U.S. Electile Dementia paralytica 2020

[ewmayer]

[No longer able to edit thread titles as of a few years back, but no point starting a brand-new thread just for 2020...]

o Kamala Harris, Opportunist to the Core: Launches Prez Bid on MLK Day, Since She Has to Remind People She’s Black After Criminalizing Truancy, Keeping CA Prison Rolls Up to Provide Cheap Labor; Sends Tone-Deaf, Narcissistic Campaign E-mail | Naked Capitalism

Readers may recall that last week, we addressed one Harris Big Lie about her record, that she was a big defender of abused homeowners by virtue of having gotten a less terrible deal than 48 other states in the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement, which we’ve regularly described as a “get out of liability almost free card” for the big mortgage servicers. Her lack of a commitment to homeowners, and her pliancy to big money interests, was confirmed by her failure to investigate One West Bank, ignoring a 2013 memo from attorneys in her office flagging the appearance of “widespread misconduct.” Her complacency was rewarded via One West’s former CEO, Steve Mnuchin, making Harris the recipient of his lone donation to a Democratic party Senate candidate.

Needless to say, if Harris had prosecuted Mnuchin, it’s hard to imagine he’d be Treasury Secretary now.
...
[From the quoted snip from Black Agenda Report:]
Kamala Harris is no activist, she is Hillary Clinton in a black face.This is precisely the reason why the corporate donor class are licking their chops and pushing Harris as a viable presidential candidate. She has proven her loyalty to Wall Street; when push comes to shove, CEOs know that they have an ally in Kamala. What Harris is banking on is an electorate that is so deranged by Trump’s puerility that we don’t inspect her positions and just accept her optics and rhetoric as a suitable alternative to the incumbent president.

And The Onion weighs in: Kamala Harris Assembles Campaign Staff Of Unpaid California Prison Laborers

o Wall Street freaks out about 2020 | Politico:

After mentioning [Iron Mike] Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California.
— Spellchecker fubar alert: I think they intended ‘appalling’, not ‘appealing’.

[ewmayer]

o Bernie Sanders Is Going to Win the Democratic Primary, and It's Going to Be Easy | Paste Magazine

It’s still going to be a massive debacle on every front—the Hillary diehards will throw themselves against the padded walls of Twitter with even greater self-destructive velocity, mainstream media will find a way to outdo themselves on the anti-Bernie beat (even if it will be extremely hard to top iconic moments like [WaPo's 2016] “16 negative stories in 16 hours”), and when cable news hosts aren’t putting on their most serious faces to ask “but how are you going to pay for it?”, they’ll probably carry water for the desperation storylines we’ve come to expect: Bernie is racist, sexist, whatever-ist, he loves guns, he’s too old, he owns more than one house, his real name is “Venezuela,” etc. Life inside the campaign cycle will be a living nightmare, and we’re going to endure multiple lifetimes of despair between now and the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020…after which, it will get worse.

o In other recent Dem-hopeful news, afew days ago Kamala Harris tried to look like one of hip cool kids by making a jokey "Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?" reference to smoking weed in college, the irony of her subsequently going on to be a notorious "tough on drugs" deplorable-druggies-sentencing-DA (while being notoriously lenient on elite white-collar criminals such as the mass-mortgage-fraudster banks at the center of the late great housing bubble and resulting bust and global financial meltdown) seemingly escaping her. Rather less-reported in the US MSM was the ensuing response by her Jamaican father:

DONALD HARRIS SLAMS HIS DAUGHTER SENATOR KAMALA HARRIS FOR FRAUDULENTLY STEREOTYPING JAMAICANS AND ACCUSES HER OF PLAYING IDENTITY POLITICS - Jamaica Global Online

[The ganja-culture-originated-in-India history in the article is quite interesting in its own right.] Similarly, Harris is trying to leverage "blackness" and gain insta-resonance with the US slave-descended African-American community, with which she has 0 in common - coming form a rather entitled background herself, and growing up with her Indian mother - except for some melanin-producing genes. To understand where Harris comes from and who she identifies with ideologically and policy-wise, one must use the lens of class, not - as her shameless pandering is attempting to force - race. Of course using identity politics as a wedge is big with the DNC, cf. their relentless use of e.g. "white working class" as opposed to the broader "working class" in their ongoing attempts to prevent any kind of broader race-transcending solidarity from developing amongst same. That would be dangerous to their sponsors. The Repubs are much more direct in this regard, they make no bones about being for the oligarchy, rather than trying to have it both ways.

[Dr Sardonicus]

The NC Ninth District congressional race mentioned just above will have a fresh election. The Republican candidate himself asked the Board of Elections to call for a new election, and they obliged unanimously. This was after his son testified that he had warned his father not to hire the operative who wound up stuffing the ballot box.

For the record, Bernie Sanders was born September 8, 1941. That makes him a few months less than 5 years older than Il Duce. Whether that's "too old" is more than I can say. One thing he has going for him, should he wind up going toe-to-toe with Il Duce in 2020, is all the nice things Il Duce said about him during the 2016 campaign
;-)

[kladner]

https://readersupportednews.org/opin...an-you-thought

When the New York Times front-paged its latest anti-left polemic masquerading as a news article, the March 9 piece declared: “Should former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. enter the race, as his top advisers vow he soon will, he would have the best immediate shot at the moderate mantle.”

