Intermezzo Americana?

Maybe some of us, many even, will sleep a little better tonight. Just that tad more restfully. It's been a good day. Some big symbolic changes.

But what we mustn't do is think we can turn off the alarm clock. Nor turn it back. Because we've had our wake up call and now, somewhat unusually, our world has a second chance, of sorts.

 

But for others, the same desperate fears and frustrations that led to their giving all their hopes and trust to a snarling sociopath grip their hearts and minds tonight as they have for years, decades, whole lives. We may condemn them for their bad choice, laugh and sneer at their credulity, denounce their apparent bigotry. 

 

Except, one in five of them would have voted for Bernie if the Democrats had run him, and many more were originally part of the New Deal Coalition targeted by Reagan and dismissed as deplorables by both Clintons. Many were Latin Americans. And many more than last time were black.

 

They will still be there in four years. Will they still be angry, still afraid? Still as many?

 

The people who destroyed their worlds, closed their factories, poisoned their water, sent their kids to desert wars and shut down their futures - they are as much in the Oval Office tonight as they were four years and forty years ago. They promise to listen more, to heal better and certainly progressive voices are louder than before. 

 

Yet they have always promised so, and power is seductive and elites so terribly good at absorbing real challenges. It's not conspiracies or cults; it's just what happens when authority is based on rank and hierarchy, greased of course by filthy lucre. It has been so ever since we were persuaded to give our grain to the priests to store in the temples. And then the priests gave the grain to soldiers and made themselves into kings and emperors and built palaces and capitols. Primus inter pares. 

 

But senators need tribunes to call time on their deeds. Symbols need to be more than themselves. You don't "speak truth to power". You tear it down and share it out. Otherwise, nothing ultimately changes until the all that is left to make it happen is the whim of the mob and the rumble of the tumbril. Biden quoted Kennedy today but not to the extent of repeating his not particularly radical but still prescient predecessor's warning that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

 

So the monster is gone. And perhaps we can sleep. But not too deeply or too long. 

 

The world may have a second chance, but it only gets one wake up call.

 

And we've just had it.

 

 

Biden and Business As Usual - Liberal Delusion Number 119

 One week out from the US Presidential election and, not entirely unlike last time, the so-called progressive wing of the Establishment, the liberals and social democrats, their sponsors and media mates, have perhaps a little more cautiously than last time more or less called it for Joe Biden. Trump is toast, disintegrating faster than bone spurs in an X-ray machine.

Yet, while yesterday's Rasmussen national poll giving the incumbent Trump a 1% lead is still something of an outlier, most other polls, while giving Biden a lead of around 7% on average all show things tightening. With the impact of the efforts by Republican governors to effectively disenfranchise poor and black voters over the last two years, a tack seen on balance as favouring Trump, and the robust efforts to impair voting by mail in this virus-ridden poll, the result may yet be much, much closer than the broad left, and some traditional conservatives, might like to wish. 

Certainly, it is far too soon to call the result – especially once you factor in the massive pile up of Democrat votes in relatively few big states set against the need to balance that with wins in smaller states to tilt the winner-takes-all maths of the Electoral College (the body that actually elects the President). As we know from 2016, the President does not need a majority of votes cast to carry the college. He just needs to come close and come ahead in the right places.

Taking a hunch, Biden on balance may probably win; and yet his victory will be a truly hollow one; less the routing of far right, neofascism and rather more the temporary stopgap Hindenburg provided against Hitler’s Nazis in their 1932 contest. That even now the outcome is actually still in question with Trump averaging the support of around 9 in 20 voters demonstrates that this vote will not conclude anything in spite of all the pious hopes of liberals for the USA to return to being “a normal country” and of their counterparts everywhere for “politics as usual”, a resumption of the comfortable spin of two sides of the same capitalist coin taking buggins turn at squandering people’s hopes and dreams and our planet’s resources and biosphere alike.

Biden’s legacy is toxic – from his active  backing of crime legislation that has incarcerated almost 3 million predominantly black people to work for free on behalf of the military and big corporations in a form of modern slavery under Bill Clinton to fostering the continent-wide fracking rolled out under Obama. Like many liberals his stance is that of a chameleon, from cold blue to hot red and back again depending on circumstances. And, in Biden’s case, it seems to also be who he listened to last - Bernie or Barack, Kamala or Hillary.

Trump has made much play of Biden’s memory issues. Some have seen this as a 74 year old man trying to disingenuously portray a 78 year od man as “past it”. But in truth Joe’s memory lapses extend far back in time to much younger days: this is a man who in his first run for President, way back in 1988, forgot to credit Bobby Kennedy when he used his words to invoke patriotism, forgot to mention he was quoting UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock when he asked why his wife was the first in her family to go to college and who somehow forgot that rather than topping his law class, came 74^th out of 86 and, in a strikingly Trumpian outburst, told a questioner he almost certainly had the higher IQ.

