Month: November 2013

The Obamacare Fiasco

On November 14, 2013

I think Schadenfraude nicely sums up what I’m feeling about Obama’s troubles with his signature health care bill, though I do feel sorry for people who are being hurt by Obamacare.

It’s not the website that is killing Obama, of course, it’s the cancellation of pre-existing policies (though the website is an unforced mistake). Obama told people they could keep their policies, but that decision was never his to make, it was up to insurance companies. Since there is no robust public option, Obama does not have any significant leverage over the insurance companies, there is nothing he can do to them, so why shouldn’t they do what is in their best interest?

Please don’t say something like “because that would hurt people” because I’d laugh so hard I might rupture something. Insurance companies are run by evil people as a class, and they make their money, not by providing care but by denying it. The more care they deny, the more money they make. One of my friends once designed medical “interest free” loans for people who needed life-saving operations. Sounds like a deal, doesn’t it? Of course, that’s zero interest on list price, not on what the insurance company was paying. The company was making a hundred to two hundred percent profit per policy. Nice business to be in, if you have no soul.

When you are dealing with bad people, you must assume bad faith; bad behavior. You must plan for it. The best option was always Medicare-for-all (and I was told by at least one House staffer that they could pass it if they really wanted to and were willing to go nuclear.) The problem with Obama has always been this sickening need to be one of the boys. He appears to genuinely like and genuinely admire the people who have “made it” in this society—people like Jamie Dimon and the people who run insurance and drug companies. He thinks you can make deals with these people, and make sure everyone wins.

You can’t. These people are the most successful parasites ever produced by our nasty form of sociopathic capitalism. You can only give them what they want or you can rip them from the body politic, so they stop sucking the blood from the host they’re killing.

So the insurance companies have bitten the hand that fed them. Obama gave them everything they wanted and made sure nothing of importance they didn’t want (like a public option) was in the bill. Now they’re chomping and chewing, destroying what remains of his presidency.

He has reaped as he sowed.

This is going to get worse. As Corrente has repeatedly pointed out, the provider networks on the low cost plans are extremely thin. People are going to find out that they’re only covered in theory, that there is no hospital that treats their type of cancer anywhere near them, for example. They’re going to find out that they’re paying for coverage they cannot, in effect, use, for any number of reasons. Drug costs will continue to rise, as well, since Obama carefully made sure all methods of reducing them were made illegal.

Obamacare was, and is, a subsidy. A way of keeping the insurance companies going; of keeping the current healthcare system going. The good, gold-plated private insurance plans, unless you’re an executive, are pretty much gone. As such everyone had to be forced to buy a shitty private insurance plan. It will definitely help some people, some people will win, but many people will lose.

I will point out, for what feels like the millionth time, that simply putting everyone on Medicare would have been less expensive per person and produced better outcomes. Even a robust public option would have given Obama leverage, because the insurance companies would have been scared everyone would migrate over to it, and so would have needed to treat people well.

But this… this is the worst of all worlds, and that is how it was designed to be.

It’s unclear to me how much of this is corruption (rest assured, Obama, like Clinton, will make tens of millions miraculously quickly on leaving office) and how much is some pathological need to be one of the boys, but I am clear that this failure is the inevitable product of how Obamacare was designed.

The Role of Violence and Coercion in Saving the World

By Ian Welsh

On November 9, 2013

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It will be impossible to save the world from climate change without coercion. The problem of climate change is a problem of common sinks and limited resources: the atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon, the seas only have so many fish and can only withstand us dumping so much plastic and other pollutants into them. The world has only so many forests, and so on.

These are genuinely limited resources. Dumping into them, or chopping them down, or overfishing them is an advantage to whoever does it: they can burn dirty (cheap) fuels, they can use plastic packaging consumers like, they can have fish to eat now.

It is rational, in the sense that you receive a benefit, to destroy the world. It is especially rational to do so if you expect to be dead before the costs come to bear, or if you think you can use your money to avoid the worst of climate change.

We have an additional problem: no one has jurisdiction over all of the atmosphere, all of the seas, all of the forests. If country A decides not to pollute or dump or cut down forests, someone else can do more of that and gain a short term benefit. And by short term benefit I mean “some of the decision makers and their friends will personally get rich. Filthy, stinking, rich.” (This is also one problem with refusing to have high marginal taxation, capital taxes, estate taxes and corporate taxes. People are less interested in destroying the world when they’ll only make a little bit off it. The calculus does change somewhat.)

