I could end up paying a lot for the corona virus and a lot of what I pay will go to people who have enough to game disasters for big profits. Against my will, almost, my retirement funds are invested in the stock market because that is the only place where I could have possibly “earned” enough on my retirement money to pay my way in the world until I die. My retirement counselor told me that if I pulled my money out of stocks–ones the retirement management company for which he works told him were the “relatively safe” ones–I would pay a substantial amount in capital gains taxes, that chunk of my nest egg gone for ever, less money in the account to ear on making more unlikely the possibility of my making it to the end solvent. My mother, to keep herself going, sold a house in Los Angeles, put the money in the high return accounts then available, and lived for a good part of her later years off of the interest she was able to earn on the house funds.

She, in the last few years of her life, almost drained those savings as interest rates that had floated her for many years dropped so low that her savings were just about sunk when she passed.

Certificates of deposits–high interest long term bank accounts–and other financial devices that payed people for the use of their money with low risk, disappeared just as the stock market grew bigger and ever bigger, in some part because people like me had nowhere else to go with pensions and retirement funds that needed to grow in value if they were to last the lifetime.

Once my money was invested by the company my employee had decided I had to trust, I had little choice to keep it where they told me they wanted it to be. They did have a fund that was stockless and drew a little interest but that amount would not have been enough to carry me through and I had no desire at all to end up so broke as to have to depend my children to float me until I ceased to be. When the market began to fluctuate somewhat wildly, I asked my retirement helper to move my money into that safe account, something he was most reluctant to do. He said it could not and should not be done, first because I was not allowed by the rules of the company’s game, to move money into the secure account and, secondly, because I would immediately have to pay 20% in capital gains taxes on what I moved if I could have moved.

This attempt at transacting occurred almost a year ago and, nice for me, the market, though breaking the back of the average working stiff, kept going up and up and up. And now, it is crashing back down and it just might take me down with it.

Bernie Sanders campaign was about something different than what Hilliary Clinton understood to be the goal of the sensible political campaign that would lead to a sensible presidency that would keep things sensible. The problem with her and with Biden and the rest of the democratic party, bolstered by black voters, for some unjustifiable reason, is that the good sense it promotes is absolute nonsense because it is predicated on the idea that AMERICA IS ALREADY GREAT when, America, the reality, is not even good and, for a good many, has been absolutely rotten ever since democracy was traded in for capitalism, the latter a virus that makes the decent chumps and the rotten cultural heroes.

Capitalism has been grinding up people and whole nations for over a century, the byproduct, absurd amounts of wealth for the absurdly wealthy, so much that, with their capital, they are able to own the rest, buy the law of the land free people enslaved to do their bidding. This terribly inhumane and rotten to the core system owns people from a young age, the schools always forced by those with power to teach in their favor a curriculum that translates the bad and inhumane into the good and necessary and polite. Consider singing songs of praise for bombs bursting in air–it would be wholly economically unsound to do so without killing several–and pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth that symbolizes a nation indivisible that is clearly divided into those with power and those without, those who have the freedom to control the lives of others and those who will be controlled by them.

What has happened in this farce of an election already is that capitalism has fought the fierce battle it can afford to fight–its advocates own every major media channel and both of the only viable political parties in existence–and is determined to win playing, of course, by rules it has created to serve its purposes, by the laws it has purchased so that justice is hardly that at all but, rather, a way to punish those who do not agree to be fucked over and fleeced.

It is really hard to buy into the Biden is better bullshit because he is only better because he is not as bad as the worst. Hope? Hardly if one is thoughtfully sane.

I am over 70 and I do not feel very good but, at this point, I really do not give much of a shit about me and survival, really. What I do care about is what is out there and what will be in the near future as it will affect people I love and care about. And, too, I cannot help but care to want to give what those who deserve better what they are denied and what I fear will happen to them in that near future, the virus certainly on my mind because I foresee another wiping clean of the assets of those who live moderately decent lives–many of these recovered to some degree from the last round of disaster thievery–and those who had little and continue to have little and, for the way this inhumane economy works, are likely to have even less into the future. Unless there is a revolution.

