Wall Street vs Main Street, 1896

Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller and JP Morgan helped steal the 1896 presidential election for Wall Street's dedicated servant, Ohio Governor William McKinley. Democrat William Jennings Bryan-- "the Great Commoner"-- was, in many ways, his day's Bernie Sanders. Bryan vowed to put the predatory oligarchs behind bars if he won. 90% of the eligible voters turned out. Industrialists told their workers not to show up for work if Bryan won. Bryan won rural areas, including the entire South and most of the West-- 22 states to McKinley's 23. The History Channel account above, should look incredibly familiar to you. The Republicans are still very much up to their old tricks.

Today the Republican Party may not have Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan but they do have the Kochs, the Adelsons and the Waltons, a far worse pack of bloodsucking parasites. Whether these contemptible figures settle on Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, or even the unlikely Ted Cruz, you may want to consider helping Bernie Sanders take them on. We need him for the upcoming battle against the trusts.

Defining The Battleground And The Nature Of Conservatism

The other day we mentioned how Indiana reactionary Todd Young just wants all these right-wing social issues-- like marriage equality-- to go away so Republicans can concentrate on all their elites have ever cared about: screwing over working families for the benefit of the Big Business interests that finance Republican politicians' careers. Yeah, that simple. That conservatives have been on the wrong side of history on every single important issue facing America starting with the Declaration of Independence-- conservatives, of course, fought on the British side during the Revolutionary War and thousands fled the new country afterward-- right through:

• The Bill of Rights and the forging of a democracy
• Universal white male suffrage
• Public education
• The emancipation of the slaves
• The national park system
• Food safety
• The breakup of monopolies
• Land grant universities
• Rural electrification
• Women’s suffrage
• The abolition of child labor
• The eight hour workday
• The minimum wage
• Social Security
• Civil rights for minorities and women
• Voting rights for minorities and the poor
• Cleaning up our air, our water, and toxic dump sites
• Consumer product safety
• Medicare and Medicaid

They are always wrong. They are an impediment-- by definition and by nature-- to progress. And their asses are always for sale to the special interests in the process. Now Republicans like Young-- Todd if not Don-- want to get all this extraneous stuff about immigration, gays, lady parts, gun massacres. Latinos, etc out of the way so they can make their case about the economy. Democrats should welcome that debate-- all Americans should. It really is the only thing that could ever expose the GOP for what it is: a tool of the selfish, greed-obsessed millionaires and billionaires. Yesterday Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent welcomed it, urging Obama to keep talking about jobs.

With the country mired in extended sequestration, and Congress trapped in a stalemate over how much austerity to impose, it’s good to see that President Obama today plans to renew his push for infrastructure investment to create jobs and get the economy going. The Associated Press reports that Obama will today unveil a plan to create jobs by encouraging more private investment in highways and other infrastructure projects-- and with billions in new federal spending on infrastructure, partly via a national “infrastructure bank” that was originally proposed during Obama’s first term.

It appears Obama will propose new spending in his forthcoming budget, which will call for a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. The White House is likely to argue that deficit reduction measures can co-exist with new spending on infrastructure, research, and early-childhood education, which will be offset by other unspecified budget changes.

Obviously new spending is a nonstarter among Republicans, as the President’s partial emphasis on private infrastructure investment makes clear. But Obama should continue pushing infrastructure spending, anyway. For one thing, it’s highly popular: A recent Gallup poll found that 72 percent of Americans-- and even 53 percent of Republicans-- support new federal spending to put people to work on infrastructure repairs. For another, the notion that we should prioritize spending to get the economy going over deficit reduction in the short term has been entirely marginalized from the Washington conversation, which remains trapped in a dialog between “balanced” austerity (the Dem push for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes) and extreme austerity (the Paul Ryan budget).

This week, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was bemoaning the fact that with more Republicans coming around to the majority view on most social issues they're still in the dark on the economy. But that's really all they care about and, as he says, "public opinion seems beside the point."

Before January’s fiscal cliff deal, for example, at least 60 percent of Americans, in poll after poll, expressed strong support for raising taxes on incomes over $250,000. As you recall, though, the deal locked in the Bush tax cut for everyone earning up to $400,000.

Yes, legislative deals require compromise. But why is it that deals over economic policy almost always compromise away what a majority of Americans want?

Most Americans weren’t particularly concerned about the budget deficit to begin with. They’ve been far more concerned about jobs and wages. Yet maneuvers over the deficit have consistently trumped jobs and wages.

Recent polls show Americans would rather reduce the deficit by raising taxes than by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, education, and transportation. Yet Congress seems incapable of making that kind of deal.

Some 65 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on large corporations-- but both parties are heading in precisely the opposite direction.

Half of Americans favor a plan to break up Wall Street’s twelve megabanks, which currently control 69 percent of the banking industry. Only 23 percent oppose such a plan (27 percent are undecided).

You might this would at least prompt an examination of the possibility on Capitol Hill and the White House-- especially now that the Street is actively eviscerating regulations under Dodd-Frank.

But our elected representatives don’t want to touch Wall Street. According to Politico, even the White House believes too-big-to-fail will soon be a closed chapter.

Why are politicians so sensitive to public opinion on equal marriage rights, immigration, and guns-- and so tone deaf to what most Americans want on the economy?

Perhaps because the former issues don’t threaten big money in America. But any tinkering with taxes or regulations sets off alarm bells in our nation’s finely-appointed dining rooms and board rooms-- alarm bells that, in turn, set off promises of (or threats to withhold) large wads of campaign cash in the next election.

