A Gamble That Paid Off: When Bernie Was Riding High, Wall St. Saw A Distressed Asset In Biden-- And Bought Low

The Republican wing of the Democratic Party lined up behind Biden early, though it wasn't enough to animate his DOA campaign-- not until Obama stepped in and told the party establishment the enough time had been wasted and that Bernie could win and take away everything they had built for themselves if they don't unite behind Biden. So they did. Was anyone surprised? Was anyone surprised when Republican elites started flocking to Biden-- first in a trickle and now in a steady stream?

So why would anyone be surprised that Biden-- who has spent his entire career in politics fellating Wall Street-- would be embraced by the banksters and junior-banksters who were FDR's and the working class' sworn enemies but have been assiduously cultivated by the Bill Clinton breed of Democrats?

Over the weekend, the NY Times published a piece by Kate Kelly, Shane Goldmacher and Thomas Kaplan, The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts that will thrill many Democrats and chill many others. The story barely mentions Bernie-- just once when he and Elizabeth Warren were dismissed-- but Bernie, fear of Bernie to be precise, was the impetus for Biden's rise among the financial elites. This story though is about how Trump is pushing Wall Street into the Biden camp. After donating millions to Biden to beat Bernie, that money "helped him build a strong lead in national polls." But with the threat of Bernie off the table, what would Wall Street do next?

"Wall Street," wrote the Times trio, "has fared extraordinarily well under Mr. Trump: deep cuts to taxes, slashed regulations and, until the pandemic hit, record stock prices. But in recent months, dozens of bankers, traders and investors said in interviews, a sense of outrage and exhaustion over Mr. Trump’s chaotic style of governance-- accelerated by his poor coronavirus response-- had markedly shifted the economic and political calculus in their industry. More and more finance professionals, they say, appear to be sidelining their concerns about Mr. Biden’s age-- 77-- and his style. They are surprisingly unperturbed at the likelihood of his raising their taxes and stiffening oversight of their industry. In return, they welcome the more seasoned and methodical presidency they believe he could bring. They may not exactly be falling in love with Mr. Biden. But they are falling in line." And they know that the raising won't be too high and the stiffening won't be too painful. Biden said so himself. He's not called Status Quo Joe just because it rhymes.

Now... ready for silly?

“I’ve seen meaningful numbers of people put aside what would appear to be their short-term economic interest because they value being citizens in a democracy,” said Seth Klarman, founder of the hedge fund Baupost. A longtime independent, Mr. Klarman was at one point New England’s biggest giver to the Republican Party. But in this cycle, he has given $3 million to groups supporting Mr. Biden.

Or as James Attwood, a managing director at the Carlyle Group and a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, put it, “For people who are in the business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a while ago.” (Mr. Attwood contributed $200,000 in June to the Biden Action Fund, a joint committee with the Democratic National Committee.)

In May and June alone, the Biden Action Fund raised more than $11.5 million. That tally-- a good measuring stick for Wall Street support because it was set up in part to draw contributions from that industry-- included $710,000 from Josh Bekenstein, a co-chair of Bain Capital, and his wife.

But Wall Street money has proved to be a double-edged sword for Democrats, as Hillary Clinton discovered when she was hounded four years ago for delivering private speeches to Goldman Sachs and other firms. Progressive voters and activists-- many of whom backed Mr. Biden’s more liberal rivals in the primary-- are particularly leery of any appearance of coziness with the finance industry.

Leery... imagine that! Why would progressives be leery of the working class' historical enemies? Everything that is wrong with the world... follow the money. Our Times trio wrote that when asked about Wall Street’s role in Biden’s current bid, the campaign spits out all the Biden bullshit about how he fights for the common man, which is quite at odds with his repulsive record of fighting against the common man. Our trio hates Trump so they refrain from noting that although they reluctantly admit that "As a senator from Delaware, Mr. Biden has for decades had relationships with credit-card companies there, but less of a presence in the financial power center of New York. He has counted a small circle of finance executives as supporters. Marc Lasry, the co-founder of Avenue Capital, for example, held a fund-raiser for Mr. Biden during his first run for president in 1988, and continues to back him now. The former hedge-fund executive Eric Mindich and the short-seller James Chanos have been supporters from well before the pandemic began. It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Biden has also not crusaded against Wall Street, the way his primary rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders did. Financial executives mostly seem to believe that while their taxes would rise in a Biden administration, they would not be subjected to the kind of 'fat cat' rhetoric that soured some of their relationships with former President Barack Obama." Feel better now? How about this then? "'Rich people are just as patriotic as poor people,' Mr. Biden told donors at a fund-raiser at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan last year. At a Brookings Institution gathering in 2018, he said, 'I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble.'" Biden is wrong; they are.