Biden’s 1988 primary candidacy collapsed with his hubris and lies, but this year it seems the Democratic National Committee was so fearful of a truly transformational candidacy in the shape of Bernie Sanders that they set aside everything. From Joe’s economy with actualite through his son’s unquestionably dodgy dealings in Ukraine to the outstanding, un-investigated claim of sexual assault by him on a young female intern working in his office in the 1990s, it doesn't matter - all that does is that he isn't Trump.

And it shows.

Biden was credited as the winner of the final debate last week: most polls found him to have stood up to Trump, though relatively few were enthused by him. The debate was seen as treading water and unlikely to shift more than a handful of voters. And yet a throw away comment by Biden in the closing moments may yet prove to be disastrous.

Asked about climate change, Biden seemingly boldly announced he would close down the oil industry. Unsurprisingly, Trump suggested this was the big news of the night, leaving Biden stumbling to correct himself that this would be done “over time.”

It is true we need to shut down oil, but the fact is Joe Biden has no particular interest in doing so. Nor does he have much understanding of what might replace it. Where Bernie Sanders (or the Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins) might have talked about transitioning jobs in oil into renewables, Biden betrayed his lack of knowledge and even belief in the need to change by having little to nothing to say. It was after all, under the Obama-Biden Administration that the plug was effectively pulled on the previously burgeoning US renewables industry in favour of opening up the country to fracking - so much so that his now running mate, Kamala Harris, sued them unsuccessfully in her capacity as Attorney-General of California to stop them drilling off the seismically sensitive Pacific coast.

In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, once a Democratic bastion but in many counties now with a registered Republican majority, Biden’s confusion and slipperiness may be his undoing. For this is where liberal managerialism comes unstuck – it was precisely its detached elitism, foisting fracking on poor communities and now after they have made some modest economic gain from it in spite of their environmental catastrophes deciding to shut it down, that turned voters away from the likes of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. 

Biden had established a narrow lead with the prospect of winning the state's vital Electoral College votes back, but on the ground Trump’s campaign by all accounts is reaping a swift dividend from Sleepy Joe’s apparent wish to now shut down the very industry he and Barak Obama imposed on the state. The very latest Pennsylvania statewide poll, out tonight, gives a 2% advantage to the President.

Donald Trump is an appalling, nasty, greedy, sociopathic narcissist. It is truly difficult to find any redeeming features in the man at all. Yet like Hitler, he has fed on genuine grievance and directed it to his advantage, however dissembling and disingenuously. Unlike Hitler, he has no ideology and is not as well organised, but that is not to say that, once he is gone, someone more coherent won’t emerge at the head of his huge and still very much intact base vote and the armed militias he has told to “stand by”. 

That the Democrats have singularly failed to destroy him and his creed is proof enough that they have yet again failed to even begin to understand the forces that created him in the first place – because they and the corrupt elitism they represent and buttress are perhaps the primary force. They, like New Labour under Blair in the UK,  saw so many working class Democrats as having nowhere else to go and so eminently betrayable to the corporate interests that have bought the Dems lock, stock and barrel – so much so that a movement like Sanders’ socialist one was seen as a threat rather than the once-in-a-generation transformational opportunity that it was.

And if in the end Joe Biden just squeaks in, with a half-baked programme, a promise simply to not-be-Trump and a Supreme Court soaked in Tea Party bigotry, the next four years are already lost and the next forty seriously at risk.

Bernie Sanders and the Revolution to Come

Passing the Progressive Torch: Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders

And so democratic socialist standard-bearer Senator Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for US President.

With around half the primaries contested, he trailed former Vice-President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates and with surveys giving Biden a roughly 2:1 advantage in forthcoming contests, Sanders could not see a realistic way to win. Coupled with the hobbling of his campaign, which had thrived on mass rallies and town hall events, by the coronavirus crisis, the institutional barriers thrown up by the Democratic Party establishment in the form of the Democrat National Committee have yet again stopped any progressive traction within the party.

There is some evidence of ballot tampering - notably, on Super Tuesday, when Biden's campaign decisively pulled ahead after a dreadful start, data indicated something amiss in states where Sanders won the exit polls but lost the actual vote, but with extraordinary differences well beyond the normal margin of error. And from the outset the mess in Iowa stymied Sanders' momentum, although it did get moving afterwards for a short period until the sudden turnaround in favour of the previously badly flailing Biden in South Carolina. The withdrawal of all the centrist candidates in favour of the clearly ailing former VP, coupled with Elizabeth Warren's refusal to back Sanders when she withdrew, effectively handed the nomination to Biden and his vague, liberal platform.

