So, I threw my back out and couldn’t sit for long at the computer—and on the same day, my computer started turning itself off abruptly every time it booted up! (I think there may be a fan/overheating problem). I’m now relegated to my laptop, and relatively short stints at keyboard.

So these are just some scattered thoughts I’m throwing out in preparation for Sen Sanders’ town hall tonight. Rather than speculating about what Sanders might do, this is where *I* am : my fundamental beliefs/framework of assumptions, questions I have, and a few thoughts.

Fundamental assumptions: These are my assumptions, and I’m not imposing them on others—feel free to disagree and express that disagreement. But don’t expect that I’ll spend a LOT of time engaging in argument about them, because these are ideas that I feel fairly sure about. They can be changed, but only with significant new input or a significantly different way of interpreting the data I’ve got.

Barring such a big change, these underlying assumptions will probably direct my choices.

Assumption #1: I just watched a few months of remarkably blatant election fraud. Exit poll data shows that this fraud was concentrated in the Democratic race, and overwhelmingly benefitted the Clinton campaign (though exit poll data is far from the only data we have showing it was fraud). Short version: my candidate was just cheated out of the nomination.

Assumption #2: The Clinton campaign has been a 6-mo-long episode of “Outing the Ringers”—if you don’t know what that is, take a look at this excellent video:

[Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9zkQcLi4Yo]

Outing the ringers is what happens when the status quo is confronted with a real challenge to its abusive power structures. In response to a real challenge, the “ringers” (who are nice guys embedded in the system, likable, apparently trustworthy, sometimes even with a history of heroic and moral action) suddenly spend all their political and moral capital, up to and including their personal reputations, in order to defend the status quo. This can also happen at the organizational level, with whole companies, non-profit organizations and even industries—hitherto imagined to be on the “right” side of some issue, or perhaps imagined to be neutral, fair arbiters—suddenly pouring all their resources into the defense of a rotten, corrupt status quo. Some of these ringers have been obvious for a while, some have not. I've listed a few here:

The DNC and the state Democratic parties have been outed as ringers. There are obvious ways in which the DNC was constantly putting its finger on the scales—for instance, taking unilateral control over the debates and then making sure the debates were few in number and scheduled opposite sports championships. The state parties were turned into pieces of a vast money-laundering scheme. The state parties also served secondary functions as re-allocators of already-won delegates to the “frontrunner,” and as generators of hatchet jobs on the challenger and his supporters. While there may be some local Democratic parties here and there who are not corrupt, the majority of the Democratic party has been revealed as being completely dedicated to propping up Hillary Clinton by fair means or foul, with all that implies.

All of the mainstream (Big 6) media has been outed as ringers (apologies to the Denver Post and the other few remaining holdouts who are out there trying to practice journalism). Some of the new media has been outed as well, including TPM, Democratic Underground, Blue Nation Review, and Daily Kos. I have been worried too about The Young Turks, especially since they signed a contract with Fusion, a subsidiary of Univision, a major Hillary supporter.

A lot of big NGOs have been outed as ringers. NARAL and Planned Parenthood just endorsed a candidate who supports “compromising with the Republicans as long as the life of the mother is protected,” which is basically the anti-choice position for everybody except lunatics. NRDC and the Sierra Club just endorsed a candidate who spread methane-spewing water-polluting fracking to all corners of the globe.

It’s been a fixture of this campaign to send out surrogates who have some moral or political capital impressive to liberals, and get them to spend it all on Hillary Clinton. This has happened with everyone from Paul Krugman to Dolores Huerta to John Lewis to Rachel Maddow to Keith Olbermann to Elizabeth Warren. I believe this is done, not so much in service of improving Hillary’s reputation (more on that below), as with the aim of demoralizing liberals, lefties, and other critics of the status quo.

There is also a sort of colonialism of the mind going on here, in which, by appropriating voices which have been critical of corruption in the past, the Clinton campaign becomes able to tell people that its critics are not progressives, not liberals—in fact, that there’s basically no name for what they are and no rationale for their criticisms. This puts the left (and other dissidents) into cultural exile with no language, (a longstanding tactic and objective of Those Rich Bastards in both parties).

Assumption #3: The party platform is a load of shit, and it’s plain insulting for people to offer us the chance to influence platform planks when we all know the Democratic party regularly wipes its ass with its own platform.

Assumption #4: Working down-ballot is basically useless unless we have some kind of answer for election fraud, at the very least a reasonably reliable set of countermeasures. Yes, we will be able to get a few down-ballot people through here and there, but the pattern we just saw in the last election is that we will be allowed to win elections right up to the point where we get close to having our hands on real power. The powerful don’t particularly like Kshama Sawant, but they don’t much care whether there’s a sprinkling of Kshama Sawants and Zephyr Teachouts throughout our system, as long as they don’t approach a critical mass which could yield real power to a populist base. Once that critical mass is approached, the same thing will happen to down-ballot races that just happened to Bernie Sanders’ campaign once he got close to putting real pressure on Hillary Clinton.

