WE KNOW WHAT OBAMA-HOLDER-BIDEN DID FOR THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS! THEIR CRIME TIDAL WAVE IS NOT OVER AND NONE HAVE GONE TO PRISON!
This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
"The reference to what “Trump’s done” is a
fraud, since the both the Democrats and
Republicans endorsed, on a nearly unanimous
basis, the multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall
Street in March."
"Biden reassured Wall Street and the billionaires, “I’m not looking to punish anyone.”
I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.
Democrats nominate Biden in inane display of political reaction
21 August 2020
The Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday night with the formal acceptance of the party’s presidential nomination by former Vice President Joe Biden, after a final two-hour session that was full of empty clichés, inane rhetoric and nauseating insincerity.
The atmosphere Thursday was more of a religious revival than a political event. There was incessant emphasis on the personal moral superiority of Biden compared to Trump, accompanied by increasingly maudlin testimonials to Biden’s alleged deep concern for children, the downtrodden, and virtually anyone who crossed his path. One former White House official referred to Biden’s “empathy skills,” a phrase which recalls the old wisecrack: “Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
The sheer contempt for the intelligence of the
population and the viewing audience was
summed up in Biden’s acceptance speech. His
speechwriters appeared to have been trying
to cram every possible trite phrase into a
single 20-minute address.
He ran through a laundry list of promises, from climate change to racism to student debt, none of which the Democratic Party has the slightest intention of actually carrying out. Only two phrases had real meaning.
Biden reassured Wall Street and the billionaires, “I’m not looking to punish anyone.” This sent a message to the financial aristocracy that, while the candidate was compelled to make demagogic attacks on the wealthy for electoral purposes, these would have no lasting consequences. “Nothing will change” for the super-rich, he told a Wall Street fundraiser last year, and that pledge he will keep.
And the former vice president denounced Trump for being too soft on Russia, threatening to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for allegedly paying bounties to Taliban fighters who attacked American troops in Afghanistan. This phony story is just the latest fabrication by the New York Times in its four-year-long campaign to provoke a US war with Russia.
The tone for the convention’s final day was set by the report Thursday afternoon that a group of 73 former national security officials from four Republican administrations were endorsing Biden and denouncing Trump in an open letter to be published in the Wall Street Journal. The list includes an array of militarists and police-state operatives who are responsible for the death of millions of people in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
Among the most prominent and most deserving of prosecution for war crimes endorsing Biden are:
- John Negroponte, with a bloody record from the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua to the occupation of Iraq in the 2000s;
- Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and secretary of state during the 2003 Iraq War, in which he played a central role in justifying a war based on lies;
- Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and later CIA director, who oversaw CIA torture programs and domestic spying;
- Robert Blackwill, deputy director of the National Security Council with responsibility for Iraq war policy in 2003–2004;
- Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center under the younger Bush; and
- William Webster, director of the FBI under Reagan and of the CIA under the elder Bush.
The support of these former leaders of the military-intelligence apparatus only underscores the real character of the conflict between the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin political instruments of the American ruling elite.
The Democrats oppose Trump, not because of his tax cuts for billionaires or his attacks on democratic rights and the rights of immigrants and refugees, but rather because of differences over foreign policy related to the Middle East and particularly Russia. An incoming Biden administration would immediately adopt an even more provocative and aggressive anti-Russian policy.
This was underscored in one segment after another of the final day’s program leading up to Biden’s acceptance speech, with military veterans and Republicans brought forward to speak in video segments. The most strident pro-war message came from Senator Tammy Duckworth, who denounced Trump as the “coward in chief” for his alleged capitulation to Putin over the bounties.
As for domestic policy, Biden’s closest political associate, his Senate chief-of-staff Ted Kaufman, who heads the transition team preparing for a future Biden administration, told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that the rising federal budget deficit would make ambitious spending programs impossible. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” Kaufman said. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit… forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.”
The reference to what “Trump’s done” is a
fraud, since the both the Democrats and
Republicans endorsed, on a nearly unanimous
basis, the multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall
Street in March. The coronavirus pandemic—which, as a
result of the policies of the ruling class, has produced a social and
economic catastrophe for the American population—has been
utilized by the ruling elite as an opportunity to loot the public
treasury. And it is the working class that will be forced to pay.
Despite claims by Bernie Sanders that Biden could become the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt, the real policy orientation of a future Biden administration was signaled by the appearance of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who gave the last speech before Biden himself was introduced, pouring scorn on Trump as a poor businessman and incompetent manager. It is the billionaires and the military-intelligence apparatus, not political charlatans like Sanders, who will call the shots if the Democrats win the White House.
Next week will put the ultra-right ravings of the Republican Party and the Trump White House on display. The Democratic Party masquerades as the friend of the workers while doing the bidding of the corporate elite; the Republican Party, under Trump’s direction, is working to develop a fascist movement. Both parties are the enemies of the working class, which must develop and build an independent revolutionary alternative.
New York Times: Wall
Street Backs Joe Biden
9 Aug 2020127
3:11
Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe
Biden, not the incumbent President of the United States, according to the New York
Times.
Under the August 9 headline,
“The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts,” three
reporters wrote:
While Wall
Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively
swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive
Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to
President George
W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr.
Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt
Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs.
Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.
This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial
industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him
dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr.
Trump’s $9 million.
The donors are already pressuring Biden to pick a
business-friendly candidate for vice president, and Biden is signaling a
hands-off policy toward Wall Street:
In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while
the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are
still being hammered out … in July, the candidate spoke of the need for
corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be
legislative.
“I love Bernie, but I’m not
Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in
trouble,” Biden said in 2018.
Notably, the article did not
mention one of Wall Street’s greatest heartburns with Trump — his on-again,
off-again popular push to reduce the immigration inflow
of foreign workers, consumers, and real estate customers.
Trump’s popular lower-immigration
promise could reduce the federal government’s policy of annually inflating the
new labor supply by roughly 20 percent. If implemented, it would force CEOs to pay higher wages and
would pressure investors to transfer some of their new investments from the
coastal states to the heartland states.
In the last few months, Trump
has zig-zagged on his low-immigration
promises as his poll ratings stay under Joe Biden’s numbers. But on June 22,
Trump blocked several visa worker
pipelines and promised regulations to ensure that CEOs are forced to hire
Americans first.
In contrast, Biden has promised to
open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and
white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere.
Those policies are catnip for
Biden’s supporters in the technology sector, including former Google chief Eric
Schmidt, who is urging the federal government
to let companies hire more of their professional workforce from overseas.
Wall Streeters’ resentment towards Trump was noted in one quote
from a former Goldman Sach’s investor, James Atwood: “For people who are in the
business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a
while ago.”
However, Trump can only be hired or fired by the voters.
Mike Lee's #S386 bill creates a Green Card Lite program for 300K Indian workers.
Lee is backed by Fortune 500, which wants to inflate the Green Card Economy
(IOW, indentured foreigners working US jobs to get 140K p/a green cards).
Estb. media is silencedhttps://t.co/fcAB4CbJgk
— Neil Munro
(@NeilMunroDC) August 7, 2020
ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN BORDERS FOR MORE CHEAP
LABOR AND NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHINESE AND INDIANS TO WORK OUR TECH JOBS CHEAP.
