Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
April 21, 2016 Bruce Dixon, managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, on black voters’ mysterious lingering romance with the Clintons • Alfredo Saad Filho on the vote to impeach Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff
Fresh audio product
Just posted to my radio archive:
April 7, 2016 David Howell on the increase of the minimum wage to $15 in California and New York • Vidar Thorsteinsson, author of this article, on the political crisis in Iceland unleashed by the Panama Papers
March 31, 2016 Nikil Saval, author of this article, on the hippie-inspired new architecture of the Silicon Valley • Alfredo Saad Filho on the ongoing political and economic crisis of Brazil
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
March 24, 2016 Rachel Price, author of Planet/Cuba, on the art scene in that country as Obama visits • Sam Stein, author of this article, on neoliberal housing programs, de Blasio style
March 17, 2016 Ben Zachariah on the activities of India’s fascist BJP government at home and abroad • David Rieff, author of The Reproach of Hunger, on the economic development racket
Zoë Heller on My Turn
It’s always a delight to read Zoë Heller, especially so when she says this about My Turn: “a solid and persuasive guide to what has been characterized as shady or shabby or unprincipled in Clinton’s political career.”
Other, less personally relevant, highlights from the piece:
…[her memoir Hard Choices] fairly brims with “aren’t women amazing?” sentiments of the sort one finds cross-stitched on decorative cushions.
…her much-vaunted “women’s rights are human rights” declaration in Beijing in 1995 (a speech that her supporters characterize somewhat implausibly as a watershed moment in feminist history)…
Just as in 2008, Clinton has found herself rejected by her “natural constituency” as a less inspirational candidate, a less plausible agent of change than her male opponent—and this time, it’s rather more galling, because the opponent in question is not an elegant, younger black man who can sing Al Green songs, but a seventy-four-year-old white man with the oratory style of a staff sergeant.
Notwithstanding these rather cynical appeals to feminist sympathy, her trials as a female public figure have always inspired considerable fellow feeling in American women, particularly college-educated, white women.
It would be a fine thing to have a woman in the White House. But, really—let’s not put her there because someone once said she had “cankles.”
But she does get one thing wrong. She quotes me saying “If by some miracle Sanders were to be elected, the establishment would crush him,” and concludes from that that I’m “not a Sanders fan.” But I am! I love the way Bernie has made it clear that there is an excitable constituency for social democracy; I love the way Bernie has exposed the class fissures within the Democratic party, forcing Hillary and her surrogates to run against social democracy. Even though Hillary will almost certainly get her damned nomination, Bernie has opened up American politics and given us a lot to work with beyond July.
Varieties of Krugmanesque experience
Paul Krugman’s talking shit about Bernie Sanders again:
Indeed, what the Sanders movement, with its demands for purity and contempt for compromise and half-measures, most nearly resembles is not the Trump insurgency but the ideologues who took over the G.O.P., becoming the establishment Mr. Trump is challenging. And yes, we’re starting to see hints from that movement of the ugliness that has long been standard operating procedure on the right: bitter personal attacks on anyone who questions the campaign’s premises, an increasing amount of demagogy from the campaign itself. Compare the Sanders and Clinton Twitter feeds to see what I mean.
This is funny, since it’s a bitter personal attack coming from a centrist ideologue on a political movement that challenges his view of the world and that of his candidate, Hillary Clinton. Anyone who believes in popular mobilization and not rule by technocrats is a demagogue to someone like Krugman.
But speaking of purity and demagogy and contempt for half-measures, let’s do a little time travel and recall what Paul Krugman wrote about the massive fraud that used to be Enron, which collapsed in 2001 causing scores of billions of dollars in losses and putting 20,000 employees out of work. Pointing out that the company paid him $50,000 to join this advisory board to introduce this quote would no doubt be regarded by Krugman as yet another bitter personal attack. Pure coincidence for sure! Anyway, here’s Krugman writing in Fortune in 1999:
The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was brought home to me recently when I joined the advisory board at Enron—a company formed in the ’80s by the merger of two pipeline operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It’s sort of like the difference between your father’s bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company’s pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.
It’s all there—the born-again 1990s neoliberal love of The Market, the embrace of business as revolutionary, the genuflection before Goldman Sachs, and the excruciating cliché “not your father’s X.”
