there not innovation in technology? There was. Were there not great increases in productivity? There were. A PEW Research Center study revealed that as U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared, output has grown. Surely we don't need to work more if we are thinning our workforce and increasing output. Why do American’s spend more time working at their jobs now, than they did 90 years ago when Keynes made his predictions?

The most common story told is that Keynes didn’t account for the rapacious consumerism of Americans, that what he imagined as being a suitably good life just wasn’t enough for us. We wanted to compete for things like Yeezy shoes and backyard swimming pools. American’s desires grew with the economy.

Author and Anthropologist Ben Graeber offers a different perspective, however, in his book Bullshit Jobs. He argues instead that organizing work in this fashion “isn't economic: it's moral and political.” He continues to make the case that the ruling class has made the decision that a population that is well cared for and given too much idle time is “mortal danger” and as such they must be occupied with meaningless jobs. He then goes on to list the hundreds of highly paid and meaningless administrative positions belonging to the folks that inhabit the office buildings that create the Manhattan skyline.

In the time of Covid, the lack of importance of the managerial class in the function of society is laid bare. Before the nationwide shutdowns there was never any question that the PMC’s were going to be able to continue to perform their work from home, they don’t really do anything anyway. Going to meetings, writing reports, meeting about the reports you’ve written, are all things one can still pretend are important contributions to society over a Zoom call. Leaving plenty of time to bring bottles of wine into the shower or whatever the hell they’ve been up to.

As the corporate machine attempts to define a new normalcy in a country that continues to be ravaged by the covid-19 pandemic, they are forced to re-evaluate the way the workforce is structured. The entire national workforce is restructuring fast and it’s high time workers unite to make their voices heard on the matter.

During the Democratic primary, Andrew Yang ran a quite popular insurgent campaign warning Americans of the dangers of automation stealing American jobs. However, despite the fevered warnings from silicon valley moguls like Elon Musk, robots are not sentient, and they are unlikely to become so any time soon. So how could they then steal anything? What is often described as theft is essentially just a dramatic hoarding of resources; the robots will be privately owned and thus the profits they generate stockpiled by the wealthy, and the poor are left with no jobs like some sort of Ayn Randian daydream.

Here the catastrophe is that instead of channeling the increased production efficiency that emerged from the technological advancements of the last century into allowing people to work less work, we’ve hollowed out the American workforce, creating a class of corporate oligarchs and poshe paper pushers who do little-to-no work at all and kept working the proletariat into the ground regardless of the improvements in productivity.

However, there doesn’t seem to be any frantic worry that software will one day replace the class of posh paper pushers? There’s a very strange sociological occurrence taking place in America, now that our entire economy is built on what Marx would call “fictitious capital” aka a speculative financial economy, where wealth is derived from speculating on wealth. Whereas by and large, the only professions in which anyone actually does or makes anything, are looked down upon as if it's low-class work, work better suited to be done by a machine.

According to a 2015 Yougov poll, nearly a quarter of all employed Americans find their jobs to be totally void of any substantive contribution to society. This growing mass of workers who collect paychecks and possess a fancy title but don't necessarily create any real value, often fetch the highest salaries and surest sense of job security. All the while living in a society where teachers and home care providers, roles our society is in desperate need of, often end up on food stamps.

As someone who has had the personal misfortune of sitting through hours of college BA courses and being served the capitalist kool aid in mass quantities, based on all theories of a capitalist economy presented to me, shouldn’t a functional market with a dire deficiency in an essential role be driving the salary of those professions through the roof until they are filled by market demand? However in spite of the spike in demand for people in the care professions or agriculture, vital professions in a functioning society, the people are forced to endure a life of poverty, the market hasn’t boosted their pay one bit. Just one of the many compoundings cracks in the hull of capitalist leviathan, and those cracks must be exploited.

This presents the left with a unique opportunity to bring new supporters into the fold by introducing a bold proposal to cut the American work week in half. The thing is, Keynes’ prediction wasn’t wrong in the sense that he foresaw a lack of need in the future for people to work for 40 hours a week. He was however wrong that it would occur naturally. The structure of the American economy is broken, but it is not too late to fix it if we make our voices and demands heard.

Through all of this it is imperative we remember that just as the economy did not produce the 8 hour day or the 40 hour work week naturally, it will not produce the 15 hour work week. It must be fought for and won by organized labour. Following the Civil War, the National Labor Union took up the cause of the eight hour workweek. Their slogan “Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay.” rings just as true as it did over a century ago, little has changed for the American worker in that sense.

The NLU along with many other organizations in the labour movement, held strikes across the nation where workers refused to raise a hammer and massive amounts of pressure was put on Congress to pass universal legislation to limit the working hours for the entire labour force, not just women and children, which had largely been implemented in the past. After much struggle in 1886, the government created an 8-hour workday for Federal Government employees, with many states adopting similar legislation.

It wasn’t until more than 50 years later, following the single most catastrophic economic collapse in American history, that Congress would pass legislation limiting the American workweek to 40 hours per week after the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Which again, like the eight hour work day, was not born out of some economic necessity, but by a concerted, collected effort by organized labour activists to demand it. In the decades following the New Deal, organized labour was quite literally beaten out of the culture using brutal tactics.

