A Candle In The Wind

Mamdani won. To the joy of a plurality of NYC voters, to the disgust of many others, and the outrage of Cuomo’s billionaires, he won, as predicted. His election, though, was not just about The Big Apple; it had seismic national implications.

Most of the Nomenklatura of the battered, rudderless, foundering Democratic Party has reacted in dismay to their single, greatest electoral victory since that of the glib, unprincipled charlatan, Obama, as if it was a shocking, distressing loss.

The reason for the wailing and gnashing of teeth is plain: he was elected by vowing to do something for ordinary, struggling, hard working Americans. That has not been the party’s intent for generations, and is a potential dire threat to its 1%er funders.

The big news, if you missed the last fifty years or so, is that the Democratic Party is not about people. It talks about them all the time, particularly of blocs that are distinct from the larger public. Their obsession is not with the huge segments of it—blacks, latinos, labor, women—and their needs. They are of no concern.

It focuses on small, unique, marginalized elements, such as transgender people, various gender identities, and other groups that can be championed as abused, denied, oppressed. This would be admirable, if their words meant anything.

Such groups are badly treated, and Dem Capos believe their advocacy for them proves how inclusive and humane they are. What their phony virtue signaling actually shows—since their act is pure lip service—is that they don’t care at all about the hard slog the great mass of hard-pressed American workers face.

This is not new, though the masking is novel. Neither party has ever given a goddam for the people, but both have had to find ways to hide that fact since before we had a nation. The “New World” was, from the first, juvenescent Capitalism’s wet dream.

That engine for extracting maximum profit from human labor had suddenly acquired a near infinite pool of free resources, and in a century its American branch was the owner of the world.

Using bought elected frauds, it laid down a smothering blanket of propaganda schooling American workers to idolize Big Money and work against their own interests, damning any move for their social and economic betterment as diabolical and morally evil.

A striving people, desperate for paid work, bought into the scam naively, and the catechism was force fed them endlessly by paid Capitalist media till it was internalized as truth by its victims.

With only very few surges of organized labor power in our history, Big Capital ran the economy for its sole profit. Mamdani’s win on a platform of shifting power and benefit toward people threatens that billionaire cabal’s game. One Socialist victory has sent a chill through both parties who only exist to enrich the tiny elite.

Big Capital is wise to worry. The long racket of abusing and robbing working people is based on pure deceit and, as such, is easily exposed as bullshit. That said, it is deeply intrenched and has the hold of religious belief on the vast majority of Americans.

Mamdani will face all the psychopathic flak that Capitalism can bring to bear. His stated intentions, mild and limited as they are, will be hysterically damned as violently revolutionary and ruinous by its vast PR apparatus that includes all public media.

Attacks on his intentions will show how sincerely he holds them. There is already concern that he may turn out to be another hollow, gutless wonder, like Bernie and AOC, who talk the game but don’t walk it. Like Obama, the poster boy for cynical, hustler jive, they just serve to herd naive, hope-addled simpletons into continuing to elect phony, sold-out Capitalist Democrats.

There is deep, genuine hunger alive and vigorous among a small conscious part of the electorate capable of comprehending what an evil house game our Potemkin Democracy is and always has been, for radical change to create a sound, life-centered system.

The systemic problem of the nation goes far deeper, though, than the fact that the top 0.1% control more money than the entire lower half. It’s that the vast majority of us not only accept this obscene inequity, but we do not even believe it can be ended.

Mamdani lit a fire in many voters’ by promising small, tangible gains could be made for them, and they rallied to him. If he can follow through, that fire may spread in his state and, if he makes real gains, perhaps even broadly. If not, it will die and go out.

Some of the few courageous, knowledgeable voices speaking from positions outside the MSM where they have been banished, exhort the public to rise and act together against the king tide of authoritarian barbarity. They declare it is our only means of avoiding fascism. They’re right, but there is no hope for that.

We are too dispirited, too divided, disillusioned, and beaten down for that to happen. Only full-blown catastrophe could create the fusion of anger and courage to engender such unified action.

The odds are great against Mamdani. As Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows the dice are loaded”. Some spineless and unprincipled Democrat Senators just joined Republican slugs to end the shutdown and yield to Trump’s wrecking ball designs.

All the Big Money backs a filthy, punishing absolutism, which is in power and rising, with no mass of principled force to resist it. It is deeply tragic that, with our people herded into fascism by its brute deceit, armed gestapo, and thought police, catastrophe is the only outcome that can now break that descent into the dark.