Obama’s State
of Delusion ... OR JUST ANOTHER "Hope & Change" HOAX?
”The
delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union
address on
Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living
standards and
a booming economy, capped by his declaration
that the
“shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched
only in its
presentation by the media and supporters of the
Democratic
Party.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html
“The general
tone was set by the New York Times in its lead editorial on Wednesday, which
described the speech as a “simple, dramatic message about economic fairness,
about the fact that the well-off—the top earners, the big banks, Silicon
Valley—have done just great, while middle and working classes remain dead in
the water.”
OBAMANOMICS:
The report
observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between
2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5
billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html
In 2010, it
took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s
population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to
80 in 2014.
THE OBAMA
ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS
“The goal of
the Obama administration, working with the Republicans and local governments,
is to roll back the living conditions of the vast majority of the population to
levels not seen since the 19th century, prior to the advent of the eight-hour
day, child labor laws, comprehensive public education, pensions, health
benefits, workplace health and safety regulations, etc.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html
“In response
to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy, spearheaded by Obama, the
working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its own policy.”
New Federal Reserve report
US
median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”
The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a
massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is
just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer
Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class
living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich
and the super-rich.
Why the rich favor the Democrats
There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party
is the party of the rich. Actually, that's an
understatement. Far more than billionaires are involved. A better
expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition
is the managerial class, also known as the elite. These are the
people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big
corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall
Street. They populate the upper levels of government
bureaucracies. These are the East and West Coasters.
The alliance of the affluent with the Democrat
Party can be seen in the widely disproportionate share of hefty political
donations from the well-to-do going to Democrats and a bevy of left-wing
causes. It's also why forty-one out of the fifty wealthiest
congressional districts are represented by Democrats.
BLOG: DEMS LOVE SOCIALISM FOR ILLEGALS TO KEEP
THEM COMING AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE AND SOCIALISM FOR BANKS.
TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF IT!
Bernie Sanders is an
exception. But he's an anomaly viewed as dangerous to the party,
which is why he's being crushed by the Democrat establishment.
Why do the wealthy align with the
Democrats? The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but it is really
quite simple. It's surely not ideals or high-minded
principles. Nor is it ignorance. Rather, it boils down to
raw self-interest.
In his book, The Age of
Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes
that rich Americans think themselves to be as vulnerable as
blacks. They are a relatively small minority of the
population. They fear being resented for their wealth and power and of
having much of that taken from them. Accordingly, the wealthy seek
to protect what is theirs by preventing strong majorities from forming by using
the divide and conquer principle.
As R.R. Reno writes when reviewing
Caldwell's book: "Therefore, the richest and most
powerful people in America have strong incentives
to support an anti-majoritarian political system." He goes
on: "Wealthy individuals shovel donations into elite institutions that
incubate identity politics, which further fragments the nation and prevents the
formation of majorities."
Some of the rotten fruit of the wealthy taking
this approach include multiculturalism, massive immigration of diverse people,
resistance to encouraging assimilation, racial strife, trying to turn
white males into pariahs, and the promotion of gender
confusion. Through it all, society is bombarded with
the Orwellian mantra that "diversity is strength," as if
repeating it often enough can make it so. It is also why patriotism
and a common American culture are so disparaged today. Those from
the upper strata of society project the idea that if you're a flag-waving
American, you must be some kind of retrograde mouth-breathing
yokel.
The wealthy as a groups are content to dissolve
the glue that holds the U.S. together. And it is all done to enhance
and preserve their power, wealth, and influence. This is why they so
hate Donald Trump. He strives to unite people and the country,
although you'd never know that that is what the president is
doing if you live in the media
bubble. Trump's MAGA agenda is an anathema to the
managerial class.
To quote Reno one final time:
The next decade will not
be easy. But it will not be about what preoccupied us in the
sixties, and which Caldwell describes so well. Rather than the
perils of discrimination we are increasingly concerned with the problem of
disintegration — or in Charles Murray's terms, the problem of "coming apart."
Trump and the GOP he is molding are the vehicles
to restore and strengthen national solidarity. Trump said at the Daytona 500,
"No matter who wins, what matters most is God, family, and
country." That is not the Democrat agenda. As
seen in Democrat politicians, their policies, and the behavior of their major
contributors, the aim is to further weaken the social and national bonds in
America. There is a lot at stake here. If solidarity
wins, the Republic can survive and prosper. If the Democrats
and their wealthy cohorts do, then the middle class withers, the Republic
dies, and the rich and their managerial class get to rule the
roost. That is what it comes down to.
ALL
BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY
AND HELL NO TO E-VERIFY!
In addition,
establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of
illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the
social costs.
This is why
the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Democrats:
The Party of Big Labor, Big Government...and Big Business
There
is a widespread perception that the Democrat Party is the party the working
class and the Republican Party is the party of big business. Even
though Republicans on average received slightly more from corporate employees
prior to 2002, the overall difference between both parties from 1990 to 2020 is
statistically insignificant (Table 1). In fact, Democrat
reliance on big labor gradually shifted toward big business following the
involvement of solidly Democrat corporate giants in 2002, and from 2014 to
2020, Democrats consistently surpassed Republicans in corporate donations
(Tables 1 & 2).
Based
on data compiled by Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management, Fahr LLC (Tom Steyer),
and Bloomberg LP ranked among the top ten for political contributions that gave
over 90% to Democrats. In sharp contrast, the right-leaning Koch
Industries made the top ten only in 2014. In nearly all other years,
Koch ranked well below the top twenty.
Whether
or not this trend is long-term, there is no denying that large corporations on
average no longer lean right. But what does it mean to be "the
party of big business"? Donations are not definitive
evidence. What ultimately matters is what politicians do once they
get elected.
Many
liberals believe that big government is needed to "rein in" big
business and that in the absence of federal intervention, corporations will
"run roughshod" over the average American. Many liberals
also believe that corporations are the main beneficiaries of laissez-faire
economics and that free-market conservatives who want to scale back regulations
are somehow "in the pocket" of big business.
In
reality, the opposite is true: big business and big government
go
hand in hand because government meddling in the economy
encourages rent-seeking by businesses that
can afford to pay
for
the lobbyists. This crony capitalism grew exponentially as
a result
of New Deal regulations that squeezed out competitors
during
the 1930s. Establishment politicians and well
connected corporations
are beneficiaries of the myth that big
government
and big business are adversaries because it hides
their
unholy alliance.
In
all fairness, neither party has had a monopoly on the dispensation of corporate
welfare: the TARP funds that propped up financial institutions deemed "too
big to fail" during the Great Recession were released by the Bush
administration. In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than
Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big
businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor
without incurring any of the social costs.
If
both parties are playing this game, what is the basis for labeling the Democrat
party "the party of big business"? What policies from
Republicans support small business?
Free-market
conservatism benefits small businesses because the government does not pick the
winners and losers by means of subsidies, tax breaks, and cumbersome
regulations. You will not see policies like these coming from
Washington in a major way because proposals for shrinking the federal
government rarely see the light of day in Congress.
