The 2016 Election – Part 3 - Where do we go from here – NOT!

We shouldn’t be surprised that the elite liberal establishment (we definitely need a good acronym for it – EEL would work if we just shifted the words around) has come out with their analysis of what happened and why. In the last couple of days, I have been made aware of two examples that merit response because they represent a misreading of the historical context of this election and therefore fail to provide guidance to how progressives can move forward.

The first, and most pernicious, is an article by Paul Krugman, Useful Idiots Galore, that appeared in the NYT. Krugman argues that a swing of 1% in the election sent Sec. Clinton down to defeat. That swing, he states was due to “dirty tricks” (my name, not his), namely the actions of Russia and James Comey in the days leading up to Nov. 8^th which produced the shift and threw the election to Trump. And he may well be right, but …

The conclusion implied from this analysis is dead wrong. It proceeds from the failure to locate this election in the historical context of American politics for the last 40 years. The question he doesn’t address is why was this election so close to begin with. And he fails to even mention the fact that this election marks the continuation of a trend that has seen the Democratic Party become a permanent minority party in most parts of the US. Congress is now solidly in the hands of the Republicans. The Senate races in 2 years will be a disaster for Democrats as they must defend a large majority of the seats that will be up for election, and the House – well’ we can forget about that since only about 10% of the seats are even contestable. Most state governments are controlled by Republicans. Fewer and fewer young people are registering as Democrats. And so on.

What has been the anomaly is that, prior to 2016, Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential elections (counting Gore’s win in 2000). Now, even that critical office has fallen to the most reactionary forces. Arguing that this election was stolen keeps us from analyzing the fundamental problems of the Democratic Party that led to this loss. To quote Thomas Frank, “What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?”

I would posit that Krugman doesn’t know because he is part of the problem. Democrats need to stop moaning about what the Repugs (a wonderful bastardization of their party’s name that my wife has been using for a while) are doing and own up to what they did wrong. We don’t need to double down on what we have always done, nor do we need to “wait” for changing demographics to give us victory. What the Democratic Party needs is something to motivate voters. It needs to become the vehicle for a real political revolution.

In that light, the widely-circulated article “Indivisible: A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda” does hit on a couple of important points. The Congressional staffers who drew it up stress the need to organize locally and call for resistance to every part of the Republican’s agenda. They caution against “buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions”.  Yes and Yes! These are critical to any strategy to reverse the losses that Democrats have sustained.

But their prescription to follow the strategy and tactics of the Tea Party are based on both a misunderstanding of the history of that reactionary movement and of the objective conditions we face today.

First, the Tea Party did not arise in an ideological vacuum. Over forty years ago, reactionaries (please don’t call them conservatives, because they are not trying to “conserve” anything) began an ideological assault on the politics of the New Deal, particularly targeting the idea that government should have any role outside of power to protect private property (basically the military and the police). This assault was carried out by a large array of think tanks, media outlets, etc. and by 1980 had successfully altered the political debate so as to lay the groundwork for the extreme reactionaries of the Tea Party (much to the chagrin of many of the old-line Republicans). The rules of the game were stacked in their favor.

No such game-changing ideological work has been done to date for the progressive movement. Despite some beginnings by progressive think tanks and institutions and the popularization of some progressive ideas by mass movements like Occupy, Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, the reactionaries still dominate the conversation. Without breaking this strangle hold on framing the questions which we address, the left will not be able to build a mass movement. The beginnings of any political revolution are in ideology, translated into program and put into place by organization. You don’t start with organization.

Second, we need to remember that the goal of the Tea Party was stop government from functioning, thereby proving that government was incapable of solving problems. Success for the party of “no” did not involve mobilizing support for programs designed to meet the needs of ordinary people. Given our historical structure of checks and balances, it is a lot easier to prevent things from happening than to make them happen. Keeping the government from functioning, becoming the new party of “no” cannot be the strategy for Democrats, it simply plays into the hands of the reactionaries. We need a positive, not a negative, blueprint.

Third, the successes of the Tea Party came at a time when the Republicans were the majority party in both the House and Senate. The Tea Party activist tactics revolved around making sure that moderate Republicans (the few that are left) towed their line. Right now Democrats are not in control of either house in Congress and only in a few states do they have much influence in the state legislatures; they are hardly in a position to block reactionary legislation.

Thus, trying to influence (or annoy) Republicans in Congress is a poor strategy.  Neither Trump nor the Congressional Republicans are about to back away from what they see as a chance to implement their reactionary policies on a grand scale. While it may be possible to sway a few moderate Republicans in battleground districts on a few issues (and we must pursue that whenever we can) as a general strategy it will fail. To recapture the hearts and minds, Democrats must become the party of “Yes, We Can”.

Another problem with the proposed strategy (I’m not sure it even qualifies as a strategy) is its piecemeal approach to policy. The Democrats have played “small ball” for much of the last 40 years, trying to build a coalition here and another one there to make limited gains. An excellent example is the Affordable Care Act. What is needed to mobilize Democratic voters, Independents and even some Republicans. is to merge the populist upsurge we are witnessing with the “big-tent” strategy to create a broad “new deal”.  

For the Democratic Party, it’s time to “tell no lies and claim no easy victories”.

Note: Part 4 will deal with the tasks ahead.

The 2016 Election (Part 2) – Why Did It Happen and Why Didn’t We See It Coming?

