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.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’
GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or
Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
1. Globalism: Google
VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates
around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
2. Hillary Clinton’s Democratic
party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not
a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
3.
Immigration: Maintaining
liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the
most.
Why the rich favor the Democrats
By Peter
Skurkiss
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
By Antonio R. Chaves
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
Matt Vespa
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
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
16 Jul 2020 34
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
By Eric
Levitz
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.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT
AMNESTY AND WIDER OPEN BORDERS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT NO CAPS ON IMPORTING
CHEAPER FOREIGN WORKER.
Further, the dubious
choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely
to placate and reassure Wall
Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to
the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
Biden’s Billionaires
By Steve McCann
Many years ago, while
participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and
disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his
paint-starved house calming smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor,
Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour
on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind. It
turned out that he had to leave school after the fourth grade in order to work
in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in a variety of menial
and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough
insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and
ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a
lick of common sense.”
I was reminded of that
observation after reading an article describing the 131 billionaires who are pouring
millions into the coffers of the Democrat party and Joe Biden’s campaign in
their mindless obsession to defeat President Trump in November. Among the
prominent names are Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay who has contributed $4.5
million; Laurene Powell Jobs of Apple and owner
of The Atlantic magazine has donated $1.2 million,
and Josh Bekenstein , Chairman of Bain
Capital (co-founded by Mitt Romney), $5 million.
Far more Wall Street
financers have also jumped on the Biden/Democrat party bandwagon than are
supporting Donald Trump, whose policies have overwhelmingly revived the economy
after the stagnation of the Obama-Biden years. The tech billionaires , not content to simply
cough up untold millions in direct political contributions, are also funding
massive voter drives, promoting mail-in balloting, creating divisive partisan
news sites, aiding and designing the Democrat party’s digital campaigns and
unabashedly censoring the social media accounts of the Trump campaign and
innumerable conservatives.
The political party they
are gleefully underwriting in order to oust Trump is no longer the party of the
middle and working class (which is now one and the same) but a two-tier
assemblage in which the prey is sleeping with the predator. The witless
wealthy and socially aware are in bed with the avowed socialists and militant
Marxists. What is holding this marriage of convenience together is a
mutual hatred of Donald Trump and the undoable promises made by Joe Biden and
the Democrat party hierarchy.
In a 2019 meeting with
100 super-wealthy potential donors, Biden assured the gathering that he would
not demonize the rich and would only increase their taxes slightly while
ensuring that their standard of living would not be affected by any of his
policies.
He also
stated: “I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 Billionaires are the reason
why we are in trouble”. Further, he unabashedly emphasized that the
wealthy are not the reason for income inequality and “If I win this
nomination. I won’t let you
down. I promise you .”
Further, the dubious
choice of Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee was made solely
to placate and reassure Wall
Street and the wealthy, as she was viewed by them as being very deferential to
the mega-rich class based on her days in California.
When the time came to
deal with the Marxist/socialist wing of the Democrat party’s anti-Trump
coalition, policy commitments, many diametrically opposite of what was promised
the wealthy donors, were also guaranteed with a non-verbal pledge of we won’t
let you down.
The first step was a de
facto party platform. The 110-page Biden-Sanders Manifesto which includes,
among other commitments, a massive job killing $2+ trillion climate agenda to
phase out fossil fuel usage within 15 years, the elimination of cash bail,
redirecting (i.e. cutting) funding for the police, dismantling all border
protections, legalizing virtually all illegal immigrants and massively raising
corporate and individual tax rates on the wealthy. This manifesto is a
socialist screed that would destroy the middle class and permanently neuter the
economy and nation.
An effusive Bernie
Sanders proclaimed to the world that Biden and the Democrats have embraced his
socialist agenda and that Biden would be the most progressive president since FDR.
Sanders exposed not only the behind the scenes reality of today’s Democrat
party but Biden’s figurehead role.
Further confirmation of
the radicalization of the Party came about unexpectedly as the militant Marxist
faction of the Sanders coalition forced the issue. Impatient and
unwilling to wait until after the 3rd of November, Antifa and Black Lives
Matter used the death of George Floyd as a pretext to take to the streets and
begin their long-hoped for revolution. They claimed that rioting,
looting, committing arson and attacking law enforcement was a necessity as this
was a systemically racist country. Yet, they openly demanded immediate
changes rooted in their radical Marxist ideology of class warfare not so-called
systemic racism. As two of their preferred chants and graffiti
slogans “eat the rich” and “abolish capitalism now” confirms.
