Unity As A Concept Is Neither Good Nor Bad... Though The Establishment Is Desperate To Unify Around Defeating Bernie And His Ideas

Beating Trump in 2020, as I've written before, is urgent-- if not existential-- but making sure we think long and hard about what we replace him with is just as important. The conservative establishment is not stupid. It senses Trump going down and the establishment does not want to see the kind of profound change America needs at this juncture. Jay Willis' GQ headline this week, The Republican Party Exists to Protect Millionaires and Billionaires, would be more historically accurate if it read "Conservatives exist to protect millionaires and billionaires. That's what conservatives are all about and have always been all about. The Republican Party is just the latest iteration in the U.S. "Other than 'downplaying federal crimes committed by the president,'" write Willis, "the modern Republican Party cherishes nothing more than finding innovative ways to lighten the financial burdens of the millionaires and billionaires who support it. This is most evident, of course, in its signature accomplishment of the 115th Congress: a $1.5 trillion tax cut for very wealthy people, propped up by the usual gamut of vague, Reaganomics-type assurances that the gaping new hole in the federal deficit would 'pay for itself.' During campaign season, after it became clear that this promise was a lie, Paul Ryan and company promptly pivoted to running ads about MS-13 instead.

An astonishing new report from The Atlantic and ProPublica, however, reveals that the party's most prominent display of corporate generosity is not necessarily the most lucrative one. Thanks to the GOP's decades-long war on the Internal Revenue Service, the federal government's ability to collect legally-owed taxes has reached a historical nadir, as deep budget cuts have hamstrung efforts to fulfill basic responsibilities-- like, among many others, hiring professionals to catch people who might be good at evading taxes.

And guess who stands to benefit the most from the agency's slow-motion failure?

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme-- and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

Investigations of nonfilers-- people who skip submitting their returns altogether-- have plummeted, from 2.4 million in 2011 to just 362,000 last year, and untold billions of dollars in uncollected tax debts expire each year after the ten-year statue of limitations runs its course. Nearly every statistic reeks of good old-fashioned American inequality: Audits are down across all income brackets, but the drop has been most precipitous among the wealthy, from 8 percent of those making more than a half-million dollars in 2011 to just 2.5 percent in 2017. During that period, audits of filers making less than $25,000 per year fell by just one-half a point, from 1.2 percent to 0.7 percent. Current and former IRS employees interviewed for the piece fear that the country could be on the verge of an era of brazen tax cheating from which it cannot recover.

This is, by any objective metric, bad: a catastrophic failure of law enforcement that deprives an already cash-strapped government of, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. (A properly-funded IRS, the article notes, is one of the few federal agencies that could actually operate in the black.) But as my colleague Drew Magary wrote earlier this year, conservatism is, at its core, a tool used to justify the continued exploitation of poor people. For Republicans, these strategic omissions are as important to their constituencies as the affirmative act of passing the tax reform bill. In public, the GOP delivers another long-awaited discount to the privileged; behind the scenes, it grins and winks-- a reminder that for them, in America, even paying that meager amount is optional.

The fact that a minority of Americans favor this fundamentally unjust arrangement is what drives literally everything the modern Republican Party does. Racists, bigots, and anodyne-sounding "social conservatives" have no inherent interest in kleptocracy, and vice versa. But the need to cobble together a coalition capable of winning elections has compelled the fiscal conservative establishment to make those groups' pet issues into key components of its political platform. The Venn diagram of climate change truthers and angry right-wingers consists of two concentric circles, because acknowledging science would create an undeniable moral obligation to do things that corporate benefactors do not want.

Even the aforementioned criminality denial is a pragmatic choice, because allowing a sitting president to break the law without consequences is, to Republicans, a less odious outcome than jeopardizing their power to enrich rich people, now and in 2020 and forever. The party of law and order always finds a way to forget about those things whenever remembering them might one day result in its donor class being held the tiniest bit accountable.

The idea of a Unity Ticket this year, was first floated as a way to get people to take the candidacy of conservative Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) seriously. Then to take the candidacy of conservative Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (D) seriously. Then Deval Patrick (D-MA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), Jason Kander (D-MO), Mark Warner (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Michael Bloomberg (?$?$?-NY)... Might as well thrown some more ground-up dried vomit into the kettle as well-- Ben Sasse, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker... The latest: Biden Should Run on a Unity Ticket With Romney. Anything-- anything at all-- to grind down working people into the mud and pig shit. "It could actually work," chirped Juleanna Glover in Politico. "Here's How." First imagine how wonderful the world would have been had McCain picked Lieberman has his VP and they would have vanquished Obama-- "diverting us from the dangerous polarization now plaguing our political system." Juleanna wants Corporate Joe Biden to learn from McCain's regret (picking Sarah Palin instead of Lieberman).