Just as the economic upheavals that occurred in the wake of both the Civil War and Great Depression created the societal conditions ripe for a groundswell of action amongst organized labour coalitions, so too does the post Covid-19 economy. Following the estimated closure of more than 40% of small businesses nationwide, Amazon “ballooned by over $90 billion to record highs since mid-February, adding $5 billion to the fortune of founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos.” according to Reuters.

The American economy has been permanently altered by the lingering effects of the widespread shutdowns and continued social distancing measures. The time is ripe for the left to organize with the American working class, the remaining doers of our society, and demand a permanent restructuring of society. Picking up the same mantra of NLU almost a century later to demand an economy that works for its workers, reducing the hours and increasing the pay.

As we confront the collapse of our economy, we must demand the construction of a new system that considers the needs of the many before the needs of the few. A society that lives in fear of a day when humans no longer have to spend their days tirelessly working is a fundamentally broken one. Instead of campaigning for a paltry 2 thousand a month in exchange for presumably lifelong unemployment, the working class deserve stable, fulfilling jobs that offer competitive, full time pay, at half the hours. It can be done as Keynes predicted, but the market won’t provide it. The working class must forcibly seize the 15 hour work week.

Look At All These Slave Masters Posing On Your Dollar

The Thirteenth Amendment says that slavery's abolished (shit)

Look at all these slave masters posin' on yo' dollar-RTJ

The myth of America is weathered and worn, and like all things destined to crumble, it erodes slowly at first, then seemingly all at once. Just when we thought Joe Biden couldn’t make a more ludicrous, ahistorical comment than he had already in this election cycle, he crawled out of his basement only to, in a very Trumpian fashion, reconstruct reality to suit his agenda and subsequently shove his foot in his mouth.

Just Wednesday in a Town Hall, the former Vice President stated that as a nation, “We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. [Trump’s] the first one that has.” An absolutely absurd notion that is quickly dispelled after one opens their wallet and takes a long gander at the slave masters and purveyors of brutal genocide who pose proudly on their currency.

In the weeks after the nation saw an outpour of citizens flooding the streets to demand that we radically alter our racist police force, Biden attacks his opponent while erasing the extensive, pernicious, and emphatically racist policies that predate the formal foundation of our nation. They are deeply integrated into every level of our government, from local municipalities to the Oval Office and there has been absolutely no point in the history of the nation where that was not the case.

Even predating our revolution, historical revision has been an absolute necessity in order to maintain the mythology of America. The myth of a virtuous nation that is home to all who seek refuge and freedom has been fabricated little by little since its founding. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, for example, the racist Dixiecrats lobbied for the constructions of the monuments honoring Confederate soldiers as patriotic guardians of states’ rights and not fierce supporters of the right to brutalize and enslave.

Now, as we see widespread calls for their long overdue destruction, it is high time we reconcile the faces we see everyday. From George Washington to Benjamin Franklin (yes, he too owned slaves), our currency is stamped almost exclusively with the ugly mugs of white slaveholding aristocrats. Americans are instilled with a veneration for our founding fathers through a massive propaganda campaign, otherwise known as history class. In a quite Orwelian fashion, our history books make heroes and martyrs of founding fathers, ardent defendants of freedom and equality.

Often times school-issued history books quickly gloss over the horrorific genocide of the indigenous peoples who freely roamed the land our forefathers claimed for themselves and viciously attempted to eradicate all who occupied it before them. Imprinting Andrew Jackson’s face on our twenty dollar bill is in no way different than Germany imprinting the face of Adolf Hitler on their currency 100 years after his rise to power and giving the justification that it is important to remember our history, the standard justification employed by those vying to keep the south decorated with Confederate monuments.

Why is the lunacy of emblazoning a tyrant like Hitler so easily accepted, while the understanding that our forefathers were also genocidal maniacs whose every decision was no doubt tainted by their deeply rooted anglo-christian supremacist orthodoxy remains entirely separate from their iconography? The men we honor on the face of our national currency, and with sparse exceptions, national monuments, are slaveholding aristocrats whether or not they adorned a Confederate uniform. Just as flawed as the argument to continue honoring the likes of Robert E. Lee is one that continues to revere that of Andrew Jackson, who, in addition to owning some 150 slaves, also signed the Indian Removal Act and forcibly uprooted more than 60,000 people from their homes, thousands of whom died in the process. All in an effort to cleanse the frontier for white settlers.

If we come to accept that the very bedrock of American history is steeped in white supremacist orthodoxy then it must be entirely unraveled before it can be considered in any sense “free.” As such, we must begin the work of unraveling. It is incumbent on us to not only reckon with the criminality of our ancestors, but where at all possible, end the harm those actions have inflicted on Americans of color and Indigenous peoples.

Indeed this effort involves far more action than replacing the images of our nation’s oppressive aristocracy with true American heroes that fought for freedom and equality for all. The fearless individuals who realized that the American dream was farce and continued to plow forward in their attempts to bring it to fruition. We must also confront the economic implications of decades of persecution and subjugation.

The white aristocracy long prohibited families of color from building any sort of generational wealth. In his seminal essay for The Atlantic, The Case For Reparations, Ta Nehisi Coates notes that long after emancipation, kleptocratic institutions, particularly those in the Deep South, cheated Black homeowners for generations. Citing one example describing state officials hijacking land from Black Southerners involving “406 victims and 24,000 acres of land,” “The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia, oil fields in Mississippi and a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Equally pressing, if not more urgent, than removing the racist iconography that stains our currency and depresses our parks, is correcting the dire economic consequences created for communities of color that have been beguiled by the despotic grifter class, happy to economically prosper off of centuries of cruel serfdom. If we are to succeed in constructing a just, post racial society, it is imperative we remove and replace the racist iconography that blanket our currency and litter our streets while making clear uncompromising demands for economic reparations. First went the monuments, now comes the money.

