TROTSKYITE LUNACY.

There's generally a recent Common Dreams column available to provide comic relief on what is turning into an unedifying election season.

They're going to be too busy fangirling over ¿Que mala? this week, but have no fear, dear reader, there's always the World Socialist Web Site.  "Kamala Harris outlines pro-corporate economic agenda at North Carolina campaign stop."

After that speech, the shade of Henry Wallace called, asking for his stump speech back, and Diocletian could be heard wandering the Boundary Waters crying, "Nikita Sergeyevich, where are my edicts?"  Panem et circenses, not so much.

Speaking in front of banners that read “Opportunity Economy, Lowering your Costs” and a “New Way Forward,” Harris advanced virtually the same corporatist and nationalist agenda President Joe Biden had been campaigning on until recently, with more overt appeals to Wall Street.

Harris began her remarks by speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic, which continues to ravage the planet, in the past tense. She admitted, “A loaf of bread costs 50 percent more today than it did before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50 percent. Many of the big food companies are seeing their highest profits in two decades.”

While the working class struggles to survive a deadly pandemic in the face of rising food, healthcare and housing costs, the ultra-wealthy under Biden-Harris have never had it better.

Leave out the necessary Communist adjectives and the exclamation marks, and that could almost be a lucid passage from a Trump rally.  The red meat, that is, if we can speak of red meat in what might be a nest of vegetarians, comes a few paragraphs later.

Harris promised to build on this “foundation” of “progress” and create “opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity.” She did not once mention how she would pay for any of the proposals, nor did she raise the possibility of increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy or corporations.

Instead, Harris declared, “I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape,” while “encouraging innovative technologies… and creating a stable business environment.” As part of a creating a “stable business environment” she promised to “work with labor and business to strengthen the American economy.”

In addition to promising to cut regulations and red tape for corporations, she outlined as series of limited proposals to combat exorbitant housing costs, healthcare, food prices, and inflation that have no chance of passing a divided Congress. Her dead-on-arrival proposals include an expanded $6,000 Child Tax Credit for middle and lower income families the first year they have a child and a $25,000 tax incentive for first-time home buyers.

These proposals are a smokescreen for the real polices of a Harris-Walz administration, which are centered on suppressing the class struggle via the trade union apparatus in order to secure profits for major corporations and national supply chains in preparation for World War III.

Perhaps because it goes without standing that Democrats are all about punitive taxation of productive people.  In that speech, though, she was all about Diocletian's edicts.  Get to the end of the essay, though, and the predictable call to action comes.  "The fight to secure good paying jobs, housing, and healthcare for all, not just 'opportunities' to be exploited by corporations and duplicitous politicians, requires a break with all capitalist parties, the nationalist trade unions, and a turn to the methods of class struggle."  Or, as Donald Trump might put it, policies in the Maduro fashion.