Biden has declared himself the "most qualified person in the country to be president," which Chirpy-- who lies about his standing in the polls, accepts on face value. (I beg to differ.) Chirpy worried that "in a Democratic primary [Biden] could be cannibalized by his own kind. Other Democratic candidates with more ambition than ability to win a general election against Donald Trump will inexorably and gleefully erode his standing by rehashing the Anita Hill hearings, pushing him to the left on domestic policy and endlessly reminding voters of his support for the Gulf War. Biden is the clear front-runner now-- with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at 13 percent-- but plenty of early favorites have ended up as also-rans (i.e. Jesse Jackson in 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Howard Dean in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2008). Running in a Democratic primary could deeply damage Biden’s legacy." LOL... yes; Idiot finally got something right.

She calls Biden "one of our most esteemed and admired leaders." That's true as well-- IF we're talking about inside they Beltway establishment corporate shills like Chirpy. They've been pushing Corporate Joe Biden for President since the 1980s. He always their favorite candidate, and always utterly rejected by actual humans. He has never-- if any of his multiple campaigns for president-- most still-born-- gotten beyond single digit polling, usually around 1%. But the Chirpies of the world love him. "[H]ere’s what Biden should do next," she confides in us: "Pick a Republican running mate in a 'trans-party' third-party run for the White House." Does that make your leg tingle?

Should Trump run again, this could be a “break-the-glass” moment for many Americans, creating an opening for a radical departure from our malfunctioning two-party political system. By injecting some ideological innovation into the process, we can break the hidebound precedents of two narrow parties running their ceremonious and illogical nominating process to select a candidate. (Why do Iowa and New Hampshire play such outsized roles? Why do independents, who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans, have only a binary political choice?) The system certainly suffered a critical failure in 2016, with both parties producing terribly flawed candidates in a race to the bottom.

The Democratic primary is shaping up to be cacophonous and chaotic. Biden should capitalize on his status as one of America’s most popular politicians, skip the risk and potential indignities of running and losing in what will be a vicious and mulish, leftward-lurching primary, and slingshot straight to the general election debate stage on a third-party ticket. Biden may not know it, but he is already well-positioned to win a three-way election outright. Here’s how:

Biden could run as the major third-party candidate with a principled conservative by his side (Lieberman, a one-time Democrat, technically categorized himself as an independent at the time McCain ran for president). A number of Republicans stand out: Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, outgoing Ohio Gov. John Kasich and newly minted Utah Sen. Mitt Romney. Many past third-party bids have failed because they came from the lunatic fringes-- think Jill Stein and Ralph Nader of the Green Party or Ross Perot with his quirky North American Free Trade Agreement obsession. Biden, by picking someone from the principled wing of the GOP, would instantly signal that he intends to run from the center.

Aside from being the most repulsive writer who has ever done a column for Politico, who, exactly is Chirpy? "Juleanna Glover has worked as an adviser for several Republican politicians, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani and advised the presidential campaigns of John McCain and Jeb Bush. She is on the Biden Institute Policy Advisory Board." She also worked for Jesse Helms, John Ashcroft, Dan Quayle and Phyllis Schlafly and made a bundle as a lobbyist and was a senior advisor to the 2000 Steve Forbes presidential campaign. The New York Times once described Chirpy as "the consummate political insider.” Getting the picture? Anything and everything Chirpy chirps should be instantly ignored or, better yet, the opposite would always be something to consider. (One more thing, she seems to have played some kind of role in the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, working for Bill Browder, an investor in Russia who gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 to avoid paying taxes and later became famous for his part in passing the Magnitsky Act.)

Please consider helping to defeat Biden, Romney, Kasich, Hickenlooper, Cheney, Quayle, Chirpy, Bloomberg, Giuliani... here.

Progressive Primary Winners Abandoned By The DCCC

Normally, I don't buy into "lesser-of-two-evils" politics. If Democrats nominate a corrupt reactionary Blue Dog, I'm at least as incensed as I am over a Republican. That's not going to change either. And, I'm still saying that "normally" no longer applies, not with Trump and his Congress-ful of enablers and rubber stamps. I'm telling friends and relatives-- my sister lives in Jeff Van Drew's district-- to just hold their noses and vote for anyone with a "D" next to their name. As Digby has been saying since Trump moved into the White House, we're in existential territory here. Boxing in Trump is more important than anything.

