Most Agree With Sanders But Understand We Can't Elect Him...Why?

Noam Chomsky discussed this democratic quandary. We agree on what we want but we also agree we cannot have it.

Most Americans agree with Sanders.

Most are persuaded he is radical and impractical.

Therefore what most Americans want and believe in is radical and impractical. And we can't have that.

This is an undemocratic problem. It may also be the key rationale of voter suppression.

Public opinion seems driven not by what the public wants but by fiat from the persuaders, the persuading class, who are employed by the people with greater wealth.

(The rich persuasions are also obeyed by those with less wealth, who own for a living on a more modest scale, whose financial security is held hostage by equity markets, the people who have retired from working life and joined––as junior members––the body of those who “own for a living.”)

This conundrum is difficult to explain in one sentence, and therefore not useful in persuading people. Fiats are one sentence.

Experience is a better persuader. The persuading class uses hard experience against us. In most cases it is hard experience their rich clients have caused.

The psychological control exerted by the people with money is our larger problem.

The defection of retired workers is understandable; their sentiments run one way but their fears dictate the safer choice of doing what their money says.

For working people the rhetorical trick works like this:

They are earning less than their parents did, but the tax burden has been shifted off of the owning classes and onto them.

This persuades them that they/we cannot afford good government and public sector spending. (Even if government-run programs and projects are less wasteful and less expensive because they’re not driven by profit.)

Their experience of lack of money persuades working people that they do not DESERVE good government and public services.

You pay for what you get.

You get what you deserve.

What you cannot afford you do not deserve.

Hence those with riches are deserving, those living in poverty deserve nothing. Working hard has nothing to do with it.

Working for a living makes you less deserving than owning for a living. In this sense Americans are participating in a violent upending of fundamental American values.

We have returned to the brutality of an earlier age.

Hillary may accomplish more in the hurly-burly of Washington politics than Bernie would. Practicality has a place. But the demands of working people, the grievances of working people, are not radical, and practical politics can solve them if we don't relegate them to second class status, which is the danger right now.

Inside Vs. Outside in the Democratic Party

An article in the Guardian is saying the insiders might be able to install Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee whether she wins the popular vote in the primaries or not.

If true, if this is really happening, it is dead wrong and defeatist. A recipe for disaster. A big opportunity thrown away.

If it's just a perception it is a perception that needs to be debunked by the DNC.

The party machinery must be there to empower the voters not dictate to them or to tip the scales.

If Hillary wins the nomination legitimately, by getting the votes, she will need the Bernie voters behind her in November, just as Bernie will need the Hillary voters if he is the nominee.

Hillary stepped gracefully aside in 2008 and joined the Obama administration in 2009. She respected the voters. I admire that. She has a great resumé. She has incredible political gifts. Women all over the country feel a woman president is long overdue, as do I. But it isn't cynical or anti-feminist to feel that Bernie might be a better candidate, that he represents a larger slice of the electorate, reaching outside the core of the party, perhaps reaching people in other parts of the country who have never voted for a Democrat. We don't know who has the stronger chance at winning. Voting in primaries is how these things are sorted out.

But Bernie is the real deal. He's shown that. An authentic champion of the interests of Americans who work for a living against the entrenched power of the much smaller group of Americans who own for a living. He has tapped into something powerful by speaking honestly and bravely without worrying about big donors or powerful people. He represents the outsider, which is most of us, against the insider, which Hillary Clinton most definitely is. Her inside game could mean she'd achieve more. Bernie's outside game could mean he'd be able to remake our politics, strengthen the progressive side by sheer force of numbers. He might set up an off-year wave of upsets to retake the Congress and statehouses.

I think the Bernie Sanders phenomenon represents an even stronger version of the wave that brought Obama into office: the sudden and enthusiastic involvement of millions of previously disengaged voters is something we’d be fools to throw away.

We have gotten into the habit in this country of engineering our politics, of prearranging the winners or (as in 2000) anointing someone who hasn’t won the popular vote, of the elders deciding what the children should have for dinner. The children have grown up and won’t have that.