Biden’s more benign stance toward the finance industry has provoked skepticism among advocates for stricter regulation. “When the candidate doesn’t have a clear plan on something like Wall Street reform, it tilts the playing field toward what is probably the most powerful industry in the world,” said Carter Dougherty, a spokesman for Americans for Financial Reform, an advocacy group. “We need more than ‘not Trump appointees’ when it comes to financial regulation.”

While Wall Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to President George W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr. Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.

This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

Last month, multiple Wall Street bundlers, including Alan Leventhal, the chief executive of Beacon Capital; Nat Simons, who runs a clean-tech investment fund; and Mr. Gray, Blackstone’s president, held virtual fund-raisers for Mr. Biden. The giving has been so robust that the Biden campaign is now asking for at least $1 million in donations before it will confirm the former vice president’s attendance at an event, say bundlers.

As the checks roll in, the Biden campaign has been carefully cultivating its relationship with the business community, with a focus on Wall Street. The outreach has included offering private briefings ahead of major policy rollouts and dangling various donor packages for the upcoming, and mostly virtual, Democratic National Convention.

In one call last month, two of Mr. Biden’s top advisers on financial policy, Ben Harris and Jake Sullivan, led a wide-ranging conversation to preview the candidate’s economic plan, which focuses on broad policy initiatives like investing in green infrastructure projects and minority-owned businesses. Two former Treasury secretaries, Robert E. Rubin and Jacob J. Lew, were part of the call.

Several major Wall Street executives and investors were also present, including Blair Effron, co-founder of the financial advisory firm Centerview Partners; Penny Pritzker, a fund-raiser and former commerce secretary; David Cohen, a top Biden bundler and Comcast executive; and Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google.

...[H]ow Mr. Biden might affect their wallets is still a major concern for industry executives who aggressively fought the implementation of new regulations after the financial crisis of 2008. Some in the business community have suggested tweaks to the former vice president’s tax and economic policies in ways that might soften the impact for companies.

At a separate July meeting with campaign staffers and a handful of Wall Street participants, Charles Phillips, chairman of the software company Infor and a onetime Morgan Stanley tech analyst, argued that Mr. Biden shouldn’t make huge expenditures on infrastructure and other new programs without also identifying spending cuts. “We can fund some of this by getting more efficient and getting rid of waste that no one will miss,” Mr. Phillips recalled saying. He said he also argued for a simpler tax code with a corporate rate lower than Mr. Biden’s proposed 28 percent.

In addition to those watching the policy details, many financiers are closely attuned to Mr. Biden’s selection of a running mate, arguing that they might reconsider their votes if he were to choose someone like Ms. Warren, whose campaign sold coffee mugs that read “Billionaire Tears” in a nod to her proposed wealth tax on the superrich.

Some in the finance industry are concerned about Ms. Warren’s emergence as an informal policy adviser, and the possibility that she could be installed as Treasury secretary.

Mr. Biden’s policy platform on the issues affecting Wall Street’s most affluent players has been relatively sparse. He has proposed a series of tax increases on businesses and on wealthy individuals, including raising the top marginal income tax rate and taxing capital gains as ordinary income for the richest Americans. But he has not embraced a wealth tax like Ms. Warren’s, nor has he rolled out any kind of detailed policy plan focused on financial regulation.

Since Mr. Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the campaign has appointed Rufus Gifford, a former finance director for the 2012 Obama campaign, as a deputy campaign manager overseeing the money operation nationwide. Mr. Gifford is in regular touch with Wall Street donors, coordinating a slew of virtual fund-raisers and discussing campaign issues with deep-pocketed financiers.

In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are still being hammered out, according to someone who has attended multiple fund-raisers but requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. At a virtual fund-raiser held in July, the candidate spoke of the need for corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be legislative.

Back in February, Mr. Biden had taken a precious day off the trail to collect a critical $800,000 at two New York fund-raisers, including the one Mr. Gray co-hosted. “You’re putting me in a position to be able to be very competitive,” Mr. Biden said, thanking his Wall Street supporters.

A few of his finance industry donors, looking back, have privately remarked how the evening turned out to be the most quintessential of Wall Street plays: seeing a distressed asset at that time, and buying low.