Based
on data collected by Gallup and Thumbtack, red states far outscore blue states
in small business friendliness (Table 3). This may be why less
affluent Americans are fleeing states that score abysmally like California, Illinois, New York, and Hawaii. This might
also be why small business–owners are more likely to vote Republican.
The
Trump administration has been good for businesses of all sizes mainly due to
the unprecedented rate at which it scaled back stifling regulations. This may be
why some of the president's highest approval ratings now come from
small businesses.
Donald
Trump set himself apart from the ruling class when he latched onto the
third-rail issue of illegal immigration and called out the corporate darling Jeb Bush (AKA
"Low Energy Jeb") for his lack of grassroots support. This
may explain in part why Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney,
switched teams and contributed solidly Democrat in 2018. In 2012,
Democrats accused Bain Capital of destroying jobs by systematically dismantling
the companies it bought off. Times have changed...
Small
businesses generate well over half of all new jobs. Most
importantly, many are family-owned, have strong ties to their communities, and
provide upward mobility for millions of Americans who never attended
college. The Democrats' undermining of this quintessentially
American institution is shameful and disqualifies it as the "party of the
working class." Contributions from big labor do not count
toward "labor-friendliness" because mega-unions care more about
recruitment than about the welfare of working Americans. This is why the SEIU
supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Democrats
fed up with the corporate status quo are now choosing their own
anti-establishment candidate, not realizing that socialism is just a more
impoverished version of the crony capitalism they are
rejecting. Many Sanders-supporters are also morally shallow because
they want to harness the power of the state to muscle in on the wealth of
Americans who borrowed responsibly and worked hard to pay their bills.
After
the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said, "This Constitution ... is
likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in
despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic
government." If Democrats implement the dystopian policies of California
on a national level, their corporate allies will do fine. It is
small business–owners and working-class Americans with nowhere to flee who have
the most to lose. Be careful what you wish for.
To view the tables below, click the links.
Table 1: Top contributors to Democrats and Republicans as compiled
by Open Secrets.
*The red lettering highlights a funding
advantage for Republicans. The blue lettering highlights a funding
disadvantage for Republicans.
**Based on a T-test, the difference is
insignificant at P = 0.46
Table 2: Top ten contributors to Democrats and Republicans by category
(union, corporate, and ideological) as compiled by Open Secrets:
*In 2008 Goldman Sachs donated 74% to
Democrats. All other groups in this column donated between 40 and
69% to both parties. This column does not differentiate between
giving equally to both parties and giving 70–79% to Democrats or Republicans.
**This number includes the "City of
New York." Although it is officially listed as
"other" by Open Secrets (not corporate, union, or ideological), I was
personally informed by someone from the organization that Michael Bloomberg was
the main source of this funding.
Table 3: Small business scores states scored by Thumbtack ranked
according to their Democratic advantage by Gallup:
*GPA scores are based on the following
numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7,
etc.
** Not scored.
***Mean GPA ± standard error. Based on a
T-test, the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.
Grim Reaper Mitch to Pelosi: I'm
Going to Kill Your Stimulus Plan
House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi just got some bad news from Mitch McConnell. Any talk
about another stimulus isn’t going to happen. She may draft a bill, but it’ll
meet a swift death in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mitch is the
legislative grim reaper for most of what the Democratic House sends his way
(via The Hill):
Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hit the brakes Tuesday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s
(D-Calif.) plan to move ahead with a fourth stimulus package that would include
major infrastructure spending and other Democratic priorities.
“I think we need
to wait a few days here, a few weeks, and see how things are working out,”
McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
“Let’s see how
things are going and respond accordingly,” he added. “I’m not going to allow
this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items
that they would not otherwise be able to pass.”
McConnell's remarks came the same day that President Trump
encouraged Congress to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill as the next piece
of coronavirus legislation.
Pelosi
is also mulling a rollback of the SALT taxes, which would be nothing short of a giveaway to
millionaires. And by the
giveaway, it would be something of a $620 billion tax cut for them. Remember,
this is the party of the working people, or so they say, and a part of me hopes
she goes aggressive on this, so we can see Bernie Sanders gum up the Democratic
works for a bit. There is no way a hardcore
lefty would back this nonsense. Yet, there’s another reason why Mitch isn’t
rushing on the House Democrats’ stimulus reloaded plans. They’re off. They
won’t be back to work until April 20. And The Hill added that Mitch hasn’t
forgotten about judges, adding that the Kentucky Republican’s motto is “leave
no vacancy behind.”
THE OBAMA – BIDEN BANKSTERS CON JOB STARTED BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE!
GET THIS
BOOK!
Obamanomics:
How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends,
Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P
CARNEY
Editorial
Reviews
Obama Is
Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market
conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and
bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best
and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the
federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and
healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes
it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every
time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are
friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the
mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather
than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all
while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and
regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The Great
Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate
profits and more government control
* The Global
Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will
drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and
Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in
the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
*
Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the
well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the
GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
Praise
for Obamanomics
“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free
market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to
demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is
conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is
exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it
to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide
to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting
rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare
the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the
president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read
for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against
Barack Obama
“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still
believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic
liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who
believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit
the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama
for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once
more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while
disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too
clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30,
2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596986123
• ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
Chuck Schumer Pushes
Tax Cut for Richest 1% in Coronavirus Relief Bill
16 Jul 202034
4:32
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing for a
repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the next round of coronavirus
relief — giving a tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers, especially in
“blue” states.
In his landmark tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of
2017, President Donald Trump and the Republicans offset some of the revenue
losses from low tax rates by restricting deductions. The law capped the SALT
deduction at $10,000.
Previously, those taxpayers wealthy enough to file a list of
itemized deductions could count all of
the taxes they paid to state and local governments toward a deduction in their
federal tax liability. That meant wealthy taxpayers in the most heavily taxed
states — primarily run by Democrats — benefited most. The SALT deduction also
gave Democrats political room to raise taxes higher, because it made rich
taxpayers less likely to resist: they could claim some of the money back.
Trump ended the deduction — at some political cost to himself.
Republicans went on to lose congressional seats in wealthy suburbs in high-tax
Democrat-run states. Orange County, California, for example, flipped entirely
to Democrats.
But Democrats still want to repeal the SALT cap, regardless,
because they want their state and local governments to avoid tax cut — and
because their wealthy campaign contributors want to be subsidized, once again,
by the rest of the country.
Even Seth Hanlon, a former Obama administration official who is
now a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has
protested against Schumer’s idea, noting that repealing the SALT cap would help
“the top 1%.”
Come on, not this again.
Repealing the SALT cap for 2020-21 would be a $137 billion tax
cut, with about 63% going to the top 1%.
It does nothing for states and localities except potentially
crowd out the actual fiscal relief they urgently need. https://t.co/jlSjIhnzpq
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
Here is the national distribution of the
tax cut from repealing the SALT cap, via @iteptweets.
A tiny percentage of middle-income people get any benefit.
The top 1% gets 63%: an avg. $35k tax cut for them.
The top 5% gets 87%.
The bottom 80% get literally 1% of the benefit. pic.twitter.com/8EIav7wgcJ
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
Here is the distribution just for New York.