Biden, the Democrat party
hierarchy as well as virtually all Democrat elected officials refused to
address the violence and those responsible. Thus, they tacitly approved
of the lawlessness and by doing so flashed a green light to continue the
riots. When forced to acknowledge the reality on the streets of the
nation’s cities, they instead blamed Trump, the police, white supremacists and
even the Russians. Due to their spinelessness, the armies of anarchy and
revolution Biden and the Democrats unleashed will never be defeated or
mollified by them.
Considering the vast
dichotomy in the litany of promises made and actions taken, it is inevitable
that either the moneyed elite or the mob of passionate true believers will be
betrayed. There is no middle ground. Who will prevail?
Will it be the elites
whose only weapon is money and fleeting political influence or the passionate
mob whose weapons are unconstrained violence and intimidation? Will it be
those who believe a revolution could never happen here or those who are
currently inciting revolution with the implicit blessing of a major political
party? Will it be those who believe that Biden and the Democrats, if
elected, will be able to forcefully deal with the insurgents or the insurgents
who now know that riots and extortion causes Democrat politicians to cower in
the corner?
Beginning with the French
Revolution and throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, history has recorded
that passionate mobs always prevail when dealing with a feckless ruling class
or party. And the first casualties have inevitably been the wealthy
elites.
I can envision sitting
with my old friend, Ully, and asking him if he thought the wealthy elites,
indiscriminately tossing money at the Democrats for the sole purpose of
defeating President Trump, understood the pitfalls involved. He would
lean back, slowly exhale a puff of smoke from his well-worn pipe and with
uncontrollable anger in his eyes would say: “Nope. Those damn fools ain’t
got a lick of common sense.”
Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign
The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.
Wall Street Praises Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’ AP Photo/Richard Drew
13 Aug 2020 996
4:20
Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive insurgency.
In interviews with the Wall Street Journal , CNBC , and Bloomberg , executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat” who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.
Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”
“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe and conventional candidate,” Nides said.
Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe, balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”
As the Journal notes, many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:
To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s selection signals a more moderate shift for the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in recent years. [Emphasis added]
“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss , who co-led a committee of lawyers across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis added]
Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great” pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect partner,” Lasry told CNBC.
Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal , calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”
Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on the Democrat ticket:
“She’s terrific,” said Chanos , founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence which will be an asset on the campaign .” [Emphasis added]
Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
While criticizing “the people who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
This month, the New York Times admitted the “wallets of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial industry’s opposition to Trump:
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.
Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’ objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.
On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy — which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S. workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been supported by Wall Street.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Goldman Sachs fined $2.9 billion over role in 1MDB corruption case Goldman Sachs has been fined $2.9 billion by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in a deal announced yesterday that closes one of the biggest corruption cases in the history of Wall Street.
Together with a settlement reached with Malaysian authorities in July, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $5 billion for its involvement in the 1MDB scandal.
While the amounts are large, the settlement follows the pattern of earlier deals on corruption. In return for an agreement to pay fines out of corporate revenue, the company and its executives escape prosecution for criminal activity. The financial penalties are simply written off as a cost of making profit.
Besides avoiding prosecution, Goldman will also escape the appointment of a government monitor to oversee its compliance department which had earlier been put forward by officials involved in pursuing the case.
While the financial penalties amount to around two-thirds of its annual profits, Goldman had already taken them into account, as they had been mooted for some time. Company shares actually rose by more than 1 percent after a report earlier this week by Wall Street Journal about the expected action by the DoJ.
Following the DoJ announcement, the bank’s share price barely moved. “This is already priced in. The stock price is already reflecting this kind of action,” Sumit Agarwal, finance professor at Singapore’s National University told the Financial Times .
Goldman’s involvement with 1MDB was in response to the situation it confronted in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, as its earnings prospects in the US declined and it went in search of profitable opportunities. The Malaysian government had launched the 1MDB fund, supposedly to finance infrastructure development. Goldman stepped forward to organise the sale of $6.5 billion in bonds, with the aim of collecting large fees, in 2012 and 2013.
The whole operation saw the development of a vast corruption ring. According to the prosecution, around $2.7 billion was stolen from 1MDB and more than $1.6 billion was paid out in bribes.
Much of the money was stolen by an adviser to the fund, businessman Jho Low, who was aided by two Goldman bankers working for its Malaysian subsidiary as well as associates in the Malaysian government. It is claimed that the former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, now serving a 12-year jail term, received $700 million.
