Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 17, 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
The Elephant in the Room–No, the Other Elephant
Charles Hugh Smith [Of Two Minds, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2024]
…The reason why it’s so easy to ignore extreme wealth inequality (EWI) is that we don’t experience EWI as a thing, we experience a decline in our standard of living as wealth is siphoned up into the top 10%….
The RAND study Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 concluded that capital skimmed $50 trillion from labor from 1975 to 2018.
Using data from the Federal Reserve’s FRED database (series A4102E1A156NBEA), correspondent Alain M. calculated the actual sum for the period 1970 to 2022 (2022 being the most recent data available) was a staggering $149 trillion: his spreadsheet is available here as a PDF: Employees Share of Gross Domestic Income 1970-2022.
If wage earners’ share of Gross Domestic Income had remained at 51% instead of declining to 43%, wage earners would have received an additional $149 trillion over those 52 years. That’s roughly $3 trillion a year, which works out to an additional $22,000 annually for America’s 134 million full-time workers or an additional $18,000 annually for the nation’s entire work force (full-time, part-time, self-employed, gig workers) of 163 million….
In my view, there should be zero taxes on all earnings up to the median wage of $60,000 annually–no Social Security taxes, nothing–and progressively steeper taxes on all income / capital gains from capital/finance above some modest amount, say half of the median wage ($30,000 annually), along with a transaction tax for every financial trade submitted, whether it executes or not. Shifting the tax burden from labor to capital/finance would at least start the overdue rebalancing….
Crypto industry accounts for half of corporate donations in 2024 election
GRAPH: Top 10 corporate campaign funders in the 2024 US election
[Public Citizen, via The Big Picture 11-17-2024]
- In 2024, crypto corporations have poured over $119 million directly into influencing federal elections, primarily into a non-partisan super PAC dedicated to electing pro-crypto candidates and defeating crypto skeptics.
- Crypto corporations are by far the dominant corporate political spenders in 2024 as nearly half (44%) of all corporate money contributed during this year’s elections ($274 million so far) came from crypto backers.
- Koch Industries is a distant second place in 2024. The privately held conglomerate owned by Charles and, formerly, the late David Koch, contributed $25 million to its Koch-controlled Americans for Prosperity Action and $3.25 million toward electing Republicans to Congress.
[TW: cryptocurrencies were created and promoted by libertarians in line with their dream of total freedom from government regulation and oversight. In the Federalist Number 10, Madison wrote “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.” In the Federalist Number 15, Hamilton poses one simple question to test the worth of any national financial scheme: “Is private credit the friend and patron of industry?” Which has contributed more to the advance of the human condition? Libertarianism, or the civic republicanism embodied by Madison and Hamilton? It is exactly because they are unable or unwilling to contemplate such questions that USA and western elites have so little support among their publics. ]
Welcome To The United States of Crypto (podcast)
Jared Jacang Maher, November 15, 2024 [The Lever]
After spending hundreds of millions to influence politicians in both parties, the industry defeated some of its fiercest critics and scored bipartisan support, particularly from President-elect Donald Trump, despite crypto’s potential risks for consumers and the financial system. Today on Lever Time, Lever reporter Freddy Brewster discusses crypto’s emergence as a political power broker and what industry insiders are hoping for in return for their massive donations….
For a transcript of this episode, click here.
Thomas Frank [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-13-2024]
(This version is from the Salt Lake Tribune because the NYT is working hard at preventing the various archives from working.) Worth reading in full: This:
At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats….
“Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out. I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals….
Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals. That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.”
The overturning of the New Deal Democrats, the Great Society Democrats was a generational story. I don’t know if there’s a social science term for it but people never betray their betrayals. Once you do something like that, once you turn the Democratic party, which these guys did in the 1970s, once you turn on the Democratic party and say we’ve had enough of organized labor, and we’ve had enough of the party of the New Deal and all that, you’re never going back. That is what you did as a generation. It is your accomplishment. They’re psychologically incapable of saying “Oh, we were wrong, our great moment as a generation was a mistake.” No human can do that.”
