Condescending Saviors

 

I wrote this shortly after the Democratic Convention:

This recent convention solidified five deficiencies of the Democratic Party. Rather than addressing these well-known criticisms, the liberal elite, the party owned them with a nice helping of Jingo.

One is their use of the term middle class. Looking down from the upper I suppose what they see is the middle class. I wrote about class in my book, Another Data Processing Book. In US land we have nine classes, a tic tac toe board, upper, middle and lower both ways:

Upper upper	Middle upper	Lower upper
Upper middle	Middle middle	Lower middle
Upper lower	Middle lower	Lower lower

 

 Most of us are middle-lower and lower-lower. There is a big bulb at the bottom with a long tail stretching out into the distance. Somewhere on that tail you can parse out a small segment that contains the population middle-middle. We aren’t in it, and we know that. I haven’t found the middle class all that amenable to my company and I’m okay with that. Democrats use the term middle class as aspiration. Perhaps they are squeamish, if there is a middle, then there must be an upper and lower, but those terms are too offensive. It is disorienting to use the word middle without lower and upper. The disposition of wealth does not fall into a bell curve and that should be an advantage to Democrats. The middle-class votes for Orange Jesus.

Second is the use of the term workers. When we think of workers, we think of unions. For most of us, unions mean we can’t get jobs. We aren’t in the 11%.  To raise wages, you must reduce hiring. Occasionally we get sucked into organizing efforts that end disastrously. Boycotts, wildcats and new trade unions are illegal. Companies are fined and unions imprisoned. Again, Democrats aspire; we live here. Union people are often middle class.

Third is the argument that we should do it for mom. MAGA base hates its mom. I’m not saying they are wrong. Mom didn’t think much of them. When mom doesn’t make you special, you find other justification.

Fourth is the subsidies. I’m not talking about services but subsidies. If everyone got something, no one got it. Mortgage interest deduction is a good example. The deduction means banks charge homeowners more interest. As Adam Smith explained, if ministers get free tuition, there will be too many ministers for churches to hire. Subsidizing home buying makes housing more expensive. If tips were tax free, we would tip our lawyers. If everyone has a college degree, it is not a distinction. We all know this.

Fifth, we need to end our empire. It’s too great a sacrifice and too expensive. Take Gaza, please. US and Qatar interest in Gaza is preventing the development of Gaza Marine, Thirteen something trillion something cubic something times whatever. Qatar is now our junior partner selling natural gas to Europe and neither of us want a large gas field selling to our market. Texas is giving natural gas away and Europe is buying. That is why the US is recovering so well. That is why we blew up the pipeline.  US and Qatar favor any policy that delays development. Stooge is a subset of chump. It is cunning, it is also dumb. US produces the most oil, we won, we’re the OPEC. Why should it be US ruining the world to make a buck? All empires fall. Let’s go out with more style. If you don’t share, no one will play with you.

This doesn’t mean we should hire an idiot to run the country. The first time the babbling baboon ran they didn’t bother with a platform. Since there were no stated objectives and who would want to work for him, they just made a mess. The Project 2025 document begins by acknowledging the mess. This time Republicans created a ridiculous and defensive platform, they hate immigrants, trans and poor people. Republicans hire the undocumented. They put on a big show, but they hate the documented immigrants who will someday vote. Abortion is only illegal for poor people in stupid states. Republicans know that they are so hateful that people become trans to avoid being gay. Hateful and rich doesn’t make it legitimate. Republicans don’t understand they are giving away the game. You can’t govern without legitimacy.

Bobs court is an embarrassment. Each decision is worse, with no pretense of sense or justification. Cleaning up this mess will require constitutional amendments. Most idiotic in the history of courts is giving the president free reign. Mealy mouthed as it was, the court did not write an opinion to restrain the president. The decision provides a silly framework to justify any executive decision. In principle, our president could order Bobs killed. Bobs is corrupt, it’s in the national interest and it’s an official act.

There was a US citizen running around Yemen running his mouth. The president ordered him killed. Then we killed his sixteen-year-old son. The first two were killed with missiles. Then the next president ordered a ground operation to kill his five-year-old daughter and the family taking care of her. Presidents have little fear of prosecution. There is no reason to make that official.

Government is all in the wrist. It almost doesn’t matter what the policy is if it is executed well and conversely how good it is if executed poorly. Democrats mean well, or at least profess good intentions. A president must come in with about four thousand people or at least 400 who can each bring ten. Even if fat and furious made sense, he doesn’t have the people. Would you work for him? Look what happened to the ones that did. Six months doesn’t give much pension. Do you want Island of Misfit Toys on your resume?

Obama handled three epidemics. El Pompadour couldn’t get an appropriation for the vaccines. Instead, they drained the government research budget. Government research is where the future comes from. That set us back at least ten years.

Troll in chief privatized government intelligence. Our government intelligence is temps.

When someone announces they are an idiot, they are a one issue voter, or undecided they give away the argument and they can’t state their true reasons. Hope they are not registered. There is nothing wrong with being either liberal or elite if you deliver. If only more poor people voted. If only more poor people voted in the primaries. The harder it is to vote, the more it matters.

Voting for the gibbering gibbon won’t keep black people out of your neighborhood. You know that. Persecuting poor women in stupid states doesn’t stop abortion. This is a democracy. Eventually abortion will be unequivocally legal; we’re sick of your shit. Ending abortion doesn’t stop women working. No one wants to marry your stupid ugly kid. You know that too. You are not going to bring down the American empire. The American empire will end when it’s good and ready and it won’t be because of losers like you. All you have done is make another mess that everyone else will have to clean up, just like every time before.

