Peace? You want peace? No peace. Only candidates. More candidates. Two drop out, two more declare. No voting. No resolution. Just campaigns and more candidates. Eternal campaigns. We have always been campaigning for 2020. You want a vision of the future? Imagine a candidate knocking on a voter’s door, forever.
Open up. The candidates know you’re in there. You can’t hide from them. You’ll never escape. Especially not from
Deval Patrick – Former Governor, MA
People have compared Deval Patrick to Mitt Romney. This is misguided. Sure, both were Governors of Massachusetts, and yes, both managed Bain Capital, but Gov. Patrick’s past points to vast differences between the two that simply cannot be overlooked. If it can be believed, Deval Patrick is somehow more evil than Mitt Romney.
Deval Patrick was raised by a single mother in the projects on the south side of Chicago. The path his life took, from his very humble early beginnings, should tell you all you need to know about liberal solutions to poverty and inequality.
In middle school he was given a scholarship to a private boarding school by a national non-profit devoted to grooming future minority leaders. That school was the Milton Academy, a school run by and for the US ruling classes with alumni like Robert and Ted Kennedy. The same sort of institution dedicated to churning out dead eyed psychopaths to fill board rooms and elected offices that so many of the other ghouls in this race attended.
From there he went to Harvard, then Harvard Law. Then a clerkship for a district court judge, a brief stint at the NAACP, years at a white shoe firm, and subsequently landing as an Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. A rather typical elite political trajectory.
Now I know what some people might be thinking. An African-American man from a humble background going to the most elite schools in the country before becoming a civil rights lawyer who worked for the NAACP and then as an assistant AG for civil rights doesn’t sound evil in the least. In fact, it sounds quite the opposite. But Patrick is the perfect example of how well meaning people are slowly corrupted by money, power, and climbing the career ladder.
Immediately after leaving his role in the justice department Patrick immediately went to work as General Counsel of Texaco, and helped engineer and shepherd through regulatory approval (using his contacts from working in government) for its merger with Chevron. Yes, that Texaco and that Chevron. Two of the companies most responsible for spreading climate change denial while knowing full well it was bullshit. Two of the companies responsible for some of the worst environmental disasters in human history. Two of the companies that have (allegedly) funded murder and war for the sake of profit.
After the merger was approved, and he received a fat paycheck he jumped ship to work as general counsel for another unfathomably evil mega-corporation, Coca-Cola. You might be wondering, well what’s so bad about working with Coca-Cola? Well, aside from their pioneering role in the privatization of water, which Patrick helped litigate, they’ve been accused of a more direct kind of evil. In fact, when Patrick took the job he immediately went to work on an international matter of evil. The lawsuit filed in Miami by a Colombian labor union concerning Coca-Cola’s (alleged) hiring of paramilitary death squads to assassinate union leaders who had been organizing and agitating for rights at its bottling plants in that country.
As if that weren’t bad enough, from 2004 to 2006 he served on the board of directors for the company that owned Ameriquest Mortgage. One of the most flagrant, and fraudulent, of all the subprime lenders that gave us the Great Recession.
All this, and we still haven’t even touched on his time as governor, which was defined by nepotism, more self interested fuckery concerning Ameriquest, and firing a civil servant for not illegally removing his rapist brother-in-law from the sex offender registry.
And after he left office? Well, he took a job as Managing Director of Bain Capital, one of the most cartoonishly evil private equity shops in existence.
Bottom line, Deval Patrick has participated in or defended nearly every malicious act perpetrated by the ruling classes for at least two decades. A man whose early background would suggest a greater sympathy with the downtrodden and oppressed instead found himself party to the acts of oppression. Rather than get a different job, he was perfectly happy to advance his career at their expense.
Luckily though, this man so beloved by Obama that he was urged to jump into the presidential race, has no chance. None.
At his second public campaign appearance only two people showed up. He’ll never make a debate stage. He probably won’t even make most state’s ballots. For a former AG and Governor this might almost be surprising until you consider that the only people who think highly of this man are other elite sociopaths.
I plead with any higher power this is the last one of these I’ll have to write. Just as a sign that I still live, and am not, in fact, in hell.
Jean Krill is is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His writing navigates the many disparate visions of a radically better future.