The election of Donald Trump caught a lot of people by surprise – and I’m certainly one of them. Clinton had every advantage – her approval ratings, although terrible, were better than his; she raised more money; she had the support of almost every major media outlet; she had a ground game and he did not; she had the strong support of the entire Democratic Party political establishment, his support from the Republican Party establishment was tepid at best. I could go on.

Yet, as the night of November 8^th went on, battleground state after battleground state in the Midwest and South fell to Trump in what was an endless cascade of unimaginable defeats. It seemed like a bad dream (read, nightmare) and it still does. How could the polls and the pols have been so wrong?

While there are other factors that need to be considered (see below), one clue to the Democratic defeat can be found, not so much in “how” people voted, as in “who” voted. We know that the turnout in general and among African-Americans and young voters was down. On the other hand, it appears that significant numbers of what has been described as the “missing white vote”, may have tipped the balance in Trump’s favor – particularly in rural areas and small towns. What distinguishes these areas is that they have not benefitted from the policies of the liberal establishment – especially those associated with trade. Little wonder that in those areas, there was no enthusiasm and much distrust for the Democratic Party standard bearer, Sec. Clinton, who was seen as the embodiment of liberal establishment politics.

Further, if we look at which areas of the country gave strong support to the Democratic ticket, we see areas that have not experienced the economic decline to the extent middle America has. Although income inequality is very high in these areas, economic growth has, for the most part, been concentrated there. As a result, there is not the same level of anti-establishment sentiment and less support for a loose cannon, who promises to “overthrow” much of the system.

This may also account for the fact that the liberal establishment (leadership of the Democratic Party and the main stream media) never saw this coming. They have little awareness of, and much distain for, this part of American society. They live, both physically and intellectually, in a different world, and have written these folks off, assuming that the support from women, minorities, the LBGT community and young people, generated by the Democrats’ liberal social policies, would provide them with a new majority. Thus, the same “identity” politics that promised a victory for Sec. Clinton blinded the campaign to the danger from rural America.

The reliance on the Democratic constituencies might have elected Clinton, except that significant sectors of these constituencies are no longer motivated by the “more of the same” approach of the Democratic Party, as they too have failed to benefit from the economic growth over the past 40 years (see American Dream Collapses for Young, StarNews, Wilmington, NC). Fear of what Trump could do if elected, particularly since it seemed that he had no real chance of winning, was not enough for them to get out and vote. Perhaps they would have come out to vote had the Democratic candidate offered an alternative to “politics as usual” (yes, I’m talking about Bernie) but we will never know.

Trump won the enthusiastic support of many whites (and a significant number of Hispanics) by scapegoating the “other”. But scapegoating doesn’t go very far unless people are dissatisfied with what is going on in their lives. It allows someone to look at their problems as caused by terrorists or immigrants or anyone who is different, particularly if they are not given a clear and credible alternative explanation.

To summarize, I would argue that the main factor leading to Trump’s election was the failure of the Democratic Party to offer a hard-hitting and genuine alternative to economic policies of both Democrat and Republican administrations over the last 40 years. These policies have left large part of American society behind and have provided fertile ground for the rise of reaction – first the tea-party and now Trump. This is not an American phenomenon alone; we are seeing it from Brexit to the resurgence of right-wing, nationalist parties in Europe.

These developments seem to share one thing in common; they result from the extreme (and rising) inequality in these countries and the growth of a class, which has been appropriately named the precariat by Guy Standing, of individuals who live on the edge of poverty and who have little or no stability in their lives. Their lack of stability, in contrast to the traditional working class, makes them more susceptible to demagogues like Trump.

Two other factors in Trump's “win” merit attention, because they show how great a danger our democracy faces in the years ahead. The first is the “ignorance factor”. A poll recently released to MSNBC shows that 2 in 5 Trump voters are so misinformed that they believe the stock market actually went down during the 7+ years that Obama was President and 2/3rds think that unemployment went up during the same time. No wonder “fake news” had such a significant effect during the election.

I would argue that the ignorance factor is the result of two interrelated components: first, the transformation of the media and its decline as a source of news and other information and second, the rise of the internet. Today the mainstream media (particularly the broadcast media - who reads newspapers any more?) is focused on entertaining, rather than informing, the public. Trump’s antics were much more entertaining than dealing with the issues in the election, so he “merited” more coverage. For many, their main source of information, besides radio talk shows, was the internet. The problem here is that anyone can post on the internet (even me) without one shred of support, and “fake news” can spread like wildfire.

The second factor is voter suppression. While we don’t know exactly how great an effect the successful acts of voter suppression were in places like Wisconsin, just the widespread information about voter IDs may have kept millions from attempting to vote. A personal note: I spent over 100 hours as a poll greeter (in New Hanover County, NC) and had countless individuals who came to vote ask what kind of ID they needed, even though the voter ID law in North Carolina had been thrown out over 3 months before the election. How many more simply decided not to try to vote because they were unsure if they had the “right” ID? Voter suppression, I would argue, works even if there is no legal barrier but only a perception that one exists.

Why is all this important? Because, unless we understand what happened and why, we will continue down the rabbit hole and the forces of reaction will lead our country in a direction to scary to even contemplate.

This is a great article and I highly recommend reading it...even if it is long.

