Putin Invested In A Trump Presidency-- He Won Big-- "These Are Dark Times. They Are About To Get Darker."

2020 America by Nancy Ohanian

Will Trump dare go on the attack against Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski (R), who said yesterday she might not back his reelection? Maybe that's what she wants. Although Trump won the state's 3 electoral votes in 2016, he only scored 52.9% of the vote and his popularity has ticked down ever since. The Morning Consult Trump Tracker's last look at Alaska found that his job approval was at 51% and that since inaugural day he had lost 19 points. An internal campaign poll shows Trump reelect number at just a dismal 47%-- and last time she ran, Murkowski wasn't supported by the Republican Party establishment and won anyway. I bet there are a lot of Republican Members of Congress who wish they could say the same and not be dragged down to defeat in the anti-Trump wave that's going to sweep over the country in November.

This is what Murkowski had to say about Mattis' remarks about Trump yesterday: "When I saw General Mattis' comments yesterday I felt like perhaps we are getting to a point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up... I was really thankful. I thought General Mattis' words were true, and honest and necessary and overdue. And, I have been struggling for the right words, and I was encouraged a couple of nights ago when I was able to read what President Bush had written. And I found that to be empowering for me as one leader." Asked if she will back Trump's reelection, she said: "I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time I think you know that. I didn't support the President in the initial election, and I work hard to try to make sure that I'm able to represent my state well that I'm able to work with any administration and any president. He is our duly elected President I will continue to work with him. I will continue to work with this administration but I think right now as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I'm going to vote for not going to vote for I think are distracting at the moment."

That didn't take long!

The immediate political problem may be Trump, but that is hardly the overarching political problem America is facing-- and our adversaries are aware or it-- and rejoicing in it. "The sight of U.S. police and other security forces tear gassing and beating up protesters are playing on television screens across the planet, offering irresistible fodder for foreign adversaries who’ve long accused the U.S. of hypocrisy. Never mind human rights records that are orders of magnitude worse than anything yet seen on America's streets-- some of these countries are now outright mocking U.S. officials.

Earlier this week, Chris Hedges noted that "The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a 'public thing' or the 'property of a people,' has been transformed into an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to commit financial fraud and theft."

The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power, ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.

“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.

There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world, will swell.

If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray.  The huge social divides, largely built around race, will be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist “patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color, Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals. Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.

The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far behind police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the poor and people of color, possible.

Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty. The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care system. The schools do not educate their children, who live without adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count. Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services, food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.

The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released. The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for all of America.

The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where 70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of sentences.

...It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25 percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with tens of thousands of desperate families.

And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do? They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.

The CARES Act handed trillions in funds or tax breaks to oil companies, the airline industry, which alone got $50 billion in stimulus money, the cruise ship industry, a $170 billion windfall for the real estate industry, private equity firms, lobbying groups, whose political action committees have given $191 million in campaign contributions to politicians in the last two decades, the meat industry and corporations that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes. The act allowed the largest corporations to gobble up money that was supposed to go to keep small businesses solvent to pay workers. It gave 80 percent of tax breaks under the stimulus package to millionaires and allowed the wealthiest to get stimulus checks that average $1.7 million. The CARES Act also authorized $454 billion for the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a massive slush fund doled out by Trump cronies to corporations that, when leveraged 10 to 1, can be used to create a staggering $4.5 trillion in assets. The act authorized the Fed to give $1.5 trillion in loans to Wall Street, which no one expects will ever be paid back. American billionaires have gotten $434 billion richer since the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, whose corporation Amazon paid no federal taxes last year, alone added $34.6 billion to his personal wealth since the pandemic started.

How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from your misery?

I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence, which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent. But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you, the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself. I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.

It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S. military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and frustration that led to the uprisings.

The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking scapegoats. The idea that Antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.

The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.

How Will the State Respond to Increasingly Forceful Protests? A Preliminary Look at the Road to Rebellion in America.

(Source)

by Thomas Neuburger

I began writing this piece by considering the modern shape of rebellion, should it come, in America. That led to words on the shapes of rebellion in general which led to many more words, a chapter in fact of some pages.

Let’s spare you that for now, and do this instead. Let’s look at two short news stories, both about rebellions and the state’s response, one a nascent rebellion by the right and another a nascent rebellion by the left.

One is Covid-related and the other is not. Both occurred recently. Considering each offers a window into how a broader revolt, or several, might progress, depending on whether the left or the right is leading it.

A Protest by the Right

First, consider this:

Michigan Closes Down Capitol in Face of Death Threats From Armed Protesters Against Gov. Whitmer

On Thursday, Michigan closed down its capitol building and canceled its legislative session after online death threats made against Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The threats were made by protesters who planned to attend a “Judgement Day” protest at the capitol. The protesters ostensibly oppose Whitmer’s statewide shutdown orders meant to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Dozens of posts in private invitation-only Facebook groups called for Whitmer to be hanged, lynched, shot, beaten or beheaded. One suggested crowdfunding sources to hire a hitman to kill her.

“We haven’t had any bloodshed yet, but the populous [sic] is counting to three, and yesterday was day two,” wrote Dave Meisenheimer in a 385,000-member Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine. “Next comes the watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” he concluded.

Numerous other posts referred to Whitmer as a “Nazi,” “spawn of the devil,” “wicked witch,” “Soros puppet,” “baby killer tyrant” and more, according to the Detroit Metro Times. Others promised to attend upcoming protests “armed to the death” and without face masks, threatening to attack any police officers who dared confront them.

To which the response was this:

Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel have considered banning firearms from the Capitol building but are awaiting the six-member Michigan State Capitol Commission to figure out if they have the legal authority to do so.

“There are legislators who are wearing bulletproof vests to go to work,” Whitmer told ABC News last week.

No one is talking about investigating, arresting, spying on or bringing to trial those making these death threats. The protests were warned, however, that they "could be charged with brandishing if they are threatening to others." Instead of being shut down and arrested, they forced a government shutdown — a fleeing, if you will — and the protest went off as planned.

(As a mental exercise, imagine the response by police and others if the protesters had been black.)

A Strike by the Left

Now consider this, a pre-Covid 2020 wage strike at UC Santa Cruz:

California Police Used Military Surveillance Tech at Grad Student Strike

UC Santa Cruz police utilized military surveillance equipment to surveil and police the graduate student ‘wildcat’ strike earlier this year.

The California National Guard provided military surveillance equipment to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Police Department in order to surveil and police the UC Santa Cruz graduate student wildcat strike earlier this year, documents acquired through the California Public Records Act show.

California National Guard, the state’s federally funded military force, provided so-called “friendly force trackers,” a military surveillance technology used to track U.S. troops in military combat, to monitor pickets, according to emails dated February 11 and 13. Police responding to the strike also had access to LEEP, a federal surveillance portal operated by the FBI. The emails show that law enforcement was monitoring student protest groups and social media to plan its response.

The California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) also assisted with law enforcement response.

I said “consider the state's response” in my introduction because clearly a large part of the mechanism of the state was involved in this response — the California National Guard provided equipment to the campus Police Department, who also had assistance from the FBI and the California Office of Emergency Services.

That’s a lot of virtual firepower trained on a small group of grad students at single university, though UC Santa Cruz's reputation for radicalism may have influenced the state's response.

