The Real Revolution

In the fight between left and right, don't lose sight of the goal

I’d love to be covering other subjects, but the dark matter world has plans. We’ve passed the event horizon for election drama and won’t be escaping soon.

Does it matter, for example, that a credible new paper in the prestigious journal Nature puts climate sensitivity (ECS) at more than double its assumed value?

[G]lobal average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO₂, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C[.]

I’ll explain what that means in a bit (preview here and here), though I sometimes think “Why bother?” if no one will act.

And of course there’s Gaza, but hey, that’s not going away.

So we’re left staring at this: Biden has dropped out, leaving many questions unanswered. For example:

• Why announce in a tweet? Is he really that sick … or pissed?

• If he’s frail as he looks these days, is someone else running the show?

• What was the actual timing of this decision?

• Did close aides like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon hide accurate polling data for some time to bolster Biden’s determination to stay in?

From right to left, the Biden advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Jen O’Malley Dillon leaving a meeting with Senate Democrats in Washington earlier this month. Photo: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

And now it looks like Harris has been given a chance, but she has to sew it up. As of this writing, Kalorama hasn’t weighed in, and I think she still needs to prove to the donor class she can better herself.

All this on top of the crazy assassination try, the pick of the maybe-real populist Vance for veep, and the endless swirl of leaks and posturing. We’ve reached a gravity well, a political dark hole. Space-time is stretching.

The Real Revolution

Yet amidst it all, I don’t want this truth to be lost: The real revolution is not between Ds and Rs, but the Rich and the Rest.

As Chris Hedges writes, the “orchestrated … deindustrialization of the United States, [ensured] that 30 million workers lost their jobs in mass layoffs. … [T]his assault on the working class created a crisis that forced the ruling elites to devise a new political paradigm. Trumpeted by a compliant media, this paradigm shifted its focus from the common good to race, crime and law and order.”

Our captured government sent manufacturing abroad to make our rich more rich. They immiserated workers, let predatory domestic companies pick cash from their bones, and trumpet on cable news the only fight that won’t hurt their bottom line. As a result, we watch our parties battle each other while the real perps, the not-yet-rich-enough rich, rake in the dough.

Look at the cartoon at the top, then note this:

The area under the curve is actual money, billions and billions, transferred from workers to owners — pure profit for a CEO class that enriches itself at the expense of their companies.

And how did their workers get by? They went into debt — new profit for lenders and banks.

No wonder people are angry. No wonder they want to strike back. And it’s going to get worse. The rich still aren’t rich enough yet.

The real revolution is to try to make this all stop. That shouldn’t be lost.

Sanders and Trump

It’s likely that Sanders would have wiped the floor with Trump, both in 2020 and 2016, but the Party didn’t want that. So here we are. The choices, again, are between what we have now and the fakest of fake revolutions.

Me, I would love for Trump not to be president. I don’t think he wants to govern. He’ll likely hand his cabinet, as he did before, to whoever has his ear.

Last time we got creeps like Mike “Kill Assange” Pompeo; John Bolton, the mustache of freedom and one of the worst of Bush’s Iraq War fiends; torture queen Gina Haspel running CIA; public school privatist Betsy DeVos at Education; and too many more.

I don’t count on friend-of-the-worker J.D. Vance, even if he is sincere, to win many anti-wealth fights in a pro-wealth world. Plus abortion, the Court, and knives out for a livable climate. You get the point.

So I wish the Democrats luck. I’d rather have them than the rip-off on skis we may get. They did themselves in, they shouldn’t have cock-blocked Sanders, but that’s in the misty past. And here we are.