The Democratic Party, 2019

[Grizzly]

Expect Trump 2020 as the DNCC passes the renewal Patriot Act. I hate all these fuckers.

[Elvis]

Check the stats for military personnel only; as employees of the Pentagon—the largest employer in the world, providing them with free healthcare, housing and eduction—they know a good thing.

Spoiler: It's Bernie Sanders.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/08/20 ... ributions/


Which Democratic Candidates Are National Security Employees Opening Their Wallets for?
Data shows that members of the State Department and the military are investing in candidates who are not currently topping national polls.

By C.K. Hickey, Shayna Greene
November 8, 2019, 3:50 PM

[liminalOyster]

Anyone watch?

[Elvis]

I was out shopping, making America great. All I know is, BBC keeps saying how Bernie Sanders called Trump a pathological liar.

I did watch this morning's House Budget Committee hearing.

[stickdog99]

https://newrepublic.com/article/155795/ ... -reformThe

Lucrative Liberal Business of Killing Health Care Reform

New tax filings show what soulless K Street hucksters—including Obama alumni—are willing to do for a buck.

By LIBBY WATSON

If you don’t live in Washington or work within the realm of politics or public affairs, you might not realize just how many people in this city have completely fake jobs. ...

A productive day could mean anything from ghostwriting an op-ed for some local schmuck to send to their local paper, to astroturfing a Twitter account, to buying Facebook ads for their real-sounding-but-totally-fake organizations—whatever will convince their funders they’re doing something with their money and not just reading about the new Game of Thrones pop-up bar. ...

These people are often not employed directly by the ersatz organizations to whose Twitter accounts they’re posting. Rather, they are on the payrolls of consulting firms or lobbying shops, which are underwritten by various organizations and corporations to influence public policy. On one day, they might work with a Democratic candidate who proudly claims they will fight for the middle class; on another day, they might work with McDonald’s. One of the most loathsome and slimy of these firms’ creations is the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a coalition of health-industry groups—from big players in the insurance industry and the drug industry to those in the hospital industry and various local chambers of commerce—that was organized with the explicit intention of killing single-payer and the public option, which the Partnership lumps together as if they were remotely the same thing.

One of the group’s favorite talking points is that “whether you call it Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, single-payer, or a public option,” a “one-size-fits-all government-run system” is a bad idea. You may think this sounds a lot like the messaging that the health insurance industry deployed against the Affordable Care Act as the efforts to write that bill were in full bloom. Years later, however, it’s coming from the Partnership’s executive director: Lauren Crawford Shaver, a former Hillary Clinton staffer who works with some of the biggest Democratic firms in Washington. (At a Chamber of Commerce event on employee benefits in September, Shaver was on a panel titled “Public Option: The Next Big Threat to ESI,” which stands for employer-sponsored insurance.) This is not some defense against creeping socialism. Even a moderate squish like Joe Biden—or Michael Bennet, for crying out loud—supports a policy that these vampires will gleefully take hundreds of thousands of dollars to kill.

The Partnership’s first tax filing, obtained this week by Andrew Perez of Maplight, details how the organization has embedded itself within a network of Democratic shit-hawking shops to conduct its work against health care reform. Its biggest vendor was consultancy Forbes Tate, whose relationship with the organization is well known: The Partnership’s operations are run out of the firm’s office, according to Politico. Shaver is a partner at Forbes Tate; before that, she worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services. Forbes Tate received $1.7 million for this work last year, a third of the Partnership’s total income. (We are not informed who donated to the Partnership, because it is a 501(c)(4).)

The second-biggest winner from the Partnership’s activities: Bully Pulpit Interactive. It has, according to its website, worked with clients ranging from the Democratic Party and Tammy Duckworth’s campaign to such society-ruining, law-flouting tech giants as Airbnb and Uber. In 2016, the firm was a major vendor for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, collecting more than $10 million for its work handling “digital advertising and digital media buying for both the Hillary Clinton campaign and its joint fundraising organization with the Democratic National Committee.” Bully Pulpit Interactive’s clients include some of the biggest center-left advocacy joints in town, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, Emily’s List, and Everytown for Gun Safety—though these are just the clients it makes public. For some reason, its site doesn’t list its work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a cartel dedicated to exploiting the labor of student-athletes, which was worth $12 million in 2017. Who knows what other clients the firm services but doesn’t publicize—as it chose not to do for the Partnership? Thanks to our feeble transparency laws, it doesn’t have to tell us. Public relations work doesn’t count as lobbying for the purposes of lobbying disclosure rules.

