The Infrastructure Bill Blues – I’ve Seen this Movie Too Many Times
By
David Gottfried
Yesterday, Steven Colbert, one of the few comics I like, said that reaching an accord on the infrastructure bill would help mental health because once these negotiations are done and finished he will no longer have to listen to the “fucking bullshit” about the bill(s).
Even though I have been interested in politics throughout my life, I feel the same way. I have seen this movie too many times. In this movie, the left is always trashed like Judy Garland being snubbed by Andy Hardy in favor of a blonde, bombastic bimbo. Meanwhile, the media falsely reports that the left is a bitch on wheels when in fact more conservative Democrats are laughing their asses off at how they have screwed progressives.
For example, yesterday’s New York Times, the quintessential phony liberal rag, reported that the staunch and strident left stopped Bourgeois Biden from getting his deal. The Times somehow seemed to think that the Left should commit to the latest iteration of the Bill – which got rid of Medicare expansion for dental and vision, community college, paid family leave, incentives to make utilities move away from fossil fuels, a billionaire’s tax and more – even though the two biggest republicans in Congress, Democratic Senators Munchkin and uncinematic Sinema, have still not agreed to anything and have reserved their right to quibble about anything and everything till the cows come home. (So many pols are so corrupt that I sometimes wonder if Trump or Mitch Mc Connel are paying Sinema and Munchkin to fuck us up)
Ah, but Sinema and Munchkin aren’t the only Democrats at fault. I have always wondered about bourgeois Biden. Of course, most people think he loves working people. He has an aw shucks manner about him, and he mentions having spent part of his childhood in working-class Scranton on a weekly basis, and whenever he is within one mile of a factory that becomes Biden’s excuse to dress in proletarian drag replete with a hard hat and a sweatshirt announcing his fealty to a sports team, and so people are convinced that he is as wedded to a working class man as an old Irish Lady making soda bread three times a week.
And I submit to you that Biden is and always was a fraud. For example, yesterday Biden said that he did not get everything he wanted because he had to bargain and that when one bargains one doesn’t get the whole enchilada. However, when Biden bargains for the left, we don’t even get a quarter of a taco. For example, in 2012, Biden’s bargaining resulted in the extension of the Bush tax cuts even though they were set to expire. At the end of that abysmal round of bargaining, the Majority Leader of the Senate, Democrat Harry Reid, told the White House to never again let Biden negotiate with Mitch Mc Connel. In fact, Biden was known as the “soft underbelly” of the Obama Administration, the weakling, or conservative sympathizer, that Republicans could rely on to axe Obama’s more progressive objectives. Furthermore, Biden, who masquerades as Joe Workingman in overalls, campaigned for Senators who opposed Obama’s “card check” proposal which would have made it easier for workers to unionize. In fact, Biden used his influence to install, in the Obama White House, John Podesta’s sister-in-law, a woman who worked with corporate lobbyists to nix Obama’s plans to facilitate unionization.
But, of course, the media ignores news stories that are too heavy for the American people, who like their news in fluffy pastels, like cotton candy. Ergo, it covers politics by characterizing and gauging the atmosphere of a candidate. If a candidate and his supporters like wine and cheese parties, Volvos, tweeds and esoteric witticisms, the media says that they are George Mc Govern liberals. And in the case of Joe Biden the media have decided that since he is a bit like Ralph Cramden (played by Art Carney) in the sit com “The Honeymooners,” he is as working class as a sausage and peppers hero and a Budweiser.
Of course, the Democrats had a fine progressive in the form of Bernie Sanders who got over 50 percent of the vote in Nevada’s 2020 caucuses while the second-place finisher got around 20 percent of the vote. But the very next primary after Nevada was South Carolina.
Since the electorate in South Carolina Democratic primaries is very heavily black, Democrats walk on eggshells when they talk about South Carolina voters. Although I will concede that blacks in South Carolina suffered a lot, that doesn’t make them wise. I think Vladimir Lenin had it right when he said that the working class often or usually does not know what it needs. After all the Russian poor were so intellectually stunted that they thought Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzoh.
Similarly, I am sure many of the blacks of South Carolina took one look at Bernie Sanders, and after seeing his white hair strewn about in different directions as if he were wired to an electrical current, decided that he was an evil, mad, Jewish scientist who wanted to drag Jesus down to earth so he could personally kill Jesus again.
[I am not a racist. I am not anti-Black. Rather, I am anti Southern. When I think of the south, it appears as if the entire confederacy has had its brains marinating in bacon grease for a couple of hundred years. For example, President Truman’s uncle came up with his own version of Darwin’s “Origin of the Species,” having told the future President that G-d made white people from sand, black people from mud and Chinamen (As befitting a country bumpkin, he did not know that some Asians weren’t Chinese) from whatever stuff that was left over.]
In the South Carolina primary, Biden was presented as a stalwart supporter of civil rights and the black man’s best friend, and the black people of South Carolina gave him their resounding support. This proves that politics is utter bullshit because only a few months before the South Caroline primary Kamala Harris tore into Biden, at a debate of the Democratic presidential contenders, likening him to a racist, confederate Neanderthal, and much of black America rejoiced in Kamala’s skewering of Biden.