Largely the same story. A few more middle-income people benefit a little
compared to nationwide, but still, the tax cut goes overwhelmingly to top
one-percenters. Not the people most affected by COVID!!! pic.twitter.com/Dp0evxq3P7
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
The basic story is the same in every state.
State by state estimates are here. https://t.co/1KREhnb6et
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
The Democrat-run House of Representatives has already passed a
repeal on the SALT cap that would be effective for two years.
According to The Hill, “Schumer urged Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [on Tuesday] to ‘join the House, and
join the Democrats in the Senate, and get rid of that cap.'”
Schumer also vowed to make the SALT deduction — the effective
tax cut for the 1% — permanent: “If I become majority leader, one of the first
things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he added, according to The Hill. “It will be dead,
gone and buried.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and
the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday
evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
David Shor’s Unified Theory of
American Politics
David Shor got famous
by getting fired. In late May, amid widespread protests over George Floyd’s
murder, the 28-year-old data scientist tweeted out a study that found
nonviolent demonstrations were more effective than “riots” at pushing public
opinion and voter behavior leftward in 1968. Many Twitter users — and (reportedly) some of Shor’s colleagues
and clients at the data firm Civis Analytics — found this post insensitive. A
day later, Shor publicly apologized for his tweet. Two weeks
after that, he’d lost his job as Civis’s head of political data science — and
become a byword for the excesses of so-called cancel culture. (Shor has not discussed his
firing publicly due to a nondisclosure agreement, and the details of his
termination remain undisclosed).
But before Shor’s
improbable transformation into a cause célèbre, he was among the most
influential data gurus in Democratic politics — a whiz kid who, at age 20,
served as the 2012 Obama campaign’s in-house Nate Silver, authoring the
forecasting model that the White House used to determine where the race really
stood.
And before that, he
was a college Marxist.
This idiosyncratic
combination of ideological background, employment experience, and expertise has
lent Shor a unique perspective on American politics. He is a self-avowed
socialist who insists that big-dollar donors pull the Democratic Party left. He is an adherent of Leninist vanguardism and the median voter theorem. And in the three
years I’ve known him, I don’t think I’ve found a single question about U.S.
politics that he could not answer with reference to at least three
peer-reviewed studies.
Shor is still
consulting in Democratic politics, but he is no longer working for a firm that
restricts his freedom to publicly opine. Intelligencer recently spoke with him
about how the Democratic Party really operates, why the coming decade could be
a great one for the American right, how protests shape public opinion, what the
left gets wrong about electoral politics, and whether Donald Trump will be
reelected, among other things.
What is it like to
have your name become shorthand for a culture war controversy?
I cannot comment on any of the stuff around all of that.
All right. That line
of questioning is canceled.
Sorry!
I feel silenced, but
it’s okay. Let’s start here then: What are the biggest revisions you’ve made to
your conception of how electoral politics works since you first took a job on
the Obama campaign?
I think going into
politics, I overestimated the importance of the personal ideology of people who
worked in campaigns for making decisions — which was part of a broader
phenomenon of overestimating the extent to which people were making decisions.
In 2012, I would see progressive blogs* publish stories like, “The White House
is doing a Climate Week. This must be because they have polling showing that
climate is a vulnerability for Republicans.” And once you know the people who
are in that office, you realize that actually no; they were just at an awkward
office meeting and were like, “Oh man, what are we going to do this week? Well,
we could do climate.” There’s very little long-term, strategic planning
happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So,
campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.
I’ve also fallen
toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So
a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely
ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the
neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that
campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material
interests of her donors.
But that’s not what
happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired
pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical
reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less
likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as
a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well
in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But
the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all
of the actors involved.
A tasteful Marxist
(or whatever the opposite of a “vulgar” one is) might counter that class biases
were implicated in that mechanical error — that cosmopolitan,
upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives’ eagerness to see their worldview
affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a
systematic sampling error.
That’s exactly right.
Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be
highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves
to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people — or that
my team [at Civis] told people — is actually that smart. You know, we’d do all
this math, and some of it’s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we’re saying
is: “You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to
the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about
unpopular issues.” And we’d use machine learning to operationalize that at
scale.
The right strategies
for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton
campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the
social views of racist white people.
What is the
definition of racist in this context?
Ah, right. People
yell at me on Twitter about this. So working-class white people have an
enormous amount of political power and they’re trending towards the Republican
Party. It would be really ideologically convenient if the reason they’re doing
that was because Democrats embraced neoliberalism. But it’s pretty clear that
that isn’t true.
I think that winning
back these voters is important. So if I was running for office, I would
definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because
Democrats failed to embrace economic populism. I think that’s sound political
messaging. But in terms of what actually drove it, the numbers are pretty
clear. It’s like theoretically possible to imagine a voter who voted for
Democrats their whole life and then voted for Trump out of frustration with
Obamacare or trade or whatever. And I’m sure that tons of those voters exist,
but they’re not representative.
When you take the
results of the 2012 and 2016 elections, and model changes in Democratic vote
share, you see the biggest individual-level predictor for vote switching was
education; college-educated people swung toward Democrats and
non-college-educated people swung toward Republicans. But, if you ask a battery
of “racial resentment” questions — stuff like, “Do you think that there are a
lot of white people who are having trouble finding a job because nonwhite
people are getting them instead?” or, “Do you think that white people don’t
have enough influence in how this country is run?” — and then control for the
propensity to answer those questions in a racially resentful way, education ceases
to be the relevant variable: Non-college-educated white people with low levels
of racial resentment trended towards us in 2016, and college-educated white
people with high levels of racial resentments turned against us.
You can say, “Oh, you
know, the way that political scientists measure racial resentment is a class
marker because college-educated people know that they’re not supposed to say
politically incorrect things.” But when you look at Trump’s support in the Republican
primary, it correlated pretty highly with, uh … racially charged … Google
search words. So you had this politician who campaigned on an anti-immigrant
and anti–political correctness platform. And then he won the votes of a large
group of swing voters, and vote switching was highly correlated with various
individual level measures of racial resentment — and, on a geographic level,
was correlated with racist search terms. At some point, you have to be like,
oh, actually, these people were motivated by racism. It’s just an important
fact of the world.
I think people take
the wrong conclusions from it. The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016
election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist
and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you
had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed
by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them
back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of
these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re
really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them
to vote for us.
How should Democrats
do that?
So there’s a big
constellation of issues. The single biggest way that highly educated people who
follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much
more ideological coherence in our views.
If you decided to
create a survey scorecard, where on every single issue — choice, guns, unions,
health care, etc. — you gave people one point for choosing the more liberal of
two policy options, and then had 1,000 Americans fill it out, you would find
that Democratic elected officials are to the left of 90 to 95 percent of
people.
And the reason is
that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues,
they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of
pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist
David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters
don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones. Some people
responded to media coverage of that paper by saying, “Oh, people are just
answering these surveys randomly, issues don’t matter.” But that’s not actually
what the paper showed. In a separate section, they tested the relevance of
issues by presenting voters with hypothetical candidate matchups — here’s a
politician running on this position, and another politician running on the
opposite — and they found that issue congruence was actually very important for
predicting who people voted for.