So how do you ensure that Brazil doesn’t destroy the rest of the Amazon, that Japan doesn’t radically overfish, or that the US doesn’t dump obscene amounts of carbon into the air per capita?

There are three essential approaches. The first is bribery: we’ll pay you not to do this. Up to a certain point this is necessary: if Brazilians can make more money chopping down jungle than keeping it around, why wouldn’t they? But everyone has the ability to do destroy the world, everyone can hold you hostage, and once people start, they don’t stop. Bribery only works if it is short term, if it becomes “we’ll pay for you to transition to a different economic model, but no more than that.”

The second is incentives. Why are the Brazilians chopping down the jungle? Because Americans want to eat beef. If Americans change how they eat, much less reason for the jungles to be chopped down. If we don’t want plastic to destroy the Oceans maybe we should just forbid most plastic packaging? It can be done, I grew up with paper bags and glass bottles, for example. I grew up in a culture where every food worker didn’t wear disposable plastic gloves. I survived, I guarantee you will too, no matter how much of a germphobe you are.

The third is coercion. You will not do this, and if you do we will do bad things to you. Lock you up, sink your ships, and if it comes to it, kill you.

Now let’s be clear, coercion underlies virtually all social relations. You pay taxes because if you don’t, somebody with a gun will come along and throw you in jail. You have property because men with guns enforce your property rights. You go to school, because if you don’t… well, you get the picture. No society has EVER existed that did not have some form of coercion available to it. In many hunter-gatherer societies that coercion was the simplest of all: expulsion. If you didn’t obey the rules, they kicked you out, and that meant death because no, most people cannot survive alone, and most people don’t want to.

Because there is an advantage to unilateral betrayal: to dumping your pollution on other people and letting them pay the cost, there will always be people who want to do it, and it’s not always worth trying to use incentives to get them not to: it swiftly becomes too expensive. The best approach is often to unilaterally take certain actions off the table: none of us will unilaterally take each others stuff. None of us will dump poisons into the air that kill other people we don’t know. None of us will, on net, allow forests to decrease. None of us will use plastic packaging.

This is the problem of collective action: if none of us do these things, we’re all better off. But if one of us or a few of us do it, we have an advantage over other people, and if other people are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.

This brings us to my comment, in my 44 Points Post about needing an armed force to protect the Oceans, a comment which caused much screaming, since people thought it violated my point about not wanting large standing armies.

An army and a police force are not the same thing. An international “Ocean Guard” is not a navy, it does not need destroyers with depth charges and nuclear submarines with missiles and Aircraft Carriers. It needs ships capable of find trawlers and boarding them. Police force.

But the key problem here is jurisdiction: no one has jurisdiction. No one can say to the US or China or India or Japan, “you will not do this!”

We must create institutions which have the authority to say “you will not pollute, you will not destroy the environment.” More than that, because we have gone too far, we are going to need institutions which can say “and you will also work to fix the environment.” Again, countries will want to not contribute, because if someone else does it, and you don’t, you get most of the benefits without the costs.

Now we can create a world economy which is not harmful to the environment and in which everyone is fed, clothed, has shelter and has a meaningful life with a good chance at happiness. We are going to have to, because people who are unhappy, who do not love, and are not loved, who are frightened, will do whatever they feel they must. We must drain the swamp of true need, of hunger, of great fear.

But that’s the end point: that’s where we must commit to go. Along the way, however, bad actors will have to be forced to stop what they are doing coercively.

Failure to do so means death and suffering. More death and suffering than is caused by coercively, say, sinking Trawlers or trade embargoing countries which won’t stop using plastic containers. We are in a situation where the median death estimate from climate change is probably a billion people.

We cannot entirely bribe and incentivize ourselves our way out of this problem, some coercion will be necessary. How much money would you have to pay Wall Street, for example, to stop doing what they do? As much, or more than they make doing what they do. How much to stop Big Oil? Same answer. We can’t afford it, that money, those resources, must be spent fixing the problem and taking care of ordinary people. So we must criminalize certain behaviour, on a world scale and then enforce it.