But these about-faces in politics happen all the time. For example, when South Caroline skewered Bernie Sanders in 2016, when he ran against Queen Hillary, South Carolina blacks portrayed Hillary as a veritable Saint in the pantheon of pro black pols even though months before Jim Clyburn, the veritable Tsar of Black Democratic politics, lambasted Hillary for claiming that some white people, such as Lyndon Johnson, were instrumental in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
According to Tzar Clyburn, by praising Lyndon Johnson, Hillary was guilty of detracting from the deification of MLK who, apparently, must always get all the glory.
Of course, since Democrats are too busy killing each other over who was the finest advocate for civil rights and other ludicrous distractions, they let themselves be steam-rolled when actual legislation takes place.
Much of the problem isn’t their fault as Congress, and many Democrats, are downright conservative. In fact, some political scientists have said that ever since 1937 or so, when Congress pilloried FDR for wanting to increase the size of the Supreme Court, until the present, Congress has been essentially conservative expect for the first two or three years of LBJ’s administration.
Because of Congress’s conservatism, and the essential conservatism of so many American presidents, all liberal initiatives are often whittled away into mush. A brief litany of the failure of Democratic Presidents to enact Progressive change (I am only discussing domestic, economic issues to keep this document from getting too long):
1) President Truman knew how to sound like a class warrior for the poor, having called the rich “bloodsuckers” and “gluttons of privilege” in the 1948 campaign, but in his administration he never fulfilled his promise to finance health care for poor and middle class people, presided over the enactment of Taft Hartley, and when railroad workers threatened to strike, he threatened to draft virtually all railroad workers in the United States.
2) John F Kennedy made many gallant, liberal speeches, but he reduced the corporate income tax rate, accelerated depreciation schedules for capital investments for businesses (instead of writing off the cost of a machine over five years, they could do it in three), did not fulfil his campaign pledge to increase the minimum wage and aid to education (In large measure, Congress was to blame) and from 1961 to `1965 dividends increased by 55 percent while the take home pay of factory workers rose by 22 percent.
3) Lyndon Johnson. Although he really did do a lot, almost every benefit bestowed upon the poor and middle class was coupled with a bigger benefit for wealthy Americans. See “Bourgeois Liberalism” a chapter in Michael Harringtons brilliant late 1970’s work, “The Twilight of Capitalism.”
4) Jimmy Carter cut corporate taxes again (Neither Nixon nor Ford cut corporate taxes), opposed the enactment of the Humphry Hawkins full employment bill (designed to stimulate employment during the recessions of the 70’s), refused to let Medicaid pay for abortions, saying that sometimes life was just unfair, and opposed any resumption of the war on poverty.
5) Bill Clinton drastically reduced the availability of welfare, presided over the repeal of Glass Steagall and the decision not to regulate derivatives (which gave us the crash of 2008), gave tens of billions to big media outlets in connection with the transition to HDTV, and, after Hillary’s health care proposals were trashed on purely psychological grounds (Essentially, the media painted her as a man-eating dominatrix), Clinton, upon the advice of Dick Morris (whose next job, after the Clinton White House, was Fox News) retreated into touchy feeling bullshit issues designed to stimulate the desires of the dumbest of the dumb, the soccer moms, for whom he promised moral regeneration by bringing back school uniforms.
6) Barack Obama was elected because the powers that be realized that a liberal Democrat would be elected in 2008 given the debacle in Iraq and the poor economy. So they gave us Obama. Because he was black, they knew the dumb electorate would assume he would be a liberal. The powers that be also knew that he was one of the mushiest, softest, easiest to manipulate liberals. While in the Illinois state legislature, he was famous for allowing his legislation to get amended to death, having advocated an ethics bill which was modified and perverted till it meant almost nothing. Ditto his bill to curb video taped confessions, taken under problematic conditions, used to lock up criminal defendants. He had been hailed as a community organizer and for fighting to remove asbestos from a housing project, but the asbestos had only been removed years after he left Chicago to go to Harvard Law School and the Times quoted one of his confederates as saying that his job as a community organizer did more for Obama than it ever did for Chicago.
As President, he decided that Medicare would not be empowered to negotiate for better drug prices (After all, he got more money from big pharma than either Hillary or Mc Cain), adopted a health care plan which essentially consisted of the government giving insurance companies money to provide insurance, and he did not fight for the public option even though, when he took office in January 2009, liberal sentiment was very powerful as the economy was crumbling and a great majority of Americans, at that time, supported Medicare for all. He gave us an economic stimulus, but although it was enough to avert a depression it was not enough to arrest the continued rusting of the rust belt. Hence, we lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and Trump won in 2016.
And do you really have to wonder why so many Democrats are in the Bernie Sanders and AOC wing of the party
I can give you many more examples of the perfidy of mainstream Democrats, but I gotta go.
As I’ve said, I’ve seen this movie many times before. It’s almost Halloween and I want to see the Exorcist, The Omen and the sort of trashy movies that really turn me on. Trash beats politics which is trash pretending to be profound and public-spirited.
Good one...