Mehrsa Baradaran, The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America (New York, W.W. Norton, 2024)
P. 66
The role of monetarism in neoliberal market orthodoxy was important, but obscured. This was due to its own success—monetarism hid the levers that control credit and money supply behind a curtain of “data-based scientific measurement.” Out of sight were the New Deal–era credit programs, subsidies, and the entire system of credit and money—and, most important, the trust that undergirded it was created by federal government power. The dollar became the. world’s currency and its control was handed over to neoliberal economic theories, ensuring monetary scarcity and maintaining the advantages 6f the already wealthy nations. Without the flexibility to expand their economies according to their own economic programs, the Global South would have to rely on “development loans.” In fact, the dollar became the United States’ most valuable export.At the time Friedman’s monetarism was introduced, it was widely denounced by everyone from mainstream economists like Paul Samuelson to even Hayek. It could not be proved or debunked in a real economy and without exact measures of monetary supply. But it would become the policy of the Federal Reserve, especially when Ronald Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan to lead the Fed in 1987. Monetarism did not rise on account of its explanatory or predictive powers. Even Friedman had to apologize for so confidently predicting a recession that never came based on monetarist principles. He admitted, “I was wrong, absolutely wrong. And I have no good explanation as to why I was wrong.” As William Poole, a former Fed executive, summarized monetarism, “Those of us who have developed strong theories tried to fit the world into the theory rather than the other way round. Wrong as Friedman was, the “science” of monetarism reshaped the world economy—and rhetoric. For hundreds that process started during the 1960s interregnum.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
As US Keeps Arms Flowing, UN Panel Says Israeli Assault on Gaza ‘Consistent With Genocide’
Jake Johnson, November 14, 2024 [CommonDreams]
“Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation, and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war, and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population.”
Chris Hedges: Genocidal Scorecard
[ConsortiumNews, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2024]
President Biden’s Gaza Policy Leaves the Middle East in Flames
Juan Cole [Counterpunch, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2024]
Egypt struggles with influx of 1.2 million (Sudanese refugees)
Sudan Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 11-12-2024]
Oligarchy
Britain must treat tech giants like nation states, minister warns
[The Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-14-2024]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
US cancels $1.1bn of Somalia’s debt in ‘historic’ financial agreement
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-10-2024]
How Albertsons Kills Rural Grocers with Land Use Restrictions
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2024]
“[S]upermarket executives see rural markets as particularly easy to monopolize, because there is often just one store. They even have a name, “no-comp[etition] or low-comp[etition] zones,” according to one executive on the stand. Of course that makes sense, we’d expect firms to maximize profits where they can. One might be tempted to say, well, there are some towns that can’t support more than one store. And that might be true, except that there are several examples of supermarket chains using tactics in such towns to thwart the opening of competition. How? Well, they find a way to dominate the existing plots of land and buildings suitable for such a store. In June, for instance, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is also litigating against the merger, fined Albertsons $25,000 for imposing a land use restriction on a store it sold in 2018 in a low-income section of Bellingham, Washington. As part of the sale, the supermarket giant put a requirement on the deed that no grocery store could open there until 2038. Ferguson found this provision was a violation of the state antitrust law. These kinds of land use restrictions are likely common. A few months ago, I got an email from an economist focused on rural areas, who explained how Albertsons abuses its market power in a series of small skiing towns in rural California using a similar strategy.”
Boeing Shows Why Squeezing Workers Is Reckless
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-11-2024]
“A shocking percentage of full-time workers don’t earn enough to raise a family, and that was true even before the recent spike in inflation made everything a lot more expensive. As much as two-thirds of full-time workers age 25 and older can’t cover the basic necessities for a family of four with one parent working, according to wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and living wage estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s this reality that has injected fresh vigor into labor action in recent years. Unions have scored first-time organizing wins at companies across industries including at Starbucks Corp., Apple Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Amazon.com Inc., while picketing workers have won record pay increases in some cases. Boeing’s is the latest victory, and expect more to follow as more workers refuse to show up for work that doesn’t allow them to pay the bills. In the Seattle area, where Boeing produces most of its aircraft, a living wage is roughly $50 an hour for a family of four with one adult working, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, or about $104,000 a year based on a 40-hour work week. It’s probably no coincidence then that Boeing’s labor deal will raise the average machinist’s annual wage to $119,000 over four years. Assuming 3% annual inflation, a living wage for a family of four will be closer to $117,000 in four years, very nearly matching what Boeing’s workers agreed to.