That said, there's no need to stop reminding the establishment Democratic Party that we need them to stop turning off the base with their Blue Dog/New Dem agenda and their uncontrollable hatred for the Democratic grassroots, for progressives and for the kind of reform that will shut down the spigots of money and power that motivates the careerism of the Hoyers, Wasserman Schultzes, Crowleys (buh bye) and the mirror image candidates the DCCC keeps recruiting to run for Congress.

The DCCC is now whining how progressives have to get on board the unity train and pull together to elect a Democratic Congress to stop the boogie man in the White House. I agree. They're correct.

What they're not correct about is that that's a one-way street. Let me give you an example. The DCCC drew up a list of the most crucial districts that they absolutely had to prioritize to flip in November. One is the Omaha swing district, NE-02. The DCCC went out and recruited a Blue Dog, Ben Ashford, who the voters in the district had rejected in 2016 after he served a term in Congress and voted pretty consistently with the GOP. Democratic voters refused to reelect him and now there's a Republican, Don Bacon, in the seat. The DCCC's strategy, which is regularly proven wrong, is that if a conservative Democrat votes with the GOP, "moderate" Republicans will eschew their own candidate and vote for the conservative Democrat. When will the DCCC learn that just doesn't work and all they do is turn off base Democratic voters?

In Omaha, a progressive Democrat, Kara Eastman, ran a grassroots campaign on issues that voters wanted to hear about. And she won, despite massive DCCC fingers-on-the-scale help for Ashford. The voters picked her-- 20,239 (51.43%) to 19,113 (48.57%). So how did the DCCC respond? They wrote NE-02-- their "must win" district-- out of their 2018 strategy and refused to back Kara. No Democratic Party institutional money is flowing in her direction. The Democratic establishment and the DCCC just flat out refuses to back her and the DCCC refused to add her to their Red-to-Blue page.

The same thing is happening with progressive primary winners all over the country-- including in must-win swing districts! Blue America has a page for that: Abandoned By The DCCC. There are men and women-- mostly women-- on this list who won their primary races and who the DCCC is refusing to recognize while they're asking progressives to support wretched Blue Dogs and New Dems because... TRUMP!

I spoke to one of those candidates this morning, J.D. Scholten. He was in a 3-way primary race to see which Democrat would take on the odious Steve King. J.D. outraised King in each of the last two FEC reporting quarters. Each time, he called the DCCC to tell them and urge them to work with him to beat King. And each time, the DCCC refused to take his call or to call him back. Then came the primary. Scholten beat the establishment fave, an ex-lobbyst with a Blue Dog agenda, Leann Jacobsen, and another candidate, John Paschen-- and it wasn't close.

• J.D. Scholten- 14,514 (51.27%)
• Leann Jacobsen- 9,055 (31.99%)
• John Paschen- 4,741 (16.75%)

So, J.D. called the DCCC to tell them about his win and ask for their help against King. Do you want to guess what happened? That's right... no return call. J.D. is campaigning full-time, not by sitting and calling donors and PACs and corporations begging for money, although he's still raising enough grassroots money to be ahead of King-- $195,348 cash on hand for J.D. and $87,250 cash on hand for King-- but by driving his RV into every town and hamlet in the sprawling 4th district and meeting the voters, talking with them about what they expect from Congress and telling them about the progressive solutions he espouses. The DCCC doesn't recognize that as valuable.

Please consider contributing to the candidates who have won their primaries and are up against Republicans while the DCCC ignores them. These are important races, not the "easy" ones the DCCC regularly screws up. Maybe these candidates are lucky not to have DCCC interference in their campaigns. But they do need some money to compete effectively.

UNITY, Baby, UNITY!

Don't forget Kara... and Amy McGrath

After her defeat Tuesday--even before the official runoff tally was announced-- Houston progressive candidate Laura Moser was urging her supporters to get behind her opponent, Lizzie Fletcher. And, in fact, Blue America had originally endorsed Jason Westin in that district but when Laura knocked him off the ballot, we immediately, even happily, endorsed her.

How about in Chicago, where Blue Dog Dan Lipinski-- an anti-Choice, anti-gay Republican masquerading as a "Democrat?" Are we supposed to unify behind him now? Tuesday one of my favorite candidates, Lillian Salerno, lost the Dallas race she was fighting with Colin Allred. I would have loved to have seen her in Congress. It would have helped the whole country. I don't see Allred doing much of anything for anyone. But I don't see him as evil either. I'm not going to contribute any money to him but if I lived in the district I wouldn't hesitate for a moment to vote for him against far right and very corrupt Republican Pete Sessions.