That is policing, if done right, not military action.

There are great big reasons to be scared of anything that looks like a world state. I have a preference for nations, because a world state that turns totalitarian is a nightmare, and a world state is also likely to lead to stagnation. My suggestion is to try federalization: specific bodies with specific enforcement, but they must have transnational police powers. There is no reason these bodies can’t be run by democratic methods, no reasons the courts they run can’t be fair and open. Our current transnational bodies aren’t democratic, indeed are anti-democratic, precisely because our elites don’t want them to be, but that is, again, a social choice.

We figure this problem out, or we fry. We need institutions for transnational action, institutions with police power, courts and which are democratically constituted. This isn’t an insoluble problem, either in general, or specific, except that it challenges the people who currently have power and who are currently getting filthy rich by destroying the environment, and in so doing likely killing a billion or more people, and conceivably, risking the future existence of humanity entirely.

Given the stakes, we’d best grow up. There is only one world, and until we get off it, it is a single point of failure. It must be dealt with as such.

Incentives

What is an economy?

By Ian Welsh

On November 7, 2013

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Perhaps the greatest difficulty I have talking about the economy is that most people don’t understand what an economy is.

An economy is what people produce and the relations that make that production possible.

An economy is not money. Printing more money does not automatically increase the size of the economy as various episodes of hyperinflation clearly indicate, but also as the giant printing of money in the last five years should have shown to people.

Money is created by printing in a fiat economy, whether it is physically printed or not. When a bank creates a loan it simply adds numbers to various accounts, and it does not have to “have money to loan”. The same is true of brokerages offering loans for stock purchases and so on. There is no direct organic relation between the amount of money in the economy and the amount of economic activity.

Moreover it is quite possible to increase the amount of money in the economy while decreasing activity. When a huge loan is taken out to buy a company, and then the company has employees slashed and plants closed, real economic activity decreases, even as the amount of money increases. When you insist on 15% profits and obtain them by refusing to do needed maintainance, firing employees, doing stock buy-backs and so on, real economy activity decreases.

If you measure the output of an economy in money you get a very distorted picture of what is actually going on. There is less employment in the US in percentage terms than there was at peak, and absolute numbers are only now about getting even, yet people have been blathering on about a “recovery”.

It is quite possible for people to be doing things that are, on net, negative. Every dollar earned by the financial industry in the 2000s was lost and then more in the financial collapse: real damage to real productive capacity was done. We were earning more money, GDP was increasing, and (at least) houses were getting built, but the cost was offshoring and outsourcing of jobs and decreased actual wellbeing (it is in the 2000s that American height, for example, began to decrease.)

Money is not the economy, and increases in money do not necessarily mean the economy is getting better or even bigger, let alone actually increasing the welfare of the population.

Now increases in money SHOULD reflect increases in the welfare of the people, or at least in the size of the economy. Money should have an organic relationship to the economy. But for it to do so we must want it to.

Take the classic post-war economy (pre 70s.) You can borrow money if you have a house or a business. The house is valuable not so much because you can live in it, but because living in it means you are close to a job. It is the job that allows you to afford the house, and if you lose the job, the house still has value because there are other jobs nearby for someone else. If you do not believe this, I invite you to look at what happened to housing prices in Detroit when the auto industry left that city.

The house is secondary, though, the jobs come first. A farm has value because you can grow food and sell it, a business has value because it makes money. All of these things, presumably, produce goods or services that people want or need, and if you no longer want to run your farm or business, someone else can. A loan just allows you to take some of the future value of what you own, and use it today.

Economic financialization seems like an extension of this system. If you have a money flow of any type, why not borrow against it? Why not borrow against its appreciation? Why not then sell those money flows for money today? There are three problems: the first is pyramiding. You borrow against a money flow, then you use leverage and buy other money flows and then you leverage on them, and soon the underlying asset is a tiny fraction of the money you have. (No leverage on loaned money is thus the first principle of avoiding problems, loaned money is already leverage.)

The second problem is printing money with no underlying asset at all. When the Fed is creating 82 billion out of midair every month, half of which is spent on treasuries, there is no organic relation to the underlying economy.