The substantial wage increase shows the degree to which Boeing’s workers fall short of a living wage. It’s a harsh truth that Boeing could easily hide from investors because public companies — even the biggest, most vital among them — are not required to disclose how much they pay workers, a hole in their financial statements that regulators should plug.” • Hmm. Social reproduction theory?
Predatory finance
Rules imposed after financial crisis have ‘gone too far’, [UK Chancellor] Reeves tells City bankers
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-16-2024]
Restoring balance to the economy
Philadelphia Workers Are Readying a Bill With a Basic Demand: Just Enforce the Law
Jen Byers November 13, 2024 [The American Prospect]
Nannies, housekeepers and gig workers have already won legal protections. Now they want consequences for bosses who break the rules.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Angus Deaton [International Monetary Fund, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-11-2024]
From March, and first mentioned by alert reader Turtle. ” Economics Nobel Prize winners have been known to denounce each other’s work at the ceremonies in Stockholm, much to the consternation of those laureates in the sciences who believe that prizes are given for getting things right.” Ouch! And: “[Mainstream] economists, who have prospered mightily over the past half century, might fairly be accused of having a vested interest in capitalism as it currently operates.” More: “Without an analysis of power, it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism.” More: “[W]e have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being.” And: “[A] concern with distribution was overruled by attention to the average, often nonsensically described as the “national interest.’” And: “Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms that are plausible, interesting, and worth thinking about.”
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Google AI chatbot responds with a threatening message: “Human … Please die.”
[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 11-16-2024]
A college student in Michigan received a threatening response during a chat with Google’s AI chatbot Gemini.
In a back-and-forth conversation about the challenges and solutions for aging adults, Google’s Gemini responded with this threatening message:
“This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
Insurance companies already refusing coverage on basis of genetic risk
[BoingBoing, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2024]
Ed Zitron [Where’s Your Ed At, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-14-2024]
“[E]verybody is affected by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy, because everybody is using technology, all the time, and the technology in question is getting worse. This election cycle saw more than 25 billion text messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was crammed full of random election advertising. Our phones are beset with notifications trying to ‘growth-hack’ us into doing things that companies want, our apps full of microtransactions, our websites slower and harder-to-use with endless demands of our emails and our phone numbers and the need to log back in because they couldn’t possibly lose a dollar to somebody who dared to consume their content for free. Our social networks are so algorithmically charged that they barely show us the things we want them to anymore, with executives dedicated to filling our feeds with AI-generated slop because despite being the customer, we are also the revenue mechanism. Our search engines do less as a means of making us use them more, our dating apps have become vehicles for private equity to add a toll to falling in love, our video games are constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite it costing money and being attached to our account, we don’t actually own any of the streaming media we purchase. We’re drowning in spam — both in our emails and on our phones — and at this point in our lives we’re probably agreed to 3 million pages worth of privacy policies allowing companies to use our information as they see fit. And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly.”
Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Feed You More AI Slop
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-14-2024]
“Get ready, folks. In much the same way that short videos and viral content took over feeds once populated with posts from our friends and family, the next wave of content will be machine-generated. A progression from personal to viral content and now to AI content seems like a dystopian direction for a social media firm that’s long framed itself as “connecting people.” But Zuckerberg calls this new trend ‘promising.’ His view is not unusual in the industry. I’ve spoken to several technology executives who believe that AI-generated content — which could make up as much as 90% of content on the Internet, according to one wild estimate — will be accepted as the new normal. AI-generated videos will eventually be called ‘videos,’ the thinking goes.” • Nice to see “AI Slop” make it into a Bloomberg headline.
Inside a Firewall Vendor’s 5-Year War With the Chinese Hackers
[Wired, via The Big Picture 11-10-2024]
Hijacking Its Devices Sophos went so far as to plant surveillance “implants” on its own devices to catch the hackers at work—and in doing so, revealed a glimpse into China’s R&D pipeline of intrusion techniques.