What Does This Comparison Tell Us?

Both of these events are rebellious acts, one by the right in protest of the government of Michigan’s Covid-19 shutdown order, the other by graduate teaching assistants who “walked off the job and withheld grades to demand an $1,412 increase to their cost of living stipend.”

Only one threatened violence though, and that one threatened quite a bit of it. Yet the state handled the wage strike much more aggressively than it handled the side that threatened death and brought guns to their events.

Which leads to a couple of questions:

• Consider a world in the not too distant future in which right-wing protests do turn violent and people are shot, some by protesters who may even be the instigators.

What does a right-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

• Next consider a world in which a left-led rent strike or debt strike or Covid-fueled health-and-safety strike turns violent, not because of the protesters, who are generally less violent than Trump-fueled mobs (see above), but in a clash between protesters and counter-protesters, or protesters and police whose propensity for violence in these cases is well known.

Police using pepper spray on peaceful Occupy protestors at UC Davis

What does a left-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

The World of Tomorrow

Revolt in today's America today will never become a Battle of Lexington world, a pattern established in the first of our revolutions. But it could devolve to a world of protests-gone-bad — or protests-forcefully-disallowed if they’re coming from the left — all when the pressure cooker of life in a donor class–controlled state becomes not just onerous, but economically impossible and medically life-threatening.

I don’t have answers to the questions above, but I do know which questions I suggest you ask if you want to start to answer them:

• What does a right-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts tacitly encouraged?

• What does a left-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts violently suppressed?

• What if both rebellions occur in parallel? How would police-abused left  respond to coddling of violence by the right?

We’re closer than ever before to a world in which many on both sides have stopped believing that government cares to fix the shared tragedy of their lives, and both sides are closer than ever before to doing something about it.

Thomas Jefferson correctly wrote that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Yet when revolt does breaks out, it does so suddenly, often chaotically, and then the country becomes a place most people won’t want to live in, yet can’t escape.

We're approaching fast the next phase of revolt in America, whatever shape it takes. We're long past that day in November of 2008 when promises of "hope and change" were a cause for optimism. The dashing of that hope, in fact, is itself a cause of despair. The outcomes of the elections of 2016 simply confirmed what both sides already knew, that no one, certainly not the donor-run state, is on their side.

So count me among the group that fears what's coming. The arrogant rich, those who control both parties and the state, will never ever stand down, rolling the dice instead on the chaos that will follow. I fear the world their hubris will create.
  

What Will America Do When the Parade of Coffins Grows Long? (A Look at the Effects of Exponential Growth)

Exponential growth (red) vs. linear growth (blue). Source.

by Thomas Neuburger

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
—Al Bartlett (quoted here)

Exponential growth occurs when a number (interest on a loan, for example, or the death rate from a disease) grows or decays at a rate proportional to its current value instead of growing by a constant number. In exponential growth, as a number gets larger the amount by which it grows gets larger as well. So if a value doubles every day, to pick just one example, a number that starts small can become very large very quickly, in less than a month in fact.

A form of exponential growth occurs with compound interest, a situation in which the interest on a loan is added back into the principal for the next calculation of interest, so that the borrower ends up paying interest on the interest. If nothing is repaid on such a loan, the amount owed can reach astronomical proportions and the amount of the original principal is dwarfed by the accumulated owed interest.

Or consider a disease whose death rate doubles every week. If in week one if there is just one death, there will be two deaths in week two, four in week three, eight in week four, and so on. In just eight weeks, the death rate will be over 100 per week and rising. Three weeks later, the death rate will be over 1000 per week ... and still rising.

Left alone, cancer cells often increase at an exponential rate. Exponential curves tend to look like a hockey stick (see the example at the top), with a slow flat part followed by a sudden rise that seemingly never stops.

The Growth Rate of Covid-19 U.S. Cases and Deaths Is Exponential

Now consider the growth rate of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths in the U.S. Both are charted below. The source for each is this great thread by David Windt, which he updates daily.

Confirmed Covid-19 cases in the U.S. as of March 29, 2020

Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. as of March 29, 2020

The top chart shows confirmed Covid-19 cases in the U.S. (red dots). Notice that the vertical space between the red dots is clearly increasing. Even though the number of active cases isn't great in most neighborhoods — "hotspots" like those in New York City or the state of Washington are still the exception — the national total is growing alarmingly fast.

Unless things drastically change — unless real South Korea-style prevention is put in place, a cure is developed and made available, or a vaccine is universally deployed — the U.S. will see one million confirmed cases by April 7. That's just days away.

Now note the steepness of the curve and imagine the number of cases the U.S. will see on April 20, the last date on the chart. Hint: The next "bump" up, the next major line to cross on the smaller logarithmic chart (which makes the curve look linear), is 10,000,000 — ten million people will have gotten the disease by then. And the line after that, which will be reached on May 2, is 100,000,000, almost a third of the country.

The number of deaths, shown in the second chart, is growing at the same inexorable rate. The projection of 1,000 deaths per day by April 1 becomes 2,000 deaths per day by April 3, just two days later.

If this continues, today's total of 2,000 U.S. deaths will become 10,000 U.S. deaths by April 3, at which point the blue line exits the top of the chart. Based on the logarithmic graph inserted into the chart, the projected total U.S. deaths will reach 100,000 on April 13, just ten days later.

As one Twitter user put it on March 28, "The first US death from the coronavirus was February 29. The 1000th death was Thursday. The 2000th death was today [Saturday]." This is the power of exponential growth.

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

None of this growth is predicted; it's merely projected based on what's gone before. Yet there's no question the pandemic is spreading exponentially in the U.S.

We could do much to mitigate this growth. We could imitate the South Koreans, for example, and institute a very strict regimen of testing + social distancing. One of our researchers could find a cure — there's some promising news on this front (along with some disturbing neoliberal attempts, since rescinded under public pressure, to profit from it). And at some point a vaccine will be developed.

But in the absence of effective policies and leadership — and the U.S. is experiencing a great lack of leadership with no end of that lack in sight — this disease could well spread unchecked for at least the near future.

Exponential Growth of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths Will Upend the U.S. Election

So, what does the near future look like? For now most Americans are hunkering down to wait it out. Except for those living in hotspots, most of us don't see cases and most don't see new deaths. Put simply, from a medical standpoint this pandemic, for most of us, is more about the news and the warnings and less about living with the visibly sick and dying.

That's not true economically, however, where effects are felt nationally and now. Here's the chart of new unemployment claims for the week ending March 21:

The spike in new claims dwarfs by an order of magnitude every spike in new claims since the late 1960s. In addition, for many workers lose of employment also means loss of employer-supplied health care — during a pandemic.

The near future holds no good news. Not only will unemployment continue to spike upward — reaching as high as 30% by some estimates — but the disease itself will come to every neighborhood, disrupting most lives in a way unfelt today.

If the exponential projections hold and one-third of the country has contracted Covid-19 by early May, if we've seen 100,000 deaths or more by mid-April evictions continue to rise and loan defaults skyrocket (another exponential curve), the nation will panic and search in desperation for a leader who can actually "save" it.