Republican Phil Heimlich, a former Cincinnati City Council member and Hamilton County commissioner, is a principal in the #NeverTrump group, Republicans For the Rule of Law and a founder of Operation Grant, an offshoot of the Lincoln Project for Ohio. Over the weekend, USA Today published an OpEd he wrote about how Ohio conservatives are abandoning Trump for Biden. Trump, he complains, hasn't lead as a true conservative. "In 2016, many Ohio voters put their faith in Donald Trump, us included. That was an error of judgment, not intent. For these reasons, we’re joining with other Republicans in this state to vote against President Trump this November. He has created a culture of fear within the Republican Party as well as across the country, demonizing anyone with differing opinions. He belittles, berates, and ruins the careers of all who oppose him-- including his own appointed government agency heads, respected military leaders and war heroes. He has undermined the rule of law, obstructed justice, and issued pardons and commutations to personal cronies who helped cover up his misdeeds. He has demonstrated gross incompetence during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing needless suffering and death. He has run up a $2.7 trillion budget deficit, $1 trillion of which occurred before the pandemic unfolded..." And so on. And... how much of President Biden will all these conservative Republicans own? 50%? 75% 99.9% More? Maybe I'll be proven wrong. We'll know when Biden announces his VP pick. If he choses Elizabeth Warren, I'm wrong, wrong, wrong. You know I'm not.

Yesterday Juan Cole, in his Informed Consent newsletter, asked how Americans became such wimps, quietly watching Trump kill tens of thousands, destroy Social Security, Medicare, the environment and the post office and openly plot to steal the election. "Americans," he wrote, "are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege... The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In 1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn’t vote for Mondale because he was a “panty-waist.” Reagan took away their right to strike and took away government services by running up the deficit and cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government couldn’t provide the services the people had paid for because it is broke. Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people don’t realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and they often won’t actually get any golden years."

What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.

Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can’t understand why. France has persistently high unemployment as it is.

In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was interrupted. Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on for months, and were very inconvenient.

Macron backed down on raising the retirement age.

The French working and middle classes know how to throw a first class fit when the servants of the rich in government come after their lifestyles. They don’t always get their way (Macron used a parliamentary maneuver to make some changes in pensions, in late February), but they make damn sure the government knows it can’t get away with encroaching on them without a fight.

I actually think that one reason Europe has done much better in tamping down the coronavirus than Trump’s America is that the governments and corporations were afraid of a public backlash if the death toll went on rising. So they did their effing jobs.

In mid-April the Financial Times reported that the CGT workers union (which it darkly observed is under Communist influences) had filed a criminal complaint against the Carrefour supermarket chain and its CEO for not protecting its workers from the coronavirus. The unions also went to court to force Amazon to step back and only ship essential items until the courts could review the company’s safety procedures.

The only thing I know of like that in the US is the UCFW’s lawsuit against the Department of Agriculture’s waivers to poultry plants allowing them to speed up the assembly lines. During a pandemic! Workers breathing harder is undesirable with a respiratory disease floating about.

But in France, it wouldn’t have been one union filing a lawsuit (which one of Mitch McConnell’s unqualified Republican judges/ideologues will likely slap down). It would have been a massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes.

By feeding us decades of propaganda against unions and “socialism,” the American rich have broken the legs of the people, and left them to twitch helplessly as more and more indignities are heaped on them. They’ve divided us by race (Trump is not alone in this tactic, only the least subtle), they’ve convinced us to give the super-rich power because they will make us rich too. (How is that working out for you?).

There is now no mainstream political party in Western Europe that is anywhere near as far right as the GOP. The closest analogues to today’s Republican Party in Europe are the far right white supremacist parties, like Marie LePen’s National Front in France or the AfD in Germany.

It appears that a plutocracy produces fascism, since appeals to racialist superiority and playing on fears of a brown and black Other are the only things that can convince people to give up their basic human rights (like a comfortable life in retirement, which they have paid for, or the right to cast a mail in ballot during a pandemic).

But despite all the military parades and brave talk of master races, fascism is just the ultimate humiliation of the sheeple. Mussolini drove enormous numbers of Italians into poverty. The Axis used them for cannon fodder at the front. If the increasingly wimpy Americans don’t watch out, they will find that it is too late to fight back, since they have surrendered all their means to do so. So as to avoid being panty-waists and all. They will be left with a borrowed greasy cheeseburger they can’t even pay for.

Does this song and video make you cry? Human solidarity has always had such an incredible power over me.