On the verge of relaunching, Joe Biden is poised to come to the rescue of the corporate political establishment -- at a time when, in the words of the Times, “the sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats.” After 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president, Biden is by far the most seasoned servant of corporate power with a prayer of becoming the next president.

When Biden read this paragraph in a recent Politico article, his ears must have been burning: “Early support from deep-pocketed financial executives could give Democrats seeking to break out of the pack an important fundraising boost. But any association with bankers also opens presidential hopefuls to sharp attacks from an ascendant left.”

But Biden’s fealty to corporate power has been only one aspect of his many-faceted record that progressives will widely find repugnant to the extent they learn about it.

Since the #MeToo movement began, some retrospective media coverage has assessed Biden’s highly problematic role in chairing the Clarence Thomas - Anita Hill hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And in recent days, Washington Post reporting has brought into focus his backstory of pandering to white racism against African-Americans during much of his Senate career.

As a 32-year-old senator, in 1975, Biden commented: “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.”

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kladner

https://readersupportednews.org/opin...an-you-thought

More:

It wasn’t just that Biden voted for the Iraq war on the Senate floor five months before it began. During the lead-up to that vote, in August 2002, as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he presided over sham hearings — refusing to allow experts who opposed an invasion to get any words in edgewise — while a cavalcade of war hawks testified in the national spotlight.

“It is difficult to over-estimate the critical role Biden played in making the tragedy of the Iraq war possible,” Middle East studies professor Stephen Zunes wrote. “More than two months prior to the 2002 war resolution even being introduced, in what was widely interpreted as the first sign that Congress would endorse a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Biden declared on August 4 that the United States was probably going to war. In his powerful position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he orchestrated a propaganda show designed to sell the war to skeptical colleagues and the America public by ensuring that dissenting voices would not get a fair hearing.”

More from Harpers:

It should go without saying, then, that Biden was among the ninety senators on one of the fatal (to the rest of us) legislative gifts presented to Wall Street back in the Clinton era: the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. The act repealed the hallowed Depression-era Glass–Steagall legislation that severed investment banking from commercial banking, thereby permitting the combined operations to gamble with depositors’ money, and ultimately ushering in the 2008 crash. “The worst vote I ever cast in my entire time in the United States Senate,” admitted Biden in December 2016, as he prepared to leave office. Seventeen years too late, he explained that the act had “allowed banks with deposits to take on risky investments, putting the whole system at risk.”

In the meantime, of course, he had been vice president of the United States for eight years, and thus in a position to address the consequences of his (and his fellow senators’) actions by using his power to press for criminal investigations. His longtime faithful aide, Ted Kaufman, in fact, had taken over his Senate seat and was urging such probes. Yet there is not the slightest sign that Biden used his influence to encourage pursuit of the financial fraudsters. As he opined in a 2018 talk at the Brookings Institution, “I don’t think five hundred billionaires are the reason we’re in trouble. The folks at the top aren’t bad guys.”

And of course there is his consignment of student-loan borrowers to debt serfdom by way of his signature bankruptcy reform act exempting such debts from being modified in bankruptcy. Biden's coziness with the Merchants of Debt, many of whom are based in his home state of Delaware, is the reason he's often referred to as "the senator from MBNA".

[ewmayer]

Joe Biden Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen | Jacobin Magazine

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Joe Biden Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen | Jacobin Magazine

Jacobin Magazine? Never heard of it. [Google Google] The Wikipedia page about it is here. I also ran across a review which is, alas, not entirely laudatory.

I do remember hearing about Joe Biden stealing from other politicians' speeches back when he was running for prez in 1987 or '88. There was a spate of jokes with the opening, "In the words of Joe Biden..." He had to quit the race. Apparently he did other plagiarizing as well.

Now he's got another problem, a bunch of women who say he's a creep.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Jacobin Magazine? Never heard of it. [Google Google] The Wikipedia page about it is here. I also ran across a review which is, alas, not entirely laudatory.

That's quite a lot of work you did to avoid simply reading the article and judging it on its merits, or lack thereof.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

That's quite a lot of work you did to avoid simply reading the article and judging it on its merits, or lack thereof.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but the rest of the world might simply close the borders of the "Great" US of A and let you kill each other.

You are not as important as you think you are. Manage it.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Joe Biden Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen | Jacobin Magazine

Thanks for that, Ernst. Some of us wild-eyed radical leftists have heard of Jacobin. I thought I knew a lot of "dirt" on Biden, but this really opened my eyes to his overt racism, beyond the lynch mob he presided over in the Thomas hearings. Not the non-existent "high-tech lynching" Justice-to-be Thomas ranted about. He led the lynching of Anita Hill, and has never even acknowledged his role. His performance, as Chairman of the Thomas hearings is quite similar to that of Chuck Grassley at the Kavanaugh hearings.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

That's quite a lot of work you did to avoid simply reading the article and judging it on its merits, or lack thereof.

That's quite a lot of ascribing motives you did. The fact is, I couldn't get in to Jacobin's web site. Google cache gave an Error 404. If the article's posted elsewhere, I didn't find it.

It doesn't really matter to me anyway. I already don't think Biden is a good candidate.