Saturday, November 21, 2020

JOE BIDEN - I NEED A SECRETARY OF TREASURY WHO WILL SUCK OFF MY CRONY BANKSTERS THE WAY BARACK, ERIC HOLDER AND I DID FOR 8 YEARS. - ASK KAMALA WHAT SHE DID FOR 'KING OF FORECLOSURES' STEVEN MNUCHIN AND BANKSTER WELLS FARGO. We're a tight swamp family here!

  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 TO SERVE THE RICH AND GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.


Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team

Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks, after spending a fortune to unseat President Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe Biden’s transition team that he has devised before the presidential election is certified.

Detailed by the New York Times, Biden’s list of transition team members includes former Wall Street employees and those with close ties to Wall Street. Many of the big banks with links to Biden transition team members were major donors to the former vice president.

The Times reports:

Commerce Department: The review team is led by Geovette Washington of the University of Pittsburgh, who previously served as general counsel and senior policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget. Other members include Anna Gomez, a partner at the law firm Wiley Rein; Arun Venkataraman, who works in government relations at Visa (and was director of policy at the Commerce Department under Mr. Obama); and Ellen Hughes-Cromwick of the think tank Third Way, who served as chief economist at Mr. Obama’s Commerce Department and held a similar role at Ford. [Emphasis added]

Treasury Department: The team is led by Don Graves, who heads corporate responsibility at KeyBank and previously worked as director of domestic and economic policy for Mr. Biden. Others include Nicole Isaac of LinkedIn and Marisa Lago, who works at the New York City Department of City Planning and previously oversaw global compliance at Citigroup. [Emphasis added]

Federal Reserve, Banking and Securities Regulators: The team is led by Gary Gensler, a top Wall Street regulator in the Obama administration who is now a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team also includes Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, long a proponent of tougher rules for banks. [Emphasis added]

Gensler previously worked at Goldman Sachs and for failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. As Breitbart News reported, giant tech conglomerates are also getting representation on Biden’s transition team.

Likewise, the Wall Street Journal noted a number of Wall Street-types who are seriously being considered for cabinet positions in a potential Biden administration:

Roger Ferguson, chief executive of retirement manager TIAA-CREF, is in the mix for a cabinet post, according to people familiar with the matter. And financial executives like Morgan Stanley executive Tom Nides and former hedge-fund manager and presidential candidate Tom Steyer publicly backed Mr. Biden and could emerge with influence, or jobs, in his administration. [Emphasis added]

Some who are active in the party or who held positions in past Democratic administrations— such as finance veteran Jeffrey Zients, co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s transition team, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jake Siewert, who served as press secretary in the Clinton White House and in the Treasury Department under President Obama — could join the new administration, Democratic fundraisers say. [Emphasis added]

Another Goldman executive who could head to Washington is Margaret Anadu, the 39-year-old head of Goldman Sachs’s urban-investment initiatives, whose name is said to have been floated for an economic policy position.
[Emphasis added]

On the campaign trail, President Trump warned that Biden was “the one that takes all the money from Wall Street” while his donors tended to be police officers, business owners, homemakers, truckers, construction workers, and drivers.

The progressive wing of the Democrat Party has attempted to push back against Biden’s potential for stacking an administration with Wall Street executives and those with deep ties to multinational corporations.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.


WE KNOW WHAT OBAMA-HOLDER-BIDEN DID FOR THEIR CRONY BANKSTERS! THEIR CRIME TIDAL WAVE IS NOT OVER AND NONE HAVE GONE TO PRISON!

As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.”

This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

"The reference to what “Trump’s done” is a fraud, since the both the Democrats and Republicans endorsed, on a nearly unanimous basis, the multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street in March."


"Biden reassured Wall Street and the billionaires, “I’m not looking to punish anyone.”

I’ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.

Democrats nominate Biden in inane display of political reaction

21 August 2020

The Democratic National Convention concluded Thursday night with the formal acceptance of the party’s presidential nomination by former Vice President Joe Biden, after a final two-hour session that was full of empty clichés, inane rhetoric and nauseating insincerity.

The atmosphere Thursday was more of a religious revival than a political event. There was incessant emphasis on the personal moral superiority of Biden compared to Trump, accompanied by increasingly maudlin testimonials to Biden’s alleged deep concern for children, the downtrodden, and virtually anyone who crossed his path. One former White House official referred to Biden’s “empathy skills,” a phrase which recalls the old wisecrack: “Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

The sheer contempt for the intelligence of the 

population and the viewing audience was 

summed up in Biden’s acceptance speech. His

speechwriters appeared to have been trying 

to cram every possible trite phrase into a 

single 20-minute address.