Want To See Bernie Defeat The Two Conservatives And Become President? Keep Fighting

Almost everyone I know is desperate to see Trump defeated in November-- but no one wanted it to be this way. CNN analyst Stephen Collinson reported yesterday that Trump is being forced to lead the country into what is shaping up to be one of its most tragic months in history "as experts say the coronavirus pandemic could kill more citizens than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined." But instead of a figure the country could rally behind, we are stuck with a self-congratulatory, divisive sociopath. "It’s no exaggeration." wrote Collinson, "to say Trump faces the most critical month of his presidency yet-- and how he conducts himself will be crucial for the country and his own hopes of reelection. But there are signs that he does not fully understand the stakes nor is willing to relegate his own interests in favor of the common good. Trump still appears to be marveling at the spread of the virus, which he says no one could have predicted. Health experts had anticipated its arrival in the US for months as he predicted a miracle would occur and it would just go away. And on a day when so many Americans died, he boasted at one point that his hair blowing in the breeze in the White House Rose Garden was his own, marking an inappropriate tone for a harrowing national moment. Trump blasted reporters for asking "snarky" questions when they use facts and his own words to point out shortcomings in the effort to combat the virus in the United States, which now has more confirmed infections than any other nation. His reaction did not dispel the impression that he is more interested in protecting his reputation than fixing mistakes that may worsen the pandemic."

With Trump in the thick of his reelection race, his daily early evening briefings are increasingly fusing with his political strategy, and the crisis is already shaping the 2020 race.

On Sunday, he embraced warnings by senior health officials that 100,000 or more Americans could die from coronavirus if he failed to extend his self-distancing guidelines. Trump alone among senior officials had been itching to ease the measures.

There was a subtle yet significant shift in his rhetoric on Monday.

"By very vigorously following these guidelines, we could save more than 1 million American lives. Think of that: 1 million American lives," the President said.

The comment suggested that at the end of a national disaster that has been exacerbated by his leadership failings, he will bill himself as a victorious wartime President who rescued many Americans from death.

...Trump's news conferences remain a self-serving mix of the most positive developments in the coronavirus fight, saved up for campaign-style announcements. On Monday, Trump posed like a game show host's assistant as he lifted a new testing kit out of its box for the cameras-- and the President basked in testimonials to his leadership from Cabinet officials and invited corporate CEOs.

The reality of the coronavirus crisis appears far less upbeat on the front lines than it does from Trump's boisterous sessions in the White House Rose Garden, however.

Maryland's Larry Hogan, a Republican who's one of several governors who introduced tough stay-at-home orders on Monday, warned that the Washington metro area was likely to replicate the difficult scenes in New York soon.

"We're just two weeks behind New York, with... higher numbers here than they were at two weeks ago," Hogan told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Hogan warned that warnings by the federal government's top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci that 100,000 Americans could die in the pandemic were a best case scenario.

"Just to put that in perspective, that's more than the number of Americans that died in the Vietnam war and the Korean war added together. And we're not talking about over a number of years. We're talking about in a very short period of time," Hogan said.

The Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor piece in yesterday's New Yorker, Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders, spread online like wildfire. But if you get your news from corporate media-- particularly from Comcast-TV, the beating heart of the #NeverBernie movement-- you will never hear about how Taylor personified the debate over the role of government in addressing income inequality, housing insecurity, debt accumulation, and health care to the battle between Bernie on the one hand and the two conservative candidates, populist-right Trump and down-the-center establishmentarian Biden on the other. "It is difficult to articulate the speed with which the U.S. and, indeed, the world, has descended into an existential crisis," wrote Taylor, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton. "We are experiencing an unprecedented public-health event whose diminution and potential resolution rests with a series of prescriptions, including settlement-in-place orders, that will annihilate the economy. The deadly spread of covid-19 demands enclosure as a way to starve the searching virus of bodies to inhabit. The consequences of doing so removes workers from work and consumers from consumption; no economy can operate under these conditions." The Act Blue thermometer on the right is where you can contribute to Bernie's campaign and to the progressive congressional candidates running on his platform. You may want to use it when you think more about what Taylor had to say.

American life has been suddenly and dramatically upended, and, when things are turned upside down, the bottom is brought to the surface and exposed to the light. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath ravaged the Gulf Coast, it, too, provided a deeper look into the darkness of U.S. inequality. As the actor Danny Glover said then, “When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country, as it has been disparagingly implied in the media; it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster; gruelling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.”

For years, the United States has gotten away with persistently chipping away at its weak welfare state by hiding or demonizing the populations most dependent on it. The poor are relegated as socially dysfunctional and inept, unable to cash in on the riches of American society. There are more than forty million poor people in the U.S., but they almost never merit a mention. While black poverty is presented as exemplary, white poverty is obscured, and Latinos and other brown people’s experiences are ignored. As many as four in five Americans say they live paycheck to paycheck. Forty per cent of Americans say that they cannot cover an unexpected four-hundred-dollar emergency expense.

