Will Deeply Committed Progressives Vote For Status Quo Joe In November-- The Lesser Of Two Evils Play?

Bernie apparently got some policy concessions out of Biden-- enough for him to endorse him. Maybe there are more to come, but what Biden announced so far isn't enough for me to vote for him. (Note: I vote for candidates, not against someone who is worse. Over the decades, the Democrats have taken interpreted progressives willingness to vote for their putrid centrist candidates as an endorsement of putrid, centrist policies. If that's ok for you, go for it.) Anyway, I stuck up a quickie Twitter poll and a tiny majority of respondents said they had decided to vote for Biden, either on their own or because of Bernie. Almost as many people said they would not vote for him or had not yet decided.

On Tuesday, The Guardian published a column by Nathan Robinson asserting that Biden needs to win progressive voters over by doing a lot more and that "his 'concessions' so far have only demonstrated that he isn’t serious about listening to leftwing voters." Trump may lose-- how could he not?-- but there's no way Biden can win in anyway but by default. The enthusiasm gap for Biden is monstrous. At best, he's simply better than Trump, a lot better for some people, magically better for others. But he has nothing to offer anyone, except neoliberals eager to see the end of Social Security and Medicare and a balanced budget.

AOC is likely to endorse Biden as well but she said he has to be made to feel uncomfortable before there can be any real of party unity. Robinson wrote that "Many younger people share Ocasio-Cortez’s perspective; they are waiting to see what Biden can offer rather than reflexively supporting him because he is the Democrat" or even because Bernie endorsed him. "Why," asked Robinson, "is Biden struggling with young progressives?"

Well, one reason is that he has spent a lifetime opposing key progressive goals, and used to be proud of his reputation as one of the Senate’s “most conservative” Democrats. He was anti-abortion, pro-Iraq war and in the pocket of big banks. Even today, Biden says he has “no empathy” for young people who complain about indebtedness and precarity. He has told millennials who raise concerns about his environmental policies that they should “go vote for someone else.” Plenty have been willing to do just that. So while some commentators, such as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, have suggested that activists and left media are responsible for Biden’s “unity problem,” the more blameworthy culprit is Biden himself.

In fact, it doesn’t seem as if Biden has much interest in solving his “unity problem.” In an ostensible effort to reach out to the left, Biden recently debuted new policies on healthcare and education. Did he adopt the policies recommended in the activists’ letter, namely Medicare for All and canceling all outstanding student debt? No, he did not. Instead, he merely proposed lowering the existing Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60 and canceling tuition-related debt for students who attended public colleges who earn under a certain income.

The first of these policies almost seems like a deliberate insult. Biden’s response to those young people demanding a better health policy is to offer a policy that won’t help any of them for decades. And to understand just how pitifully stingy this “concession” is, remember that dozens of Democratic senators, including plenty of “moderates”, have already endorsed lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55. You can find an op-ed in Forbes (not exactly the Democratic Socialists of America newsletter) suggesting 50 would be a better age. Bill Clinton proposed 55 in 1998, and Hillary Clinton advocated 55 in 2016. So Biden’s big concession to the left is actually more conservative than a centrist Democratic proposal! It’s not nothing, but it’s about as close to nothing as a policy can get without literally being nothing, and it shows that Biden isn’t serious about courting the left.

Remember, too, that we’re only talking about the platform. This is where negotiations start. By the time a proposal has gone through the political process, it inevitably gets watered down. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get the Medicare age dropped from 65 to 63 by the year 2030 or something. And even that prospect assumes that Biden is serious about fighting for his platform. At election time, politicians have an unfortunate habit of promising voters whatever they think voters want to hear. Needless to say, they don’t always follow through, and you’re often better off looking at their record than their rhetoric. From Biden’s record, it’s more plausible that he’ll follow through on his reported plan to put Michael Bloomberg and JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, in his cabinet than that he’ll overhaul the healthcare system.

The student debt plan is a disappointment, too. Why only public colleges, when so much unsustainable debt comes from private universities? Why only tuition-related expenses? Why is it means-tested? If Biden wants to impress the left, he will need a big, sweeping plan, not a plan with dozens of qualifiers and caveats that recalls Kamala Harris’s infamous proposal to forgive debt only for “Pell grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities.

I actually really hope Biden embraces one of the big left policy proposals such as Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, because he can’t afford to write off progressive votes, and the stakes of this election are high. If Donald Trump is re-elected, it will be a disaster: he will be emboldened and more powerful, and will end his second term with almost complete control of the courts. Democracy as we know it may disappear altogether; U.S. militarism will escalate; carbon emissions will spiral out of control; and brutal new immigration policies will be introduced. Trump needs to lose, but Biden is already a weak candidate, and he will be even weaker if he can’t turn out the progressive base.

Many progressives are going to have a difficult time voting for Biden. He has shown contempt for them and betrayed many of the causes they care about. To make matters worse, Tara Reade’s credible sexual assault allegation against Biden will make it difficult for those who consider themselves allies of women and supporters of #MeToo to vote for him in good conscience. Biden has a long way to go to convince the left he’s worth supporting.

So far, though, it seems as if Biden is mostly concerned with reassuring rich Democratic donors and party bigwigs that he will keep his promise that “nothing would fundamentally change.” That could almost be Biden’s campaign slogan at this point. But it doesn’t seem like a winner. He will need to do better if he’s going to stand a chance of beating Trump.