The Covid-19 Pandemic Lays Bare The Pitfalls of Capitalism

In a reference to the old adage “there are no atheists in fox holes,” Pete Nichols at The Atlantic proclaimed, “there are no libertarians in a pandemic.” There are also, it seems, no capitalists, at least not during this pandemic, which has lurched the United States to the brink of economic apocalypse.

The word apocalypse, derived from the Greek word apokalypsis, translates to disclosure, something laid bare and brought to light. Just as we marked the dawn of the century’s second decade, the American public was dealt their third financial crash in the form of the Coronavirus pandemic, this one even more devastating than the two that preceded it. While the Republican Party lobbies for America to turn back the clock, and the Democratic Party appeals to stacis, the country is in dire need of a third option.

Now, the COVID-19 epidemic ravages an already cleaned out working class, many of whom have largely already lost their homes and retirement savings to this century’s previous economic crises of 2000 and 2008. The reality facing Americans every day is that what little action being taken by the government is woefully inadequate, as more than 20 million people were forced out of work in the last month as a result of the pandemic alone.

With every economic or environmental crisis that strikes, more of the few remaining small businesses are forced to shutter their doors.. So when local governments began ordering a halt to all “non-essential” business operations, it sent the country’s economy into a total whirlwind.A Goldman Sachs survey of more than 1,500 small business owners found more than half reported they would close permanently if the mandated closures lasted more than 3 months. Corporations lurk in waiting like hungry vultures ready to gobble up their market share and redirect the profit towards their bottom line. This ever-expanding power bubble is inflated by corporate conglomerates, wielding their enormous amount of influence in both the public and private spheres and using that power to continue expanding their influence and profits.

Capitalism relies on constant growth in order to sustain functionality; it cannot exist in stacis. The free market orthodoxy, often parroted by the grifter class and their pundit stooges, is exactly what led our nation to the production crisis we are experiencing now–it was more profitable in the short term to outsource the manufacturing of critical medicine and other healthcare necessities like N95 masks and ventilators.

Even a soulless machine programmed to look at people as numbers on a spreadsheet would see that the way the United States has responded to this pandemic has been a model for inefficiency. As economist Richard Wolff argues, “It was inefficient not to produce the medical supplies, it was inefficient not to stockpile. Capitalism was efficient in producing profit and inefficient at protecting public health, therefore the claim that is contained in 99% in textbooks of economics that profit maximizations is the royal road to efficiency, is now definitively proved wrong.”

Capitalism will always prioritize profit over people, even in the midst of a pandemic. However, even the most devout champions of the free market clamored obnoxiously for handouts, as multi billion dollar airline companies like Boeing made off with billions in government aid after the recent passing of the CARES act after spending 74% of its free cash flow on buybacks over the last decade, and the trend continues throughout the industry. The major US airlines devoted a whopping 96% of their cash flow to stock buybacks.

It’s not just the airline industry that has crippled themselves with stock buybacks–the financial equivalent of breaking your neck in an effort to suck your own dick. According to research by the Roosevelt Institute, in the two years between 2015 and 2017, the restaurant industry shelled out 140% of its profits on stock buybacks, followed by the retail industry which spent 80% of its profits on stock buybacks, and the food manufacturing industry that spent 60%. This leads to the normalization of Fortune 500 companies saddled with historic levels of debt-garnering record high evaluations on the NY Stock Exchange. Our financial systems have prepared us to collapse economically, as opposed to preparing for a potential economic collapse.

Government intervention in the market in any capacity is a direct ideological break with capitalist dogmatism that is heralded by the right as not only the most just economic system, but also the most efficient. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the deceit in both of those assertions.

Congress, far from an instrument of a democratic, self-ruling society, serves instead as a kleptocratic institution with a single mind bent on tending to the whims of the opulent and the oligarchic class. Instead of serving the interest of the public writ large, it serves the interest of the highest bidding contractors: often those who pillage the resources of our planet and of its communities not for the greater utilitarian good, but for their own short-term profits. Overtaken by private special interests, our public representatives will continue to manifest their will irrespective of their devastating implications for the country and climate.

In the United States, we are bearing witness to a total failure to protect our front line, physicians and medical staff. In countries that have successfully contained their virus and mitigated its devastation, they have equipped their front lines with hazmat suits and access to testing, in America however we’ve required our doctors and nurses to reuse their N95 masks against regulation guidelines and don trash bags as their only protection from the virus they could be exposed to at any moment. A consequence of both the tremendous lack of government oversight imposed on the private health care industry, and the decades of offshoring our production of critical supplies, leaving us unable to produce these necessities ourselves.

In the midst of a public health crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic, it becomes evident that unless every individual is assured access to healthcare within the nation's borders, a virus cannot be contained. Which is why South Korea, a country that has had universal health coverage since 1981, announced that the government would be shouldering all of the costs for citizens and foreigners alike for Covid-19 testing and treatment. The ability to test people throughout their country, without being inhibited by medical profiteers and middle men, is paramount to containing a virus.