Will Donald Trump fill that need? It's possible, but it's also possible he'll be swept up in the blame, as more and more of his missteps are laid at his feet. Will the evicted hold him blameless if he doesn't protect him now, on the day they land on the street with all their belongings? Will the bankrupt put on their MAGA hats if he doesn't make them whole instead of enriching the swamp creatures, bankers and CEOs he actually serves?

Will Joe Biden and the neoliberal Democratic Party survive unscathed if the nation is drowning in debt and disease and they offer just crumbs when long-term money, meals and shelter are needed instead?

The person who gives a drowning man a rope is a savior. The one who withholds it ... isn't. The ranks of the nation's leaders are stuffed with people who really want to withhold that rope. These leaders live by constraining the wealth of the people and giving what's saved to themselves. They make their living from it, they tell tales to their friends about how they got away with another one, they encourage each other to keep the cruel project on track.

They haven't changed either their stripes or their tune. The latest bailout package is "a robbery in progress" as one analyst put it, and people for whom a single $1200 (means-tested) check will not be nearly enough, will notice and care.

As more and more voters begin to drown, go down for the third and last time, or watch as their friends and family falter and die ... as they witness the parade of coffins, born on the shoulders of the poor, grow longer each day ... the rebellion against the entire leadership class will grow as well, perhaps even exponentially.

At that point, it's a whole new ball game. Who will come out the winner? That's impossible to predict at this point — though Bernie Sanders may find that a lot more "back to normal" moms are seeing the value of political revolution after all.

Needless to say though, more than one outcome is possible, including the one with tanks. Stay tuned. We may know what's coming next in just a few weeks.
  

Teachers Uprisings Are The More Long-Term Story Of The Political Revolution Underway Than Any Single Congressional Eelection-- A Guest Post By Jonathan Tasini

Our old pal, Jonathan Tasini, labor activist, author, podcaster and former Senate candidate, has been on the teacher uprising case for months. He's certain that "those uprisings are the more long-term story of the political revolution underway with far more consequences for the country than the obsession over any single congressional election." A new guest post he originally did for Playboy, Why the Midterm Battleground Could Be in Classrooms Instead of Congress, that "those uprisings have the potential to obliterate the Big Lie in our economic lives, a lie that has bankrupted many states."

Travis Benda is not a name you’ll hear uttered by most political pundits. He may, in fact, never achieve long-term institutional power or become a household name. Yet, his recent surprise primary victory may be signaling a long-term titanic shift in the nation’s attitude toward taxes and what we are willing to pay to have a properly functioning government. This was all triggered, or at least significantly advanced, by the teachers’ uprisings sweeping the country.

Benda is a high school math teacher. In the May 22nd Republican primary, he defeated the House majority floor leader, Jonathan Shell, who two years prior had led Republicans to a takeover of the legislative chamber and was hailed as a paragon of young Republican future leaders. Benda challenged Shell for one basic reason: the incumbent’s support for an anti-teacher pension bill that would have reduced promised benefits.

Benda is a high school math teacher. In the May 22nd Republican primary, he defeated the House majority floor leader, Jonathan Shell, who two years prior had led Republicans to a takeover of the legislative chamber and was hailed as a paragon of young Republican future leaders. Benda challenged Shell for one basic reason: the incumbent’s support for an anti-teacher pension bill that would have reduced promised benefits.

That Benda won running as a Republican only underscores what teachers, and other workers in the education system, have sparked. In mostly conservative states across the country, tens of thousands of teachers and support staff-- defying or skirting laws barring teacher strikes-- poured into the streets and amassed at state capitol buildings. Importantly, they did so almost always with strong support from parents and even many superintendents of school districts, which have been starved for funds.

The public, it seems, has woken up to a stark reality regardless of political affiliation: education, and other key government services that make for a functioning society, need money to run-- and the coffers are empty.

The short-term impact of the teacher uprisings will be felt in November. To be sure, elections hinge on many factors, and it is often hard to isolate, in retrospect, one element that makes the difference between victory or defeat. Yet, taken together, the teachers revolt is arguably going to tip scores of state legislative races, and perhaps the balance of power in Congress-- largely because teachers’ unions, along with other labor and community allies, are making a concerted effort to defeat anti-school funding politicians. To make an obvious point: Teachers, and their educator brethren, are everywhere, in every community, large and small. Consider this: Nearly nine million educators work for states and local governments nationwide, accounting for more than half of all public sector workers.

It would be hard to find a more conservative state than Oklahoma: Republicans control the legislature, governor’s mansion, both seats in the U.S. Senate and every House district. Tax-cutting and business-friendly policies have been an almost unshakeable article of political faith. Yet, Oklahoma was fertile ground for a revolt because its tax-cutting mania created a crisis. As the Oklahoma Policy Institute points out, “state aid funding will remain some $145 million less than it was in FY 2009, even as K-12 enrollment has grown by over 50,000 students. As important as the pay raises are for moving Oklahoma teachers towards a fair and competitive salary, schools remain in desperate need of additional operating support to reverse cuts that have led to fewer teachers and support professionals, larger class sizes, fewer courses and programs, and outdated textbooks and supplies.” It’s worth hammering home the point that despite an exploding student population, the current education budget is lower than a decade ago.

The teachers’ union in Oklahoma sees the opening, and is backing 100 candidates for state office, 48 who are union members and the rest who have ties to union members or simply support the union’s agenda. “OEA is supporting many teacher candidates this election cycle, but we will also support non-educator candidates and incumbents who show strong support for public education,” says Alicia Priest, the union’s president. “If an incumbent has a great voting record on education, we will stick by them, even in the face of an educator running against them.”

North Carolina also has a strong teacher resistance movement. “We are doing targeted calls to districts to defeat Republicans, calling voters and focusing on education,” Mark Jewell, the president of the state’s educators’ association, told me. Those efforts may, then, tip two federal House seats to Democrats-- the 13th Congressional district held by an incumbent Republican, and the 9th Congressional district where the incumbent Republican lost a primary race.

Setting aside the November elections this year, I am more intrigued by the longer-term impact of the teacher uprisings because it is possibly much more consequential for the nation’s economic future. Teachers, partly because they are held in high esteem by the public, have been able to bring focus to the Big Lie: For four decades, Republican ideologues (buttressed by a good helping of Democrats) told the people that society would be just fine without robust taxes to adequately fund government’s basic services. You know the rap: Cut taxes deeply, let the money trickle down to everyone, and, presto, big booms in jobs and economic output would follow. The Big Lie came all dressed up with a theory called “supply side economics,” which Republicans, business leaders and billionaires could foist on people to give the whole gimmick some respectability and believability.

Except supply side economics, starting with its big splashy debut at the core of Reaganomics in the 1980s, was proven, time and again, to fail. It was a theory with no empirical data proving it worked. There is virtually no evidence—none—that shows tax cuts spark job growth, certainly not tax cuts entirely structured as gross handouts to the very wealthy. But, what can be documented quite well is society’s breakdowns-- crumbling roads, failing schools, poor housing, soaring healthcare costs-- that all trace back to the tax cut-starving of the government.

From the outset, if its advocates were honest, it was clear that the supply side economic “theory” was primarily a political gambit. People who hated the government simply wanted to kill it-- and dressing up dastardly, dumb policies with a faux economic theory was part of the scam. And it worked, for a time, at least judged by the four decades of relentless reduction in taxes at the state and federal level.

But, like many scams, eventually reality comes crashing in.