And so, just as Corbyn was crucified by a range of tactical manoeuvring by his centrist opponents and their corporate media paymasters in the UK, so in the USA once again the Establishment has spiked and neutralised a major challenge. They may be popping the champagne in the DNC tonight, but in truth the path ahead for them is infinitely harder than the typically pompously naive centrists can imagine.

Joe Biden - confused

For Joe Biden has to be arguably one of the worst, if not the worst, candidates the Democrats have ever nominated. Aside from his self-evident health issues, which appear to be some form of dementia or Alzheimers, his provenance is poisonous.

While faced with the mercurial Trump some may still fondly remember the Obama years, when Biden served as the President's loyal deputy, many aspects of his career raise serious questions - his civil rights record, contrary to his propaganda, is poor going back decades, as has been his approval of wars and welfare cuts. A rape allegation from a Democrat activist and former staffer of Biden has gone uninvestigated alongside a myriad of other issues about his invasion of women's personal space and unwelcome touching. And while Democrats may have invoked legal process to try to impeach Trump as ineffectually as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the incumbent President was in fact worrying a very real sore when he tried to induce the Ukrainians to investigate Biden's son Hunter over his lucrative involvement in the energy sector in their country.

Senior Democrats seem to acknowledge this and blatantly, having rid themselves of Sanders' challenge, rumour is rife that Biden will, in fact, not become their final candidate for President. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has been substantially boosted by his very visible leadership of the state's response to the Covid-19 epidemic, or even former 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton, are both touted as possible replacements, in spite of neither having won a single delegate to the Democrat Convention. Taking the democracy, such as it is, finally and irrevocably out of the Democratic Party.

So what now for the progressive and socialist movement? Sanders' relentless advocacy for fully-funded public health has been completely and dreadfully validated as tens of thousands of US lives succumb to coronavirus, with poorer and ethnic minority communities disproportionately affected. His huge movement, which has effectively mobilised tens of thousands of younger people and others towards a socialist or at least social democratic platform, remains intact and vibrant, hungering for change and social justice. And with the pandemic set to utterly transform politics around the globe, the USA will be no exception.

All the inequality, the underinvestment in crisis preparation and lack of effective public health facilities and staff, as well as the low level of welfare in the USA, has never been more poignantly and powerfully evident than now. While President Trump has enjoyed, inevitably, a miniature boost in the polls as he heads up the government response to the national crisis, his veering backwards and forwards around how to respond to a threat he ignored for weeks, then played down for weeks and for which even now he declares all manner of wild and unproven solutions that never turn out leave him vulnerable to attack.

Just as Cameron and Osborne's prominent involvement in the Remain campaign handed the UK Euro-referendum to the Brexiteers, so the DNC's eagerness to put up Biden or Clinton or even Cuomo against Trump plays directly into his hands in the November poll. It is unsurprising that a leaked recording showed that he feared Sanders above all other potential Democrats - for Sanders' stance on issues like opposing free trade deals like the job-thieving NAFTA, or on tackling the influence of political lobbying in "the swamp" posed a direct threat to Trump's tried and tested card, even as the incumbent, of being in Washington but not of it. While centrists fantastically claim that Biden can reach out to supposed "moderate" Republicans who nevertheless backed Trump in 2016, in truth, it is Sanders' agenda of radical change that is far more likely to cut into the President's base of the alienated and oppressed working class and turn their anger into something more positive.

By contrast, Biden or Clinton could not appeal to such voters in a century of trying - it is precisely because of them and their betrayal of the decades' old New Deal Coalition that Trump and other populists have been able to rise and harness voters' disillusion into racism and xenophobia rather than challenging the gross wealth of the tiny elite.

With a clearly misplaced loyalty, Sanders has already lauded Biden in a show of unity, while stating he will stay on the remaining primary ballots, though inactively, in order to influence the final party policy platform in the autumn. But that is almost certainly a forlorn hope. Biden and his ringmasters have made clear that they will stick with the same unimaginative, business-as-usual Democrat agenda that left Trump catapulted into the Oval Office four years ago.

Sanders' socialist torch will now pass on, skipping a generation from him to much younger politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and their colleagues in the Progressive Caucus within Congress and others outside the legislature. The Green New Deal, central to Sanders' movement, will continue to inspire and attract millions of younger voters as the climate crisis eclipses by far the current virus pandemic, but it will also increasingly raise the question of how long, and why, they should persist with the institutionally totalitarian, pro-corporate, corrupt Democratic Party - or go their own way. With socialism as popular as capitalism among young US adults even before the current crisis, new routes to change will inevitably be mapped out and taken. If ever there was a time for a third party/ independent run by a credible progressive candidate, it is now.