Climate and environmental crises
Dutch appeals court overturns landmark climate ruling against Shell
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2024]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change
[MIT Technology Review, via The Big Picture 11-11-2024]
Jennifer Doudna, the co-developer of CRISPR, says there’s a “coming revolution” in climate-adapted crops and animals.
Democrats’ political malpractice
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-11-2024]
ZitoSalena
@ZitoSalena
Interviewed thousands of folks across Pennsylvania as well as North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan & Wisconsin. Working suburban & rural voters. Across-the-board it was inflation. Many times they knew exactly how much something had gone up from food to gas to car/home insurance.
Thomas Neuburger, November 14, 2024 [God’ Spies]
GRAPH: What issue mattered to you most in deciding how you voted?
[For Harris, democracy; for Trump, the economy]
The Democrats’ Refusal to Break With a Broken System Cost Them Dearly
Eric Schmeltzer, November 15, 2024 [The New Republic]
The party has followed its affection for Beltway institutions and their stodgy norms to its logical endpoint—getting locked out of power….
The one self-evident answer that no high-minded pundit wants to admit is that people simply bought what Donald Trump was selling. Specifically, that Trump manages to appeal to voters who believe the system sucks and respond to what he says, over and over again, he’s going to do about it: crush it, shove obstacles out of the way, and get immediate results. It’s obviously authoritarianism and a terrible way to actually run a country. But I sympathize with many of the people who pinned their hopes on a radical transformation of a status quo that’s left people behind, including many in traditional Democratic constituencies.
Donald Trump tapped into something that everyone feels—that our current system of checks and balances and polite political norms doesn’t allow the country to move either nimbly or boldly enough, resulting in a consistent failure to deliver relief and results that people tangibly feel and desperately want.
A survey of Americans in 2024 from the Partnership for Public Service showed that trust and confidence in government was at an all-time low. A whopping 63 percent of Americans said they do not trust the government—up from the mid-40s in 2022. There is not a single demographic where the majority believes the government can be trusted—not Democrats, not Republicans, not men, not women, not Latinos, not Black Americans. No one.
Only 23 percent of Americans said they trust the government, far below the 35 percent who said that in 2022. Sixty-six percent say the government is incompetent. A full 68 percent of Americans say democracy is not working in the United States today, versus only 23 percent who say it is. Read that last part again. Nearly seven in 10 Americans say democracy is not working.
[TW: An excellent essay, except for what Schmeltzer omits: USA today is no longer a republic, but an oligarchy being looted by plutocrats — and Trump is one of them. ]
Democrats Are Letting a Vital Chance to Protect Workers Slip Away
Chris Lehmann, November 13, 2024 [The Nation]
What Senate Democrats Can Still Do to Promote the General Welfare
Harold Meyerson November 12, 2024
Until December 31st, they can still confirm some Biden nominees to crucial regulatory and judicial posts.
Gabriel Winant [Dissent, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2024]
“Just as in 2016, Harris supporters have fallen back on the racism and sexism of American society as an explanation for defeat. No doubt these are hulking obstacles, but they don’t suffice as omnibus explanation….
[But] these are not static phenomena. Trump mobilizes these forces; the task of his opponent is to countermobilize and defeat them. A successful campaign draws on the material of the existing society and assembles it into a portrait of the present and a vision of the future: it does not simply reflect frozen facts of public opinion and common sense but reorganizes them and ultimately produces new forms.” And: “The pathologies of the Democrats, though, are in a sense not the result of errors. It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. As the organized power of the latter has been washed away, the commitment has become somewhat more aspirational: Harris notably cleaned up with the richest income bracket of voters.”….
“The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation. Champions of the domestic rule of law and the rules-based international order, they engaged in a spectacular series of violations of domestic and international law. Promising a new New Deal, they admonished voters to be grateful for how well they were already doing economically. Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction. It is by this dynamic that a decade of (appropriate) anti-Trump hysteria led first to the adoption of parts of Trump’s program by the Democrats, and then finally his reinstallation as president at new heights of public opinion favorability. Nothing better than the real thing.”