...Thus far, the Trump Administration has predictably bungled the response to the coronavirus. But the Democratic Party’s response has been hampered by its shared hostility to unleashing the power of the state, through the advance of vast universal programs, to attend to an unprecedented, devolving catastrophe. About half of American workers receive health insurance through their employer. As job losses mount, millions of workers will lose their insurance while the public-health crisis surges. In the last Democratic debate, former Vice-President Joe Biden insisted that the U.S. doesn’t need single-payer health care because the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in Italy proved that it doesn’t work. Strangely, he simultaneously insisted that all testing and treatment of the virus should be free because we are in crisis. This insistence that health care should only be free in an emergency reveals a profound ignorance about the ways that preventive medicine can mitigate the harshest effects of an acute infection. By mid-February, a Chinese government study of that country’s coronavirus-related deaths found that those with preëxisting conditions accounted for at least a third of all covid-19 fatalities.




Dismissing the necessity of universal health care also shows an obliviousness to the power of medical expenses to alter the course of one’s life. Two-thirds of Americans who file for bankruptcy say that medical debt or losing work while they were sick contributed to their need to do so. The costs of medical treatment become a reason for postponing visits to the doctor. A 2018 poll found that forty-four per cent of Americans delayed seeing a doctor due to its cost. Already, half of Americans polled have said that they worry about the costs of the testing and treatment of covid-19. In a situation like the one we are in, it becomes easy to see the ways that encumbered access to health care exacerbates a public-health breakdown. N.B.A. players, celebrities, and the wealthy have access to the coronavirus test, but attending nurses and frontline health-care workers, community health centers, and public hospitals do not. Health-care inequalities are problems that have been left unattended, creating so many small, imperceptible fractures that, in the midst of a full-scale crisis, the structure is collapsing, shattering under its own weight.

The case has never been clearer for a transition to Medicare for All, but its achievement clashes with the Democratic Party’s decades-long hostility to funding the social-welfare state. At the heart of this resistance is the pernicious glorification of “personal responsibility,” through which success or failure in life is seen as an expression of personal fortitude or personal laxity. The American Dream, we are told, is anchored in the promise of unfettered social mobility, a destiny driven by self-determination and perseverance. This ingrained thinking evades the fact that it was the New Deal, in the nineteen-thirties, and the G.I. Bill, in the nineteen-forties, that, through a combination of federal work programs, subsidies, and government-backed guarantees, created a middle-class life style for millions of white Americans. In the nineteen-sixties, as a result of prolonged black protest, Lyndon Johnson authored the War on Poverty and other Great Society programs, which were intended to lessen the impact of decades of racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and education. By 1969, with Richard Nixon at the helm, during an economic downturn that ended what was then the longest economic expansion in American history, the conservatives attacked the notion of the “social contract” embedded in all of these programs, claiming that they rewarded laziness and were evidence of special rights for some. When Nixon ran for reëlection, in 1972, he claimed that his campaign pitted the “work ethic” against the “welfare ethic.”

This was an attack not only on public aid and subsidized housing but also on the people using those programs. Republicans successfully tapped into the racial resentments of white suburbanites, who decried “their” tax dollars going to unruly, rioting African-Americans. They resented “forced integration,” “forced busing,” and “the bureaucrats,” as Nixon derisively called the previous Democratic Administrations. It is important to understand that this was not demonization for its own sake or because of some irrational antipathy toward African-Americans. This was about keeping the corporate tax rate low and reëstablishing the profitability of capital in the aftermath of another, longer economic downturn. It is hard for businesses and their political representatives to counsel ordinary workers to do more with less. It was easier to blame welfare queens, welfare cheats, and an oblique, yet black, underclass for the end of these “wasteful” programs. In 1973, Nixon unceremoniously declared an end to the “urban crisis”—the catalyst for much of Johnson’s welfare state. This created the pretext for his gutting of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the office that managed the web of anti-poverty programs created by the War on Poverty.

The eventual defection of ordinary white voters from the Democratic Party to the Republicans meant that the Democrats soon aped the right’s strategy of downplaying the structural roots of inequality while portraying black communities as ultimately responsible for their own hardships. By the end of the nineteen-eighties, the Democratic Party was championing law-and-order politics and harsh, racist attacks on welfare entitlements. In a 1988 column for the Post of Newark, Delaware, titled “Welfare System About to Change,” the then Senator Biden wrote, “We are all too familiar with the stories of welfare mothers driving luxury cars and leading lifestyles that mirror the rich and famous. Whether they are exaggerated or not, these stories underlie a broad social concern that the welfare system has broken down-- that it only parcels out welfare checks and does nothing to help the poor find productive jobs.” This statement was hardly extraordinary; it reflected widespread efforts to transform public perceptions of the Democratic Party. By the early nineties, President Bill Clinton was promising to “end welfare as we know it,” which he succeeded in doing by the end of the decade.