This article was originally published as a Facebook post by Timothy Snyder, the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

As Inauguration approaches and reality sets in, you will need this. History has traveled down this road before.
Tuesday, on Facebook, Yale historian and Holocaust expert Timothy Snyder shared the following powerful thoughts:
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.
1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
4. When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of "terrorism" and "extremism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "exception" and "emergency." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.
5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don't fall for it.
6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don't use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps "The Power of the Powerless" by Václav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czesław Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
9. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen is there to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes.
10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.
11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
13. Hinder the one-party state. The parties that took over states were once something else. They exploited a historical moment to make political life impossible for their rivals. Vote in local and state elections while you can.
14. Give regularly to good causes, if you can. Pick a charity and set up autopay. Then you will know that you have made a free choice that is supporting civil society helping others doing something good.
15. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Authoritarianism works as a blackmail state, looking for the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have too many hooks.
16. Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad. The present difficulties here are an element of a general trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.
17. Watch out for the paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a Leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-Leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the game is over.
18. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. (If you do not know what this means, contact the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and ask about training in professional ethics.)
19. Be as courageous as you can.If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.
20. Be a patriot. The incoming president is not. Set a good example​ ​of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

The 2016 Election (Part One): What happened and what didn’t

By now (2+ weeks after the cataclysm) every political tendency to the left of the tea-party has had a go at explaining what happened, or perhaps more accurately, who or what is to blame. From the diehard Hillary supporters (it was the Bernie bros) to the establishment media and many of the liberal Democrats, they pontificate, but often without paying much attention to what actually happened. So it might be a good idea to start by clarifying what did and what didn’t happen.

The Republicans did not win this election. Their candidate (I have a hard time even mentioning his name) lost the popular vote by approximately 2 million votes. I know, I know – that’s not what counts, but it goes a long way to indicate that there is NO mandate. Further, the Republicans lost seats in both the US House and Senate and several top offices in their tea-party model state government (North Carolina). That’s not what is supposed to happen when you “win” a Presidential election.

The Democrats lost the election. They failed to capitalize on the legacy of a fairly popular President and the restoration of economic prosperity (at least for some), certainly when compared to the last year of the Bush II Presidency. They failed to win back the Senate, despite very favorable conditions and strong candidates. And they continued to cede control of state governments to the Republicans. It’s a fact that not since 1928 has the Democratic Party been shut out of power to the extent it will be in 2017.

The election did not result from a right-wing tsunami or significant rise in racism. Trump’s candidacy simply brought out the reactionary right in large numbers just as Clinton’s candidacy did not bring out the Democratic Party’s constituencies, despite a truly massive ground game. Her candidacy simply didn’t inspire many voters; his did. It is hard to attribute the vote for Trump to a rise in white racism, when he carried many areas that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Yes, Trump (along with Faux News, Breitbart and others) brought the overt racists out of the closet and they are deplorable (thanks, Hillary), but they hardly represent the majority of Trump’s voters.

The election did reveal that the US is essentially two countries – the Northeast and West Coast (including several urban centers in between) and the rest of the country. Clinton won the first, Trump the other. This should come as no surprise, but apparently the media and the liberal establishment have been wearing azure-colored glasses. What is it that differentiates these two countries that might account both for the political divergence and for the failure of liberals to see clearly what was right in front of their eyes? Maybe this is where we need to look to find answers to "our Brexit".

Dishonest Hillary

Can't trust Hillary

This is, of course, going to be the main theme of the Trump campaign. The perception is not merely the creation of current political campaigns. The significant lack of trust of HRC would exist if there was no Donald or Bernie campaign. Why is that?

The answer might be that she is truly not trustworthy, but what is the evidence?

HRC refers to a 25-year right wing conspiracy to discredit her. She may have the date wrong by a couple of years. She was viewed with suspicion during the 1992 presidential campaign but her real problems with the right wing began after Clinton took the White House in 1993.

The main theme in those early years were that she was inappropriately using her position as first lady to influence executive policy. The big item was her leadership of a health care reform task force that met in private and excluded many in the industry, and also the nomination of civil rights advocate Lani Guinier for assistant attorney general. Both brought loud condemnations from the right. There was also Travelgate where she was believed to be the reason seven long-term employees of the White House travel office were terminated. Investigations into this determined she basically was operating from an inaccurate understanding of the role of this office.

Then, of course, the Whitewater investigation raised questions about favor trading when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. The fact that HRC was a law partner in the firm that handled the legal affairs of the Whitewater partnership and that the Clintons were investors raised conflict of interest questions despite the fact that they lost money in the venture. Although investigations led to criminal charges and convictions in this matter, none led to improprieties by the Clintons.

Vincent Foster was believed to have been a close friend and confidant of HRC. His suicide was interpreted by the right wing as a murder committed by the Clintons. While the theory was totally debunked by law enforcement agencies, it remains an “unanswered question” in HRC’s past.

Of course, much has been made of HRC’s decisions to stay in her marriage with her husband despite well-established instances of his infidelity.  If this had been a conservative couple, there would have been paeans to her determination to make the marriage work. But this has not been the case and, instead, is another reason to distrust HRC.

It is well to remember what the Citizens United case was about. The right wing group had created a movie based on the above history that they wanted to run during the 2008 presidential campaign to destroy Clinton’s campaign for president.

So HRC untrustworthiness is a well-established right wing theme that has been repeated so often that it is widely accepted even among those not on the right side of the ledger.

And this sets the stage for the Republican “investigation” into Benghazi and the media frenzy about her e-mails. Despite the findings of eight Republican investigations into Benghazi, the National Rifle Association is planning a series of television ads accusing HRC of dereliction of duty that led to the death of the American ambassador. It is hard to characterize this as anything less than a continuation of the right wing’s obsession with discrediting HRC.