In America however, a very different approach was taken by the government. Instead of ensuring that all Americans would receive no cost for any testing or treatment, the executive branch continuously waffled on the matter. In a public address, President Trump erroneously claimed that private insurance companies had “agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments, and to prevent surprise medical billing.” This statement is loaded with partial truths as well as flat out lies. While it is true that the Families First Coronavirus Response Act guarantees free testing for Covid-19, it makes no such mandates for follow-up treatment, and includes no provisions to address surprise billing, which means seeking treatment of any kind could mean financial catastrophe for millions of Americans.

It is utterly insufficient to have a hierarchical society that hoards healthcare as a privilege for the opulent. In a country like the United States, not only are there 30 million individuals who simply have no health insurance at all, more than 100 million Americans are reluctant or fearful of seeking medical attention out of fear of high copayments and premium costs to receive care. The Democrats have been paying lip service to the principal that healthcare is a human right throughout the entire 2020 cycle, both in and out of the progressive faction, but when the rubber hit the road, Congress proposed expanding COBRA insurance subsidies for unemployed workers–a program notorious for its bureaucracy and unaffordability.

America is desperate for innovation and change, for a breath of fresh thought, and for vanguard solutions to lead us into a new era of humanistic politics. The inadequate action taken to defend Americans against present and future dangers like climate change represents an extreme abdication of duty by our elected officials to protect all within our borders, not just physically but financially.

It is too tempting to ignore how the Red Scare propaganda that once proffered scenes of panic-stricken shoppers arriving at the supermarket only to the find the shelves barren, is eerily similar to the one unfolding now in America, as people find themselves unable to purchase staples like flour, eggs and pampers for their children. The people of this country have found themselves living in the situation that was supposed to have been brought on by the Boogeyman of Communism; in reality, it was the hands of capital that subdued our government into inaction. It will not be capitalism that frees them.

failed state:

noun

a state whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic which has claimed nearly 160,000 American lives, millions of people have also been uprooted from any remaining financial stability they may have had. After coming to a quick, bipartisan decision that the single greatest upward transfer of wealth in American history would be necessary action, our leadership continues to bicker about the size of the crumbs left for ordinary Americans.

Congress adjourned Friday, July 31st, after having neglected to extend eviction moratoriums or the expanded unemployment provisions authorized under the CARES Act. Over the course of the pandemic, nearly 25 million Americans have come to rely on the weekly $600 payments. Despite the looming crisis, however, it was announced flatly that Congress was “not close” on reaching an agreement.

At the time of writing, 40% of all US renters are facing evictions — that’s more than 17 million Americans who could be out on the street by winter during a pandemic that political negligence has allowed to ravage our nation from coast to coast. Southern conservative strongholds like West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida are among the states with the largest looming eviction crisis, despite their Republican leadership urging people to return to business as usual. By no means is economic devastation unique to the South however, with New York City renters being among the most vulnerable in the entire country. 1 out of every 5 New Yorkers is unemployed and 1 out of 4 haven’t paid rent since March.

Meanwhile, as millions of Americans teeter on the brink of financial ruin, a report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that in just the few short months between January 1st and April 10th, US billionaires saw their wealth grow by nearly 10%: a $282 billion increase. The two biggest gainers, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, saw their collective fortunes grow more than $30 billion. The same report noted that less publicized billionaire Rocco Commisso, owner of media conglomerate Mediacom, saw his net worth drop “$800 million” before the US government took evasive action. His fortune “recovered around the same time Mediacom secured a March 23rd financing deal” with the government. Go figure.

As Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to take a tremendous nose dive into the trash can, the Democrats have been seemingly handed the election. Unsurprisingly, Joe Biden has been reluctant to fill the fabulous vacuum of leadership. After all, any time he dares to make national headlines, Americans are reminded of the former Vice President’s tendency for hackneyed talking points and racist gaffes. So much so that he and his staff have been toying publicly with the idea of refusing a debate altogether, something the Democrats would have surely have eviscerated Trump for had the roles been reversed.

Republican legislators who are up for re-election are by and large more willing to vote for continued benefits, while those in a comfortable seat reveal their true allegiance is not to their constituents but to the donor class that bankrolls their campaigns. Conservative stalwart Lindsey Graham said it flatly in an interview with Fox News last week: “Half of the Republicans are going to vote ‘no’ on any more aid, that’s just a fact.”

This is not because of some principled logic that has led them to believe that stimulus aid would not be beneficial to their constituents, but because they are beholden to the interests of their corporate overlords, rather than their actual constituents. As 48% of renters in his home state of Kentucky brace for the harrowing impact that being evicted from their homes will have on their long term personal and financial well being, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell remains firm in his resolve to deny his constituents the relief they so desperately need.

Across the aisle, behind the fading veneer of resistance proffered by the Democrats in the face of total economic collapse, is the troublesome truth that they too serve the corporate aristocracy. Which is why the Democrats, ever true to form, have put forth proposals like providing tenants facing eviction with legal counsel. Perhaps so that a public attorney can explain to them and the millions of their fellow soon-to-be evicted neighbors the depraved legislative logic that justifies ousting them all from their homes and denying them access to shelter in the midst of a once in a century health crisis. All for the sake of profit.