This is the historical backdrop to the hypocrisy of U.S. government-spending priorities today. Bipartisan denunciations of big government do not apply to the obscene amounts spent on the military or the maintenance of the nation’s criminal-justice system. The U.S., across all levels of government, spends more than eighty billion dollars annually to operate jails and prisons and to maintain probation and parole. The budget for the U.S. armed forces topped out at a stunning seven hundred and thirty-eight billion dollars for this year alone-- more than the next seven largest military budgets in the world. Meanwhile, social-welfare programs-- from food stamps to Medicaid, to subsidized and assisted housing, to public schools-- are forced to provide on the thinnest margin, triaging crises, rather than actually pulling people out of poverty.

When Bernie Sanders’s critics mocked his platform as just a bunch of “free stuff,” they were drawing on the past forty years of bipartisan consensus about social-welfare benefits and entitlements. They have argued, instead, that competition organized through the market insures more choices and better quality. In fact, the surreality of market logic was on clear display when, on March 13th, Donald Trump held a press conference to discuss the covid-19 crisis with executives from Walgreens, Target, Walmart, and CVS, and a host of laboratory, research, and medical-device corporations. There were no social-service providers or educators there to discuss the immediate, overwhelming needs of the public.

The crisis is laying bare the brutality of an economy organized around production for the sake of profit and not human need. The logic that the free market knows best can be seen in the prioritization of affordability in health care as millions careen toward economic ruin. It is seen in the ways that states have been thrown into frantic competition with one another for personal protective equipment and ventilators—the equipment goes to whichever state can pay the most. It can be seen in the still criminally slow and inefficient and inconsistent testing for the virus. It is found in the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the airline industry, alongside nickel-and-dime means tests to determine which people might be eligible to receive ridiculously inadequate public assistance.

The argument for resuming a viable social-welfare state is about not only attending to the immediate needs of tens of millions of people but also reëstablishing social connectivity, collective responsibility, and a sense of common purpose, if not common wealth. In an unrelenting and unemotional way, covid-19 is demonstrating the vastness of our human connection and mutuality. Our collectivity must be borne out in public policies that repair the friable welfare infrastructure that threatens to collapse beneath our social weight. A society that allows hundreds of thousands of home health-care workers to labor without health insurance, that keeps school buildings open so that black and brown children can eat and be sheltered, that allows millionaires to stow their wealth in empty apartments while homeless families navigate the streets, that threatens eviction and loan defaults while hundreds of millions are mandated to stay inside to suppress the virus, is bewildering in its incoherence and inhumanity.

Naomi Klein has written about how the political class has used social catastrophes to create policies that allow for private plunder. She calls it “disaster capitalism,” or the “shock doctrine.” But she has also written that, in each of these moments, there are also opportunities for ordinary people to transform their conditions in ways that benefit humanity. The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this virus unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table. As Sanders has counselled, we must think in unprecedented ways. This includes universal health care, an indefinite moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, the cancellation of student-loan debt, a universal basic income, and the reversal of all cuts to food stamps. These are the basic measures that can staunch the immediate crisis of deprivation-- of millions of layoffs and millions more to come.

The Sanders campaign was an entry point to this discussion. It has shown public appetite, even desire, for vast spending and new programs. These desires did not translate into votes because they seemed like a risky endeavor when the consequence was four more years of Trump. But the mushrooming crisis of covid-19 is changing the calculus. As federal officials announce new trillion-dollar aid packages daily, we can never go back to banal discussions of “How will we pay for it?” How can we not? Now is a moment to remake our society anew.

The RealClearPolitics head-to-head general election averages show Bernie beating Trump by nearly 6 points. The average is 50.5% to 44.8%. The most recent poll (last week by Harris) shows Bernie beating Trump 53-47%, exactly the same as the most recent Emerson polling of the week before.

