What if...

What if the Republicans don't really don't care if Congress passes their massive tax cut for the 1%? What if there is a more sinister plot afoot? Conspiracy, no, just the long game of the partisan Republicans.

After all, what political benefit do they think they can gain from passing this massive giveaway to the richest Americans? Public opinion is running 2 to 1 against the bill, and that's before most falks have seen how horrible it really is. Even the stupidest Republican Congressman (well maybe not the stupidest, for example my Congressman) has to realize that this bill will NOT result in increased investment and significant economic growth no matter how much smoke and mirrors they use to sell it.

It doesn't take a Wharton School economics degree to understand that if you keep taking from the middle class and the poor to enrich the 1%, sooner or later almost everyone is going to be maxed out on their credit cards and pay day loans. What happens then in an economy that is based on mass consumption?

I would think that passing this bill, along with the repeal of the ACA, would be tantmount to political suicide. Maybe they actually hope against hope that it will not pass. So why all the fuss?

Part of it undoubtly has to do with appeasing the basest of their base. "Look, we tried to carry out our promises, but the damn Democrats and a few RINOs prevented our success."

But I think there maybe another way they could use the failure to pass this and other reactionary legislation. If you analyze the basic partisan game plan they've been playing for the past 30+ years, the pattern that emerges is simple. For the Republicans to remain in power, they have to surpress the vote.

It has long been accepted that Democrats benefit from large turnouts at the polls and that current demographic trends are highly favorable to the Democrats' electoral chances. The solution, as far as Republicans are concerned, is to keep people from voting, by any means necessary. Voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, cutting down on early voting days and locations, keeping immigrants from attaining citizenship status, gerrymandering and so on are on the agenda of Republicans from the national down to the local levels.

But there is another method of surpressing the vote that can give them more bang for the buck. That is convincing large numbers of voters that the government can't do anything right. It's why having a incompetent narcisist as President doesn't bother them at all. It's why the level of corruption in the Trump administration doesn't bother them at all. And it is why, not being able to pass landmark legislation doesn't really bother them.

Whether out of power or in power, gridlock benefits the Republican ideologues. Cynicism is their greatist ally. And 2017 has been a banner year for that, despite the efforts of the resistance across the country. Combatting that cynicism is the most important task confronting us in the next 11 months.

Understanding Runaway Inequality

If you want to understand runaway inequality, really understand it, you must read Les Leopold's book, aptly titled "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice".

Leopold, a longtime labor activist, is working to build a national movement around the concepts outlined in the book. The key thing to note about the book is that it explains the concepts in everyday language and simple, clear graphs so that your don't have to be an economist to grasp the ideas. And it shows how runaway inequality is related to the other issues we, ask progressives, care about. As Les concludes "everything is connected to everything else".

I am participating in his "Train the Trainer" workshop this weekend and hope to post a synopsis of the book and the workshop in short order. However, as a teaser, I've copied below a press statement I wrote for the President of the SENC Central Labor Council, based on Les' analysis (and 30 minutes of research on the Internet).

Background - Duke Energy, the largest electric utility in the country and the only one in North Carolina (with the exception, I believe of a couple of very small co-ops) has been storing its waste coal ash in open ponds through out the state. This became an major issue when one of them spilled into the Dan River polluting the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of homes.

Belatedly, Duke has been ordered to clean up some of the ponds. So now Duke has demanded a 17% rate hike to pay for this and future clean ups. To add insult to injury, the way the proposed rate hike is structured it will hit small consumers (working class families) the hardest. The following is the statement read at a press conference and at the rate hike hearing in Wilmington.

Statement by Herb Harton, President, Southeastern North Carolina Central Labor Council.

Duke Energy is demanding a huge rate increase to pay for cleaning up the coal ash ponds, a mess that it created, and for its failure to invest sufficiently in clean energy to prevent future environmental crises.

It’s not that Duke didn’t have the money from its profits over the past ten years. Rather it chose to pay out 17 billion dollars in dividends. It chose to spend billions more to buy back almost one-half of its outstanding stock in 2011, resulting in the value of the remaining stock tripling from $21 a share to $63 a share in just one year. It chose to use its assets to buy Progress Energy for $13.7 billion, paying Progress Energy’s CEO a $44 million golden parachute. Just a note – at the time of the merger, Duke’s CEO stated that it would save customers at least $600 million over 5 years. The 5 years are up, and we’re still waiting!

Who benefited from all these actions. Duke’s CEO and other officers who get paid in stock options on top of their inflated salaries and Duke’s other large shareholders, but certainly not its customers.

Duke claims it needs more money to clean up present and future messes and make necessary investments in infrastructure. They want their customers, working families, most of whom haven’t seen any increase in their meager incomes over the past 10 years, to pony up.

But we have a better idea. Duke needs to start retaining its profits and investing them. If they need more money to invest, they can resell 10% of the 600 million shares of stock they bought back in 2011, which, at current prices, would give them $5 billion cash to invest. That’s what companies would have done 50 years ago, when the growing economy benefitted most Americans, not just a few.

What’s Next for Progressives – A rebuttal

Paul Krugman, in a NYT column on Aug. 7^th, 2017, concludes that Democrats should not take up the fight for single-payer Medicare for All. While his arguments are weak, they still need to be refuted, as they will be taken up by those who oppose any progressive agenda as the way forward for the Democratic Party.