The Democrats Committed Suicide This Year
James K. Galbraith [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-14-2024]
” Trump’s final tally will be only slightly higher than his 2020 total of 74.2 million votes. For Harris, though, we will see a disastrous decline from the 81.2 million votes that Joe Biden received, and this despite the fact that the voting-eligible population has increased by four million. In other words, Trump gained almost no support in his four-year campaign for redemption. If all the voters were the same, one could even say that he merely got his 2020 supporters to vote for him again. In fact, about 13 million people (most of them eligible voters) have died, and about 17 million have become voter-eligible, implying that Trump replaced his losses about one-for-one, while a decline in turnout cost the Democrats nearly ten million votes. These numbers cast grave doubt on explanations of the result that focus on economic conditions, and still more on the impact of advertising and get-out-the-vote campaigns. The results also deflate analyses based on the ‘American voter.’… The real story is that one side voted at peak strength, and the other did not.”….
“After we have ruled out the implausible, at least three reasonable conjectures remain. The first concerns the conditions of voting. In 2020, owing to the pandemic, voting was more accessible than ever before…. In 2024, some – though not all – of these expedients no longer existed, after already declining in 2022. It is standard in America to use the structure of voting to help determine the outcome: long lines at the polls discourage turnout, especially among working people with limited time.” Yes, the distinctive competence of the modern political party. More: “A second plausible explanation concerns voter registration. Students and low-income minority citizens move more frequently and usually must re-register every time their address changes. It is highly probable that this burden falls more heavily on Democrats.” And now: “The third hypothesis turns on the long-standing divisions within the Democratic Party….
The Clintons and Obamas are currently the de facto heads of the centrist faction, and Biden and Harris were their appointees…. The Democratic leadership engineered this situation and must therefore desire it. Win or lose, it remains in control of a vast shadow apparatus: consultants, pollsters, lobbyists, fundraisers, key positions on Capitol Hill. Any concessions to new forces within the party would undermine this control, whereas losses to Republicans do not. The Democratic leadership would far rather lose an election or two – or even become a permanent minority party – than open the party to people it cannot control. The 2024 election was, therefore, a suicide. The Democratic leadership was, at best, indifferent to the erosion of voting access, negligent in retaining 2020’s new voters, and proactive in ensuring the abstention of what little remains of its ‘left’ wing. It tried to cover this up, as usual, with celebrity endorsements and identity politics. As usual, it did not work. But the party’s mandarins and their apparatchiks will be around next time to try again.”
[TW: Emphasis mine; Thomas Frank has the same conclusion. As one of the great proponents of civic republicanism, John Milton, has Satan conclude in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.” ]
‘They Blame the People That They Let Down’ Longtime DNC member unloads on his party after watching it fumble another election to Trump
Tim Dickinson, November 10, 2024 [Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 11-10-2024]
Howie Klein, November 14, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Celebrated documentarian and a member of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party Executive Committee, Billy Corben isn’t just quitting the Executive Committee, he’s quitting the Democratic Party. Like anyone with two brain cells, he’s sick of the corruption and incompetence of the state’s Democratic Party. He has also called on Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried— preparing for her future disastrous run for the Senate seat Marco Rubio is abandoning— to quit her party position as well. It’s worth carefully reading Corben’s spectacular open letter of resignation…
Corben isn’t the only Democratic Party official calling attention to the problems inherent in the party’s dependence on the consultant class. Former DNC Executive Committee member (2001- 2017) James Zogby wrote an opinion piece for Common Dreams on Tuesday, My Fury Is Aimed at the Democratic Consultancy Class Which Runs the Party. He wrote that his overriding emotion to Trump’s victory last week was anger, “anger at the Democrat’s political campaigns and consultants who brought us this disaster. And anger at the collapse of the political parties as vibrant organizations that once brought people together, empowered them, and were responsive to their needs.