The firm Seven Letter, formerly Blue Engine, made $140,000 off the Partnership last year. The Intercept reported that Seven Letter “handled the Partnership’s interactions with the media.” Its staff includes prominent spin doctors such as Brendan Buck, who has previously worked for Paul Ryan and America’s Health Insurance Plans, and Adam Abrams, who used to work for the Obama White House. (If you long for a lost era of bipartisan comity, you’ll find it thriving on K Street.) According to a tax filing viewed at ProPublica, in 2014 Blue Engine worked for a group called Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably, a coalition of some of America’s biggest corporations that exists to push for lower corporate tax rates; it would go on to celebrate the 2017 Trump tax bill.

The New Republic asked Karthik Ganapathy, a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer who recently founded MVMT Communications, which bills itself as “primarying the consultant class”: What is the deal with these firms? “A lot of people come into politics to make people’s lives better,” he said. “Somewhere along the way, though, those folks get ground down by its institutions and start to understand that politics is a business just like any other, run by really rich folks who call the shots, and begin to see a lot of potential money on the table. So they start to work for and with people that the 25-year-old version of themselves would have thrown tomatoes at—and that’s just really sad to me.” It is worthy of lament: You’ll meet very few young people who moved to Washington for the purpose of feathering the nests of petrochemical corporations.

The pressure on all sides in this town—institutional, ideological, financial—to accept the broad status quo is immense; candidates who make a habit of challenging the established order are rare. Many of the firms that work for the Partnership were started by or staffed with former members of Obama’s “Yes, We Can” brigade, with others going on to work for Amazon or Uber (or Theresa May). The ability of people who come to public service as righteous, justice-and-fairness-seeking liberals to transform themselves into dedicated laborers against the goals they once espoused is astounding, but every road in Washington is laid to funnel people toward that stupid, cynical end.

If Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren wants to pass Medicare for All; if Biden or Pete Buttigieg wants to implement his public option, they will have to go around not just health-industry lobbyists and their money but a whole city of careerist worms whose children’s college funds and extravagant lifestyles depend on money scraped from the Partnership’s vaults. No Democrat in Washington can claim to care at all about the millions of Americans who are currently suffering at the hands of a health care system designed to torment them for profit if they work with a group like this, or work at a firm that works with groups like this, or go to parties with people who work at groups like this without throwing a drink in their face. These are the denizens of this subterranean world, perpetuating this repulsive system by not speaking out against it and forswearing its tainted rewards. This is what big structural change means—losing friends and paychecks, and gaining a soul.

Any president who truly wants to enact bold policies to provide Americans with lives of worth and dignity will have to contend with the raw financial power of industry as well as its grinning factotums—men and women who not long ago looked as if they were down for the cause themselves. The armies that are usually deployed in defense of Democratic policies are mercenaries who are mostly happy to work for the orcs, too, if the price is right. And if Democratic policy priorities shift from “a tax credit for small businesses that employ three dogs who are veterans” to “the Green New Deal,” there’s no guarantee the Bully Pulpit Interactives of this town will pitch in. What is the fate of the planet when the needs, wants, and desires of their lucrative client base hang in the balance?

[Elvis]

Big surprise, not...so much wrong... How can Medicare for All be "too expensive" when Americans are already paying for it PLUS a big dividend—a tax, in effect—that goes to owners, stockholders, billers, insurance companies and, uh, billionaires? How can a smart financial guy like Bloomberg not know this? I hope he doesn't find out that Bloomberg News is regularly giving space to MMT advocates!

https://www.barrons.com/articles/mike-b ... 1574339404
Mike Bloomberg Is the Stock Market’s Favorite Democrat for President
By Connor Smith

Just when we thought the Democratic primary was narrowing, Michael Bloomberg is once again seriously considering a run.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, would be viewed most favorably by equity markets among candidates, according to Wolfe Research’s Chris Senyek, Chip Miller, and Adam Calingasan.

The team broke down several factors including stances on financial regulation, health care reform, taxes, and technology anti-trust issues for the five candidates they believe have the best shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. Along with Bloomberg, former Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the analysts consider Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg as the most likely nominees.

Across the board, the billionaire Bloomberg seems like the best for markets, according to the Wolfe team, while Sanders and Warren swap spots at the bottom. Biden and Buttigieg are sandwiched in between.

Bloomberg’s stance that Medicare for All would be too expensive makes him the most favorable for health care, while Sanders’ single-payer plan stands out as the hostile toward the sector. Biden, Buttigieg and Warren are all viewed similarly, they wrote.