When a government elects to willfully deny their constituents housing and medicine in the midst of a pandemic to further the financial interests of the opulent, they are no longer representing those they were elected to serve. This pandemic serves to lay bare the hollowness of the state, and the pitfalls capitalism. The relentless and unchecked criminal pursuit of profit has ruined the lives of millions of Americans and is poised to scourge millions more. We must recognize our legislator’s primary interest is protecting the profiteers, who effectively control our government.

This unacceptable reality requires a well-organized response. As such the need for community action and solidarity among working people is paramount. It is incumbent upon each of us fortunate enough to find ourselves sheltered to demand that all receive shelter, to demand that all people who have homes are kept in them and those who do not have housing are put in them at once. We must demand that the debt accumulated during this time of crisis is erased and that the profits generated during this crisis are distributed according to need instead of ownership. The power of the government must be wielded by the people for the people, not for the moneyed elite.

Kamala

The long wait has finally ended, and just about as anti-climatically as possible: Joe Biden has picked Kamala Harris to be his running mate. Harris, the Attorney General of California from 2011-2017, was selected for VP in large part due to her status as black woman. This being supposed evidence from that Biden campaign that he’s on the side of those demanding racial justice, and that the new age of awareness to BIPOC struggles is both heard and represented on the Democratic ticket.

The glaring irony? Well, obviously Kamala Harris is more than just a black woman. The color of her skin does not make her Rosa Parks, and just because her failed, short-lived Presidential campaign tried to cast her as an icon of powerful black femininity doesn’t actually mean she’s a warrior on the side of justice or even the people.

In fact, during her stint as the “Top Cop” of America’s largest most populous state, Harris was quite literally responsible for the imprisonment of thousands of disenfranchised people, mostly poor, including those who were foreclosed on and were the victims of the Housing Crash brought on by the Wall St bankers at the end of the 2000’s decade.

As Hawaaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard so beautifully put it on the Democratic debate stage almost a year ago exactly, “There are too many examples to cite, but she (Kamala) put over fifteen-hundred people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” Kamala Harris is no friend to marginalized communities, and as California’s lead prosecutor, she furthered oppression of the working class instead of doing anything to improve our racist, broken criminal justice system.

Rewatching that epic admonishment of Harris by Congresswoman Gabbard, I briefly found myself lost in daydream, remembering Gabbard’s articulate, poised and unequivocally anti-establishment performance in the 2020 Democratic Primary -- why can’t Biden have picked her as his running mate? Or one of the many other qualified women of color who hold progressive values and actually represent the future of the Left? Kamala Harris instead represents the very police state which the activist Left is currently at war with on the streets.

California Representative Barbara Lee would have been another amazing choice. Widely known for being the sole vote against the war in Afghanistan, Lee is an experienced Representative and has far more cred with the progressive left than any of the names floated by the Biden camp as options that were under consideration. Though I can’t speak for all leftists, I personally would be far more comfortable casting a vote for Biden if I knew Barabara Lee was also on the ticket, only a heartbeat away from being the President.

Instead, it’s Kamala Harris who Biden went with—no surprise, given that Biden is clearly at the whim of his corporate donors and Wall St. buddies, who also happen to love Harris. Harris, one of the very first to drop out of the Democratic primary after a directionless, tepid campaign, was hyped up by the corporate media to no end before she even entered the race: a CNN piece from December, 2018 entitled “Chris Cillizza’s Definitive 2020 Democratic Candidate Power Rankings” hilariously predicted Kamala had the #1 chance of winning the primary (equally hilarious: they put Beto at #2). And in addition to an absolute torrent of similar pieces ranking her as the most likely contender of the pack, cable news also fawned over her constantly. CNN even once aired a short documentary about Harris’ life and achievements which didn’t go into her problematic track record even once.

Via the media, the plutocratic establishment made it obvious from an early point that Harris was their pick for President, and that’s why it’s not in the least surprising that Biden has picked her as VP, given that he himself is a puppet, or at very least an ally of said plutocrats. With Biden as the President and Harris waiting in the wings to be crowned 2016-style in the next primary, the establishment can rest easy knowing that the Democratic party will for at least the next 8 years be a dependable vessel for their interests and agenda.

Kamala Harris, whose sole memorable moment from the Dem primary was ironically her takedown of Joe Biden, will actually be a liability to the Joe Biden ticket. Her persona drips with smug, coastal elitism, barley masked behind a facade of feigned cheer and optimism. After that moment in the first debate where she attacked the man she is now running alongside, the moronic pundits on cable news were quick to label her “the new Obama” or the “female Obama”, but I always thought such comparisons were an insult to Barack, who, for all my grievances, is undeniably an A+ actor -- so much so that his continual charade has tricked the country into thinking his inspiring speeches and feel good platitudes constitute actual leadership. (Obama is truly the Reagan of the Left, and I have a sickening feeling that I will have to be continually subjected to blind Obama veneration and nostalgia for the rest of my life.)

Joe Biden choosing Kamala Harris as his VP confirms once-and-for-all that the Democratic Party is a party of performative wokeness that only cares about appearing progressive and evolved on racial issues to win over the support of well-intentioned voters who don’t want to see their country destroyed by racists and divisionists the likes of Donald Trump. However, adding her to the ticket won’t win the Dems any new votes; those who will be excited by VP Harris are already solidly “blue no matter who”, but for voters like myself who feel excluded and unrepresented in the Democratic ticket, this appointment only adds insult to injury. By choosing a corrupt prosecutor who infamously chose not to foreclose on One West Bank, the Democrats have made clear that they are not the party of the progresive left, or the youth.

