No, the Democrats are NOT “in Power Now” & No, these 8 Ideas are NOT “Bold” and Will NOT “Fix America”

A Response to The New York Times Editorial Board

7 hours ago

No More Local Endorsements by The New York Times - The New York Times

Last Saturday, four days after the Democrats swept both houses of the next (potentially seated) Congress in the2026 midterm elections, The New York Times Editorial Board posted a commentary bearing the online title “The Democrats are in Power Now. This is What They Should Do.” When you clicked on that title, you were taken to an essay titled “8 BOLD IDEAS TO FIX AMERICA.”

Each “bold idea” is a Congressional bill or other action advocated for Democratic Party consideration by one of the Times’ “sharpest writers and thinkers.”

The online heading was delusional. The House and the Senate remain in Republifascist hands through the first week of January. The transfer of Congressional power to the Democrats is not 100% certain in light of the fascist composition of the executive branch and the chances that Trump’s Iran War could create a context for the suspension of the certification and seating of a new Congress.

And even if the peaceful transfer occurs, as seems quite likely, it will mean that Democrats sit atop just one third of the federal government — and a very hemmed in third at that. Minus a long overdue successful popular uprising for removal, the presidency, remains in Republifascist hands for at least two more years and two months, headed by a deranged eco-cidal, pandemicist, fascist, and warmongering lunatic who has won “unitary” control of the entire executive branch. The Trump-handpicked Supreme Court, which granted Trump lifetime federal legal immunity, is still very much majority (6-3) right-wing.

Furthermore, Trump’s constitutional veto power, the requirement of 60 Senate votes to pass most Congressional bills, and the Senate filibuster should stop the Democrats from passing significant legislation in the next two years.

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Here are the Times’ hotshots’ “Eight Bold” proposals to “Fix America”:

+1. Binyamin Appelbaum: “Build Housing” to “make everyday life more affordable.”

+2. Tim Wu: “an Affordability Act” that will “target the most obvious and visible extractive pricing practices that have become part of daily life,” i.e. “junk fees and all forms of surprise billing” and other forms of price-fixing.

+3. Zeynep Tufekci: “smart, sensible regulation” of Big Tech, including legal penalties for bot-hacking, chatbot misbehavior, “scal[ing] back Section 230 immunity — which protects online platforms from significant liability — for social media companies, and “comprehensive privacy and data use legislation.”.

+4. Rachael Bedard: a “MediKids Act” expanding Medicaid to grant “universal health care coverage for children.”

+5. Jamal Greene: expand the Supreme Court by “uncapping the court’s size and providing for a new justice every two years, indefinitely.”

+6. Michael Waldman: a new statute with real teeth to ban campaign contributions as well as “gifts to inauguration committees and presidential libraries” by “companies with federal contracts — as well as their top executives, shareholders, subsidiaries and other corporate affiliates.”

+7. W.J. Hennigan:

“withhold spending until the White House provides answers about the administration’s militarism around the world, particularly the illegal and unwinnable war with Iran…Congress has yet to pass Mr. Trump’s record-breaking request for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, nor has it appropriated the $87.6 billion the administration wants to help fund the war, among other things. Democrats can leverage these asks to compel the president to compromise, agreeing to increase spending in exchange for a deal to end the war….The new funding will help replenish the military’s dwindling stocks of long-range missiles and interceptors and build its arsenal of smaller, tech-savvy weapons, which have revolutionized combat in the 21st century.”

+8. Dara Lind: “Legalize undocumented immigrants” by “making it possible for immigrants to ‘get legal’ and eventually apply for citizenship” (so, in other words, another in a long line of calls for “comprehensive immigration reform.”)

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This is weak tea, nothing less than appeasement of Trump’s fascist and exterminist regime. Note the absence of any call for the impeachment and removal of the epically corrupt, criminal and deranged fascist lunatic Trump and others in his horrific fascist regime, which represents a grave and imminent existential danger to humanity in a world tipping into environmental catastrophe and towards global and possibly nuclear war.

That’s quite an omission: the notion of leaving this mad regime in power for two more years and two months is, well, mad. It’s a quicksand trap likely to enhance the Republifascists’s chances of keeping the presidency in 2028-29.

Notice also the absence of a single recommendation regarding the deepening climate crisis that the fossil fascist Trump has been madly accelerating atop the lethal national vanguard of capitalogenic global warming.

Except for number seven --- “withholding spending until the president provides answers about the administration’s militarism around the world” --- all these recommendations are dead in the water until and unless the Democrats both keep Congress and put a Democratic president in the White House in 2028-29. The Times’ “bold proposals to fix America” are mainly about helping the highly unpopular Democratic Party position itself for the 2028 elections.

And number seven involves agreeing to increase the Pentagon’s massive war budget. Of course: the Democrats are every bit as imperialist as Trump and his party, just in different and more traditional post-1945 Council on Foreign Relations ways.