The third is that some people get to borrow money for much less than other people. Banks get prime (or less). Large investors get close to prime, ordinary people get Prime ++, if they can get less than 20% on a credit card. This is justified by “risk”, but the risk is mostly that the person doesn’t have access to essentially free (prime rate) money. It also distorts the economy, because it favors financial companies since the interest rate is the cost of money, and the cost of money is a cost of business, which means financial operations are cheap even before you get to the fact that financial operations also have access to the highest amounts of leverage.

The problem here is that finance creates NOTHING of worth itself. It exists (or should exist rather) only to facilitate creating goods and services with actual value: food, housing, entertainment, medicine, art, philosophy and so on. Those goods and services, or rather the people, equipment and relationships that produced them, are the economy. Finance’s purpose is only to help allocate money between those activities, and it is only one mechanism of allocation. The market will not allocate money properly to many goods because it undervalues the future (so, for example, education, especially in the humanities and basic science), cannot account for externalities not embedded in the valuation system (that you are getting sick from my pollution is not the market’s problem), and cannot value anything that is not denominated in cold hard cash (like love, or friendship or a sunny day free of smog or the health of someone who doesn’t make money.)

Any society which makes all or most of its decisions about how to allocate money through the market mechanism will be hell on earth and will devalue those things most important to human happiness and meaning. It is not an accident that the depression rate in the US has increased by an order of magnitude in the last hundred years.

If you give outsize money returns to finance then, it drives out actual productive investment in the real economy. If you make the market your primary method of allocating funds, it doesn’t allocate resources to the future or to intangibles and ignores externalities which are key both to long term growth and avoiding negative outcomes (like your kid having cancer, or your spouse dying of cancer, or your sibling having a debilitating case of depression.)

But the problem is worse than this. Money, as my friend Stirling Newberry has noted, is permission: it is the right to decide what other people do with their time. Money lets you buy up people who spend all day lobbying government, it lets you create political movements, it lets you buy up think tanks and universities, it lets you create your own mercenary army. If you are throwing off more money than other industries, it lets you take over those industries. It lets you buy government, and thus control the rules.

If some group, in an economy, has a consistently higher rate of return than other groups over a long period of time, they WILL become dominant in that society absent a reaction by violent men. Period. Because they can use that money to decide what other people do. This is true not just of finance, it is true of any group of people controlling a bottleneck resource (see: oil, among others).

You can solve this one of two ways: you can make sure no one gets these consistent outsize returns in the first place (remember, basic economics, if an industry is making more than average profits, they are not in a competitive market, there is an inefficiency). Or you can just take their excess profits away from them.

IF you choose not to do so, because they have bought the system and created an ideology that says it is unfair to take money away from people who are given a systemic advantage by being allowed to create money from thin air and/or borrow it at prime when no one else can; or that the people allowed to control oil production should be allowed to keep all its benefits because they created the oil, or some such, then those people WILL come to control your society and they will create it in their image.

I will discuss at a later day happiness and meaning (and even eudomania), which should be the sane goal of any political economy. I will discuss how to design an economy which works for everyone. But the first thing to realize is that you must want that, and you must believe it is Just that your society be run that way.

If you do not believe that it is moral and right and just to tax people who have a structural advantage in your economy (and that structural advantage can and will exist if you remove the State entirely), if you do not believe you are allowed to redistribute, if you do not understand what the economy is for (creating the good life), if you do not believe in not allowing concentrations of private power based on position, then you will not keep whatever prosperity and good life you have, because those who win the game (and someone always will) will buy up the game and change the rules to ensure their continued wealth and power. They will do so in a way that will cost you your liberty, your health and your prosperity.

There will always be winners and we don’t want to change that. Let them win, let them enjoy winning in their time, but do not allow them to buy the system, to destroy the actual productive capacity of the system, or to try and make money the sole determinant of how decisions are made. Doing so, letting market mechanisms work until they don’t, then continuing to use them anyway: refusing to enforce competitive markets and keep markets doing what they do well and only what they do well, is why we had a financial collapse, why we’re in a depression, and why we have a catastrophic climate change episode coming our way which will kill a billion people or more. It is why we are seeing a long term decline in happiness in market democracies, why we have soaring rates of depression and chronic disease, rising chronic unemployment, and a host of other social ills.

An economy exists to fill the needs of the people in it, material and non-material. It has no other purpose.

