Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 9 of 29

The Oligarch Stage of the American Disease: Bloomberg Edition

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On February 19, 2020

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Michael Bloomberg

So, Michael Bloomberg has spent $300 million, and, by some polling, is now tied for second place in the Democratic primaries with Joe Biden, whose numbers are collapsing.

Bloomberg is worth about $63 billion.

He entered the race to defeat Sanders. He considered entering the race in 2016 until it became clear that Clinton would be the nominee.

This makes perfect sense, because Sanders tax plan will cost him billions. He can spend ten times as much as he has, and it will still be a good investment.

The thing about Trump was always that he was a symptom of a disease. It’s hard to say exactly when the disease started, but serious symptoms started showing up after the elections of Reagan and Thatcher. Wage increase rates collapsed, stock markets and other asset prices rose much faster than inflation, regulations were gutted, people were thrown in jail at a ferocious rate, and unions were smashed.

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Inequality took off, and over time this created “multibillionaires.” They used their money to buy politicians, and, through those politicians, they bought policy. They slashed tax rates on corporations, rich people and their estates, and so on to the bone. They increased subsidies for the rich, while they cut subsidies for the poor and middle class, in relative terms.

The Federal Reserve (all of whose governors are political appointees), acted aggressively to keep wage increases at or under inflation, and targeted inflation rather than job growth. Good working class and many middle class jobs were off-shored and outsourced. Some of these processes had started before Reagan, such as offshoring and cutting top marginal tax rates (JFK foolishly did so, but then he was the son of an oligarch), but they went into overdrive after 1980.

From ’33 to ’68, the general trend was for the percentage of income controlled by the wealthy to decrease relative to the percentage controlled by everyone else. In 1968, that reversed, but 1980 is when it was locked in.

Money is, of course, power. Anyone who denies this is tediously stupid, given that almost all of us have spent most of our lives doing shit we wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to to get money. (Getting other people to do shit they don’t want to do but that you do want them to do is the very definition of power.)

So, the oligarchs, aided by the huge concentration of companies into oligopolies, have come to own or control vast amounts of wealth. They passed a law that defined money as free speech, and now that the political class has proven incapable of handling a left-wing populist, an oligarch is stepping in directly, because his class’s lackeys, like Biden and Buttigieg (and indeed most of the field), are incompetent.

Bloomberg is an oligarch. He’s racist, sexist, and arrogant. He had New York’s laws changed so he could have a third term. He is competent and ruthless. In most respects, he is far more dangerous than Trump–even though he is for some things the left likes, like birth and gun control. Trump is good at demagoguery, but he isn’t a competent executive.

Bloomberg IS a competent executive. As he joked when asked about having two billionaires in the election, “Who’s the other one?”

(He also has massive interests in China and has done their bidding in the past, a fact the hysterical Russia-Gaters might note.)

My guess is that Bloomberg can’t win except through a brokered convention. The plan may be to deny Sanders an outright majority, then combine against him. Doing so will break the Democratic party. Remember that the Clintons still have the most power over the Democratic establishment, and Hilary hates Sanders with a vindictive passion, while she is on good terms with Bloomberg. Obama, who also still has power and influence, seems more ambivalent, but he’s never liked the left. On the other hand, reports are that he’s dispassionate and recognizes that denying the vote leader the nomination will damage the party.

If Bloomberg does get the fix in, who will win in a Bloomberg/Trump match? I don’t know, but while Bloomberg is more competent as an executive, my feeling is that Trump’s unique strength as a demagogue will be the deciding factor in outmatching Bloomberg. The question then becomes whether Bloomberg’s money and organizational abilities can outweigh that.

Trump has increasingly been acting against the rule of law. He always was, starting with emoluments violations, but now that he was impeached and not convicted, he feels immune to Congress’s censure.

Trump also HAS TO WIN. If he loses, he will be destroyed by his enemies in New York, in various criminal investigations. They will take him down and destroy him. He understands this.

So, it’s oligarch vs. left-wing populist to see who gets to take on the minor oligarch, criminal, and current president Donald Trump, who knows that a loss means the end of his good life and the destruction of the minor empire he has built.

The only possible good outcome for most Americans is a Sanders win. No other path leads anywhere decent.

This is likely be the nastiest election cycle since the Democrats deliberately sabotaged McGovern.

For approximately the same reasons.

It’ll be horrific, and the outcome will control whether many people live, die, or have good or terrible lives. I suggest getting some hot dogs. If Rome is going to burn, you may as well roast wieners.

