I would like to add to my previous comment that it seems the party doesn't want to change it's direction and as you mentioned just try to sell you better the one they already have. If you allow me to being more jaded here, I would saw they are trying to craft their marketing for just a 51% win. This means no accountability to do what you say you would and when they're are real important issues that you say you would tackle but truly behind closed door don't really want to, you just need a couple of representative to cross party line and nothing happens and the illusion is maintained.
Addressing the real issues you mentioned could trigger a landslide win with an accountability to change things about where the power truly is.
True. The citizenry is controlled by a mere handful of corrupt thieves of massive wealth and interconnected, manipulative influence. They buy all sides of any political conflict. They set up the conflicts to mask the toxic theft and destruction. They could really care less who wins, as long as those winners bend the knee. There are differences between these 'parties' for sure, but that occurs at the lower echelons of management, as well as withing th electorate. But the top decisions are the decisions of the oligarchs handed down to the sycophantic political class. The status quo is the only quo. This, of course, is the sure fire strategy of failure, and all of us read of it in history and watch it occur in real time. But the addictions to power are mental illnesses so massive and intrenched they resemble fentanyl. Hoarding on a scale that is innately illogical and bizarre. Only the creation of Envy via Propaganda keeps the hordes in check. Imagine if all the gun owners in 'murka blinked and allowed the scales to fall from their eyes? Mass murder of all pyramidal institutions and their power structures. Mayhem. Chaos. Degeneration at a massive scale. And then the pathos of Denial of Climate Catastrophe wipes out what is left. Ozymandus on steroids, catabolic steriods.
I think there is a real hunger right now for approaches that move beyond simply managing existing systems toward genuinely rethinking how economic and political power are organized and whom those systems are ultimately meant to serve.
What stood out to me in the article and in your comment is the sense that many people no longer feel satisfied with symbolic victories or narrowly transactional politics. They want to see institutions become more accountable to human wellbeing, community stability, and everyday lived reality rather than primarily serving concentrated power and perpetual growth for its own sake.
At the same time, rebuilding trust likely requires more than critique. It requires tangible examples of cooperation, competence, and public-serving leadership that people can actually experience in their communities and daily lives.
Agree with you but in order to change something, the law has to change or be interpreted appropriately. It has to be written into concrete law that are effective and enforced. We are listening to you or we are hearing you is not enough. Never was. However, in the system as it is now, it's a catch 22, the people that can do this are not accountable to us anymore.
A dead party can't do its own autopsy any more than a dead person can. This autopsy was never going to yield insight. We are living in a nation of foxes and henhouses.
I, personally Cindy, do not believe that the Ds or Rs can be rehabilitated. They are over 90% owned by AIPAC, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Merchants of War etc. That's why we have 401K's replacing actual retirement accounts and Wall Street Healthcare.
I agree with you completely, Dav. They are zombie parties. We have only a single branch of federal government--the Corporate Branch. The legislative, executive, and judicial all work for them, not us.
We have one political party that is now simply terrible. And the other often seems out of touch and even incompetent. What is missing is open competition. Competition has long been understood as necessary (but too often absent) for a capitalist economy to thrive, but that is also the case for democracy. We should make the effort to introduce more candidates to our politics; it is not impossible but it surely will require us to adopt a better voting system.
Capitalism is a big part of the problem. It is an exploitative system that has outlived its usefulness and needs to go. Competition is a relic of the past that we need to get beyond. Cooperation is a much better way. If we don’t learn how to do that, nothing will change.
I'm not at all opposed to ending capitalism as it is now practiced. But for years it did work reasonably well under the reforms of the New Deal and until its decline in the 1980's. Some would say that was not capitalism, however, but rather socialism. Whatever you call it, it did work well for us for a few decades. Keeping capitalism working well seems to require constant vigilence against the capitalists who want to kill the golden goose.