He ran through a laundry list of promises, from climate change to racism to student debt, none of which the Democratic Party has the slightest intention of actually carrying out. Only two phrases had real meaning.

Biden reassured Wall Street and the billionaires, “I’m not looking to punish anyone.” This sent a message to the financial aristocracy that, while the candidate was compelled to make demagogic attacks on the wealthy for electoral purposes, these would have no lasting consequences. “Nothing will change” for the super-rich, he told a Wall Street fundraiser last year, and that pledge he will keep.

And the former vice president denounced Trump for being too soft on Russia, threatening to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for allegedly paying bounties to Taliban fighters who attacked American troops in Afghanistan. This phony story is just the latest fabrication by the New York Times in its four-year-long campaign to provoke a US war with Russia.

The tone for the convention’s final day was set by the report Thursday afternoon that a group of 73 former national security officials from four Republican administrations were endorsing Biden and denouncing Trump in an open letter to be published in the Wall Street Journal. The list includes an array of militarists and police-state operatives who are responsible for the death of millions of people in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Among the most prominent and most deserving of prosecution for war crimes endorsing Biden are:

·         John Negroponte, with a bloody record from the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua to the occupation of Iraq in the 2000s;

·         Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and secretary of state during the 2003 Iraq War, in which he played a central role in justifying a war based on lies;

·         Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and later CIA director, who oversaw CIA torture programs and domestic spying;

·         Robert Blackwill, deputy director of the National Security Council with responsibility for Iraq war policy in 2003–2004;

·         Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center under the younger Bush; and

·         William Webster, director of the FBI under Reagan and of the CIA under the elder Bush.

The support of these former leaders of the military-intelligence apparatus only underscores the real character of the conflict between the Democratic and Republican parties, the twin political instruments of the American ruling elite.

The Democrats oppose Trump, not because of his tax cuts for billionaires or his attacks on democratic rights and the rights of immigrants and refugees, but rather because of differences over foreign policy related to the Middle East and particularly Russia. An incoming Biden administration would immediately adopt an even more provocative and aggressive anti-Russian policy.

This was underscored in one segment after another of the final day’s program leading up to Biden’s acceptance speech, with military veterans and Republicans brought forward to speak in video segments. The most strident pro-war message came from Senator Tammy Duckworth, who denounced Trump as the “coward in chief” for his alleged capitulation to Putin over the bounties.

As for domestic policy, Biden’s closest political associate, his Senate chief-of-staff Ted Kaufman, who heads the transition team preparing for a future Biden administration, told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that the rising federal budget deficit would make ambitious spending programs impossible. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” Kaufman said. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit… forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.”

The reference to what “Trump’s done” is a 

fraud, since the both the Democrats and 

Republicans endorsed, on a nearly unanimous

basis, the multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall 

Street in March. The coronavirus pandemic—which, as a 

result of the policies of the ruling class, has produced a social and 

economic catastrophe for the American population—has been 

utilized by the ruling elite as an opportunity to loot the public 

treasury. And it is the working class that will be forced to pay.

Despite claims by Bernie Sanders that Biden could become the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt, the real policy orientation of a future Biden administration was signaled by the appearance of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who gave the last speech before Biden himself was introduced, pouring scorn on Trump as a poor businessman and incompetent manager. It is the billionaires and the military-intelligence apparatus, not political charlatans like Sanders, who will call the shots if the Democrats win the White House.

Next week will put the ultra-right ravings of the Republican Party and the Trump White House on display. The Democratic Party masquerades as the friend of the workers while doing the bidding of the corporate elite; the Republican Party, under Trump’s direction, is working to develop a fascist movement. Both parties are the enemies of the working class, which must develop and build an independent revolutionary alternative.

 

BIDEN WAS SELECTED BY BANKSTER-OWNED OBAMA BECAUSE OF HIS LONG HISTORY OF SERVING THE BANKSTERS!

 

Biden backed brutal bankruptcy bill in 2005

By Chris Talgo

In 1999, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) declared, “I’m not the senator from MBNA.” Apparently, Biden felt it was necessary to clarify that he did not exclusively represent credit card giant MBNA because his constituents were thoroughly confused, based on his track record of being a shill for credit card companies located in the First State.