Assumption #5: It’s pleasant that the establishment is offering us Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s professional head on a pike, but they will obviously replace her with someone just as corrupt. And even though I can enjoy watching that rotten person suffer a setback—I’m no saint—I’m also no fool; if she doesn’t have a soft landing somewhere in the Clinton empire, or perhaps even the Bush empire, or the MSM empire, I’ll eat my hat.

Two observations:
Hillary Clinton has become a vortex down which people pour political and moral capital. When politicians and public figures use their clout on her behalf, she does not gain in favorability—they lose favorability. She’s like a political Typhoid Mary: essentially, the poster child for corruption. 56% of the electorate thinks she’s untrustworthy, and that number has been going up since May 2015. (That’s an historic unfavorability record matched only by Trump). Recently, someone made a word cloud based on Hillary Clinton, and the most oft-repeated words about her online were Fixed Election.

What’s remarkable is watching the DNC burn all its assets doubling and tripling down in support for her, when it would be simple to find a less-hated, less well-known but equally corrupt politician willing to serve as a frontman /frontwoman for Wall St. It’s even more remarkable when you consider that part of the Deep State—the military intelligence, covert operations, and “security” part of it—really hates her too. We have a candidate that manages to put CIA agents and fifth-branch covert military on the same side with me, united in intense dislike of her and extreme annoyance bordering on hatred.

Wouldn’t it just be simpler for Wall St and the Chamber to find another corrupt politician?

Mirror, mirror: two ways of looking at the situation

On the one hand, the Democratic party has ruthlessly consolidated its power and beaten back a populist challenge (Co-optation comes next! Get ready for some serious head-patting!), which means that the duopoly and the elite it serves have advanced us essentially into a post-voter era, in which voters function mainly as props for the establishment of a plausible political narrative of victory for a pre-chosen politician: the voters become props for photo-ops, essentially, and essential characters in a cover story. But you don’t need all that many voters to create a plausible illusion of victory. You can effectively create it by capturing most of one or two demographics, and letting the mainstream press go to town with the story. It doesn’t matter if Hillary wins the SC primary with 12% of the electorate, nor does it matter that SC won’t go blue in the general. What matters is fueling the narrative that can plausibly explain her “win” by saying “Bernie Sanders isn’t good with Black people; Hillary is.”

On the other hand, the Democratic party has played its last card, whether that card be Warren or Sanders. I DON’T mean that Sanders is an insincere party tool, but that he was basically the Democratic party’s last chance to salvage any credibility and to keep people within the two-party system. The Democratic party has almost run out of people with credibility. I can count the people I think *might* be trustworthy on the fingers of one hand. Meanwhile, if you talk to any Republicans, they appear to be in just as much despair about their party, which is also suffering a similar, though not equally bad, credibility crisis. I say it’s not equally bad, because there are actually around 25-30% of Republicans who feel represented by Donald Trump, and, despite all Trump’s other rotten qualities, exit poll data suggests that he at least didn’t baldfaced cheat his way to the Republican nomination.

So the other way of looking at this is that the duopoly has outed itself thoroughly and pretty much gone for broke. It doesn’t have anything left to spend to create credibility. In fact, it’s badly overdrawn. On the one hand, perhaps this doesn’t matter; on the other, what are political parties and elections for, if not to establish credibility, political or moral authority, some kind of mandate? If our politics can no longer create even the illusion of credibility, what good are they, to the elites or anybody else?

Questions
I. Could we do something in the future with Bernie?

Bernie can (possibly) be a movement leader as well as a presidential candidate. This is his decision, not ours, but does he have to vanish into the woodwork? And if he sticks around are we no longer interested now that he isn’t a presidential candidate? Is *all* we were interested in the Presidency? If Bernie is willing to be a movement leader, is he willing to speak honestly and openly about the electoral corruption we’ve just gone through? Or is he going to give us one more version of “Work within the party and push it left! Work on those campaigns and we’ll get there eventually!” without even acknowledging the massive election fraud that serves as a very effective Kryptonite to that strategy?

II. What can we do on our own? Do we have to have Bernie?

i. We are, fundamentally, an anti-corruption movement. We just found the corruption. Are we going to fight it, or lie to ourselves and pretend we can work within the corrupt system to stop corruption, despite all evidence to the contrary? Or are we going to give up?

ii. If we can raise 40 to 50 million dollars a month for Bernie Sanders’ campaign, why can’t we raise 10 million a month to fund a networked independent media? Even given that 40 to 50 million per month is not sustainable over the long term, one would think we could manage a quarter of that amount.

iii. If we can raise 40 to 50 million dollars a month for Bernie’s campaign, why can’t we raise 5 million a month to fund the building of persistent political infrastructure in our cities and towns? Is 15 million/month, raised by 7-10 million of us, really not doable?

iv. If we get sad at the prospect that we may have just been at our last Bernie rally, do we really have to go back to our corners and isolate ourselves, filled w/angst? Perhaps we can’t have Bernie up front giving speeches, but is that *all* that was good about being at the Bernie rally? Do we value the tribe, or not?

These are my thoughts. Thanks to all those who read through the whole thing, and I will check back later to see what you guys think. It may be tomorrow, b/c I sat at the computer longer than I should writing this, and my back is telling me about it!