Capitalism as it is now practiced is the inevitable outcome. Constant vigilance will never win out over the cancer that is the profit paradigm. All capitalism did under your New Deal to the 1980s scenario was to hook people up to a consumer/buy stuff IV, as well as set in motion the privatize profit, socialize external costs playbook. It was always an illusion, put in place by propaganda and enforced by imperial militarism, to protect the raping of the earth’s resources.
The so-called autopsy report also said nothing about Biden and the Dem’s support for genocide in Gaza, or anything about concerns around Biden’s age and acuity.
To paraphrase Principal Skinner, “Was it us? No, it’s the voters that were wrong.”
I managed a Dem campaign for U.S. Senate in 2008. It was a deeply red state and we had no real chance of winning (though the Republican candidate had loads of dirty laundry and the personality of wallpaper paste so if we could have got a little traction, who knows?) Anyway, it became apparent to us from the reaction of people while we were out on the campaign trail and through our internal polling that people were able to be swayed by big ideas, e.g. high speed rail, a just energy transition (especially if tied to an aggressive "this is how you win the war on terror which is funded by oil" stance), and universal preschool. Unsurprisingly, people want to believe in something. It turns out that the country everyone says they want to take back is the one that built the interstate highway system, raced for the moon, and created the greatest system of public education in the history of the world.
Every campaign, even the ones dead in the water, gets at least one phone call with the DSCC. You get like ten minutes to share your elevator pitch with Chuck Schumer and Co. before they hang up on you. We were genuinely excited to share what we'd found. In the reddest of red states if we ran even the few ads we could afford about big picture/actual "make America great again" ideas we'd get a ten point swing. We believed that with a little help we could make our state at least competitive which the national Dems could tout as signs of a blue wave. At minimum, we hoped that the DSCC would hear about our findings (which were not unlike the results we were starting to see from Obama's "hope and change" message) and run with them. I cannot tell you how quickly Schumer, in the most condescending way possible, explained to us rubes that Dems had already thought of all of that and saying any of it just meant they'd get beaten to death with claims of being tax and spend liberals who wanted to waste money on expensive boondoggles. The focus had to be on wedge issues. That was it. Our time was up. A week later he was on TV and while pointing to how great Dems were doing nationwide he singled out our state as a lost cause. Our fundraising dried up overnight. We never had a snowball's chance of winning so he was correct. But you don't expect the leader of your own party to sink one of his own campaigns.
I've watched Dems run out the same playlist for nearly twenty years now and it not only never changes, but also gets more stale over time. Their goal is to become the pro-life wing of the Republican party because they truly believe that if they're indistinguishable from Republicans that elections will be decided by the bare handful of issues in which they perceive an electoral edge. The number one goal is "Don't do anything or say anything they can hit us with later." That is the message that comes from the top. Try and pull away from that message and they will shut you down. So the Dem party has become the party of bland predictability. It's a feature, not a bug.
The parties and polls do not ask questions which they already know they wouldn't like the answer. This is how we are handled and the conversation about what is important is defined. They are intentionally avoiding asking questions about what they are unwilling to do, not because of incompetence or being out of touch.
"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT." Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Ch X, 1853.
I generally like and agree with everything Corbin has stated. What is missing for me is a recognition of the failure of dialogue. There is an enormous focus on the "message" with very few really listening to what people really say. We rely on "pollsters" today instead of getting out with the people and really getting the whole picture. "Sound bites" might seem wonderful but a "bite" isn't the whole picture. The US is constantly passing from one management fad to the next. Our current fad feels a lot like "management by marketing". The Japanese term is "Genchi Genbutsu" or as taught by a long successful firm, Toyota, get off your ass and go and see for yourself. We seem also to be in the midst or end of "cross promotion" within health insurance and other industries where rewards (kickbacks) hinge on selling something for somebody else.
If that is hard to understand, just ask any merchant how those "cash back" rewards credit cards really work. Everything for money, management by marketing that is hiding behind lawyers, etc. simply aren't practices that really contribute to humanity.
