Flop Sweat: Democrats try to assure Bernie voters that Biden's practically the same
Bernie-ites are furious at how this whole election has been going. They were determined to see that this election, unlike the last one, in 2016, not be rigged.
The sentiment intensified when they practically had the nomination in their hands, post-Iowa and post-New Hampshire just a couple weeks ago. Their victory dance was at hand. They almost had it. Then two days before Super Tuesday, all of a sudden, most Democratic rival candidates dropped out, nearly all at once, the better to consolidate behind jurassic old Joe Biden, who doesn't even know which state he's in. It had the look of rigging again, and this time in a different way. Democrats know seven ways to Sunday how to rig elections.
So now, via Weaselzippers, we are seeing things like this:
Asked about "how far Biden should go" in incorporating Sanders platform of Medicare for all, free education and a green new deal into the Biden platform, DNC chairman Tom Perez replied:
"...one of the things that gives me great optimism as we move forward, is that what unites us as a party far exceeds what our differences are..."
Which is a not so unobvious bid to bring the scattering and demoralized Bernie voters into the Biden fold, same as the others.
Which for sure signals desperation, given that so many Bernie-ites are now planning to either stay home or worse still, vote for Trump. Their internals must be atrocious for them to put on such a show. Sounds like flop sweat.
For the rest of us, though, it pretty well exposes as a canard the idea that Biden is "moderate" and Bernie is the 'extremist.' If the pair of them have the same ideas, all things being equal, why would any voter pick addled Joe over sentient Bernie? Joe's a guy they've practically put in a cone to keep him out of trouble. Everyone knows Joe's got a bunch of puppet-string pullers behind that curtain no one's supposed to pay attention to.
This is why it won't work.
But more to the point, if Bernie and Joe are indistinguishable, why shouldn't Trump go to town with it? It looks like they might be, given that a site called GOP War Room is onto the matter already, here. If Joe's ideas are as bad as Bernie's now, Trump has a ready made plan to run against socialism. No more Mister Moderation for them.
No matter which way you pull this, Democrats can only lose.
Image credit: PBS / GOP War Room, via YouTube, screen shot
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all
got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann
points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt
had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a
staggering white-collar crime spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street
Thievery
How
corporations and their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the
middle class.
America has long had a suspicious streak toward business, from
the Populists and trustbusters to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a
tendency that has increased over the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of
respondents told Gallup they had only “some” confidence in big business, while
20 percent had “very little.” But in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32
percent—near the highs registered during the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went wrong
is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations. Control
resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle was alarmed by the wealth of these
mega-corporations and the political power it generated, but also believed that
bigness was a necessary concomitant of economic progress. He thus argued that
corporations should be tamed, not broken up. The key was to harness the
corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on behalf of the citizenry.
Berle exerted major influence on the New Deal
political economy, but he did not get his way every time. He was a fervent
supporter of the National Industrial Recovery Act, an effort to directly
control corporate prices and production, which mostly flopped before it was
declared unconstitutional. Felix Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of
the great anti-monopolist Louis Brandeis, used that opportunity to build
significant Brandeisian elements into New Deal structures. The New Deal social
contract thus ended up being a somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and
Berle’s ideas. On the one hand, antitrust did get a major focus; on the other,
corporations were expected to play a major role delivering basic public goods
like health insurance and pensions.
Lemann then turns to his major subject, the
rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The New Deal order inspired furious
resistance from the start. Conservative businessmen and ideologues argued for a
return to 1920s policies and provided major funding for a new ideological
project spearheaded by economists like Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an
article titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits.” Lemann focuses on a lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen,
whose 1976 article “Theory of the Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for
blowing up that [New Deal] social order.”
Jensen and his colleagues embodied that
particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that only intelligent people can
achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis of unregulated capitalism
that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly destroyed the United
States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations that had
prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest economic
boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were outraged by the
lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly owned, and
argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The best part of the book is the connection
Lemann draws between Washington policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of
those decisions. There was much to criticize about the New Deal social
contract—especially its relative blindness to racism—but it underpinned a
functioning society that delivered a tolerable level of inequality and a decent
standard of living to a critical mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story
through the lens of a thriving close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn.
Despite how much of its culture “was intensely provincial and based on
personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it
was connected to the big organizations that dominated American culture.” In
other words, it was a functioning democratic political economy.
Then came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral
picture of what it was like at street level as Wall Street buccaneers were
freed from the chains of regulation and proceeded to tear up the New Deal
social contract. Cities hemorrhaged population and tax revenue as their
factories were shipped overseas. Whole businesses were eviscerated or even
destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile takeovers. Jobs vanished by the
hundreds of thousands.
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. Neighborhoods drowned under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off
financial derivatives imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the
General Motors umbrella for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago
Lawn residents desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little
success. “What they were struggling against was a set of conditions that had
been made by faraway government officials—not one that had sprung up
naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the book, however, Lemann starts to run out of
steam. He investigates a possible rising “Network Man” in the form of top
Silicon Valley executives, who have largely maintained control over their
companies instead of serving as a sort of esophagus for disgorging their
companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street maw. But they turn out to be, at
bottom, the same combination of blinkered and predatory as the Transaction Men.
Google and Facebook, for instance, have grown over the last few years by
devouring virtually the entire online ad market, strangling the journalism
industry as a result. And they directly employ far too few people to serve as
the kind of broad social anchor that the car industry once did.
In his final chapter, Lemann argues for a
return to “pluralism,” a “messy, contentious system that can’t be subordinated
to one conception of the common good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad
guys. It distributes, rather than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This is a peculiar conclusion for someone who
has just finished Lemann’s book, which is full to bursting with profoundly bad
people—men and women who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions
for their own private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about
lambasting rich people who “had begun to consider the government of the United
States as a mere appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech
in which he also declared, “We know now that government by organized money is
just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
If concentrated economic power is a bad thing,
then the corporate form is simply a poor basis for a truly strong and equal
society. Placing it as one of the social foundation stones makes its workers
dependent on the unreliable goodwill and business acumen of management on the one
hand and the broader marketplace on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless
Transaction Men to undermine the entire corporate social model by outcompeting
the more generous businesses. And even at the high tide of the New Deal, far
too many people were left out, especially African Americans.
Lemann writes that in the 1940s the United
States “chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model.”
But there is actually great variation among the European welfare states. States
like Germany and Switzerland went much farther on the corporatist road than the
U.S. ever did, but they do considerably worse on metrics like inequality,
poverty, and political polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the
real welfare kings.
Conversely, for how threadbare it is, the U.S.
welfare state still delivers a great deal of vital income to the American
people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently calculated that American welfare
eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,” which is how far families are below
the poverty line before government transfers are factored in. (This happens
mainly through Social Security.) Imagine how much worse this country would be
without those programs! And though it proved rather easy for Wall Street
pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist social model without many people
noticing, attempts to cut welfare are typically very obvious, and hence
unpopular.
Still, Lemann’s book is more than worth the
price of admission for the perceptive history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid
and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy
has for the daily lives of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at the
Week. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the
Nation. He was an editor at the Washington Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
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