The Bonfire of the Democrats

If the economy stays as good as it is, it should be tough to beat Trump in spite of his ridiculous posturing.  A lot of  people know that he favors policies intended to please them; immigration, taxes, employment, trade, guns, limited overseas engagements, etc., and the people who mass for  his rallies don't give a damn about what the elites and the I-95 corridor crowd think about anything.  So, his chances are good in the electoral college where it counts, even if the Congress is up for grabs.

But, pilgrims, the Democrats seem determined to sweeten his chances even more than they already are. 

Policies favored by Democrats in Congress or running for office:

• "Medicare for All."  The title is a deception.  This proposal has nothing to do with present "Medicare" which is a limited program for old people, a program that pays part of medical expenses and for which participants pay premiums.  Medicare Part B pays about 80% of medical expenses.  The recipient either pays the remainder or has a supplemental secondary payer insurance.  "Medicare for All" is a single payer, government pays all, concept that wipes everything else off the board and which would cost a vast amount of non-existent magic money.   Warren calculates the cost of such a system to be 52 trillion dollars over ten years.  Say what?  What?  180 million Americans would lose their employer funded health insurance in this scheme and Warren admits that around 2 million jobs would be lost in the health insurance business, and other health connected services.  Her response to people rejecting such an outcome is to say that these people can go find work elsewhere, somewhere.
• Immigration.  It is obvious that the Dems do not want to see immigration controlled.  They see unlimited Latino immigration as a source of unlimited new votes that they think will go their way, especially in states where illegal voting can be made easy by state policies involving easy registration.  California is a prime example.  There is a reason why California refused to participate in a national audit of voting after 2016.  Democrat hostility to border and immigration security police is recognized by the Deplorables as intended to create Open Borders.  The Deplorables do not want to become a cultural minority in the country their ancestors built.  This has nothing to do with race, whatever that is.
  
• Guns.  Gemocrats want to take the Deplorables guns away from them.  The Deplorables do not like that.  They understand that the Founders did not want them to be a herd of sheeple completely at the mercy of central government.  You don't think the Founders  wanted that?   Read Federalist Paper #46.
• Permissiveness in state and local government.  The Democrats are letting our great cities become sink holes of filth.  Sinkholes filled with inert masses of often mentally ill homeless people inhabiting city centers and trespassing on both public and private property.  Drug apparatus and human dung litter the streets in places like; LA, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, New York City.  This list is long and with few exception these cities have state and city Democrat governments.  The Deplorables have TeeVee. They watch Foxnews where the existence of such conditions is made evident.  They blame the Democrats. 
• Anti-business attitudes.  AOC ran Amazon out of her district thereby depriving many of good jobs and is proud of that.  Seattle tried to install confiscatory city taxation against major employers.  Only corporate threats to cancel projects stopped that.  Deplorables see that the Democrats are hostile to employers.
• Prisoner releases.  A general release of prisoners awaiting trial is planned in places like NY State and City where Cuomo and De Blasio are going to release 900 prisoners on their own recognizance asking them to return for trial some day.  Main Street shakes its head over such foolishness.

People in the Democrat Party.

• Biden appears to be both personally corrupt and senile.  He has several times made errors with crowds (small crowds) by not knowing what state he was in.  He is an aggressive, mean old man.  (I know that from personal encounters).  His behavior toward reporters who press him is nasty.  When Peter Doucy questioned him about his son, he poked Doucy in the ribs and said that Doucy was not asking the right questions.  And then there is Hunter who seems to be the ne'er do well family bagman.  Do the Democrats really believe that most people are going to think that his appointments to well paid board positions were connected to anything but his father's positions?  And then there was the 1.5 billion dollar credit for Hunter's "business" from the Bank of China.  Come 0n! Americans are not stupid.
• Sanders.  Someone said recently that "Bernie went to the USSR on his honeymoon and never came back."  Anti-capitalist, hypocritical millionaire member of the rentier  class.  He expresses fully the ambitions of the marxist left in America.  People understand that their well indoctrinated marxist children love Bernie because their marxist professors, spawn of the 60's and 70's, told their children to love Bernie.  Unlike most Americans he detests Israel as an example of the "Western Imperialism" that his ally Ilhan Omar says they are going to fight when they are in office as a team along with Rashida Tlaib and AOC.  BTW AOC has now stated that the 900 prisoner release is a good idea because we should not have prisons.
• Warren.  IMO she is a poor man's version of Sanders, one who cannot do arithmetic.  She has conjured up a vision of a world in which money has no real  value.  For her, money is just something the government prints.  The inflationary effect of that kind of process seems to escape her altogether.  She imagines that her various programmatic plans can be funded by beggaring the rich and large corporations.  She does not seem to understand that doing that will kill the present economy and force the creation of a highly planned Soviet style planning and programming setup.  That worked well for the Nomenklatura and nobody else, but presumably that group would have a lot of Ivy League faculty in it.
• Mayor Pete.  America is not going to elect an open homosexual and his husband as president and First Partner.  Maybe they will someday, but not yet.
• And then there is Hillary lurking and sniping at honorable people like Gabbard.  IMO she is hoping that these crazies (not Gabbard) will cancel each other out and then ...