Searingly cogent Corbin, as always. The entire facade of politics and business and capitalism is the same as that for religions -- spin the top until dizziness feels stable. Rapture via a thousand placebos. Somerset Maughm wrote a brilliant novel long ago, The Painted Veil. The illusions of the charlatan are as thin as rice paper, but if the spin is potent, the finger never finds the paper canvass, and entropy roars downward on the other side until the entire Kabuki burns to the ground. As always, FEAR writes the lines and transfixes the chemistry in the human brain, wired directly to the adrena-sphere, where the reptile brain still holds sway. We are all victims of Fast Brain, Slow Brain. Spin the Top, Never Let It Stop.
That autopsy was embarassing! No surprise - long on process analysis and absolutely devoid of any meaningful content. I guess, if you only talk to the consultants who led you to the 2024 election disaster, you'll get answers that serve no one but those same consultants.
If the Democrats persist in their fantasies, they'll find they will lose the 2026 election cycle, too - an almost impossible feat, considering the opposition. But millions of voters who yearn for real solutions to real problems will be so disgusted and discouraged that they could stay home in November.
I too finally found this so called autopsy and as Corbin says it was bullshit! Every page was headed by a blurb saying that it was not DNC approved! Every page ended saying that there was no documentation of the facts. If that is true it is more proof that the DNC didn’t even take the time or energy to create it! The DNC does not want to admit they haven’t a clue to how to do anything or they simply want to continue sitting on their asses doing nothing. It must be nice to get paid all that money to do nothing!
It’s like the worker that tried a new method of doing their job which failed miserably. That’s not really the problem.. The real problem is that they are unwilling to say truthfully “Well that idea didn’t work.” Instead they spend all their time trying to prove that it really did work, or that there wasn’t really a problem, or that someone else sabotaged their plan.
The DNC does not know how to fix the problems they are facing but they don’t want to admit it or maybe they don’t truly want to change at all! Why can they not simply admit it and get the hell out of the way? Let people like Mamdani and AOC and the other young people take the lead for goodness sake.
Trump in 2024 promised DOGE would give everyone $2,000 checks. We got DOGE, but we got no checks. The simplest way for the Democrats to get all their big Ideas accomplished, would be to immediately tax the rich, and give every individual making less than $100,000 a year $3,000 checks every year for at least 2 years. Give every married couple making less than $120,000 a year $7,000. Call it a "stimulus check", just like during covid, except this time target it to people that are EXCLUSIVELY lower class and middle class. Don't send it to the idiots that were tweeting about drinking champagne in their shower while they were at home due to the covid shutdown.
Not only does this help the average person out, but it also proves that Democrats can do what the Republicans lied about doing. Which then proves the Republicans are tricking you and the Democrats or the real deal... once Americans have a little money in their pocket for emergencies/groceries, then they trust you and they'll keep voting progressives in. Then you get enough votes to where you can really shake the system up and get the white house, and get Medicare for all and free college, and raise the minimum wage in every state, etc.
In an affordability crisis such as this, Americans will do anything for money, sometimes even terrible things, sometimes things as terrible as switching their party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
Republicans love to argue that giving people government handouts or Universal Basic Income, means people won't want to work anymore... but this is the part where Democrats say, "these Republicans are trying to tell you that they believe that you could live off $3,000 a year for a single person, or $7,000 a year for a married couple"... that is a hilariously out-of-touch view which makes it even easier to paint GOP as the party of out-of-touch wealthy elites (which is what Gop has been painting Dems as for years).
One completely corrupt party. One partially corrupt party. An audience declaring its absolute disgust with corruption in general. A system that grooms corruption. Where to go from here?
I would like to add to my previous comment that it seems the party doesn't want to change it's direction and as you mentioned just try to sell you better the one they already have. If you allow me to being more jaded here, I would saw they are trying to craft their marketing for just a 51% win. This means no accountability to do what you say you would and when they're are real important issues that you say you would tackle but truly behind closed door don't really want to, you just need a couple of representative to cross party line and nothing happens and the illusion is maintained.
Addressing the real issues you mentioned could trigger a landslide win with an accountability to change things about where the power truly is.
True. The citizenry is controlled by a mere handful of corrupt thieves of massive wealth and interconnected, manipulative influence. They buy all sides of any political conflict. They set up the conflicts to mask the toxic theft and destruction. They could really care less who wins, as long as those winners bend the knee. There are differences between these 'parties' for sure, but that occurs at the lower echelons of management, as well as withing th electorate. But the top decisions are the decisions of the oligarchs handed down to the sycophantic political class. The status quo is the only quo. This, of course, is the sure fire strategy of failure, and all of us read of it in history and watch it occur in real time. But the addictions to power are mental illnesses so massive and intrenched they resemble fentanyl. Hoarding on a scale that is innately illogical and bizarre. Only the creation of Envy via Propaganda keeps the hordes in check. Imagine if all the gun owners in 'murka blinked and allowed the scales to fall from their eyes? Mass murder of all pyramidal institutions and their power structures. Mayhem. Chaos. Degeneration at a massive scale. And then the pathos of Denial of Climate Catastrophe wipes out what is left. Ozymandus on steroids, catabolic steriods.
I am hopeful we can change things without violence but recapturing the power in a legal peaceful way before it's too late.
I think there is a real hunger right now for approaches that move beyond simply managing existing systems toward genuinely rethinking how economic and political power are organized and whom those systems are ultimately meant to serve.
What stood out to me in the article and in your comment is the sense that many people no longer feel satisfied with symbolic victories or narrowly transactional politics. They want to see institutions become more accountable to human wellbeing, community stability, and everyday lived reality rather than primarily serving concentrated power and perpetual growth for its own sake.
At the same time, rebuilding trust likely requires more than critique. It requires tangible examples of cooperation, competence, and public-serving leadership that people can actually experience in their communities and daily lives.
Agree with you but in order to change something, the law has to change or be interpreted appropriately. It has to be written into concrete law that are effective and enforced. We are listening to you or we are hearing you is not enough. Never was. However, in the system as it is now, it's a catch 22, the people that can do this are not accountable to us anymore.
Yaaasssss! Well said, brother.
Thank you.
A dead party can't do its own autopsy any more than a dead person can. This autopsy was never going to yield insight. We are living in a nation of foxes and henhouses.
I, personally Cindy, do not believe that the Ds or Rs can be rehabilitated. They are over 90% owned by AIPAC, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Merchants of War etc. That's why we have 401K's replacing actual retirement accounts and Wall Street Healthcare.
I agree with you completely, Dav. They are zombie parties. We have only a single branch of federal government--the Corporate Branch. The legislative, executive, and judicial all work for them, not us.
We have one political party that is now simply terrible. And the other often seems out of touch and even incompetent. What is missing is open competition. Competition has long been understood as necessary (but too often absent) for a capitalist economy to thrive, but that is also the case for democracy. We should make the effort to introduce more candidates to our politics; it is not impossible but it surely will require us to adopt a better voting system.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Are-More-Political-Parties-by-Paul-Cohen-Change_Political-Parties_Political-Science_Politics-140522-528.html
Capitalism is a big part of the problem. It is an exploitative system that has outlived its usefulness and needs to go. Competition is a relic of the past that we need to get beyond. Cooperation is a much better way. If we don’t learn how to do that, nothing will change.
I'm not at all opposed to ending capitalism as it is now practiced. But for years it did work reasonably well under the reforms of the New Deal and until its decline in the 1980's. Some would say that was not capitalism, however, but rather socialism. Whatever you call it, it did work well for us for a few decades. Keeping capitalism working well seems to require constant vigilence against the capitalists who want to kill the golden goose.