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Bernie Wins New Hampshire Primary

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On February 12, 2020

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He’s only 1.6 percent ahead as of this article, but a win is a win. Buttigieg came in second.

We’ll see if Buttigieg gets any more bounce from this. His national numbers aren’t that great, but his New Hampshire numbers weren’t good until his showing in Iowa.

Bernie and Buttigieg got nine delegates each, Klobucharg received six, no one else got any. This means in delegates, Buttigieg is still one delegate ahead.

Feel free to discuss in comments, etc…

Update: Oh no, the media isn’t biased at all.

Update 2: Interesting exit poll demographic numbers.

Iowa Caucuses: Incompetent or, *cough,* “Not Cheating?”

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On February 6, 2020

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Since this is STILL going on, let’s lay out the basics.

Somehow, almost every “error” has worked against Bernie.

Buttigieg’s campaign gave the app company over $40k. The app company is called Shadow. Shadow’s parent company is called Acronym. Acronym’s CEO is Buttigieg’s advisor’s wife and also his communications director’s sister–in-law.

Now we have Perez, the chief of the DNC, saying there may have to be a re-do, just as the satellite caucuses, made up mostly of minorities and working class people, put Sanders over the top and give him the victory

When the errors are almost all against a single candidate, and never seem to benefit that same candidate, is it “coincidence” and “incompetence?”

Nor need we pretend that malign intention and incompetence are incompatible. As the old Bush, Jr. regime joke ran: “Evil or stupid? Why not both!”

The funny thing is, it’s hard to see Buttigieg’s path to the nomination, let alone the presidency. For all of this, *cough* not-cheating, he has no meaningful support in any other state. His only way through is by a brokered convention that throws the nomination to someone who isn’t likely to even be in the top three. If that was done, it would be rightly seen as a huge abnegation of democracy, and he would be crushed in the general.

So he’s not-cheating for what? He’s not even going to make overall, which means he won’t be the presumptive nominee next time.

Now, of course, the Democratic operative class, of which everyone who’s been involved–whether incompetent, not-cheating, or both–is a member, is scared of Sanders. Not because they really don’t believe in his policies (though they don’t), but because, unlike Warren, the next most “left” candidate, all indications are he won’t hire them for his administration.

They make their living by being connected, and Sanders is going to cut them out. He’s actually an existential threat to their right to be incompetent, lose a lot, and still make tons of money.

Oh.

Right, so that’s why it’s worth pulling out all the stops.

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Who Is More Competent? The Democrat Establishment or the Sanders Campaign?

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On February 4, 2020

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Bernie Sanders

So, one talking point being spun out is that Bernie’s people aren’t competent enough to run government because their expertise lies in winning primaries.

This is a prime example of the flailing that occurs when an establishment is scared of losing power (and when your billionaire boss is being crushed).

First, everyone who gets into power has, as a primary competence, the ability to get into power. There aren’t a lot of slots at the top, especially not in the Senate or the Presidency. If you got there, you have something on the ball. People don’t like to admit it about people they hate, but even Trump was shockingly competent at campaigning.

Second, after the Democratic party couldn’t build an app that worked to handle the Iowa caucus results AND the Sanders campaign could, well, perhaps it’s the outsider who’s competent?

There is a larger question here, about who will run the Sanders administration.

Outsiders, mostly. People who are competent and angry. Class traitors, who have worked inside the system, hated it, and want to smash and rebuild it.

The sort of people who ran FDR’s administration: People who can’t take the bullshit any more and want the government to actually work, and actually work for the people.

There will be teething problems, especially with those who have not been high-ranked in government before, but they will manage it–because it actually matters to them. It isn’t just about a paycheck.

Further, the damage Trump has done to the the bureaucracy will be more of an advantage than a bad thing in a Sanders administration. All that “draining the swamp” will make it easier to rebuild in the way Sanders want to, and it will reduce deep state resistance.

Because if you think the deep state hates Trump, well you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Hopefully, Sanders will be willing to use the power of the Presidency and remove deep state saboteurs.

But overall, while it’s possible he could botch it, I’m not super-worried about Bernie’s ability to run apparatus. The US has been sick for a long time, but there are tons of angry competent people who are itching to set it right. He just has to pick them, let them run, and if they blow it too often, replace them. (This is what FDR did).

Don’t be too fixed on methods, be fixated on outcomes. If one thing doesn’t work, have the next plan already teed up.

It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket surgery, anyway.