There Are Worse Governors Than Andrew Cuomo, But None Who Are Personally Responsible For As Many Coronavirus Deaths

"Better Than Trump" is just not good enough

The media has created a very positive image for New York neo-liberal governor Andrew Cuomo. No one can deny Cuomo looks relatively good compared to Trump in his pandemic response. But no one should deny that with Trump out of the equation, Cuomo was a disaster for New York where there were 180,458 confirmed cases as of yesterday-- more than China, Italy or Spain-- and close to 8,627 deaths (an out-sized 4.7% totality rate). When Mayor Bill DeBlasio tried to shut New York City down-- the way San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose had shut down-- Cuomo went nuts and overrode him. And he just did it again!

While salivating and empty-headed TV talking heads like Rachel Maddow were working to turn Cuomo into a saint, the New York Post reported that the governor again couldn't control his own ego in a battle with de Blasio over school closures. After the mayor declared the schools will remain closed until the fall term, Cuomo dismissed de Blasio's remarks as only "an opinion" and said he himself hasn't made a decision yet. There's blood on Cuomo's hands and there is no doubt far fewer New Yorkers would have been infected had he not prevented de Blasio from shutting down New York City when he wanted to.

“He didn’t close them, and he can’t open them,” Cuomo said.

A few hours earlier in City Hall, de Blasio said he made the decision after speaking the night before with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert on the White House’s coronavirus task force.

“He was so clear about how important keeping the schools closed would be in our overall strategy,” the mayor said. “It will help us to save lives.”

By Saturday evening, de Blasio was digging in his heels.

“My responsibility is not to another elected official,” he said on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation. “My responsibility is to those kids, those parents, those educators.”

“I have to do what I think is right to stop the coronavirus from holding the city in its grip. I have to make sure we get out of this horrible moment in our city’s history and move forward.”

But Cuomo, whose emergency powers trump those of city officials, said it was simply not de Blasio’s call to make.

“It is my legal authority in this situation” via executive order, Cuomo said, quipping that if the mayor wants to close schools, he should do so during a blizzard.

“This is not a snow day,” the governor sniped.

Cuomo first ordered all schools in the state closed on March 18 for two weeks to stem the virus.

He later expanded that executive order to continue through April 29, at which point the shutdown would be re-evaluated.

“It’s not going to be decided in the next few days, because we don’t know,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing in Albany.

“I can’t tell you what June is going to look like. I can’t tell you what May is going to look like. But I can tell you it will be a metropolitan-wide decision.”

City Hall spun the brouhaha as another case in which de Blasio would be proven right, with press secretary Freddi Goldstein noting that Cuomo had dismissed the mayor’s call for a shelter-in-place order in mid-March, but ordered a lockdown three days later.

“We were right then and we’re right now,” Goldstein tweeted.

“Schools will remain closed, just like how we eventually-- days later-- moved to a shelter in place model.”

Cuomo staffers said they got wind of the mayor’s decision only at around 9:25 a.m. in a phone call from de Blasio aides.

They talked about schools staying closed through June, but “they didn’t say they were going to publicly announce this using powers that they don’t have,” said Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi.

Five minutes later, de Blasio publicly declared schools closed for the rest of the academic year.

Meanwhile CNN looked into why the pandemic is so much more catastrophic in New York-- especially New York City and its suburbs-- than anywhere else in the country or, for that matter, the word. They didn't blame Trump or Cuomo, who should share the blame. But they did note that "Sadly, the likeliest explanation for the high death rate, though, is the chronically inadequate health care given to minorities and the poor throughout New York City, as in the rest of the country. New York City and New York state have only now released the race distribution of cases and deaths, as well as by zip code, a surrogate for poverty rates. It is clear that severe disease has not been distributed equally by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers represent 51% of the city's population, yet account for 62% of Covid-19 deaths. They have twice the rate of death compared with whites, when adjusted for age. This likely is due to both a higher proportion of black and Hispanic New Yorkers being diagnosed with severe disease and a higher rate of death among those who are known to be infected."

This disparity likely is the result of several factors. Co-morbid conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, are strongly associated with death from Covid-19 and are more common in black and Hispanic communities. But what causes high rates of poorly controlled hypertension and diabetes? Lack of appropriate health care. People who cannot easily find good health care for reasons of money, time, location, or trust may be more likely to stay at home undiagnosed and spread the virus-- as well as experience potentially fatal delays in diagnosis and treatment.

The explanation is the same for New York City as for Italy, New Orleans and probably Iran: the virus exploits weaknesses in health and health care, be it advanced age or co-morbidity or access to care.

Hopefully, the Covid-19 pandemic will force us to reckon honestly with the many shortfalls that have been exposed and build a fair, forward-thinking approach that allows doctors and nurses to care for people in need. Failure to do this will only further darken the memory of those who have died and the hearts of those who remain.

Odd that CNN chose not to mention how-- in the midst of the pandemic response he botched so badly-- Cuomo just forced through a budget that drastically cuts healthcare funds to the exact people they're referring to. The media is protecting, even celebrating, New York's corrupt, thuggish Governor Cuomo. I wonder why. (I don't really wonder why; I'm certain he's being set up for a bigger job.)