Obama-Trump vs McCain-Harris Counties
[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 11-10-2024]
In 2024, Donald J. Trump won 480 counties that Obama had won in 2008. In contrast, Harris secured just 19 counties that McCain had secured back then. The gap between these two contains a much stronger signal of the class-partisan cleavage than that revealed by the covariates of vote change, which is the standard approach. The reason is that 2,557 or 83% of all counties are either deep red of deep blue. Swings that took place in them (and their underlying social cleavages) are not as directly implicated as these swing counties in the outcome. And conditioning on them allows us to isolate a cleaner signal….
Again, this difference estimator contains a cleaner class signal than that revealed by change in vote share. And we can make two quite unambiguous inferences from this more kosher analysis.
First, the educated, affluent, urban elites—even those who had traditionally been Republican enough to vote for McCain over Obama—turned against Trump presumably because they bought the argument made by Democrats that he posed an existential threat to the American republic.
Second, large numbers of Obama voters—who can hardly be accused of racism—voted for Trump this year. And these voters are disproportionately on the wrong side of the diploma divide, have more modest incomes, and live in more rural areas that are bleeding people. This the classic signature of the working class.
So what just happened can be best described as the revenge of what is condescending called “flyover country” against the hated “coastal elites.” Trump won on the backs of a powerful multiracial working class coalition.
There’s So Much To Learn From Catastrophes That Grow Out Of Your Own Shortcomings— But Few Ever Do
Howie Klein, November 10, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
After the 2016 fiasco, the DNC chose not to do an autopsy. I mean if you already know everything there is to know why bother? But RootsAction do one for them. Judging by what just happened, I’ll guess no one at the DNC ever read it. Among the key findings the DNC missed in 2016… and relived last week….
[TW: amazing and disheartening that the Democratic Leadership learned nothing from their 2016 defeat.]
Who Will Lead the Democratic Party?
Robert Kuttner November 11, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…One early test of the party’s future direction will be the election of a new chair of the Democratic National Committee, to be held in late February or early March. The current chair, Jaime Harrison of South Carolina, will be stepping down. Harrison was the protégé of James Clyburn, whose effusive endorsement helped President Biden win key Southern primaries and the 2020 nomination….
White House control has long been the unfortunate norm whenever Democrats have the presidency. You have to go back to the inspired term of Howard Dean (2005–2009) to find a creative party chair who was serious about party-building in all 50 states. Dean helped turn red states purple. His work in red states also helped Barack Obama secure the 2008 nomination, since it was in red states where Obama won more primaries. Obama rewarded Dean by firing him and bringing in his own loyalists.
The party becomes far more important when Democrats are in opposition. But even then, the party establishment seeks to keep control.
After the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, progressives nearly elected one of their own, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a close ally of Bernie Sanders, who had a similar vision as Dean. But then the Obama-Clinton people swooped in and mounted a successful campaign for Tom Perez, Obama’s outgoing secretary of labor. The election was so close (Perez won by six votes) that the Perez faction had to concede several process reforms, as well as de facto roles for Ellison (as something close to a co-chair) and Sanders ally Larry Cohen….
Several names are being mentioned for the new party chair. Two people are actively taking soundings: Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia and longtime voter registration organizer; and Ken Martin, the Minnesota state party chair who also chairs the national association of state party organizations. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is said to be interested. Party donors are in conversation with several others, which would continue an unfortunate trend.
Two people whose names have been prominently mentioned are Ben Wikler, the widely admired Wisconsin state party chair; and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. According to my sources, Wikler is said to have ruled the job out. Brown is not running but might consider it. (UPDATE: A separate source indicates that Wikler is also considering a run.)
For those who want to reduce the influence of billionaire money in the Democratic Party in favor of sorely needed working-class appeal, Brown would be a fine choice. Brown kept defying the odds to win election in red Ohio until a wave election did him in. He has favored tough financial regulation. The Ohio Senate race looked to be tied until the crypto industry dumped $40 million into the campaign to defeat Brown.
As a victim of dark money, Brown would be an important force for resisting the influence of billionaires on the people’s party….