Capitalism as it is now practiced is the inevitable outcome. Constant vigilance will never win out over the cancer that is the profit paradigm. All capitalism did under your New Deal to the 1980s scenario was to hook people up to a consumer/buy stuff IV, as well as set in motion the privatize profit, socialize external costs playbook. It was always an illusion, put in place by propaganda and enforced by imperial militarism, to protect the raping of the earth’s resources.
https://davcer.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-run-for-office
On point as usual.
The so-called autopsy report also said nothing about Biden and the Dem’s support for genocide in Gaza, or anything about concerns around Biden’s age and acuity.
To paraphrase Principal Skinner, “Was it us? No, it’s the voters that were wrong.”
I managed a Dem campaign for U.S. Senate in 2008. It was a deeply red state and we had no real chance of winning (though the Republican candidate had loads of dirty laundry and the personality of wallpaper paste so if we could have got a little traction, who knows?) Anyway, it became apparent to us from the reaction of people while we were out on the campaign trail and through our internal polling that people were able to be swayed by big ideas, e.g. high speed rail, a just energy transition (especially if tied to an aggressive "this is how you win the war on terror which is funded by oil" stance), and universal preschool. Unsurprisingly, people want to believe in something. It turns out that the country everyone says they want to take back is the one that built the interstate highway system, raced for the moon, and created the greatest system of public education in the history of the world.
Every campaign, even the ones dead in the water, gets at least one phone call with the DSCC. You get like ten minutes to share your elevator pitch with Chuck Schumer and Co. before they hang up on you. We were genuinely excited to share what we'd found. In the reddest of red states if we ran even the few ads we could afford about big picture/actual "make America great again" ideas we'd get a ten point swing. We believed that with a little help we could make our state at least competitive which the national Dems could tout as signs of a blue wave. At minimum, we hoped that the DSCC would hear about our findings (which were not unlike the results we were starting to see from Obama's "hope and change" message) and run with them. I cannot tell you how quickly Schumer, in the most condescending way possible, explained to us rubes that Dems had already thought of all of that and saying any of it just meant they'd get beaten to death with claims of being tax and spend liberals who wanted to waste money on expensive boondoggles. The focus had to be on wedge issues. That was it. Our time was up. A week later he was on TV and while pointing to how great Dems were doing nationwide he singled out our state as a lost cause. Our fundraising dried up overnight. We never had a snowball's chance of winning so he was correct. But you don't expect the leader of your own party to sink one of his own campaigns.
I've watched Dems run out the same playlist for nearly twenty years now and it not only never changes, but also gets more stale over time. Their goal is to become the pro-life wing of the Republican party because they truly believe that if they're indistinguishable from Republicans that elections will be decided by the bare handful of issues in which they perceive an electoral edge. The number one goal is "Don't do anything or say anything they can hit us with later." That is the message that comes from the top. Try and pull away from that message and they will shut you down. So the Dem party has become the party of bland predictability. It's a feature, not a bug.
The parties and polls do not ask questions which they already know they wouldn't like the answer. This is how we are handled and the conversation about what is important is defined. They are intentionally avoiding asking questions about what they are unwilling to do, not because of incompetence or being out of touch.
"The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT." Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Ch X, 1853.
I generally like and agree with everything Corbin has stated. What is missing for me is a recognition of the failure of dialogue. There is an enormous focus on the "message" with very few really listening to what people really say. We rely on "pollsters" today instead of getting out with the people and really getting the whole picture. "Sound bites" might seem wonderful but a "bite" isn't the whole picture. The US is constantly passing from one management fad to the next. Our current fad feels a lot like "management by marketing". The Japanese term is "Genchi Genbutsu" or as taught by a long successful firm, Toyota, get off your ass and go and see for yourself. We seem also to be in the midst or end of "cross promotion" within health insurance and other industries where rewards (kickbacks) hinge on selling something for somebody else.
If that is hard to understand, just ask any merchant how those "cash back" rewards credit cards really work. Everything for money, management by marketing that is hiding behind lawyers, etc. simply aren't practices that really contribute to humanity.
These people are apologists. They fit the facts to the narrative. Dialog does not exist to an apologist.