Then, six years later, Biden inserted his foot directly into his mouth (again) when he championed the notorious (and ill-named) Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA). A more appropriate name could have been the Act to Protect Credit Card Companies and Shaft Students and Workers.

In short, BAPCPA was a terrible bill that favored credit card companies, big banks, and millionaires over working-class borrowers. It also is solely responsible for the fact that student loan debt is totally impossible to dismiss -- even after one has declared bankruptcy.

Wait a minute, I thought Joe Biden was the consummate defender and advocate of the working class and oppressed. Far from it. In reality,Biden’s political career of more than four decades was predicated upon protecting the interests of credit card companies. 

And he and his son, Hunter, were compensated handsomely for doing so. According to a 2019 GQ article titled “How Biden Helped Strip Bankruptcy Protection From Millions Just Before a Recession” -- “one of the biggest credit card companies in Delaware, MBNA, hired Joe Biden's son Hunter in 1996. Even after Hunter became a federal lobbyist in 2001, he stayed on at MBNA as a consultant at a fee of $100,000 per year, meaning he was pulling in a six-figure salary at the same time his father was pushing for the industry's top priorities.” Can you say, quid pro quo, Joe?

As if the backroom deals and “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” shenanigans that Biden blatantly engaged in before, during, and after BAPCPA was passed were not bad enough, the bill wrought untold damage among the very people Biden constantly claims to protect.

According to Adam J. Levitin, professor of law at Georgetown University, BAPCPA “was perhaps the most anti-middle class piece of legislation in the past century.” And, as Levitin writes, “Biden used his clout to push for the law’s passage and to defeat amendments to shield servicemembers, women, and children from its harsh treatment. When votes were taken, ‘Middle-Class Joe’ was no friend to the middle class.” It sure seems that Biden abandoned his Lunchbox Joe persona when it came to voting in favor of BAPCPA, not to mention that he strongly supported amendments that made the bill even more hostile to the middle class!

And adding insult to injury, Biden also voted against several amendments that were specifically meant to help several “underprivileged” groups.  As Levitin writes, “He voted against three amendments to ease bankruptcy requirements for consumers whose financial troubles stem from medical expenses. He voted against an amendment that would have helped seniors keep their homes. He voted against exempting servicemembers and widows of servicemembers killed in action from the law’s eligibility restrictions. He voted against an amendment to exempt women whose financial troubles stemmed from deadbeat husbands’ failure to pay child support or alimony. And Biden even voted against an amendment that would have ensured that children of debtors could still be given birthday and Christmas presents. Biden also voted against allowing debtors to pay their union dues during bankruptcy, potentially imperiling their employment and ability to achieve financial rehabilitation.” Could Biden’s voting record on this bill get any worse? Actually, yes.

Not only did Biden strongly oppose BAPCPA amendments aimed to help “disadvantaged” groups, he voted for two giant loopholes that effectively allowed millionaires to shield their assets from collectors after they filed for bankruptcy. What a joke, Joe.

As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.”

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.orgis an editor at The Heartland Institute.

 

New York Times: Wall Street Backs Joe Biden

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

NEIL MUNRO

9 Aug 2020127

3:11

Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe Biden, not the incumbent President of the United States, according to the New York Times.

Under the August 9 headline, “The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts,” three reporters wrote:

While Wall Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to President George W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr. Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.

This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.

The donors are already pressuring Biden to pick a business-friendly candidate for vice president, and Biden is signaling a hands-off policy toward Wall Street:

In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are still being hammered out … in July, the candidate spoke of the need for corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be legislative.

“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in 2018.

Notably, the article did not mention one of Wall Street’s greatest heartburns with Trump — his on-again, off-again popular push to reduce the immigration inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and real estate customers.

Trump’s popular lower-immigration promise could reduce the federal government’s policy of annually inflating the new labor supply by roughly 20 percent. If implemented, it would force CEOs to pay higher wages and would pressure investors to transfer some of their new investments from the coastal states to the heartland states.

In the last few months, Trump has zig-zagged on his low-immigration promises as his poll ratings stay under Joe Biden’s numbers. But on June 22, Trump blocked several visa worker pipelines and promised regulations to ensure that CEOs are forced to hire Americans first.

In contrast, Biden has promised to open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere.