On taxes, Bloomberg has suggested a wealth tax is unconstitutional—making him the most favorable candidate for equity markets, in terms of tax policy.

“Our sense is that Biden is next in line given that his plan focuses on reversing the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act (‘The Trump Tax Cuts’),” they wrote. If Warren or Sanders wins the nomination, investors would start pricing in a risk taxes go up significantly, they added.

While breaking up big tech has been a focus of Warren’s campaign, Bloomberg has not provided an official plan. Biden and Buttigieg are only “paying lip service” for the potential break up of the largest technology companies, they said.

They also noted Bloomberg’s past comments that “overly restrictive financial regulations can have negative impacts on economic growth.” “This is polar opposite to the views expressed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have both called for the break-up of large banks and a 21st century Glass-Stegall Act,” they add.

Since Bloomberg and Biden don’t appear to support the most expensive parts of the Green New Deal, a congressional resolution, Wolfe sees them as most friendly to the energy sector. A Warren or Sanders nomination would likely be most damaging for energy companies, the Wolfe team said.

Regarding Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV etc. I've noticed that for a business news outfit, it's unusually impartial, less 'centralized' ideologically than most. E.g. giving heterodox (secretly Commie) economists regular columns. Its refocus on just economics and business is good; sports & other "lifestyle" fluff was cut out awhile back. Peeking at Wikipedia, this story sort of confirms a certain top-down journalistic ethos I sense from Bloomberg:

According to Matthew Winkler, then a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg telephoned him in November 1989 and asked, "What would it take to get into the news business?"

Knowing that Bloomberg had no experience in journalism, Winkler presented him with a hypothetical ethical dilemma:

"You have just published a story that says the chairman—and I mean chairman—of your biggest customer has taken $5 million from the corporate till. He is with his secretary at a Rio de Janeiro resort, and the secretary's spurned boyfriend calls to tip you off. You get an independent verification that the story is true. Then the phone rings. The customer's public-relations person says, 'Kill the story or we will return all the terminals we currently rent from you.'"

"What would you do?" Winkler asked.

"Go with the story," Bloomberg replied. "Our lawyers will love the fees you generate."[8]

Winkler recalls this as his "deciding moment", the time at which he became willing to help Bloomberg build his news organization.[8]

[liminalOyster]

Poll: Biden and Sanders tied nationally, followed by Warren
BY RACHEL FRAZIN - 11/21/19 02:02 PM EST 193

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are leading the Democratic presidential primary field in a new national poll, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) following in third place.

The Emerson poll released Thursday found Biden and Sanders each with the support of 27 percent of Democratic primary voters, with Warren following at 20 percent support. No other candidate received double-digit support in the poll.

South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) was supported by 7 percent of registered voters in the poll, and entrepreneur Andrew Yang was supported by 4 percent.

Sanders's support increased by 2 percentage points since October in the poll, and Warren's support decreased by 1 percentage point, while Biden's remained steady.

“Biden and Sanders continue to hold their bases, which should concern Warren, as she has waited for one of the front runners to slip these past few months — yet, their support seems to be crystalizing,” Emerson Polling Director Spencer Kimball said in a statement.

Sanders in recent weeks has secured key endorsements from progressives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) broke from the group of freshman lawmakers to endorse Warren.

Researchers surveyed 468 Democratic primary voters Nov. 17–20. The results have a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

More than a dozen people are vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... -by-warren

[Elvis]

^^^^ Encouraging.

---

Democratic president in 1962 calls for national healthcare:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14A1zxaHpD8

"...a learned and progressive citizenry and a progressive government is what has made this country great."

Listen to the cheers. Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXUJErr_vfo

2019: Democratic leadership calls national healthcare "too extreme."


(P.S. No wonder they killed him.)

[RocketMan]

WOW. I am still bracing for a second Trump term, but the DNC certainly seem to have their work cut out for them to fuck Bernie over in a manner that will not cause a full blown revolt/insurgency among the population.

[JackRiddler]

When not rigged the polls are blind, the assumptions are wrong.

