everythingisonfireandimangry

[everythingisonfireandimangry]

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE

The movement to get Al Franken to resign is gaining momentum with progressives and justice groups.

I. Am. Losing. My. Mind.

“We have to hold people accountable for sexual assault! We can’t let our morals change with the wind, we have to think of the victims first. How can the Democratic party be progressive if it shelters sexual assaulters?”

All completely useless points when the only reason we still have any healthcare system is because there were JUST enough Democrats that we only needed 3 Republicans to vote against repeal. The only reason the tax bill has a popsicles chance in hell of being stopped is because of that same margin.

In an ideal world the Democratic Party, or any party, could hold itself to a high standard where we only allow representatives that are not criminals or sexual predators. It’s a low fucking bar, but right now we need to accept that it is better to have Franken, whatever awful person he may be, in power than to risk giving his seat to a Republican.

Because the thing is, Franken’s voting record is solid. There is zero record that his personal actions and character are reflected in his voting habits. He has and continues to be, as a representative, a staunch Democrat supporting the right causes. 

After 2018, if Democrats take back Congress, kick his ass to the curb. Fuck that guy. But in the meantime, this idealism about politics - that we must fight for perfect politics - is deranged. It isn’t “the capitalist machine making us believe we can’t ask for something better”, it’s just basic common sense that when we have ZERO votes to spare, when the biggest threats to our future hang on literally THREE votes at any given time, we cannot afford to lose any ground. Period. 

Al Franken could have murdered someone in the street and I’d be saying the same damn thing. We are in the midst of a crisis and we need to prioritize. And it is a fucking BAFFLING priority that we should risk the lives of hundreds of millions of people on the grounds that moral purity should trump practical reality. 

[everythingisonfireandimangry]

“Summers, who served as former President Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary and former President Barack Obama's National Economic Council director...”

Larry Summers was one of the chief architects of the late 90s deregulation of Wall Street that led to 2008 financial crisis. Larry Summers shares responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, that resulted from the rise of the far right - due almost entirely to the economic collapse -, the loss of jobs, healthcare, civil conflict, and countless other crises over the last two decades of corporate-first fiscal policy. 

Larry Summers can go choke.

Also this is an extremely low estimate - the number would actually be tens of thousands more deaths annually

[everythingisonfireandimangry]

CVS is buying Aetna, one of the largest health insurance companies in the country, for $69 billion. 

No company should have $69 billion in assets. No merger this large should be allowed to occur. No merger that violates every antitrust principle there is should be allowed to occur.

And Trump and the Republicans will get the blame for part of this, but really the Democrats are to blame as well. Bill Clinton continued the deregulation of financial markets begun by Reagan. Obama oversaw Comcast buying NBC. Democrats at every turn have been fine feeding this monster, their only concern has been that it works form. 

Democrats and liberals are STILL crying foul that Hillary lost, mourning what could have been as if she would’ve been some savior. This merger is EXACTLY the sort of thing she supports, and has supported. Pelosi, Schumer - they love this bullshit. Oh sure they might complain about it when they think the right people are listening, but they’ve been all too eager to pave the way for laissez fair capitalism to become the order of the day.

For decades leftists and progressives have said this is where we’ve been heading. All through the Bush years, all through the Obama years, there were plenty of loud, articulate voices explaining in measured tones that Republicans have no principles or values, that Republican voters will always vote along party lines, that there is no such thing as a bridge too far for a party that regularly advocates the most atrocious violence and policy without compunction. 

And at each turn, liberals and Democrats have made excuses for their friends, family members, and colleagues who vote Republican. At each turn the Democratic Party has prided itself on holding procedure and tradition to be sacred. “Ram through progressive legislation when we have the power to? No thank you! We believe in working together and reaching across the aisle. The American people won’t tolerate a ruling party who ignores basic decorum”.

Republicans and their base have consistently been this craven, this selfish, this petty, tribalistic, and fear-driven over the last twenty years. And yet we were all supposed to pretend that there “moderate Republicans”, that there were reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful people who just happened to ally with the death cult that Republican party has been since Reagan took office. That you can be a reasonable politically astute person who felt no cognitive dissonance supporting policies that openly destroyed the lives of millions for the gains for a select few, policies that demolished the basic functions of government in service of corporate interests, policies that sold off the planet wholesale so that CEOs could post higher quarterly earnings.

Again and again, radicals and leftists have said that this is utter nonsense. When Obama took office he had a ruling majority in the House and Senate and a definitive victory over McCain to justify radical action. Yet he pushed for NO progressive policy. He didn’t even put universal healthcare on the table. When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf became the largest oil spill in history, Obama and the Democrats did nothing. Gun massacre after gun massacre - nothing. 

