Finally a solo cover by Lauren Lusardi performing as PLASMIC.
A Kamala abstainer of my acquaintance recently shared as his latest salvo in our ongoing debate about electoral politics a paragraph from a Nation article, The Lost Millions by Kali Holloway, (not online as of this writing):
The Democrats' takeaway from Trump's victory should be that a party's political priorities must resonate with the identities of its base. But they have fundamentally misunderstood this assignment, yet again.
The consequences of that misunderstanding-- or refusal to understand-- were reflected in 2024's turnout, when, by some estimates, a staggering 19 million people who votged for Joe Biden in 2020 stayed home. It's not that Dem voters became Republican en masse this election. In fact, in "nearly a third of the top 50 counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican, Trump's vote actually declined from his 2020 numbers," writes Steve Phillips of both the Guardian and this magazine. Trump increased his vote total by just 2.8 million over 2020/. The far bigger problem was Harris's nearly 7 million vote shortfall.
No argument Harris's campaign disexcited people. But there was more to it. Greg Palast, an investigative journalist, discovered millions of people who voted had their votes thrown out due to strategic republican challenging. According to him those votes would have won her the election.
... Palast claims that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris would have defeated Donald Trump by 1.2 million votes in 2024, if not for widespread voter suppression tactics. According to Palast, the actions of Republican officials, including the purging of Black voters from the rolls and the rejection of ballots, ultimately cost Harris the election.
Palast ... concluded that, if all legal votes had been counted, Harris would have won the popular vote by 3.5 million votes in addition to claiming key battleground states.
“If not for the mass purge of voters of color, the disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, and the new ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Kamala Harris would have won,” Palast said. He cited data from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, which revealed that over 4.7 million voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls.
It’s a combination of factors. There's enough blame to go all around. Especially on Biden and his team which became Harris's team. But also on the cheaters. And I have a hard time forgiving influencers who pretended or acted ignorant to the threat Trump posed because it inconveniently diluted the opportunity to punish Biden (who was no longer running). Kamala was the sacrificial lamb anyway. Those people won their election but will not take credit for it.
Not saying it was a deciding factor. Just that I have a hard time forgiving it, I think because I can't escape my perception that the opportunity to avoid Trump was squandered on a performative spoiling of the ballot. My wing of the left and the influencers have an irreconcilable difference probably about the relevance and effectiveness of that protest on that particular unrepeatable date. If I carp on it it’s because I don’t want people to squander opportunities to reduce harms like Trump in the future. People who voted for Trump are starting to have regrets. People who consciously and deliberately voted against Kamala will never have to reckon. As I say not the deciding factor but a peeve I can’t seem to get over. Maybe spelling it out will help.
I sense a lot of self-satisfaction on the left about the defeat of the Democrats in November and it's causing a change in my viewing habits. A Marxist intellectual I have been edified by in the past was given space recently to pontificate on the meaning of the chaos we're witnessing as a result of the failure of the neoliberal party to win in November. He and his interlocutor were not prepared to call the new regime fascist though they felt the chaos was instructive. The previous day it was Sabby Sabs and Briahna Joy Gray who I deliberately tortured myself with which predictably undermined my mood. That I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting myself to be annoyed by a certainty that the US/capitalism is going down as though that takes some kind of political genius to discern and also as if the impending end of it alone is something worth wasting your breath on. I guess we’re supposed to just endure not-Fascism for now while history takes its sweet time. Ok I was already doing that.
Re-reading some correspondence from last year I remembered how no one but me wanted to challenge Joe Biden in the primary, and no one but me wanted to stop Project 2025 from happening and now that it’s happening no one is taking credit for it.
If hatred of Dems leads to socialism I’m down with it. If it leads to Trump not so much
I reiterate. I hate establishment dum dum Dems too. But in no world would Kamala Harris be dismantling Social Security, Medicaid, USAID, the Department of Education, the Post Office. In no world would she be stepping up ICE's kidnapping and black holing immigrants and blackmailing and memory-holing civil rights, and terminating juridically established rights and commandeering Universities and cultural institutions, and forcing coercion of law firms and media outlets and threatening to send US born dissidents to foreign gulags. In no world would she be defying the Supreme Court. Would her foreign policy be as misguidedly destructive as Biden’s? I hoped not. But it would not be as reckless as Trump's. Too late to merely regret the fuckup of last election. Let’s hope that ultimately, regardless of what we're going through socialists (who seem to be AWOL) win the war without too much socialist or innocent blood shed, and bucketfuls of evil motherfucker blood spilt. And not the opposite which is what the Project 2025 architects promised.