Searingly cogent Corbin, as always. The entire facade of politics and business and capitalism is the same as that for religions -- spin the top until dizziness feels stable. Rapture via a thousand placebos. Somerset Maughm wrote a brilliant novel long ago, The Painted Veil. The illusions of the charlatan are as thin as rice paper, but if the spin is potent, the finger never finds the paper canvass, and entropy roars downward on the other side until the entire Kabuki burns to the ground. As always, FEAR writes the lines and transfixes the chemistry in the human brain, wired directly to the adrena-sphere, where the reptile brain still holds sway. We are all victims of Fast Brain, Slow Brain. Spin the Top, Never Let It Stop.
That autopsy was embarassing! No surprise - long on process analysis and absolutely devoid of any meaningful content. I guess, if you only talk to the consultants who led you to the 2024 election disaster, you'll get answers that serve no one but those same consultants.
If the Democrats persist in their fantasies, they'll find they will lose the 2026 election cycle, too - an almost impossible feat, considering the opposition. But millions of voters who yearn for real solutions to real problems will be so disgusted and discouraged that they could stay home in November.
For God's sake, Democrats - get a grip!
I too finally found this so called autopsy and as Corbin says it was bullshit! Every page was headed by a blurb saying that it was not DNC approved! Every page ended saying that there was no documentation of the facts. If that is true it is more proof that the DNC didn’t even take the time or energy to create it! The DNC does not want to admit they haven’t a clue to how to do anything or they simply want to continue sitting on their asses doing nothing. It must be nice to get paid all that money to do nothing!
It’s like the worker that tried a new method of doing their job which failed miserably. That’s not really the problem.. The real problem is that they are unwilling to say truthfully “Well that idea didn’t work.” Instead they spend all their time trying to prove that it really did work, or that there wasn’t really a problem, or that someone else sabotaged their plan.
The DNC does not know how to fix the problems they are facing but they don’t want to admit it or maybe they don’t truly want to change at all! Why can they not simply admit it and get the hell out of the way? Let people like Mamdani and AOC and the other young people take the lead for goodness sake.
So who is strong enough and progressive enough to run, win and start to do what must be done in 2028?
Yes, maintaining their lack of accountability. Getting elected for the power alone, Not the "power to" (do anything related to what we need)
Trump in 2024 promised DOGE would give everyone $2,000 checks. We got DOGE, but we got no checks. The simplest way for the Democrats to get all their big Ideas accomplished, would be to immediately tax the rich, and give every individual making less than $100,000 a year $3,000 checks every year for at least 2 years. Give every married couple making less than $120,000 a year $7,000. Call it a "stimulus check", just like during covid, except this time target it to people that are EXCLUSIVELY lower class and middle class. Don't send it to the idiots that were tweeting about drinking champagne in their shower while they were at home due to the covid shutdown.
Not only does this help the average person out, but it also proves that Democrats can do what the Republicans lied about doing. Which then proves the Republicans are tricking you and the Democrats or the real deal... once Americans have a little money in their pocket for emergencies/groceries, then they trust you and they'll keep voting progressives in. Then you get enough votes to where you can really shake the system up and get the white house, and get Medicare for all and free college, and raise the minimum wage in every state, etc.
In an affordability crisis such as this, Americans will do anything for money, sometimes even terrible things, sometimes things as terrible as switching their party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
Republicans love to argue that giving people government handouts or Universal Basic Income, means people won't want to work anymore... but this is the part where Democrats say, "these Republicans are trying to tell you that they believe that you could live off $3,000 a year for a single person, or $7,000 a year for a married couple"... that is a hilariously out-of-touch view which makes it even easier to paint GOP as the party of out-of-touch wealthy elites (which is what Gop has been painting Dems as for years).
One completely corrupt party. One partially corrupt party. An audience declaring its absolute disgust with corruption in general. A system that grooms corruption. Where to go from here?
Paid to lose, the dems are collaborators. gop are the abusers, dems are their enablers.