John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“The Charms of Elizabeth Warren”
https://russia-insider.com/en/charms-elizabeth-warren/ri27751
There are some good, sharp observations here. She's a weak choice for many reasons.
Of course, the Dark State may actually find her a reasonable alternative to Joe Biden, who is undoubtedly their favorite, representing, as he does, a new version of brainless George Bush, someone who happily served as a figurehead president, smiling and signing every piece of paper shoved in front of him.
And it’s good to have an alternative. Biden is making a spectacle of himself with obviously blundering and forgetful statements on any number of matters, perhaps throwing away the lead he had.
Warren is an excellent Dark State alternative choice.
She has never represented opposition to the Pentagon and CIA and NSA. Never.
She has never opposed imperial wars and coups and interventions.
She has supported dutifully the Defense Department’s budgets.
She holds the attraction of a kind of American wholesome, harmless American professional woman, well-coiffed and well-dressed. The contemporary feminist political equivalent to one of those moms in 1950s’ television series, such as Harriet Nelson in “Ozzie and Harriet,” although Harriet had a kind of smoky undertone, as an old big band singer, missing completely from Warren.
Perhaps, June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley), doing the vacuuming wearing pearls in “Leave It to Beaver” is closer to the mark? June, having gone back to school and earned some degrees?
Despite her effort to appear as something of a human rights champion at home, she has not brought that much-unwanted perspective to foreign affairs. Not to attacks on Syria. Not to attacks on Venezuela. Not to attacks on Iran. Not to Israel’s attacks on everyone. She definitely gets passing grades from the establishment there.
It’s okay at home to blather on about such matters, just as it’s okay to blather about social programs. With their spending a trillion dollars a year – and all of it borrowed – the military-security establishment knows there is no chance for such words to go beyond speeches.
If the speeches make Americans feel good about the state of things, well, that’s just fine.
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Response to another comment:
Sanders always sounds good, but it's an illusion to believe the sounds mean anything of substance.
First, he showed the world what kind of stuff he is made of in 2016, when he smilingly supported the woman who cheated him out of the nomination and who, indeed, represented the embodiment of many of the things that his strong campaign condemned.
How is someone like that supposed to stand up to a crowd of guys in big Armani suits and gleaming uniforms seated around huge oak tables in Washington?
His “programs,” like those of Warren or anyone else, are just blather, political entertainment at best. Maybe “fantasies” or “dreams” would be a better word. You are, after all, still allowed to dream or fantasize in America. What you are not allowed to do is to change much of anything.
So long as the Pentagon and the security establishment burn through a trillion dollars a year – money, they don’t even have, but just keep borrowing, putting immense future burdens on average Americans – no “program” of any description will see the light of day.
Furthermore, the American privileged class will not tolerate appropriately-serious new taxes. And just who is it that you think pays all the campaign expenses for “the best Congress money can buy”?
Bernie is an attractive candidate, at a glance, but with a little thought you realize he’s from Cloud-cuckoo-land. He actually doesn’t grasp the hard realities of the country in which he lives.
Vermont is a nice place – I’ve been there several times – pretty, charming, populated with a good many liberal college professor or artistic types, but it is completely out of step with America, the raw, unvarnished reality of a brutal global power representing the interests of a plutocracy.
Vermont - with its roughly one-third of one percent of the national population, unrepresentative economy and ethnic make-up - does a little remind me of Newt Gingrich’s unpleasant phrase about “a sandbox for yuppies,” his characterization of national public television.
The state does represent a kind of prettified Disneyworld attraction, “Precious Early Rural America Land.” Or a rural retreat for Americans fed up with the ugly realities of their own country, both at home and abroad. That’s certainly why Bernie himself went there, fleeing New York decades ago as part of America’s massive urban phenomenon known as “White Flight.”
I suspect the Pentagon and security establishments have no real problem with him making his speeches that are virtually guaranteed to have no effect.
He is not John Kennedy, someone who became a genuine threat to establishment arrangements of his time, arrangements which have only flourished and become deeply rooted for nearly sixty years.
Again, the overwhelmingly dominant reality of America, something affecting and distorting every aspect of its society, is that it represents a plutocracy and runs a brutal global empire for that plutocracy’s benefit.
If you don’t deal with that central fact, then you can deal with almost nothing but matters about as important as re-arranging the dinner table.
