For I can raise no money by vile means*

Nobody has more contempt for Republican voters than professional Republicans:

The Trump campaign has been unrelenting in recent days with its all-caps, bold font, exclamation-point-ridden fundraising appeals: “THE DEMOCRATS WANT TO STEAL THIS ELECTION!” “We can’t allow the Left-wing MOB to undermine our election.”

They urge supporters to make donations to President Donald Trump’s election integrity defense, to ensure he has the “resources” he needs to keep the election from being “stolen.”

In the fine print of the fundraising blasts, it lays out that 60 percent of the contributions will first go to the new PAC, up to the maximum contribution of $5,000. The remaining 40 percent goes to the RNC up to the maximum $35,500. If that first 60 percent of the donation exceeds $5,000 the remnants go to the campaign’s “recount account”; if the 40 percent exceeds the $35,500 RNC maximum, only then does it go to the RNC’s legal defense fund.

That story was three weeks ago. By now they have raised more than $170m and it’s difficult to characterize as anything other than a nice haul. It can also be a struggle to sympathize with the donors, as it has always been:

The new NRA disclosures appear to constitute a formal admission of financial mismanagement, which the gun group had denied under months of mounting pressure. In August, following a lengthy investigation, Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York, filed a civil suit seeking to dissolve the organization, alleging the NRA had grown rotten from “a culture of self-dealing, mismanagement, and negligent oversight.” To James’s mind, LaPierre’s repayment represents a drop in the bucket. She told the Post that the $300,000 is “just a fraction of the millions he personally profited from,” and she accused LaPierre and his deputies of having raided “NRA coffers to fund lavish lifestyles that included private jets, pricey vacations, expensive meals and no-show contracts.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that LaPierre is being investigated by the IRS for “possible criminal tax fraud related to his personal taxes.” LaPierre declined to comment to the Post.

We might call this Green brutality, because nothing reveals the vulnerable like the willingness to sell their fears back to them.

* For I can raise no money by vile means.
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart
And drop my blood for drachmas

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III

A fluid struggle

No not a GatorADE cage match. But the struggle about how much of the economic stimulus will be devoted to what seems quite fluid at the moment, i.e., pertains to a substance that easily changes shape. So, too, the question of what to do about the “toxic” assets of the major banks. The very misuse of that adjective is even coming into view and the route through nationalization toward a someday re-normalization of the financial sector, while not inevitable in the least, is at least being shoved out onto the stage for a kind of hearing. These whispers need to grow into impatient yelling.

Because unless there is fighting, screaming, wailing all about, little will change. Frederick Douglass spoke of the nature of reform often – how it won’t be, and can’t be, anything less than a torrid affair.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.

A kind of hearing is not enough. We’re vastly afraid of words, especially nationalization, and particularly covetous of the our wealthy, and loathe to spread wealth for the greater good. These blaspheme a specific strain in the paradox of our egalitarian right to prosper and guard our prosperity, and this contradition won’t be reconciled with incrementalist calculation of the possible.

A fluid struggle

No not a GatorADE cage match. But the struggle about how much of the economic stimulus will be devoted to what seems quite fluid at the moment, i.e., pertains to a substance that easily changes shape. So, too, the question of what to do about the “toxic” assets of the major banks. The very misuse of that adjective is even coming into view and the route through nationalization toward a someday re-normalization of the financial sector, while not inevitable in the least, is at least being shoved out onto the stage for a kind of hearing. These whispers need to grow into impatient yelling.

Because unless there is fighting, screaming, wailing all about, little will change. Frederick Douglass spoke of the nature of reform often – how it won’t be, and can’t be, anything less than a torrid affair.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal.

A kind of hearing is not enough. We’re vastly afraid of words, especially nationalization, and particularly covetous of the our wealthy, and loathe to spread wealth for the greater good. These blaspheme a specific strain in the paradox of our egalitarian right to prosper and guard our prosperity, and this contradition won’t be reconciled with incrementalist calculation of the possible.