Krugman states that having won a great victory in the battle against “repeal and replace”, progressives should move on to more important issues. More important issues??? WTF. What could be more important than an issue which affects 20% of the economy and every single man, woman and child in the country? An issue that is the largest cause of personal bankruptcy, pain and premature death in the US. An issue which has resulted in spiraling increases in the federal budget.

And since when is a temporary stand-off a great victory? Krugman just declares victory and says, let’s go home. Is it possible that he thinks the Republicans will not come back with a war of attrition, a death by a thousand cuts? I guess he doesn’t read the newspaper he writes for.

The problem he wants us to ignore is that the two main progressive goals for healthcare reform, universal coverage and controlling rapidly rising healthcare costs, were NOT accomplished by the ACA. Simply tweaking it, will not solve these problems. It will leave in place an inefficient and wasteful system with the power in the hands of the private insurance industry and corporate medical providers like Big Pharma.

For some reason (I’ll leave that to your imagination) Krugman wants to leave the insurance industry in control. He supports this by saying that the insurance industry helped save the ACA from Republican plans. Of course, they did; they are not going to bite the hand that feeds them. But they are also not going to resist the changes short of repeal, that the Republicans are likely to enact. Krugman apparently forgets that the insurance industry will always protect its bottom line, not the health of the insured.

On the political level, winning the war over healthcare will require a clear and concise alternative to “repeal and replace”. The goal of “making incremental improvements to the ACA” just doesn’t get it. “Medicare for All” does.

Krugman is right about one thing – getting to single payer will take a lot of work. It will require Democrats to take back the federal government. The actual way in which it will be accomplished needs to be worked out. But as the goal for healthcare reform, it can provide a rallying point (along with several other issues) for Democrats to win back political power.

We are faced with an historic opportunity to fight for the solution to our healthcare crisis. A majority of Americans support the idea that the government should guarantee affordable healthcare insurance to all. The Republicans have been totally discredited; the Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative.

If we walk away from this opportunity, who knows when it will come again.

Who we honor says a lot about who we are

It is long past the time for our country to come to grips with its history. It has been almost 400 years since the first kidnapped Africans were brought to Virginia against their will, 152 years since the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13^th Amendment banning slavery, and 63 years since the landmark Brown v Board decision outlawing Jim Crow school segregation. Yet today we still live in a society where separate and unequal define the lives of our black citizens and where racial injustice is defended as “part of our heritage”.

The tragic deaths in Charlottesville and the failure of the President to condemn the white racists and neo-Nazis responsible for the violence is a shocking reminder that we have a long way to go in dealing with our history of systematic racial oppression, our nation’s “original sin”. The promise of America, to affirm the fundamental worth and dignity of ALL people, rings hollow in the ears of millions of our fellow citizens.

To be clear, the Civil War was not about states’ rights, just as opposition to desegregation in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t. The former was about defending a system of chattel slavery, where human beings were treated like property; the latter was about maintaining Jim Crow, which continued the systematic discrimination and hatred that is a fundamental part of our American heritage, both South AND North. That part of our history can only be put behind us when we acknowledge the past and present expressions and thoroughly reject them.

To combat systematic racism, we need to accept that those who fought to maintain this system, regardless of their justification, should not be celebrated as heroes. Robert E. Lee may have been a brilliant general, but he put his skills to work for an immoral cause. To honor him is to celebrate that cause and to support the continuation of the system of racial oppression he fought to maintain.

In fact, we must to do more than just remove those monuments honoring the Confederates who fought to divide our country in order to preserve slavery. In their place, we need to erect monuments to those who fought and died for freedom and equality. They fought for the values that made our country great and are the true heroes in our history. That’s a heritage that we should all celebrate.

LTE Submitted to the StarNews in Wilmington, NC on 8/25/17

WTF – The Empire Strikes Back, Again!

According to a new posting by Common Dreams, 2 tech billionaires have launched an initiative appropriately titled Win the Future (WTF). Apparently Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman and their corporate elite friends think that the problem with the Democrats is that they are moving away from a “pro-business”, pro-economy” stance and have been pushed too far left.

Wow! History does repeat – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Is this the new iteration of the Democratic Leadership Council? Are we witnessing an attempt at a corporate coup or, in business parlance, a hostile takeover - well really not that hostile?  Do Pincus and Hoffman intend to patent the “Democratic” brand and sell it. They could call it Republican-lite.

WTF – they got that part right.

Politics and the Upper Middle Class

Interesting review of Richard Reeves' new book in The Nation. Reeves makes an important point that not all inequality is the result of the 1% hogging all the benefits from economic growth. He demonstrates that the upper middle class has also benefited to a great extent. The significance is that this class has a great deal of power, political economic and social, and uses that power to preserve its privileges. Think protecting zoning laws and neighborhood schools; think tax benefits for educational savings accounts; think support for "balanced budgets" to preclude tax increases.

Reeves analysis is worth considering when formulating responses to inequality. The upper middle class is a major force behind the neoliberal "solutions" to inequality, arguing (as unfortunately Reeves himself seems to do) that making competition "fairer" by providing a few rungs to the ladder of success is all we need to do. But doesn't competition always lead to winners and losers? Changing the class, race and/or gender of the winners does nothing to overcome the basic inequality of a system that reserves almost all of its rewards for the few winners.