So this suggests there’s
a big mass of voters who agree with us on some issues, and disagree with us on
others. And whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to
which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue.
Mitt Romney and
Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that
happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked
a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between
preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In
2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the
correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for
went down.
So this means that
every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem
where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this
is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they
talk about.
Non-college-educated
whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally
conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics;
they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think
Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really
hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means
not talking about immigration.
It sounds like you’re
saying that public opinion is a fixed entity, which campaigns have little power
to reshape. I think many progressives dispute that notion. In their view, the
“social views of racist white people” aren’t a given. Right-wing media has fed
the public a story that pits their interests against those of immigrants. But if Democrats offer a counter-narrative about how corporate
interests use ethnic divisions to divide and conquer working people, maybe they
can change what is and is not “popular.” Why is that view wrong?
It’s worth being
precise about mechanisms. It’s true that political parties have enormous
control over the views of their partisans. There’s like 20 percent of the
electorate that trusts Democratic elites tremendously. And they will turn their
views on a dime if the party tells them to. So this is how you can get Abolish
ICE to go from a 10 percent issue to a 30 percent issue. If you’re an
ideological activist, that’s a powerful force. If you convince strong partisans
to adopt your view, then when the party comes to power, strong partisans will
ultimately make up that administration and then you can make policy progress.
The problem is that
swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace
Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish,
racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So
that’s the trade-off. When you embrace unpopular things, you become more
unpopular with marginal voters, but also get a fairly large segment of the
public to change its views. And the latter can sometimes produce long-term
change.
But it’s a hard
trade-off. And I don’t think anyone ever says something like, “I think it was a
good trade for us to lose the presidency because we raised the salience of this
issue.” That’s not generally what people want. They don’t want to make an
unpopular issue go from 7 percent to 30 percent support. They want something
like what happened with gay marriage or marijuana legalization, where you take
an issue that is 30 percent and then it goes to 70 percent. And if you look at
the history of those things, it’s kind of clear that campaigns didn’t do that.
If you look at
long-term trends in support for gay marriage, it began linearly increasing,
year over year, starting in the late 1980s. But then, right when the issue increased
in salience during the 2004 campaign, it suddenly became partisan, and support
declined. After it stopped being a campaign issue, support returned to trend.
Graphic: Gallup
Campaigns just can’t
effect those kinds of long-term changes. They can direct information to
partisans who trust them, and they can curry favor with marginal voters by
signaling agreement with them on issues. But there isn’t much space for
changing marginal voters’ minds.
How do you square
this analysis with the events of the past few weeks, in which the salience of
racially discriminatory policing increased in tandem with Joe Biden’s lead over
Donald Trump? Obviously there are a lot of other variables. But we have
seen a surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement and police reform. We’ve
seen Biden boasting a bigger advantage over Trump on the question of which candidate can best
handle race relations — and all while progressive activists have been
associating the left with the exceptionally unpopular
concept of defunding the police.
Yeah. I’m not going
to pretend that I would have predicted that this is how it was going to shake
out. But I do think it’s actually consistent with what we’ve been discussing.
One way to think
about electoral salience and the effects of raising the salience of given
issues, is to look at which party voters trust on a given issue, not just what
their stated policy preference is. So if you do a poll on universal background
checks for guns, you’ll find that they’re super-popular. But then, politicians
who run on background checks often lose. In the same way, if you poll
comprehensive immigration reform, it’s super-popular, even among Republicans.
But then Republicans can run on anti-immigrant platforms and win. So how do you
square that circle?
One way is to
remember that these polls give us a very limited informational environment. You
just throw people a sentence-length idea, which they’ve often never heard of before,
and then people react to it. So it tells you how people will respond to a
policy at first brush without any partisan context. But ultimately, when people
hear from both sides, they’re gonna revert to some kind of partisan baseline.
But there’s not a nihilism there; it’s not just that Democratic-leaning voters
will adopt the Democratic position or Republican-leaning ones will
automatically adopt the Republican one. Persuadable voters trust the parties on
different issues.
And there’s a pretty
basic pattern — both here and in other countries — in which voters view
center-left parties as empathetic. Center-left parties care about the
environment, lowering poverty, improving race relations. And then, you know,
center-right parties are seen as more “serious,” or more like the stern dad
figure or something. They do better on getting the economy going or lowering
unemployment or taxes or crime or immigration.
If you look at how
this breaks down in the U.S. — Gallup did something on this in 2017, and I’m sure the numbers haven’t changed that much since
then — you see that same basic story. But there’s an interesting twist. One
thing that Democrats consistently get rated highly on is improving race
relations. And this points to the complexities of racial resentment. The way
that racially charged issues generally get brought up in the U.S. is in the
context of crime, which is a very Republican-loaded issue (in terms of which
party the median voter trusts on it). Or it comes up in terms of immigration,
which is itself a Republican-loaded issue. So even if voters acknowledge the
massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally
happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or
all these other things people trust Republicans on.
What’s powerful about
nonviolent protest — and particularly nonviolent protest that incurs a
disproportionate response from the police — is that it can shift the
conversation, in a really visceral way, into the part of this issue space that
benefits Democrats and the center left. Which is the pursuit of equality,
social justice, fairness — these Democratic-loaded concepts — without the trade-off
of crime or public safety. So I think it is really consistent with a pretty
broad, cross-sectional body of evidence (a piece of which I obviously tweeted at some point) that nonviolent protest is politically advantageous, both in
terms of changing public opinion on discrete issues and electing parties
sympathetic to the left’s concerns.
As for “the abolish
the police” stuff, I think the important thing there is that basically no mainstream
elected officials embraced it. Most persuadable voters get their news from the
networks’ nightly news broadcasts and CNN. And if you look at how they
covered things, the “abolish the police” concept didn’t get nearly as
much play as it did on Twitter and elite discourse. And to the extent that it
was covered, that coverage featured prominent left politicians loudly
denouncing it. And I think that’s a success story for everyone involved.
Activists were able to dramatically shift the terms of debate around not just
racial justice issues, but police justice in a way that’s basically the
Second Great Awokening. But because
Democratic politicians kept chasing the median voter, we got to have our cake
and eat it too. We got to have public opinion shift in our direction on the
issues without paying an electoral price.
To play
insurrectionist’s advocate: The protests weren’t entirely nonviolent. And one
could argue that, had there not been rioting in Minneapolis, there would have
been less media attention and thus, fewer nonviolent protests. So how do we
know that the nonviolent protests were the source of the movement’s political
efficacy? And why didn’t the violence at the fringes of those protests activate
the public’s concerns about crime?
I want to caution
against turning this into physics. There’s only so much we can understand
about the dynamics of these events. But if you wanted to be purely utilitarian,
and set aside the morality concerns, I think you can tell a story about how the
initial wave of violence triggered media coverage, or got the police or
security forces really primed to use violence against nonviolent protesters,
and without that happening, it wouldn’t have exploded as much as it did. It’s
hard to know. I can’t really evaluate that counterfactual.