Today, the cupboard is bare. Poor teacher pay isn’t an abstract problem that can be waved away by ignorant talking heads on television. Most people will tolerate, grudgingly, crumbling roads. They may also not feel personally effected by fewer parks rangers or even a public library imposing shorter hours because of staffing shortages. But, when your kid does not have pencil and paper, or every day she walks into a crowded classroom with 35 other kids taught by a substitute each year because qualified teachers can’t afford to take a job with starvation-level wages, that’s a problem plopped right on the kitchen table at home, a problem that does not discriminate between Democrats, Republicans or independents.

Meg Wiehe, the deputy director of the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, the foremost tax analysis research group in the nation, thinks voters are starting to draw the connections. It’s personal for Wiehe. She lives in North Carolina where the “story is yet another example of how lawmakers have prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations over public services,” she points out. “North Carolina legislators have cut taxes four times in the last five years. When all of the tax cuts are in place, the state will have $3.5 billion less a year to spend on public services, including education. The recent tax cuts will provide the state’s millionaires with an average annual tax cut of more than $45,000, which is nearly as much as the average teacher’s annual salary of about $50,000.”

West Virginia, where the rebellion started, has been, politically, trending more Republican in elections-- but it still retains a strong awareness of its historical union roots, principally because of the once-mighty United Mine Workers. “The teacher and public employee strike woke a lot of people up to the fact that you cannot tax cut your way to prosperity,” says Ted Boettner, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy. “I’d say at least a third of those striking were Republicans, and many of them for the first time understood that their fate was not a matter of affordability but priority.”

Mark Jewell sees a new sentiment in North Carolina. “The public has always been behind public education. When you go out to western North Carolina, which is more conservative, they like their schools, and they’ve seen them decimated. We saw a lot of Republican teachers out in the streets with us. It opens up a bigger conversation that government is protecting the people, and it’s all an investment. We got the Research Triangle partly because we had a strong public-school system. The idea was you could come to North Carolina and put your child in a public school. Now businesses are saying I can’t bring my workers here if they have to put them in private schools that they can’t afford.”

Arizona’s legislature-- which, except for one session, has been controlled by Republicans since 1978-- has cut taxes every year since 1990, says David Lujan, director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress who also served as a Democrat in the state House from 2005 to 2013. “Most polling that I saw during those years consistently showed majorities of Arizonans opposed to raising taxes,” he tells me. “In contrast, a number of polls of Arizona voters that I have seen in the past year have consistently shown Arizonans support raising taxes to fund state priorities like public education.” In fact, Lujan says, while this year saw a couple of small tax-cut bills pass, the major tax cut effort, which included a capital gains tax, was defeated principally because of teacher opposition.

Teachers’ union president Priest sees the longer-term shift underway. “It feels as though every day Republicans in Oklahoma have started to shift toward more moderate stances on taxes, recognizing that reasonable taxes are necessary to fund our essential state services like schools and healthcare,” she says. “As a conservative state, however, the anti-tax rhetoric still resonates with many voters. Our Platform Caucus in the legislature, which is extremely anti-tax, seems to be weakening, with many members in jeopardy of losing their seats this year. Until we see what happens in November, though, we won’t know if a real shift has occurred.”

Yet, Oklahoma has seen a fascinating turnaround. In 2012, the governor proposed entirely eliminating the state income tax, claiming it could be done without cutting services. But, in the past session, the legislature passed, with a supermajority vote, a $500 million tax increase, including tax hikes on the heretofore almost untouchable oil and gas industry. “The political makeup of the government has not changed,” says David Blatt, the executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute. Significantly driven by the teachers’ uprising, he says, “Lawmakers got the message that voters wanted higher teacher pay even if it means higher taxes.”

As the November election nears, Travis Benda is busying himself with tasks left undone, most having little to do with politics. There is, for example, the unfinished addition to a garage at home. In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Benda knows he is headed for public office, and will almost certainly have less time for personal chores once he is sworn in.

He will be representing a district where he sees a real shift. “What the legislature did in the last session was give tax cuts that were only going to go to those making $175,000 or more, and the cuts in services were disproportionately going to affect those making less than $175,000,” he says, a hit on people like many of his neighbors and constituents. “I live in a rural area, it’s a working class conservative area that still has strong conservative Christian beliefs. I’m more of a social conservative on the Second Amendment and capital punishment,” he says. “But we have to have certain services in place.”

Teachers are reminding us not only that it is a good place to live where a kid can learn but that virtually every progress society makes comes from investments-- taxes-- made by the public, the community. Despite the swaggering and self-serving narratives of billionaires, no fortune-- not a single one-- is made without passable roads leading to workplaces, the internet (started by government funding), regulations (for example, the rules governing the stock market) and, yes, public schools to educate workers in reading, math and sciences-- all paid for by us, by our taxes.

We want our community to be healthy-- and, so, we have invested in government-funded research in medical technologies and drugs. We want to eat food that won’t poison us-- so, we have built a network of inspectors who make sure contaminated food is kept out of stores and restaurants (and when we cut the inspection regime, more people get sick). We want our community to be safe in their homes, so we make sure the firehouse down the street stays open because though we may never personally need the help, we want to ensure our neighbor can rely on that red truck careening down the street lickety-split, fire hose at the ready, if needed.

In essence, reclaiming the idea that taxes are a good thing isn’t about the specific “services” we individually get. It’s about community itself. And reminding ourselves of its value.

And that’s worth every dollar.

Tom Guild, an educator himself, has to fight a primary runoff (August 28) before he gets to face his reactionary Republicans incumbent, Steve Russell in the Oklahoma City 5th district. Obviously he's watched the Oklahoma teachers movement closely and after he read Jonathan's piece, he reminded me that "In Oklahoma, a spontaneous movement began when a middle school teacher started a group on social media that grew at warp speed. His success was noticed by more traditional players in the education establishment and a teacher walkout ensued. Thousands were gathered at the state capitol grounds for days on end. Many local units had their own tents and infrastructure on the capitol grounds. Tent A housed Edmond teachers, B educators from Oklahoma City, C teachers from Moore, and D a group from Norman. The teachers walked the halls of the state capitol and lobbied state legislators and had a tremendous impact on state politics. Those who had opposed reactionary budget cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate elitists were galvanized. Teachers had great homemade signs. My favorite was, 'Pluto is still a planet in my school’s textbooks!' A number of incumbent legislators were subsequently defeated or taken to August runoffs in their re-election campaigns. Many of the walking political wounded are Republicans challenged by educators in the nominating process. You can feel change in the air in Oklahoma. The political establishment was trounced in a successful medical marijuana ballot measure that was placed on the primary election ballot, because the Republican establishment was terrified at the prospect of progressives and non-Republican voters marching to the polls in massive numbers in November. As Garth Brooks sang in 'The Dance,' if we knew how it all would end, we’d miss the dance. So far, many Oklahoma voters are dancing to the beat of their own drummer. The incumbent lieutenant governor was denied a place in the Republican runoff when he finished third in a huge field of primary candidates. The first shot has been fired around the state and Oklahoma voters seem to be channeling the classic movie Network saying, we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore!!"