The Krugman archives are full of interesting material. For example, he wNow he’s busily denouncing Sanders for his attempts to bring something like a Scandinavian welfare state to the U.S., citing the worries of his tepid liberal colleagues that it would just be too expensive. In 1998, just before he wrote that Enron informercial, he disclosed that his ideal regime would be “Sweden of 1980…very generous and high social expenses, a flat income distribution and no unemployment.” Seven years later, in 2005, he told Pepe Escobar that “We should be getting 28% of GDP in revenue. We are only collecting 17%.” (Update: now it’s 19%.)
It’s funny—now that there’s a candidate advocating something like that agenda, he’s against it, standing instead with the finger-wagging, “No, you can’t have that!” contingent. But a guy who’s getting paid $225,000 a year to teach one graduate course and study income inequality is familiar with embracing contradictions.
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
March 10, 2016 Anne Balay, co-author of this article, on the tough but romantic life of the truck driver • Lester Spence, author of Knocking the Hustle, on neoliberalism and black politics
[Back after KPFA fundraising break. If you like these shows and want to keep them coming, please support KPFA. If you do, be sure to mention Behind the News.]
The New Republicans
In a remarkable New York Times story, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell has revealed the strategy of the Hillary Democrats as they face the challenge of Donald Trump:
“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” he said.
In other words, they’re hoping to terrify the moderately conservative into voting for their candidate. Forget having any positive message that might attract disaffected “blue-collar Democrats,” meaning the white working class. The appeal is going to be to the center–right. Forget too the enthusiasm for Sanders among the young, an appeal based on hope for a better future. As former Obama advisor turned Uber advisor David Plouffe put it in the same article:
“Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”
Marco Rubio coyly suggested the other day that Donald Trump has a tiny todger (as Keith Richards said of Mick Jagger). Plouffe is jonseing to cut it off.
So it’s come to this: as I wrote last week, the Dem leadership hasn’t merely abandoned hope, it’s running against it. Policies that could materially benefit those disaffected blue-collar sorts would displease the party’s funders and must be ruled out. The Dems’ desperate hope is that fear of Trump will close the deal.
Maybe it’ll work—though everyone has underestimated Trump’s appeal all along (me included, I should say). But this strategy of writing off the white working class is precisely what has fueled his rise. As Ed Luce, the Financial Times’ very sharp columnist, wrote in yesterday’s paper:
It is the white vote—and particularly white males—that ought to worry Mrs Clinton. Blue collar whites are America’s angriest people. They feel belittled, trod upon and discarded. The future belongs neither to them nor their children. Mrs Clinton personifies an establishment that has taken everything for itself while talking down to those it has left behind. Mr Trump is their revenge.
Rendell & Co.’s strategy feeds into this unfortunate dynamic.
Dems will, of course, dismiss those angry white voters as hopelessly racist and sexist. Some no doubt are, and that’s the source of Trump’s appeal to them. But that’s not all that could appeal to them. The Sanders campaign has shown that policies that could benefit them materially have great electoral potential. But the Dem leadership would rather court suburban independents and Republicans than cross their funders.
So far that potential hasn’t shown up much in the Democratic primaries, because the disaffected don’t normally vote in them. But the longer-term potential shows up repeatedly in the popularity contests and hypothetical general election matchups. There’s one out just this morning from CNN and ORC International that should cause worry at Hillary Central. Some highlights:
- 42% of those polled offered a “favorable” rating for Hillary, and 55% unfavorable, for a net of –13. In November 2014 she had a net favorable rating of +21. That’s a shift of 34 percentage points in 15 months. As recently as October 2015, her net negative rating was just 4 points; she’s lost 17 in four months. This confirms a law of Hillary’s popularity: the more people see her the less they like her.
- That -13 net puts Hillary’s net positives towards the bottom of the broad presidential field. Ben Carson earns a net of +9; Rubio, + 6; Kasich, +19. Hillary does do better than Trump, at -23. But the highest net positive in the field is Bernie Sanders, +23.
- In hypothetical general election races, Hillary beats Trump by 8 points. That margin looks comfy now, but given the trajectory of Trump’s support, far from armor-plated. But she would lose to Rubio by 3 and Cruz by 1.
- Sanders would beat Trump by 12, Rubio also by 12, and Cruz by 17.
- Hillary’s negatives are surprisingly broad, as are Sanders’ positives, as the graph below shows.
Polls at this stage of the election are more suggestive than definitive, but the “electability” argument for the HRC candidacy is based mostly on the wishes of her fans.