Jerome Armstrong’s Oral History of the Dean and Clark Movements

By Ian Welsh

On November 5, 2013

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(This is a comment elevated from my post on why Democrats and Obama don’t do what progressives want. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)

by Jerome Armstrong

In the fall of 2002, I was busy putting together about a 10-page memo for Joe Trippi on how Howard Dean could win the upcoming Presidential campaign. And it had revolution written throughout. Fundraising, organizing, communicating, the whole thing. In that document was laid out the fifty state organizing campaign, how blogs would build the movement around Dean, and how small dollar online donors could become bigger than the John Kerry’s decades-long amassed donor mailing list. Nothing short of revolutionary. If you’ve read Trippi’s book, you’ll see that he gained insight into applicable tactics from the rip roaring 90′s Raging Bull financial commenting site. I was also on those boards (for better or worse– or much worse), so we were both of similar mind when Joe got the opportunity to take over managing the campaign, on the possibilities. We also saw what McCain did after New Hampshire, with online fundraising, in 2000. It was quite fantastic. Heady days. But the point is that it was all revolutionary for the campaign, especially so being the primary for Democratic President. The electricity of the netroots movement emerged right alongside Howard Dean message that was anti-Bush, anti-war, and full-bore partisanship.

And if you experienced that ’03 campaign, you gained insight into those revolutionary tactics. If you did not, then they didn’t make up what you brought to your next campaign. And the experience didn’t need to be one of being on the winning side either. I have to credit a book that Nate Wilcox had me read for understanding this, by my looking at what happened with TV and how it changed political campaigning, by Ray Strothers called “Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting”.

So, in 2003, we on Dean’s campaign had a big advantage on the rest of the campaigns. Dean, for the most part, knew the message to use. The campaign knew exactly what tools to use to grow. None of the other campaigns (Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman) could figure the internet part out (save Clark’s nascent campaign).

Howard Dean’s Strategy

As we entered the Spring of 2003, the Dean campaign staff gathered together with early bundlers for a strategic retreat in Vermont at the Trapp family lodge. Trippi had always worked on separate presidential campaigns against Paul Maslin. So, wanting to work together, he had brought him on as Dean’s pollster. They put together a campaign strategy that made sense. In short, rely on the internet-based strategy to grow the campaign up to the caucuses and primaries. Dean would lose to Gephardt in Iowa, placing second. Then, followed by Dean winning first in New Hampshire, he’d thereafter steamroll to the nomination. This plan went awry by the Fall though, when public polls came out showing Dean way ahead in Iowa too. Maslin tried to temper Dean’s expectations, but Dean decided a sweep was a must, and the whole campaign strategy was changed. Iowa all of a sudden meant everything.

Dean For America

Second, also from that March 2003 Trapp family lodge meeting. Trippi, Markos, Zephyr, Matt Gross and a few others and myself sat out on the front lawn early into the next morning, drinking and talking about what we were in the middle of transpiring. Finally, around 2 am, the staff comes to shut us up for the night, as the other guests are complaining. As we are ending and walking in, I ask Trippi what’s going to happen when it looks like Dean might win. At the point, it was still unfathomable to most, but I could tell it wasn’t a new thought to him, but instead something he’d been mulling quite a bit, and he replied: “the moment when the insurgent becomes the frontrunner is the moment when he either becomes the establishment or…” and just looks at me, like he was waiting for me to answer, but his face gives me no clue as to how to answer. My thought is that, ‘well yea, the insurgent throws down the revolution,’ but that answer didn’t phase the ‘what happens next’ look on Trippi’s face.

Fast forward about 6 months, I get onto the campaign elevator in the morning, arriving late as usual, same time as Trippi and his wife Kathy Lash. She turns to me and says, “Dean is going to be on next week’s cover of Time and Newsweek.” My first thought was to get them both signed by Dean, which I did later, but I turned to Joe and said to his nodding up, “I guess this is that moment”.