Third parties are effectively barred from competing in the USA, a fact missed by much of a world  still dazzled by the propaganda that it is supposedly the "land of the free". While not formally banned, they frequently have to find much higher, often prohibitive thresholds of sometimes tens of thousands of electors to nominate their candidates while Democrats and Republicans enjoy automatic ballot access and even then remain excluded from the public funds handed over to the two main parties. With the media stitched up to advocate the status quo, like much of the rest of the world, voters are powerfully corralled into voting for the "right" candidates, who, contrary to myth, are distinctly not the best of the USA.

Yet the Republicans themselves once replaced the Whigs almost overnight, and strong third candidate Presidential runs have occurred as recently as 1992 when Ross Perot polled nearly one in five votes running as an independent on an anti-free trade platform. With Biden or any replacement distinctly flaky and Trump vulnerable over the Covid-19 crisis and the economic one to follow, could there be a better time? Wouldn't a Sanders-Cortez ticket, perhaps in conjunction with existing radical third parties such as the Greens, have a uniquely powerful chance of delivering the revolution he and his supporters have worked so hard to prepare for?

It sadly remains an unlikely outcome, but in a world of social lockdown, viral pandemic and economic dislocation, this may be the best and possibly last chance to effect real change to the USA, and the rest of the world, before the gathering storms of global warming, resource depletion and societal collapse hit our fragile Earth.

And while an independent candidacy is remote, the challenge will endure - the ideas and the movement Bernie Sanders shaped, harnessed and energised will go on. As the crises facing the planet and our species become clearer, its cry will become sharper, and as the vested interests threatening our survival are ultimately forced break cover, its demands will become ever more radical.
 "Not me. Us."

Super Choice on Super Tuesday

Sanders and Warren

SUPER-TUESDAY, the only second working day of the week to lay claim to such a dubious titĺe, is about to dawn

Democrats in 16 states across the USA will be voting for the party's Presidential candidate. In today's opinion polls, Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders leads centrist Joe Biden in the three largest states - California (35 to 14%), Texas (31 to 26%) and North Carolina (28 to 14% with billionaire Mike Bloomberg on 20%).

But with Amy Klobucher endorsing Biden and Pete Buttigieg out of the contest, the liberal vote may begin to coalesce against Sanders as the divided Democrat Establishment rally around either former Vice-President Biden or, perhaps less likely now, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

While the centrists fall like nine-pins, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, now touted by some as a perhaps still unlikely VP candidate for Sanders, continues to run as high as 17% nationally. As the race tightens, she will now be ever more critical to how the party's existential contest turns out and with it the long-term future of democracy in what remains perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most destructive nation on Earth.

It is to be hoped that personal ambition does not cloud out the reality that the nomination is far beyond her grasp now. While she and Sanders retain significant policy and perspective differences, they have worked together many times over the years and the progressive wing of a party still stitched up by the Clintonite Democratic National Committee needs to unite to have any chance of overcoming the myriad of obstacles about to be chucked at them on the path to the Presidency.

Barring any last-minute upsets, by Wednesday morning, Warren will have a crucial decision to make - one that anyone hoping to see a first glimmer of a reversal of the populist right's surge across the globe must hope she calls correctly, stands down and backs Bernie.

Taking Libertarians - America's Other Choices

As the US Presidential election draws ever closer, while Hillary Clinton remains favourite to win, neither she nor her rival Donald Trump draw much enthusiasm from anyone outside the minorities that form their base. Clinton is even more distrusted than at any time in her career following the FBI's not yet finished investigation into her private email account and her opaque responses to the inevitable questions about her judgement. Meanwhile, Trump's sociopathic-like egotism and rampant racism make him arguably more divisive than any major candidate in the last century, worse even than the Republican extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964 (whom Hillary Clinton enthusiastically campaigned for in her student days).

Little surprise then, though woefully undereported, has been the emergence of a large third party vote. Around one in five of those planning to go to the polls in November are signalling support outside of the traditional Republican-Democrat duopoly. Unlike the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot in the 1990s, or the fantastic voyage of John Anderson way back in 1980, the notable thing is that the challenge is coming from candidates of well-established and growing political parties fielding candidates at all governmental levels and so suggesting that there may now be a lasting trend towards change.

There is a plethora of third party candidates and independents, but the two that matter are the rightwing Libertarians' Governor Gary Johnson and left's Dr Jill Stein of the Green Party, both of whom are standing for a second time. Their platforms are genuinely insurgent challenges to the Establishment - while there is a significant crossover on issues such as net freedom, soft drugs, immigration and abortion, the two are far apart in areas such as government regulation of the economy, tax policy, health provision, protecting the environment and providing state education. Both stand for campaign finance reform and an avowedly non-interventionist foreign/military policy.