When political scientists Benjamin Page and Larry Bartels surveyed Chicagoans with an average net worth of $14 million, they found their biggest concern was curbing budget deficits and government spending-- ranking these as priorities three times as often as they did unemployment.

And-- no surprise-- these wealthy individuals were also far less willing than are other Americans to curb deficits by raising taxes on high-income people, and more willing to cut Social Security and Medicare. They also opposed initiatives most other Americans favor-- such as increasing spending on schools and raising the minimum wage above the poverty level.

The other thing distinguishing Page’s and Bartels’ wealthy respondents from the rest of America was their political influence.

Two-thirds of them had contributed money (averaging $4,633) in the most recent presidential election. A fifth of them had even “bundled” contributions from others.

That money bought the kind of political access most Americans only dream of. About half of these wealthy people had recently initiated contact with a U.S. senator or representative-- and nearly half (44 percent) of those contacts concerned matters of relatively narrow economic self-interest rather than broader national concerns.

This is just the wealthy of one city-- Chicago. Multiply it across the entire United States and you begin to see the larger picture of whom our representatives are listening to, and why. Nor does the survey include the institutionalized wealth-- and economic clout-- of Wall Street and large corporations. Multiply the multiplier.

Great wealth can also influence public opinion. It is possible, for example, that the piles of money spent by billionaire Pete Peterson to persuade Americans that the budget deficit is the nation’s most urgent economic problem is now paying off. Recent polls show greater concern about the deficit now than was expressed a few years ago when the deficit represented a much larger percentage of the total economy.

Yesterday President Obama made the point in Florida that investing "in infrastructure not only makes our roads, bridges, and ports safer and gives our businesses and workers the tools to compete successfully in the global economy, it also creates thousands of good American jobs that cannot be outsourced." With the GOP gratuitously obstructing every single initiative he takes, he's calling for a partnership with private enterprise to rebuild the country's infrastructure. If businesses see the GOP standing in the way of them making a profit... watch out-- all bets will be off.

The Ultimate Class War Presidential Campaign

Financed by a few wealthy families and Wall Street interests, bolstered by systematic attempts to suppress the vote and intimidate working class voters, even employing a strategy of threatening to close down businesses if their candidate loses the election, 2012 was hardly the first time the GOP used anti-democratic tactics in a presidential race. The election of 1896, which pitted populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan against Big Business whore William McKinley, was the model for how conservatives would use electoral politics to undermine democracy and promote plutocracy. If the Karl Rove role was played by Mark Hanna, Adelson and the Koch brothers were certainly J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller (seen in the clip above personally editing McKinley's convention speech).

The GOP won that time and they tried replicating the whole strategy again with Romney. But this time it fell flat on its face, in part because, as much as Romney was a perfect xerox of McKinley, Obama could never be plausibly be forced into the unapologetic populism of William Jennings Bryan. Obama's economic and fiscal politics, of anything, are closer to McKinley's than to Bryan's. And Americans will pay for that with what he and Boehner are cooking up in their Grand Bargain. We've been talking a lot about how our elites' economic, social and cultural distance from the middle class discourages empathy. Quoting again from Chris Hayes' Twilight of the Elites, let's not forget that "A wide distance between the governors and the governed will produce a state that is predatory toward its own citizens, indifferent to their desires, and subject to the inbred whims and compulsions of its ruling class... [T]hose members of the elite who occupy the high offices of our pillar institutions and organizations are already psychologically disposed to close themselves off to the perspectives of others... Time and again, in radically different contexts, we saw those in charge be so blind to the interests of those outside their small circle that they pursued a course of action that would ultimately bring ruin and disgrace." Yesterday conservative pundit David Frum made a half-assed attempt to tackle the empathy problem that plagues his political party.

In this weekend's Weekly Standard, Jay Cost walks right up to the front door of Mitt Romney's electoral problem-- and then turns aside and walks back away again.

Obama’s campaign against Romney, which portrayed him as an out-of-touch plutocrat, appears largely to have been successful. Romney’s favorable rating in the exit poll was just 47 percent, with 50 percent holding an unfavorable view. By 53 to 43 percent, voters said that Obama was “more in touch with people like” them, and by a staggering 53 percent to 34 percent, they said Romney’s policies would favor the rich instead of the middle class.

In other words, Romney lost in large part because of a yawning empathy gap. Typically, this plagues Republican candidates to some degree, even victorious ones, but it was pronounced this year, and appears to have been determinative. The voters who showed up on Election Day identified more closely with Obama than Romney, and those who stayed home presumably identified with neither. Importantly, this problem transcended age, race, ethnicity, and gender. Compared with Bush in 2004, Romney simply failed to connect with people.

All true, so far as it goes. But it's very important for Republicans to understand that Romney's failure to connect with people was not a mere personability deficit. George W. Bush ran in 2004, let's not forget, as the candidate who had created Medicare Part D, the costliest expansion of the welfare state since the mid-1970s. Romney ran in 2012 as the candidate of the Ryan plan. That's the difference.

  Which is not to suggest that Republicans make a habit of championing huge, unpaid-for government programs. That's not the party's job. But it's important that Republicans emancipate themselves from two illusions: (1) that their problem is immigration; and (2) that their problems can be fixed by more charming candidates.

    The Republican problem is the party's disconnect from the experiences and challenges of middle-class Americans in the 21st century. Start there, and work forward.

Now listen to Bryan's speech and I guarantee you there's no way to imagine Barack Obama ever saying-- let alone backing-- anything like it: