Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Only money.

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Sometimes I think my head is going to explode. Every get that way? It sometimes happens over stupid shit, like earlier this week when the MS Office install stopped working on my two-year-old PC, and Bill Gates’ automated tech support tried to trick me into buying a subscription to Office 365 rather than just reinstalling my Office 2016 once-and-done version. Hate when that happens, don’t you?

That’s not what really made my head explode this week. The true culprit was our ridiculous political culture – you know, the one that whines incessantly about how expensive Medicare For All will be (i.e. trillions of dollars less than what we’re spending now) but then turns around and drops two trillion dollars on saving Trump’s political bacon (they wanted to spend six trillion). Suddenly, all this money appeared out of nowhere.

And like the financial crisis, Congress’s piece is just the down payment. As David Dayen explained on Majority Report this past week, the $425 billion fund managed by Steve Mnuchin (the foreclosure king) will serve as initial capital in a Federal Reserve program that will direct more than ten times that amount towards select businesses – big banks, etc. – in the form of low-interest credit. Dayen refers to it as a money cannon, and he’s not wrong. There will be oversight in the form of an inspector general and an oversight board, but the review will be after the fact. It’s deja vu, all over again.

Sure, presumably every worker/taxpayer in America will get some kind of check. But the point is the bailout – the prole checks are just for window dressing. The bishops of austerity in the Senate are already whining about expanded unemployment benefits being too generous to people who are not working, as if there’s some moral hazard in paying people not to spread the Coronavirus. I’m not hearing them complain about trillions in public money being dropped on private enterprise, which will turn around and enrich themselves rather than use it for productive purposes, like hiring people. I’ve heard some vague hand-waving about the American people having a stake in the beneficiary industries, but this isn’t going to happen. Like the Wall Street and Detroit bailouts, there are very few strings attached to this money.

If we hand trillions of dollars out to private companies, we should own those companies. If we own those companies, we should put their workers in charge of managing them. If capitalism requires the government to resuscitate it every ten or so years with massive injections of socialism, we should start to rethink our system and, perhaps, pursue a vision of society that doesn’t entail crash-and-burn collapses every time something goes wrong … a vision that would emphasize social cohesion and a more robust approach to preparedness, involving – I don’t know – an exponentially larger number of, say, ICU beds, respirators, freaking PPE, for when the next plague comes strolling along.

We determine what’s possible. It’s just a question of political will.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Plague times.

Greetings from my corner of our national COVID-19 quarantine. As someone who is not unaccustomed to a certain amount of social isolation, I can say with confidence that this new normal has even me a bit more than creeped out. When I was in my teens and twenties, I wasn’t a big believer in psychology, but perhaps the only real advantage of advancing age is that it gives you an opportunity to discover the things you were wrong about earlier on – for me, one of those items was the fact that psychology is a thing that affects me. So, while my life is not all that different from the way it was before this crisis, I feel a lot different … and not in a good way.

Part of what I find disturbing about this pandemic scare is the degree to which so many people in my community are acting out of fear. I don’t mean to single central New York out in any way – similar effects are being seen all over the country. But when I go to grocery stores now, in particular, the evidence of panic buying is all around. I went to the supermarket at 7:30 a.m. last Saturday – half an hour into their business day – and there were gaping holes throughout the inventory. Because it’s kind of a white-dominant bedroom community, the missing items read like Ozzy and Harriet’s shopping list: iceberg lettuce, white bread, cans of tuna fish, jars of tomato sauce, canned soup, frozen vegetables, etc. Of course, paper products were cleared out entirely … 30 minutes into the business day!

Trump's empty America.

Weirdly, it didn’t seem like there were all that many people in the supermarket. And people didn’t seem frenzied, and they didn’t appear to be buying any more than I would have expected to see in their carts on an ordinary shopping day. Strangers were even interacting with me, in a friendly way, which was encouraging. And yet … the shelves were bare, as if Visigoths had marauded through the place a half hour earlier. Like the Coronavirus itself, panicked citizens seem like an invisible menace; you seldom actually see it, but you can see its effects. Then, of course, there are the follow-on effects: when people know their neighbors are buying everything in sight, they then go to the store and stock up before the goods are all gone. Selfishness starts to rule the day as people compete for consumer items suddenly in short supply. This is what late-stage capitalism looks like: very similar to the capitalists’ own distorted stereotype of socialist privation – empty shelves, desperate consumers, valueless scrip.

Of course, now that capitalism is in crisis (businesses shutting down, the stock market crashing), it’s time again for socialism! Trump and the Republicans, along with corporate Democrats, are reaching for massive state intervention in the economy, cutting billions of dollars in checks to individuals, back-stopping banks with enormous credit guarantees, dumping public cash into enormous, well-connected private corporations. All of the television austerians have come to their collectivist Jesus, much like they did in 2008-09. (Elect a Democrat, and trust me, they will be deficit hawks once more.)

So, no, you’re not hallucinating. This is all actually happening. Please stay safe, wash your hands, etc., and don’t freak out. We rely on each other to keep our heads – that may be the most effective thing we can do right now.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Berned.

It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.

Building a future, not just a campaign.

As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.

The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.

My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.

luv u,

jp