Rock is dead.

Kind of fun. But then I wonder if I was telling you anything. Would this have any effect? Would it be positive?

It is yet another vestige of slavery that such a small plurality, less than 2,500,000 votes, produces so dramatic an advantage. There were only about 6 million registered voters that didn’t vote.

When training a police officer or prison guard someone has the responsibility of explaining to them that if they are taken hostage, it is possible that they will be the first target of the police sniper. This policy became obvious at the Attica Prison uprising. This minimizes casualties. Porky’s 47 cracks about Hannibal Lecter are a juvenile reference to the Isreal Hannibal directive that informed the Israeli people that they are all prison guards. Juvenile slyness targets a demographic.

Incels affect a depraved exploitative homosexuality. Orange Julius fellatio references was for their benefit.

There is no reasoning with MAGA. Biden cut bait in Afghanistan, not Don John. Big Greasy jailing children and sending their parents back to die insulted the Mexican undocumented and they quit coming. The fruit rotted, stores closed on Mondays and there are more jobs. That combined with Double O zero raising oil prices and Covid supply shocks without the undocumented to cushion them, brought inflation. Admittedly Mexico doesn’t seem to have street gutters, and they use adobe not brick, wait till they are arguing in front of the Supreme Court. It is wrong to let Cubans run Catholic charities. East Orthodox handled their federal money. We haven’t quite made it, but if we can survive the Irish, we can survive anything. Except for 9/11 Muslims are Irish lite.

MAGA likes undocumented. The undocumented work for MAGA. MAGA is not going to round up and deport its own undocumented. It is the people in the system, paying taxes, workmen’s comp, social security, that will someday vote who MAGA targets. Whatever rationalization MAGA offers, it ends with voting for His Hugeness.

MAGA doesn’t care about any of this. They don’t care about the price of eggs. They hate women, blacks, and themselves. Whatever talking point they throw, there is no way that Rumbo will deliver, except for keeping a woman out of the White House.

You can’t change people’s minds. What you can do is bring in new constituencies. My mom helped win an aldermanic by registering students in 1959. Big Cheeto’s success in 2016 was bringing his audience into the Republican party. Kind of like converting the King of the Khazars.  Jews quit proselytizing after that. Bidens victory was due to the Democratic snap back, more new Democrats registered than Republicans. Each election registered more voters. This election the Republicans found incels and enough women want their pussy grabbed. Besides running a woman, the Democratic mistake was concentrating all that resource on the existing voting base rather than registering more voters. Taylor Swift and Beyonce can’t overwhelm the incels by themselves. Someday we may run out of unregistered, but for now even Democrats should have found constituencies amongst the more than 80 million. Showing voter registration should be obligatory at concerts, events, demonstrations and family gatherings.

The Business School at University of Chicago just made the argument that we vote for Democrats when times are bad and Republicans when we feel prosperous. This is in line with Adam Smith’s view of the constant cycle between ruination and salvation in democracies. It was said that Democrats must be bought, and Republicans are already there. Everybody is bought. The difference is that Democrats seek consensus, and Republicans think they are right.

It is almost impossible to believe that “can you get me 11,000 votes” and electric Musk didn’t steal the election. There is the Adamowski argument. Adamowski was the Cook County States Attorney in 1959. Daley got Republicans to trade him away for Nixon votes. Since the States Attorney is supposed to police elections, if he can’t do his job he doesn’t get to keep it. If the election is stolen from incumbents, they are incompetent. Again, Democrat incumbents want an obvious plurality. Democrats are hurt that misogyny beats ability.

As to registered voters. I am going to state the obvious. During an election voters have power. The voters are deciding who to hire. We used to go door to door canvassing precincts to determine how people are going to vote. There is a quantum problem. Someone might say:

-I was going to vote for your candidate.

Canvassers should be short, elderly, and like your pet. One tactic is to ask people if they want to volunteer.  They don’t, but if they looked guilty, they were probably a plus. Once we contacted you and determined your preference, we did not contact you until election day. If you hadn’t voted we would helpfully remind you. If you were a minus or a zero, we didn’t want to remind you to vote. If you were a plus any further contact might change your mind.

Once we had experience in the precinct, we didn’t have to canvass everybody. There was the legendary Mrs. Isenberg of East Hyde Park who had five precincts. Voters knew when she was available to ask her how to vote if they weren’t sure. She may have occasionally canvassed if it was expected.

As I explained in an earlier post, I vote against anyone who robocalls me. Once you know I am voting for Harris and I am not donating money, any further contact may discourage me, even texts. The message Harris gave is that her campaign did not know who I am and has too much money. Just because I am voting for you doesn’t mean I should be pestered. Harris is the first candidate who wanted my donation more than my vote. Would you solicit money on a job interview? I would like to see a list of donors who did not vote.

The Democratic Party did fine out of this, everybody made money. Now they can stand back, and watch Republicans make another stinking mess. Grifter in Chief is already shaking the tariff money tree, looking for his taste, just as before with a wider scope. Please don’t ever say managed trade again. We need the free trade amendment. Put that on the list with ending the presidential pardon, abortion is legal amendment, dropping the second amendment, ERA, making federal election law an amendment, ending the Department of Labor, legalize drugs… The Democrats expect to come roaring back. After Big Bill Thompson Chicago is a Democratic city. Assuming there is another election. Mr. Microphone and the right wing Yippees denying legitimacy while owning the oil market invites a coup.