Well, what came next first is that Dean tried to become the establishment candidate. By November and December 2003, the formal endorsements. First Labor groups, then Al Gore & Bill Bradley, were rolled out. Tom Harkin in Iowa. Dean’s poll numbers grew higher. The fundraising numbers went through the roof, but a funny thing was happening with grassroots internet support. It was coming to a standstill around 600,000. I was running all of the online advertising for the campaign, so I firsthand saw the efficacy and resulting metrics for every ad we put out there. We were growing in fundraising, but the movement wasn’t getting bigger. It got so bad, that Nicco Mele had to fudge up the email signup numbers that were public on the website some days (due no doubt in part to Clark’s campaign which I’ll mention below), and we had to figure out techniques to do more than juice them going higher.

What Happens Next

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Jerome Armstrong: A blogger is the first follower, not the leader

By Ian Welsh

On November 4, 2013

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By Jerome Armstrong

I want to say something about the role of a blogger, just to try and frame the expectations and limitations inherently in place. The blogger is like that first follower in the famous Derek Sivers video, that is: “the first follower is the person that transforms the lone dancing guy into someone leading a movement.” So, when I saw Howard Dean dancing solo among the Democrats, at a Democratic Party gathering up in Seattle in June 2002, I started blogging, ‘hey there’s a guy dancing here’ I’m dancing now too, and so on, and a movement started…

This is the arena of politics, the politicians are the ones that have to be the crazy lone dancer for there to be bloggers to stand up and dance along. That’s their role. So its not a correct frame to say “FDL didn’t go down with the ship against ACA” in spring ’10, when already, the the only ones that came forward to dance, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, both stopped, and became supporters. No dance, nothing to follow; the music has stopped.

As for the modern day (2001-2013) Democratic Party’s politicians. They’ll dance quite a jig during the campaign. When in power, they’ll dance on an populist issue here or there, usually when it’s not likely to have much a chance of passing. Mostly though, they just look busy while holding up the wall.

And it’s not about ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ but about the politicians moment on the stage. When a leader starts dancing, the early followers jump in, and a movement starts. If the leader stops dancing, that’s when a movement dies. If, however, even in losing, they kept on dancing, that’s a movement that will live another day.

This is something we see play out over and over on both sides of the aisles, among the populist progressives and libertarians, usually against the old guard. A dance starts, they laugh first, then get pissed, start fighting, charge in using whatever it takes, claim ownership of the floor, and shut down the dancer.

(This a comment elevated from my post on the failure of the why progressives don’t get much of what they want from politicians. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)

Why Obama And Democrats Don’t Do Much of What Liberals Want (Netroots Failure: Part 2)

By Ian Welsh

On November 2, 2013

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Politicians do most things because someone wants them done who can hold them accountable if they don’t do it. That includes bad things, and good things. Anyone who doesn’t understand this reality doesn’t understand even the most basic part of politics.

In 2008 Clinton reached out to the Netroots, and felt the Netroots (we, not me, I had almost no contact with the campaign) mattered enough to at least listen to. Obama did not.

You dances with the ones who brought you, as Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney once said, Obama won by bypassing the Netroots and lying to Progressives and Liberals: he won without us, he owed us nothing once elected.

The movement, such as it was, was bypassed and lost power. As a result, for example, we could not improve Dodd-Frank, insist on more help for homeowners (which I pushed hard for), improve the shitty stimulus bill, or get any of a number of other liberal or progressive priorities pushed.

Note that gays were originally ignored by Obama as well. What did they do? They got in Obama’s face personally, heckling him and they organized a very effective donor boycott. As a result, they got much (but not all) of what they wanted from him.

Holding someone accountable means “inflicting pain”. If they don’t do what you want, you must be able to do something to them they don’t like (heckling), or take away something they want (money).

Like FDL or not, the last serious attempt by left-wingers other than gays to hold Obama accountable was when they refused to go along with the Affordable Care Act if it didn’t include a public option. FDL said “if this bill has no public option, we won’t support it.” When it didn’t, they didn’t. You may think that’s not a good red-line, but they had a red line. Of course FDL, virtually alone, did not have the juice: they could not inflict enough pain or take away enough funding or create enough bad publicity for Obama to care, especially when powerful interests (read: insurance companies), didn’t want a public option. (For doing so, FDL was attacked by all the usual suspects on “left-wing” blogs and labelled firebaggers.)

Political power is constituted of getting people elected, getting people unelected and being able to reward or punish people for doing or not doing what you want. If you can’t do any of those things, you have no power.

This is realpolitik.