If the Democrats beat Trump and the GOP with this set of disadvantages, they will deserve the victory.  pl

Comments

[gaikokumaniakku]

Sir,
this may be off-topic, but Project Veritas has accused ABC News of covering up the misdeeds of the Democratic Party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lfwkTsJGYA

I suspect the Democratic Party has been corrupt to the point of self-destructiveness for decades and it has only survived because it has been shielded by accomplices, including news corporations.

[English Outsider]

Colonel - AOC's statements on fiscal policy are alarming. Any policy that's based on an imperfect understanding of money creation is alarming.

They seem to be based on an extreme interpretation of MMT. That has been discussed often in your pages. A brief summary is given here -

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-21/modern-monetary-theory-beginner-s-guide

and a rather more boring account of money creation is given here -

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

The second account is dead on. The BOE account clears away many misconceptions about money creation. It's not universally accepted yet but it will be.

I guess it's possible to reconcile MMT with that BOE account. MMT is essentially just a different way of looking at money creation. At least, I think it is - most descriptions of MMT lose me fairly early on but then, I'm not an economist.

Nor is AOC, nor those who talk like her. Which could lead to trouble. The idea that money can just be printed at will, no problem, is an idea that most economists, MMTers or not, would shudder at. But it's a nice idea. With one bound we can escape all artificial constraints and arrive in a brave new world of plenty for all. It's only a banker's conspiracy preventing that; sweep that conspiracy aside and we can get the economy motoring. So it's wildly attractive to all who despair of the current state of the economy most of whom, like me and AOC, also get lost fairly early on when looking at the theory but who know in their bones that bankers are up to no good.

They get that last bit right, anyway, looking at Christine Lagarde's desperate contortions as she fights to save the EZ. But revulsion at bankers' antics isn't enough. Any theory of money creation, if it's money creation that isn't at least approximately in sync with the underlying flow of goods and services, is fool's gold. And that's what AOC would sell us.

[Offtrail]

I haven't studied Senator Warren's MCA plan, so I can't comment on the details.

However,

* As a people, Americans are far less happy with their health care than citizens of peer countries that have universal coverage.
* We are not as healthy as those in countries with universal coverage. Notably, life expectancy is much lower (37th world wide).
* We pay far more per capita for health care than anyone else.
* We don't pay people excellent wages to dig holes and fill them in again, which is essentially what health insurance company employees do. "Free enterprise" health insurance imposes huge administrative costs on health care. I know how incredibly complex and expensive that overhead is. I used to work as a programmer in that field.

Our system is a relative failure, and dissatisfaction is real. We can do much better. Change will no doubt be painful.

[Upstate NY'er]

Ah, the famous Canadian "health" system.
Why does Canada send cancer patients to US hospitals for chemo?
Visit any large hospital near the Canadian border, look in the parking garage, count the Canadian license plates.
The Canadian system provides routine care.
The USA is the "critical care" component of Canada's socialized medicine.
My first 2 points are personal observation.
My final point is derived from Canadian acquaintances.

[Upstate NY'er]

I think Larry Elder:
"The division in America is that half of the people think that they deserve a free lunch and blame the other half for not letting them have it."