The media has only reluctantly started to recognise the rise of Johnson and Stein - the former New Mexico Governor is frequently polling in double digits nationwide, while the Green has topped 6% of the national vote in some polls and is set to win many times her 0.4% 2012 score. Organisationally both parties are better placed and funded than before, with Johnson on the ballot in every state and electors able to vote for Stein everywhere bar four states that have managed to bar the Greens from running (The US is far more adept at limiting choice than even Putin's Russia).

Stein has grabbed some headlines this week after an arrest warrant was issued for her and her running mate, Amaju Baraka, after they were filmed spray-painting mechanical diggers at the site of a planned oil pipeline project across sacred land in the Standing Rock Sioux tribal reservation. The Green Party campaign has built on the Sanders' campaign success within the Democrat primaries, arguing that with the demise of the democratic socialist Senator's challenge to Clinton, the real option for a genuine revolution in US politics is to be found on the left, in the Stein-Baraka fold rather than the ruthlessly establishmentarian Democratic Party.

Indeed, Baraka has suggested that, unlike Sanders, when the Greens talk about revolutionary change, they mean it. Like most European Greens, they have a strongly progressive programme for social justice alongside and intertwined with environmental sustainability, and have formally adopted ecosocialism as their philosophical basis.

More prosaically, Libertarian Johnson has gained unwelcome attention after fumbling over a question in an MSNBC interview about the siege of the Syrian city of Aleppo.

"What's Aleppo?" he asked in response the the question, "What would you do about Aleppo?"
This has been used to suggest he is an isolationist, ignorant of the wider world and so unqualified to be President. Yet, if you watch the whole discussion, Johnson quickly realised what the question was about and gave a perfectly articulate, well-informed response about a diplomatic solution working with Russia, ending support for the FSA and avoiding interventionist wars in the future.

Johnson later said that when the question was asked he was thinking of an acronym rather than the name Aleppo. A big crime to get confused? Not when his Republican opponent avowedly wants to bomb the Middle East to oblivion, while the Democrat one already is.

It is highly unlikely either Johnson nor Stein will meet the 15% score required to win a place in the TV debates with Trump and Clinton - if either or both took part, it would undoubtedly shift both the quality and tenor of the argument immensely and be a huge step in busting the race open. Yet in any case, the third parties' rise at a time when the traditional parties are collapsing on themselves is a welcome reminder that, even in a large, neoliberal superpower, with all the forces of Big Money and Big Brother ranged against true democracy, no Establishment is forever.

Video: Hitler Hears Sanders Won't Stand Down

Bernie Sanders won a further primary victory this week and ran Hillary Clinton agonisingly close in Kentucky, less than 2,000 votes behind her out of over 550,000 cast. With just ten primary contests to go, he trails her by over 250 in the elected delegate count, but with more than 750 still to be selected, it is at least technically feasible for him to win - although with her 9 to 1 inbuilt majority among the unelected "superdelegates", Clinton seems guaranteed to have a majority when the Democrat Convention gathers in Philadelphia in July. Consequently, although Clinton fought to the very end in 2008 against Barak Obama, she and her media allies are increasingly trying to pressure Sanders into stepping down now, rather than see the electoral process through to its supposedly democratic conclusion.

It is not how the script was meant to be, of course: from the outset, the Democratic National Committee and the mass liberal media had crowned her the heir presumptive to President Obama before a single vote was cast. Sanders' socialist-inspired insurgency, drawing in millions of independents and socialists who would otherwise never vote Democrat, has torn asunder the Establishment's plans, just as his mirror opposite Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party.

Notably, while the two men could not be further apart in almost every way, their respective insurgent platforms appeal to a surprisingly large number of "crossover" voters: people who, like growing numbers throughout the world, feel disenfranchised and ignored by the political elite,and are more than ready to support anyone who challenges the status quo. Consequently, opinion polls show that, while Sanders would comfortably see off Trump in the full Presidential election, as an establishment candidate, Clinton could potentially struggle and even lose to the eclectic Republican maverick.

But perhaps this is what happens when liberalism, like the market capitalism it depends upon, draws towards its close. Just as the economics no longer work, nor do the politics. People are less and less inclined to trip once every four or five years to ballot boxes to simply confirm the elite's right to rule over them, bar the odd, minimal policy variation. The politics of tomorrow, if not quite yet today, will again be the politics of ideas and vision; not the politics of managerialism and consumerism.

But that is not to say that the current Establishment will give way gracefully or democratically. As evidenced by the shutdown of voting procedures at the Nevada Democratic Convention (backed by sinister looking security personnel and police) and the media campaign to deflect criticism from Sanders' supporters by labelling their anger as extremist, the kick-back has already begun and it is likely to get much, much worse in the times ahead.

