Where We Are This Week 04/27/23
Chess, the 2008 remix, and the anti-democratic DNC.
Let’s play a game, shall we?
During the height of the pandemic, my wife and I frequently played a game of chess while we sipped our libations on the back patio and deliberated on dinner plans.
We’d play music and indulge in the sanity of our own backyard. While the rest of the world was panicking about the virus, we took advantage of the downtime. Tennessee shut down around April and May of 2020 - preeminently as it were, Covid-19 didn’t reach lockdown-worthy numbers (if there is such a thing) until much later that year.
Not ones to waste time alone, we spent our afternoons piddling in our garden, reading - I reread The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series in its entirety, the best five-part trilogy out there if you ask me - and pushing pawns and knights around a checkered board.
Sure, the thin veneer of genteel society was being ripped away before our eyes, but at least, the rules of the game were clear and predictable, and here, in the quiet comfort of our home, we were content to be confined within the chessboard.
It’s been a while since I’ve played regularly so, admittedly, I’m a little out of practice. But, I’m a good sport! It might be easy for you, but let’s play anyways - I’ll let you go first.
Oh, but first, I should tell you. The way I play chess isn’t exactly conventional; there are a few additional rules. The white pieces, the ones with which you’re playing, don’t move quite the same as mine. Your queen can only move one space at a time, your knights can only move to spaces unoccupied by my forces, and I’ve gone ahead and done you the service of removing your pesky pawns from the board entirely.
I hope you weren’t planning on castling your king, either; the white pieces don’t do that in my game.
But enough with all the talking, let’s play!
The Silent Primary of 2024
If after you read my addendum of rules, you still decided to play, then, congratulations are in order. You, dear reader, have just made the same decision that hundreds of millions of Americans, myself included, make every few years in November.
The rules of nominating and electing the next president of the United States are such that, unless you’re playing with the black pieces, the candidates that truly represent the American people - if they even exist - are kept as far from the executive office as possible.
Albert Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. If this is the standard, we all ought to be committed.
President Joe Biden announced he was running for reelection on Tuesday. Democrats must have read the tea leaves and felt confident that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee and another Biden victory would be secured in ‘24. The mere facts of the current president’s age - he would be 82 at his second inauguration - and his apparent cognitive decline should be enough for Democrats to keep him off the ticket.
But no, Biden represents the status quo - something the DNC is too concerned with to risk running a principled candidate or an untested quantity like Gavin Newsome.
Biden’s announcement throws his hat into the ring along with the ever-hopeful, new age guru Marianne Williamson, and the (increasingly less) fringe Robert F. Kennedy Jr of the traditional left and the new right. You’d think that these characters would be easy for the incumbent president to defeat, but establishment democrats and new surveys appear to show otherwise.
Early polls show that RFK Jr has garnered the support of 14% of former Biden voters, and Williamson currently has 10% of likely Democrat voters saying they’ll be casting their ballot in her direction. Though it’s small, it’s an uncanny level of support for two potential primary challengers of the sitting president.
Donald Trump, despite having large swathes of Republicans who were against his 2016 nomination, didn’t face any significant opposition to his 2020 reelection bid effectively bailing out the Republican party from any scrutiny of their processes.
This early on, the contenders’ surprising popularity has the Democratic National Committee taking precautionary measures to shore up Biden’s nomination. Remember, this is the ‘pro-democracy’ party you’ve heard so much about in the past few years.
The DNC has already stated that it will not hold any primary debates ahead of the nomination next year declaring their unwavering support for the inimitable Joe Biden. By 2020’s standards, however, Williamson and Kennedy Jr would easily qualify for a space on the debate stage - the first round of presidential primaries last cycle had twenty candidates. That year, candidates had to have been polling at least 1% or have surpassed a certain fundraising threshold in order to grab a podium.
By either of those guidelines, Biden’s competitors would surely have what it takes to debate the president on the national stage in the upcoming primary - but that is where the DNC’s worst fears lie.
How could they let the current president, the one that can only answer pre-approved questions with a journalist cheatsheet on White House stationary, reveal himself and his mental degradation in real-time in front of the American public? Letting Biden enter into an unscripted debate against a serious opponent is tantamount to giving the nomination away.
The DNC is prioritizing a victory in 2024 over the opinions of its base. How democratic, indeed. Granted, they have experience in doing so; the DNC colluded with Hillary Clinton in 2016 to hand over the financial and political levers of the party to steer her to the nomination over outsider - just barely at this point - Bernie Sanders.