Yes, competition may drive growth, but growth itself should NOT be the goal of economic activity. Should our society serve the economy, or should our economy serve society? And how can we change the narrative from a liberal (or neoliberal) perspective to a progressive one?

We Are the 99 Percent—Except for the Top 20 Percent of Us

In a new book, Richard V. Reeves argues that members of the upper middle class, not just the ultra-wealthy, are making our society profoundly unequal.

THENATION.COM

"It's the Economy, Stupid"

Two recent articles in The Nation have revived my concern about how we should analyze the election of Donald Trump. 

The first is a data driven analysis “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did”. After attempting to mystify us with charts and graphs, the authors’ basic conclusion is that Trump voters scored higher than Democratic voters “across several different measures of racial animus” (duh) while not showing any more economic anxiety than Democratic voters, proving that racism, not economic peril, was the basis of Trump’s win.

So, let’s begin by noting what anyone schooled in the social sciences should know – correlation does not demonstrate causation. Yes, large numbers of Trump supporters are racist and with the current political alignment, the Democrats generally don’t appeal to voters motivated primarily by racism. 

But if I’m right and the real issue is not how people voted, but who voted, then this correlation proves little. And, most importantly, it fails to explain the demographics of the election. Why did Trump win in areas that have seen little in the way of economic recovery in the last 8 years and lose in areas which have done significantly better under the neoliberal policies of the last 40+ years? How did Trump carry many areas that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012? And why was the voter turnout significantly lower than in the past two presidential elections?

Many working class whites did vote for Trump based on their animus towards blacks and immigrants. But what motivated their animus and also gave them a reason to “vent” by voting for the man who gave the establishment the finger? Was it their precarious relationship to the American economy and political structure? Was it the same sort of alienation that has led to the opioid epidemic and the rising death rate among working class whites in the US? And were there large numbers of working class whites (and w-c minorities) who simply didn’t come out to vote because they didn’t see a candidate who was addressing their needs? None of these questions are addressed by this limited statistical analysis. Nor does this give us any understanding of how the resistance should move forward.

In “Trumpism: It’s Coming from the Suburbs”, Jesse Myerson argues that the basis of support for Trump is the petit bourgeois, which he says constitutes the core of fascism “always and everywhere” and populates the suburbs. While his goal, critiquing the establishment liberal dismissal of white workers who supported Trump as racist trailer trash, is commendable, his op/ed does little to promote a deeper understanding of what really happened.

There are many problems with this analysis. To begin with, Myerson’s utilizes Marxist terminology, but then offers a decidedly non-Marxist and very vague definition of petit bourgeois, which allows him to classify the police and Border Patrol agents as petit bourgeois and imply that anyone who has a pension plan and lives in the suburbs is also petit bourgeois. Then he reasons that because the petit bourgeois is always the core of fascism, this must be where Trump’s support came from. As suburbanites, who fled the cities to escape living next door to minorities, Trump’s racist appeals spoke to them and they flocked to his banner. They were not motivated by economic anxiety, but more by status anxiety.

Myerson then states that the working class is limited to those “in and adjacent to poverty” and goes on to claim that, since poor people don’t vote (why should they, I might ask), this group could not have possibly been a major basis of Trump support. The problem here is that it just doesn’t fit the actual demographics of the election. Trump won large majorities in rural areas of the South, Mid-West and West, but not necessarily in the suburban areas of the Northeast and West Coast.

A much more credible theory might look at who came out and who did not. Did Trump bring out the “missing white voters” (poor, working class and petit bourgeois),who saw in his candidacy a chance to fight back against the establishment which has offered them nothing to improve their situation over the past 40 years? Was this a protest vote for many Trump supporters? And did a sizable portion of the working-class electorate (both the white and minority), who were not motivated by Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant appeals, stay home because they saw no reason to come out and vote for the people who have done little or nothing for them over this same period?

I think we would be much better off adopting the classification proposed by the British economist, Guy Standing, a professor at the University of London. (See my earlier posting “The ‘Precariat’ and the Danger of Fascism” – 1/2/16.) Standing has suggested an updated system of economic classification in which he posits a large class (1/3rd to1/2 of the population in developed capitalist countries) called the “precariat”. This class is defined by its precarious economic existence.

According to Standing, the diverse individuals in the precariat share several characteristics:

• They suffer from elevated 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 WalMart greeters and the McDonald’s workers)
• THEY ARE ALIENATED, ISOLATED AND VERY ANGRY

Their ranks have been swelled by 30 years of economic recessions, followed by recoveries that have bypassed them. They have formed the basis of both the left and right populist explosions in Europe and the US, and they offer a fertile ground for the development of fascism, particularly when, absent a strong labor movement, there is a weak countervailing force on the left. Donald Trump appealed to their anxieties (both economic and social) and offered them "hope", while the Democrats offered???

We must therefore ask, can the Democratic Party fill that void on the left? The answer will depend on how we analyze the election of 2016 and the long-term decline of the Democrats and whether the Democrats can shed the neoliberalism of the past 40+ years and regain their former status as the “party of the people”.

A luta continua.