The e-mail issues are less clear. HRC violated State Department policy about using private e-mail servers to communicate with her staff.  Her predecessors, Condoleezza Rica and Colin Powell apparently also used private servers for this purpose but not as extensively as HRC. Despite the violation of State Department policy, it does not appear that HRC used the private server to communicate about any matter that was at the time classified.

So what does this all amount to?

In her public life, Clinton has made mistakes, been less than candid at times and repeatedly pissed off the right wing.

HRC’s Iraq vote and some of her support of her Wall Street constituent interests as US Senator from New York are things that I disagree with but they are not evidence of dishonesty.

But, in the end, HRC simply does not deserve the reputation of untrustworthiness that the right wing has pinned on her. She is almost certain to be elected out next president. Unfortunately, like Obama being labelled a Muslim, born outside the US and an anti-white conspirator, HRC will face the same kind of headwinds.

Why Bernie Sanders Matters, a brief review:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27778614-why-bernie-sanders-matters

FDR & the Four Freedoms

I have a friend here in FL who came from Wisconsin to do graduate work at USF where she did a PhD in anthropology. She fell in love with FL largely because of the weather & decided that she wanted very much to stay here. Naturally, she's being rewarded for that decision by alternating periods of overwork & underpay with completely inept & abusive management and unemployment. Just a few days ago, she mentioned to me that as an undergrad in Wisconsin, she took a course or 2 from a self-professed Marxian scholar named Harvey J. Kaye who convinced her of the merit of certain aspects of Marxian analysis. I checked with the library here to see if they had any of Kaye's works & found & put holds on 2. The first to arrive & the one I'm nearly finished reading now is The Fight for the Four Freedoms. I like the book & will try to tell you why but first I'll include links to 2 reviews: The Washington Post which considers the book to be little more than propaganda - with some possible justification, and Bill Moyers which is far more favorable towards Kaye's thesis which should not come as a surprise.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fight-for-the-four-freedoms-what-made-fdr-and-the-greatest-generation-truly-great-by-harvey-j-kaye/2014/05/02/f832f778-c951-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

http://billmoyers.com/episode/fighting-for-the-four-freedoms/

I'm reading the book coincidentally after just having finished Jane Meyer's Dark Money & I want to emphasize that juxtaposition in these remarks. Meyer talks about the advent of a concerted and centrally planned effort of a small number of hyper wealthy plutocrats to subvert the US democratic process to the detriment of civil rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and proponents of progressive politics in general largely by means of carefully targeted expenditures of huge sums of money. Kaye writes of a very similar counter-revolutionary backlash against the progressive policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt beginning during his presidency but accelerating in the years after his death under the presidencies of Harry Truman & Dwight Eisenhower. The similarities in goals and tactics are undeniable. We are not facing a new phenomenon with the Koch Brothers in any way except the leadership & bankrolling of such a small cadre of determined activists. The Fight for the Four Freedoms is well worth a read as a lesson of just how far the progressive movement has regressed since the days of the New Deal. Kaye explains this failure in terms of leaders lacking vision, commitment and energy. There are no surprises among the enemies of progressivism. He cites most if not all of the usual suspects from Lewis Powell to the Kock Brothers to Ronald Reagan & George W Bush but earning a special place on his Wall of Dishonor is Jimmy Carter who Kaye considers the least progressive or visionary of Democratic presidents. Kaye names Carter as the transition figure between the Democratic leadership of the post-FDR years who at least gave lip service to the principles of the New Deal and the Clintons who transformed the party into one FDR would have scarcely recognized or supported. I'll close with a 1948 quote from Max Lerner as cited by Kaye: "The creative capacity itself seems to have gone out of American political life...What strikes me hardest about all this is the terrible waste of history it involves...The worst part of it is that most liberals seem to feel hopeless unless a new Great Depression comes. Can it be true that the greatness of the American people can be evoked only in adversity, and that liberalism in a plant that flowers only among the ruins?"

Some Debating Points for Sanders

I am a little late for tonight, but I want to offer Sanders some debating points. Maybe they will be useful to others also.
1. When it comes to foreign policy, Sanders should be the clear preference. See the great article in The Nation, by Robert English, from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California! (“Bernie Sanders, the Foreign-Policy Realist of 2016: Of all the presidential candidates of either party, Bernie is actually the most sober and clear-eyed.” http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-the-foreign-policy-realist-of-2016/?nc=1 ) I hope Bernie had a chance to read it before the debate tonight. Clinton has spent too much of her political life as a hawk – her Iraq vote, her support for the Libyan regime change, her support for NATO expansion right up to Russian borders, her support for a no-fly zone in Syria. Do we ever learn? Sanders is calling for a broad coalition to address the crisis in Syria, and holding back on regime-change policies.
2. When it comes to trade policy, Sanders is the clear choice. Clinton is a long supporter of the US trade agreements, very late coming to reservations on TPP. Sanders has opposed all the trade agreements. In the debate with Clinton, Sanders should hit hard on trade policy and its effect on jobs, especially manufacturing jobs. Specifically, Sanders should promise to renegotiate all the trade agreements to better protect American jobs and to disallow the trade courts the ability to overturn American law.
3. When it comes to regulating Wall Street and breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks, Sanders is the clear choice. Many of the financial institutions are now too big to fail, and Clinton won’t say she will break them up. Who is in a better position to tackle Wall Street, one who accepts millions of dollars from the Street, or one is supported by millions of small donations?
4. Polls for the general election are notoriously unreliable at this early date, but they are uniform and have been for months that Sanders does better against any Republican than does Clinton. Thus, with available evidence, Sanders looks like the best choice for winning the presidency. Hopefully he will choose Elizabeth Warren for vice president, which will put a true progressive on track to become the first woman to be president of the US.
5. Sanders has a progressive vision for the country, and the country greatly needs change. Clinton has no such vision for the country.