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But the real kicker is this: put the Trump fascist regime and party aside for a moment and ask whether any of these “bold ideas” would actually “fix America” if enacted. Scientifically speaking, the answer to that is a hard and definitive no they would not. The problems that plague the United States and indeed other nations and peoples across the world are far more deeply rooted than anything such short or even longer and more elaborate lists of reforms and ameliorative actions can remotely begin to tackle. These reformist-wish lists, platforms, and agendas are all about running away from the real problem – the system of capitalism-imperialism. None of these band-aid measures or actions can begin to “fix America” or any other country because the underlying taproot system is functioning on a basis that cannot and will not seriously accommodate more just and equitable ways of life, shorn of exploitation, oppression, militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, repression, ecocide, nationalism, xenophobia, and violence. Except for the Supreme Court issue, all the small number of very real problems the Times piece purports to address --- insufficient affordable housing, prices in excesses of people’s income, high technology beyond popular control and benefit, disproportionate political influence and favoritism for wealthy capitalists, inadequate health care, reckless imperialism and militarism, and mass immigration from poor to rich nations (and nativist reaction to the migration) – are ultimately rooted in the inherent oppressive and exploitative anarchy and parasitism of the capitalist mode of production and the political and ideological systems that have grown up in and around the underlying class dictatorship that defines that destructive and now cancerous and outmoded mode of organizing humanity’s core material and social relations. (And actually, even the limited size and reactionary nature of the US Supreme Court can perhaps be traced back to this.) As Ardea Skybreak said 11 years ago in a series of interviews published in the book Science and Revolution:

‘Sometimes we talk about the unresolvable contradictions of capitalism. If you use science to analyze this stuff, you will increasingly understand that this system cannot fix itself, and that it is not fundamentally capable of correcting these types of abuses. It cannot do away, ultimately, with the police murders of Black and Latino people in this society. It cannot do away with the rule of their enforcers, the brutality of their enforcers, that keeps a whole section of the people down…It’s the same thing with the question of the oppression of women. It’s another one of those profoundly unresolvable contradictions of the existing system. This system cannot ultimately resolve that problem, which science can show has been deeply built into the root foundational structures of this capitalist system as well as those of previous oppressive and exploitative systems going way, way back in time. Yes, there are some women, a few—there are a few sections of women that can be allowed to move up the ladder, so to speak, under capitalism. The same can be said about Black people—a few can be allowed to move on up, to enter the professional middle strata or even become totally bourgeois, and you can elect some Black officials to high places and even have a Black president these days. But none of this changes anything fundamentally about the profound and relentless oppression faced by the vast majority of Black people in this country, and of other people of color as well. The same goes for women. Literally half of humanity—in other words, women—continues to be kept down, in all sorts of ways, in the U.S. and all around the world, and none of that changes just because you can now have a few female corporate CEOs or government representatives or a few very wealthy bourgeois women. None of that changes the ongoing fundamentally degraded and dehumanized status and experience of the vast majority of women here and throughout the world.
Wars of empire—there’s another one of those unresolvable contradictions of this system. It doesn’t ultimately matter whether, every now and then, even a few individual politicians or other representatives of the ruling class are willing to speak out—even sincerely—against one or another war of imperialist aggression. This ruling class is going to continue to wage wars of empire to extend and defend and consolidate their imperialist system. And they will do so over and over again. Why? Because the underlying dynamics of their system drive that process, whether any individual politician or other ruling class figure would like it to be that way or not. Do you see? The very machinery of this ghoulish system repeatedly requires such wars—for its ongoing maintenance, expansion, and consolidation.
So we have to confront the fact that what we call national oppression, the oppression of minority peoples, and the oppression of women, the wars of empire and the armies of occupation—none of this can ultimately be solved under this system. Science can analyze why none of this can fundamentally be solved under the structures of capitalism-imperialism. And this is something that BA has done a lot of work analyzing over decades, really deeply bringing to light why this system cannot be reformed, why it cannot just be fixed with a few quick fixes, why you have to have an actual revolution, rather than just work for a few little tweaks here or there.
And the same thing is very much the case with the question of the environment, the global environment. Even if you had a bunch of capitalists and other ruling class figures—you know, their government representatives in this country or in other countries—who personally became really convinced that there is an environmental emergency for the planet, and that steps really have to be taken to try to save the planetary environment and prevent all this degradation which is causing critical problems throughout the world—even if some (or even many) individuals in the ruling class became personally convinced of that, and even if they tried to institute a few reforms here or there, they would quickly run up against the limitations and obstacles of their own system! The capitalist-imperialist system is simply not set up and structured in such a way as to allow the kind of radical transformations that are actually needed to resolve the global environmental crisis. Because of the underlying structures and “rules of functioning” of their aggressively competitive and profit-driven system, capitalists are simply not capable, they do not have the material basis, to actually resolve this planetary environmental problem, with sufficient scope and scale, under the current system.
This is all very important to understand, and once again it takes science to deeply understand that you can’t just “convince” rulers to change, because they are themselves completely caught up in the rules and machinery of their own system, whether they like it or not. The machinery of the capitalist-imperialist system has basic rules of functioning, “rules” which ultimately cannot be changed without changing the type of system we live under. If you don’t understand this...if you think the way to change the world...if you think, for instance, that the way to keep the police from killing unarmed Black youth is to just to do a few “reforms,” like putting body cameras on the cops, or just do better education and training for the cops, you’re going to have a rude awakening, because their system will keep regenerating this form of terror and oppression. It can’t not do it.’

Sorry for the extra-long quote (929 words!) but I really think it merits the break from the norm.

Caveat: you don’t have to agree with me or Skybreak on the at once moral and scientific necessity of an actual revolutionary communist-led socialist revolution to agree with me that the notion of leaving the Trump fascist regime in power until January 20, 2029, is nuts. The appointment of the depraved sadist and neo-Nazi Stephen Miller as White House Chief of Staff (please see my last PSR) is proof that this regime will be every bit as dangerous, if not more dangerous after the mid-terms than it was before the “blue tsunami.”

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