How big a scumbag is Cuomo inside Democratic politics? We know he hates the Congressional Progressive Caucus and everything they stand for. Now, Maggie Moran, Cuomo's top political operative-- the one not currently serving a prison term-- is surreptitiously fund-raising against AOC and soliciting campaign operatives to work against her reelection.

One more thing-- this odd map of states that require, encourage and discourage vote by mail. New York (as well as Connecticut, Delaware and New Hampshire) are in pretty strange company-- the 11 beet-red Trump states that make it difficult to vote by mail. Maybe Cuomo should put some energy behind getting New York off this list instead of working so hard to cut Medicaid funding. Conservatives-- and not just Republican conservatives-- hate expanding the franchise.

It's Too Early To Just Hold Your Nose And Resign Yourself To The Status Quo Ante Candidate

On Monday, Biden's wife, told a crowd in New Hampshire that her husband might not be people's favorite candidate but asserted that he is the most electable. Maybe she doesn't know any better or maybe she's just trying to push the campaign's one and only strategy-- that Trump is worse than Biden and that Biden has the best shot to beat him. Trump is worse than Biden... but Biden would be very lucky to do as well as Hillary did-- and that's way too risky. Directing herself to Bernie supporters and Elizabeth Warren supporters-- the former is way ahead of Biden in the latest New Hampshire poll, the latter is rapidly catching up-- she said "Your candidate might be better on, I don't know, health care, than Joe is, but you've got to look at who's going to win this election. And maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, 'OK, I personally like so-and-so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump."

Sounds like the disproven Hillary Clinton strategy. So does Biden's lame first TV ad (released yesterday). The elites and the Democratic establishment certainly buys the messaging. And the corporate media has been moving heaven and earth to tear Bernie down and invalidate him. MSNBC (Comcast), particularly Maddow, may be the worst but not the only one disparaging her at every opportunity.

Yesterday, Katrina vanderHeuvel penned a powerful counterpoint to the Washington Post's anti-Bernie narrative-- in the Washington Post. She wrote that "Last week, after criticizing Amazon for underpaying its workers and paying nothing in federal income taxes last year, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VtT) noted: 'I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why the Washington Post-- which is owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon-- doesn’t write particularly good articles about me.' The response was immediate. Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, dismissed Sanders’s characterization as a 'conspiracy theory.' CNN’s commentators accused Sanders of using President Trump’s playbook; NPR similarly suggested he was echoing Trump. Nate Silver, [OF COURSE] the editor of FiveThirtyEight, descended to psychological babble, assailing Sanders for having a 'sense of entitlement,' feeling that 'he’s entitled to the nomination this time, and if he doesn’t win, it’s only because the media/the establishment took it away from him.' Let's be clear: The Post and the New York Times aren’t the same as Fox News, which has turned into a shameless propaganda outfit. But Sanders wasn’t repeating Trump; he was making a smart structural critique of our commercial mainstream media."

It’s not as if Sanders lacks for evidence that he has particularly suffered at the hands of the mainstream media. The New York Times featured an article on his trip to the Soviet Union decades ago as somehow formative of his views, and got caught quoting a Democratic strategist critical of Sanders without disclosing the strategist’s close ties to Hillary Clinton’s super PAC. Sometimes outlets simply pretend Sanders doesn’t exist, as when Politico headlined a national poll showing Sanders in a strong second place this way: “Harris, Warren tie for third place in new 2020 Dem poll, but Biden still leads.” After one fiercely contested debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton in early March 2016, The Post published 16 news articles and opinion pieces, many of them critical, about Sanders in 16 hours; a few weeks later, The Times’ own public editor criticized the post-publication “stealth editing” of a piece originally favorable to Sanders.

But, contrary to his critics’ claims, Sanders disavowed any notion that Bezos controls coverage at The Post. “I think my criticism of the corporate media is not … that they wake up, you know, in the morning and say, ‘What could we do to hurt Bernie Sanders?’ ” he told CNN. Instead he offered a criticism that is neither new nor radical: “There is a framework of what we can discuss and what we cannot discuss, and that’s a serious problem.”

In an interview with John Nichols of The Nation (where I serve as publisher and editorial director), Sanders went out of his way to distinguish this critique of the media from Trump’s assault on the free press: “We’ve got to be careful. We have an authoritarian type president right now, who does not believe in our Constitution, who is trying to intimidate the media… That’s not what we do. But I think what we have to be concerned about... is that you have a small number of very, very large corporate interests who control a lot of what the people in this country see, hear, and read. And they have their agenda.”

In an email to supporters, Sanders wrote: “Even more important than much of the corporate media’s dislike of our campaign is the fact that much of the coverage in this country portrays politics as entertainment, and largely ignores the major crises facing our communities... As a general rule of thumb, the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to the corporate media.” The corporate media inevitably turns politics into a horse race and policy into “gotcha” questions or personality disputes. Trump’s ability to dominate the free media in 2016 is testament to this tendency.

The structural bias of the corporate media is particularly clear in these tempestuous times. The elite consensus-- the post-Cold War bipartisan embrace of corporate globalization, market fundamentalism and the United States’ global reach-- has been shattered in the sands of Iraq and the suites of Wall Street. With the economy-- even at its best-- not working for most Americans, the old order cannot be sustained. When insurgent candidates such as Sanders shock Beltway pundits, conventional wisdom is exposed as folly. Sanders is particularly frowned on by the Democratic Party establishment and by big business, which disagree with his views, especially on inequality. Not surprisingly, a mainstream media that swims in that same pond takes on the same color. It doesn’t take a call from the outlets’ owners.