Not mentioned here: race. Hillary clearly has a huge base of support among black voters, and it would be ugly and unproductive of me to type out a lecture on how they’re mistaken in that preference. I don’t understand it, but it’s not my business to second-guess it. What I will say, though, is that the Democratic establishment is playing a cynical game, relying on that “firewall” of support while they court moderate Republicans in the Columbus suburbs by running against social democracy and amping up the fear factor. Because as the man from Uber says, “Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”
Liberal redbaiting
The Sanders campaign has certainly sharpened the contradictions, hasn’t it? It’s been very clarifying to see Hillary Clinton and her surrogates running against single-payer and free college, with intellectual cover coming from Paul Krugman and Vox. Expectations, having been systematically beaten down for 35 years, must be beaten down further, whether it’s Hillary saying that to go to college one needs some “skin in the game,” or Rep. John Lewis reminding us that nothing is free in America. A challenge from the left has forced centrist Democrats to reveal themselves as proud capitalist tools.
Latest to step up is Paul Starr, co-founder of The American Prospect. Normally the dull embodiment of tepid liberalism, Starr has unleashed a redbaiting philippic— a frothing one, even, by his usual standards—aimed at Bernie Sanders. Sanders is no liberal, Starr reveals—he’s a socialist. He may call himself a democratic socialist to assure us that he’s no Bolshevik—Starr actually says this—but that doesn’t stop Starr from stoking fears of state ownership and central planning. Thankfully the word “gulag” doesn’t appear, but that was probably an oversight.
Starr does have one substantial point—Sanders’ tax proposals wouldn’t be up to financing a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Taxing the rich more could raise substantial revenue, but nowhere near enough. And part of the point of steepening the progressivity of the tax system is hindering great fortunes from developing and being passed on. A good part of the reason that CEO incomes have gone up so much since the early 1980s is that taxes on them have gone down; stiffen the tax on them, and there’s far less incentive to pay überbosses so much in the first place. It’s like taxing tobacco or carbon—you can raise revenue by doing it, but you’re also trying to make the toxic things go away.
But, really, you don’t need a Swedish or Danish tax structure to pay for free college tuition and single-payer health care, which are highly achievable first steps of a Sanderista political revolution. As I wrote back in 2010:
It would not be hard at all to make higher education completely free in the USA. It accounts for not quite 2% of GDP. The personal share, about 1% of GDP, is a third of the income of the richest 10,000 households in the U.S., or three months of Pentagon spending. It’s less than four months of what we waste on administrative costs by not having a single-payer health care finance system. But introduce such a proposal into an election campaign and you would be regarded as suicidally insane.
That last sentence turned out to be not a bad prophecy.
Starr really loses contact with earth when he writes about single-payer.* In one sense, this is surprising, since he wrote a fat book on the history of medicine in America, and, although it was 34 years ago, is presumably still familiar with the territory. But the pressures of a political campaign often dislodge an apologist’s higher cerebral functions. That’s the only plausible explanation for why he wrote this:
Sanders’ single-payer health plan shows the same indifference to real-world consequences. The plan calls for eliminating all patient cost sharing and promises to cover the full range of services, including long-term care. With health care running at 17.5 percent of gross domestic product, Sanders’ plan would sweep a huge share of economic activity into the federal government and invite that share to grow. Another way of looking at single payer is that it would make Washington the sole checkpoint, removing the incentive for anyone else—patients, providers, employers or state governments—even to monitor, much less hold back, excessive costs. It would leave no alternative except federal management of the health sector.
Where to start with this? Why, as a matter of principle, should patients “share costs”? They’re already paying for the services with their tax dollars. According to Hillary’s “skin-in-the-game” theory, forcing patients to pay up will reduce demand, thereby keeping spending down, but this is a brutal form of cost-control. Co-pays often force people to forego needed care, resulting in higher costs down the road, and more importantly, needless suffering. (See this Gallup poll, and references 6, 7, and 8 here.)
A far more effective form of cost control is having the government use its buying power to demand lower prices from hospitals and drug companies. That’s the way it works in civilized countries, though that fact looks to have passed Starr by, probably because he was too busy trying to make precisely the opposite, and wrong, argument: single-payer would “invite that share to grow” by “removing the incentive for anyone else…even to monitor, much less hold back, excessive costs.” Just what is wrong with “federal management of the health sector”? Medicare does it for the 0ver-65 portion of the population; it works very well and is enormously popular.