Comments on Joseph Stiglitz’ Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity

Joseph Stiglitz’ Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity, published in 2016, updates and fills out the ideas for economic reform presented in Stiglitz’ 2012 book The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. The earlier book explained some of the forces leading to our current economic and political inequality and described the effects of that inequality on our society and democracy. Stiglitz repeatedly made clear that the shift to greater inequality was not inevitable, but was a result of choices. The alternative choices that would lead to a more egalitarian society were also elucidated in that book. The earlier book does have a final chapter outlining another way forward, but that chapter is relatively brief, and many of the ideas that would fit in the chapter are scattered throughout the book.

The newer book has two parts, “The Current Rules” and “Rewriting the Rules”. What are these rules? Stiglitz dispels the myth of the free market, in making it clear that our markets certainly do have rules. The problem is that our current set of rules leads to inequality, in income, wealth, and political power, and because of the latter this situation is self-perpetuating. The section “Rewriting the Rules” brings Stiglitz’ agenda for reform into one place, still fairly compact, but fleshed out from the earlier book’s presentation, and also supplemented by additional items putting his reform agenda clearly in the progressive path. The “Rewriting the Rules” chapter has two parts, “Taming the Top” and “Growing the Middle”. There is not a lot here that is not already included in our Chapter 16 “Transforming Our Society” of We Can Have a Better Country: A Progressive Reader’s Guide, from Stiglitz and other writers, but it is nice to get it as an action agenda, with some additional details. Additions include proposals for a postal savings bank. Many countries have such a system, including Britain, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, and the U.S. had one as recently as 1966. In addition to savings banking, Stiglitz would have this new system create a “debit card available with minimum fees and high protections for consumers.” This card would bring competition to the commercial credit and debit card market. Stiglitz would also “create a public option for housing finance”. In the health care arena, as a counter-balance to that other Nobel laureate Paul Krugman’s position, thrust into the Democratic presidential primary, that a single payer system is ideal but cannot be reached at present, Stiglitz touts a Medicare for All program, a public option in the Affordable Care Act system. This is a reasonable start towards a single payer system.

Application of Epidemiological/Biostatistical Methods to Political/Economic Issues

I was recently asked by friends who worked in the field of public health whether typical epidemiological/biostatistical methods had been much applied to political and economic issues. The answer is a definite YES. The question is not whether socioeconomic issues have been considered in public health studies, since there is a long history of social epidemiology, or social medicine, going back at least to Rudolf Virchow in Germany in the mid-19th century. Geoffrey Rose and Michael Marmot in Great Britain and George Kaplan and John Lynch in the U.S. (the latter also active in Australia) are just a few well known more recent practitioners. Indeed, Virchow famously stated that “[m]edicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Poverty, social status, and educational attainment have been well-studied as associated with prevalence and incidence of disease. A newer socio-economic variable of interest is degree of economic inequality as a predictor of well-being, most famously examined by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level. This association is by definition an analysis of grouped variables, i.e., an ecological analysis in the statistical sense of that word. The groups are societies, the exposure of interest is income or wealth inequality, and the outcome variable is health status or other measure of well-being or lack thereof, all variously defined. We summarize some of the work from The Spirit Level in our We Can Have a Better Country, in Chapter 7 (“Inequality, Poverty, and Corporate Control in the Public Health Arena”).

Two recent papers by economists further explore inequality and its potential effects on mortality. A 2016 paper from the Brookings Institute, “Later Retirement, Inequality in Old Age, and the Growing Gap in Longevity Between Rich and Poor”, by Barry Bosworth, Gary Burtless, and Kan Zhang explore factors affecting probability of retirement and mortality rates, though using probit analysis and linear regression where epidemiologist/biostatisticians would more likely have used logistic and Poisson regression. They also examine the association of life expectancy at age 50 with income level, for those reaching age 50 in 1970 or in 1990. Those in the top tenth of income in the U.S. have a higher life expectancy than those in the lowest tenth, as would be expected, but the new information is that the gap in life expectancy between top and bottom incomes has grown enormously, as the top income group has grown vastly richer and the bottom income group poorer. For women the gap went from under five years in 1970 to over ten years in 1990. For men, the gap went from two to eight years over the period. Another recent finding is that increasing inequality may be leading to reduced life expectancy in working class whites – see “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century”, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Ernest Drucker explicitly applies methods of epidemiology to look at the issue of mass incarceration in the U.S., in A Plague of Prisons: the Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. He looks at factors associated with the increase of incarceration, the chronic incapacitation that often follows incarceration, and a public health approach to end mass incarceration.