The DoJ said Goldman had played a “central role” in the looting of 1MDB and should have detected warning signs. The acting head of the DoJ’s criminal division, Brian Rabbitt, said: “Personnel at the bank allowed this scheme to proceed by overlooking or ignoring a number of clear red flags.”
The attempts to claim that one of the largest corruption operations in history was a matter of oversight simply does not pass muster. In court yesterday, Karen Seymour, Goldman’s senior counsel, admitted its Malaysian subsidiary had paid bribes “in order to obtain and retain business for Goldman Sachs.”
According to court papers, when an employee told an unnamed senior executive he was concerned that a 1MDB deal was being delayed because one of the participants was seeking a bribe, he was told: “What’s disturbing about that? It’s nothing new, is it?”
The deals were organised by two Goldman bankers, Timothy Leissner and Roger Ng. Leissner, the former head of Goldman’s Southeast Asian business, pleaded guilty to his role in the 1MDB case in 2018. He received more than $200 million from 1MDB and paid bribes to government officials.
Goldman chief executive David Solomon, who took over from Lloyd Blankfein—author of the infamous comment in 2009 that big profits for banks meant they were doing “God’s work”—said: “We recognise that we did not adequately address red flags and scrutinise the representations of certain members of the deal team.”
As details of the corruption began to emerge, Goldman sought to blame its involvement on “rogue operators.” In fact, their activities were encouraged. According to the Wall Street Journal , one of the 1MDB bond deals organised in 2012, “won one of Goldman’s most prestigious internal awards, praised for its ‘spirit of creativity and entrepreneurial thinking’.”
In an effort to clean up its image, Goldman announced that four senior executives, including CEO Solomon, would forfeit $31 million in pay this year, and that it would attempt to claw back bonuses paid to Blankfein in the past. But the penalty imposed on current executives amounts only to about one-third of what they were paid in 2019.
The notion that Goldman was somehow the victim of “rogue” activity and that its involvement in massive corruption is simply the result of oversight is belied by its history, in particular, the role it played in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008.
The Senate investigation into the crisis, which found that the financial system was a “snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing,” singled out Goldman for special mention.
In 2006, Goldman determined that subprime mortgage assets it was selling to clients were destined to flounder. Goldman went short in the market in the expectation that it would crash and it would make a profit on the other side of the very trades it had been promoting. The sums were not small. At one point the firm held short positions amounting to $13 billion.
In an email, referring to an unsuspecting investor, a Goldman executive wrote: “I think I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at once.”
But the exposure of criminal activity did not bring any prosecutions, let alone jail terms, merely fines, which Goldman and others simply wrote off. In 2013, President Obama’s attorney-general, Eric Holder, clearly recognising the extent of the malfeasance, said that prosecutions would impact on the stability of the US and global banking system.
Since 2008, notwithstanding claims by authorities that there would be a clamp down, the corrupt practices have extended, of which Goldman’s involvement in 1MDB is only one expression.
Last month, documents published by BuzzFeed News from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, showed that between 1999 and 2017, major banks has been involved in financial transactions of $2 trillion flagged as potentially involving money laundering. The banks involved were some of the biggest in the world including JP Morgan, HSBC and Standard Charter Bank.
Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase was fined $920 million over “spoofing” activity involving the quick placing and withdrawal of buy and sell orders to create the impression there was a surge of activity around a particular financial asset in order to create a profitable opportunity.
According to one of the lead investigators in the case, “a significant number of JP Morgan traders and sales personnel openly disregarded US laws that serve to prevent illegal activity in the marketplace.”
But despite the fact that the practice was not only well known but was actively promoted, no one in the upper echelons was prosecuted, and the fine has been written off as an operating expense.
The issue which clearly arises is: what is the underlying cause of this system of corruption and illegality?
Commenting on the latest Goldman case, Seth DuCharme, the acting US attorney in Brooklyn, might have gone further than he intended when he remarked: “This case is … about the way our American financial institutions conduct business.”
It certainly is. However, it would be wrong to simply ascribe it to the greed of the financial executives and others, and thereby able to be countered through tighter regulations.
Of course the greed of executives and others exists in abundance. But their activities are, in the final analysis, the expression of processes rooted at the very heart of the profit system—they are the personification of objective tendencies.
While the aim and driving force of the capitalist system is the accumulation of profit the mode of accumulation has undergone profound changes, above all in the US. No longer is the chief source of profit investment and production in the real economy.
It occurs through operations in the financial system based on speculation, clever trades, the securing of fees for the passage of money (without questioning its source) and where the “value” of assets is determined by arcane algorithms and other forms of “financial engineering.”
