Steve's Politics Blog

New Economic Perspectives has the article Krugman’s Failure to Speak Truth to Power about Austerity.

Ever since the birth of the New Democrats, their adherents have embraced austerity. This act of mutual economic and political self-destruction has become so core to their identity that Hillary unhesitatingly made it one her most important closing pitches during the last 40 days of her campaign against Trump. At the very moment when her pollsters were warning her that she could lose due to working class hostility, she chose to showcase her hostility to the working class by promising to inflict eight more years of austerity on them. In your face working class! This is a political strategy that has no upside, but a toxic downside. Despite intense criticism from progressives of her austerity threats, Paul Krugman never urged her publicly to promise to end austerity’s assault on the working class. Similarly, no one on her official campaign team had the courage and strength to tell her to stop and reverse her position.

This is exactly my beef with all Democrats who tried to sell us Hillary Clinton after Bernie Sanders dropped out. Elizabeth Warren I write off without hesitation because she caved to Hillary at exactly the strategic moment when she should have promoted Bernie Sanders. At the end, even Robert Reich, a firm supporter of Bernie Sanders, tried to sell us Hillary Clinton, when his previous statements showed that he full well knew the stupidity of Clinton’s austerity plan. Surely Bernie Sanders knew how bad the Clinton plan was. He lost all credibility when he tried to sell her to us.

On television shows about court trials, you often hear an opposing lawyer ask a witness who has admitted to lying, “Were you lying then, or are you lying now?” How can we ever trust someone that we know has lied to us? Sorry, Bernie, we only have trust in people with unblemished records for telling the truth.

Jared Paquette had a post that referred to The New York Review of Books article Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco, June 22, 1995 Issue.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

The article goes on to describe 14 features. What I like about the article is that it seems to explain why there are so many different descriptions of what fascism is.

The original article Jared pointed to is Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism. This article adds some more modern examples to the 14 features than Eco could have written about in the original 1995 article. For someone of my age, it is hard to think of a 1995 article as being almost prehistoric.

The Boston Globe has the article Elizabeth Warren is ready to defend consumer agency.

Six years later, Warren and like-minded forces are girding for Round Two, as newly empowered Republicans prepare to kill or gut Warren’s most tangible government accomplishment: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There’s a good chance blood and teeth will be shed before it’s all over.

Is it too sexist if I use the common vernacular “Ain’t karma a bitch?” If she had supported Bernie Sanders when she had the chance, she wouldn’t be facing the problem of a Trump Presidency. When she sold out to Hillary, she sold out the CFPB. Am I supposed to feel sorry for Warren? Schadenfreude would be more like it.

Five Thirty Eight has the article What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?

Basic income is not a single idea but a family of closely related ideas, which go by an assortment of names: universal basic income, unconditional basic income, social dividend, guaranteed annual income, citizen’s income, negative income tax, etc. But the core motivation — to address social ills by just giving people money — has a long history.

A good discussion of this intriguing concept. I haven’t had the chance to read the whole article. That is why I post it here. When I have the time, I can come back to it to read the rest of it.

Harvard Business Review has the excellent article What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class.

For months, the only thing that’s surprised me about Donald Trump is my friends’ astonishment at his success. What’s driving it is the class culture gap.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

In my more lucid moments, I understand what this article is saying. Sometimes I am even aware that “professional people were generally suspect”. I know how badly received is my attitude that I know something that someone else does not know. That’s why I would never be as successful as a candidate as Bernie Sanders was and is.

I have learned that using credentials to back up what I write and talk about is a losing strategy for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article. In my more self-aware moments, I do avoid talking about my credentials as proof of anything.

Ironically, the people on the left who came from a working class background but have achieved success through education, see those credentials they earned as proof that they are worthy. Think of Barack Obama or even Hillary Clinton. In the case of a woman politician like Hillary, they are proud of the struggle they succeeded in when they broke through the ceilings men placed over them. It is hard for anyone like Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or even Elizabeth Warren to not want to tout education as the path into the middle and upper classes. What they don’t realize as politicians is that those who are still struggling resent their success.