The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself
Pete Davis [The Nation, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2024]
“The party should jettison its consultant class and move toward a local-membership model that would help to rejuvenate civic life across the country.” More: “Here’s one sketch of how we could begin to turn this around: The 4 Ms of party membership, each symbolic of a necessary mindset shift. First, Membership Cards. When you join the Labour Party in Britain, you get mailed a welcome packet, complete with a membership card and information about how to get more involved. The Democratic Party could learn from this: It should mean something to join the Democrats. … Second, Maps. There should be an accountable Democratic captain for every neighborhood in the country…. Third, Meeting Halls. Monthly meetings should be designed with utmost care. Best practices for making meetings, working groups, and annual calendars warm and engaging should be gathered and disseminated. Formal rules and procedures should not be fetishized at the expense of engaging new members. … Finally, Mutual Aid. The party should directly care for members and for the broader community. Democrats should do disaster relief, take on homeless-shelter shifts, cook food when members have a baby, welcome new immigrants to town, and host block parties throughout the year. … This is all easier dreamed than realized. Fostering a culture of membership is a long-haul project—more like the planting of acorns than the planting of sunflower seeds.”
[TW: The (anti)Republican Party transformed, but not of and by itself. The (anti)Republican Party was transformed by a “grass roots” movement that despised the leadership of the (anti)Republican Party. And, I think it is important to note that this “grass roots” movement was lavishly funded and supported by the revanchist rich, such as the Kochs. I’m not aware of anyone who has examined this unique event: an anti-establishment movement funded and promoted by a unique faction of that establishment. It is, in many disturbing ways, a triumph of the Cold War John Birch Society. Which bring up another paradox: the today’s conservatives view Russia and Putin favorably, rather than adversarialy, as during the Cold War.]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Howie Klein, November 14, 2024 [downwithtyranny.com]
Trump’s New War on Press Freedoms Has Already Begun
Aril Paul, November 16, 2024 [FAIR, via CommonDreams]
Trump’s transactional regime
[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2024]
David Dayen, November 14, 2024 [The American Prospect]
…But while these cabinet officials will attend meetings and nod their heads at whatever Trump says, the early indications strongly suggest they won’t be setting policy. That will be reserved for the czars, the internal White House appointees that Trump has made in parallel, and who are key to the emerging vision of centralizing power under the president-elect’s thumb.
This development is as funny as it is maddening. A good chunk of conservative media was obsessed with Barack Obama’s “czars,” White House advisers who in the conspiratorial retelling were usurping the Constitution and amassing unearned authority to carry out the president’s bidding. Most of them were in coordinating roles for things like the stimulus program or the bank bailout.
I doubt that the same house organs will see much wrong with Trump’s czars this time around. But it’s clear that’s where the action will be in this incoming administration.
You can start with the border czars. Technically speaking, there’s only one: Tom Homan, the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who has been formally tapped to carry out Trump’s mass deportation program. But Stephen Miller, named deputy chief of staff for policy and a Homeland Security adviser, will obviously also be part of this effort. Whatever Kristi Noem thinks about border security is irrelevant; Miller and Homan are going to plan and execute the forced removal of potentially millions of undocumented people across the country.
These are the same people, incidentally, who carried out exceedingly unpopular family separations in the first Trump term. Homan has vowed to enter all parts of the country to eject immigrants, setting up confrontations in, and with, blue states and cities. Much of the next couple years will be about Homan and Miller’s blueprints. And neither requires Senate confirmation; Homan wasn’t confirmed as ICE director anyway….
Big Oil Sends Trump Its Wish List
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism 11-15-2024]
The Populist Paradox Of Matt Gaetz (podcast)
Arjun Singh, November 14, 2024 [The Lever]
Monopoly expert Matt Stoller unpacks the surprising antitrust record of Trump’s controversial attorney general pick.
Trump Nominates ‘Khanservative’ Matt Gaetz as Attorney General
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-14-2024]
(anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
New GOP Senate Leader Is a Former Lobbyist Who Has Taken Aim at Social Security
Jake Johnson, November 13, 2024 [CommonDreams]
Sen. John Thune “has called for taking the debt limit hostage to force cuts to Social Security,” warned one defender of the nation’s most effective anti-poverty program.
Elite impunity
’Big Day… for Justice’: US Jury Finds Contractor CACI Liable for Abu Ghraib Torture
Brett Wilkins, November 12, 2024 [CommonDreams]
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