Fearing that an uncontested primary run wouldn’t be enough, the DNC has moved to reorder the sequence of primaries in 2024. New Hampshire has been traditionally first, but the New England state is where Sanders took a resounding lead against Biden. That presents a problem for the Biden hopefuls.
Now, in first, hoping to give the 80-year-old a running start, is South Carolina - a state where he clinched the nomination by some margin in 2020.
Are Democrats to blame for their anti-democratic powerplay? Yes. Are Republicans? Sure, why not?
The moves speak to the weakness - or at least, the perceived weakness - of former president Donald Trump. The ex-president is currently running away from all contenders, declared or pre-declared - as is the case with Ron DeSantis. Trump has even suggested he may not even attend the planned Republican primary debates due to his seemingly insurmountable lead - which is another problem all on its own.
With Trump forty-something points clear of the next closest candidate, Democrats felt it was safe in announcing Biden’s reelection bid since he comfortably defeated Trump in 2020; the DNC sees no reason why he can’t do the same next year - and they’re probably right.
Trump hasn’t learned from his mistakes during his first term, and neither the media nor the DNC are willing to reprimand Biden for his dismal first term. If the economy remains in stasis - as tenuous as it may be - and there’s no resurgence of Covid-19, the 2024 presidential race will likely look identical to the last one.
This is all despite every available metric suggesting the American public doesn’t want either of that illustrious duo to run again in 2024. 70% of Americans said so of Biden while 60% said similarly of his MAGA counterpart. Public opinion be damned! Let’s shove ‘em down their throats!
This is the result of the two-party system. While they play their power games, the rest of us are left in the lurch. The machinations of the president-making regime are such that by the time November comes around you feel as if you had the choice of who presides in the executive office. This is the false perception of choice and the manufacturing of consent of the American body politic.
Queen to D3. Your move.
Groundhog Day ‘08
Remember when you did the bank bailouts? Remember when you did the subprime mortgage crisis? That was awesome.
Washington DC is like a live-action enactment of VH1’s I Love the 00’s. As apparent fans of the 2000s, lawmakers, regrettably, can’t relive the roaring highs of the decade so they’re doing their best to replicate them fifteen years later.
Granted, 2008 did bring us Dr. Dog’s Fate, the timeless, noncancelable Tropic Thunder, and yet another Manchester United Premier League title, but accompanying those things were a few highlights I’d like to not revisit; namely, the collapse of the housing market.
But back to yesteryear, we go! Is that a DeLorean or do you just love financial insolvency?
Last week, the Biden Administration’s Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that high-credit-score borrowers will be penalized and forced to pay higher mortgage fees than their low-credit-score counterparts. Borrowers with a credit score over 680 will be required to pay an additional $40 per month which over the course of a 30-year mortgage would amount to close to $15,000 without adjusting for inflation - of which there will be plenty.
In an effort to subsidize low-credit-score borrowers’ mortgages, the feds are, yet again, incentivizing borrowers to leverage themselves into mortgage payments they otherwise couldn’t afford. Financial institutions and predatory lenders must be salivating at the prospect. BlackRock, is that you?
Thanks to the 2008 crisis, and the bank run of SVB - remember that? - we know who will be offered protection when the housing market goes belly-up. Hint: it’s not the homeowner. It takes thinking literally only a few steps ahead to predict how this disaster will unfold. Yet, some technocrat in DC is recklessly forging full-steam ahead into a housing market that is already artificially overheated.
No congressional oversight, no referendum, no choice.
Any complaints lodged by financial institutions to sympathetic media are disingenuous and glib. The entire financial system and the arbitrary categorization of borrowers have been set up for their benefit. For instance, the credit score, a tool that came to prominence thanks to the collaboration of corporate and governmental interests, has long been used to take advantage of the American consumer.
The credit score is only a stone’s throw away from China’s social credit system; the American version takes in a variety of factors, some social, some financial, and nearly all of which are opaque to those who are subject to its rating.
It’s at once the very thing limiting financial involvement in the economy but also the only recourse that allows the average consumer to enter it. In order to purchase a house, you must have a sufficient score. In order to have a sufficient score, you must have debt. In order to have debt, you must have a sufficient score to garner a credit card or the like, et cetera, et cetera.
The American laden with debt is the preferred citizen, not so much where their debtors lose their hats, but just enough that it makes them conformed and predictable. Thus, the snake bites its own tail.
It’s a nearly unobjectionable, unavoidable proposal. To eschew the credit system is to avoid all conventions of American society, but to embrace it is to reinforce its strength.
You want to own a home, don’t you? You want to play the game, right? After all, it’s the only game we’re playing.
Checkmate.
To a better next week.
~FDA