It is true that the popular vote can be dangerous, as we see on the GOP side where it has been so divorced from our better angels and become pure ID, chasing a reality TV racist and sociopath, a billionaire who plays to our hatreds and our fears.

It is unfair and untrue to create a false equivalency between Bernie and Trump. They are both populists but Bernie is not one to rev up fascist emotions in the voting public. Trump is.

It's the GOP that divides us up by class and race and gender in order to control us.

The DNC should be the opposite of that.

I think it's time for both candidates to sit with the DNC and establish a process that will see fair play and a true expression of the will of the voters, an open nomination process without cronies, without the insider machinery, without resorting to the ill-named SuperDelegates.

I seem to remember this idea of Super Delegates emerged as a tool to prevent coups similar to the Lyndon LaRouche phenomenon which messed up our process in the 1980s. Bernie is not Lyndon LaRouche. He is tapping into decades of very legitimate anger and grievance but he is not exploiting these emotions to force the 12-tone scale onto classical orchestras or to create a right wing monster out of far flung parts of the Democratic Party. The Super Delegate is a relic. It echoes the Orwellian phrase about some pigs being more equal than others. It gives the party sages a feeling of involvement but the party is not about them, it is about the voters.

If the DNC is setting up a pre-ordained nomination they, and we, are throwing away an enormous wave of energy. New voters, fresh blood, fresh enthusiasm, a chance to build on what Barack Obama began in 2009, which the Republicans did their damnedest to block at every turn. The GOP seeks to divide us up and suppress the will of the voters. That is the sort of thing that makes voters cynical and disengaged. That is the GOP’s strategy. We shouldn’t be playing that hand too.

I will vote for whoever wins. Gladly. Hillary is a strong candidate. Bernie is a strong candidate. But if we split, we lose. We can't afford to lose this one.

A Killer Business Model

Headlining the business news this week is Martin Shkreli, 32 year-old former hedge fund manager and now CEO of his own pharmaceutical company, who bought the rights to a very effective drug used to treat critically ill infants and AIDS patients and promptly jacked up the price per dose by 5500%, raising it from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

Find something people will do anything to get and demand everything they have. That, my friend, is a killer business model. That is what American business has gotten especially good at in the past 30 years, since we learned to jettison all that Compassionate Society crap and finally ditch the New Deal. (Thank you Reaganomics!)

No more of this Jonas Salk giving the patent to the polio vaccine to humanity for free. Jonas Salk was an irresponsible fool––at least that’s the belief of American free market capitalists. Since money is the only measure of truth, they are absolutely right.

Pain and fear of death are wonderful motivators and American business schools keep churning out geniuses who know how to make sure every last fear-driven dime is carefully migrated out of the pockets of the sick and dying and into the pockets of smarter people who deserve it more and will spend it on $200,000 cars and party drugs.

Why do they deserve it more? Because they are Achievers. Because they are willing to go that extra mile. They are willing to do things most human beings would never do because it would make them feel like monsters. These businesspeople are able to turn off the small useless part of the brain that contains kindness, human decency, fellow-feeling, compassion and remorse. Being able to not think about other people makes them the most evolved, the most advanced, the most perfectly lethal form of the human species to date. They are unfeeling moneymaking machines and worth every penny they extort from people in pain.

Plutocrats Explain What's Wrong With Working Americans

Jeb Bush’s unending cascade of clueless tactless and gormless remarks rubbishing working people has been unfairly ignored because of Donald Trump’s far more impressive and much louder tsunami of clueless tactless and gormless remarks about every group that doesn’t include billionaires.

To even things out, here’s Jeb in his own words...

"Americans need to work longer hours” ~Jeb Bush (And some feedback from Americans, via the Guardian)

“The American economy needs more immigrants because they’re more fertile.” ~Jeb Bush (There’s been less feedback on this one, possibly because people are laughing...via the Washington Post)

That’s enough Bushism for one meal. There are commentators who are less gormless than Bush. Here are a few:

Robert Reich writes about the biggest myths about poverty.