The virus is very likely to affect peoples’ ability to earn livings, people unable to shop, shops shutting down, people out of work. This is likely to go high up the economic chain, to the upper middle and middle of upper classes and so jobs will be lost and people will be unable to pay their bills, their mortgages, their car payments and so on and so forth. Houses and other belongings will be taken by those who can afford to take and, as happened last round of crash, those with money will cash in and the rest will be left will little.

That cannot be allowed to happen. It probably will be allowed to happen and the concentration of wealth in even fewer hands, the rich will get richer and the rest more desperate to just survive, lower paying jobs better than starving to death.

This is the system that Bernie Sanders has yelled and screamed needs to be changed. I do not care if Bernie is elected president. I do not think he, considering how little support he will get from those who need him most and the meat grinder he will be put through by those who cannot at all tolerate what he is about–not because they care about those who they will convince to vote against themselves but to get more out of those who have less–can do much unless those who are getting fucked over and who will get fucked over even more rise up.

We will watch again a passive public allow themselves to be fleeced and then give thanks to those who fleeced them because they are being given back a little, enough to allow them to work hard to make sure those who own them have everything else.

For those who know that progress cannot be made in the context of the current system, the message that is being made loud and clear is that there is no gentle way to meaningful change. The pushback against Bernie Sanders was to be expected. He is not a candidate. He is a threat. He is a threat to a way of life that has to hurt at least as many as it helps and the help it gives is not for those who need but to those who already have. That is what is being protected by the campaign to override the legitimacy of the movement Bernie Sanders is leading and he is threatening a way of life, a comfortable way of life that can only be lived comfortably if the pain of millions of people is ignored because the comforts come as they do only through the exploitation of others. Some, many, are sacrificed so that some others can have their comforts.

Americans and those who live in other capitalist countries are habituated to such a way of life and, because it is so dominant even those hurt by it are unlikely to question it to the point of understanding what it is about or why it has been allowed to exist, why those who are harmed, who, for example, are made to live lives fulled with anxiety because of corporate decisions and fluctuations in a stock market, accept that anxiety as the price that must be payed to live in this good society. What they are constantly made to believe is that the society is actually a good one, its economic system the best ever, even if it is not so good to them.

This is not a political campaign. It should not be looked upon as that. It is a battle over how we are to be allowed to live our lives, how human beings are to be treated in a nation where the possibility for a good life for all is real but in which that possibility is undermined by a philosophy that really is that greed is good and hoarding while others hurt is a form of decency. It is indecent and it deserves to be destroyed for the sake of humanity.

Two parties and none that reflects my views, none that is there to defend the public from the onslaught of predatory capitalism, none that is there to make it so that a decent day’s work guarantees a decent day’s wages, decent health care, a decent chance for the children to have full educational opportunity, that makes possible access to clear air and clean and safe water, that allows for adequate leisure time to experience what is there in the world to be enjoyed.

I had to register democratic to vote in the recent Nevada caucus. I had dropped my affiliation after the last election when I was forced to vote for either neoliberalism or Trumpism and I hated having to make such a choice. I have good reason to believe that the democratic party is trying to make sure that I will have the same kind of choice before me if its leaders have their way.

Tonight, the suits came together to anoint the antidote to meaningful change and everyone knows that this gang was always going to do what they felt best for a status quo that any humane person would find cruel and inhumane.

I loath these people because I crave proper justice for the people, equity, a meaningful seat at the table. Those who voted for Trump over Hillary will have before them a choice similar to the one that pushed them toward Trump, no one to champion their cause. There will be blame and it will be placed, by the party and its “moderate” media cheerleaders, on those who fought for something different. We will be said to have given Trump four more years.

That will be an incredible bold-faced lie. But it will resonate with those who want to keep what they have at what ever cost to those who have so much more less, their concern for the latter a case of the illness that deserves to be show up for what it is, false charity.