Police State: the Nevada Democratic Party Convention last weekend.

American Psycho

The USA has seen two of the most tumultuous and ultimately troubling primary contests in recent history, both now drawing to a close in terms of voting and with the formal nominating conventions on the other side of summer.

On the Democrats' part, Bernie Sanders has led a incredibly powerful insurgency against the establishment candidate Hillary ("It's my turn") Clinton. The DNC's response has been to put up all means of obstacles to Sanders en route, and we have seen voters disenfranchised, claims of vote-rigging and of course the power of the appointed super-delegates, whose utterly unwarranted say in the process rips away any shred of democratic pretence. Like so many liberals, these people see elections as a mere ritual where the grateful masses confirm their right to govern - democratically, of course. As soon as they start choosing the "wrong" candidates, the people are being "unrealistic", "not taking it seriously" and, by some paradox, even "undemocratic".

Clinton is now likely to be the Democrat nominee - though as Sanders' unexpected win in Indiana last week shows, it ain't over until it is over. And, in spite of the establishment, there is even now a faint possibility that the FBI may yet subpoena Hillary over its investigation into her emails, an unprecedented situation for a Presidential candidate (well, other than for early 20th century Socialist Eugene Debs, who fought one entire election from his prison cell).

This opens up the terrifying prospect of a Republican Party Presidency under their own insurgent nominee, Donald Trump - for the polls all show that, while Sanders would pull enough independent voters to the Democrats to trounce The Donald, Clinton struggles to stay just ahead. The very latest poll gives Trump a two point advantage over her.

Trump. What can you say?
An Ego, wrapped in an Id, inside a toupee...

This man has built his entire career on an unwarranted image of entrepreneurship that never happened, trust that was actively betrayed and success that went down the toilet. Yet, it shows the depths of disconnection of the American political class and system from ordinary people that his rambling, incoherent rage and bile simply piles up more and more votes for him. The Republican party establishment is in meltdown even more than the DNC, but they have only themselves to blame - it was they who created the narrative of xenophobia and global aggression that Trump is now simply taking to a logical, if extreme, conclusion. That Ted Cruz, a man who thinks Jesus had sent him to bomb the deserts of Syria "until they glow", was his only serious rival shows just how hollow the party of Lincoln now is.

So, much more on this in the weeks ahead. For now, a little gallery of the American elections memes on the Viridis Lumen facebook page, collected here to amuse and terrify, possibly in equal order.

1. Atomic Finger...

There was a time it just seemed too incredible.

2. Netrump
Donald had problems with the internet of ideas. Best to shut it down. Or bits of it. Maybe.

3. Game of Trumps
Republicans aren't good on tackling climate change. Donald saw some snow in December, so what the heck's all the fuss about?

4. Gremlins Ex Machina
Jeb Bush was meant to be the Republican candidate. It was his turn after all. But if you feed an Ego, it can multiply without warning...

5. No Muslims. Mates excepted
Building on years of paranoia whipped up by the Establishment, Trump has used Islamophobia to announce he will "shutdown" American to Muslims. Did he mention his extensive business links with the Muslim world? And the people there who are, erm, Muslims?

6. Major Cruz to Ground Control...
Latterly, the only semi-serious challenge to Trump's nomination was Senator Ted Cruz. He dislikes most people apart from Jesus, though Jesus has been quiet on his own thoughts about Cruz.
Ted notably wants to visit the Holy Land so he can help along that whole Armaggeddony process thing.

7. Comedy of Terrors
Someone organised a Shakespeare for Republicans Day to highlight the tragedy and face. But are we laughing?

8. Feel The Bird
Bernie Sanders had a major comeback after a little bird hoped onto his lectern during a rally. Quick to the moment, the Socialist Senator announced that although it didn't look like it, it was a dove of peace. Here's Birdie Sanders...

As Sanders' poll ratings, votes and delegate count started to ratchet rapidly upwards, the Clinton camp was in panic, trying to pull all manner of stunts to make Hillary look sort of regular.

9. Office for Sale
Sanders has raised virtually all his campaign finance from small individual donors. Clinton by contrast has taken millions from corporate America to fund her drive to supposedly represent ordinary people.

10. American Psycho
We won't know the final outcome until November, and many variants from police investigations to third party runs may yet skew what happens. But one thing is for sure - Bernie aside, the collection of truly bizarre, corrupt, narrow-minded and frankly dangerous egotists running this year has put any and all attempts at satire, parody or allegory far beyond the pale. There is a very good chance of someone becoming President who categorically refused when asked to rule out dropping a nuclear bomb on Britain, let alone scores of other places.

“I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.” - Donald Trump, Republican Presidential candidate.