Of Circuses and Wars

Just read an excellent article by Phyllis Bennis in Common Dreams. The title “There is No Strategy Behind Trump’s Wars – Only Brute Force” drew my attention. Phyllis is quite right from the perspective of foreign policy. And her analysis that this is a raw demonstration of power, showing that the bully in the White House has no qualms about unleashing the horrific weapons he has at his command, is spot-on.

But is this a qualitative change in US foreign policy? Although there is a shift to more emphasis on military might and less on diplomacy, what Trump is doing is an extension of the War on Terrorism, which has been conducted by both Republican and Democratic administrations since before 2001. 

Are Trump’s targets restricted to North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.? Or are the bombs also aimed at us, the resistance to Trump’s domestic policies. I would propose that there is a strategy, and it is to divert our attention while the Republicans retool their domestic attacks. Unfortunately, it seems to be working.

Wars and circuses are traditional ways in which the public can be “entertained” while an autocratic regime fleeces them. The problem for Trump is that his circus is so outlandish and has been on the road so long that it has lost its appeal. It’s no longer entertaining, just tawdry and disgusting.

On the other hand, wars, particularly those waged with “awesome” weapons, are the perfect diversion. Trump has already accomplished a lot with few, if any, negative consequences. He has reinvigorated his base by appearing tough in his approach to two other autocrats, Putin and Kim Jong-Un. He has put the Democratic Party establishment between a rock and a hard place, unable to criticize policies which are the extension of those they have supported in the past. He has pushed his domestic agenda off the front page, allowing Republicans to regroup (do we hear Repeal and Replace coming back) and push their policies with less visible resistance.

How should the left respond? To begin, it is necessary to expose Trump’s policies in terms of both the terrible cost in human lives (well over 1,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria in March alone) and the racism inherent in United States military actions the Middle East and Africa. In addition, we need focus attention on the fact that dropping the Mother Of All Bombs or firing missiles at Syrian bases have done nothing to make the world or the US any safer. But most importantly we need to connect Trump’s foreign aggressions with his domestic agenda before the “fog of war” engulfs us all.

The Cold War Liberals are Back (and Trump is Going to Love It)

Article from the Washington Post: The Soviet Union Fought the Cold War in Nicaragua. Now Putin’s Russia is Back.

The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. Forget Medicare for all, forget free college tuition, forget Planned Parenthood and climate change, forget deportations, mass incarceration, voter suppression and inequality – THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!

To prove their point, the Washington Post found it necessary to drag out old Cold War lies about the then Soviet Union setting up a client state in Nicaragua and combine it with the same kind of innuendo that Ronnie used to sponsor the Contra war against the Sandinista in the 1980s. In fact, if you change the dates and a few (not many) of the names in the Post article, it could have been written in 1984 (sic).

The article goes on to insinuate that Russian diplomacy in Afghanistan and the Middle East and trade in South America are all part the sinister Russian plot to win a new Cold War. It uses terms such as “the Russian buildup in Nicaragua” and speculates that a Russian GPS satellite facility in that country will be used to spy on the US.

The problem with this hype is that it wasn’t true in the 1980s and there is little evidence it’s true today. But that hasn’t stopped the liberal establishment from doing the Donald’s work for him. Divert attention from his domestic plans which he can’t get off the ground (repeal and replace, tax “reform”) and from controversy over his advisers.  Give the Donald a chance to look like a strong leader by initiating military strikes that will have negligible effect but look “awesome” and will put to rest fears that the Donald is Putin’s lapdog.

“Thanks for your help, liberal hawks, you’ve handled me a pass for at least several months. Now I can get back to the real business of screwing the American people” - The Donald

The Bombing of Syria Trumps the Russian Connection

Donald Trump has dealt a significant blow to the resistance to his administration with the missile attack on Syria. He has simultaneously driven his domestic failures off the front pages and TV news, rallied much of the Congress and the country around him as Commander-in-Chief, and defused the investigations of his administration’s Russian connections. He has done it by appearing to care about the suffering of the same children he wants to keep out of the US and with little actual diplomatic cost in terms of relations with the Russians. For good measure, he has shored up his base by demonstrating how he intends to “make America great again”.

There is nothing new in his approach – it’s hardly a stroke of genius. Past Republican and Democratic administrations have used foreign policy crises (both real and manufactured) to deflect attention from their problems at home. But this insignificant military action has already accomplished much more than past diversions and, for that, he can thank the Democratic establishment and the “liberal” media for their assistance.

Because of their obsessive focus on the Russian connection and their history of support for military interventions, leading Democrats and their supporters in the media are caught between a rock and a hard place. They now feel compelled to support Trump as he leads the US further down the rabbit hole in the Middle East and will find it infinitely harder to oppose shifting funds in the budget from domestic needs to the military. National security trumps domestic issues every time, particularly since both political parties often differ only on minor points when it comes to projecting US power abroad.

Where should progressives go from here? While it is unclear what Trump’s plan regarding US involvement in the civil war in Syria, or if he even has one beyond squelching domestic dissent, the resistance needs to make it clear that there is no military solution to the situation in Syria. If the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t proof enough, then the realization that using US power to overthrow Assad, even under the guise of NATO or some other coalition, will further isolate Iran – the most powerful military and economic country in the region – and will inevitably lead the Iranians to ramp up their pursuit of nuclear capability as their only defense. Where we might go from there is too scary to even speculate.