It doesn't matter if Bernie has far more support in California than Biden does because no matter which candidate faces Trump in November, California's 55 electoral votes will go to that candidate. Nor does it matter that Biden has far more support than Bernie does in South Carolina because no matter how much huffing and puffing Jim Clyburn does this fall, South Carolina's 9 electoral votes are going-- uncontested-- to Trump. But you know what is important? Swing states, where the winner of the 2020 election will be determined. The RealClearPolitics polling average of Wisconsin shows Trump and Biden tied all year-- 45.0% to 45.0%. Democrats need those 10 electoral votes, that their status quo candidate lost in 2016. And Bernie has been ahead of Trump in Wisconsin all year-- and their average right now shows Bernie leading 46.2% to 45.2%. The average in Florida shows Biden and Bernie both losing to Trump, Biden by less... but the polling this year shows that Florida's 29 electoral votes are going to Trump no matter who the Democratic candidate is. That just makes Michigan's 16 electoral votes all the more crucial. Again, the Democrats' status quo candidate lost Michigan to Trump in 2016. This year Bernie is ahead of Trump 46.3% to 41.8%. Trump is so unpopular in the state that even Status Quo Joe is ahead of him-- albeit by a bit less than Bernie: 46.2% to 41.8%. Both Bernie and Biden lead Trump in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and North Carolina. And Trump is ahead of both in Texas, although Bernie is closer and has a better chance of closing the gap. It's the opposite in Georgia where Trump leads them both but Biden is closer.

MSNBC has done everything its corporate masters have demanded to make it look like the race is over and that Biden is the nominee. It isn't over and yesterday Juan Cole noted that elections will be conducted in such a way going forward that will be advantageous to progressives and harm those who have benefitted from keeping voting to a minimum, namely the conservative establishment. He began with Trump's admission on Fox News "that a mail-in ballot program that made it possible for the public to vote with ease and increased turnout would keep Republicans from ever being elected again."

Hispanics are now 18 percent of the US population, up from about 6 percent in 1980. In order to win fairly, Republicans needed to gain a significant proportion of that vote. The Bush’s knew this, and cultivated that constituency. George W. Bush typically attracted 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. But the dominance of Evangelicals and xenophobic southern and rural whites turned the party increasingly xenophobic and anti-immigrant. (Most Hispanic Americans are not immigrants, but many whites coded them that way). The increasingly vitriolic racism of the Tea Party and the Republican base against Hispanics drove some of them out of the party. Trump only got 28 percent of the Hispanic vote, very substantially off from Bush’s percentages. His favorability ratings by late last fall had further fallen among Hispanics to only 25 percent.

Then, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders now make up 6 percent of the US population, up from 1.6 percent in 1980. They now comed to over 20 million people. Many were conservative and business-oriented and the old Republican Party had a shot at them. But the racism has also caused many of them to flee. They heavily now favor the Democrats and they really don’t like Trump.

Further, according to Pew, white evangelicals as a proportion of the population have plummeted from 23 percent in 2004 to only 16 percent today. Pew finds that among white Protestants, evangelicals have retained their proportion, but not in the general population (i.e. many fewer Americans identify as Protestants or as religious at all). So white evangelicals could help put Bush in the White House, but just don’t have that kind of moxie any more.

And another thing: the proportion of whites in the population has fallen to only 60 percent from 75 percent in 2000. The number of counties that are majority non-white is rising. So since some significant proportion of whites vote Democratic, you can’t get elected just with what’s left of the white vote. Trump got in only because a few tens of thousands of traditionally Democratic whites in the Midwest switched to him because he said he’d bring jobs back from China and because there was a significant fall-off in the African-American vote, at least a point in Michigan, for instance.

So the lesson is that Republicans can now only win by poaching whites from the Democrats and by suppressing the minority vote.

They succeeded in 2016 (and the lackluster campaign of Hillary Clinton helped). But in the electoral college, Trump’s victory was by the skin of his teeth in three Midwestern states. The old saying attributed to circus impresario P. T. Barnum is that “A sucker is born every minute.” But the opinion polling in Michigan, at least, does not support the notion that white workers are likely to be suckered again.

So if Trump can’t steal some white Democrats this time, that really does leave only one hope, which is to find ways of preventing African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians from voting.

The Republican Party has obviously made some very bad choices. Gravitating to the Neo-Fascist Breitbart crowd, the nativist crazies, the rapidly declining evangelicals, and generally old white people has been stupid policy. But it is in many ways Nixon’s legacy. What worked in the 1980s may not work in the 2020s. And if the numbers are any indication, the Republicans could become a long-term minority in the near future, as there were from 1931 until 1952.

The arc of history may or may not bend toward justice but it sure as hell bends toward reality.

The U.S. Is A Corrupt Country-- Now More Than Ever... Is That The Swamp?

The House Ethics Committee still hasn't taken up the very serious charges against ex-Congressman Tom Price (R-GA) and current Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY), who have both engaged in flagrant insider trading while serving on committees that were able to influence the value of sticks they were trading. It's been over a year. A 29-page report from the Office of Congressional Ethics strongly suggests that there was insider trading by both Collins and Price and on July 14, 2017 recommended that the House Ethics Committee pursue a formal investigation. It hasn't.