But whereas in earlier decades the mainstream media, the keepers of the consensus, could easily set the terms of public debate, new technology gives candidates the chance to challenge that status quo. Sanders has started to build his own independent media apparatus, including a web show, a podcast and a newsletter. While the corporate media focuses on the limits of Sanders’s support, he laps the Democratic field in garnering small donors across the country. While “mainstream” pundits question his reach among people of color, polls show him leading among Latinos and polling favorably among young African Americans.

As Sanders noted, “We have more folks on our social media than anybody except Donald Trump… We are nowhere near where he is. But we have a lot of people on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, who use it every single day. So certainly one of the technological breakthroughs that has been of help to us in an ability to circumvent corporate media is to talk directly to people, and we do that virtually every day.”

With the elite consensus shattered, this is a frightening and exhilarating time of new ideas and new movements. It is also a time when the gatekeepers of established opinion no longer hold as much sway, when new forms of communication and independent media challenge the old. It’s not surprising that the corporate media gives Sanders bad press. Thankfully, though, that matters less and less.

Is A 70% Tax Rate On Incomes Beyond A Million Dollars Enough? Why Not Back To 90 Where It Used To Be Before 1963?

The weekend Paul Krugman was on fire after Republicans cluelessly went on the warpath against Alexandria Cortez again, this time because of her 60 Minutes tax hike for the rich proposal. His NY Times column, The Economics of Soaking the Rich, started by asking "What does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez know about tax policy?" and then answering... "A lot."

I have no idea how well Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will perform as a member of Congress. But her election is already serving a valuable purpose. You see, the mere thought of having a young, articulate, telegenic nonwhite woman serve is driving many on the right mad-- and in their madness they’re inadvertently revealing their true selves.

Some of the revelations are cultural: The hysteria over a video of AOC dancing in college says volumes, not about her, but about the hysterics. But in some ways the more important revelations are intellectual: The right’s denunciation of AOC’s “insane” policy ideas serves as a very good reminder of who is actually insane.

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II-- including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.



To be more specific, Diamond, in work with Emmanuel Saez-- one of our leading experts on inequality-- estimated the optimal top tax rate to be 73 percent. Some put it higher: Christina Romer, top macroeconomist and former head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, estimates it at more than 80 percent.

Where do these numbers come from? Underlying the Diamond-Saez analysis are two propositions: Diminishing marginal utility and competitive markets.

Diminishing marginal utility is the common-sense notion that an extra dollar is worth a lot less in satisfaction to people with very high incomes than to those with low incomes. Give a family with an annual income of $20,000 an extra $1,000 and it will make a big difference to their lives. Give a guy who makes $1 million an extra thousand and he’ll barely notice it.

What this implies for economic policy is that we shouldn’t care what a policy does to the incomes of the very rich. A policy that makes the rich a bit poorer will affect only a handful of people, and will barely affect their life satisfaction, since they will still be able to buy whatever they want.

So why not tax them at 100 percent? The answer is that this would eliminate any incentive to do whatever it is they do to earn that much money, which would hurt the economy. In other words, tax policy toward the rich should have nothing to do with the interests of the rich, per se, but should only be concerned with how incentive effects change the behavior of the rich, and how this affects the rest of the population.

But here’s where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions-- which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have-- everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it’s because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy’s output.

In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone else doesn’t change, does it? Ah, but it does-- because he pays taxes on that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort-- and conversely the cost of their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.

Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.

And that’s something we can estimate, given evidence on how responsive the pre-tax income of the wealthy actually is to tax rates. As I said, Diamond and Saez put the optimal rate at 73 percent, Romer at over 80 percent-- which is consistent with what AOC said.

An aside: What if we take into account the reality that markets aren’t perfectly competitive, that there’s a lot of monopoly power out there? The answer is that this almost surely makes the case for even higher tax rates, since high-income people presumably get a lot of those monopoly rents.

So AOC, far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research. (I hear that she’s been talking to some very good economists.) Her critics, on the other hand, do indeed have crazy policy ideas-- and tax policy is at the heart of the crazy.

You see, Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy, based on the claim that tax cuts at the top will have huge beneficial effects on the economy. This claim rests on research by … well, nobody. There isn’t any body of serious work supporting G.O.P. tax ideas, because the evidence is overwhelmingly against those ideas.

Look at the history of top marginal income tax rates (left) versus growth in real GDP per capita (right, measured over 10 years, to smooth out short-run fluctuations.):

What we see is that America used to have very high tax rates on the rich-- higher even than those AOC is proposing-- and did just fine. Since then tax rates have come way down, and if anything the economy has done less well.

Why do Republicans adhere to a tax theory that has no support from nonpartisan economists and is refuted by all available data? Well, ask who benefits from low taxes on the rich, and it’s obvious.

And because the party’s coffers demand adherence to nonsense economics, the party prefers “economists” who are obvious frauds and can’t even fake their numbers effectively.

Which brings me back to AOC, and the constant effort to portray her as flaky and ignorant. Well, on the tax issue she’s just saying what good economists say; and she definitely knows more economics than almost everyone in the G.O.P. caucus, not least because she doesn’t “know” things that aren’t true.

And Krugman's not alone here. Eric Levitz called her 70% top tax rate both moderate and evidence-based policy. He began by reminding his readers that when Reagan took office, affluent Americans paid 70% on all income above $216,000. "In the decades since," he wrote, "our country’s highest earners have seen their annual pay skyrocket, while the median household’s has barely budged. As a result, America’s 160,000 richest families now lay claim to 90% of its wealth. Studies suggest that this kind of inequality erodes social trust, abets plutocracy, and depresses economic growth. Politicians from both major parties routinely suggest that they see inequality as a major problem.

The case for trickle-down economics-- which is to say, the idea that high top-marginal tax rates hurt economic growth-- is much weaker now than it was in 1980. The U.S. saw faster GDP and productivity growth in the decades before Reagan’s tax cuts, than it did in the decades after. And during that latter era, the American economy grew at roughly the same rate as peer nations with higher top tax rates. A separate premise of the trickle-down theory held that raising taxes on the rich eventually costs the government revenue by discouraging work. The latest economic research suggests that this is true-- but only if you raise the top tax rate higher than (approximately) 70 percent.

Meanwhile, French economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated that high tax rates reduce pre-tax inequality-- ostensibly, by discouraging rent-seeking among top executives, whose compensation is often determined less by productivity than a combination of social mores and their own audacity: CEOs are less likely to extract an extra $5 million from their companies (instead of allowing their firms to invest that sum in other purposes) if they know that Uncle Sam will collect 70 percent of their bonus. Thus, there is now some reason to believe that confiscatory top rates can reduce wage inequality, while producing some gains in economic efficiency.

All of which is to say: In 1980, taxing incomes above $216,000 (or $658,213 in today’s dollars) at 70 percent was considered a moderate, mainstream idea, even though wage inequality was much less severe, and supply-side economics had yet to be discredited.

...There is nothing substantively extreme about Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal. It is true that, when the top marginal rate was last at 70 percent, there were more loopholes in the tax code enabling the affluent to sneak out of that top bracket. But this does not mean that Ocasio-Cortez’s tax policy would actually be more radical than Jimmy Carter’s was-- after all, the congresswoman’s 70 percent rate kicks in at a much higher threshold, exclusively targeting America’s super-rich (who weren’t nearly as well off in the 1970s as they are now). One can raise a variety of technocratic quibbles with Ocasio-Cortez’s plan (raising taxes on capital gains might be a more effective way of soaking the super-rich; a confiscatory top marginal rate might prove impotent absent a global war on tax havens). But it would not be extreme in its redistributive implications, relative to our country’s past tax practices, or to other nations’ current ones. And a significant number of highly respected economists have endorsed top tax rates roughly as high as the one floated by the congresswoman, while Piketty has advocated for an 80 percent top rate.

Meanwhile, in terms of public opinion, Ocasio-Cortez’s view on tax policy for the rich is much more mainstream than Susan Collins’s.

Last year, a Data For Progress and YouGov Blue poll asked voters if they would support a 90 percent tax rate on all income above $1 million. Respondents opposed the idea by (just) a two-point margin. In Pew Research polling taken shortly before Congress passed the Trump tax cuts, voters opposed cutting taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 by a 48-point margin.

The notion that confiscatory tax rates on super-high incomes are more popular than the Republican Party’s alternative is buttressed by other data. For example, when Berkley political scientists David Broockman and Douglas Ahler offered voters seven different tax-policy options (ranging from extremely conservative to extremely progressive) in 2014, they found that the furthest left option-- establishing a maximum annual income of $1 million (by taxing all income above that at 100 percent)-- was the third-most-common choice, boasting four times more support than the Republican Party’s 2012 platform on taxation.

And yet, the fact that Susan Collins voted to sharply cut taxes on the rich in 2017 has not led nonpartisan news outlets to describe her as a far-right extremist. In fact, just yesterday, the New York Times referred to her as one of the Senate’s “most moderate members.” (Which is enough to make one wonder whether the overrepresentation of the affluent among national reporters-- and the extremely rich, among owners of national media companies-- might bias our political discourse in the upper class’s favor.)

Wonder, wonder, wonder... I say yes, it does! And Susan Collins is a damn fool in any case.

Why Did The Working Families Party Push Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBTQ, AIPAC-Supported Jumaane Williams On Progressives?

by Patty Murphy


Jumaane Williams, the NYC Councilman with a checkered progressive record is running for his third office this year and appears to have cut a deal with WFP to get there.

You may recall, no electeds were willing to challenge Gov. Cuomo, out of fear of retribution this year. After considerable pushback from its progressive base, some of whom felt the party betrayed them over the years, the Working Families Party split from Cuomo and lost almost all its union funding. WFP backed Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams, even though pro-choice activist and self-described queer, Cynthia Nixon, resisted endorsing Williams until a few weeks before the election (which many speculate is because of his bad record on LGBTQ and choice issues, unaired personal issues, as well as conflicts between the campaigns).

While Cynthia Nixon was tirelessly campaigning across the state-- leaving no communities out of her strategy-- Jumaane Williams never made it to the 2nd largest African American region in NYC (South East Queens), and as a result lost it to a conservative white woman named Kathy Hochul, from Buffalo. Williams is touting his “success” in the LGs race-- a very different race-- as a qualifier for NYC Public Advocate. But the politics are different. Williams was a protest vote. The Public Advocate’s race is made up of at least 7 qualified candidates from NYC, many from his borough of Brooklyn and many who have a much more progressive record than Williams. Furthermore, Williams needs to reach a fundraising threshold in NYC to receive matching funds, and has shown to be a bad fundraiser and takes special interest and corporate money. With actual competition, this makes him a weak candidate. But let's discuss how he’s bad on issues.