Let’s be clear – humanitarian concerns are not going to be served by further destabilization of the region.  Progressives must push back against the current and demand that the US pursue a political, rather than military, solution as difficult as that might be, else the cloud of war will engulf us all. And while the civil war continues to generate horrific human tragedies, the US should do all it can to provide aid to war refugees, including admitting them to the US, Donald.

In the addition, we need to expose this move by Trump for what it is, and to demand a return to focus on the genuine issues confronting the American people – economic inequality, affordable healthcare, racism & mass incarceration, climate change, public education, voter suppression and other attacks on democratic rights, money in politics and so on. Perhaps the slogan should be “Let’s put our own house in order”, or even better "Regime change begins at home".

Progressives Need a Paradigm Shift

What progressives need today more than anything else is a “paradigm shift”. To be sure, we need to reject all the attempts to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, we need to defend the ACA, Planned Parenthood, Voting Rights and the EPA, we need a financial transactions tax and we need to take hundreds of billions from a bloated military budget to fund our communities, to repair and update our infrastructure, to provide public education for our children, etc.

But winning some (or even all) of these battles will NOT change the situation we are in unless we tie them to a revolution in the way Americans think about the role of government in society. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn popularized the concept of “paradigm shift” in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. He argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but is accomplished through revolutions where “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” (Think - Newton, Darwin and Einstein) I would argue that this same model applies to Americans’ ideas about government’s role in society.

The reactionaries (please, let’s stop calling them conservatives, because that’s not what they are) understand this. More than 40 years ago, they set out to produce just such a paradigm shift, to reverse the social and economic thinking of the previous 70 years of history in this country. To undo what the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and The Great Society (and similar movements lead by Socialists and Social Democrats in Europe) had accomplished, they had to vilify government as the source of all problems in society (particularly in the economy) and to promote the ideas of economic individualism and the free market as the solution to these problems.

Their intellectual forefather, Friedrich Hayek, provided the economic and philosophical underpinnings in his book, The Road to Serfdom. In this work, Hayek argues that government intervention in the economy (and collective action more generally) inevitably leads to tyranny and that the only defense of individual liberty is the free market and laissez faire capitalism. These ideas, further developed by the Chicago School of Economics and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, formed the basis for the neoclassical school of thought and the antigovernment politics of the new right in the 1970s.

Enter David Stockman, et al. From the Reagan “revolution” to the Tea Party and Donald Trump, the arguments of reaction have been based on the acceptance of this conceptual framework. If we accept this paradigm (and it is today, and has been for the past 30 years, the dominant framework in economics and politics), the best we can hope for is to fight a rear-guard action to slow the erosion of programs that meet the needs of ordinary Americans. In 2017 that is what we are doing, and it feels very much like a terrible game of Whack-A-Mole.

What we need is to shift the paradigm, to reassert the concepts of collective response to problems and the expansion of the public sector (aka the commons) as the only guarantor of real freedom and social progress. This won’t be easy, but to use a sports analogy, the best defense is a good offense.

To change the debate we must do three things: first, redefine what government spending is and why it is critical to society; second, overcome the argument that the government is already spending too much and as a result going into debt and make clear that government budget deficits are NOT primarily a product of increased spending over the last 40 years (with the exception of spending on the military & war, which has played a significant role), but rather of reduced revenues due to tax cuts for the wealthy and tax avoidance by the corporations; and finally emphasize that the growing economic inequality and the problems it creates are a product of the very changes in government policies which the reactionaries keep shoving down our throats.

Government (more accurately “the state”) is the way in which a society protects and provides benefits for individuals that they can not effectively provide for themselves. It performs that role by taking some of the wealth produced by society (usually through taxes) and investing it to make available these benefits and protections. While individuals may disagree with this or that particular use of society’s resources (and as progressives we do disagree with its use to project American power and dominance abroad), we need to recreate a consensus that overall what governments do is both necessary and beneficial. Here we can use examples to demonstrate how society could not possibly function without these collective activities (police, roads, schools, etc.)

Well duh, everybody knows that, don’t they? No, this is where the reactionaries get support from ordinary Americans, by simply denying this role for government. What progressives must do is repeat this framework whenever we fight for a particular program or policy. We need to point out that the collective actions of government benefit society even when they may not affect a particular individual. Public education benefits everyone in a multitude of ways, even those who don’t have children in the schools!

But government has a second role to play (and one that it has not always carried out). Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” points out that individuals’ and private corporations’ pursuit of their short-term interests may frequently occur at the expense of other individuals and of the long-term survival of the society. Thus, a critical role of the state is to defend those collective and long-term interests against rapacious forces that threaten individual and/or group survival (read coal and oil industries and global warming).

Conclusion: Society needs government with adequate resources to carry out those functions. The question then becomes, where can those resources come from, not where can we cut, cut, cut.

Our second task should be a lot easier. “Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.  Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) And that does not even include the much more significant Reagan/Bush tax cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But tax cuts have had another “side effect” recognized as early as the later 1980s. Kevin Phillips (former chief political analyst for Nixon’s 1968 campaign) in his book “The Politics of Rich and Poor” points out that it was a major factor in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy beginning in the 1980s.

