The gaffe machine Biden’s brains have been coming out of his ears for years and it’s only going to get worse in coming weeks, months, and years. His lack of impulse control is a telling sign of his dementia. His body men struggle to prevent him from rubbing women’s’ backs and sniffing their hair. He told a Warren supporter in Iowa that he was “too old to vote,” calling the gentleman “fat” along the way. He called a young woman a “lying dog-faced pony-soldier.’ He accused the centrist Joy Reid of wanting a leftist “physical revolution.”

Where can you go?

They Rule: No Easter Bernie

He loses his train of thought in mid-sentence. He forgets what state he’s in and what day it is. He idiotically defends his past alliance with a racial-terrorist segregationist senator by saying that “he never called me boy.” He boasts that he would have beaten up Trump behind the gym in high school. He tells outlandish stories about past swimming pool confrontations with angry young Black men named “Corn Pop.” He babbles idiotically about young Black children who like to watch the hair curl up his legs. He calls for the use of “record players” as a solution to inner-city poverty. He has to rescind a preposterous claim to have gotten arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa.

Seriously? Joe Biden? The man is way past his bedtime. And he was a terrible lying candidate and a serial plagiarist long before his mind stared fading. (Besides being morally and ideologically offensive, the promotion of Biden speaks to our abject ignorance about mental health in the USA: if people can’t see that Biden is suffering from dementia and it’s only going to get worse and worse, it’s hard to know what to say. Imagine the 2020 debates between Trump and Biden. In one corner a full-on level-one malignant narcissist who is practically illiterate and innumerate, besides being an at least instinctual fascist: Trump. In the other corner, a right-wing Dem corporatist who doesn’t know what state he’s in or how to tie his shoelaces: Biden.)

On top of which, Biden’s corporate-funded record stands well to the right of the majority-progressive values of the Democratic base on issue after issue: public health insurance, the protection of Social Security, bankruptcy law, credit card interest rates, racist mass incarceration, the arch-criminal invasion of Iraq, student debt, tuition, the minimum wage, climate, and more.

“The moderate 11th-hour dropouts [Buttigieg and Klobuchar] are craven, not courageous…The logic set forth by Klobuchar in her endorsement speech, which is no doubt shared across vast stretches of the Democratic professional/media class, is that Bernie would ‘divide the party’ and therefore hand Trump an easy win in November [same for Buttigieg’s nauseating endorsement oration, which absurdly hailed Biden as a progressive – P.S.]. Oddly, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that this coordinated establishment intervention done for the purposes of blocking Bernie will also inevitably ‘divide the party’, and probably more gravely so. Bernie’s most ardent backers are already absolutely incensed. They will not fall in line behind…Joe Biden. They just won’t…. If you enrage and alienate them by appearing to rig the process against their candidate (for the second time) then you are inescapably ‘dividing the party’ and in all likelihood assuring a Trump victory.”

A Biden nomination will amount to the Corporate-Neoliberal Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance mounting a Campaign to Re-Elect “the Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History” (Noam Chomsky’s accurate and recent description of Trump).

They Don’t Care

And here’s something to reflect on: The Democratic establishment won’t care. They don’t care. Please let that sink in, dear progressives: THEY DO NOT CARE. Put this on your record player: the Dem establishment will gladly enable a second fascistic and ecocidal Trump term before it will get behind a progressive Dem/Sanders nomination. They would rather to lose to the rightmost party, even an ever-more fascistic and apocalyptic GOP, than to the moderately social-democratic left wing of their own party.

The Party’s Over: Sanders “Fighting on two Fronts”

The party’s over, folks. Sorry. This right-wing Joe Corn Pop-a-bin Biden, champion of the Vinyl New Deal, is the “opposition” candidate. Biden is going to the Democratic National Convention with a plurality of delegates and will of course have all or nearly all the openly authoritarian corporate-Democratic super-delegates if he needs them on the convention’s second ballot. Biden also has the corporate media, which is reporting history it helped make, “an Orwellian masterpiece.” (Biden got Maine and Massachusetts without even opening offices there —- that’s the power of name recognition and corporate media. Process that.)

“Sanders,” Takashi Shimura writes from Iowa City, “the most popular candidate in the race, is fighting on two fronts, on the one hand his own party, and on the other the party’s corporate media. There are so many attacks on Sanders, more than even in 2016, that voters have to be diligent in finding real news and be belligerent against the noise of negativity. I’m seeing stuff in the corporate media that I have never seen before” [like likening a major party presidential candidate to a deadly virus? – P.S.]

Bracing for the Best

“Your call for revolution seems to be becoming the only way,” a friend wrote me from Ohio two nights ago, adding this: “We will lose with Joe just like we lost with Hillary just like we lost with John Kerry.” Well, yes: The institutions are captive to the ruling class. It’s not complicated. Nothing new here. Please read my book They Rule: The1% v. Democracy. It’s a decent historical analysis of how the ruling class rules. Which is a good thing to study if and when we ever decide to take it on in a serious way – in the streets, on the shop-floors, in the offices, on the runways, in the pipeline construction sites, around the Pentagon, at the corporate headquarters, in the face of repression. Voting for Bernie isn’t really taking it on all that much I’m afraid.

The “normal” constitutional and electoral paths of “resistance” are a complete fail. The system is a ruling class-imposed travesty, delivering us to tragedy on a mass scale.

Actual leftists need to take advantage of this. This is what we have been saying. The major party ballot box is the coffin of class consciousness. The Sanders thing and indeed social democratic politics in the U.S. are over: trade in your ballot for a yellow vest.

The bourgeoisie will not be unseated – as it needs to be for humanity to survive – through the existing constitutional and electoral channels. It just won’t. The U.S. party and elections system broadly understood (to include the media, among other things) is owned and managed by and for the capitalist elite — and that elite doesn’t want anything to do with even mild social democracy or environmental sanity, even if both are required for human survival.

We will not get rid of that elite at the ballot box. I wish we could, but we can’t, and we won’t. Sorry. There’s no electoral politics Santa Claus, not even an Easter Bunny/Bernie.

How much longer are we going to let them rule? As Istvan Meszaros wrote nineteen years ago, in an age of clear capitalogenic Ecocide, “it’s socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky.”

Read the whole thing. It's worth it