Williams is known for showing up in photo opps and at protests when press arrives, but just how progressive is he? And why would WFP put its reputation on the line with a candidate who is verifiably not progressive?

The Deal: WFP cut a deal to support Jumaane Williams in Public Advocate's race in exchange for their own institutional interests. Williams would not get off the WFP line in November, but WFP had made a deal with Governor Cuomo to give him the line for the general election. The only way Williams would get off the line after losing the primary was to have WFPs support in the Public Advocate’s race just a couple weeks later. This is inherently corrupt and undemocratic.

Furthermore, WFP-- a membership organization-- had absolutely no process for candidates. WFP didn't send a questionnaire, they didn't interview, they never told candidates (many who they have worked closely with) when and how they were voting-- despite requests by candidates. They endorsed just over a week after the general election, all behind closed doors with political leadership who have separate motives. Given the issues with Jumaane’s record, it's pretty shocking that they would put themselves out there with such a vulnerable and non-progressive candidate who has a tough race. it is a crowded left field, with at least three African American candidates as of now, 2-3 from Brooklyn alone and unions will either stay out or will be split.

But, more importantly-- this is an Independent nonpartisan special election where parties cannot get involved. If progressives only follow the rules when it doesn’t serve their self interests then we will never be able to build a stronger democracy. It is very clearly against the rules stated in the charter for a political party to work with candidates in this race. And the Campaign Finance Board of NYC is very strict.

WFP has also latched onto progressive groups to use them for field and petitioning, as their funding and own field efforts have suffered severely in recent years. So forced affiliate groups like NYPAN to undemocratically endorse. These groups are being called out for bias and may lose other progressive support.

AIPAC: Just last week, Jumaane Williams went to an AIPAC event, taking pictures with its political director. When called out, Williams’ message was about meeting with everyone. In the photos, he wore a “stay woke” button with his AIPAC badge, against the AIPAC backdrop, with its leadership. At a recent DSA endorsement meeting, his response over AIPAC was stating he has debated Mort Zuckerman on TV.

REAL ESTATE MONEY: Despite promising to not take real estate money in his LGs race, to receive DSA endorsement, Williams not only took over $30,000 from a major real estate developer family, he won’t give it back. When pressed, he says “he doesn’t know who the donors are.” The Ratners are one of the most well known political donors in NYC and developed the Barclays center and pushed for rezoning for major development in the area of Brooklyn. Bruce Ranter is known as a paid-to-play real estate developer. This is a controversial issue-- and a family that has an entire political office devoted to giving donations to politicians in exchange for favors. It’s highly unlikely the Ratners gave money to an anti-Cuomo candidate without cutting a deal with him for something in advance. Which is probably why Jumaane has resisted giving the donations back.

CHOICE & LGBTQ issues: Williams’ personal opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion lost him his first run for City Council Speaker in 2013 and again this year when he ran for Speaker. Receiving LGBTQ groups push back, Williams abstained from a bill in 2014 to allow transgender people to change sex on their birth certificate. In progressive New York City, it is unheard of-- even with Republicans-- to be anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ (whether personal or not).

IRRESPONSIBLE-- 27 SCHOOL ZONE SPEEDING TICKETS IN 5 YEARS: Williams earned 27 speeding tickets in school zones in 5 years, 18 tickets of which were in the last 2 years. He was the only Democrat to vote AGAINST lowering the speed limit in NYC. (As a side note: this is one of the biggest reasons why Republican Sen. Marty Golden lost his Senate seat to Andrew Gounardes-- winning the Democrats control of the NYS Senate.)

CORRUPTION: Williams hired his friend, rapper, Kristofer Bain to work on his council campaign, then in his office. Soon after, Williams sent $60,000 in city funds to a nonprofit Bain left to work for. Bain and Williams also were investors in a restaurant that went under, where taxes are still owed.

BAD LANDLORD, BUT CLAIMS TO BE TENANTS RIGHTS ACTIVIST? Williams claims to be a tenants rights activist but also has evicted many of his tenants for being late on rent or short $300, further unleashing lawyers on the tenants demanding they also pay late fees and legal fees.

URGED AMAZON TO MAKE NYC DEAL: Williams signed a letter inviting Amazon to NYC, but now that he is being called out, he claims it was to "open a conversation” with Amazon. The letter’s language was very clear-- it urged Amazon to move to NYC. Furthermore, beyond his defense, any progressive would understand what Amazon represents and their history of these tax deals in other communities. They’ve driven up homelessness, exploited workers and killed small businesses. Progressives understand this, tax deal or not.

With a record like this, it's baffling why the WFP would line up for Jumaane Williams if it weren't for the political deal they made. If they indeed believed in Jumaane Williams, they wouldn't be lining up the political machine-- including the Brooklyn County Boss, Frank Seddio-- and would be open to having debates and sharing questionnaires.

We regret being duped by the WFP, who attempted to re-invent Jumaane Williams as a progressive when he is just another self-serving politician.