Which brings us to the third point we need to hammer home. While many “mainstream” economists and politicians seem oblivious to the fact, the outstanding economic problem of the 21^st century is not growth, but rather income and wealth inequality, that is the distribution of the income society produces.

The third point requires a lot more analysis, but I would highly recommend the book our Wilmington Progressive Book Club is currently reading and discussing, Runaway Inequality by Les Leopold as a good starting point. More on this later.

The Empire Strikes Back

In the wake of the populist explosion of the last 8 year that has swept the US Democratic, UK Labor and other Social Democratic parties from power, we have seen two different responses from the traditional conservative and neo-liberal elites that have dominated Western politics for the last 40 years, particularly since the fall of Communism. This is perhaps most true of the US and Great Britain.

The conservative elites have embraced rightwing populism and are utilizing its energy to continue to roll back the economic, social and political advances that social democracy achieved in the 20^th Century. They have done this by focusing the legitimate anger of ordinary people on immigrants, terrorism, etc., while enriching their friends at the public trough and through privatization of the commons. And they are winning just about everywhere, but particularly in the US.

Not so the neo-liberal elites. They have not only resisted the populist wave, they continue to urge that the way forward is to move to the center, although in this period the “center” keeps shifting to the right. They do this for several reasons: a sincere, if misguided, belief that by moving to the right they will pick up support from middle forces alienated by the extreme right turn of the conservative parties; a desire to maintain support from wealthy patrons in finance (Wall Street) and in the technology sector (Silicon Valley); and a supposition that the left has no other place to go.

One would think that after a series of disastrous defeats (and long-term decline, as is the case for the Democratic Party in the US and many Socialist and Social Democratic Parties in Europe) they might have reason to question this approach. But, NO, instead they keep doubling down.

Two articles in the New York Times illustrate this refusal by the liberal elite to take seriously the populist explosion and the force behind it – the growth of inequality. The first “John Lennon vs Steve Bannon” by Jochen Bittner (Feb 23, 2017) focuses on cultural and political differences as the source of the deepening rift with American and European societies. According to Bittner, the Lennonists have an internationalist, traditional liberal/libertarian, secular world view often based on identity politics while Bannonism arouse as a critique of the Lennonists and takes a nationalist perspective, is more likely to align with Judeo-Christianity, and rejects the idea that various sectors of society (women, minorities, LGBTQ) are still not treated equality with straight, white males. His conclusion – that the two world views must engage in dialogue from the center, a “third way”, if you like.

Tony Blair (yes, he keeps turning up like a bad penny; reminds me of someone else closer to home) is even more direct in his opinion piece “Against Populism, the Center Must Hold” (March 3, 2017). Blair’s dismissal of “leftist populism” as being unable to compete with rightwing populism shows that he is totally out of touch with what has been happening – both in the US (Sanders campaign) and in Southern Europe. His recipe for the “progressives” is to build from the center by caving to the right on issues like immigration and gender identity (he doesn’t mention racism or sexism, but I’m sure he would include these as issues that the progressives obsess about). Then, we can bring together Silicon Valley (did he forget to mention Wall Street?) and those responsible for public policy and all live happily in our Brave New World.

The problem with all this BS is that it ignores the 8000 pound gorilla in the room. “It’s the economy stupid”, to quote James Carville, campaign strategist for the Bill Clinton campaign. Populist movements do not arise out of thin air; they are a response to something that causes widespread pain. Is it a coincidence that we have seen these movements, both of the right and left, in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession and the lack of a real recovery (forget the great gambling house for the rich, the stock market) for the large majority of the working class in Europe and the US?

Economic inequality has reached an extreme that has not been seen since the Gilded Age and continues to grow. Real economists (like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz), not those who are point men for big business, have been pointing this out for several years, but the political elites of the Democratic Party and its counterparts in Europe have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the consequences.

Guy Standing, Professor of Economics at the University of London, in his book The Precariat: A Dangerous New Class, has given us some insight into the social and political implications of runaway inequality and they are not pretty. His analysis concludes that members of this new class face a life of insecurity, lacking prospects for long term employment (even m any who are college graduates) and living a precarious life on the edge of poverty and despair. His analysis is that as much as 50% of the population of European countries and the US now belongs to the “precariat”. Its members are susceptible to demagogues, think Trump, unless the progressive left offers clear and palpable alternatives.

The road ahead for progressives in the US must not be to double down on the failed politics of neoliberalism. If we are to resist and overcome the rightwing surge, we must offer something more – a true vision of a society where the government and the economy meet the needs of the many, not the rapacious greed of the few.  

The 2016 Election – Part 5 – What is to be done?

Given the preceding analyses of the election (Parts 1-4), the question we need to answer is where does the progressive movement go from here? Perhaps the easier part is to begin with where we shouldn’t go, since much of the renewed political activism seems to be guided, either explicitly or implicitly, by what I would argue are incorrect or incomplete evaluations of how we got to where we are today.

One position is that we (and here I mean progressive Democratic Party activists) need to double down on what we’ve been doing. Whether it’s work harder (organize more effectively, have more personal contacts, have a 50-state strategy, etc.) or work smarter (utilize the internet, voter identification software, etc.) or raise more money, it is essentially the same prescription we’ve heard for years. The problem here is that this is exactly what the Democratic Party has been doing, and it hasn’t worked. “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is …” (I assume you know the rest of the quote).