The misconduct of OneWest Bank, run at the time by current Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, was so flagrant and criminal that leaders of the Consumer Law Section in California recommended Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the bank. However, Harris decided against pursuing Mnuchin. Instead, she decided to spend her stint as Attorney General bringing down the law on nonviolent drug offenders and the mothers of truant school children. A few years later, in 2016, Steven Mnuchin dutifully donated to Harris’ Seatoral campaign, knowing she’d be an attentive Representative to his needs and interests, having already served him once before.

Because we know the truth about who she’s spent her career serving, the Left will not be amused nor capitulated by the anointment of Kamala Harris as Biden’s Vice President and ultimate successor. Harris may represent the ideal future of the Democratic Party to CNN pundits, bankers and pharma executives, but she doesn't represent the future of any party that I feel at all comfortable voting for. But, that’s by design: at this point, the Democratic party is ironically now relying on and couriting the John McCain coalition of suburbanites and boomers, rather than trying to reassemble the Obama coalition which of course energized the youth and activist Left.

The Biden/Harris ticket represents a stagnation of progress. It represents a party that is moving increasingly far right and being increasingly corporate-friendly. It represents the iron-clad grip that the corporate interests have on our government and elected officials, and it reminds us of the lack of hope ahead for achieving a more equitable and just system. Having learned nothing from their mistakes and having taken no introspection, the Democrats are eager to recreate the same conditions which lead to Trump in the first place: more outsourcing of American jobs, more wasteful military spending, more handouts to Wall St. and multinational corporations, and little-to-no fundamental or tangible change for your average American. But at least we won’t have to look at Trump’s ugly mug anymore, right?

Congressional Inaction Underscores The Dire Need For Direct Democracy.

In the midst of a global pandemic, of which our country leads the death toll, which has devastated the hollow American economy and pushed millions of Americans to the brink of homelessness, Congress has still taken no action to extend the public benefits allocated in the CARES package. After taking care of the corporate masterclass that lines their pockets with legalized bribes in the form of campaign contributions, Congress has elected to take cruel inaction, twiddling their thumbs as food bank lines stretch on for miles.

If it is truly the case that evil Republican henchmen in the Senate like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell are the sole reason we aren’t seeing landmark legislation passed, why hasn’t the House passed a bill that rises to the occasion? A Democratic House of Representatives could easily choose to pass a bill including rent cancellation, UBI, and all of the other expanded social programs the working class desperately needs if they are ever going to truly recover from this massively devastating economic meltdown. Nancy Pelosi could go on TV every night pointing to this historic bill passed in Congress that would alleviate the suffering of the masses, hammering the Republicans senselessly until they were forced to relent or watch their chance at reelection crumble. They could do that, but they aren’t. Why?

No time was spared approving the likely single greatest upward transfer of wealth in US history, when Congress harmoniously agreed to let Wall Street pillage the Federal Reserve, creating trillions of dollars out of thin air to spuriously stabilize the stock market with an influx in fictitious capital. Once the patsies in power had done the bidding of their master class, they then pretended that everything would be fine, not acknowledging the ticking time bomb they’d set for the unemployment benefits, which were the last remaining lifeline for millions of once working Americans now totally displaced after the shutdowns.

Now, nearly 2 weeks after the last bolstered unemployment checks have been cashed, those same stooges of the powerful stand before the hungry and scared Americans telling them their hands are tied, and that they will not act as they are about to let them lose their homes in a pandemic, just like they let them lose their jobs. They will continue to assure each and every one of their constituents that their hands are tied, that the polarization in Washington is too intense to pass such a piece of legislation.

President Trump’s flimsy executive orders further underscore the point that our representative government no longer represents us, so much so they are subject to the foolish whims of the executive branch. This arrantly antidemocratic behavior brings light to the extreme hollowness of our “democracy.” How can our society be considered a representative democracy, when by and large, Congress is out of step with Americans on nearly every major issue?

How much more clear does the public have to be that we are uninterested in pumping trillions of our tax dollars into a war that has taken the lives of more than 200,000 innocent men, women, and children overseas? Every successful presidential campaign since George W. Bush has paid tremendous lip service to bringing home our troops, But still, Congress continues to approve the colossal, always growing military budget, in spite of their assurance that Trump is the single greatest threat to the world order.

Or how about the war on drugs? More than two-thirds of the country support the legalization of cannabis, and yet this arcane, racist law, is still responsible for hundreds of thousands of arrests, wasting tax dollars that would be better served strengthening our communities, and more importantly destroy young lives while allowing megacorporations like Phillip Morris to buy up market share before they inevitably remove the federal schedule 1 classification of cannabis.

We are trapped in a system that has never been truly by and for the people, and we must demand a change. The justification for this system fed to us in the public school system is that our founding fathers, in their tremendous wisdom, understood that the working people of this country couldn't be bothered to develop an opinion on the matters of governance directly, and instead needed a proxy to make the decisions for them in Washington. While this logic was dubious at the time, perhaps it held more weight when the information was far less freely disseminated. In the age of the internet information, it sounds like a farce, it’s time for the people to truly have the power to represent themselves directly.