They could’ve. They could’ve ignored decorum and procedure and done what Republicans are doing now. They could’ve strong armed every piece of legislation they wanted and proudly championed themselves as fighting for the well being of the American people after 8 years of a venal, self-serving, warmonger. They could’ve called Republican’s bluff on the filibuster and made Republicans work for, and own, every single obstructionist action they took.

All the while, Democrats and liberals insisted this was necessary. They insisted that this was unfortunate situation that Republicans had forced. That Obama’s hands were tied. That the Democrats in Congress were powerless - they couldn’t push for too much too quickly and they’d look unreasonable if they fought back too hard.

And all the while, AT EVERY PIVOTAL MOMENT, the progressive left said this was untrue. Said that Democrats and Obama needed to fight harder because Republicans would come back with a vengeance as soon as given a chance. That a strong progressive vision was the only way to combat the nihilism and corruption of Republicans. That the Republican party could go lower, get meaner, and be far more cruel than anything they’d done before and that we couldn’t let them have a chance.

And still, Democrats insisted they were being pragmatic. They insisted choosing Hillary as their candidate was the right move. They insisted that her record unpopularity and unfavorables as a candidate were irrelevant because they were unjust. They insisted that centrism was how you beat extremism. And Democrats lost. And STILL they are beating that drum. They’re justifying the loss, explaining that Hillary was in fact the right candidate, that it was so close in the midwest.

All the most progressive demographics of the Democratic party - young people, people of color, the LGBTQ community - voted overwhelmingly for Hillary. They turned out in huge numbers. Even though these demographics all also far prefer progressive policies and candidates, they rallied around Hillary for the sake of avoiding Trump. But you know who didn’t? Middle class white people, women and men. The centrist block went for Trump, the stupidest, most incompetent candidate in modern history. 

As if to justify this, Democrats paint these wild pictures of Trump as a savvy media mogul who knows his audience. Trump, the idiot savant who may not be a political wonk, but who is a master media manipulator. Trump, the deft messaging whiz who was a difficult mercurial candidate to run against.

Trump was, and is, a moron, with no discernible skill of any kind. His success can entirely be attributed to luck and the incompetence of his opponents. He is in the right place at the right time for his idiocy to propel him forward. That his messages and personality resonate in his favor says nothing of his abilities and everything of the present zeitgeist his constituents inhabit. He is the bird who keeps returning to the pond each day because the human arrives to give him food - the bird isn’t orchestrating anything, it simply knows that if it repeats it’s behavior it gets rewarded.

But this notion that Trump is somehow better, more skilled, more competent than he is is necessary for Democrats to justify why Hillary lost. It’s necessary because the truth is any decent candidate should not only have beat Trump, they should have demolished him. He should have lost in record numbers. Any half-way competent campaign team and candidate could have picked out the threads in Trump’s campaign that were resonating and developed an effective counter narrative. 

But Hillary had no narrative. She had no vision. She had no invigorating slogan or exciting imagery or quotable speeches. She ran a technocratic campaign that hinged on demeaning Trump voters, slandering progressive Democrats, and painting herself as a blank canvass every woman who could represent the struggles of all women. This, despite the fact that she is one of the top 0.1% of wealthiest most powerful individuals on Earth, has thrown women of color under the bus at every turn, proactively helped her husband slander the names of the women he raped and sexually assaulted, underpaid the women that worked for her as a Senator, and actively supported anti-humanitarian causes and polices namely standing with Israel against Palestine, opposing universal healthcare, supporting mass deportations, supporting fracking and fossil fuel interests, and supporting continued US military engagement in the Middle East.

Republicans are actively waging a policy war against the survival of humanity - they are supporting a president who taunts nuclear war and are working tirelessly to accelerate global warming, the most tangible existential threat humanity has ever faced. And they’re doing all of this by building off the foundation Democrats helped build and continue to defend.

It is necessary to recognize the brazen callousness of the Republican Party and to face it clear-eyed as so entrenched as to be entirely synonymous with the party itself. We cannot expect to turn things around if we continue to be naive about the prospect of ever working with the Republican Party to build a better world. But equally, we cannot expect to turn things around by remaining naive that the Democrats have done their best on our behalf or that the party’s sacred idols know something we don’t and that that is why they have failed to fight for a progressive vision. 

Neither of the major two US political parties wants to build a world that genuinely supports and serves the people - they each, in their own ways, want to preserve a world where those on top can remain on top, where wealth and power are guarded with the utmost sanctity, where the well being of humanity plays second fiddle to “growth” and “innovation”. 

CVS is buying Aetna because neither of the two major parties gives a shit if humanity survives another 200 years. We cannot count on them to save us and we cannot expect that to ever change. If we make it out of this it will be because we took back power for ourselves and held uncompromisingly to our own values and vision for a just world, not because we petitioned our current leaders to do better.