[Jim Ticehurst]

I Have a lot of thoughts going through My Mind over All The Issues Colonel Lang Raises here..The Phoney Democrats..today...The DNC Operators..all Fake ..and Running a Front Group that Hijacked the Old Democrat Party..I Knew...My Mother..was a Grange Hall..Farm Family Democrat ..Mostly Moderate..to Slightly Liberal..She was Active in local Politics in the 1950s..and Loved Politics...When I went to a Local Club meeting with her in 1965..and The Marxist were Taking Control of Berkley Students and California Politics..Moms democrat club was suddenly taken over by Loud Mouth Elizabeth Warren.and..OTC Types..In the 1960s...jumping Up..Ranting Marxist Points and My Mom Leaned over..at that Time...and Said..."the Communists are taking over Our Party" and they kept it up forever after that..The TAKE OVER of the Democrat Party..Making it their Front Group... Then the Revolution Bagan..As Obama said.He was empowering...."The Fundamental Transformation" of America .By 2016..The DNC felt so Confident..They put Out Bernie Sanders on The Ticket..Clench Fisted Calls for National Revolution..Appealing to all those Doped up and Dummied down since the 60s. those in the welfare State Created by Democrats...all Those Americans..victimized and Corrupted by democrat Social Decay...and Infiltration of of the United States Educational System. .They thought they had Won The Revolution..Had Achieved..a Political Coup..in doing so ...They EXPOSED themselves at all Levels of Government and Society.....To Me..This Started in California..at Berkley..and..The Infiltrators and.The.Media..and.Money Backers...helped them gain Power and Influence...Its Now..ending with The Marxists Players from California..while Its Burnsin Ashes.. The Decays..and and Stench..of Failed Marxist Socialism..Who are the Altered State Leaders...?? Nancy Pelosi.and Adam Schiff...The second generation Son..of Jewish Immigrants...from Lithuania..To Hell with Their talking Points...Their Phney Politics....Their Party...AND Their COUP...They Cannot...and they WILL NO Win..

[annamissed]

What about HR 1384 Medicare for all sponsored by 118 Democrats?

[annamissed]

Seeing that many attribute a million reasons Tulsi is running, I think she is simply in it to win, and not angling for some cabinet position.Short of winning, I'd love to see her head up the VA.

[JBV]

Tulsi 2020!

I was surprised you did not post something re Hillary's shameful comments toward Tulsi Gabbard inferring Russian influence on her. Her comments exposed the utter corruption of neoliberalism as it is presently conducted within the Democratic party. To smear Gabbard like she did, for shame Hillary, for shame...

But perhaps Ms. Clinton should be on this list of Democratic presidential hopefuls?!

[turcopolier]

JBV

She might be a VP pick. I give her money every month. I will add something about HC.

[Rick Merlotti]

Sec of State in 2020, in the second Trump admin.

[annamissed]

So do I (give her money). Never been so behind a candidate in my life.

[turcopolier]

All

Someone mentioned that I have in the past expressed approval of the idea of socialized medicine. That is true but not socialized medicine with warren's price tag.

[Factotum]

We cannot even define "health care" so we should not be giving it away for free.

I dare you, define "health care". We talk about it all the time as if it was a finite, assessable, fixed entity - in a box, on a shelf. And all we have to do is buy it and hand it out to everyone.

But what is it? You cannot talk about "healthcare" without confronting rationing, evidence based medicine, futility of treatment and yes, death panels.

Democrats won in 2018 because they claimed Trump was going to take away your "health care". Pelosi bragged they won 2018 because they made it about "health care". Yet what exactly, in definable parameters, is health care.

[PRC90]

After her fainting episode(s) in 2016, I suggest that Hillary is probably down to only a few hours per day of medicated lucidity. Perhaps she and Joe Biden could take shifts when able.

The Dems problem is that they fail to understand the difference between Trump the man, and Trumpism as the percieved solution to America's problems. Apart from Tulsi Gabbard (and then probably as a third force within her own party, perhaps in 2024), none of the candidates in the Dem zoo are remotely capable of carrying forward an election-winning Trumpist solution. Instead, they flail away fighting Trump the man while burning time and energy as 2020 gets closer.

[PRC90]

Two success elements for a notional POTUS Gabbard after 2024 would be a crowd-funded campaign as actually pioneered seperatley by Beto O'Rourke and AOC, and heading her own party.
She would need to be free of the DNC to have the opportunity of electoral success and being able to implement policy that works.