Independent progressives actually have a real choice in Nomiki Konst who has distinguished herself as an advocate for party reform and has taken on special interests and corporations as an investigative reporter. She has the intellectual capacity and the fierce independence from the political machines to truly use the office as a powerful vehicle for progressive change.

Battle For The Democratic Party: After the Unity Reform Commission-- A Guest Post By Norman Solomon

Sunday night we took a look at the work of the DNC's Unity Reform Commission. Norman Solomon, a co-author of the 2016 Autopsy, wrote a postscript for us and asked me to share it with DWT readers this evening. This is especially important for those of us working to defeat Trump and his brand of fascism with a Bernie/Elizabeth Warren presidential ticket in 2020.

With the Democratic Party’s “Unity Reform Commission” now history, major political forces are entering a new stage of contention over the future of the party. Seven months after the commission’s first meeting-- and nine months after Hillary Clinton backer Tom Perez won a close election over Bernie Sanders supporter Keith Ellison to become chair of the Democratic National Committee-- the battle lines are coming into focus for next year.

The commission’s final meeting adjourned on Saturday after a few steps toward democratizing the party had won approval-- due to the grassroots strength of progressives. But the recommendations from the commission will go to the Rules and Bylaws Committee, which was one of the DNC decision-making bodies that Perez subjected to a purge two months ago. Now, in the words of Jim Zogby (who was removed from the Executive Committee by Perez), “There are virtually no Bernie supporters on the Rules and Bylaws Committee.”

When the latest Unity Reform Commission meeting got underway, Perez talked a lot about unity. But kicking Sanders supporters off of key DNC committees is the ugly underside of an ongoing dual discourse. (Are we supposed to believe Perez’s soothing words or our own eyes?) And party unity behind a failed approach-- internally undemocratic and politically hitched to corporate wagons-- would hardly be auspicious.

“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination,” says the recent report “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis” (which I co-authored). The report adds: “Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

DNC Chairman Perez and allied power brokers keep showing that they’re afraid of the party’s progressive base. No amount of appealing rhetoric changes that reality.

“We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming to all,” the Democratic National Committee proclaimed anew at the start of this month, touting the commission meeting as “open to the public.” Yet the DNC delayed and obscured information about the meeting, never replying to those who filled out an online RSVP form-- thus leaving them in the dark about the times of the meeting. In short, the DNC went out of its way to suppress public turnout rather than facilitate it.

One member of the task force that wrote the Autopsy, Karen Bernal, is the chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party. After traveling across the country and sitting in the sparse audience during the first day of the Unity Reform Commission meeting, she took the liberty of speaking up as the second day got underway. Bernal provided a firm rebuke of the DNC’s efforts to suppress public attendance.

“For all of the talk about wanting to improve and reform and make this party more transparent, the exact opposite has happened,” Bernal told the commission. (Her intervention, which lasted a little more than two minutes, aired in full on C-SPAN.)

On Sunday, a mass email from Zogby via Our Revolution summed up: “We are fighting for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. The Democratic Party needs everyone, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, country of origin, language, or socioeconomic status, to be deeply involved in order to change the course of this country.”

For those reasons, he added, “we are calling for an end to superdelegates, open primaries and caucuses, same-day registration, and more transparent, fair, and accountable leadership at the helm of the DNC.”

Overall, the commission approved some recommendations that were partial victories for progressives. Among the most notable: It called for reducing the number of notoriously undemocratic superdelegates to the national convention from 712 to about 300, while the only democratic number would be zero. It somewhat improved transparency for often-dubious DNC contracts with high-paid consultants and vendors, while defeating sensible amendments by commission member Nomiki Konst-- who spoke with notable clarity about the need to clamp down on financial conflicts of interest among DNC decision-makers.

The eight Sanders appointees-- Konst, Zogby, Larry Cohen, Lucy Flores, Jane Kleeb, Gus Newport, Nina Turner and Jeff Weaver-- put up a good fight as members of the Unity Reform Commission. They were outnumbered, and on key issues were often outvoted, by the 13 who’d been selected by Clinton or Perez. Next year, the odds to overcome will be much worse.

With the purged Rules and Bylaws Committee now overwhelmingly stacked against progressives, only massive pressure from the grassroots will be able to sustain momentum toward a democratic Democratic Party. Meanwhile, corporate forces will do all they can to prevent the Democratic Party from living up to its first name.

For Those Who Believe The Democratic Party Is Salvageable...

As you may-- or may not-- know, the DNC has been working to heal the wounds left from Wasserman Schultz's reign of terror, particularly over how she worked to undermine Bernie's campaign and rig the primaries for Hillary, making the party weak and un-unified and giving Trump more opportunities to gain ground. Over the weekend the 8 Bernie appointees to the Unity Reform Commission-- Our Revolution Board Chair Larry Cohen, Our Revolution President Nina Turner, Our Revolution Board members Lucy Flores, Jane Kleeb, and Jim Zogby, as well as former Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport, Jeff Weaver, and Nomiki Konst-- participated in the last of 5 meetings on how to reform the DNC. These were some of the top recommendations that came out of their work:

• Reducing the number of unpledged, "superdelegates," in the presidential nominating process by 60 percent.
• Electoral reforms and a process for rewarding states that have same day registration, same day party change, open primaries, other measures that increase civic participation
• Commitment to re-evaluating allocation formulas so primary and caucus winners receive more pledged delegates
• Commitment to reexamine the primary calendar, and offer incentives to states to ensure the calendar is appropriately spread out so voters in each state receive the necessary exposure to the candidates
• Steps toward transparency and greater inclusion in Democratic National Committee spending including the creation of an Ombudsman Committee and strengthening the conflict of interest provision.