“What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?” - Katrina Pierson, Trump spokesperson.
(Both statements 20 December 2015)  

Perhaps only the dark dreams of apocalyptic science fiction-turning-to-fact can give us any warning, if little in the way of any comfort.

The Triumvirate of the Damned; Or Jesus Lives, But Satire Is Dead

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend of mine posted a link on Facebook to what appeared to be a shocking statement by Republican Senator and would-be Presidential candidate Marco Rubio. In it Rubio held forth on his opposition to abortion in virtually all circumstances, even, when challenged by the interviewer, if Martians invaded and assaulted American women. Zika virus meantime was possibly God's way of punishing babies, so no legitimate ground for a termination.

Eventually by looking at other items on the "news" site, I ascertained that this was, in fact satire - the giveaway article was one where President Obama was reported to be angry about internet porn, but only because it was costing him so much to view.

Yet it was a close call - because the thing is, it isn't so difficult to imagine Rubio saying what was attributed to him. His party, after all, boasts a range of lawmakers who see rape as the woman's fault and have been prepared to legislate to enforce this warped view, inspiring memes such as this one, where each statement is not satire, but hard-fact comments from elected (male) American representatives.

And, of course, somehow, on some distant planet, Rubio is seen as the "moderate" member of the Triumvirate of the Damned composed of himself, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.

Satire works when it takes the most ludicrously extreme position of a public figure and then stretches it to a logical but far-beyond-feasible horizon. The humour is in the warning - this is where you are headed if you take their dogmatic stupidity to its furthest but nigh-impossible conclusion.

But satire dies if it is no longer a humorous warning and becomes instead an all-too likely forecast. Because, in this era of post-factual and post-reason politics, anything at all really is possible.

Back in 1980, the British satirical TV programme, Not the Nine O'Clock News, included this sketch:

People were amused because, under the early days of the Thatcher Government, the Tories were imposing swingeing cuts on welfare spending. If they kept on this path, the satire held, the next thing they would indeed do would be to tax white sticks and wheelchairs. Except, of course, no one thought for a moment that they actually would, even if we knew a good number of them might like to - because it was simply too far, too outrageous. So, even under Thatcher, even under the greed-inducing, society-denying Iron Lady, they never did - indeed, latterly, they even encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to classify as disabled in order to reduce the official unemployment figures.

Whizz forward thirty years and now we have headlines like these:

Now, Government ministers with six figure expenses claims extol the need to cut disability benefit by £30 a week and utter statements chillingly close to Hitler's arbeit mach frei (work sets you free),  while a Tory councillor recommended euthanasia by the guillotine for disabled children with little rebuke. There is no longer anything to joke about. Anything, it seems, really is possible.

And so to the Republican Presidential race.

Marco Rubio perhaps does slide into some faint degree of distant reason set against his rival Ted Cruz, who happily lets his preacher father go on TV to declare that God has sent his son to make America great again while, in his own appearances, Cruz himself claims God is helping his campaign. In the Republican debates he has declared he will bomb Syria until the sand glows - an aspiration unlikely to have been approved by Jesus though Ted at least claims to be in the know on that score, with his direct-line to Heaven. But in case things aren't absolutely certain, just for sake of clarity, Cruz has welcomed the support of a rightwing Pastor who claimed God sent Hitler to hunt Jews.

And then, of course, there is Trump. And what can you say? From the satirical to the surreal, and back to the only too real. Prayed over and blessed by Christian and Jewish faith leaders, he wants to build a "beautiful" wall and make Mexico pay. Ban Muslims from entering America and make the ones already there wear special badges so people can identify them in the street. Torture for freedom. Wage war for peace.

This is a man who mocks the disability of a reporter and just gets more popular. A man who talks about the size of his genitals at a political rally and is cheered to the rafters. A man who leads a baying mob in roaring applause of the choke-slamming of a photographer he didn't like . A man whose speeches have allegedly inspired white rightwingers to commit acts of violence against minorities. A man who boasts he could kill someone, but his supporters would just keep voting for him...

You can point to the parallels with Hitler and the Jews. To Stalin and the Berlin Wall. To any number of dictators. Or psychopaths. But you can't laugh.

Outstretched arms for the Trump Pledge in Florida

Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, was released in 1964 against a backdrop of the Cold War. Yet while it satirized the doctrine of mutual assured destruction that was central to military planning and the politics of the time, the characters so powerfully and humorously portrayed were nevertheless parodies: ludicrous extensions of the appallingly unpleasant but nevertheless limited-by-some-faint-degree-of-reason individuals the story lampooned. Major Kongs existed for sure, but they wouldn't really get to ride the Bomb.

But now, with it almost a dead certainty that one of those three will win the Republican nomination and have at least an evens chance of actually becoming President, while nearly everything becomes ludicrous, anything also becomes possible.

And the joke is over.