Those policies are catnip for Biden’s supporters in the technology sector, including former Google chief Eric Schmidt, who is urging the federal government to let companies hire more of their professional workforce from overseas.

Wall Streeters’ resentment towards Trump was noted in one quote from a former Goldman Sach’s investor, James Atwood: “For people who are in the business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a while ago.”

However, Trump can only be hired or fired by the voters.

Mike Lee's #S386 bill creates a Green Card Lite program for 300K Indian workers.
Lee is backed by Fortune 500, which wants to inflate the Green Card Economy (IOW, indentured foreigners working US jobs to get 140K p/a green cards).
Estb. media is silenced
https://t.co/fcAB4CbJgk

— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) August 7, 2020

 

ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT OPEN BORDERS FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR AND NO CAPS ON IMPORTING CHINESE AND INDIANS TO WORK OUR TECH JOBS CHEAP.

 

Obama’s State of Delusion ... OR JUST ANOTHER "Hope & Change" HOAX?

 

”The delusional character of Obama’s State of the Union

 

address on Tuesday—presenting an America of rising living

 

standards and a booming economy, capped by his declaration

 

that the “shadow of crisis has passed”—is perhaps matched

 

only in its presentation by the media and supporters of the

 

Democratic Party.”


http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

“The general tone was set by the New York Times in its lead editorial on Wednesday, which described the speech as a “simple, dramatic message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off—the top earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley—have done just great, while middle and working classes remain dead in the water.”

 

OBAMANOMICS:

 

The report observes that while the wealth of the world’s 80 richest people doubled between 2009 and 2014, the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.5 billion people) was lower in 2014 than it was in 2009.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to match the wealth of the bottom half of the earth’s population; by 2013, the figure had fallen to just 92 billionaires. It fell to 80 in 2014.

 

THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS

 

“The goal of the Obama administration, working with the Republicans and local governments, is to roll back the living conditions of the vast majority of the population to levels not seen since the 19th century, prior to the advent of the eight-hour day, child labor laws, comprehensive public education, pensions, health benefits, workplace health and safety regulations, etc.”

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/01/oxfam-richest-one-percent-set-to.html

 

“In response to the ruthless assault of the financial oligarchy, spearheaded by Obama, the working class must advance, no less ruthlessly, its own policy.”

New Federal Reserve report

US median income has plunged, inequality has grown in Obama “recovery”

The yearly income of a typical US household dropped by a massive 12 percent, or $6,400, in the six years between 2007 and 2013. This is just one of the findings of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances released Thursday, which documents a sharp decline in working class living standards and a further concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and the super-rich.

Why the rich favor the Democrats

 

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 CaliforniaIllinoisNew 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

JOEL B. POLLAK

16 Jul 202034

4:32

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing for a repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the next round of coronavirus relief — giving a tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers, especially in “blue” states.

In his landmark tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, President Donald Trump and the Republicans offset some of the revenue losses from low tax rates by restricting deductions. The law capped the SALT deduction at $10,000.

Previously, those taxpayers wealthy enough to file a list of itemized deductions could count all of the taxes they paid to state and local governments toward a deduction in their federal tax liability. That meant wealthy taxpayers in the most heavily taxed states — primarily run by Democrats — benefited most. The SALT deduction also gave Democrats political room to raise taxes higher, because it made rich taxpayers less likely to resist: they could claim some of the money back.

Trump ended the deduction — at some political cost to himself. Republicans went on to lose congressional seats in wealthy suburbs in high-tax Democrat-run states. Orange County, California, for example, flipped entirely to Democrats.

But Democrats still want to repeal the SALT cap, regardless, because they want their state and local governments to avoid tax cut — and because their wealthy campaign contributors want to be subsidized, once again, by the rest of the country.

Even Seth Hanlon, a former Obama administration official who is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has protested against Schumer’s idea, noting that repealing the SALT cap would help “the top 1%.”

Come on, not this again.

Repealing the SALT cap for 2020-21 would be a $137 billion tax cut, with about 63% going to the top 1%.

It does nothing for states and localities except potentially crowd out the actual fiscal relief they urgently need. https://t.co/jlSjIhnzpq

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

Here is the national distribution of the tax cut from repealing the SALT cap, via @iteptweets.

A tiny percentage of middle-income people get any benefit.

The top 1% gets 63%: an avg. $35k tax cut for them.

The top 5% gets 87%.