Larry Cohen, who served as Vice Chair of the Commission, reported that the "proposals, assuming adoption by the DNC in 2018, lead to a Democratic Party that would be a beacon in voting rights and transparency. Much of the attention of the Unity Reform Commission is on the Presidential nominating process, particularly the cut in unpledged superdelegates on the first ballot from 715 to less than 300. Just as important, the reforms mandated for party caucus and primary reform provide for same day registration and same day party registration. Similarly party leadership elections must be open and transparent rules for nominations and deadlines must be simple not controlled by insiders. In all of our recommendations we are saying to party officials in all states: This party must be inclusive in building membership and leadership-- no barriers."



Our old friend, Norman Solomon, one of the authors of the 2016 Autopsy, isn't as high on the Commission's work. He pointed out to the Real News Network that the chair of the commission is Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a co-founder of Precision Strategies, a consulting firm that in the years 2015 and 2016 received more than half a million dollars from the Democratic Party. "Dillon, holding a gavel, oversaw a discussion about a series of proposals to basically cut back on what one Bernie Sanders supporter on the commission referred to as 'outright corruption of the Democratic Party,' involving consultants. So, the very measures that were aimed to eliminate financial conflicts of interest between the party and high-rolling consultants, those proposals were being overseen by a chairperson who had received a great deal of money, including in the four-month period between February and June of 2016, 230,000 dollars to the consultant firm that she co-founded. You look at the big picture, and you see that there’s a lot of money that keeps flowing to Clinton-aligned political consultants from the Democratic Party, and the majority on this commission clearly does not want to shake up that game, much less end it."

Keith Ellison is in a bind and a box, really, when he lost a close election nine months ago to be chair of the Democratic National Committee to Tom Perez. Then Perez immediately invited him to be deputy chair. In that role, Ellison is supposed to be a team player, but when it comes down to these nitty gritty power issues, he’s pretty much in a hamstrung position. So, we know that in 2016 at the national convention, 712 of the delegates were superdelegates. That’s 15 percent of the total. There’s a proposal on the table, and it looks like it’s now being recommended by the Unity Reform Commission, to cut that number back to perhaps about 250 or 300 superdelegates.

Just to sort of recap, superdelegates means that people get to vote for the nominee for president at the national convention without any accountability or relationship to what voters or caucus members have voted for. A good example is that 11 weeks before a single vote was cast in a caucus or primary in the Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton battle, Hillary Clinton had already lined up half of all the superdelegates. It’s as though in a race, the starting gun goes off and immediately one of the candidates, one of the people in the race in an instant is far ahead of the other.

That’s the way the corporate forces like it. Naturally, the superdelegates being made up largely of members of Congress who are Democrats, Democratic governors, not that there are many of those anymore, others who are on the Democratic National Committee, including a lot of lobbyists and elite insiders. They love being able to put their money down literally and figuratively with endorsement quickly for their preferred candidate. It puts them ahead as media frontrunner immediately. They’re part of the delegate count as superdelegate and also gives enormous fundraising advantage. It likes to or is aimed to put forward the image that perception as reality idea that hey, there’s a frontrunner. There’s a sort of inevitability.

Another way to put it is the superdelegate battle is the question of whether corporate power in the party is going to continue to dominate. As we say in the Autopsy report, “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis,” it’s really not possible for the leaders at the national level of the Democratic Party to have a close working relationship with the base when it’s afraid of the base. I think what’s happened here at this final meeting of the Unity Reform Commission is a further indication that those in control of the DNC by a small but significant margin are afraid of the grass-roots. They did everything they could for this ostensibly open meeting to prevent access by the public to even show up at the meeting.

...[M]ore than half, and we saw this on a number of votes today, more than half of the commission is composed of people who, when push comes to shove, when the chips fall, they make the chips fall in a way that protects corporate interests that prevent transparency or accountability about the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent by the Democratic Party. It reminds me of something that Bernie Sanders said more than six months ago in speaking to a reporter from The New York Times Magazine when he put it this way, there are people in the Democratic Party who don’t mind being on the Titanic as long as they have a first-class cabin.

There are vested interests, both personal interests of lucrative contracts and power and so forth in and in relation to the DNC as well as the big Wall Street and big bank firms and so forth. And they want their party. It’s sort of a tacit division of labor. There’s an unspoken sense that yeah, you have African Americans and Latinos and lower, working class people. You want them to turn out and vote but when it comes to the policies, those policies that will be pursued by the Democratic Party are largely circumscribed by the donor class.

So, it’s talk about you support the working class. Have the ship steered by the donor class, by Wall Street. This is so corrosive because when you get real about politics and power and the future of the country, there is no way to split the difference and say we’re going to help the big bankers. We’re going to help the multimillionaires and billionaires and we’re going to help the working class. This Democratic Party has a split identity. There’s the rhetoric that says we’re for the working people. There’s the overarching policy and control the DNC that’s vested in those who feel a direct kinship, a connection with and often are of the banker and donor and Wall Street class. That’s a part of the battle that I think is being fought and must be fought.