I’m selective in my blame for where we are right now. We have been lied to about electoral politics. Dems take our votes and do whatever the fuck their donors please. Republicans at least do the harm they promise they’ll do which is mistaken for honesty by the ovine electorate rather than as just making good on their threats. So I don’t blame the ovines. I do blame dem strategists for their blindness and ineptitude and asshattery.
I also want more from my fellow leftists than empty powerless pissing away of votes and futile anger churning nihilism, let the consequences be damned. "None of the above" never wins. Who does it teach? What is the lesson? The Online Left wants to say it teaches the Dems and the lesson is listen or lose my vote but the reality is it teaches powerlessness and nihilism to people vulnerable to both. Who does it serve? Trump. It places, too much importance on Election Day without taking the obligation of that day seriously. It’s anger-based not strategic. Understandable anger to be sure. It’s infuriating. But James fucking Carville Carvilles on no matter who wins or how badly Dems lose.
"He who saves his country violates no laws" - Donald Trump
Not intended this way , but we would all of us-- and I do mean all-- do well to take that to heart. Especially you doers who know exactly what I mean by that.
Trump is not heeding the unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home to Maryland from his bogus deportation and actual imprisonment in El Salvador. We should take Trump's cue and throw out the law. This is the country he wants to live in. Why should he have all the fun? We should take advantage of it now to the fullest extent possible before the civil society that I think most of would prefer is restored. This could turn out to be a much better opportunity than we thought, this rotting from the head! Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, eh "Mr President"? Maybe he's a religious man after all, this macher.
While we're at it, let's abrogate the terms of every friendship and relationship we have in our lives and arrogate better deals for ourselves out of each of them. And when the backlash starts, let's declare a 90 day pause.
Let's make promises to get ourselves power and then go back on them once we've achieved the status our promises got us.
There's no one below us to shit on, so let's shit upward. Together, we can make a hell of a lot more shit for them than what's coming down on us.
Let's manipulate the stock market -- we may not be able to cause a predictable crash that we can then profit from, but I think a rabble of us could actually storm the premises and manipulate the stock market.
They can't arrest all of us.
Let's lie about all of it. Especially the obvious crimes that have solid proof.
Let's. And before we do any of that, let's disappear the few who we feel most deserve it. It's like a wise man once said (perhaps accidentally), He who saves his country violates no laws.
I thought Elon Musk was IT. Isn't part of the rationale of electing business people rather than technocrats that we want government run like a business?* No decent business that I know would stomach Musk's willy-nilly implementation of change without a Change Control process.
In IT (and perhaps in your line of work) we have a little thing called Change Control—an annoying little process you have to go through before you make any change to production systems in order to ensure that the change will not break what it’s supposed to fix or break anything you didn’t take the time to consider would be impacted. You’re supposed to have a plan, one which involves understanding the requirements of the change; developing it in an environment isolated from the one people use for their jobs; testing it, debugging it and testing again; developing a test plan for users involving actual use cases from their jobs, socializing the change with others whose impacts you may not have considered and getting buy-in from all before you’re allowed to proceed, communicating the change beforehand to all including a thorough explanation of why the change is being made, what is expected to be impacted, what users are expected to do before, during and after the implentation. And if the change goes badly you’re supposed to have a plan for rolling it back. And if you're rolling it back as much as you're rolling it out, your process is ass. Even in the best processes, things are overlooked, someone did not fully understand the impact a change would have and because change sucks, users will still be unhappy with it. That is supposed to be addressed. The idea being Do No Harm.
As much as we hate the change control process, there is something to be said for making the social outcasts who do IT think about other people and what they need and want to get out of a system before they get their gloms on it. But where are any of the precepts of Change Control in DOGE’s process? It is the sloppiest fucking change I’ve ever seen. Unprofessional. Noob. Bogus. Shameful. Fireable. And no one whose systems are being mauled by Musk's minions asked for it, least of all the voters who put Musk's figurehead in the White House. Again. (Probably because they were afraid or unhappy or incurious about the actual unknown change of the alternative.)
No one likes change. But there are two kinds of it. One, the kind that Elon Musk (and as recently seen in the Tariffs fiasco, the entire Trump administration) is not practicing is the end result of a well thought out, intentional, purposeful, carefully executed process that is in place to serve the needs of the users of a system and if thought out and done well, improve it.
The other we call disaster.
~~~~~
* Those who have bought the truism that the solution to government is to run it like a business forget that ideal government serves the people; ideal business serves only those who own it. It should be fucking obvious now.