[stickdog99]

Time magazine?

https://time.com/5735384/capitalism-rec ... rica-2019/

How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip

In March 29, 2003, at a wedding reception in the Harvard Faculty Club, Lawrence W. Reed gave a toast in honor of the friend whom he was serving as best man—one Joseph P. Overton. Overton had worked at Dow Chemical; he had since become an executive at a free-market, small–government think tank in central Michigan. Among his duties at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy was raising money, and in doing so, he had made a brochure that would become his legacy. Overton was trying to describe the role of think tanks in a society, and he posited an idea that would come to be called the Overton window. In a given society, at a given moment, there is a range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream. (A 70% top tax rate and a 20% top tax rate are both within this window in America today; abolishing taxes is not.) Generally, the theory went, politicians will only propose ideas that fall within the window. It falls to think tanks (and others) to propose unpopular things outside of the window in the hope of shifting the window and making the previously unthinkable achievable. Overton was an ardent libertarian who pushed ideas like school choice—and, according to Reed’s wedding toast, he had on occasion resorted to more extreme methods of moving the window of the possible, “including the time,” Reed recounted that day, “we flew in a Cessna 172 in broad daylight at treetop level 150 miles into war-torn Mozambique to assist armed rebels fighting the Marxist regime there.” Overton died just weeks after his wedding.

Were Overton still alive, he would be pushing 60—and might be aghast to learn that his “window,” having become famous after his death, is now invoked to describe America’s great, unlikely backlash against the system he defended so ardently: capitalism.

A democratic socialist—Bernie Sanders—is among the top contenders to be the next Democratic nominee for U.S. President. His rival and fellow Senator, Elizabeth Warren, is also among the top tier of candidates, declaring herself a capitalist who wishes to transform American capitalism as we know it, with a wealth tax, a Green New Deal and the elimination of private health insurance. A more centrist candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., illustrated the shifting winds when he recently declared that “neo-liberalism is the political–economic consensus that has governed the last 40 years of policy in the U.S. and U.K. Its failure helped to produce the Trump moment. Now we have to replace it with something better.”

In 2016, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had 5,000 members; since then, its dues-paying membership has multiplied more than tenfold. This new energy on the left terrifies chief executives and billionaires, and yet many of them have been voicing similar alarms about a crisis of capitalism. Ray Dalio, the billionaire co-chairman of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates, warned in April that America faced a “national emergency” in capitalism’s failure to benefit more people, and he pronounced the American Dream lost. The anti-capitalist impulse has some purchase on the right too. Before he pushed a tax cut that lined the capitalists’ pockets, Donald Trump ran, most improbably, as a Republican skeptical of the financial elite’s loyalty to Americans. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson has entertained a surprising skepticism of capitalist doctrines and said positive things about Warren.

America loves a capitalist reckoning the way the NFL loves Colin Kaepernick. But it is having one anyway. And if this year that reckoning seemed to reach new intensity, it was because the economic precariousness, stalled mobility and gaping social divides that have for years fueled the backlash now had an improbable sidekick: plutocracy itself and the win-win ideology that has governed the past few decades. This year, America’s ultra-elites seemed to bend over backward to lend support to the idea that maybe the system they superintend needs gut renovating. As a political movement bubbled up to challenge their wealth and power, the elite’s own misbehavior trickled down. And where the two met, ideas that once seemed unutterable started, to many, to sound like the future.

History is the story of conditions that long seem reasonable until they begin to seem ridiculous. So it is with America’s present manic hyper-capitalism.

Until recently, it seemed normal that a technological revolution that began with promises of leveled playing fields had culminated in an age of platform monopolies. Normal that businesspeople should try to make as much money as possible by paying as little as possible in taxes and wages, then donate a fraction of the spoils to PR-friendly social causes. Normal that economic security for most Americans was becoming a relic of the past. Normal that people in the street-level marijuana business go to prison while people in the business of selling ads to Russian intelligence go on magazine covers. Normal that bankers could shatter the world economy with their speculating, and that they would be among the few to be made whole after the crisis.

For years, there have been voices trying to denormalize this state. There were protests in Seattle in 1999, there was Occupy in 2011, there was the DSA, there was the World Social Forum to rival the World Economic Forum, there was, eternally, Bernie Sanders saying the exact stuff he is still saying today, there were civic groups trying to organize workers and poor communities, there were outcasts in Silicon Valley warning that Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t really about human connection. But America was in the grips of the ideological consensus that Buttigieg described. Hyper-capitalism was the intellectual stadium in which the country played. There was a left side of the field, more wary of capitalism’s extremes, and a right side of the field, prone to capitalist boosting. But the stadium, as Overton understood, demarcated the boundaries of the debate for most people: Capitalism, more or less as we practice it, is our system, and it is the best system, so how do we tweak it to make it better?