The bottom 80% get literally 1% of the benefit. pic.twitter.com/8EIav7wgcJ

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

Here is the distribution just for New York. Largely the same story. A few more middle-income people benefit a little compared to nationwide, but still, the tax cut goes overwhelmingly to top one-percenters. Not the people most affected by COVID!!! pic.twitter.com/Dp0evxq3P7

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

The basic story is the same in every state. State by state estimates are here. https://t.co/1KREhnb6et

— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020

The Democrat-run House of Representatives has already passed a repeal on the SALT cap that would be effective for two years.

According to The Hill, “Schumer urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [on Tuesday] to ‘join the House, and join the Democrats in the Senate, and get rid of that cap.'”

Schumer also vowed to make the SALT deduction — the effective tax cut for the 1% — permanent: “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he added, according to The Hill. “It will be dead, gone and buried.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

 

 

David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics

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.

 

 World economy to take biggest hit since Great Depression

The International Monetary Fund has forecast that the world economy is entering its worst slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the loss of output will “dwarf” that suffered in the global financial crisis 12 years ago.

Even on the assumption that the second quarter records the sharpest downturn, followed by a recovery and then a rebound next year, the IMF said the world economy will lose $9 trillion in output over 2020 and 2021. This is an amount equivalent to the combined economies of Japan and Germany, the world’s third and fourth largest respectively.

It said under the assumption that the pandemic and the required containment measures peak in the second quarter for most countries, global growth would fall to minus 3 percent this year, a 6.3 percentage fall from the forecast issued in January.

This “major revision over a very short period” made what the IMF has called the Great Lockdown the “worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse that the global financial crisis,” IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath wrote in a comment on its World Economic Outlook report issued yesterday.

Gopinath said the IMF forecasts were grounded in its “baseline scenario” in which it anticipated global growth would rebound to 5.8 percent next year. But even if that did take place, the recovery would only be “partial,” with the level of economic activity below that projected for 2021, before the virus hit.

However, given the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, the IMF has projected more adverse scenarios. The outbreak may not recede in the second half of the year, leading to longer periods of containment that would worsen financial conditions and a further breakdown of global supply chains.

Under these conditions, Gopinath wrote, “global GDP would fall even further: an additional 3 percent in 2020 if the pandemic is more protracted this year, while, if the pandemic continues into 2021, it may fall next year by an additional 8 percent compared to our baseline scenario.”

The IMF has predicted a contraction of growth in the advanced economies of 6.1 percent with emerging and developing economies, excluding China, expected to experience negative growth rates of between 1 percent and 2 percent in 2020. Income per capita will fall in over 170 countries.

The actual falls could be steeper than estimated by the IMF at this point, with the forecasts of private sector organisations pointing to an even larger contraction. In recent years the IMF has had to revise down its forecasts amid the marked slowdown in the world economy that had developed well before the coronavirus shock.

An example of the possible depth of the collapse was highlighted in a report by the UK Office for Budget Responsibility, also issued yesterday. It said if the lockdown of the British economy proceeded for three months then it faced a 35 percent plunge in the second quarter.

It said this was not a forecast but should be taken as a “reference scenario” because it could not predict how long the restrictions on economic activity would need to be maintained.

However, if they stayed in place, education, accommodation and food services would be the hardest hit, with contractions of 90 percent and 85 percent respectively. Similar estimates have been made by government statisticians in France.

The IMF said multilateral cooperation was “vital” for the health of global recovery. But precisely the opposite is taking place.

In a comment on the IMF report, Financial Times economic columnist Martin Wolf wrote that the world was confronting the “biggest economic disaster since the Depression of the 1930s.

“The world has come into this moment with divisions among its great powers and incompetence at the highest levels of government of terrifying proportions.”

He noted that the “negative-sum economic nationalism that has driven Donald Trump throughout his term as US president, and has even emerged within the EU, is a serious danger… If the world economy is broken apart, as happened in response to the Depression, the recovery will be blighted, if not slain.”

Wolf cited the conclusion drawn by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington which stated: “Put simply, in the COVID-19 pandemic, lack of international cooperation will mean that more people will die.”

But just as the insatiable drive for profit via financialisation has undermined public health systems around the world, so the division of the global economy into rival nation-states and great powers is provoking a struggle of each against all. This is rapidly rendering any international collaboration a dead letter.

