Every single day there is an article about Kamala Harris' quest for VP

I have noticed how, in the past eight weeks, there is an article about Kamala Harris' quest for the VP spot in major corporate owned newspapers nearly every single day.

Now, we are treated to an article in CNBC that explains why Harris has not fully secured the VP spot, though she remains in the hunt. 

What I found striking in the article is how a few "bundlers," including one from Florida, have more access to and influence over Biden than, oh, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of activists and delegates across the nation. Oligopoly anyone? These rich people control what happens in the Democratic Party, and what this article reveals is simply there is division among the people who actually count over a particular potential VP candidate--and you and me? We don't count. #DemExit.

Over at the Lawyers/Guns/Money Blog, Paul Campos thinks there is sexism at work in the opposition to Harris among some Biden "bundlers" because they are calling Harris "ambitious." Um, Paul, the "sexism" argument works more credibly if there are competing male VP candidates, which Biden has already said there would be none. So, maybe this is reverse sexism since no men allowed to audition for VP? LOL. 

Campos belittles the substance of those in the Biden circle's critique of Harris, which is this: There is only one woman in the VP short-list who truly humiliated Biden on a national stage during the primary, and that was Harris. This was so, even as, the day after Harris' personal attack on Biden about his refusal to support mandating bussing of African-American and other minority students to white dominated schools during the 1970s, that she would not mandate it, either. That is essentially Trumpian in accusing someone of a personal failing the accuser has as well. 

News flash to Campos and anyone else who thinks as he does on this topic: The issue here is first and foremost money power and influence in the Democratic Party. The second issue is we see, once again, how Biden is telegraphing he does not want anyone who is not personally loyal to him, and not merely loyal to corporate Democratic Party priorities, which is a big overlap if plotted on a Venn Diagram.

As for Harris' ambition, let's put it this way: If Harris was given a test designed to expose narcissism and sociopathy, she would likely test hugely positive for both. Unfortunately, so would most people in office or who run for office in this modern era, especially. These people are monsters--and the irony is, Bernie showed he was not a monster when he refused to rip off Biden's face when he had the chance. I know, though. Bernie's supporters were so mean. Yeah, keep believing that.

As George Carlin famously said in a much larger context, it is called the "American Dream," "because you have to be asleep to believe it."  

UPDATE: 8/12/2020:  Funny how it is Harris who is chosen to be VP. That Politico article must have been the last gasp of the anti-Harris people on Biden's team.  I believe the majority of the Democratic Party's big donors (Wall St., Silicon Valley, and Hollywood) pushed Harris on Biden, and Biden, ever so compliant to big donors--Biden's true base--chose Harris.  I should have figured something was up when I read how the horrible corporate Democrat, Chris Dodd, Biden's leading adviser for his VP search, was being pushed to the side.  And don't over interpret the 92% voting record in the past year with Bernie.  It is not a meaningful metric, when there is no chance the legislation would be passed, and when Harris has already shown, when she awkwardly but strongly backed away from single payer health care, that she is nothing but a player for the big donor class.  We also had the same figure back in 2015 about Senator Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.  I remember, nearly two decades ago, how Ralph Nader explained how that voting record metric did not mean anything in a time where corporatism is so pervasive in American society. And it still doesn't. Harris is a self-actualizing Indian-Jamaican female Senator Payne.

Waking up to the irredeemability of the Zionist project

The late, great Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) wrote an essay in 1916, where he said he had high hopes that Jewish nationalism, i.e. Zionism, was not going to end up as every other nationalism, which is to say reactionary, racist, and militant. As more and more American Jews, at least, are recognizing, Zionism is fitting into the pattern Bourne thought Zionism was supposed to have avoided. In this context, here is Peter Beinart, in his co-founded magazine, Jewish Currents, deciding he can no longer support political Zionism in the form of Israel. Beinart's trajectory from pro-Iraq War II war booster, as a young editor at the then-Zionist dominated The New Republic, to where he has ended up today is nothing short of extraordinary in modern American journalism. Most people who change their political views tend to move right and pro-military-industrial complex. Beinart has moved left on the issues of the military-industrial complex, and its subset, Zionism, and, in that process, has given up much monetary advantage as no US synagogue or temple is likely to invite him to speak, and if a brave little temple or synagogue were to invite him, the little temple or synagogue would not likely have any money to pay for much beyond a plane ticket.

Also in this growing trend and context, here is a very good interview (though the professor, Benjamin Balthaser, assumes too much previous reader knowledge), which explains how American Jewry went from being largely anti-Zionist to nearly lockstep pro-Zionist, especially since the end of World War II. The fact that this topic, which has long interested me, is becoming more interesting to others reflects how increasing numbers of American Jews have become estranged from Israel. 

Happy Fourth of July?

Retired General Andrew Bacevich is one of the living generals I most admire. Bacevich understood, from his military perch, that the War Against Vietnam was unnecessary, and was cruel to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Thais, and even to US soldiers. He is best known among political junkies as a commentator for what has been the best self-styled conservative magazine in our nation for at least the last decade, The American Conservative (which transcended much, though not all, of the magazine's founding members' racism).  Bacevich has long understood the rot inside our nation from an economic, political, and cultural perspective, and from a perspective that remembers the root word of "conservative" is "conserve." Too often, as Corey Robin ably showed us in The Reactionary Mind, conservatives and reactionaries primarily are interested in conserving privilege, whether wealth privilege, male privilege, or white privilege. It is a conceit of conservatives rarely uttered in American corporate media because it would give away the game of most of our disputes, and illuminate the triviality in much of our discourse--where corporate cable news has conditioned us to merely and largely wait for, and argue about, the "outrage of the day." Trump's tweets are a particularly odious manifestation of our trivial discourse, but Trump merely seized a new platform for use in a system corporate media "news" structures helped create.

Anyway, Bacevich has written a short, sharp, and insightful piece for another conservative journal, The Spectator US, which journal is a more strident and polemical conservative journal than The American Conservative. The essay speaks to Bacevich's integrity, as he did not change his overall style for the Spectator. The two key paragraphs in the essay are near the end, where Bacevich answers two major questions he poses for the reader:

...(F)or too long, ruling elites allowed the purported obligations of global leadership to take precedence over tending to the collective wellbeing of the American people. This was a conscious choice made by leaders of both political parties. We are now living with the consequences of that choice, with the persistence of racism offering just one example of what neglect has produced. Yet it deserves to be emphasized: the neglect was not Trump’s doing; he was merely its ironic beneficiary. We are its victims.

A preliminary answer to the second question must begin with this admission: the era of US dominion has now passed. So Americans can no longer afford to indulge in the fiction of their indispensability, cherished in elite circles. In fact, the sun has set on the American empire. Subordinating the wellbeing of the American people to ostensible imperatives of global leadership — thereby allowing racism, inequality, and other problems to fester at home — has become intolerable.

My critique of Bacevich's essay is in the second of the two paragraphs quoted above, which is about the end of American leadership around the globe.  Bacevich says the time for America's leadership in the world has passed, and that it was a long time coming. I would say he is correct as far as what he says, but not so for what he does not say. I would say, had we ever elected a Robert Kennedy or Bernie Sanders-type as president, the nation would have become a leader again with respect to climate change, and the push for renewable energy and mass transit, which would also entail, because of RFK's and Sanders' recognition of the interconnectivity between energy, diplomacy, and economics, a change in priorities regarding economic growth. It may be a stretch to give RFK credit for things before his time, but his GNP speech tells us he understood things beyond his moment. The US would have become a leader in diplomacy, starting in various hot spots, though, in the Middle East, it would have been a carrot-stick approach with Israelis, and, to a much lesser extent, Palestinians (the latter are victims, and their acting out is a response to oppression, so less sticks and more carrots are necessary for Palestinians). The US would have become a leader in promoting labor rights and unions, pulling up wages, and in the process, experimenting with Universal Basic Income, transferring wealth in various nations, and, very importantly, improving women's autonomy over their own bodies. 

Yes, I know this is a very sentimental what-if, but we could have done a lot more good than we have done for the globe, and a lot more good for each other, even if we still fell short.  Also, let us keep in mind how the Chinese government is already going around the world, building influence through building hospitals, and roads, and providing doctors. We could have done something similar to create, instead of an arms race, a "race" to help the people and creatures in our planet.  

We have long had the potential to be a nice nation. It is too bad, and a tragedy, how rarely we showed our nice side to the world, and to the Native Americans we genocidally displaced. The one exception is perhaps the Marshall Plan for Europe, but, even then, there was some deep political corruption involved.

At this particular point in our nation's history, only movement politics, led more by our disaffected, indebted youth, and younger people up to ages 38-40, is capable of saving our nation from ourselves. However, movement politics' most insidious enemy remains corporate network television and radio. I am working on a theory, which will now have to be put aside for personal reasons of securing my first job as a high school teacher, that future historians--if there are any, besides the equivalent of monks squirreled away from cataclysms and dystopian environments--will see broadcast network news as a technological "advance," which had the ironic effect of leading the "masses" to become addled, passive, confused, misled, and polarized--in short, blaming each other instead of the overlords who own the nation. The late Neil Postman saw this, as did Jerry Mander.  Bacevich may not know about Postman, Mander, or anything relating to corporate media criticism of the past 100 years.

Bacevich knows the true overlords in the military-industrial-financial-entertainment-and-prison complexes within our society, and rightly blames them in his essay, and in many of his other essays over the past decade or more. I sometimes wish Bacevich had run for president, as he had instant credibility for the mass of our nation from his status as a respected general. However, Bacevich's level of cultural conservatism reveals something missing with respect to his ability to understand the dynamics which exists in any modern culture. Bacevich's inability to understand modern culture would have been a flaw greater than Bernie Sanders' inability or refusal to stick a rhetorical knife into his opponents, the way most political leaders do as they rise to the top.  