Paul Krugman writes about the myth that Americans are “living on welfare”. You know, moochers.

Interesting fact: most of those lazy selfish folks living off food stamps are white and living in Republican districts. (Via a recent report in TIME magazine)

The whole Trickle Down Philosophy that has shaped post Reagan America has created enormous prosperity among a tiny percentage of very rich people ––you know, the people who own for a living––and an epidemic of anxiety among the rest of us who work for a living. (Courtesy of the Atlantic)

Even in the Magic Kingdom life is getting very mean. Before they fire you they ask you to please train the imported worker who will be replacing you. (From the New York Times)

In case you’ve bought the propaganda about Climate Change being a “good thing,” consider this (and it’s fairly big): Scientists are now predicting mass malnutrition because of the warming climate. (Via the Washington Post)

Working for a Living Vs. Owning for a Living

Jeb Bush said something odd yesterday: he said that our economy will do better if American workers will only work longer hours. Spoken like someone who owns for a living. The number of working people with jobs divided by those same workers working longer hours equals fewer jobs. It’s not that Bush is stupid, or that he is unable to think. His problem is he thinks like his money. His money thinks all problems should be solved to the benefit of money and people who have lots of it.

This from Bill Moyers. Lest anyone think Bernie Sanders is outside the American mainstream, he’s actually in the middle of it, historically. Unless you think every cooperative effort from barn raising to Social Security is unAmerican...

From The Guardian's George Monbiot: The Greek crisis is just a repetition of the age old conflict between people who work for a living (the 99%) and people who own for a living, between labor and capital. When it comes to money, capital always writes the rules.

The always perceptive and clearheaded David Cay Johnston writes about how venture capitalists loot pension funds. It’s a shame it’s in Al Jazeera where it will never persuade those it needs to persuade.

How Is A National Economy Not Like A Household Budget?

Krugman is especially good today. He makes some crucial points, one in particular, that most Americans don't understand, and that the conservative power structure, the banks, the 1%, are determined Americans never understand:

"Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family. Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too."

The Austerity mantra tells us that nobody should spend more than they have in their pocket right now. No homeowners, no car owners, no college for you.

Unless you are a member of the 1% who have accumulated all of America's earning power over the past 30 years.

What income and savings ordinary working and formerly middle class consumers used to spend now belongs to the very rich and adds to the leverage that the 1% has to manipulate the economy.

The 1% also uses this leverage to manipulate Congress to ease their taxes and increase ours, to get our tax dollars to bail out the big banks but not help the homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed, to get government to protect corporate earnings and CEO pay from taxes but cover any losses they might suffer through their own risky behavior.

The concentration of wealth also buys a lot of media, a lot of punditry, a lot of "expert opinion", a lot of public relations that can be used to persuade the mass of Americans that they don't deserve what they used to deserve, that austerity is good for them, that Americans should settle for less and quit grumbling.

Austerity policies take trillions out of the middle class consumer economy and put them into the well-stuffed mattresses of the 1%.

To what purpose? The rich can afford to play a long game. (Call it a long con if you like.) Their goal is to suppress working incomes to their lowest possible degree. They own for a living; they see working incomes as an evil. They have been suppressing working incomes for the past 30 years. What will eventually happen is the U.S. economy will begin to resemble a third world country, with large slums full of workers desperate enough to work for pennies and small gated enclaves of very wealthy people and their bodyguards.

Interestingly, the Austerity preachers give us Greece as an example of what happens if a country doesn't act according to the wishes of the very rich. But Greece is an example of the opposite. The Greek economy fell apart because its extremely wealthy stopped paying taxes and the consequences (unwise austerity policies) were forced upon the working population. But economies are made up of people who work and spend money, not just people who own for a living, who are rich for a living and do nothing productive. Why are the latter group made immune to taxes? What happens when trillions are taken out of a nation's economy and put tax-free in offshore banks? What happens is a Greek style collapse.