And I imagine the Bernie administration, unlike the Obama one, will be able to build a healthcare web site if they have four years in which to do it.

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Iowa Caucus

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On February 3, 2020

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It’s today. It’d be a big deal if Bernie won it, and the polls show him leading.

Last week was Sanders week here at the blog.

There was a post by Pachacutec on Sanders’ Theory of Change and how he can get his platform through if he’s President.

There was a post on why I think Sanders is the best candidate.

There was a post on the characteristics of the sort of people supporting each of the candidates–from Warren to Sanders, to Biden to Buttigieg.

And there was a post on why the most important thing in a candidate is what they want to do, and why that means Sanders is superior

Feel free to use comments to this thread to discuss the Iowa caucuses and the primary in general.

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Sanders vs. Warren Supporters

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On January 31, 2020

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Bernie Sanders

Something I’ve been tracking for a while is who supports Sanders vs. Warren. This is anecdotal, though there’s some data to back it up. What I’ve noticed is that the people I know who prefer Warren are those who are doing OK or well in the current system, but understand it isn’t a fair system, and want to help those for whom the system hasn’t worked.

They don’t want radical change, they want the system fixed: They want it to be fair, and somewhat kinder to the poor. But they aren’t actually behind real Medicare 4 All, or full student debt cancellation.

These are people who are comfortable with Warren because she is like them–a member of the system who has done well by the system, knows how it works, and how it should work (like in the 80s, but a bit kinder), and want it put that way. She’s an insider, and they’ll go on about how she worked the system behind the scenes.

Sanders supporters tend to be either people the system has failed, who want radical change, or people who, despite doing OK, still want radical change: They see the system as rotten and evil, even if they are one of those able to make it work for them. To them, Sanders is an outsider, despite all his time in DC, and if it’s true he isn’t as adept at working within the current system to get shit done as Warren is, that’s OK, because they want the current system broken. Being an outsider is the point; insiders can’t be trusted.

Biden followers are people who think that things were great under Obama, who want a restoration to 2016 (as opposed to Warren’ 1982.) Buttigieg followers want the same, but to feel woke because Pete’s Gay.

Sanders basically wants to go back to the New Deal, add in help for minorities and the environment, then advance it somewhat further.

Voting preferences thus come down to a combination of identity (they’re like me), position (how am I doing), and belief (is the system good or bad and when was it last good?).

Biden and Buttigieg are about a restoration to 2016, ie., the problem is just Trump. Warren’s about a restoration to 1982 (just as Republicans are starting to chop up the New Deal). Sanders is about 1944, fix the racism and sexism, and advance the New Deal further.

Or, so it seems to me. If you see otherwise, let us know in the comments. (Yes, yes, this is Sanders week at the blog.)

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Does Bernie Sanders Know What He’s Doing?

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On January 30, 2020

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Sanders-021507-18335- 0004

Sanders-021507-18335- 0004

This post by Pachacutec seems worth revisiting (originally published Feb 16, 2016)– Ian

Bernie Sanders is taking a lot of heat for making promises everyone agrees can’t be achieved in today’s Washington. However, Sanders is not just smoking free-love-sixties-dope when he talks about universal health care, free college tuition, stopping deportations, and drastically cutting the prison population.

I used to teach negotiation to MBA students and lawyers seeking CLE credit, and have included negotiation content in executive coaching and other consulting work I do. One of the things I’ve sometimes taught was how to use audience effects to gain leverage in negotiations. The best story I know to illustrate this comes from Gandhi, from his autobiography.

Gandhi Rides First Class

Gandhi’s early years as an activist led him to South Africa, where he advocated as a lawyer for the rights of Indians there. One discriminatory law required “coolie” Indians to ride third class on trains. Soon after arriving in South Africa, Gandhi himself had been thrown off a train for seating himself in first class.

Looking for a way to challenge the law, he dressed flawlessly and purchased a first class ticket face to face from an agent who turned out to be a sympathetic Hollander, not a Transvaaler. Boarding the train, Gandhi knew the conductor would try to throw him off, so he very consciously looked for and found a compartment where an English, upper class gentleman was seated, with no white South Africans around. He politely greeted his compartment mate and settled into his seat for the trip.

Sure enough, when the conductor came, he immediately told Gandhi to leave. Gandhi presented his ticket, and the conductor told him it didn’t matter, no coolies in first class. The law was on his side. But the English passenger intervened, “What do you mean troubling this gentleman? Don’t you see he has a first class ticket? I don’t mind in the least his traveling with me.” He turned to Gandhi and said, “You should make yourself comfortable where you are.”