Starr cites the 17.5% of GDP we devote to health care without putting that figure into any reasonable context—the sort of move that is supposed to provoke a “gee-whiz” moment of surrender. Here’s an interesting graph based on data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based quasi-official think tank for the world’s rich countries. It shows the share of GDP devoted to health care for a subset of the OECD’s 34 members, divided into public and private. (Put them together and you get the total.)
There are several striking features in this graph:
- Most striking of all is how far ahead of the pack the U.S. is: we spend 16.4% of GDP on health care, compared to a 10.1% average for all the other countries shown. (That’s the dotted vertical line on the right.) And recall that all those other countries cover almost their entire populations, unlike the U.S., where a tenth of the population is uninsured (and many of the insured have terrible coverage), with little change since the drop when Obamacare first took effect. (Gallup has 12% of the population uninsured, slightly higher than the Census Bureau, though with a similar trajectory of initial decline followed by flatlining.)
- Another striking, though less obvious, thing is that U.S. public spending alone, 7.9% of GDP, is just 0.1 point below the average of 8.0%. In other words, the government already spends as much as many other countries do while accomplishing far less. That 7.9% is also not much less than the entire health bill for Italy, Australia, and Britain, public and private combined.
- Yet another striking thing is the outlandishly large share of private spending on health care: 8.5% of GDP, more than four times the average of the other countries and almost three times Canada’s private share.
- Does all that spending produce better outcomes? Seems not: our life expectancy, 78.8 years, is three years shorter than the average of all the other countries.
So just about everything in Starr’s quoted mini-lecture about the real world is at odds with the real world.
There’s a perverse form of American exceptionalism circulating around the Clinton camp: just because things work in other countries doesn’t mean they can work here. As Hillary herself put it, “We are not Denmark. I love Denmark, but we are the United States of America.” True enough, but that has no bearing on why single-payer couldn’t work here. The only obstacles are political—elites, which include Hillary and Starr, don’t want it.
The rest of Starr’s piece is a highly unsubtle rant about socialism and how bad it is, even though Sanders isn’t really a socialist. That sort of thing may resonate with people who grew up during the Cold War—though not with all of us!—but it seems not to move the younger portion of the population, many of whom seem charmed by socialism. It’s not like capitalism has been treating them all that well. But Starr doesn’t want to hear about that.
Starr also finds the style of Sanders’ politics in bad taste:
Sanders is also doing what populists on both sides of the political spectrum do so well: the mobilization of resentment. The attacks on billionaires and Wall Street are a way of eliciting a roar of approval from angry audiences without necessarily having good solutions for the problems that caused that anger in the first place.
But people have a lot to resent—why shouldn’t it be mobilized politically? And free tuition and single-payer are pretty good solutions for some of those problems. Starr just doesn’t like them. Best leave the tuition issue to some vague, incomprehensible scheme (that apparently involves lots of work–study and online learning) and health care to a lightly regulated and generously subsidized insurance industry. Establishment Democrats haven’t merely gone post-hope—they’ve declared war on it.
_________
*Single-payer is just one way of organizing a public health insurance system. Under such a model, providers remain private and the government pays the bills. That is, only the insurance function is socialized. This is how it works in Canada. Under Britain’s National Health Service, everything is socialized: doctors are public employees and hospitals are government-owned. Sanders is proposing the former, even though the British system is cheaper to run than the Canadian, as the graph shows.
Complacency of the Dems
According to the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM), Hillary has an almost-90% chance of winning the Democratic nomination. Anything can happen of course, but I wouldn’t put much money on the other side of that bet.
So what about November? As I write this, the IEM has Trump ahead of Rubio by 45–37. That may underestimate Trump’s chances, as people have been doing all along. Leaving that aside for now, I think that Dems are way too overconfident that Hillary can beat Trump in November. People are pissed and don’t want another president from Goldman Sachs.
Trump is a master taunter. It was amazing to watch him destroy Jeb (who was none too mighty to start with). Trump knows how to get under people’s skin, and could break Hillary psychologically. She’s brittle and has many potential lines of cleavage, personal and political. She’s a nervous, error-prone campaigner who prefers sticking to a script (which is why she hasn’t had a press conference or an informal chat with reporters in over two months). Trump could go after her emails and the shady business of the Clinton Foundation in ways that Sanders never has, for fear of starring in a GOP ad in the fall.
Trump is relentlessly vicious. As he said in his South Carolina victory speech, “There’s nothing easy about running for president, I can tell you. It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious, it’s beautiful.” A debate between the two of them could be a remarkable spectacle, though it would hold glum prospects for humanity.
