We’re in Some Deep Shit
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Not since Ralph Nader’s failed third-party bid for the presidency in 2000 has the blame game garnered the megaphone attention that this year’s duopoly has. Now, Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign has focused the hyper attention of Democrats, whose own candidate Kamala Harris says just about nothing in the realm of major policy initiatives, while Trump travels the countryside with his jaundiced and hate-filled speech view of the world. It’s soon forgotten that hate speech that does not lead to violence is protected speech, but with guns ablaze in the US that fine line sometimes is filled with the blood of the innocent.
Not to travel too far into the universe of minutiae, but both Trump and Harris are supporters of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and Israel’s expanding war in the Middle East, have absolutely no plan to reverse climate destruction, and will allow the decades-old party for wealth to continue with low personal and corporate taxes. Both of the duopoly’s jokesters will continue the policy to isolate and surround China militarily and through trade, with the Democrats worse on Russia, from where we’re told every evil emanates. US weapons manufacturers are experiencing a field day and no proposals to reverse nuclear war-fighting capacity are on anyone’s table. Mass incarceration is the answer to the absent social welfare safety net, housing is generally unaffordable, good jobs for ordinary people have long since been destroyed by sending whole industries overseas, the education system, once a jewel in some places, is on life support, and medical care depends on how much a person has in his or her pocket and where one lives. In other words, it’s a shitshow that has been moving steadily along since the last New Deal president, Richard Nixon, who was also a warmonger. Many in the power elite love the sirens’ song of scarcity. The idea of a social safety net long ago washed up on the shores of individual responsibility. A person does not have to be a Ph.D. to figure out that those people standing and begging on the traffic islands bordering shopping centers aren’t standing there as a fitness routine.
Adam Smith’s “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,” and hasn’t changed very much in the centuries since that pronouncement. Readers can easily imagine the mass media banning Smith from what passes today as rational discourse.
The New York Times has devolved into a mouthpiece of neoliberalism. In “Jill Stein Won’t Stop. No Matter Who Asks.” (October 20, 2024) this is what is expected: “How does it feel to be personally responsible for actually bringing Donald Trump into power?” Ms. Stein recalled being asked this year by a man in New York — another heckler accusing Ms. Stein of tipping the 2016 election.”
According to the Times, the resistance to her campaign has even come down to her family: “For her political activities, she does not have the support of the family,” one of Ms. Stein’s adult sons said in an interview, asking not to be identified by name to avoid any personal or professional repercussions from associating with her. “When she told us she was going to run again back in October 2023, we asked her not to.”
It’s 2000 all over again, except now Jill Stein’s name can be substituted for Ralph Nader’s: “And Democrats, as never before, are focused on Ms. Stein. “The party has prepared a negative ad blitz for the election’s final weeks, its first-such effort ever directed at a third-party candidate.”
The reaction of Democratic operatives and the media is both nauseating and expected. Neoliberalism is so devoid of policies and fight for the ordinary working Jane and Joe, and as a result, smear campaigns are the “best” that happens. The Democrats are hand-in-hand with Republicans over the crime of crimes, genocide by Israel in the Middle East and the response is that their candidate, Kamala Harris, is the answer to all of the substantive issues facing both the US and the rest of the world. But, there are no policy positions, which in any case are easily broken after taking office, and this abysmally less than lackluster campaign is allowed to go on as if nothing of substance matters. Listening to interviews and news programs with Harris is painful. If I’m not Joe Biden is the best she can do while being part of the Biden administration that has supported Israel in every one of its bellicose actions and supporting fracking is the best that can be hoped for as environmental policy, then we’re in exactly the deep shit we have known we are in for a very, very long time.
The duopoly and its blessing from the mass media and wealth won’t let anyone else into the halls of power. Libertarians, socialists, communists, or whatever political party a candidate represents outside of the duopoly is forbidden in the US. Kowtowing to power and money is as old as the Federalist Papers and as new as today. This nation was founded by wealthy land and slaveowners for the most part and a slightly different tune plays out to this very day. This is James Madison in Federalist Papers 10: “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” What mattered at this nation’s founding remains true today. Even the bizarreness of the religious right has a place at the table of power. Once they were ensconced in the Puritans and now in the radical religious right that would like nothing more if we all flew up to their version of heaven on the wings of a nuclear holocaust.
In “Kamala’s Complete Inability to State Real Beliefs’s EXPOSED” (October 25, 2024), investigative journalist Glen Greenwald goes to the heart of the Harris campaign’s lack of policy positions and even a casual observer might ask: “What the hell is going on here?” Kamala Harris’ non-answers to questioning by the media’s talking heads is reminiscent of Chauncey Gardiner’s interviews in the fictional movie Being There (1979). It may be that Harris’ interviewers might have been better off asking her about the seasons?
Emma Goldman’s observation: “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal,” has become more prescient as elections follow upon the heels of elections in the US and the empire and its discontents march on. Ordinary people have become observers. Huge multinational corporations, the finance sector, weapons manufacturers, and those from the political power elite have control over our lives. Protest is often repressed.
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