The conductor backed down. “If you want to ride with a coolie, what do I care?”

And that, my friends, illustrates the strategic use of creating an audience effect to gain leverage in a negotiated conflict. The tactic can be applied in any negotiated conflict where an outside stakeholder party can be made aware of the conflict and subsequently influence its outcome.

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It’s the Conflict, Stupid

A couple of weeks ago, members of the neoliberal wonkosphere and others in the pundit class tut-tutted, fretted, and wearily explained to Sanders’ band of childish fools and hippies that his “theory of change” was wrong. Well, not merely wrong, but deceptive, deceitful, maybe even dangerous. False hopes, stakes are too high, and all that. This was Clinton campaign, and, more to the point, political establishment ideology pushback. When Ezra Klein starts voxsplaining how to catalyze a genuine social, cultural, and political movement, you know you’ve entered the land of unfettered bullshit.

Bernie Sanders, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter before him, wants to use mass appeal audience effects to renegotiate the country’s political and economic contract. The strategy, writ small in Gandhi’s train ride tale, is perfectly applicable–and has proven successful through history–in bringing about successful, peaceful, radical change.

These movements operate by forcing conflict out into the open, on favorable terms and on favorable ground. Make the malignancy of power show its face in daylight. Gandhi and the salt march. MLK and the Selma to Montgomery marches. FDR picking fights and catalyzing popular support throughout the New Deal era, starting with the first 100 days. OWS changed American language and political consciousness by cementing the frame of the 1% into the lexicon. BLM reminded America who it has been and still is on the streets of Ferguson.

One FDR snippet is instructive to consider in light all these discussions–and dismissals–of Sanders’ “theory of change.” As FDR watched progressive legislation be struck down by a majority conservative court, he famously proposed legislation that would have allowed him to add another justice. He failed, but:

In one sense, however, he succeeded: Justice Owen Roberts switched positions and began voting to uphold New Deal measures, effectively creating a liberal majority in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, thus departing from the Lochner v. New York era and giving the government more power in questions of economic policies. Journalists called this change “the switch in time that saved nine.”

This was a constitutional overreach by FDR, and it caused him political damage, but forcing the conflict created pressure on the Court, making its actions highly visible to the mass of people who wanted change, who voted for change, but did not always see or understand how the elite establishment acts to thwart change.

Your Mistakes are My Ladder

The paths to change for all of these movements are neither linear nor predictable. By nature, they act like guerilla movements. They force conflict and force an entrenched enemy into the open. Then, once exposed and vulnerable, the guerilla tactic is to attack opportunistically on strategically favorable ground. In peaceful social movements, “winning” means winning the hearts and minds of the majority of the society’s stakeholders to the point where they actively choose sides. First make them witnesses, then convert them into participants in the conflict. That’s exactly what Gandhi did with the Englishman in the first class compartment.

This is why calls from pundits and Camp Clinton for Bernie to lay out the fifteen point plan of how he gets from here to there are, at best, naïve. The social revolution playbook requires creating cycles of conflict and contrast, taking opportunistic advantage of your opponent’s mistakes. No one can predict with certainty where and how those opportunities will arise, though you can choose where to poke. If the Clinton campaign wants to know how Bernie can run that playbook in action, it need only review its own performance campaigning against him.

Does Sanders Have a Plan?

So, is Bernie Sanders the underpants gnome of political change? Is his theory: “1) Call for revolution; 2) ?????; 3) Profit!”? Or does he have something else–some other historical precedents–in mind? Everything I hear and see from the Sanders campaign suggests the latter.

Take a look at this ad from Sanders:

https://youtu.be/ptJf3ju3X1g

To me, this ad says that Sanders understands very clearly what kind of coalition and movement he needs to ignite to accomplish the vision he’s putting out in his campaign. It’s an aspirational vision, sure. And neither he nor any movement he helps create can or will accomplish all of it, just as FDR was unable to accomplish all he set out to achieve. Still, accomplishing as much as FDR did, relatively speaking, would be pretty damn good. Democrats used to say they liked that sort of thing.

Or how about this ad, where Sanders is introduced by Erica Garner explicitly as a “protestor,” invoking the lineage of MLK:

Yes, I’d say Sanders has a very clear, and historically grounded “theory of change.” What those who question it’s validity are really saying is either: 1) they lack imagination and can’t’ see beyond the status quo; 2) they lack knowledge of history, including American history, or; 3) they understand Sanders’ “theory of change” very well and want to choke it in the crib as quickly as they can.