Then, in 2016, something happened. Sanders ran for President. He built a formidable national movement, powered by small donations, and won 22 states—mind you, as a democratic socialist in the United States of America. Sometimes the thing that could never happen happens, and it makes people doubt their sense of reality. And in that election cycle, if Sanders discredited capitalism as a conscious project, his cause received unexpected, unintentional help from the man who would become President. Trump ran as a flamboyant capitalist, wary of certain aspects of capitalism, but promising that his capitalist mind and his capitalist fortune would make him a uniquely gifted, uniquely incorruptible President. When that turned out not to be the case, Trump not only damaged himself but the idea of the selfless billionaire savior

The Overton window was moving. Then came the 2018 midterms and a new wave of Democratic -candidates—most prominently, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York—questioning capitalism–as–capitalism in a way that seemed unfamiliar and fresh. As the 2020 campaign approached, Warren jumped into the race, a beneficiary of the opening Sanders had helped carve for capitalist–critical aspirants to America’s highest office. With her now famous litany of “plans,” Warren detailed an agenda that would put American business in a headlock. That she and Sanders, both veritable enemies of Big Business, are among the top candidates shows how much the politics of capitalism has changed.

But, politics can be abstract; it can be complicated; people are busy living. Politics often benefits from scandal, from prominent misbehavior, from a dramatization of the discourse. And this was what was so remarkable about 2019: because of the coming election in these populist times, it was already a year potentially full of trouble for the plutocrats—or plutes, as I like to call them (to save space and, thus, paper and, therefore, trees). But, almost as if to assist the cause, the plutes seemed this year to put on an extended exhibit of performance art whose plain, if unstated, thesis is that plutocracy is maybe a bad idea.

Exhibit A: Early in the year, Amazon, run by one of the world’s richest people, Jeff Bezos, announced it was pulling out of its planned Hydra-like “second headquarters” in New York City. It seemed to come as a surprise to Bezos that in a city where a significant number of people struggle to keep up with rising costs and stagnant pay, many weren’t excited by the idea of the state and city giving his company a few billion dollars in tax breaks that wouldn’t be available to a regular Joe starting a business. In the debate that erupted, the conventional wisdom that it is always better to attract jobs, even by offering companies major incentives, came to be questioned.

Exhibit B: The college-bribery scandal. Wealth and privilege are already great guarantors of securing a spot in a university. What the scandal unearthed by federal prosecutors illustrated is that many very rich people are not satisfied with the general advantage of hyper-privilege, nor even with the specific advantage of donations to universities that give you an edge but not a guarantee. The ascendant critics of capitalism in American politics have called the system “rigged” for years. But here was a biopsy of the rigging. The most revealing subplot of the college scandal was the arrest of Bill McGlashan. Many others ensnared in the scheme had bolder-faced names, but McGlashan was significant because he had become a symbol of the hope, promoted by so many of the winners of our age, that they would lead the charge toward a fairer society. McGlashan, through the Rise Fund that he helped create and is managed by his private-equity firm, TPG Growth, had helped popularize the growing field of “impact investing”—in which a fund pursues not only economic returns but also the betterment of the world. He was charged with—and pleaded not guilty to—trying to bribe his son into the University of Southern California, thus depriving the people whom he supposedly helped for a living of a fair shot at that college seat.

Exhibit C: In July, Facebook, on account of just one of the scandals hovering over it, this one involving privacy violations, received a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission. Now, for you, that may be a big fine. For Facebook, it was such a feathery tickle that the company’s stock surged on the news, reaching its highest price in nearly a year. Facebook’s massive market power, its dubious behavior in the face of Russian intelligence activities, its fueling of polarization and its enabling of mis-information and even violence were unaffected by the FTC fine—a penalty that, if anything, left the impression that companies like Facebook enjoy near total impunity.

Still, in response to these scandals and outrages, many in the business world declared themselves newly interested in reform. The most prominent and heralded instance this past year was a statement by the Business Roundtable, an umbrella organization whose members are the chief executives of many of America’s largest companies. For decades, the roundtable has clung to a particular interpretation of the purpose of a business—that it is solely to make money for shareholders. With its new statement, issued in August, the roundtable updated its view: “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans.’”

It was inspiring, limited stuff. What it really revealed was how hard it will be for the old-guard capitalists to change at all. The statement was a call for every corporate signatory to decide, voluntarily, to behave in ways more supportive of people and the planet. As far as I know, no company, because of the statement, announced the cessation of practices in lobbying, tax avoidance, employment or other realms. When I publicly questioned the teeth of a pledge that reminded me of my own pledges not to eat fries, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and chairman of the roundtable, contacted me. We talked on the phone for half an hour. He was incredulous that I didn’t trust that the pledge would mean action. I challenged him to give the pledge teeth. Why not begin to lobby for proposals in Congress that would make “stakeholder capitalism” the law, not just an airy promise? Why not excommunicate companies that lobby for things contrary to the stated values of the roundtable? He said the roundtable wasn’t a “police force.” When I put to him that many signatories of this pledge to treat people better were known to be fairly exploitative of workers, he pushed back with words that illustrate that self-reformed capitalism is a lot like unreformed capitalism, but with better public relations. He said that he knew the chief executives I was talking about, and that he liked them; they were good people; he was sure they were kind to employees. Plus, he said, “A lot of people just don’t like to work.” (A spokes-person for Dimon later said to the Washington Post, “These quotes don’t reflect the conversation.”)