But how would direct democracy come to be? How would it be run, and more importantly, who would decide what the people would vote on, as opposed to our representatives? Surely it won't happen overnight. A humble introduction could come in the form of a survey portion of the census, where public opinion can be gauged accurately on issues like the ones outlined above. In instances where the results come back dramatically out of step with the current law, such as the federal prohibition of cannabis, a law which according to the PEW research center more than 2 thirds of the country opposes, a ballot measure could be introduced. Then we would simply allow the public to vote on the matter, in exactly the same way that people would participate in a direct ballot initiative at the state and local level. If the votes were counted and a majority of the people supported a new law or opposed an existing one, the change would be enacted.

Allowing the public to do a once-every-decade course correction will serve as an extremely modest introduction to direct democracy. The proposal would in no way jeopardize the safety of our election, cause an undue intellectual burden on our population, infringe on the sanctity of our electoral system, or any of the other absurd criticisms that would be lobbed by the elite to dissuade people from demanding the right to truly influence the government, in a meaningful, direct way.

While these once-in-a-decade ballot initiatives would not address all the urgent issues that need to be addressed, they would serve as a constant reminder to our representatives in our government that the people have the power in our government, and allowing them to wield it would underscore the lack of action taken by our representatives, when we desperately needed them to respond. Now that information is now freer than ever before, so should our democracy.

The Biden Cabinet Will Be an Oligarch's Wet Dream

The surest sign of a president’s true intentions once in office are the cadre of cabinet appointees happily cashing in on all the favors they bought betting on the right horse. Folks like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, who dutifully bowed out of the race to make way for Biden, will likely be rewarded alongside the biggest donors and their representatives. The New York Times reported that “one of Mr. Biden’s closest aides joined the campaign from Apple.” He is also advised by a number of other individuals who hold “senior roles at firms that consulted for major tech companies.”

While Joe may have made passing remarks critiquing fake news on Facebook while stumping for the presidency, it’s abundantly clear he will not be doing any trust busting if he assumes office in January. After all, he has constantly assured his bankrollers that “nothing would fundamentally change.” One might scratch their head and wonder how a presidential candidate can both refer to the incumbent as “the worst president in American history” and also announce their intention to change absolutely nothing without getting questioned about it.

After an exhaustively public and performative vetting process, news finally broke that Joe Biden had indeed selected the sitting Senator and former top cop of California to be his running mate. The decision punctuated an end to any meaningful speculation that Biden had any intention of reigning in big tech. The decision garnered swooning praise from PMCs nationwide and defeated groans from the progressive left, Kamala Harris would be his successor to the party’s throne.

It was under the eight years of the Obama administration in the wake of The Great Recession that Silicon Valley was able to replace Wall Street as the nation's preeminent capitalist hub, and with it, a whole new way of structuring the economy: gigs, which were designed largely as a way to save money after the Affordable Care Act mandated that all full-time workers be provided with health insurance. Silicon Valley innovators responded by creating a loophole where employers could treat essential staff as contractors and not provide them any health care or benefits at all, and were not subject to minimum wage regulation. A win for everyone but the worker.

After all, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes famously left the burgeoning startup to join the Obama campaign as a strategic adviser in 2007. Airbnb launched to service the influx of travelers to Denver for the 2008 DNC, after the rabid success of their political themed cereal boxes: Captain McCains and Obama-o’s. When we look at the vast state of economic despair and the hollowed-out job market that paved the way for the rise of the gig economy, which offers workers absolutely no benefits or employee protections, we must remember it was under the wandering eye of Obama.

Many of these trendy Silicon Valley startups are perfectly on board with paying lip service to workplace equality and celebrating diversity, so long as it never threatens their bottom line. One massive difference between Wall Street and Silicon Valley is the value they hold on the public's opinion of them. Because hedge funds in Manhattan don't market themselves to the average Joe, they could give two fucks what they think about their company's ethics. However, with a company like Facebook or Google, they need their users to want to be on their platform, so the public opinion of their companies matter. Which is why, with the exception of a few noteworthy outsiders, the bulk of the Silicon Valley ownership class is perfectly happy with a Biden presidency.

Because of the absolute lack of individual ideology presented by Joe Biden, we can only imagine he will be an even more neoliberal purveyor of corporate class. In many ways, Biden could become the wet dream of Silicon Valley in the way Bill Clinton was a wet dream to Wall Street (then again, Wall Street has never had many dry nights when it’s come to American politics). When Joe Biden becomes the president, it moves the goalposts back another decade at least. The massive unpopularity of all of his ideas have led to a campaign strategy of not campaigning at all, allowing him to essentially tune out the demands of the public, whose votes he already feels entitled to.

It is well noted that while Trump’s electoral strategy is saying everything and nothing all at once, Biden has taken a different approach, by just flat saying nothing at all. This allows the former Vice President to keep his feet on the ground and out of his mouth, but it also keeps his actual governing priorities shrouded in mystery. While this lack of ideology has been interpreted by some to mean that Biden will be easier to push toward the left, history would indicate the contrary. Presidents without much of their own ideology, like Donald Trump or George W. Bush, and really every other modern president, more often than not just defer to the advice of their cabinet.

Joe Biden spent almost 50 years as the Senator of Delaware, a state known for little more as a haven for credit card companies than its extremely lax state policy that allows companies to incorporate there without paying the state any corporate income tax. Coupled with Biden’s very earned moniker as the Senator from MBNA, a major credit card company that was bought by Bank of America in 2006, and his tireless work to pass the The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, it’s perfectly clear he will let the corporate machine rage on without so much as an inch of pushback.

