By Paul Edwards
March 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Natural disasters come
barreling out of nowhere, unforeseen. Before they
occur, cataclysms and catastrophic events of the
physical world--tidal wave, earthquake, wildfire,
eruption--are inconceivable. They blindside us
utterly. Human caused calamities are quite another
matter.
When Augustus Caesar, at the height of his imperial
power, sent three crack legions--unmatched fighting
units--into tribal wildland across the Rhine on a
routine disciplinary action he never imagined they
would march into Teutoberg Forest and never come
out, slaughtered to the last man.
He didn’t. But he could have. Because most
tremendous shocks and dislocations in human society
occur only after an accumulating series of
predictive and prefiguring indicators, a data set
that, properly assessed, points toward an inevitable
outcome. The run-up is obvious in hindsight.
The Democratic Party apparatus, from its governing
elite down through all its controlled and managed
bureaus and affiliates, is vitally absorbed now in
the effort to terminate the flourishing Presidential
candidacy of Bernie Sanders. It believes it’s
engaged in a mortal effort to prevent a “democratic
socialist” from betraying its governing ethos and
subverting its creed. It is.
The tools it uses to achieve its end--the smarmy
commentary and acid innuendo, the sly denigration
and biased sniping, the techno manipulation and
sleazy assaults on his character, sanity and
goals--are the desperate tactics of a political
elite that believes it’s fighting for its life. It
is.
What its ruling clique can’t understand is that the
mortal threat it faces is not Bernie and his
politics. It’s the fatal reality of what it has
become.
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Factional contradictions within a party are all
manageable to a point. The charade of trampled,
abandoned principles, cynical dissembling of intent,
and cosmetic masking of policies as what they are
not, can continue as long as key constituencies are
mollified and rewarded. When they can’t be, when all
pretense that they are is an open sick joke, when
the yawning gap between its rhetoric and its reality
is baldly, flamingly clear and all spoils accrue to
a single, voracious controlling faction, the writing
is on the wall.
The fact of Bernie brings the reality of the
Democratic Party today into plain view and exposes,
as an open casket does, the grisly horror within it.
The last fifty years have seen the appalling descent
of the Party from one which could--when forced--take
halting steps to benefit The People, to the
money-hustling brothel it is now. It was rare, but
from public force plays came Social Security,
Medicare, and the Civil Rights and Wilderness Acts.
Those coerced deliveries of popular social good gave
some color to its claim to be the “Party of the
People”. There has been none for fifty years.
The Vietnam debacle did us irreparable harm in many
ways but one most prominent was that, with the total
U.S. takeover by the corporate oligopoly and the War
Machine, Democrats who ran opposing them were
pulverized. The answer to that in the minds of the
Dem politburo and Bill Clinton was to move all in
after money and just bullshit the proles because,
hey, they have to stay with us anyway. We’re nicer
than those other pricks.
It made perfect sense to the corporate mind. Cater
to the massive bucks of Wall Street and the War
Machine, befuddle the dim, sappy, declining middle
class with pleasant, polite, high-minded blather,
and cut the poor, ill, elderly, and immiserated
dead. They have no money to give. They don’t matter.
Between the glib, ingratiating, snakeoil poster boys
for faux progressivism, Clinton and Obama, the
transition was made. The Party became the toy of the
Big Kahuna donors of the Oligarchy while its
traditional electoral base--ordinary, working
people--like tipsy, seduced debutantes, surrendered
and embraced the two Prom Kings it adoringly
permitted to fuck them.
But America finally got a belly full of it, and the
inevitable reckoning came: enter Trump and his coven
of inverts, sociopaths, and kookball Christer
warlocks. And into that resulting chaos rode Bernie,
the Knight of Flaming Social Equity, wielding his
magic sword, Medicare For All.
Where does this face-off go? First, there is the
dingbat Slough of Despond of our half-assed primary
maze for Bernie to negotiate, with one of two
results: he gets a clear majority of delegates or he
doesn’t. If he does, he’s nominated. If not, he gets
brokered out at the convention and that ends his
threat... but not their problem. That just moves it
closer to endgame.
Because Bernie’s damage to the big bosses is already
done. In the ’16 race, his treacherous sabotage by
the Party machine in favor of Hillary was revealed
for the world to see. By that, and in denigrating
him and his ideas, intensifying now many fold, he
has consistently shown them up for what they are: a
second-string party of Big Money, of the .0001%, of
the War Machine, banking/finance thieves and
pirates, and the Vampire Squid of remorseless
Capitalist exploitation that has sucked the economic
life out of The People, raped and fouled our world,
and sold our children’s futures. That exposure can’t
be eradicated, regardless of what happens to Bernie.
The Democratic Party has ingeniously arranged two
ways to fail, one odds on, the other a real long
shot, but either will destroy it in its current
form.
If the combine of reactionary nonentities who
bombed, with Mike Millions, and vindictive team mole
Warren, deny Bernie his majority, then the Party
will nominate its flaccid, fatuous Nowhere Man who
will be joyfully flogged by Trump, beaten like the
vacuous drum he is. In that event, the Party dies of
permanent 1% donor withdrawal and mass youth
abandonment.
If, spectacularly, Bernie somehow fights through the
blazing broadsides of his Party to nomination, he
will thrash Trump against the open opposition of his
own power elite. When elected, the Party, with its
traditional voter base energized but completely
alienated from the official apparatus, will be riven
and dismembered, which will mean formation of a real
progressive party.
Contrary to popular belief, parties do die. The
Federalists did. The Whigs did. And the Democrats
have every confidence they can do it, too. And they
should. A more sleazy, cynical betrayal of a mass
voting body has perhaps not been seen since the
Reichstag Fire.
When the nation demanded a party dedicated to the
health, prosperity and welfare of a yearning
citizenry, what it got was vile betrayal and
cowardly abandonment by Democrats, who sold every
iota of concern for Americans for the money of a
grasping, visionless, suicidal Capitalist oligarchy.
So... as The Bard put it, “Now blow wind, swell
billow, and swim bark, for the storm is up, and all
is on the hazard”.
Paul Edwards is a
writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached
at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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