The report reads that there's "a substantial reason to believe that … Collins shared material nonpublic information in the purchase of Innate stock, in violation of House rules, standards of conduct and federal law.” Collins is on the board of directors of Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited as well as in Congress. Price also traded extensively in Innate stock while serving in Congress, reportedly on Collins' suggestion that he could make a killing.

This is another reason why people hate Congress so much. Nor do Americans trust government. And most of the time, we shouldn't. This week MarketWatch reported that Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio is seeing a growing chance iff a recession as the U.S. enters a "pre-bubble stage." What's Congress doing to protect us? Nothing to protect anyone but themselves-- as Collins and Price have done-- but everything to accerbate the underlying problems. Which brings us to the much-shared essay by Juan Cole Thursday at Truthdig! Top 10 Signs the U.S. Is the Most Corrupt Nation in the World. I spent years in Asia and corruption is woven into the fabric of life. It's as bad here-- just not as visible. I was shocked when I was forced to negotiate at a post office in New Delhi for the price of sending a postcard to America.

Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly “corrupt” always imply that the United States is not corrupt. This year’s report from Transparency International puts the US on a par with Austria, which is ridiculous. All kinds of people from politicians to businessmen would go to jail in Austria today if they engaged in practices that are quite common in the US.

While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $18 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.

1. A sure sign of corruption is an electoral outcome like 2016. An addled nonentity like Donald Trump got filthy rich via tax loopholes a predatory behavior in his casinos and other businesses, and then was permitted to buy the presidency with his own money. He was given billions of dollars in free campaign time every evening on CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other channels that should have been more even-handed, because they were in search of advertising dollars and Trump was a good draw. Then, too, the way the Supreme Court got rid of campaign finance reform and allowed open, unlimited secret buying of elections is the height of corruption. The permitting of massive black money in our elections was taken advantage of by the Russian Federation, which, having hopelessly corrupted its own presidential elections, managed to further corrupt the American ones, as well. Once ensconced in power, Trump Inc. has taken advantage of the power of White House to engage in a wide range of corrupt practices, including an attempt to sell visas to wealthy Chinese and the promotion of the Trump brand as part of diplomacy.

2. The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. The Koch brothers and other mega-rich troglodytes explicitly told Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in 2017 that if the Republican Party, controlling all three branches of government, could not lower taxes on its main sponsors, there would be no billionaire backing of the party in the 2018 midterms. This threat of an electoral firing squad made the hundreds of bribe-takers in Congress sit up and take notice, and they duly gave away to the billionaire class $1.5 trillion in government services (that’s what Federal taxes are, folks, services–roads, schools, health inspections, implementation of anti-pollution laws–things that everyone benefits from and which won’t be there any more. To the extent that the government will try to continue to provide those slashed services despite assessing no taxes on the people with the money to pay for them, it will run up an enormous budget deficit and weaken the dollar, which is a form of inflation in the imported goods sector. Inflation hits the poor the worst. As it stands, 3 American billionaires are worth, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

One sign of American corruption is the rapidity with which American society has become more unequal since the 1980s Reagan destruction of the progressive income tax. The wealthier the top 1 percent is, the more politicians it can buy to gather up even more of the country’s wealth. In my lifetime the top one percent has gone from holding 25% of the privately held wealth under Eisenhower to 38% today.

3. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. The campaign season should be shortened to 3 months (did we really need 2 years to get an outcome in which a fool like Trump is president?), and Congress should pass a law that winners of primaries don’t have to pay for political ads on tv and radio.

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.

American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.

4. Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren’t sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the fossil fuels billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Virtually the entire Republican Party resists the firm consensus of all respected scientists in the world and the firm consensus of everybody else in the world save for a few denialists in English-speaking countries. This resistance to an urgent and dangerous reality comes about because they are bribed to take this stance. Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.

5. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Scott Pruitt, a Manchurian candidate from Big Oil, has single-handedly demolished the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of polluting industry. This assault on the health of American citizens on behalf of vampirical corporations is the height of corruption.

6. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside. Precisely because it is a cesspool of large-scale corruption, Trump’s budget will throw over $100 billion extra taxpayer dollars at it.

7. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.

8. The National Security Agency’s domestic spying was a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn’t have defended this indefensible invasion of citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren’t making money on it.

9. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.

10. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is corrupting police departments and the judiciary. Although some state legislatures are dialing this corrupt practice back, it is widespread and a danger to the constitution.

So don’t tell the global South how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.