Presidents always campaign in the direction of the people and legislate in the direction of the opulent. Just like Obama and Trump campaigned against the war and corruption only to fan the flames when they arrived in Washington. Obama selected corporate vultures like Rahm Emmanuel and hawks like Robert Gates and Susan Rice, whereas Trump’s Wall Street loyalty trumped his “populist” campaign rhetoric with appointees like Larry Summers and Betsy Devos. Joe Biden will continue to pay lip service to lefty imperatives like climate change, healthcare, and housing, all while letting the sick and evicted go unaided as the planet around us goes up in flames.

Why Won't We Strike?

It’s Labor Day, one week after the supposed general strike that was trending in various Twitter circles fizzled out once again, leaving many to wonder, what is it going to take to catalyze the American people to action? If it’s not a pandemic that has left nearly 200,000 dead, devastated the working class economy, of Americans are unemployed, facing eviction, food insecurity, and fearful of their own futures, and the future of their children, where in response our government pissed on its people and told them to drink, while simultaneously flooding federal reserve dollars into the pockets of the opulent what the hell will it be?

Well, growing the momentum for a national strike in America is sort of like growing a pineapple in the midst of a Minnesota winter, it can be done, but not without an immense amount of effort and engineering, it will never just organically sprout up from the soil, it's just not the right climate for it. What few strikes have been successful have been well organized and clear in their goals. The last successful wave of wildcat strikes erupted where they would have been considered least likely. The Red for Ed strike wave in 2018 reached conservative states from West Virginia to Arizona when well organized teachers unions said enough is enough and demanded an increase in pay, from their poverty wages, of which they often dipped into to provide classroom decorations and supplemental learning resources for the children they taught.

If there is going to be a general strike on the magnitude necessary to create sustained employment for working people, the seeds will need to be sewn long before they are reaped. While social media is a potentially useful tool for organizing large groups of individuals, the companies’ allegiance to corporate power and profit will always trump any loyalty to its user base. And regardless, a movement cannot be built on hashtags, it requires real people building real trust and solidarity. Before people will be willing to put their livelihoods on the line and walk out of their jobs that is the lifeline to food, shelter and health insurance etc, they want to know damn well that they won't be alone. Before we can ethically ask people to risk their livelihoods we need to reinvigorate the lost ethic of unity amongst the American working class.

Unlike countries on the opposite side of the Atlantic in western Europe like France and Spain, where there is a long history of working class resistance and revolt, and so much as an unwelcome change in pension policy will flood the streets of Paris with pissed off protesters, the United States has been vigilantly stamping out working class uprisings since the nation’s founding. Still, American history textbooks love to glorify acts of looting and property destruction when convenient, heaping praise on events like that tea party in Boston, where lawless criminals boarded a vessel in the city’s harbour, defaced all the cargo and hoisted it overboard.

The national myth of America stands on a mountain of historical inaccuracies and unquestioned hypocrisy and our culture is one of incessant, perpetual, self-idolization. This totalitarian culture of deference to the national myth did not emerge with Donald Trump, but rather with the founding of our nation. It is why the Boston Tea Party is heralded as a momentous juncture in our national myth, and Shay’s Rebellion exists only as a footnote in a 10th grade history textbook.

In a way that is similar to how it is considered gauche and even dangerous to critique military action in war time, when the public perceives our nation to be under threat, it has also been unacceptable to critique the economic system that has been imposed on us by the opulent since the nation's inception, no matter how many times they fail. This despotic allegiance to the story of our nation, a nation that has so thoroughly entwined its economic system into its national mythology that is often prevents people from clearly seeing what stands in front of them and many those who do see it live in fear that pointing it out would lead to societal ostracism and major career penalties.

Our country is one that holds many startling similarities to the culture of authoritarian states and thus makes the American cultural climate unfriendly to uprising. For example, as Noam Chomsky pointed out in his lectures on totalitarian culture in a free society that the charge of anti-Americanism is a truly totalitarian phenomena, the example he sites in the lecture compares modern day Italy to Stalinist Russia, if an Italian was critiquing their government, the charge of “anti-Italianism” would be both laughed and scoffed at, however in Soviet Russia, the charge of anti-Sovietism was the highest charge. Because we have deeply intertwined our economic system into our national myth, just as the Soviets had in the 20th century, anything that is anti-capitalism is considered anti-American and thus, unacceptable.

Another non-trivial hurdle is overcoming the fact that presenting yourself as a struggling worker in this country leaves you vulnerable to judgement, societal ridicule and personal embarrassment. We are taught from a young age in this country to internalize our economic shortcomings, conditioned to believe that the failures of the economic system are failures of ourselves. Not accidentally these societal norms isolate workers in shame instead of allowing them to create bonds over their shared economic situation, and band together to make change.

As the dust settles from another disappointing primary season, the left must begin to do the work of building true solidarity amongst workers in all industries nationword. A tremendous task that will require the same outpouring of effort the progressive left devoted to Sanders campaign.

In 2020, without unions creating respites for workers to discuss their shared financial strife and demand change, it's difficult to build the community required for striking. It is foolish to believe millions of Americans would heedlessly jeopardize their livelihood without first giving people reason to believe it will work. Orchestrating an effective national general strike will require a well organized network of democratic, worker led insurgencies working in tandem and feeding off of each other's energy, firing off in quick succession like Black Cat fireworks on the 4th of July.