Fresh audio product
Just uploaded to my radio archive:
February 11, 2016 Tim Shorrock on panic over North Korea (Nation author page) • Robert Fatton on the mess in Haiti on the departure of Sweet Micky from the presidency
February 4, 2016 Matt Karp on the demographics of Sanders’ support (Jacobin author page) • Jasson Perez on the Black Youth Project 100 (full agenda here)
Blaming Hillary for Bill
Hillary apologists insist that one shouldn’t hold her responsible for abominations perpetrated by her husband, like the crime bill and the end of welfare. There’s some truth to that; she wasn’t the one with executive power. But she did praise both, extensively. Not only was there her calling ”welfare recipients “deadbeats”—there’s this chilling demand to bring “superpredator” youth “to heel.”
Holding her not responsible for Bill also undermines a good bit of the argument for her “experience”—that quality we’re supposed to admire but not examine. As I write in My Turn (pp. 22–25), she was very much Bill’s partner in the invention of the New Democrat ideology—tough on crime, hard on the poor, and happy to go to war. She co-wrote his keynote speech to the 1991 conference of the Democratic Leadership Conferece, the New Dems’ trade association. She ran his campaign to impugn the reputation of Arkansas teachers and their union, a strategy that would become neoliberal standard fare.
And then there’s this memory, reported by Gail Sheehy in Hillary’s Choice:
“[Hillary] decided [Bill] lacked the discipline and toughness,” observes Dick Morris. “He was too idealistic. His head was in the clouds. He wasn’t a pragmatist. He needed a tough-as-nails manager.” Morris saw Hillary make a bold choice: “In 1978, they were a two-career couple; in 1981, Hillary became the manager of their joint political career.”
Of course, Hillaryites will dismiss Morris as an unreliable source, even though he was in the Clintons’ employ for 20 years.
Sheehy supported Morris’ analysis with this quote from Hillary: “If I didn’t kick his ass every morning, he’d never amount to anything.” Their old friend Susan McDougal—who served 18 months in prison, 8 of them in solitary, for refusing to answer questions in the Whitewater investigation—glossed Hillary’s quote by saying, “You always knew that Hillary was about the business end of it, and Bill was about being loved.”
From the time more than 25 years ago when they first became famous, they advertised themselves as a two-fer. If you’re going to tout experience, you can’t be so selective about evaluating it.
Fresh audio product
Just uploaded to my radio archive:
January 28, 2016 Shane Bauer on his imprisonment in Iran and how Hillary Clinton made it worse (with some remarks about solitary in the U.S.) • Jennifer Mittelstadt, author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State, on that, and its privatization from Clinton onwards
Katha Pollitt, 1996 vs. 2016
[What a difference 20 years can make. Here’s the full text of column that Katha Pollitt wrote for The Nation as welfare was being repealed. It’s full of sharp criticism of the Clinton administration, the awfulness of the Dems, the treachery of lesser-evil politics, the limits of elite advocacy—and even a little mockery of Supreme Court fetishism. Today, Katha is a big fan of Hillary Clinton and has forgotten all this. Too bad, because this is very good.]
The Nation — August 26-September 2,1996
The Strange Death of Liberal America
Katha Pollitt
I woke up this morning to the voice of Linda Chavez-Thompson-first and only female, first and only minority executive vice president of the supposedly revitalized, supposedly reprogressified A.F.L.-C.I.O.-telling National Public Radio how thrilled she was with the Democratic Party platform. That’s the one that claims as a party triumph the Republican-authored welfare bill that will push countless children into poverty, deprive legal immigrants of a wide array of benefits and force millions of poor mothers into minimum- or even subminimum-wage jobs that do not, so far as we know, exist. “I love this platform!” announced Dennis Archer, Mayor of Detroit, where 67 percent of children are on public assistance. Did I mention that the platform this year omits the usual lip service to the ongoing urban crisis?
The passage of the welfare reform bill signifies more than the end of welfare as we know it; it signifies the end of a certain kind of liberalism too. Plenty of solid liberal Democrats voted for the act in the Senate: Russell Feingold, Bob Graham and Barbara Mikulski, who wasn’t even up for re-election. The House vote included yeas from Nita Lowey, who is co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues; Elizabeth Furse; Jane Harmon; and Lynn Rivers. I’m ashamed to say I actually contributed to the campaigns of some of these people, through EMILY’S List and other supposedly feminist PACs. Maybe you did too.