Another position, put forth by the Indivisible folks, is to take up the “strategy” of the tea party. I’ve dealt with my critique of that in part 3 on the election, but it deserves further comment since it has come to dominate a great deal of the activist response to the Trump election. At the risk of sounding harsh in response to the genuine sentiments motivating this approach, it leads to knee-jerk reactions to every obscenity coming from the Trump administration. One can almost imagine Trump's advisers urging a particular action by telling him “This will really get a reaction from the liberals. Let’s keep them busy.”

There many problems with this approach. First, it generally reaches only those already part of the “choir”. It does little to change the minds of those who sat out the election or voted for Trump because he was someone who gave the establishment the finger. If anything, it reinforces their view that the opposition does not speak for them.

Second, it will almost always come up short (if the strategy couldn’t block the Betsy DeVos nomination, where do the Indivisible folks think we can win?) which will demoralize many of the newer activists. True, it can help to give Democrats in Congress some backbone, but beyond that, it accomplishes little. And I believe there are better ways to shore up weak-kneed Democratic lawmakers.

Third, it may focus attention on less, rather than more, critical aspects of the assault on ordinary Americans, allowing the Trump administration to push through more damaging measures without significant opposition. Feint one way, run with your reactionary politics in another direction.

But most importantly, it fails to develop a conversation around the assumptions of the existing political establishment (both liberal and conservative). In other words, it fails to offer a real alternative vision to the Republican’s assault on all of us.

So, what do we need to do?

A.    FOCUSED RESISTANCE

I am not saying that resistance isn’t critical. I believe that we need to resist with all our might, but that resistance needs to be focused in three ways; first on the defense of those most vulnerable, second on issues where we can draw clear lessons which can begin the change the conversation and third on issues where we have at least a chance of winning.

A good example is the resistance to the Muslim ban. It focuses on defending a vulnerable minority, it allows us to frame our resistance as supporting a basic tenet of our democracy, and it is complemented by a legal strategy that could produce a win for the resistance.

Likewise, the battle to defeat the nomination of Betsy DeVos. It had an outside chance of winning; it focused on defending poor and minority children, who are those who are most affected by the attempts to dismantle public education; and it gave us the opportunity to rise up in support of maintaining public, rather than privatized, education – a defense of the “commons” against the privatizers.

I would argue that, in the immediate future, our resistance needs to focus on the battle over health care. This should include not only preserving Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA and fully funding Planned Parenthood, but expanding affordable health care to all by creating a single payer health care system. A vigorous defense of the existing programs which provide healthcare insurance for millions of Americans (many of whom may have voted for Trump) combined with a clearly stated plan which would guarantee benefits to all Americans would allow us to begin changing the conversation.

B.     CHANGING THE CONVERSATION by CREATING A VISION

Much of the efforts of progressives have been focused on mobilizing our forces opposition to particular actions or policies of the Trump administration. The problem is that this does not reach those who feel they are disenfranchised or have been scammed by the right-wing alt-facts (aka, lies). After the massive protests on Jan. 21^st, Trump tweeted asking why the protesters didn’t vote. Well, he was wrong, as usual. They did vote and not for him. But how did this action reach out to those who didn’t vote or voted for him?  The answer should be obvious – it did not.

Progressives need to create a vision, a big picture that counters the picture that the right has cultivated for the past forty years. Like any big picture, it requires an overarching theme that ties together the various issues and constituencies that can make up the majority of Americans. I would argue that the theme must be the fight against inequality.

That fight means more than just raising the minimum wage, or taxing the rich or free college tuition at public colleges and universities. It requires rejecting what Les Leopold refers to as the “Better Business Climate model” and the idea that economic competition always leads to a better life. It requires us to accept that the economy should serve the interests of the society rather than the other way around; that cooperation trumps competition in promoting the interests of all. It means rejecting the “Race to the Top” with its winners (and therefore its losers) and adopting the guiding principle of the labor movement that we all advance together ("the union makes us strong").

This is, unfortunately, not the big picture that has been projected by the Democratic Party (and in Europe by the Social Democratic, Labor or other “left” parties). It is, as a number of authors have argued, the central reason for the decline of these parties and the populist explosion since the Great Recession. It is why we must concentrate our efforts on make the Democratic Party a true part of the people.

C.     RESTORING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AS THE “PARTY OF THE PEOPLE”

There is nothing wrong with a big-tent party bringing together various electorates under the guise of identity politics. But a big tent needs a center pole that provides support for the entire structure and a political party needs a central tenet that unifies its constituencies under a single banner. I would argue that a “party of the people” needs to build its program around the fight against inequality and for economic as well as social justice. Despite its progressive platform (largely ignored during the election campaign) the Democrats have not done that for fear of alienating their Wall Street and Silicon Valley supporters.

How can the Democratic Party merge an all-out struggle against inequality and the assumptions that arise from accepting competition as the be all and end all of progress and still maintain its big tent? By tying the struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia to a broad movement against inequality which can unite us all (well, except for the 1%).


We must point out that everyone loses when working people allow politicians to turn us against each other. We need to project an image that is more than a coalition of groups and an inclusive organization that fights for each group’s demands. We need to show explicitly that behind that support for each issue is the overriding issue that unites us all. Then and only then will the Democratic Party be able to reclaim the mantle as “the Party of the People” and capture the populist tide that has swept the country.