But there’s always a
mix of violent and nonviolent protest; or, there’s always some violence that
occurs at nonviolent protests. And it’s not a situation where a drop of
violence spoils everything and turns everybody into fascists. The research
isn’t consistent with that. It’s more about the proportions. Because the
mechanism here is that when violence is happening, people become afraid. They
fear for their safety, and then they crave order. And order is a winning issue
for conservatives here and everywhere around the world. The basic political
argument since the French Revolution has been the left saying, “Let’s make
things more fair,” and the right saying, “If we do that, it will lead to chaos
and threaten your family.”
But when you have
nonviolent protests that goad security forces into using excessive force
against unarmed people — preferably while people are watching — then order gets
discredited, and people experience this visceral sense of unfairness. And you
can change public opinion. And if you look at the [George Floyd] protests,
there was some violence in the first two or three days. But then that largely
subsided, and was followed by very high-profile incidents of the state using
violence against innocent people.
And, you know, the
real inflection point in our polling was the Lafayette Park incident, when Trump used tear gas on innocent people. That’s when support
for Biden shot up and it’s been pretty steady since then.
In describing the
Democrats’ troubles with non-college-educated white voters earlier, you put a
lot of emphasis on discrete decisions that the Hillary Clinton campaign made.
But, in my understanding, the 2016 election just accelerated a preexisting
trend: In both the United States and Western Europe, non-college-educated
voters have been drifting right for decades. Doesn’t
that suggest that something larger than any given campaign’s messaging choices
is at work here?
That’s a great point.
I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, “Where did things
go wrong?” You see Matt Stoller and Ryan Grim do this, where you try to
pinpoint the moment in time when Democratic elites decided to turn their backs
on the working class and embrace neoliberalism. Maybe it was the Watergate
babies. Maybe it was the failure to repeal Taft-Hartley. Maybe it was Bill
Clinton in 1992.
But then you read
about other countries and you see that the same story is happening everywhere.
It happened in England with Tony Blair. It happened in Germany with Gerhard
Schröder. The thing that really got me was reading about the history of PASOK,
the Social Democratic Party in Greece. And you’re reading about an election in
the 1990s where it’s like, “the right-wing New Democracy party made gains with
working-class voters,” and you realize there are broader forces at work here.
So why is this
happening? The story that makes the most sense to me goes like this: In the
postwar era, college-educated professionals were maybe 4 percent of the
electorate. Which meant that basically no voters had remotely cosmopolitan
values. But the flip side of this is that this educated 4 percent still ran the
world. Both parties at this point were run by this highly educated,
cosmopolitan minority that held a bunch of values that undergirded the postwar
consensus, around democracy and rule of law, and all these things.
Obviously, these
people were more right wing on a bunch of social issues than their contemporary
counterparts, but during that era, both parties were run by just about the most
cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong
gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the
commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the
media. There were only a small number of TV stations — in other countries,
those stations were even run by the government. And both sides knew it wasn’t
electorally advantageous to campaign on cosmopolitan values.
So, as a result,
campaigns centered around this cosmopolitan elite’s internal disagreements over
economic issues. But over the past 60 years, college graduates have gone from
being 4 percent of the electorate to being more like 35. Now, it’s actually
possible — for the first time ever in human history — for political parties to
openly embrace cosmopolitan values and win elections; certainly primary and
municipal elections, maybe even national elections if you don’t push things too
far or if you have a recession at your back. And so Democratic elites started
campaigning on the things they’d always wanted to, but which had previously
been too toxic. And so did center-left parties internationally.
What is your
understanding of why there’s such a profound divide between college-educated
and non-college-educated people on these so-called cosmopolitan issues?
Education is highly
correlated with openness to new experiences; basically, there’s this divide
where some people react positively to novel things and others react less
positively. And there’s evidence that this relationship is causal. In Europe,
when countries raised their mandatory schooling age from 16 to 18, the first
generation of students who remained in school longer had substantially more
liberal views on immigration than their immediate predecessors. And then,
college-educated people are also more willing to try strange foods or travel
broad. So it really seems like education makes people more open to new
experiences.
But politically, this
manifests on immigration. And it’s ironclad. You can look at polling from the
1940s on whether America should take in Jewish refugees, and college-educated
people wanted to and non-college-educated people didn’t. It’s true
cross-nationally — like, working-class South Africans oppose taking in refugees
from Zimbabwe, while college-educated South Africans support taking them in.
Other research has
shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and
positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that
emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated
people. Arguably, this is because college-educated professionals live really
blessed lives filled with mutually beneficial exchange, while negative-sum
conflicts play a very big part of working-class people’s lives, in ways that
richer people are sheltered from. But it manifests in a lot of ways and leads
to divergent political attitudes.
We’ve been talking a
lot about the education split among white voters. But the polling results you
just referenced from South Africa suggest that education-based splits on
cosmopolitanism manifest across racial and ethnic lines. Are Democrats losing
ground with nonwhite, non-college-educated voters?
Yeah. Black voters
trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground
states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of
the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. In Florida, Democratic senator
Bill Nelson did 2 or 3 points better than Clinton among white voters but lost
because he did considerably worse than her among Black and Hispanic voters.
We’re seeing this in 2020 polling, too. I think there’s a lot of denial about
this fact.
I don’t think there
are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white
voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each
other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong
education-based splits increases — whether it’s gender politics or
authoritarianism or immigration — it would make sense that we’d see some
convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.
American politics
used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign
analogues. But the world is slowly changing — not changing in ways that make
racism go away or not matter — but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings
of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s
not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more
Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this
is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons,
occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor
African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the
biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church. So I think
you can tell this story about how the America-centric aspects of our politics
are starting to decay, and we’re converging on the dynamics that you see in
Europe, where nonwhite voters are more left wing than white voters, but where
they vote for the left by like 65 to 35 percent, rather than the 90-10 split
you see with African-Americans.
To be clear, if that
happens, it would take a long time. But if I had to guess, I’d say young
African-Americans might trend 4 or 5 percent against us in relative terms. But
they’re a small percent of the Black electorate. These are slow-moving trends.
Are all of the trends
you’ve studied unfavorable for Democrats? If the party is losing young
African-Americans and non-college-educated whites, is it making compensatory
gains? What is the outlook for the party over the coming decade?
I’ll start with the
good news. The fear I had after 2016 was that Romney-Clinton voters were going
to snap back to being Republicans, but Obama-Trump voters wouldn’t snap back to
being Democrats. And that hasn’t happened — we’ve retained Clinton’s gains. We
see this in 2020 polling. We saw it in 2018, with Democrats making big gains
with these voters in the Senate, House, and state-level elections.
And those don’t just
reflect discrepancies in which college-educated professionals decided to
turnout for a midterm?
Some of it was. But
roughly 75 percent was people changing their minds. So college-educated
professionals have basically become Democrats. These voters aren’t optimal for
winning the Electoral College. But they have other assets as a demographic.
There’s this sense in
left-wing politics that rich people have disproportionate political influence
and power. Well, we’ve never had an industrialized society where the richest
and most powerful people were as liberal as they are now in the U.S. You know, controlling
for education, very rich people still lean Republican. But we’re at a point now
where, if you look at Stanford Law School, the ratio of students in the college
Democrats to students in the college Republicans is something like 20-to-1.