What people who rise above the statistical norm cannot understand is that they should never let the following words pass their lips: “If I can do it, anyone can.” No, the statistics say that you are exceptional. Exceptional meaning that most people cannot do what you have done.

The frightening thing for Democrats should be that this article appeared in Harvard Business Review. It may be that Republicans will learn the lessons from this article before Democrats will. Maybe this is how political parties trade places in the political spectrum over long periods of time.

Think of how much emphasis Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush placed on the fact that they were only C students in college. They understood the need and the reasons to downplay educational success if you are going to win in the political realm. Even Bernie Sanders is quick to point out that he learned more from living life than he did from college.

Received this in the email from cousin and friend Michael K.

More stuff without comment

The Right Way to Resist Trump from NYT

J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America from New Republic.

We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump from The Correspondent.

I will follow his example – no comment. You, on the other hand, can make the comments.

YouTube has the video Ralph Nader, “Democrats Have Lost Their Identity”

Big Picture Interview: Ralph Nader, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, has a plan for progressives that could really shake things up.

I noticed that there have only been 16,914 views of this on YouTube as I write this. The challenge I posed to those viewers and anybody viewing this post is:

What are you going to do to get this number higher? I am going to blog it and Facebook it. If we all do that, then we get some visibility for this.

Another comment on YouTube was that the Green Party will take over from the Democrats. To that Idea I commented:

Nice dream. I voted for Jill Stein and volunteered for her after Bernie dropped out. I have suggested that name recognition is her biggest and top priority problem. She needs to concentrate on getting the world to know about her and the Green Party. I suggested she write a book and go on a national book tour to promote it. I see that Bernie Sanders has beaten her to the punch. He has already written the book and is drawing crowds on his book tour. If the Green Party and Jill Stein snooze, they lose.

Ok, I think it is time to elevate my response to a comment on a previous post on Facebook. A person quoted the ignorant meme that a vote for Stein was a vote for Trump. My response was:

A vote for Hillary in the primary was a vote for Trump. We told you that, but you refused to listen. When are you people going to own the mess you made, and stop trying to blame us who warned you that this is exactly what was going to happen? If you thought that anybody but a blue dog democrat would vote for the most hated woman in politics, then I just don’t think you realize that there are non-Democcrats who vote. How can you be so blind?

If you have to rig a primary to win, don’t you think that is a sign that you have a problem? If you have to sell yourself as the antidote to fear of the other guy, rather than sell your platform proposals, then shouldn’t you realize you have a problem? When you have to tell working people that the economy is just doing great while they are drowning in debt, low wage jobs, and the fear of homelessness, don’t you think you might have a problem?

When the “low-information” voter knows full well that your description of life in these united states at this time is just a bunch of malarkey, do you think you may have a problem?

When voters see you disrespect them by hoping they are ignorant enough to trust you instead of their own lying eyes, do you expect them to respect you back? How are they supposed to respond when you keep saying “I get it” when you clearly don’t get it?

Even in hind-sight you don’t get it. What are we supposed to do other than keep you as far out of the politics of this country as we possibly can? Are we supposed to give you bunch of losers another chance to wreck the Democratic Party? Do you think blaming us for the mess you caused is the way to win friends and influence people? No wonder you couldn’t win against Donald Trump.

We may all be singing this if there are any of us left to sing after the next 4 years.

I have been reading a lot of charges about George Soros that claim to be based on documents from WikiLeaks.

I think I have found a thread into what WikiLeaks has to say. Here is one example that popped up when I searched what I presume is the WikiLeaks web site. This article is China Now Runs the World, Soros Says.

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

I don’t find this article particularly damaging to George Soros, but perhaps there are such emails related to Soros and John Podesta. I post this entry point so that you or I can do more research if we feel like it.