Tag: Progressive Populism

Its been quite a while since I have cast the Beauty Platform at Docudharma ~ nearly four years since Casting the Beauty Platform for the Afghanistan Quagmire (that cast for that one was “Retreat”, by the way … with no moving lines. Just Retreat. Pretty good call for $0.03).

But this morning I saw that Robert Reich had called for a Third Party.

Well, not really, what Robert Reich said was,  

Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street. If there were ever an issue ripe for a third party, the Street would be it.

This is “Calling for a third party!” like saying “ever stronger hurricanes would suck” is “Calling for action NOW on climate change!”. Saying that the Democrats can’t be trusted to control Wall Street is one of those “The Sky is BLUE!!!” statements that is only to any degree controversial to the extend that people have been following an American media debate whether the sky is red or green (complete with supporting daily kos essays about how is it OBVIOUSLY green and anyone who thinks its red is a traitor to the country).

Its an observation of the obvious, rather than actually arguing that a Third Party would be a solution for what ails us.

Still, it got me thinking … what is the reading on the question? Is it time for a third party? As stuck in their various ruts the various established positions on the question are, this seems like an excellent question to reach for a response from the Book of Changes and reflect on the answer that results.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

First off, the thing to do with the BS about gutting the safety net on the excuse that the Take Everything Away Party wants to kill it is to take the idea of gutting the safety programs behind the farmhouse to the mint bed and apply a sharp ax.

How to do that, I don’t know.

But if it can be done, then there’s still the question of whether and how to sell the “Jobs Policy”

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

The Story So Far (imagine a Star Wars Scroll):

Under normal conditions, the primary political parties are representatives of distinct interest groups within the status quo. Democracy, after all, is allowing the citizens of the country to choose winners and losers among the elite, rather than having that choice performed by military might, accident of birth, or etc.

For most of its political history to the late 1800’s, the US was either dominated by one or two political parties. The (extra-constitutional) winner take all electoral college system and the winner take all nature of a state legislature selecting the state’s Senator strongly pushed in that direction.

And with business interests always falling on distinct sides of important issues of the day, that meant that political interests have long been distributed among the rival claimants for power or the natural party of government and natural party of (regional) opposition.

But alongside this was a political institution that allowed third parties to emerge and compete for influence ~ and indeed, the Great Re-Alignment from the Democrats and the Whigs to the Republicans and the Democrats occured in part thanks to the existence of third parties that were available to merge with the Anti-Slavery Whigs once they had been purged from the Whig Party. So in the late 1800’s …

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Suppose that you were a political party devoted to the interests of the top 1% wealthiest in the country. And suppose that either you or your puppeteers knew that public debt is private wealth. And suppose that it was politically convenient to attack programs that provide no benefit to the top 1% as generating public debt. What would you do?

(1) Pretend that you are opposed to generating public debt whenever there is a risk that government money will get spent on the 99ers ~ that is, the bottom 99%, though the 99ers in terms of running out of unemployment benefits are obviously one part of the broader 99ers.

(2) Take actions to run deficits whenever you have the opportunity to set fiscal policy.

(3) Take action to get the 99ers into debt to your paymasters, so get all of the private wealth created into your paymaster’s hands.

(4) Collect your 5% tip from your paymasters, and live high off the hog.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Also in orange

When Lawrence O’Donnell started berating the woman who received the email from Alan Simpson with this BS (5:05)], I was forced to leave the room until Rachel came on:

It is solvent until 2037.

Workers your age who are contributing to social security every day, we concurrently tell you when your time comes to collect, the money will not be there according to all projections we have today.

“According to all the projections we have today”? First, that is false. Its according to one projection we have today ~ among a range of projections that are made. And second, if Lawrence O’Donnell is going to shift from host to pundit, he is responsible when he uses figures in a misleading way.

Over the fold, how this is wrong, let me Countdown the Ways.  

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Also at Agent Orange

While Matthew Yglesias tends to be susceptible to patently absurd conventional wisdom economics, he does have his moments, as back in February when he observed:

The people in all the key jobs-not just the members of congress and cabinet secretaries and FOMC members and newspaper editors, but the bulk of the people who staff those people-are virtually all college graduates. And the way America works in 2010 those people are overwhelmingly going to have friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who are also college graduates. And while the labor market outlook for college graduates is bad by the standards of recent history, it’s really not catastrophic. Things look very different for people with high school diplomas.

The figures are stark, and starker when plotted as a graph:

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

The March Jobs Report has come, and though there appears to have been some employment growth in the rose colored glasses retailing sector, in most other sectors, the headline is that the Job Free Recovery continues.

There are three main numbers to focus on when looking at the monthly employment report:

• employment
• the headline unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted
• the broad (“U6”) unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted

… so let’s have a look at them.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

Now that the Republican Health Care Reform legislation of the early 90’s has been passed with no Republican votes, I’ve been musing on the Path Ahead.

The path ahead for health insurance reform seems straightforward, at least for as long as the Republicans remain trapped in a strict “Repeal” stance by the angry and noisy opposition to health insurance reform that corporations have stirred up in their base.

It has always been a misnomer to call the current legislation “health care reform” when it has always been primarily health insurance reform. Yet there is a necessary-through-not-sufficient relationship that applies here. Just as arriving at a less broken health insurance system was necessary to even apply bandaids to the health care system, a not-at-all broken publicly administered, not-for-profit health insurance system will allow actual reform of the health care system to proceed.

But then, thinking about how to organize to work for progress on Health Insurance Reform leads to thinking more broadly about achieving progressive social change in the face of our thoroughly corrupted political establishment

… or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Also available in Orange

Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action – whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.

The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.

If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch’s Media Empire that we could.

Now, I’m game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, “why should I become outraged by that in particular”. If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted – hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted – is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire … then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.

Crossposted at Agent Orange, ~7pm EDT, Saturday

This short essay started as a comment on a Docudharma Diary,  but its something that’s been percolating in my head for a while, now.

First, yes, of course, the Administration is acting like a representative of the moderate wing of the Corporate Party, because after all … that’s what they are. That is, after all, what they ran on … if they had pivoted to act as progressive populists, they would, indeed, have given substance to the radical reactionary lies about running as a moderate while secretly yearning for a radical agenda.

Instead, it turns out that the radical reactionary charge is more of the same projection … since they have for such a long time been running as more moderate than their actual radical agenda. The marketing genius of labeling a program of ripping out not just the New Deal of the Democratic Roosevelt but also the Square Deal of the Republican Roosevelt “conservative” … the tagline of the Fox Noise Channel as “Fair and Balanced” is just a pale shadow of that rhetorical trick.

Still …

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery, cross-posted from My Left Wing.

If you wander around the fringes of economic discussion on these Interwebs, you may encounter sites extolling the wondrous virtues of the VAT. “If only we would adopt a massive VAT, our two decade long decline in manufacturing output would be gone, and we would be an exporting powerhouse once again.” … well, no, that would be a stereotyping of the argument. A real sample of the claims sound more like this, from tradereform.org:

I Squared R Element Company is in Akron, New York. It makes industrial heating elements which are used for many processes to make other things, including glass and computer chips. The company was the low bidder on a contract to export to China.

However, the company lost the bid. Why?

I squared R was told it did not include, in its bid, China’s 10% customs duty or the 17% value added tax(VAT) that must be paid at the border.

All our goods pay a 17% VAT at the Chinese border. And the uninformed say we are a high cost producer. Chinese exporters also get a 17% VAT rebate, i.e. they get paid to export.

And, yes, I have picked out this quote to pick on VAT-uber-alles advocates, precisely because it focuses on the part of the argument that is simply wrong.

More below…