America on the Brink of Civil War (wish I could have written "revival")
An Introduction from Second Bill of Rights, Greened
Dear Citizens of the Republic:
I have been published over at Word Press almost a year now, here, https://wordpress.com/posts/gracchibros.wordpress.com and the reason I began there was that after more than seven years at the Daily Kos, I was banned, censored for three days but never reinstated in late October of 2021. My “crime” was writing that “Joe Biden was destroying the Democratic Party.” Yes, a bid edgy at that date, but I think, fairly, confirmed since then. Instead of Build Back Better (BBB) we got DDD: Dems Don’t Deliver.
And here’s a rowdy column stating the obvious from Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/opinion/beware-the-ruinous-optimism-of-democratic-leaders.html (that’s so like the Times: they softened the title in the link from the one which appears in print for the actual column, which reads: “The Gerontocracy of the Democratic Party Doesn’t Understand That We’re at the Brink.”) Yes, indeed. That column got 3,000 plus comments, a record for the newly arrived columnist. Whom I like.
I’ll spare you the details of my exile from the Daily Kos. Suffice it to say that readers there, whom seemed to be largely centrist democrats, defended Joe Biden to the hilt, generating for me a record number of comments, most quite hostile.
Since the high water mark of the Green New Deal, and the Sanders’s candidacy, that is, March of 2020, I’ve assumed more the role of a slightly biased (to the left, Second Bill of Rights, 1944) journalist who believes progressives have to tell themselves, and the public, the truth about the Democratic Party, its leaders, and its failures and I think I have quite a bit more company surfacing now than I did in the late fall of 2021, when I wrote this - https://wordpress.com/post/gracchibros.wordpress.com/63 or this - https://wordpress.com/post/gracchibros.wordpress.com/106; and my “New Year’s Day Post” - or this https://wordpress.com/post/gracchibros.wordpress.com/140
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24 of this year, I have been following the flow of events there very closely, and saw by Memorial Day that Ukraine was in deep trouble militarily, hands tied behind its back, in terms of weaponry and tactics, by the US decision, Biden’s decision, not to send our troops there in Dec-Jan 2021-2022 - before the invasion. No boots on the ground, no No Fly Zone, no long range artillery or rocketry able to hit wherever Russia is firing from, and not even military hospitals to care for the rising casualties. After that, and despite courage and tactical imagination by the Ukrainian military, it’s Russia’s reversion to WWII mass artillery which has sent the defender’s casualty rate soaring to unstainable levels (between 100-300 dead, 500 hundred wounded, per day). I’ll be sending over my postings from Word Press as soon as I can, and you can follow the train of my reasoning, flowing from Putin’s read of Biden from the very beginning in their talks: unimaginative plodder, as Joe Manchin can testify. Even when the opponent of democracy has been branded a “war criminal.”
Putin is managing Biden just the way Manchin did: setting the terms and what responses will be allowable without Putin’s chain of “escalations.” No one has ever won a war, military or ideological, by following the terms set by their opponents. And Putin’s are all fear based, while he duplicates, via his army, the tactics of the German Nazis (better specify which Nazis I’m writing about, since the term flies in all directions out of Putin’s mouth) in the very Ukraine he is now shredding, bodies and buildings. Civilians and soldiers. A smaller scale (so far) rerun of Timothy Snyder’s account of the region - Belarus and Ukraine, primarily, but overlapping with what is now Poland too - in his book “Bloodlands,” which I recommend all Americans read as well as viewing the movie “Come and See” which you can find easily on You Tube.
As citizens good and bad know from everyday life, our Republic is in deep trouble: spelled Trump and the fanatical Right, hearings or not, and progressive reform hopes have taken perhaps, but not finally, a crippling blow in the popular imagination under the great sign in the sky that now reads “We can’t Afford It - Anything - due to INFLATION.” But cautious, financially well-off Democratic centrists have to shoulder some of the blame as well. Many rural Americans hate the coastal elites, and if Joe Manchin is to be believed, there is nothing much government can do about it because even the Weak Tea version of the Green New Deal (Sanders version), that is, Build Back Better, Biden’s version, the magic shrinking reforms, will cripple the morale of those who need help the most, leading them to the lowest of Dante’s circles: “the entitlement society.” (Meanwhile, over at the 1-10%’s world, entitlements only bring prosperity for you and me: formerly low inflation and still low unemployment, secular heaven for economists. Recession to follow, if not a crash, but we on the left have been saying that since at least 2016)
Therefore, perhaps my most urgent job is to take that resurrected belief system - austerity, debt and deficits, on in a direct way, a way that CNN and the NY Times have not. And certainly not Larry Summers.
Well, that will have to do for now to whet your appetite…as one of my hobbies, I’ve just discovered nesting Bobolinks in a large grassland field adjacent to a public park near Frostburg, MD. These birds, like so many others, are in trouble, especially so in the East, due to the decline of farming and farm practices/timing…so I’m asking the landowner to delay harvesting until Aug. 1st. By that time the young birds will, along with the parents, be starting their flight to the pampas of Argentina, surely a fact to appeal to our imaginations, or what is left of them in the Second Age of the Big Lie, after the last round of Covid, and the age of ever climbing stocks and “coins,” from March of 2009 until March of 2020, the longest period without a recession in “recorded” economic history according to the bible of capitalism, or at least one of its leading evangelical journals, “The Economist.”
Now, in addition to all those plunging numbers of birds, insects, forests that poured out between 2015-2019, themed as “Nature/Climate On the Brink” which helped fuel the drive for a Green New Deal resolution, we have plunging numbers for bitcoin related speculations, all three major indexes diving, and the reality all economic historians have been anticipating: that the markets couldn’t continue to climb forever, least of all given all the special rocket boosters the Fed has been supplying since 2008-2009 - massive asset purchases and low interest rates.
I’ll leave you then with a sense of perhaps my next piece, where I will ask Larry Summers, “Since when has consumer spending been bad for capitalism, ‘we’re only following the advertisers’ leads.’ Are we to conclude spending for and by the average “Joe” is bad, but all that high octane fuel from the Fed for the 1-10% and their assets’ INFLATION is good? Seems to me something’s very wrong in this ship’s ‘rigging.’
Best to you all,
Second Bill of Rights, Greening
Bill - here's my friend Jeffrey St. Clair's take on Biden and Dems:
+ In the special election for Texas 34th congressional district, Mayra Flores (R) defeats Dan Sanchez (D) flipping an 84% Hispanic Rio Grande Valley seat red for the first time in 75 years. The dominoes will start falling very fast now…
+ Like Bill Clinton, Biden wouldn’t mind (and might even secretly desire) having the Republicans take control of Congress for the next two years, so he can blame them for nothing getting done (even though he doesn’t really want to do much of anything himself). But the rest of the party is nuts for going along with him.
+ The Democrats are using a playbook from the late 1980s. It didn’t work very well then and it’s pretty much worthless now, but apparently it still seems like the latest thing to the octogenarians running the party.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/06/17/roaming-charges-57/