Consequently, in conditions where profits are increasingly divorced from the underlying real economy, lies, deception, misinformation, corruption and criminality come to dominate the entire financial system.
Goldman Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden Campaign The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.
Donald Mullen Jr., as first noted by the Washington Free Beacon, gave $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in August. Mullen was a key architect of the “Big Short” scheme that allowed Goldman Sachs to profit from the housing collapse.
New York Magazine detailed the scheme:
In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a team of mortgage executives and traders at Goldman Sachs predicted that the housing market was in trouble. So they designed a massive bet against it, using a bunch of esoteric financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations that would pay off in the event that housing prices fell and homeowners defaulted on their mortgages . [Emphasis added]
That bet, now known colloquially as “the big short,” allowed Goldman and its clients (including hedge-fund managers like John Paulson) to avoid losses and make billions of dollars when the housing market collapsed , at the same time that people around the country lost their homes to foreclosure. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, millions of America’s working and middle class lost their homes, as Business Insider reported in 2018:
After the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many families living in the US found that the cost of running their homes was no longer affordable , resulting in many of those people losing their homes. [Emphasis added]
The widespread consequences were that, between 2006 and 2014, nearly 10 million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their own homes , which entailed having to give up their property to lenders or selling it as quickly as possible via an emergency sale, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. [Emphasis added]
Livelihoods were threatened and the financial damage was colossal — not to mention the emotional damage suffered by victims of the crisis — a 2014 study shows a correlation between the crisis and an increased suicide rate. But where are the victims of the real estate and financial crisis now? [Emphasis added]
It’s not just Mullen Jr. who is showering Biden with campaign cash to defeat President Trump on November 3. Biden has taken nearly 200 contributions from employees at Goldman Sachs — including contributions of nearly $50,000 to $55,000 from the bank’s top executives.
Altogether, a recent CNBC analysis revealed, Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s campaign this election cycle and CNN has noted that “all the big banks” are backing Biden and Harris against Trump.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
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.
by Ryan Cooper
MAGAZINE
A merica 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.
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.
T oward 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.
Fact Check: Big Banks that Kamala Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her 2020 Democratic National Convention / YouTube
Volume 90%
19 Aug 202017
2:53
CLAIM: Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that because Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “took on” the big banks as attorney general of California, she will stand up to them as vice president.
VERDICT: While Harris was among 49 state attorney generals who secured a $25 billion settlement from big banks, many executives from those banks now support her as Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s vice presidential choice.
“When millions of families lost their homes, my friend in California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on the big banks and won,” Solis said in reference to the case which involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank.
BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR BANKSTER-CAUSED MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND FORECLOSURE!
A number of executives on Wall Street with links to Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America now support Harris in her effort with Biden to defeat Trump.
As Breitbart News reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice Chairman for Public Affairs Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris a “reasonable, rational person who has worked in the system.”
Citigroup executive Ray McGuire called Harris a “great choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary, Harris raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of America.
In These Times reported the donations at the time:
Then there’s California Sen. Kamala Harris, who received a total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Harris, who was once branded a “bankster’s worst nightmare,” and has touted her prosecutorial record against banks as evidence of her progressive credibility, received donations from five executives of these firms. They include Blackstone managing director Tia Breakley, Morgan Stanley’s new head of international wealth management Colbert Narcisse, Bank of America senior vice president for diversity and inclusion Alex Rhodes, and Goldman Sachs vice president of financial crime compliance Margaret Cullum. [Emphasis added]
Harris’s most enthusiastic source of support among these firms, however, is Wells Fargo, from whose employees she received a total of $16,713 — the most funding from the bank out of any other candidate examined. The donors span multiple tiers of the bank’s hierarchy, from bankers and consultants, to a regional director and a manager, to executives like National Head of Cards and Retail Services Beverly Anderson, both of whom gave the maximum individual donation of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis added]
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
OBAMA CRONY DONORS Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. By Eric Levitz @EricLevitz
Steve Mnuchin knows his way around a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million. That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.
Thus far, the COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip. Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund .
Which is to say: We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this one.
Of course, it wasn’t really God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.
From the first capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel collective prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises. In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk, high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so invested in it.
Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career, Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this game before.”
He played it like a natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid. Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets — the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.
Purchasing IndyMac secured OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve: Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request. But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff. Mnuchin called it.
In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of the future GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August 2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in the administration.”
Mnuchin is the last of the “adults in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal ’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.” Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill. “Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand” devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”
The soft skills Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health systems and services could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management for personal profit.
The White House’s next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a pandemic.
Nevertheless, could we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90 billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic risk-takers.
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