We explored in We Can Have a Better Country, in Chapter 13, “New Directions in Political and Economic Thought,” two interesting analyses that are epidemiological in approach but are on political issues. The authors of these two books are both political scientists. Martin Gilens, professor of politics at Princeton University, in his book Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, brings extensive data to the question of the how responsive our government is to its citizens, and in particular to the question of how this responsiveness varies by level of income of the citizens. His outcome variable of interest is yes/no, according to whether the government enacts policy changes on the various issues considered, and his exposure variable is the level of citizen support for these issues. We would expect that the government would have a higher likelihood of adopting a policy change when that change has a higher level of support among the citizens. The interesting twist is that Gilens does this analysis by income level of the people surveyed on opinions regarding these policy questions. (In epidemiological terms, this is a consideration of “effect modification”.) The analysis method is logistic regression. His conclusion: among the affluent respondents there was a strong association between preference levels and later policy changes. For the respondents with low income there was no association at all.

The second epidemiology-like analysis described in Chapter 13 of We Can Have a Better Country is by Benjamin Radcliff, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, from his book The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life. He analyzes with linear regression the association between human happiness and the role of government, variously defined. His conclusion, however “role of government” was defined, was that countries with the more activist governments had a higher mean level of happiness.

We Can Have a Better Country: A Progressive Reader's Guide

With lots of help from fellow blogger Carl and helpful reviews of one chapter by other fellow bloggers Laird and George, a new book title is available for your reading list: We Can Have a Better Country: A Progressive Reader's Guide, by Lloyd Chambless. There are some excellent books available on what is wrong with our country and how the country could be improved, but the topics are broad and a compendium may be useful. The book could not come out at a better time, with the Sanders presidential campaign doing so well and the Democracy Awakening meeting/march in Washington planned for April. It is almost as if both groups had a pre-publication copy!! As most of us know, the U.S. political system and the resulting economy are not serving us well and are serving us a little worse each year. The primary reason for this is the influence of money in politics - our democracy is broken. The start on the road to a better country is when enough of us realize this. Next we will have to realize that change is possible, but that it is unlikely unless we change our politics. Having many disparate groups each fighting alone for its own small piece of progressive change, be it about climate change, social justice, or whatever, has little chance of significant success. It is time to work together! My book weaves together material from the many fine books on individual pieces of this tapestry, on the status of our political economy, how we got to this point, and on the pathway to a better country. You can get the book at Amazon (eBook or paperback), or at https://www.createspace.com/6043009 for the paperback.

A short note on "progress"

Small additions to the unintended consequences of actions supported by the US government:

1. Following the fall of communism and the use of "shock therapy" on the Russian economy (and people) the life expectancy of in Russia nosedived. In 1991 life expectancy for men was 63.5 years; by 1994 it have dropped to 57.6 years. For women the drop was from 74.3 years to 71.2 years.
2. While the life expectancy in Iraq rose from the early 1950s to the late 1980s (from 44 years to 64 years), with the onset of economic sanctions, life expectancy for women plummeted from 65.2 years in 1990 to 60.8 years in 2000 and an estimated 500,000 children died. One can only speculate how far it has declined since the beginning of the Iraq War or what is happening in countries like Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Syria.
3. Mexico saw a "decline in life expectancy from 2005 to 2010 among men, mainly from large increases in homicides. It was during this period that the US increased its support for Mexico's military "war on drugs."

On another front, there has been concern about the abnormally high death rate among middle age white American males, due to drugs, alcohol and suicides. Analysis of this trend points to the decline in economic opportunity (due to the skyrocketing inequality in the US?)

"One of the greatest stories of the 20th century was that we doubled the life expectancy of adults," the head of the John A. Hartford Foundation, remarked recently.  It would appear that we are hell-bent on reversing that progress.

The “Precariat” and the Danger of Fascism

An article from the National Catholic Reporter which I read recently, discusses the ideas British economist Guy Standing, a professor at the University of London. Standing has proposed an updated system of economic classification, which at least on the surface, seems an accurate (and scary) analysis of class structure in developed countries.

He identifies the following classes:

• The plutocracy (the 0.001%)
• The elite (multi-millionaires whose earnings come mostly from ownership of capital)
• The entrepreneurs (creative, highly paid individuals, mostly young, who aspire to join the elite)*
• The salariat (those with long term employment security and benefits)
• The old working class (middle class wage earners with some benefits, although their wages and benefits are constantly under attack; they have little or nothing to fall back on)*
• The precariat (unstable labor, temporary jobs, in and out of work, few or no benefits, no savings)
• The poor

*    Indicate my description, not Standing’s.

Standing notes that both the salariat and the old working class are shrinking everywhere as more and more people are forced down into the precariat. Although lacking precise data, he argues that between 1/3 and 1/2 of the population in most developed nations are currently part of this growing sector. (Note: The fact that the last three recessions in the US have seen minimal “recovery” for everyone but the very wealthy is undoubtedly a major factor in the growth of this class.)

Standing uses the term precariat because their lives are so precarious and sees this class as composed of three parts: workers and their families that have fallen out of the old working class; young, educated individuals with few job prospects and a mountain of debt; and migrants (I think this should include other minorities who may not be migrants, particularly in the US). These groups often see themselves as pitted against each other, blaming the “others” for their precarious status.

This economic and social class, although it is very diverse, shares a number of characteristics.

• The suffer from high levels of stress
• They lack meaningful work and have no occupational identity
• They have no access to benefits and no financial security
• Their level of education is frequently above the work they do
• They are both young and old (think of the Wal-Mart greeters and the McDonald’s workers)
• THEY ARE ALIENATED, ANOMIC AND VERY ANGRY

Why is this important, you might ask? Because the basic conditions of alienation found in the precariat are vary similar to life experiences of the lower middle class Germans who provided the mass support for the Nazis in the period leading up to WW II. Erich Fromm, in his classic 1941 work Escape from Freedom, provides an analysis which links the alienation resulting from the development of capitalism, exacerbated by the Great Depression and disenchantment with democracy to the willingness of members of this class to subjugate themselves to the authoritarianism of the Nazis.