In public relations, an important term of art is “getting out ahead of the story.” If bad news about you is coming, pre-empt it by telling the story on your terms. The Business Roundtable’s move, long on rhetoric, short on support for any actual reforms with teeth, seemed very much in that tradition: get out in front of the backlash to extreme capitalism by proposing an optional Capitalism Lite. Then there is the other classic way in which the plutes get out in front of such backlashes: philanthropy. If you’re Goldman Sachs, contribute to a financial crisis that costs millions of men and women their homes and livelihoods, then give back (and scrub your name) through something like the “10,000 Women” program to mentor entrepreneurs.

Yet this year more people seemed to see through this take-and-give playbook. A striking moment came in late March when New York State, led by its new attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit against members of the Sackler family and others whom it accused of abetting the opioid crisis. In addition to alleging malfeasance in selling the drugs, the complaint made a claim about the use of philanthropy to lubricate wrongdoing. “Ultimately, the Sacklers used their ill-gotten wealth to cover up their misconduct with a philanthropic campaign to whitewash their decades-long success in profiting at New Yorkers’ expense.” The suit cited donations to many arts institutions, resulting in Sackler wings and institutes and centers, while also serving to cleanse their name in a way that allowed the grim machinery of drug peddling to grind on for years.

Then there was the Jeffrey Epstein case. Epstein, the late sexual predator and maybe tycoon, gave endless ammunition to plutocracy’s critics. Here was a man who had allegedly trafficked and raped children; who had been convicted of serious offenses; and who managed, through deftly arranged philanthropy and social climbing, to re-establish himself in high society. Epstein ingratiated himself with Harvard. He gave money to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was given the chance to meddle in its research—a phenomenon that one writer aptly called “sugar-daddy science.” He even spent a surprising amount of time with Bill Gates, a children’s advocate who has since apologized for his lapse in judgment. Yet what Epstein revealed was less individual lapses than systemic rot in our culture—especially at our universities, which have become drive-through reputational laundromats.

As the chances have increased that a candidate outside the neoliberal consensus will win the nomination, we have begun to see the Great Plute Freakout of 2019. A wave of plutes have weighed in about the dangers of a Sanders or Warren presidency. Although their obvious motivation is clear—not wanting to lose their money to the federal government—that’s seldom how they argue it. Instead, they engage in economic concern trolling—framing their self–preservational worries as being, in fact, worries about you and yours.

Zuckerberg of Facebook warned us that taxing wealth would limit the diversity of philanthropic efforts in medical research. Leon Cooperman, a hedge-fund billionaire, warned us that taxing wealth would curb the good works that he and his friends do. And then, in the cherry on top, Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and media billionaire, made moves to launch his own bid for the Democratic nomination. Peak billionaire may be a billionaire deciding to possibly attempt to purchase a party nomination because of his fear that some candidates in the race aren’t plutophilic enough—and then running against a maybe–billionaire who promised that being a billionaire would make him specially incorruptible and now is in impeachment proceedings over his alleged corruption.

America’s crisis of capitalism has cousins abroad. In Chile, an increase in subway fares triggered massive antigovernment, pro-reform protests in recent months, killing at least 20 and injuring more than 1,000. A slogan of the protests has been “Neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile.” The protesters have been demanding that education and health care be established as rights under the Chilean constitution. Argentina has also been rocked by protests, as it grapples with an economic crisis, rising hunger, and the angry fallout from an International Monetary Fund bailout last year. In Britain, the chaos of Brexit drags on, fueled by feelings that the economy wasn’t working for enough people and questions about whether billionaires should exist.

The mercy of all this elite failure and backlash is this: the ongoing collapse of any pretense of selflessness among the winners of our new Gilded Age.

If a single cultural idea has upheld the disproportionate power of this class, it has been the idea of the “win-win.” They could get rich and then “give back” to you: win-win. They could run a fund that made them sizable returns and offered you social returns too: win-win. They could sell sugary drinks to children in schools and work on public-private partnerships to improve children’s health: win-win. They could build cutthroat technology monopolies and get credit for serving to connect humanity and foster community: win-win.