[ex PFC Chuck]

You got the “What” right, as expressed in the title of this post, but not the “Why.” The fundamental reason the Democratic Party of the early 21st century is such a clusterf**k is that in 1992 and 93 Bill Clinton closed the sale of the party to the wealthy, with the controlling share to the US financial sector - Wall Street. Negotiations had been underway since the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in the wake of the disastrous (for Democrats) election of 1984. Slick Willie, who in 1985 was not prominent enough to be among the founding members of the DLC but soon joined up, was the closer. Clinton’s presidency set the Democratic Party off on a quarter century of fraudulent campaigning as the champion of the working class, which the party had been since FDR days, all the while selling their interests out to Wall Street. In 2008 Obama doubled down on the scam with his hopey-changey thing, but showed his true colors when he told his Wall Street buds he was the only thing between them and the pitchforks and proceeded to shut down even the investigations of, let alone prosecutions, of the millions of individual acts of perjury, forgery and fraud that permeated the entire food chain of the home mortgage business. Over that quarter century the entire Democratic Party establishment was captured by the advocates fundamentalist neoliberalism*, and these advocates now own control both major “political parties.”
In reality these two “political parties” are coalitions of stenographers that fight each other every two years for the dominant role in copying down the desires of their owners into the law of the land. And because there is a consensus of agreement between them on the fundamentalist neoliberal* principles of our oligarchs they cannot fight it out on these issues except in narrow circumstances. (e.g. The financial sector of the Borg excuses Trump’s position on immigrants, even though it violates one of their tenets, because he’s doing almost everything else they want on the domestic front.) Each coalition party has attempted to adapt to this situation in their own way. The Republicans, whose establishment has long been in Wall Street’s pocket since its founding, have climbed into bed with the social conservatives of the Christian right. The Democrats, as their former working and lower middle class base has walked away in disgust as they’ve come to realize they have been scammed, have tried to replace them by focusing on various “demographics,” such as racial minorities, LGBQ people and those who see themselves as part of what John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed “the technostructure” in his book The New Industrial State. The Democrats dominated mid-20th century American politics because during that era they worked the base layers of the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs. But now they’ve become so attached to the Wall Street teats they can’t risk having it pulled away from their lips. Not only might they lose their cushy Congressional seats with their perks, gold-plated health care, and lavish retirement benefits but, worse, they might become pariahs to the recruiters on K Street.
The Democrats’ modus operendi in the early 21st century is another “D” word: Distraction. They can’t take issue with what Trump is doing as he guts one regulatory regime after another because they know their betters heartily approve of him doing so. Thus they come up with Russiagate, and managed to kick that ball down the road for almost three years. But that’s now been replaced by Impeachgate, which will probably last well in to Trump‘s second term.
By the way Colonel, your remarks on the health care issue make it clear that although you’ve no doubt had a much wider variety of life experiences than many of us here, extended, direct exposure to the tender mercies of what’s become of the USA civilian healthcare system over the past half century is probably one of the blank spots in your resume. When combined with the collateral damage of fundamentalist neoliberalism it’s toxic. Many of the millions of people who the healthcare industry claim are happy as pigs in s**t with their coverage aren’t so happy when their employers change providers every year or two in vain attempts to keep a lid on costs, and the affected employees suddenly find their caregivers are now “out of network.” Then there’s the rise in “gig workers,” another collateral outcome of radical neoliberalism, for whom the expense of decent coverage is out of the question. Then there’s my own experience.
From 1988 on I worked for a small consulting company that didn’t provide healthcare insurance. Fortunately SWMBO’s much larger employer did. In the late ‘90s the CEO, who was the son-in-law of one of the founders hired an outside COO to be groomed as a successor. Soon after he took over a few years later he decided to make a major change in the business model, but it didn’t work. But the pump-and-dump he did subsequently worked to perfection! At least for him. But for the employees, not so much. The P&D goosed sales but to customers of, shall we say, less than ideal credit-worthiness. Less than a year down the road, when the buyer (a nationally prominent company) realized how badly it had been scammed, they shut down the entire company almost overnight. 4,000 people out of work just like that, including SWMBO who had been managing a group of about 35 talented artists and writers. Needless to say a female at about 60 didn’t find anything nearly as lucrative to replace that income. But just as financially threatening was the loss of health insurance. After the obligatory adjustment period policy went away because of her history we couldn’t get anything affordable and had to settle for a very high-deductble policy. To cut to the chase the incipient hernia we knew she had due to an abdominal wall weakened by five previous surgeries popped two weeks before she qualified for Medicare.