The similarities between 1930s Germany and the US (and many other developed countries) today ought to be on the table in every discussion of where we go from here. Understanding the nature of the crisis that confronts us is the first step to finding solutions BEFORE it’s too late.

While the Republican Party has been captured by the forces of extreme reaction and is leading the charge to fascism, all too often the opposition party (yes, I mean the Democrats) have made a Faustian bargain with the plutocracy, securing minor benefits for a few, while ignoring the structural problems that have eviscerated the old working class and the salariat and generally ignoring the poor. Only a genuine political revolution, targeting the sources of the great and growing inequality, can get to the root of the problem.

It’s time to act, before it’s too late. If we fail to learn from history, we will be doomed to repeat it.

And the rich get even richer

In case you were wondering if worldwide inequality was getting worse, the latest figures from Oxfam provide a definitive picture. In 2010 the richest 388 individuals held as much wealth as the poorest 1/2 of the world's population. As outrageous as that was, by 2016 the richest 62 individuals' wealth equaled that of the bottom 50% of the world's people (that's 3.5 billion folks!!!)

And so it goes on, with the accumulation of wealth at the top and the immiseration of all of the rest of us. I think it's clear that never in the history of human society, have we seen this level of worldwide concentration of wealth in the hands of a very, very few. And as the wealthy use their wealth to accumulate even more wealth, as capital's share of the world's income continues to increase and to be passed on from one generation to the next, this process seems to have no bounds.

This kind of accumulation is a product of our current system of unbridled capitalism. It stands in stark contrast to what was happening in the period between WW I and the 1970s. During that time the destruction of wealth (i.e., capital) during the two world wars and the depression, combined with government actions through taxation (both to meet the needs of war and to provide social services to their populations)  to restrain unlimited acquisition of wealth produced an extended period of wage and wealth compression.

This period came to an end in the late 1970s with the rise of  new economic theories based on the Chicago Schools (and the cheerleaders for globalization) and with the vast increase in the global mobility of capital. In the political sphere, the rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and the failure to develop a real critique of on the part of the opposition political parties, resulted in the end of any attempts by the government to maintain a robust public sphere and in the reversal of almost every form of government redistribution of wealth (and opportunity to acquire wealth) to those at the bottom.

All of which points to the critical role of government. Currently it facilitates the rising inequality with policies which favor the 1%, policies, which starved the public sphere (or privatized much of it), all the while granting huge subsidies to the wealthy. In the US Republicans have led the charge, but until the emergence of the Warren wing and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the establishment Democrats have followed meekly behind. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (if she is elected) all offer only insignificant palliatives, but don't support real change. Little wonder that the Democrats find it harder and harder to mobilize their constituencies and get them to the polls. What they offer just doesn't hack it.

When I was a kid my father used to say "no man should have two coats unless every man has at least one". This very simple justification for redistribution of wealth rings in my ear every time I read about the extreme inequality today. Call it socialism, call it morality, call it justice, call it freedom - call it whatever you want, let's just do it!

The rich get richer and the poor get???

It’s official. Not only are the rich getting wildly richer, not only is the middle class being eviscerated, but the poor are getting poorer. They are getting poorer not simply in relation to the wealthy, but in absolute terms. So says an analysis of US Census data by the Brookings Institute.

One example is the earnings of the bottom 20% of wage earners in Cincinnati. Since the recession which started in 2008 they have seen their incomes, when adjusted for inflation, decline a jaw-dropping 25%! And the decline has continued during the "recovery", falling 3% between 2013 and 2014.

Now this undoubtedly comes as no surprise to the poor, but it should shock the mainstream economists, who keep talking about an economic recovery. Recovery for whom? The banksters, the hedge fund managers, the rent-seekers, but not ordinary Americans, who continue to be trapped in a recession that is now 8 years old. There is no trickle down, only trickle up, up and away.

As if to put an exclamation point on this, the Supreme Court appears poised to deal another blow to the one institution which has the power to represent working Americans and fight against income inequality - labor unions in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Assn. It is no coincidence that the period of greatest prosperity for ordinary Americans the US, from 1940 until the late 1970s, was also the period of strong labor unions, which fought in both the economic and political spheres for the rights and dignity of American workers. The lead attorney for the anti-union side made it very clear that the goal of this case was to force unions to be "less involved in things like politics."

As I write this post, it appears that even the coupon clippers on Wall Street are beginning to understand that you can only milk this cow for so long, before things begin to fall apart. Despite assurances from mainstream economists that “recovery is just around the corner” (or that it is already here) we are beginning to see fears that the bubble is about to burst.

There is a joke about the left, that we have predicted 9 of the last 4 recessions. Maybe it’s time to revise the punch line. Mainstream economists have predicted 3 of the last 0 recoveries. This time, however, it is definitely not funny!

Figures don't lie, economists do

It always amazes me how true the old adage, “figures don’t lie, but liars figure”, is. Take the mainstream economists. Month after month, year after year since the meltdown of 2008, they come up for statistics that claim that our economy has fully recovered (or, at least, that things are looking up).

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that they basically function as cheerleaders for the banks and big business. After all that’s who pays them and whoever pays the piper, gets to call the tune.