Harvard students have always been Democratic-leaning, but only like three or
four percent of them voted for Donald Trump. So there is now this host of
incredibly powerful institutions — whether it’s corporate boardrooms or
professional organizations — which are now substantially more liberal than
they’ve ever been.
And this is
reflected not just in how they vote but in their ideological preferences. If
you look at small donors — which, to be clear, are still mostly rich people —
Democrats got around 54 percent of small donors in 2012. In 2018, we got 76
percent. People like to chalk that up to ActBlue or technology or whatever. But
2018 was also the first year where super-PACs, as a spending group, gave more
to Democrats than Republicans.
So these
constituencies that previously did a lot to uphold conservative power are now
liberal. I don’t know what all of the consequences of that are. But Democrats
are now better funded than they were. And the media is nicer to us. There’s a
lot of downstream consequences.
Many on the
left are wary of the Democratic Party’s growing dependence on wealthy voters
and donors. But you’ve argued that the party’s donor class actually pulls it to the
left, as big-dollar Democratic
donors are more progressive — even on economic issues — than the median
Democratic voter. I’m skeptical of that claim. After all, so much regulation
and legislation never crosses ordinary Americans’ radar. It seems implausible
to me that, during negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama
administration fought to export
America’s generous patent protections on pharmaceuticals to the developing world, or to expand the
reach of the Investor State Dispute
Settlement process, because they felt
compelled to placate swing voters. Similarly, it’s hard for me to believe that the primary reason
why Democrats did not significantly expand collective-bargaining rights under
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama was voter hostility to labor-law
reform rather than the unified opposition of business interests to such a
policy. So why couldn’t it be the case that,
when it comes to policy, a minority of big-dollar donors who are highly
motivated — and reactionary — on discrete issues pull the party to the right,
even as wealthier Democrats give more ideologically consistent responses to
survey questions?
It depends on what
level of government you’re talking about. When you’re talking about state
legislatures, that’s all really low-salience stuff. And the reality is that
state parties have to do some ethically questionable things to keep the lights
on because small-dollar donors generally don’t donate to their campaigns. So in
state and local politics, corporate money is absolutely a big driver.
But the rise of small-dollar
donors has really changed federal politics. And again — to be clear —
“small-dollar” donors are mostly affluent people. Most of these donors are
giving hundreds of dollars. But the thing people don’t realize is, at this
point, that’s most of the money. Most of the money in Democratic politics now
comes from ideologically motivated small donors and very liberal millionaires
and billionaires like George Soros. There’s corporate money, but it’s not the
biggest pool anymore. This produces some counterintuitive dynamics where, like
in West Virginia, there aren’t a lot of affluent liberals, and so there isn’t a
lot of small-dollar donations, and so Joe Manchin is a little bit more beholden
to corporations.
It’s true that, if
you are a representative in a swing district, you have a strong incentive to
raise lots of money. But I think those incentives mostly pull candidates left,
for the simple reason that the way that you get a lot of small-dollar donations
is to stand up and yell at Trump — or do whatever makes very liberal dentists
and doctors excited. Obviously, that doesn’t mean calling for socialism. But
these liberal professionals do tend to be pretty economically left wing.
David Broockman
showed in a recent paper — and I’ve seen
this in internal data — that people who give money to Democrats are more
economically left wing than Democrats overall. And the more money people give,
the more economically left wing they are. These are obviously the
non-transactional donors. But people underestimate the extent to which the
non-transactional money is now all of the money. This wasn’t true ten years
ago.
So then you get to
the question: Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies
that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median
voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing
is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter
doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the
North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp,
that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural
power.
I think that’s a very
straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have
disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But
it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence
public opinion, not through donations to campaigns.
So, in your view, the
reason that Democrats aren’t more left wing on economic issues isn’t because
they’re bought off, but because the median voter is “bought off,” in the sense
of responding to cues from corporate interests?
Yeah. One thing I’ve
learned from working in Democratic politics for eight years is that the idea
that the limiting factor on what moves policy to the left in this country is
the personal decisions of individual Democrats is kind of crazy. Democratic
politicians, relative to the country, are very left wing. But campaigns really
want to win.
In my career, I have
seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t
do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored
the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls,
he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for
abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who
work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde
Amendment.
Like, if you look at
the Obama administration, the first time they resorted to procedural radicalism
was to make recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. They didn’t do that to win votes; a lot of labor’s agenda —
repealing right-to-work laws, establishing sectoral bargaining — is unpopular.
But Democrats do pro-labor policies because the people who work on Democratic
campaigns, and who run for office as Democrats, are generally very liberal
people. Leftists just don’t understand how small of a minority we are.
One personal
anecdote: Shortly after Civis did a poll showing that a federal job guarantee
is actually a very popular idea, one of my colleagues took a call from a big
Democratic super-PAC. And they said, “You know, we saw the job guarantee
polling from Civis” — and my colleague was about to throw me under the bus (you
know, “Oh, it was just those crazy socialists in Chicago”) — but the super-PAC
just thought it was cool. And then there was a long discussion about how to
incorporate public job creation into messaging.
So I think people
underestimate Democrats’ openness to left-wing policies that won’t cost them
elections. And there are a lot of radical, left-wing policies that are
genuinely very popular. Codetermination is popular. A job guarantee is popular. Large
minimum-wage increases are popular and could literally end market poverty.
All these things will
engender opposition from capital. But if you focus on the popular things, and
manage to build positive earned media around those things, then you can
convince Democrats to do them. So we should be asking ourselves, “What is the
maximally radical thing that can get past Joe Manchin.” And that’s like a
really depressing optimization problem. And it’s one that most leftists don’t
even want to approach, but they should. There’s a wide spectrum of
possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take power, and if
we don’t come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up
getting rolled.
Do you think the
coronavirus crisis has expanded the realm of realistic demands?
I think a really
underrated political consequence of coronavirus has been a large increase in
Democrats’ odds of taking the Senate. A year ago, I thought it was possible but
a long shot. Now, it’s something that has a very reasonable chance of
happening.
And I think that’s
partly because a lot of Senate Republicans have put themselves in the position
of opposing very popular things. The coronavirus has really increased the
salience of health care, which is a Democratic-loaded issue. But it’s also made
opposing things like paid leave incredibly toxic. And we’ve seen Republican
incumbents do that again and again. I think Republican Senate incumbents are
being blamed for a lot of what’s happening in ways that aren’t fully
appreciated by the media. So that’s the most direct way that coronavirus is
expanding the realm of the possible.
Sorry, so you were
saying about positive trends for Democrats?
Yeah. So the other
positive thing is that age polarization has also gone up. It’s not just that
every new generation is more Democratic. Something much weirder has happened.
People who were 18 years old in 2012 have swung about 12 points toward
Democrats, while people who were 65 years old in that year have since swung
like eight points toward Republicans. Right now, that’s a bad trade. Old people
vote more than young people. But the age gap has gotten so large that
cycle-to-cycle demographic changes are actually worth something now. On the
Obama campaign in 2012, I calculated that demographic change between 2008 and
2012 — holding everything else constant — would gain Democrats like 0.3 points.