As this seductive idea fizzles out, it raises the possibility that this age of capital, in which money was the ultimate organizing principle of American life, could actually end. Something could actually replace it. After all, a century ago, America was firmly planted in the first Gilded Age—and then it found its way into the Progressive Era and the New Deal, an era of great public ambition. Business didn’t go away; it wasn’t abolished; capitalists didn’t go into gulags. It was just that the emphasis of the society shifted. Money was no longer the lodestar of all pursuits.

The choice facing Americans is whether we want to be a society organized around money’s thirsts, a playground for the whims of billionaires, or whether we wish to be a democracy. The second Gilded Age will end at some point. The question is what comes next: What Trump offers is tribal nationalism, strongman politics and plutocrat–friendly policy greased by populist rhetoric. The other possibility is that, as occurred a century ago, a gilded age collapses into an age of reform: an era defined culturally by renewed public purpose and politically by the restoration of the state in areas where people are too powerless to solve problems of their own—defined by the use of shared institutions to solve shared problems. You can already see glimpses of how an age of reform is being dreamed up. Higher taxes on the very fortunate, to be sure; more regulation and worker protections and the like. An attack on climate change almost as dramatic as climate change itself. Programs to give workers greater security. It would be an age in which it was cooler, more thrilling, more admired, more viable to change the world democratically.

If there is one thing that could hasten the end of the age of capital and accelerate the coming of an age of reform, it is a vigorous new culture of joining in American life. Not clicking, not liking, not retweeting, not TikTokking, not screaming at MSNBC/Fox, but actually joining: political movements and civic organizations with memberships so vast that politicians cannot ignore them. The age of capital has been facilitated by a remarkable solidarity among the ultra-fortunate. Putting that period in the museum will take other, broader solidarities.

[Elvis]

Time magazine?

Wow. Something is up. This take, "the end of neoliberalism," is popping up all over, in parallel with a fairly rapid acknowledgement and (more gradual) acceptance of MMT among mainstream economists, pundits etc. (By now everyone should know what 'MMT' stands for; knowing what it means may take longer). The plutocracy sees the MMT perspective as a direct challenge to its primacy: if we take back our money system and use it for the public good—they're basically fucked in terms of forcing us to rely on them and the private money markets.

Ocasio-Cortez strikes fear not just because she's a sexy whip-smart progressive female with a little bit of power, it's the awful spectre of economic justice. The Green New Deal proposal is essentially the prescriptive side of MMT, following naturally from MMT's description of sovereign money as a public utility.

I'm surprised how fast MMT has gone from "crazy" to "interesting" to "likely" just in the last year. To wit:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41320&start=300#p677756
ECB confirms monetary policy has run its course – Part 1 http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43176

^^^ The upshot of that headline is that fiscal policy is the only tool left—in this instance that means greater federal spending on the social good and greater taxation on the ultra-wealthy.

And BAML analysts announcing the 'end of neoliberalism':
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41320&start=330#p681304
Bank of America Merrill Lynch forecasting peak globalisation

Sure, much of this is "getting out ahead of the narrative" but—

Time magazine and Bank of America Merrill Lynch??

[Elvis]

How to explain Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick (who?) seeming to jump into the race this way?

A: Anybody but Bernie!!

https://newrepublic.com/article/155789/ ... make-sense

There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense
Democratic Party elders are making plans.
By Alex Pareene
November 20, 2019


I’m going to write something annoying. I’m going to write some horse-race campaign analysis. I’m going to write very broadly and subjectively about trends in the race without using hard data or discussing policy. I’m doing so because I think what I am describing has a possibility of happening, and I think people who are invested in this presidential election should be prepared for it.

The following things are true:

To be very overly broad (I am, I am aware, describing the beliefs and motives of a large and diverse set of individuals), “Clinton World” detests Bernie Sanders, is largely on board with Kamala Harris, but has no real problem with Elizabeth Warren and would greet her nomination without much rancor.

“Obama World” doesn’t share this perspective. It doesn’t take Sanders seriously, and thinks of him—even with some affection—as a harmless crank. It, however, strongly dislikes Warren. I don’t want to say it would stop at nothing to prevent her from winning the nomination, but there are a lot of ancient tensions between the two camps that are far from settled.

If it is the growing consensus among many top Democrats in those two worlds that Joe Biden does not have it in him to win the nomination (or the general election), there are a couple of obvious paths forward: Boost the prospects of the “mainstream” candidate most likely to win if Biden fades or Option B, which we will get to in a minute.