The State Stands Guard Over Equifax

Protecting the very very rich from the rest of us (source)

by Gaius Publius

In an earlier piece on the Equifax data hack and its consequences, I predicted this:

This breach and its likely consequences represents three acts of violence inflicted on the population of the U.S....

The third act of violence is about to be committed by the bipartisan wealth-protecting neoliberal state, which sees as its duty — is paid in fact to see as its duty — the protection of corporate profits, including Equifax's, at the expense of its citizens. If Equifax is protected by government and business-friendly conservative judges, in all likelihood, the company will suffer no damage at all beyond a temporary PR "speed bump." Government protection of Equifax will guarantee that the maximum possible cost will be passed to you....

Will Equifax risk going out of business for this massive data breach, or will its "runway be foamed" by government protection so it can recover as a company pretty much intact?

In other words, not only would Equifax not be disciplined by the government, but it would be protected by the government from harm cause either by the so-called "free market" or by federal courts.

In the immediate wake of the data breach news we saw a round of announced, outraged congressional investigations. But time has passed, the major shock is over, and now we see the start of government protection. The IRS has announced that it's awarding Equifax a multi-million dollar no-bid exclusive contract to aid the agency with "fraud prevention."

No, this is not The Onion:

IRS awards multimillion-dollar fraud-prevention contract to Equifax

The no-bid contract was issued last week, as the company continued facing fallout from its massive security breach. 

The IRS will pay Equifax $7.25 million to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud under a no-bid contract issued last week, even as lawmakers lash the embattled company about a massive security breach that exposed personal information of as many as 145.5 million Americans.

A contract award for Equifax's data services was posted to the Federal Business Opportunities database Sept. 30 — the final day of the fiscal year. The credit agency will "verify taxpayer identity" and "assist in ongoing identity verification and validations" at the IRS, according to the award.

The notice describes the contract as a "sole source order," meaning Equifax is the only company deemed capable of providing the service. It says the order was issued to prevent a lapse in identity checks while officials resolve a dispute over a separate contract.

A $7.5 million dollar cash infusion is not that great for a company with nearly $500 million in net income (pdf), but it's not nothing either, especially coming from the federal government, and the timing will help restore confidence in the stock price, which has been rising. This is the government saying, "We're not going to let Equifax go away, despite their demonstrated dangerous incompetence."

The optics, of course, are terrible, but if you think this happened because the Republicans are in the White House, think again. A Democratic administration under any neoliberal president would do the same — protect Equifax from market harm. Ask yourself if Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer allow Equifax to twist in the free market wind. Of course not. They'd treat that company like they treated the Wall Street banks — chasten them, then offer whatever bailout is needed to "preserve an indispensable market giant."

The Failed Revolt of 2016

This is why the failed revolt we now call the "2016 election" — a failed revolution really — will inevitably continue, whichever pit or paradise it leads us to as a country. Does the voting public think a Democratic president-not-named-Sanders would act differently, or just more circumspectly?

Democrats in Congress would like you to think they'd be different. Sen. Ron Wyden:

"The Finance Committee will be looking into why Equifax was the only company to apply for and be rewarded with this. I will continue to take every measure possible to prevent taxpayer data from being compromised as this arrangement moves forward."

But then, the Republicans are saying the same thing. Sen. Orrin Hatch:

"In the wake of one of the most massive data breaches in a decade, it’s irresponsible for the IRS to turn over millions in taxpayer dollars to a company that has yet to offer a succinct answer on how at least 145 million Americans had personally identifiable information exposed,"

Which party will independent voters believe — one, both, or neither — as the failed revolt of 2016 rolls to the 2018 races? We'll soon find out.

GP
  

Violence and the State: A Prelude

by Gaius Publius

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

—Yours truly (paraphrased)

As you ponder the criticism of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement for engaging in violent tactics in Berkeley, consider the following.

▪ This is violence.

"The scene in Berkeley on Sunday" (source). Photo: Marcus Yam/LA Times via Getty Images

▪ This is violence.

To justify Bush's numerous rights violations, at home and abroad, James Comey turned Jose Padilla's brain "to jello" (image source).

According to Rick Perlstein:

James Comey, currently sailing smoothly through Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for confirmation as chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was ... in charge, and proudly so, of a “terrorism” case that began with a detention without charges, continued with made-up and spurious charges, and ended with a conviction won against an American [Jose Padilla] whose treatment during confinement (on the American mainland) turned his brain to jello...

▪ This is violence.

"The 350-acre Horse Prairie Fire is burning outside of Olalla [Oregon] on Saturday night and is zero percent contained" (source). Photo courtesy of Kyle Reed

A look at the headlines:

Los Angeles wildfires: City battles 'largest fire in history'

British Columbia is having its worst wildfire season in recorded history.

After burning for months, Montana looks like a fiery apocalypse.

Rain in Seattle is normal. Raining ash, however, is not.

We are in, to quote Randall Amster, a "new normal of destabilization," created by a political world in which both parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, out of service to fossil fuel billionaires and the companies they control, refuse in varying degrees to treat global warming as already a national emergency, one that requires, first and foremost, a transition to zero use of fossil fuels at the fastest possible rate if we hope in any way to alter the deadly and destructive path of what's already started happening to us.

▪ And this is violence.

"An alternate transportation network of private buses—fully equipped with wifi—thus threads daily through San Francisco, picking up workers at unmarked bus stops (though many coexist in digital space), carrying them southward via the commuter lanes of the 101 and 280 freeways, and eventually delivers them to their campuses" (source).

According to the SF Examiner, "Right now the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency charges companies serving multi-billion dollar technology companies $3.67 per stop event, what some critics have called a 'pittance.'"

The city gets a pittance for each "stop event" by these private busses, while the city's non-high-tech-connected citizens get no right at all to ride them. A two-tiered world of transportation, in other words, sanctioned and welcomed by government and financed in large part by tax dollars.

One more wealth transfer among a great many. A gift given to the few (our "future-seeing" high tech billionaires) to sweeten their bottom lines by making their jobs as attractive to their workers as possible. A gift paid from the pockets of the many to whom the service is unavailable.

The Violence of the State

Every national instance of Rule by the Rich is accompanied by a great deal of violence, inflicted on the many by the few.

Consider just the examples above.

The violence of torture and death, inflicted at home and abroad, by the state on the innocent, all so the state can appear to be something it's not, all so its ruling elites can stay in power.

The violence of climate chaos, inflicted by a national government which for decades has refused to act in any real way to lessen the coming costly horrible climate blows. (Of all major candidates, only Sanders was serious about climate mitigation.)

The violence of near-slavish service to increasing income inequality, again by both parties, a service that brought us the failed revolt we now call the 2016 election and its disastrous aftermath — a revolt, by the way, which is not going away no matter which party takes power.

Consider all this as you ponder the critics of the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement and the call by those same elites (example: Nancy Pelosi in the quote above) for a return to the state-only violence they call "order."

Whose hands are clean? Whose violence does greater harm?

GP
 

Life in Trump Country — "I make $2.35 an hour in coal country. I want a living wage."

What rebellion looks like in Trump Country, and why people choose selling Oxy over flipping burgers (Spencer Platt/Getty Images; source)

by Gaius Publius

The good wages that my father and grandfather fought to win are gone. I’m 20 years old, and I’m working at Waffle House, getting paid $2.35 an hour ... [W]e don’t need empty promises about bringing back coal jobs. We need the jobs that actually exist in our towns to pay us wages high enough for us to afford basics we can live on.

—Nic Smith, Roanoke, Virginia

At Netroots Nation in 2014 I taped a conversation with economist Stephanie Kelton in which we discussed work in America. She made two interesting points about "bringing back manufacturing" to America.

"Junk Jobs" vs. "Junk Wages"

First, those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back, and they weren't great jobs (as jobs) to begin with. Imagine yourself working an auto assembly line all day. But they became good-paying jobs because of unions and union wages.

Second, there's a way for government to create a de facto living wage in the U.S. without reverting to the country as it existed in the 1950s — make government the employer of last resort.

Click here to listen to the clip; start at about 5:30 for just this section. A short quote:

SK: If [FDR-style jobs programs] were created the right way, and you said, “Anybody who’s ready, willing and able to work, or unable to find a job in the private sector — or if you just don’t like that job — you can come and take this [government] job. We’re going to create one for you at a living wage with these benefits …”

You create a package for the worker that then becomes the minimum, [which] everyone else has to provide … or they’re not going to get workers. That becomes the de facto minimum. … We’re not going to let you starve in America.

My comment to her, just to make sure I had it right (emphasis added):

GP: I don’t want this to go by without people getting what was said. … You’re saying that you don’t really need to define a minimum wage, because the government sets a floor. … [Then] anybody who wants a better job than the junk job they’ve got, can work for the government. That forces the private employers to compete with the government for workers, and that’s a good thing for workers.

Her answer was yes, I have it right. Note the reference to "junk jobs." What's the answer to junk jobs in the absence of better ones? A living wage — an end to "junk wages."

Unfortunately, Kelton's means to that end — a presidential administration that would implement her "government as employer as last resort" plan — isn't available under Trump, and frankly, would not have been available under any Democrat with the possible exception of Sanders, for whom Kelton worked in the Senate.

But the plan is still right. And the means to execute that plan under Trump — a rebellion against Trump himself by Trump voters whose lives are not getting better — is definitely available.

The Rebellion of Trump Voters

That rebellion, the revolt of Trump voters in places like Roanoke, Virginia — coal country — may already be starting. Consider the following from Nic Smith, a man in his twenties who comes from a coal mining family, reflecting on his life.

Please read, and as you do, ask yourself: Are any of the conditions he and his neighbors suffer under — job loss, home foreclosures, drug-ravaged towns, school closings, poverty wages — likely to improve under a Trump administration? If not, what will people like Nic Smith do?

In this excellent piece in the Washington Post, Smith writes (my emphasis):

[C]oal country isn’t what it used to be. Corporate greed, mechanization and the rise of fracking have forced people in Dickenson County into lower-paying, less stable work. Now 25 percent of people in Dickenson live under the poverty line, and the average income is under $20,000 a year. There are not enough jobs to go around, and the jobs we can get pay next to nothing. Corporations are emboldened to cut wages and benefits with no regard for the working people who drive companies’ profits. Mineworker families have been forced to accept pennies because we don’t have another choice. My family was on welfare when I was a kid, and I’ve seen schools shut down and people lose their homes. I’ve seen neighbors lose their jobs and scrape by struggling to pick up work. Some people I know fell victim to addiction, others turned to selling drugs to survive. Meth and OxyContin have ravaged towns across the coalfields.

The good wages that my father and grandfather fought to win are gone. I’m 20 years old, and I’m working at Waffle House, getting paid $2.35 an hour and relying on tips to reach the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

Our reality goes unmentioned but for every four years, when politicians start knocking on our doors and stumping outside old, shuttered mines and factories. But we don’t need empty promises about bringing back coal jobs. We need the jobs that actually exist in our towns to pay us wages high enough for us to afford basics we can live on.

To the first question I asked above, the answer is clearly No. The gold-plated Trump regime will serve only itself, never the voters who handed him the power he now revels in.

To the second question I asked above — how will people respond to that? — notice what Nic Smith's answer is:

If the white working class gives in to the notion that the color of our skin makes us more politically valuable ... we lose power against the very forces of rampant greed that wreaked havoc on Appalachia to begin with.

And:

I saw the power of working people with the UMWA victory that preserved my family’s livelihood in 1990, and I see it with the Fight for $15 today. Now more than ever, working people must come together and tackle our broken economy head-on. It’s time to go beyond voting to fight for higher wages so we can create growth and jobs in my county and across the country.

Shorter Nic Smith — forget color; organize and fight.

Shorter me — Trump is creating against himself the rebellion he rode to power on. And maybe because institutional Democrats are now out of power, some of them might actually join it.

GP
 

A Guest Post From Jesse Myerson: The Political Revolution: Where From Here?

Beyond Bernie, What?

Since mid-April, when Hillary Clinton handily won the New York primary, variations on that question have animated discussions all over the country among activists, Sen. Sanders’ detractors as well as his supporters, who recognize that his run’s successes present an opportunity. Attending that opportunity, however, comes a burden. The political terrain opened up by social movements over the last five years demands the formation of a politicized constituency to inhabit it, and the Sanders campaign hinted at such a project’s near-term viability.

Developing a strategy for electing a socialist government is now an urgent matter.

Not that implementing that strategy should take priority. Any chance the left has of obtaining power is premised foremost on groundwork that must continue to be done outside the electoral sphere: labor and community organizing, base-building, political education, mass spectacle, direct action, grassroots leadership development, and so forth. Even if the left were to achieve electoral success, it would be fleeting and unsustainable, if we’d abandoned political groundwork to attain it.

Still, the reverse is also true: we risk losing the political ground we’ve been gaining if we don’t undertake an effort to populate it. Unfortunately, existing institutional avenues for achieving left electoral success are woefully deficient.

The Problem with Socialist Parties

In Parliamentary systems that operate on the principle of proportional representation, the leftist electoral strategy is simple: join or start a party and campaign on its line. If you only manage to get 2% of the vote, you are awarded 2% of the representation. If you get a plurality of the vote, you get to try to form a government.

A First-Past-The-Post system like ours strongly discourages this approach. Here, whoever wins an election, whether in a squeaker or a blowout, gets 100% of the representation. No representation whatsoever is awarded a loser, whether their campaign mobilized no voters or 49.9% of them.

In certain races in leftist pockets of the country, such as Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant’s Seattle City Council district, a leftist party may be able to pull a majority, and in such cases it should. Scaling up to national or even statewide races, though, it runs a risk that parties in a Parliamentary system don’t have to worry about: throwing the election to the right. If Socialist Alternative were to increase its share of the vote and begin running in more ideologically diverse electorates, the likely result would be increasing right wing majorities in government. The electoral odds confronting third parties do not generally admit of present success in gubernatorial, senatorial or presidential contests.

For organizer Waleed Shahid, the impediment posed by the winner-take-all approach is counteracted by an advantage US parties have over their Parliamentary counterparts. Whereas in proportional representation systems “parties develop candidate-lists up and down the ballot from school board to parliament,” here “candidates can theoretically gather the required number of signatures on an official party form and be placed on a ballot in a primary election.” An insurgent faction of “Sanders Democrats” could take on the party elite, leaving the Democratic Party to serve “a purely administrative function to foster electoral functions of the state, rather than a programmatic or disciplinary role.”

It is tempting to consider this option in the wake of Donald Trump’s populist conquest of the majority of the Republican establishment, its prominent politicians and major institutional constituents. What is a US political party anyhow, Trump’s success challenges us to ask, but a group of people who can be defeated through collective action?

Shahid proposes a new “party” which takes the form of a faction within the Democratic Party, like a left Tea Party. Such a form might maintain “its own accountability mechanisms, membership models, and decision making structures” without sacrificing “the existing tools of the major party’s administrative machinery: primaries, ballot access, petitions, conventions, and the party line vote used by an increasing number of voters.”

Not everyone is on board with this strategy.

The Problem with the Democratic Party

Shortly after the New Hampshire primary, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, made a peculiar political endorsement. She forcefully condemned Hillary Clinton, but declined to endorse Bernie Sanders, preferring instead to endorse the idea of a political revolution. Why promote a candidate’s catchphrase and not the candidate himself? Because of his ballot line: “it would be easier,” according to Alexander, “to build a new party than to save the Democratic Party from itself.”

Paul Heidelman, a proponent of the strategy of splitting completely from the Democratic Party, invites us to consider the socialist effort in the 1960s-70s at party realignment. Bayard Rustin, Michael Harrington and others advanced a strategy of expelling the Dixiecrat faction of the New Deal coalition, thinking this would liberate the Democratic Party to pursue social democracy. In the end, though they managed to shed the South, the Democrats did not become more socialist.

In predicting otherwise, Heidelman argues, Rustin and Harrington ignored the essential core of the Democratic Party: its funding base. Since the Great Depression, the Democratic coalition included those segments of the capitalist class most easily able to absorb the tighter labor markets the New Deal sought: capital-intensive and multi-national firms, like oil companies and international commercial banks. These interests were only induced to go along with the program because the alternative seemed to be mass insurgency, courtesy of a militant labor movement. When, a generation later, the oil sector threatened to abandon the Democratic Party, the counter-threat of working-class insurgency had dwindled, setting the stage for the the Carter Administration’s energetic pivot rightward, toward deregulation, austerity, and militarism.

Even if Sanders had been elected President, he would still be the titular head of a party whose major funding centers, and therefore whose major politicians, would be hostile to his agenda. The Sanders campaign’s small-dollar fundraising success was a marvel to behold, but normal Democrats don’t put up those numbers, so the party is, for the moment, still beholden to its moneyed interests. “Should he become president,” wrote Alexander, “he would also become part of what he has otherwise derided as ‘the establishment.’” Indeed, as tantalizing as Trump’s example of party-conquest may be, his prospects of advancing his agenda through a ruling coalition remain dubious.

There is also a more mundane reason for the left to want distance from the Democratic Party than its unreliability as a champion of working class interests: it is bedeviled by deep unpopularity. The latest from Gallup indicates that although the Party’s favorability rating has risen “slightly” since its historic low of 36% in November 2014, “both parties remain unpopular relative to their historical performance.” It is sensible to suppose that the unusually high degree to which Sanders is not a Democrat boosted his Democratic candidacy.

In the interest of its program and its political prospects, the left should seek a greater degree of independence from the Democrats than Shahid’s Progressive-Caucus-but-better offers.

The Problem with the Working Families Party

The Working Families Party is supposed to provide just such a vehicle. To be sure, it is the best attempt we currently have at operating within-and-without the Democratic Party. Through its shrewd use of fusion voting, WFP became a major force in New York politics and has expanded to nine states and is implementing a “pipeline project” to make politicians of grassroots leaders. However, as Shahid, a WFP organizer, writes, “Neither the WFP nor a prior, important effort to similarly challenge the two-party system --  Rebuild the Dream--  have generated the kind of momentum and mass participation of the Tea Party.”

For obvious reasons, the burden cannot fall to Shahid to give an account of why this should be.

As recently as 2013, the WFP was showing signs of powerful ascendency. A wave election swept Bill de Blasio and other WFP-nurtured politicians into office in New York City, defeating a powerful business-friendly Democrat who early on was considered the inevitable victor. The New York Times declared “A New Era for Progressives.” Here was a model capable of electing governments farther left than normal Democrats.

But only a year later, the model collapsed. For months leading up to its 2014 convention, the WFP searched for a viable progressive challenger to Andrew Cuomo. The Governor was a perfect WFP Primary election target, despised by liberals not only for his plutocrat-friendly policies but his tacit support for throwing the Senate to the Republicans, via the “Independent Democratic Conference”-- a group of four State Senators who, elected as Democrats, promptly turned coat.

At last, shortly before the convention, a solid candidate emerged in the figure of anti-monopoly law professor Zephyr Teachout, now a candidate for Congress. Despite the raucous ovations she garnered at from grassroots members at the convention, the party endorsed Cuomo, upon the prevailing of the executive leadership of the state’s largest union, 1199SEIU--  and Mayor de Blasio. Wisely, Cuomo did not show up in person to the convention, remotely delivering a speech that outlined his concessions, above all that he would restore to New Yorkers the Democratic majority they had elected by reigning the IDC back.

Party members who had boo’d through the video knew what was coming. They very next morning, Cuomo revealed his level commitment to the deal: “It’s very simple at these political conventions: you either win or you lose. Uh, and I won.” Not only did he win, he won ugly, sinking millions of dollars into a fake “Women’s Equality Party” designed to resemble and thus siphon votes away from WFP in the general election. Moreover, he convinced 1199SEIU and other unions that had supported him to cease paying WFP dues. As for the IDC, its leader, Bronx Sen. Jeffrey Klein wasted no words: “Nothing changes.” Voters justly knocked WFP down one ballot line for four years.

Ironically, Heinelman’s injunction to socialists that we ought to beware of funders is apt not only when the funders are organized capital, but even when they are organized labor. Union leaders, after all, represent the interests of a specific membership, not the working class writ large. If you have to deal with the governor for the sake of your members’ livelihoods, you don’t think he can be beaten, and you know he’s a vindictive demon, you, and thus the party you anchor, are at his mercy.

So the WFP is changing models. New chapters are staring up in states like Wisconsin and Nevada. Fusion voting is not an option in those states, so the WFP exists not as a ballot line, but as something closer to what Shahid calls for, an organization within the Democratic coalition. I am not privy to the party’s finances, but it appears to be in the unenviable “Do More With Less” mode.

If reliance on labor unions for funding is a liability, albeit a smaller one than reliance on capital, political independence will have to be driven substantially by small dollar donations. Here is where even the WFP’s new model provokes doubt. The type of exuberant small-dollar fundraising Sanders has accomplished requires something WFP lacks and the Tea Party had: an emotional connection with a mass of people.

Shahid points out that the Tea Party’s decentralized, open-source structure facilitated the kind of mass rallies and listening-session shout-downs that propelled 2010’s far-right electoral insurgency. I share his regard for decentralization, and admire many of the strategies advocated by the Momentum model of organizing (with which Shahid is affiliated) for achieving it. The Sanders campaign shows, though, that if there is energy around a project, it decentralizes spontaneously. People who were inspired to participate in the Sanders “movement moment” formed their own outfits, chapters, and networks, which become a sort of “Greater Campaign Area”--  People For Bernie, Labor for Bernie, Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, and so forth. If an open source structure provides a conduit for left political power, it is the emotional connection with a mass of people which provides the propulsion.

Resonant iconography is critical to fostering emotional connection. In a presidential campaign, the iconography inevitably revolves around a single icon: the candidate, who can symbolize many things to many people. In the absence of a candidate, though, iconography formation demands a more deliberate approach. The Tea Party claimed a historical lineage, which had a widely resonant iconography built in--  imagery, sounds, and dramatizations that inherently bespoke an appeal to insurgency, with the strong value of liberty from tyrannical government at its core.

If the Working Families Party has a symbolic logo, much less an animal to compete with a donkey and elephant, or any other type of mascot, symbol, anthem, costume, custom, ritual, ceremony, idiolect, etc.--  it is unknown to this long time WFP supporter. The name itself limits the appeal of the party: not only are there millions of people who don’t identify primarily as workers, there are millions more who don’t identify as families. An iconography revolving around a candidate or an historical event admits of mass, diverse emotional investment, and thus decentralized funding; it is not at all clear that an iconography-less Working Families Party does.

The Problem With The Tea Party

Though there is much to admire about the swiftness with which the Tea Party insurgency was able to advance a political program (however odious the program itself), it is easy to overstate the desirability of replicating its model.

Its chief deficiency was that it happened in a single wave. The Summer 2009 shout-downs may have propelled a crop of politicians embracing the Tea Party iconography into office in 2010 in sufficient numbers to impose a ruthless program of austerity, but by 2012, notwithstanding Ted Cruz’ attainment of a Senate seat, the Tea Party label all but ceased to be a force at the ballot box. If the left is going to implement a socialist program, it will need a sustained effort that builds on its own success in cycle after cycle.

To this end, the Tea Party lacked some crucial attributes: a coherent political critique, transformative vision and understandable program. Its critique took the form of a freewheeling, seething opposition to social welfare broadly and President Obama singularly. Its vision, freedom from Big Goverment, was never especially vivid, and it thus was never able to articulate a program capable of achieving it--  policies to overhaul, institutions to erect or abolish, etc. That the 2010 insurgency was able to yield severe budget cuts and the defeat of the proposed Public Option component of Obamacare was no mean feat, but these policy outcomes were also already GOP priorities. That is, “Tea Partiers” were, from a policy perspective, like mainstream Republicans, only more so.

A wave of sentiment provoking a political lurch rightward followed by an erosion of power is nothing like the sustained, transformative change the left seeks. The Tea Party was effectively too open source, lacking a central pillar capable of sustaining the decentralized insurgency. If the left replicated its model, we would wind up assisting the realization of the liberal agenda--  regulated access to market-based services--  rather than advancing our own program of guaranteed economic rights, directly provided by the public sector.

A Strategy for Political Independence

I’d like to offer a strategy for political independence, not as a blueprint, but as a provocation for discussion. I think it may be viable in the main, and that we may have a considerable amount of the necessary infrastructure already in place.

The strategy revolves not around a party but a national inter-partisan slate (and, once elected, caucus). Candidates could run for office at any level, but to achieve the greatest national significance with the smallest voting bodies, it might be wise to focus on the US House. They would share a core message, a basic program, and an explicit affiliation with one another under a common banner, maybe even with shared campaign ads. To maximize its degree of independence from any party’s funding base, the caucus should fastidiously maintain a diversity of parties-- perhaps there could be a bylaw stipulating that no more than 20% of a given slate’s candidates would appear on the same ballot line. A given slate might feature primarily Independents, some Greens in areas where local chapters are strong, some from socialist parties, some people running on the Working Families line, and a deliberately small number of Democrats.

For unity as its own entity, the slate/caucus would require a broad vision, a program for achieving it, a stated commitment to values/principles, and, critically, an iconography which resonates with these. Much of this may already exist in embryo.

The “divest-invest” framework has attracted social movements from climate justice to the Movement for Black Lives, and the Sanders campaign occasionally employed it, conceptually if not by name. It is capable of linking the diverse interests of social movements into a narratively coherent critique, vision, and program. Broadly speaking, the left wants to divest from prisons, policing, border enforcement, war, energy extraction, and the surveillance state, and invest in guaranteeing everyone the essentials for a dignified life: healthful food, comfortable housing, quality healthcare, student-centered/directed education, meaningful work, leisure time to build family, community, and culture, and the energy and communications tools required to do it.

The call to divest from the enforcement regime and invest in people’s livelihoods articulates commitments to freedom and dignity. To these, a third pillar might be added in commitment to democracy: unconditional universal enfranchisement, public election funding, a much more decisive system of participatory budgeting, federal standardization of election procedure, and so forth. Freedom, dignity, democracy. Divest-invest-enfranchise. Make love, not war, and power to the people.



In addition to this program, which is adaptable to local circumstances and priorities in every community in the country, the caucus could unite around a set of values/principles. Two closely related examples come to mind that pervade social movement spaces and the young activists propelling the Sanders campaign.

The first is “targeted universalism,” characterized by a devotion to the interests of the people who live farthest on the losing ends of various hierarchies, double standards, and violent relations-- the “margins of the margins.” Without this anchor, universalism is often carried adrift by the prevailing currents of bigotry. It tends to become abstract: “All lives matter.” The slate should demonstrate this commitment not just by enshrining it officially in its documents, but by realizing it in the figures it elevates to “party” leadership.

The second is what movements tend to call “accountability” and Sanders supporters tend to call “integrity.” His demonstrated inability to be bought by, and indeed his hostility toward, wealthy interests clearly ignited Sanders’ popularity and fundraising.

To bind the program and principles, a unified iconography is necessary. I am nowhere near capable of offering up a comprehensive scheme in this division, but for my own part, I am a fan of birds. A great deal of the symbology already employed by youth-led social movements and the ones from which they derive inspiration is already about freedom and dreams. What could signify those more vividly than birds? Birds mean renewal, birds mean grace. As Bernie Sanders pointed out when he summoned one to his lectern in Oregon, birds mean peace. “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Flocks of birds operate as a collective mass, following rotating leadership. Birds have vision wide enough to survey all the terrain visible from the sky but sharp enough to peer down at particular areas of focus. My two cents.

With these points of unity in place, a diverse slate of candidates might successfully organize as a left political faction, independent of any one party or funding center. Eventually, when powerful enough, it might become a party in its own right, seeking a ballot line and full realignment resembling what the Republicans achieved in the mid-19th Century.

Problems With The Strategy

I look forward to being alerted to many problems with my idea that I can’t see. One that I can is, as always, the funding question. A pool of small-dollar donations is ideal for political independence, and I hope the form I propose would be well-suited to generating one, but even a large pool would be unlikely to be able to truly sustain a major political operation by itself. If the caucus were to grow in scale, it would likely need to think of other sources for funds. Might union reform caucuses be able to shoulder some burden? A politicized federation of co-ops, land trusts, and other “new economy” institutions and organizations? What could a left formation produce that people might want to buy-- music, fashion, software, or something else millennials are good at?

Strategic discussions about leftist political operation will become increasingly vital in our newest “new normal.” I hope this essay will prove useful in provoking more of them, and that critics of what I’ve written will not be shy about identifying its deficiencies. And I hope that, if anyone reading is already busy building something like what I’ve outlined, they’ll let me know how I can be useful.