Even liberal Democrats are unwilling to provide real relief to distressed homeowners and renters. All they want to offer is a temporary moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. In that respect, they are exactly the same as the Republicans. After all, they have a common class interest.
We Are All in This Together. But Some of Us Are More in It Than Others
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Excellent cartoon today. A minor detail: the curtains in the Oval Office are now gold, a subtle reminder of what life’s really all about.
… millions of people will be homeless.
Who cares?
I care a great deal, actually. Or rather I smell a great deal: our portfolio managers keep nagging me about my gazillions of dollars – those we got out of the market before it crashed due to inside information – are eating a hole into my pocket for want of investment opportunities.
Look no further, I say. When those foreclosures all happen at the same time, housing will be a buyers’ market and we can take our pick.
Next, we will take over a section of those small businesses that we were unwilling or too ineffectual to save.
We can even use the bail-out money to leverage our funds to take over yet more of whatever is left that seems of value.
We engineered the rising tide to not only lift all the yachts but also drown all the suckers. Grandpa would be so proud.
The moratorium serves one major purpose: to psychologically condition the chumps to think they’ve been treated fairly. “Well, they gave us six months, a year, a year and six months …”
The game was rigged, and the chumps kept playing. Clinton. Obama. Then the chumps lined up to vote for Hillary. Here comes an epidemic. And an economic collapse of unprecedented scale, and one candidate warned about them before they got here. And Biden’s beating him 2-to-1 in the primaries because the chumps are too stupid to admit they’ve been conned for their entire lives (it’s the same mechanism religion operates on).
We’re facing hardships that will drive many of us to suicide, pills, the bottle, and crime. And two out of three democrats are still voting Biden. Biden can’t win the general election. He’s the opening credits of the “Six Million Dollar Man.”
Those of us in our fifties might, just barely, get social security, at least until Biden ends the program–just as thirty years of footage shows he intended to–but the rest of you? You will have nothing. Not even hope.
Don’t tell me class trumps (no pun intended) politcal party, Ted – never would have thought it !…
Henri
Well, I kinda do give a rat’s arse.
Because when these people buy us out for ten cents off he dollar, and accumulate even more wealth and power, they are going to need more force to maintain this grotesque structure. That means more official state apparatus but also soon extrajudicial means of maintaining this system.
And that is what I really fear.
( Like in El Salvador. )
Well, I kinda do give a rat’s arse.
Because when these people buy us out for ten cents on the dollar, and accumulate even more wealth and power, they are going to need more force to maintain this grotesque structure. That means more official state apparatus but also soon extrajudicial means of maintaining this system.
And that is what I really fear.
( Like in El Salvador. )
American Exceptionalism:
The belief that no matter how many foreign governments and their elections the US subverts; no matter how many baseless wars devastate no matter how many millions; no matter how many are tortured and imprisoned without cause for no matter how long; no matter how many Americans now populate the extreme lower economic classes and its prisons: The Government of the USA would NEVER do anything so cruel, underhanded and deceptive to its own “exceptional” people.
We’re all in this together, each like one crab in a bucket of crabs.
Some crabs manage to climb over and up upon the backs of their “compatriots”, leaving them crushed and suffocating beneath.
Some are praised for their sacrifices; some are forced down into dwelling among they who are to be sacrificed.
Does any essential worker really believe that the flattery of their “betters” is anything more than instrumental?
It’s insulting to be thought of as naively accepting false praise and to be assumed to be so stupid as to believe you are respected for making a sacrifice when the choice of who is to be sacrificed is made by the few crabs who sit comfortably at the top of the crab pile where air is plentiful and breathing is easy.
Essential workers are essentially expendable workers and will be easily replaced by other desperate workers who must in turn choose between deaths by covid-19 or homeless starvation.
There is a difference between making a sacrifice and being sacrificed if their personal choice is not genuinely their own.
Excellent
Perfect, Mr Rall.
What bothers me is that all the Trumpeters think Trump is GREAT, while Obama and Clinton were terrible, and the #NeverTrumps figure Obama and Clinton were two of our best presidents, and Trump is the absolute worst, when all did about the same things.
(Of course, Obama and Clinton were bigger liars than Trump, they kept SAYING they were doing everything they could to help African-Americans and Hispanics and to fight climate change while pushing through laws that maximised incarcerations and removals and greatly increased fossil fuel production and protected the fossil fuel companies from lawsuits, & etc., & etc.)
That’s the way I see it too, michaelwme.
Michael, you raise a point that coincides with something I was discussing with a friend earlier today: Trump is absolutely hated by a substantial portion of the left. I mean, absolutely despised and reviled.
But where’s the protest?
Democratic voters number around 50 million to 60 million. If 1% of those voters organized through social media and e-mail, it would cost (um, carry the three, divide by zero, square the negative, accentual the positive) nothing to organize them into into 12 rotating squads of 40,000 to 50,000 people to “Occupy D.C.” on a rotating basis. Can’t put your whole life on hold to protest the Hitler of the 21st Century? Fine. Once every three months, commit to a weekend occupying a protest camp in D.C.
But I don’t see the dems doing that. I don’t see them doing much of anything. They love to complain about Trump, equate him to an existential threat, but I don’t see them actually DOING anything.
Actually DOING something, Alex, would be vulgar – almost Sandersesque – to which so well-brought up people as those who populate the DNC would never lower themselves. They, like Mr Trump et consortes, would prefer a war with China to a protest camp in Washington (and perhaps they recall the fate of the Bonus Army, back in the day….)
Henri
You’re correct Henri.
Americans are too polite [broken spirited?] and politically correct to be openly political.
And being politically critical instead of celebratory, in highly status conscious self-promotional America, is an admission [perceived as shameful?] of being one beaten by the system instead of being of the class of system beaters.
Complaint is so de classe.
I myself have not refrained from occasionally wearing a wiff of the bad odor of pig wrestling as a badge of honor.
It’s sometimes impossible to do good work (pig wrestling) without getting a little dirty.
Re: “Even liberal Democrats are unwilling to provide real relief to distressed homeowners and renters.”
Given the general (consensus?) opinion of the term “liberal(s)” on this thread, including myself, I’d suggest there is really nothing about the definition of that term to compel anyone to expect anything meaningful / compassionate from liberal Democrats (congressional or otherwise) with regard to those distressed by the economic effects of the response to COVID-19.
By the same token “progressive” is still (naively?) considered a title invoking positive connotation. But, that term, too is rapidly following the course of “liberal.” While some widely proclaimed congressional “progressives” may have hollered loudly in their floor speeches, I would have to see roll call votes to believe
any voted “NO” on the series corporate-ass-licking, pre-emptive bail-out bills … with nothing more than cheap talk and the political back-of-the hand to the many in true need.
“Liberal”and “Conservative” are two names that have the same meaning.
So between them there is the fierce competition to garner the favor of the same Oligarchy.
The competition between two members of the same species is most brutal because both want to occupy the same ecological niche.