Witness a syndicated article in today’s StarNews (Wilmington, NC) titled “Salaries poised to climb in 2016”. The economists from Moody’s and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (what did I say about big business and the banks paying the piper?) are cited as having found an improving trend in workers’ wages. They claim at “workers who have kept their jobs” saw a 4.1% year to year increase in the 3^rd quarter of last year. They managed to find this mildly optimistic showing by excluding new and part-time workers, since, if they are included, the rise in hourly wages drops to around 2%. WOW! What are folks going to do with all that extra money?

I guess these workers really don’t count – that is unless we are calculating the “unemployment” rate. There it’s convenient to include part time workers who want full time jobs as employed, but exclude workers who have given up finding work from the count of the unemployed. If we include the under-employed and the discouraged workers we get a figure about double the published rate of 5%.

One figure that gets a lot less play in the media is the labor participation rate which stands at its lowest since the late 1970s. It is a longer term trend that started during the dotcom bust of 2001 and accelerated after the 2008 crash. Not a positive sign at all for the future of the average family income. And this “reserve army” of workers definitely exerts a downward pressure on wages.

A more sober assessment of the US (and world) economy might raise concerns about the economic effects of inequality which has (at least in the US) reached heights not seen since the 1920s and continues to spiral out of control (sic). It would draw on the work of economists like Piketty, Stiglitz and Krugman who have raised red flags (oops, bad choice of color) about the growing inequality.

So the real economic picture in the US (and abroad) is not that rosy at all. But the economic pundits continue to spout their mantra that “prosperity (for all) is just around the corner”. Haven’t we heard that tune before?

So you see, the facts can be manipulated to prove the opposite of what is actually happening. That’s scary, almost as scary as Faux News and friends and the Republican candidates for President, who don’t want to be bothered by facts at all.

Taxation for Prosperity

I ran across this article in my old computer files. Not only does it give a summary of the strongest argument for progressive taxation, but the man who made it was a "famed corporate tax lawyer" and was named Randolph Paul. A little irony here? 

I've posted it with a few minor deletions and am hoping to find a copy of his aptly titled work "Taxation for Prosperity".

Why Do We Tax?

Years ago, right after World War II, America's most famed corporate tax lawyer gave an answer that had the nation's super rich squirming.

Over the past half-century, we’ve had a profound transformation in our attitudes toward income taxation. How profound? Consider the tax perspective of Randolph Paul, the corporate tax attorney who helped shape federal tax policy during and after World War II.

Randolph Paul probably thought about taxes — and their role in our society — as deeply as any American of his time. Paul lived and died taxes, literally. In 1956, he slumped over and passed away while testifying about tax policy before a U.S. Senate committee.

Paul’s tax career had started decades earlier. In 1918, just a few years after the federal income tax went into effect, Paul began specializing in tax law. By the 1930s, he had become one of Wall Street’s top tax experts. His clients ranged from General Motors to Standard Oil of California, and probably no one in America knew the tax code — loopholes and all — any better.

That knowledge made Randolph Paul invaluable to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1940, Paul helped New Dealers write an excess profits bill. In 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, he joined the Treasury Department and worked to make sure that all Americans, the wealthy included, contributed financially to the war effort.

Paul succeeded. By 1944, the federal income tax had become a major presence in American life. Most Americans, for the first time ever, were paying income tax — and rich Americans were paying the most taxes of all. During the war, the tax rate on income over $200,000, about $2.6 million today, jumped to 94 percent.

Two years after the war, back in private practice, Paul published his masterwork, the ultimate distillation of his thinking about tax policy. His new book, Taxation for Prosperity, presented a carefully argued case for continuing high wartime tax rates on peacetime high incomes.

In fact, Paul would argue, taxes in a mature economy offer us “powerful instruments for influencing the social and economic life of the nation.” With “well-planned taxes,” we could avert a next depression.

By “well-planned taxes,” Paul meant progressive taxes, steeply graduated levies that kept as much money as possible in the pockets of “people in the lower brackets.” Lower-income people, Paul explained, “have a higher propensity to spend.” Their spending keeps “the wheels of industry turning.”

For people in higher income brackets, by contrast, a “well-planned” tax system meant high tax rates. “The people with high incomes can best afford to contribute to the support of the government,” as Paul noted, “and the failure to impose substantial taxes in the upper brackets would seriously injure the morale of the rest of the taxpaying public.”

High taxes on people of high income, Paul continued, also “perform the valuable service of preventing more saving than our economy can absorb,” soaking up the excess that would otherwise wind up devoted to destabilizing speculation.

Could taxes on the rich ever go too high? That danger, Paul acknowledged, does exist in an economy that “depends upon the profit motive.” So taxes on the rich ought always be kept at a level that “fosters economic activity.” But the “need for this incentive,” Paul added, fades away “when we reach the highest brackets.” At that point, tax rates ought to rise “very sharply ” to help “counteract undue concentration of wealth.”

In other words, Paul summed up, we need a tax system that keeps “the nation’s wealth” from flowing “into the hands of too few.”

Over the next two decades, in the 1950s and 1960s, we had a tax system that for the most part played that role. Tax rates on America’s rich hovered at high, near World War II-era levels, and average Americans, over the course of these years, prospered as never before.

Since then, we’ve gone in the opposite direction. Our nation’s tax experts — and the elected officials they advise — no longer think about taxes as a tool for combating our “undue concentration of wealth.” They see taxes as a matter of raising revenue pure and simple.

Randolph Paul considered that attitude “immature.” We should, too.