In the twisted minds of the Triumvirs, Jesus is alive and working through them.

If he is, he might wish himself dead.

He could be entombed alongside the stone cold corpse of satire.

America's Choice

We know now, after a couple of weeks of uncertainty, that President Obama has been re-elected by what passes for a comfortable margin (about 2% of the vote) in deeply divided America. Although in many respects the lesser of two evils and still unlikely in the extreme to herald any genuine change, it is worth reflecting a little on the people who might have been elected in his place.

Mitt Romney, whose election victory website went live yesterday by accident, is clearly a consummate chameleon, twisting and changing his position on everything from healthcare and abortion to fiscal policy. To this end, he was content to embrace some pretty unpleasant people with unpleasant views in his pursuit of power. There were the pro-war agitators, keen to assault Iran and Syria at the earliest opportunity; the people who wanted to strip away even the minimal health protection provided to tens of millions of poor Americans by "Obamacare", and worst of all the men (and they all were) who made repeated and ever more extreme comments about female rape victims as alternately asking for it or being the subject of Divinely-ordained sexual assault. They were not even medieval in their outlook, but positively Old Testament. Even Romney's running mate for Vice President, Paul Ryan, had been involved in sponsoring unsuccessful legislation which distinguished between "forcible" and apparently "non-forcible" rape.

It is to the credit of American voters that all of these men went down in flames at the polls - and Obama led Romney by a huge margin among women voters. This led to chilling comments from a number of rightwing commentators that Obama is not the choice of white Americans, or that alternatives to voting need to be found to force through their Christian fundamentalist agenda.

Outside the mainstream, the Green candidate for President Jill Stein polled over 397,000 votes in spite of the two-party squeeze, more than doubling the Green vote since 2008, and some local gains were made with Greens elected in Maine, including one representative to the state assembly.

But among the non-major party candidates, it was former Republican Governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, who polled best, taking 1.1 million votes as the Libertarian Party candidate running on a platform characterised by one commentator as being "founded on the concern that Americans are not yet greedy enough."

Vote Tuesday 6th November; Go Green!

The Green Choice: Jill Stein for President

USA - is one of the world's biggest polluters; the average US citizen's activities release nine times the sustainable level of carbon into the atmosphere - almost 18 tonnes per annum against the safe level of 2 tonnes. By contrast, the average European emits 7.5 tonnes; the average Chinese person 7.2 tonnes and the average Indian just 1.5 tonne.

The US is also the biggest user of the Earth's dwindling resources. With less than 5% of the global population, the USA consumes over one quarter of all the resources used in the world each year.

The USA is the biggest spender on weapons on the planet - the US military budget is larger than the military expenditure of almost other country on the planet combined. The USA spends more than $2,000 per person per year (4.7% of national wealth) - compared to just $428 (3.9%) by Russia, $74 (2.1%) by China and $89 (1.8%) by Iran. Only Israel and the UAE spend higher proportions of their GDP than the USA on the military.

There is another way: for a more sustainable economy putting people back to work through a Green New Deal;  using clean, renewable energy; freed from dependence on foreign energy and removed from the conflicts that have isolated America from many potential allies.

Tuesday 6th - for America, for the Planet : go and vote Jill Stein for President of the USA.

Website - jillstein.org

Free & Equal: the Other Presidential Candidates' Debate

Corporate America would like the world to think that US politics is just about Romney and Obama, Republican and Democrat, two sides of the same coin, two variations on a theme. When it comes to the Big Money, that's certainly true as, hurricane aside, the current elections becomes the most expensive in US history (and by default world history). With the major parties expected to spend over $6 billion dollars on the elections for President and Congress, US "democracy" looks like a rich man's game.

The rules make it difficult for anyone outside the two main parties to participate - minor parties face countless obstacles, financial and legal, to gain ballot access, making American complaints about foul play in other countries' elections (like Russia and Iran) smack of more than a little hypocrisy. Yet, in spite of this, four minor party candidates are on ballots across the USA as rivals to Romney and Obama. They represent a diverse range of views but when they debate, they offer perhaps more real politics and real argument than the two main candidates could dare to offer.

The Free & Equal Foundation, which campaigns for greater democratic access to US elections at all levels, recently hosted a debate with the four minor party candidates, chaired by veteran TV commentator Larry King and broadcast on the net. See it here and find out more about the real choices American voters do indeed have if they decide to make them...(click names for link to campaign websites)

Rocky Anderson - Justice Party candidate
Virgil Goode - Constitution Party candidate
Gary Johnson - Libertarian candidate
Dr Jill Stein - Green Party candidate

After an online vote, the Greens' Jill Stein will face the Libertarians' Gary Johnson in a final online debate on the eve-of-poll, Monday 5th November.