“Sometimes you’re in a position in which you have to make a decision,” Representative Lowey told me. “The system is so broken,” Is it? Lowey asserted that 25 percent of those on welfare are third-generation recipients, a figure she revised later in our talk as 25 percent on welfare for ten years or more — “that’s two generations.” Maybe she was thinking of horses on welfare? (Actually, only about 6 percent of recipients have been on welfare continuously for that long, and only 9 percent grew up in house- holds that frequently received welfare.) It was unnerving but strangely enlightening to hear the head of the Congressional women’s caucus defending her vote with numbers plucked out of the air and Orwellian tributes to “the dignity of work,” while simultaneously professing herself “concerned” about the actual content of the bill — the free hand given to states with atrocious records, the cutoffs of legal immigrants, food stamp limits, etc. When the Democrats retake Congress we’ll be monitoring those things, she assured me. So now we’re supposed to vote for the Democrats so they can undo their own votes! Talk about triangulation.
Well, why single out Nita Lowey? Elizabeth Furse’s press aide wanted me to believe that Furse voted for the bill in order to protect Oregon’s “wonderful” programs. (Hello? There are forty-nine other states out here? Full of women you asked for campaign contributions?) The picture from the world of Beltway advocacy is not much brighter. Marian Wright Edelman threw away the last, best chance to organize popular resistance to punitive welfare reform and convened a giant Stand for Children that attracted 200,000 people to.. stand for children. A.F.S.C.M.E. finally decided to use its phone banks to organize callers to urge a White House veto — on the very day Clinton announced he would sign the bill.
NOW (which, to its credit, is refusing to endorse or support legislators who voted for the bill) is mounting a daily vigil at the White House with a coalition of progressive groups. Patricia Ireland and other NOW staffers are on a hunger strike.
All this is good, but why so little? Why so late? This bill has been moving toward passage for months, and welfare reform has been a major political issue for four years. It’s because these liberal groups are caught up in mainstream electoral politics, which in practice means clinging to Clinton and the Democratic Party, waiting and hoping and beseeching, working on the inside, faxing and phoning and producing yet another study or poll. Meanwhile they preach the gospel of the lesser of two evils, that ever-downward spiral that has brought us to this pass and that will doubtless end with liberals in hell organizing votes for Satan because Beelzebub would be even worse — think of the Supreme Court!
They really didn’t think he’d sign it, one welfare expert told me when I asked why protests were so lackluster as the bill moved toward passage. That was a miscalculation that goes way beyond the President’s character — it applies to a whole mode of political action. Liberalism is the idea that the good people close to power can solve the problems of those beneath them in the social order. Its tools are studies and sermons and campaign contributions and press conferences. The trouble is, the political forces they call on are not interested anymore — and this is true not just in the United States. In country after country, social benefits are being slashed and the working class’s standard of living lowered, and the major parties, including the ones that call themselves Labor or Socialist or Democratic, accept this process as a given. Of course, there will always be a few noble oddballs like Paul Wellstone, the only Democratic senator up for re-election who voted against the welfare bill. But the general direction of government in the age of globalized corporate power is clear.
Advocacy politics can’t turn this around, because advocacy is based on speaking for people rather than those people acting on their own behalf. Enormous demonstrations around the country, with strikes by S.E.I.U. and A.F.S.C.M.E., sit-downs in welfare offices and 100,000 homeless people camping out on the capital Mall might have affected the debate. Marian Wright Edelman issuing a press release no longer can. Indeed, the media didn’t even pick up the most recent one, eloquent as it was. The Women’s Committee of 100is suggesting that people return fundraising letters from party organizations, PACs and anti-welfare politicians with a note saying that you’re now sending your disposable dollars to social welfare organizations. Why not take it a step further and fund direct action? The National Union of the Homeless (246 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106) has great politics and no money. The Democratic Party cannot make the same claim.
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive:
January 21, 2016 Adolph Reed on reparations to black Americans (a reaction to this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece; Reed’s 2000 piece on reparations is here) • Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Program on single-payer, Sanders, and Clinton Inc.’s lies
January 14, 2016 Isabel Hilton on the Chinese financial melodrama • Chris Maisano (author of this article) on legal challenges to public sector unions
January 7, 2016 Jason Williams reports from Oregon on the rancher occupation • Toby Jones on Saudi Arabia
LBO News from Doug Henwood 