* Among the core tenets of the fundamentalist neoliberal belief system are: homo economicus; the removal of the rules of the economy from the purviews of national and local governments; free migration of people, capital and control and disposition of property across national borders; and elimination of all regulation of business and capital by national and local governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

[turcopolier]

All

BTW, I have decided that the two greatest menaces facing the US are the aforementioned invasion by inundation underway from Latin America and the New Model Democrat Party. "Just sayin'" to quote some of the worst asses posting comments.

[turcopolier]

ex PFC Chuck

"You got the “What” right, as expressed in the title of this post, but not the “Why.” Tell you what - I will write about what I want to write about and you can write about what you think best. Fair? don't tell me what I "missed."

[Patrick Armstrong]

What fascinates me about the whole Dimocrats health care discussion is that nobody ever seems to mention Obamacare. Wasn't that supposed to have solved the issue For all time? Now it's as if it never happened. Pelosi was correct, I guess: you have to pass it to see that it's no good.

[J]

Colonel,

Take a look at this one, seems that U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tx) may need to resign from the House and register himself as an agent for a foreign government. Guess that Crenshaw doesn't believe in the oaths he took regarding protecting our U.S. Constitution. His oath as a Navy SEAL, or his oath as a member of the Congress.

https://www.prisonplanet.com/dan-crenshaw-suggests-criticism-of-israel-is-not-protected-under-the-first-amendment.html

[Grumpy Expat]

I agree and it explains her irrational and sudden cancellation of her re-election campaign for her Congressional seat. However, hidden by the MSM is that Clinton after being effectively counter-attacked by Gabbard has thrown a ton of money towards her opponent. So, that is perhaps another explanation. BUt, IMHO a person wouldn't do that unless they have a better Plan B as I believe she is unelectable as a Democrat Presidential candidate being anti-war and the Democrats are the War Party which is her Plan A. Personally, I think she is the only candidate making any kind of sense at all which is why both parties hate her. Both parties since Clinton's shift away from labor support moving the Democratic Party relatively far right only now support the top 0.1%.

On a side note, I would not be shocked to see the DNC, even after all the Primaries are finished, move to put HRC in as the candidate maybe at the convention of perhaps even without a convention. They openly admitted there is no democratic process in place within the party and that was the reason Gabbard resigned from the leadership position she had inside the DNC when they screwed over Sanders (as evidenced by the DNC emails). Sanders lost my support when he threw in his support for Clinton after she cheated him. He is actually an Independent so could have easily run that way instead and maybe he would have won. BUt, he decided to go with the flow and I personally think this shows how weak he is as a person. He is also now too old to serve (as are Trump and Warren for that matter) and in poor health so electing Sanders is really electing Gabbard through the back door.

[DefendUSA]

Whether you believe it or not...the structure of the socialized system does have rationing of care. The countries you mention have "success" because ALL people are taxed. They all have a stake in what they pay for. In the US, we use the heartstring method to say "EVERYONE should have it" and thus we have medicaid, but those people are not earning or paying for it. That is the difference. There is where your Capitalists are paying for the socialists "entitlement" bred mentality. The memes that people are dying while "waiting" for care? I'm going to wager that they avoided care and then it was too late.

I believe population matters. The US system is supposed to serve 317 million people over a land mass that isn't even close to Canada, France, Norway, Germany and the infrastructure they have in comparison. Collectively, those countries are maybe 200 million people. Alone? Pretty easy for Canada to tax all their 37 million people and everyone gets what they pay for, no? And I am sure the bureaucracy is scant compared to the US. Just look at what service disable veterans must go through to "prove" their injuries which are usually visible. Look what a person goes through for a disability as a civilian...2 to 3 years before they get help.
Cost comparisons? When so many people get care for free (no stake in the game)on the backs of others and fraud is never accounted for? Just follow the money. Fraud in Medicare, medicaid and even the US Income tax system is rampant and never addressed.

[James Doleman]

How did the election in Virginia go?

[turcopolier]

James Doleman

This is now the New Dominion.