What I continue to say is Boomerang is coming, while climate chaos is already here. Addled Joe Biden won't save what remains of the Republic, but voting out Trump probably will forestall the collapse. Hence, my back and forth about, on the one hand, #NeverBiden, and third party politics development, and, on the other hand, my recognition that Trump represents destruction in so many ways. This indecision leads me back to my belief that what has the best chance of saving the nation--and getting around corporate broadcast television and radio cable news--is movement politics. We older people continue to remain an enemy to all that is good in our nation--not all of us old people, of course, but certainly the majority of older white people, and a less higher percentage of older minorities who somehow think they can just go along, get along, and wait things out. We older people really have been bad parents and grandparents in our voting habits and how we evaluate what is happening in our world.  

But, Hey, Baby, It's the Fourth of July. Strike up the bar-b-que, open a beer, and sing that "tribute" to ignorance and hateful nationalism, Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA. Meanwhile, for those other people who watch MSNBC, and think of themselves as "liberal," and supposedly enlightened, can download Disney Plus, and watch Hamilton. We all have our sentimental myths, and sentimental hopes. I admit mine is, every few weeks, re-reading parts of, and arguing with, Claude Bowers' Jefferson and Hamilton (1925), a book most famously in history reviewed by then-future president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  To each our own, I suppose. But, we better learn to own up, and stop punching downward and sideways.

Kentucky voter registration numbers and McConnell-McGrath US Senate race

I just saw a poll showing McConnell beating McGrath in Kentucky by approximately 20 points. Pathetic, right? I had seen another poll last week showing the same McConnell margin of victory over McGrath, and a comparison with progressive Charles Booker as the candidate. It showed Booker also losing, but by 12 or 14 points--which is also a lot. This morning, I thought I'd check Kentucky's voter registration information. This is what I found:

Male: 1,641,101

Female: 1,834,456

Democrats: 1,677,777

Republicans: 1,491,224

Other (Decline to State): 186,726

Independent: 107,844

Libertarian: 10,215

Green: 1608

Constitution (real old fashioned right wing and racist): 692

Reform (old Perot, now Nativist/Racist): 94

Socialist Worker: 213 (Wow. That is interesting, isn't it?)

Let's start with nearly 200,000 more female registered voters. That should mean run a female in the usual campaign strategist playbook, right? Well, in McConnell's last election in 2014, Dems ran a relatively popular female statewide officeholder, Alison Grimes, and McConnell clobbered her. Grimes suffered from the same problem McGrath does, which was trying to outflank McConnell from the right (Grimes would not say if she voted for Obama in 2012, and often had commercials saying how she'd fight Obama as "your Senator."). Once again, gender doesn't seem to count as anything positive for a Democrat against a Republican.

Then, let's recognize there are still 180,000 more registered Democratic Party voters than Republican voters. Get out the vote, and win, right? Well, know that is not too big a margin, and we see nearly 295,000 voters registered as Other (Decline to State) or Independent. That is a lot of voters disaffected from the duopoly. Good political science studies show such people are often anti-Establishment. However, this is Kentucky, and what we do not know is how many are white and harbor racist views. But, somehow, the African-American progressive firebrand, Booker, would be doing somewhat, but not significantly, better against McConnell. One may have thought racism should have overwhelmed the anti-Establishment perspective, but perhaps it only represents a ceiling of his independent support.  

My hope for a Booker nomination had been to register a heck of a lot more unregistered African-Americans. Kentucky's total population is 4,467,673. The percentage of people 18 and older is 78.5%.  That would leave 3,194,387, which is weird! That means there are nearly 200,000 voters more registered voters than people. It also means either not enough Kentuckians filled out the census forms, or worse, Republican officeholders, who essentially control the State, are not purging dead people or people leaving the State from voter registration rolls, or, worst of all, adding nonexistent registered voters.

I leave it to someone who has more deeply studied Kentucky politics to tell me how people vote for McConnell regardless of the population issue. I would think a Democratic Senator would bring home more "bacon" than McConnell, a full-on corporatist. Also, in recent years, McConnell's corruption and fealty to corporations should be obvious to more Kentucky voters. However, it seems McGrath has no chance to beat McConnell. She excites nobody outside of a few people, and, had Booker received corporate media publicity a month before he did, he would most likely have won the primary over McGrath. But all the same, Booker would still likely lose to McConnell, as we see how Kentucky's actual voters behave in that State's general elections.

If anyone wants to donate to a political lost cause that would at least make us feel good, I'd recommend Shahid Buttar's race against that classic corporate enabler-virtue signaler, Nancy Pelosi. In that race, the battle we need inside the Democratic Party is worth the effort. Buttar is an amazing candidate, and has just raised his first million in the two person race.  He won a paltry 13% of the vote in CA's "jungle primary," but beat every Republican, so there are two Democrats running against each other (Buttar and Pelosi) for November, with no write in or third party.  Pelosi's district is essentially San Francisco.  My take is, if Buttar gets more money, he can compete over the airwaves, and let people know about him and why he is the better candidate.  Sending Pelosi home would definitely send shockwaves through the corporate Democratic Party establishment and their enablers in corporate media.  Forget about McGrath. She looks like toast.  Buttar is the more fun, more hopeful, and more revolutionary candidate to support.