They may succeed. Elites may beat Sanders himself but they will not beat the movement he’s invigorating but did not create. However, saying Sanders may fail is not the same as saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing, or that what he’s setting out to accomplish is impossible.

Because, if history shows us anything, it is, indeed, possible.

Identity, Politics

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On January 29, 2020

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MANDOS POST

If you’re someone who thinks that The Thing Called “Identity Politics” (I’ll call it TTCIP for short, because I think the term “identity” has been thoroughly poisoned at this point) is simply a fabrication of intelligence agencies or at minimum only lives and dies at the behest of the neoliberal leviathan, then this post is not for you, because we simply cannot communicate. It’s very likely that nefarious actors do have a vested interest in manipulating leftist divisions (duh!), but if you think what they’re manipulating is all made up, then you dismiss a great deal of what I know are real life experiences and genuine political motivation based on the genuine interests of otherwise very ordinary people. We are very liberal about these things at Chez Ian, so of course you can continue to participate in the comments of this thread, but I suggest that there is no real point in doing so and no one to convince.

So yeah, I’m pursuing this Rogan/Sanders thing yet again, or rather the issue that underlies that controversy, because the discussions on the point took an interesting turn that’s worth exploring. I thought that what would ensue was something quite predictable: “guns and butter” leftists would interpret/subsume TTCIP into class conflict and hold that once we had resolved the class conflict in favour of the working class and an economically egalitarian society, the main instigating factor for other TTCIP-based resentments would disappear. Thus, working to attract a constituency of somewhat socially reactionary working-class voters would be worth it to everyone in the long run, because allowing the left to gain power would give it the leverage to satisfy all demands at once. A candidate like Sanders could safely hold TTCIP positions alongside positions that attract everyone who lives on a precarious paycheque and while appealing separately to each subgroup.

But this is not what happened. Instead, I noticed that many people were not merely hostile to the intra-class division caused by TTCIP, but actually held that the content of all but the largest and most obvious of the claims (hard for most leftists to deny the negative effects of “classic” male chauvinism and sexual harassment, for example) were either inherently objectionable in themselves or were actually stated from a position of acquired power, even implying that they were now merely claims of the managerial class engaging in a form of totalitarian “psychological extortion,” as one commenter phrased it with what seemed a certain amount of unseemly relish. More or less explicit is the suggestion that these TTCIP claims are actually trivialities, and to sacrifice them without hope of later restitution in the pursuit of a class-conflict power coalition is actually a net positive overall.

In the not too distant past, I also used to take for granted the idea that some TTCIP claims were merely the result of neuroticism or privileged frivolity. But I don’t throw out implied claims to justice lightly, so upon deeper investigation and contact with some of the sorts of people making those “frivolous” claim, I realized that actually it was intellectually lazy to dismiss them and assume that they hadn’t thought about the consequences. I came to understand that actually, even for the “sillier-sounding” ones, there were real consequences for actual people, often in surprising and indirect ways. That some of the conflicts represented by the “petty” TTCIP claims actually have a long lineage, that what appears like inordinate power is for them a brief moment to emerge into the light of the sun, and the powerful appearance is merely that the rest of us are not used to having ever been confronted by them. And that, yes, only the ascension of some TTCIP claimants to the upper classes gave them any social capital by which to emerge into daylight, and that is why, to some extent, it looks like it is being driven by powerful people.

Furthermore, while these groups are individually quite small, together they are large enough and overlapping enough with the general population to change, e.g., electoral outcomes.

So when even very progressive politicians, left-wing both economically and socially, decide to try to embrace media figures and voting blocs that are indifferent at best or actively hostile at worst to the claims of TTCIP, it’s not irrational to worry that, in order to hold on to newfound political coalitions, they may attempt to jettison the old, inconvenient, frivolous-seeming ones. That is doubly true when it appears that some part of the online or real-life economic left does not really intend to use the opportunity to reconcile these newfound supporters with the old, now-unpopular TTCIP ones. And that for the Good of Humanity, they intend for people with TTCIP claims to, possibly forever, give up their moment in the sun and accept the consequences to themselves that they always had to do.

Perhaps this is necessary. Perhaps it is even overblown, and we’re all going to sit in the big tent, together. But this debate has shown, at the very least, that it’s not a made-up conflict, except for those of you who think TTCIP claims are only ever fabricated by intelligence agencies.

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