In Clinton World, it seems obvious to continue to offer support to Kamala Harris, or to hope for Amy Klobuchar to surge, or perhaps get behind Warren. It would be smarter for anyone in the anybody-but-Sanders camp to throw in with Warren now, given the fact that the Harris and Klobuchar campaigns have entered a decaying orbit. But for many, those two senators still “make sense on paper,” so seemingly smart people are still convinced something might come of them.

But what should Obama World do if it sees Harris (or Cory Booker, or Julián Castro, both of whom are viewed with favor by this camp) struggling to gain traction? Many of this cohort seem to like Mayor Pete Buttigieg and would find his nomination acceptable. Nevertheless, they surely originally envisioned him as, perhaps, a future Senate candidate, or a running mate at best. It can’t be lost on them that the primary calendar after New Hampshire and Iowa becomes rough sledding for a candidate whose entire base of support is white. Still, they can’t back Warren; Sanders is an unserious option; Biden has perhaps lost it.

So: Enter Deval Patrick. But not to actually win the nomination in the primary process. No, this is Option B.

Patrick cannot possibly expect to enter the race at this late hour and run a normal presidential candidacy designed to accrue a majority of delegates ahead of the convention. (Who is he even hiring to run his campaign? There are a dozen active campaigns already being run by campaign professionals!) He won’t qualify for the debates. He has low national name recognition, hasn’t been fundraising, and his history in the private sector is radioactive. No one in decades has entered the race this late and won any primaries or caucuses. He launched his campaign in time to file for the New Hampshire primary but has already missed filing deadlines in multiple other states.

I am not the first person to suggest this, but Patrick seems to have jumped into the race with a clear purpose in mind: to hurt Warren’s chances in New England. (For those who doubt Obama allies would operate like this, please remember who runs the Democratic National Committee, and why.) Still, the Obama camp has been encouraging Patrick to run for years presumably because they think he would be a great candidate—in a general election. Patrick, too, is not the sort to leave his elite private sector job solely to screw over Elizabeth Warren on behalf of his friends from the Obama White House. He seemingly plans to actually run for president with the intention of winning the presidency. But the inescapable fact is that his campaign does not make any logical sense as a conventional primary campaign.

Finally, let us consider Michael Bloomberg, whose bid makes even less sense. While he is able to completely self-fund a presidential campaign, giving him an advantage over Patrick (who is regular-rich, not plutocrat-rich), the former New York City mayor is skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and purchasing generically anti-Trump Facebook ads instead of Facebook ads promoting a Michael Bloomberg candidacy. He has apologized for stop and frisk, yes, but he is broadly doing things to make himself seem acceptable to Democratic voters, not (yet) to convince them to support Michael Bloomberg in enough primaries and caucuses to give him the nomination.

Bloomberg also very much wants to be president, and has only declined to run in the past because he was smart enough to know he couldn’t win as an independent and probably couldn’t win either party’s nomination the traditional way. How could Bloomberg win, then? If he was handed the nomination at a brokered convention. I know that invoking that term is going to touch off a wave of groans from people who, every election cycle, read countless pieces of glorified politics fanfic from pundits predicting brokered conventions that simply do not happen anymore. I said from the start that this was going to be annoying.

But this is the only way these two late entrants make any sense. The Patrick and Bloomberg campaigns are not mere long shots, or attempts to harm Sanders or Warren on behalf of the moderates. They are calculated bets on a brokered convention. These are well-connected people at the highest levels of Democratic Party politics (despite his independent status, Bloomberg has always surrounded himself with Democratic campaign veterans and aides), making it clear that they think there is a real chance that the nomination will be completely up for grabs next July.

The fact that these two men and their allies believe this does not make a contested convention inevitable, or even more likely than it was a month ago. All the insiders involved with these latter-day candidacies believe themselves to be much more electorally savvy than they actually are. They make assumptions about the current front-runners, and about the electorate, that are probably untrue. Elections are unpredictable. But plans are in motion, because nothing is going according to plan. Be prepared.

[Elvis]

I noticed that CAP, the Center for American Progress, has (laudably) been focused on climate change.

So why aren't they wholeheartedly endorsing Bernie Sanders?

[Grizzly]

Is this a joke? Spoof? Please tell me it is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvehkmNI62U&feature=emb_logo

The FBI’s Protected Voices initiative provides cybersecurity recommendations to political campaigns on multiple topics, including foreign influence, to help mitigate the risk of cyber influence operations targeting U.S. elections. For more information, visit fbi.gov/protectedvoices.