Conversation with a Concerned & Aware Friend

This is from a very recent conversation with an old Florida friend, Mike Flanery, an engineer & Quaker activist.

Mike,

You mentioned that there were 7 issues of critical threat to the future - e.g. human cloning.  Could I 

get a complete list & maybe a citation or citations if possible?

D Michael Flanery	11:32 AM (2 hours ago)
to me

My short list, there are probably more:

Critical Issues that concern me that seem unstoppable considering human tribalism and self-interest. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1) Sea Level Rise – General Displacement, starvation.  Climate change in Syria is an example. This will 

occur around the world at the same time, tipping point has already been crossed, CO2 levels in oceans, 

methane in tundra.

2) Wealth Distribution due to Sea Level Rise – .  Wealthy gain short term financial benefits to raise roads, 

barriers built at public / future indebtedness, (Miami, $6B in new construction, denying SLR.  Loss of tax 

revenue due to decrease in land values are one reason Governor won’t discuss climate change “not on 

his watch will land values go down” Then as rise increases and desirable sandy beaches – around the 

world – disappear, the wealthy use taxes on poor (who were living at higher areas) to drive them out 

(displacement).  Ref Great Depression, where taxes went up on the poor, driving them into bankruptcy) 

At that point rich live in most protected areas, middle and lower classes have nothing, and then Oligarchy, 

Feudalism.

3) Genetics & Life Extension– Access to life extension methods and drugs, and major expenses as well, 

limited by those in power and with money to their supporters and relatives.  Include organ transplants, (soon 

to be grown in pigs)

4) Cloning – Already Dolly the Sheep has been successfully cloned, and cones are surviving just fine.  

Dictators will clone themselves, choosing best gene modifications, and perhaps cloning less capable 

workers.  “Time machine +)

5) Control of Personal Information – Those in power will be able to know everything we do.  Computers can 

already translate our voices, read handwriting and text in our Facebook mimes, and match faces.  This is 

coming soon.   With this they will control us.  No apparent way to stop, particularly the efforts of a foreign 

county like Russia who already knows all they need to control Trump.

6) Computer Superiority – Postulated as being the next phase of human evolution.

7) Nuclear “war” with explosive and radioactive agents, particularly in the hands of Sociopaths, 

Narcissists, others for which reconciliation and empathy are valueless.  Proliferation continues – 

N Korea, Pakistan, Israel, etc.  For example, N Korea is developing submarines that can launch 

missiles without being detected.  They are also selling missiles to other countries.  When a 

nuclear explosion goes off in NY or LA, we will have to retaliate, and it’s over.

The 2016 Election – Part 4 - Who Could Have Predicted It?

A lot has been written about who did and who didn’t predict the outcome of the 2016 election, based on polls in the weeks before Nov. 8^th. Yes, a very few were lucky and predicted Trump’s win but the large majority got it wrong. And even those prognosticators who got it right, provided data to support their prediction, but little, if any, analysis of why.

One author got it right well before the two parties had decided on their candidates and without any reference to polling data. Thomas Frank, in his book “Listen Liberal” (published in March of 2016), analyses the decline of the Democratic Party as a party of the people from the 1970s down to through the Obama administration. What he does is put this election in historical context so can we begin to understand, not just this loss, but the overall decline of the Democratic Party to a point where it has less political power than at any time since 1928.

Frank’s thesis is simple – the Democratic Party has gone from the party of the working class (not just the white working class) to the party of the “professional” class or the party of the 10% (as opposed to the Republicans who are the party of the truly wealthy, of the 1%). This class, which the New Democrats see as the agent of change, is composed of highly educated (i.e., smart), innovative and successful individuals. They tend to be socially liberal; they are “hip” and cosmopolitan. They believe that individuals should reap rewards based on merit and that competition will always lead to the best results.

The latter explains why these New Democrats have no real use for unions. It also explains why they support charter schools and NAFTA and TPP. Most importantly, it explains why the Democrats have failed to take up the banner against inequality; why they have made balancing the federal budget a more important goal than full employment; why they have bailed out banks but not home owners who are being foreclosed; and so on.

Frank documents the failure of both the Clinton and Obama presidencies to take on inequality in any meaningful way. In fact, he argues that Clinton’s legacy has made the situation much worse for large sectors of the working class (particularly African Americans) and notes all the missed opportunities for combating inequality in responding to the Great Recession during Obama’s 8 years in office.

The basic logic of focusing on the “professional” class is that they are the rising demographic which supports the social and economic politics of the “big tent” party. And the working class? They will have nowhere else to go and so they will follow their “betters” (my word, not Frank’s) to the polls and vote Democrat. The problem with this is that there are other options – stay at home (which many, many did on Nov. 8^th) or follow the pseudo populist who promises to return their country to them.

As should be obvious, this has nothing to do with Citizens United or the need to raise campaign contributions from the uber-rich. Getting money out of politics won’t affect this basic ideological shift within the party. Only making the struggle against inequality CENTRAL to the Democratic Party’s agenda can we begin to rebuild the “party of the people”.

Conclusion: To quote Gary Younge in The Nation, “The Democratic machine does not need a tune-up—it needs a complete overhaul.”