Now, I think that number is probably two-to-three times higher. Young white
people are now very liberal. And that’s going to be important.
The bad news is, over
the next ten years, our institutions’ structural biases against Democrats are
going to become very large. People say this a lot, but I don’t think they truly
appreciate how bad things are. The Electoral College bias is now such that
realistically we have to win by 3.5 to 4 percent in order to win presidential
elections. Trump is historically unpopular, so this year we can maybe pull that
off. But for the past 30 years or so, most presidential elections have been
pretty close. So the fact that we need to win by four points is going to
decrease the amount of time we hold the presidency. People like to say things
like, “Oh, but the Sun Belt will trend towards us” — I think if you actually go
and simulate things, barring some large realignment, the Electoral College bias
is probably going to hold steady over the next decade.
So you don’t think
Texas could become a 51 percent Democratic state by 2030?
If education-based
polarization reaches a point where Texas becomes the tipping-point state, then
that means that Michigan and Minnesota and Maine and Wisconsin are all gone.
Right now, we’re in a place where there are a bunch of working-class states
that are two points more Republican than the country. And that sucks, but we
can live with it. If those states become five points more Republican than the
country, then it becomes harder. I’m not saying it will be like this forever.
But for the next two cycles, the baseline case is fairly bad.
The Senate is even
worse. And much worse than people realize. The Senate has always been, on
paper, biased against Democrats. It overrepresents states that are rural and
white, and mechanically, that gives a structural advantage to Republicans. For
50 years or so, the tipping-point state in the Senate has been about one
percentage point more Republican than the country as a whole. And that
advantage did go up in 2016, because white rural voters trended against us (it
went up to 3 percent). But the problem isn’t just about that increase in the
long-term structural bias. If it were, I wouldn’t be so despondent about the
future. The real problem is that the Senate’s bias used to not matter much,
because the correlation between how people voted for president and how they
voted for Senate used to be much lower. As recently as 2006, if you looked
among Democratic incumbents, there was literally zero correlation between how
states voted on the Senate level and how they voted on the presidential level.
That year, Ben Nelson in Nebraska actually did better than Bob Menendez in New
Jersey. So 14 years ago, the correlation was roughly zero. And now, it’s
roughly 90 percent.
That’s the core of
the problem. There used to be a lot of randomness down ballot, and there also
used to be very strong incumbency advantages. In 2004, being an incumbent was
worth about 11 points of vote share. Now it’s about three points. And with an
incumbency advantage that low — and correlation with presidential vote that
high — it’s just not possible for Democrats to win in all these states that
used to be the backbone of our Senate majorities. We won an open race in North
Dakota in 2012. It’s true that the bias is getting higher, and that that’s made
things worse. But 90 percent of the story is that ticket-splitting used to be
common and now it’s rare. And that’s not a Trump thing. Ticket-splitting was
declining in the Bush era, and accelerated under Obama. And that trend line
probably isn’t going to change.
Why not?
The reason people
aren’t splitting their tickets anymore is probably because the internet exists
now and people are better informed than they used to be. There was this
broadband rollout study where they looked at the fact that different places got
broadband at different times. And what they saw was that when broadband reached
a given congressional district, ticket-splitting
declined and ideological polarization went up.
Right now — because
we already have a lot of these incumbents in red states, and because we were
lucky enough to have a big wave when many of them were on the ballot in 2018 —
we have a decent chance of winning the Senate in 2020. But if you just project
out the trends — if you fit a regression on 2018 polling and apply it forward —
if we have a neutral national environment in 2024 (i.e., a 2016-style
environment), we’re going to be down to 43 Senate seats. It’s really quite
bleak. The Senate was always a really fucked-up anti-majoritarian institution.
But it was okay because people in Nebraska used to vote randomly. But now they
have the internet, and they know that Democrats are liberal.
So what should
Democrats do? Abolish the internet? Or add states?
Everything we can.
Obviously, D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood are great. But we should really
strongly consider adding more than two states. I’ve been trying to push the
U.S. Virgin Islands, for example — home to largely nonwhite, marginalized
people who don’t have representation. We’ve actually done polling on this. And
even with pro and con arguments provided, it polls really well. People
have really weird, incoherent views on representation. When you tell people,
“There are 50,000 people in American Samoa and they don’t have a senator to
stand up for their interests. Do you think they should get a senator?” — even
when you tell them that Republicans say this proposal is an absurd Democratic
power grab — still a very large minority of Trump supporters say yes. In our polls,
majorities are onboard with adding three or four or five states. People think
it’s fair. One fun thing is, Virgin Islands statehood actually polls much
better than D.C. statehood. D.C. statehood is actually the least popular of any
of the statehood proposals we’ve polled.
What probability
would you assign to Donald Trump winning reelection?
I think one big
lesson of 2018 was that Trump’s coalition held up. Obviously, we did better as
the party out of power. But if you look at how we did in places like Maine or
Wisconsin or Michigan, it looked more like 2016 than 2012. Donald Trump still
has a giant structural advantage in the Electoral College.
So, in 2016, we got
51.1 percent of the two-party vote share (of the share of votes that went to Democrats
and Republicans). And if we had gotten 51.6 percent of that, we would have had
about a 50 percent chance of winning an Electoral College majority. We probably
needed to get to 52 percent in order to have a high chance of winning the
presidency. For most of the last six months, in public polls, Biden was at 52
or so. Now, we’re at like 54.
So, the question is
just: Are things going to go down?
I’m not gonna
speculate about whether the coronavirus will get better or whether it will get
worse. I think you can tell plausible stories in either direction. But if you
go back and look at polling this far out, and then do a regression where you
predict Election Day as a function of polling, generally, when candidates are
this far ahead, things tend to revert toward a mean. And unfortunately, in this
case, the historical mean we’re regressing to isn’t 50 percent; incumbents have
historically averaged 51 percent of the vote. So things are likely to tighten.
And, of course, polling was wrong in 2016. And actually, on a state level, the
polling was wrong by a similar margin in places like West Virginia or Ohio or
Michigan or Montana in 2018. So after we get through the conventions, and
partisans activate on both sides, there’s a substantial chance that we’ll find ourselves
in a close election. And everybody should treat it that way.
Personally, I
remember that in 2016, around September, we gave Hillary an 85 percent chance
of winning. And this led to situations where you had Democratic organizations,
our clients at Civis, wanting to take money out of Pennsylvania and put it in
other places. I think one person literally asked me, “What if we try to
maximize 370 electoral votes instead of 270.” I think there’s going to be a
real instinct for us to take the election for granted, and start to do dumb,
hubristic things like spending millions of dollars on our victory stage, which
is something that Hillary Clinton did.
So we should all have
the discipline to continue investing in tipping-point states and appealing to
the median voter. Because this is an incredibly important year. This is our
last chance to win a trifecta for a very long time. And if we don’t win the
presidency, things could get very dark. So everything we do matters a lot.
*In an earlier
version of this interview, Shor attributed a blog post about “climate week” to
Daily Kos Elections (DKE). He was referencing something he remembered reading
eight years ago extemporaneously, and misidentified the outlet that published
the (alleged) blog. DKE published no such post.
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