Tim Canova was defeated-- if you call being cheated "defeated-- by Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I doubt anyone who reads DWT to ever imagine anything would get me to vote for her. In fact, I immediately called Canova and begged him to run again. When he did, I contributed to his campaign... several times.

I don't notice the DCCC getting behind the progressives who are beating their conservative primaries-- practicing what they preach-- and I sense it's a one way street. They want progressives to back their shitty corrupt conservative candidates but don't think they should back the primary winners who they didn't get behind. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Last week the grassroots progressive Kara Eastman beat a putrid DCCC Blue Dog, Brad Ashford in Omaha. Ashford, an ultra-conservative "ex"-Republican had already been in Congress and was rejected by NE-02 voters and defeated after one miserable term of him voting with the Republicans and against working families. But he's who the pig-headed party bosses wanted. Then this happened:

• Kara Eastman- 20,239 (51.43%)
• Brad Ashford- 19,113 (48.57%)

The DCCC immediately removed Ashford from their Red-to-Blue list. But they didn't replace him with Kara. Why's that? They've been crowing all cycle that NE-02 was one of the most flippable seats in the country. But not for a progressive? Not for a woman? No for someone with an independent mind? What's their problem? They're always winning about the money. But, as of the April 25 FEC reporting deadline-- and with their help-- Ashford had spent $397,194 and Kara has spent $284,880. But she won anyway. Does that mean she knew how to spend her money more wisely? Does it mean that her volunteer army is worth more than corporate money? Or should we look at what Pelosi had to say back in February when she barged in on the editors of the Austin American-Statesman and started babbling away about how the DCCC decides which candidates to back and which to abandon? Jonathan Tilove called it her "cold-blooded to Democratic primary voters." Pelosi:

[C]andidates know, this is almost like a competition. They have to do their share. This isn’t an entitlement program. We need people  to run, oh you’re good, you look good for the district, here’s the money, No, they have to work. How do you connect with your constituents? That’s the most important thing. First of all, it’s would you win, but even before that, chronologically, show how you are going to represent them. How are you going know them, how are they going to know you.

...Forgive me for using this word,  you have to be very cold-blooded about how you make these decisions about the races because everybody’s so great, but one in five children lives in poverty in America and we have to have our best fighters go out there to win.

...We have to be cold-blooded in what we do. In other words, if the wrong person wins-- well nobody’s wrong-- but if the person who can’t win, wins, it’s not a priority race for us anymore, because we’ve got 100 races.

Maybe if Pelosi and the DCCC and the establishment Democrats really did know which duly nominated primary winner can and can't win, they would not have lost hundreds of seats at every level of government over the last decade. Maybe if the DCCC stuck to using their resources to fighting Republicans and not to fighting progressives and grassroots candidates the Democrats would be in better shape today. I wonder if that thought ever crosses Pelosi's mind. I sincerely doubt it. I what kind of Democratic leaders are coming up behind her. She has certainly failed in nurturing a next generation of leaders. No one could be worse than Joe Crowley, reportedly her pick to run the Democratic caucus. He's even worse than Stenchy Hoyer-- and as bad as Wasserman Schultz. Where does it say in the rule book that the Democrats can't get behind someone younger and better suited to the newer century-- men and women like Ted Lieu, Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal, Jamie Raskin, Mark Pocan?

Why Has America Been Split In Two?

America really is more split along a partisan divide than ever before. This 2005 documentary, The State of the Union, shows that there are two Americas, a red one and a blue one. It's hard to believe that Montclair, NJ and Franklin, TN, each of which was voting 50/50 Democrat/Repug in 1970, are now even in the same country. Montclair is a blowout for Dems and Franklin has been hopelessly swallows up by the Dark Side.

It was funny how in the documentary's focus groups, the liberal participants all allow their faces to be shown. None of them are ashamed of their views. Even the conservatives who take moderate positions, instead of hate-filled ones, allow their faces to be shown. But almost all the right wing loons and the bigots and freaks, demanded that their identities be covered up. They know their views are "wrong" and disgraceful and they don't want to be exposed to the world for what they believe and what they are.

It's a very interesting, and nonpartisan, 40 minute documentary and very well worth watching. The unasked question, of course, is whether or not Barack Obama will be able to bring the country back together. He's in the film, in 2005, addressing that. (McBush has a cameo too but just to do some ineffectual posturing). Enjoy: