Matt Stoller tries his hand at diagnosing the D party’s ailment.
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For the last few weeks, I’ve been mulling over a question that I think will bedevil all of us in the anti-monopoly space for years, perhaps decades. Anti-monopoly policy is immensely popular, and there hasn’t been an administration as aggressive on antitrust in our lifetimes as there was under Joe Biden. Yet, voters soundly rejected his successor, Kamala Harris, and thrashed the party in power. And while anti-monopoly politics sits uneasily in the Democratic Party, that is where it sits. Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra and Jonathan Kanter will be out of power soon.
From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, “impossible.”
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His description is perfect. The Biden admin took real action to turn the clock back to 1939, which is WHAT WE NEED. The enforcers clamped down hard on stock criminals and monopolizers, using their existing authority. They didn’t need to ask useless Congress for any new “laws”.
They had a salable product and they refused to sell it.
They didn’t even fucking MENTION their real achievement. Instead they continued endlessly punching and spitting and slapping and kicking the voters for failing to love the utterly meaningless nonexistent empty nonword “democracy”.
Stoller’s diagnosis is too nice. The party doesn’t look powerless, it’s DEAD.
Or inanimate if you prefer. Both parties are giant granite boulders sitting on top of the country, squashing the life out of it. The boulders don’t listen, don’t see problems, don’t move, don’t solve problems. They just sit there.
What can we do about it? Reprint from 2019.
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This week’s big rain triggered a ferocious sprouting of a ‘ground cover’ plant in ALL of the street cracks. The streets are a dense web of cracks now, thanks to the Gaian city dysgovernment abandoning silly little games like plowing and sanding. Ice has full control of the streets in winter, and criminals have full control in summer.
The ground-cover plant is always present in the well-watered crack between the pavement and the curb. I grabbed up a handful and scanned it:
Normally it doesn’t show up in the smaller cracks. Now it fills and marks every crack wider than 1/4″. This plant obviously doesn’t need soil, and seems to dislike soil. It doesn’t grow where the dips in the street have gathered a permanent deposit of dirt.
Are the stolons just waiting year-round, always ready to explode into action with sufficient water?
After some googling … I know nothing about plants, and most pix of “ground cover between pavers” or similar phrases aren’t closeups, so can’t compare the tiny leaves. The nearest equivalent with a clear picture is creeping thyme.
It’s not just my neighborhood, it’s everywhere. Every crack is caulked with Creeping Thyme.
Michael Bloomberg, you may own the commanding heights of Spokane, but Creeping Thyme owns the ground. Creeping Thyme was here before you, and will still be here after you.
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The answer is to be creeping thyme. Let Mutual Benefit Societies be the stolons and mycelia linking us together in Friendship, Love and Trust. Grow wherever water is available, push through the cracks between the DEAD party rocks, eventually crack them and shove them aside.
Polistra's Mill 