The IMF also issued a warning about the state of the global financial system saying it had already felt a “dramatic impact” and “further intensification of the crisis would affect global financial stability.”

The massive injection of money by the world’s central banks, amounting to at least $6 trillion, along with their indications of a readiness to do still more, has stabilised markets in recent weeks.

But signs of stress have emerged in major short-term funding markets, including the global market for US dollars. Less developed economies have been hardest hit, experiencing an outflow of about $100 billion, the largest on record.

Major markets could also be impacted if the spread of the pandemic required further containment measures exacerbating the COVID-19 shock.

Asset managers facing large outflows could be forced to sell into falling markets, accelerating the decline. Leveraged investors may face further margin calls, aggravating selling pressures.

“As firms become distressed and default rates climb higher, credit markets may come to a sudden stop, especially in risky segments like high yield, leveraged loan and private debt markets. These markets have expanded rapidly since the global financial crisis, reaching $9 trillion globally, while borrowers’ credit quality, underwriting standards, and investor protections have weakened,” the IMF stated.

In other words, the consequences of the policies of central banks since the global financial crisis are coming home to roost. The continuous supply of ultra-cheap money to enable the continuation of the very same speculation and parasitism that produced the 2008 crash has created the conditions for an even bigger disaster.

The IMF noted that banks have more capital and liquidity than they did 12 years ago but they could be tested in the face of a “sharp slowdown that may turn out to be more severe and lengthy than currently anticipated.”

Measures of bank capitalization based on market prices were now worse in many countries than in 2008, giving rise to a concern that “banks and other financial intermediaries may act as an amplifier should the crisis deepen further.”

A revealing report on the mid-March financial crisis


In its analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the  has characterised it as a trigger event that set in motion and intensified the underlying contradictions of the global capitalist system, impacting on every area of social and economic life.

This analysis has been underscored by a report issued by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), comprised of officials from leading central banks and finance ministry officials, on the crisis in financial markets last March at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report was prepared for a meeting of the G20 to be held this weekend.

The crisis took the form of a “dash for cash” in major global financial markets in mid-March as financial assets were sold off. Its most significant feature was that it struck at the very foundations of the global financial system—the $20 trillion US government bond market—as Treasuries were sold off.

As the Financial Times noted in a report on the crisis in September: “The US government bond market is akin to the investment world’s bomb shelter, a safe space where everyone can seek refuge when the rest of the financial system is exploding. In March, the bomb shelter itself started to rumble ominously.”

According to the FSB report, the crisis was set off when foreign investors, primarily central banks, sold off almost $300 billion worth of US Treasury debt. “Market dysfunction” was then exacerbated by “substantial sales” of US Treasuries as speculative and highly-leveraged trades, based on taking advantage of the difference between the price of Treasury bonds and their futures, became loss-making.

The large-scale unwinding of these trades, amounting to $90 billion during March, was “likely one of the contributors to a short period of extreme illiquidity on government bond markets,” the report said.

The storm lasted for a “short period” not because of any self-correction mechanism in financial markets but only as a result of the massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks that prevented a meltdown of the entire financial system going far beyond what took place in 2008.

According to the report, the policy actions taken by central banks were “unprecedented” as they increased their balance sheets “at unparalleled scale.”

“Overall, these measures led to a US$7 trillion increase in G7 central bank assets in just eight months” in contrast to the $3 trillion increase in the year following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

In the US, the Fed’s intervention went across the board with the result that it has become the backstop for all areas of the financial system.

In the lead-up to the mid-March crisis, as the impact of the pandemic became increasingly apparent, central bankers indicated they would support financial markets.

On February 28, Fed chairman Jerome Powell pledged to use the Fed’s tools and to “act as appropriate.” This was followed by a statement on March 2 by Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko that the BoJ would “provide ample liquidity” and on the same day European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde said the ECB was ready to take “appropriate and targeted measures.”

On March 3 Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said the bank was ready to take all “necessary steps” to support the UK economy and the Fed cut its rate by 50 basis points.

These statements were unsuccessful in calming financial markets.

As the FSB report noted, longstanding relationships of prices across different markets, including in the core US Treasuries market, “began to break down.” “Usually at times of stress equity prices decline while government bond prices increase. But during the dash for cash both types of assets experienced large price declines.”

The report pointed to some of the reasons for the intensity of the mid-March crisis noting that the “COVID-19 shock hit a global financial system that has fundamentally changed over the past decade.”

Significantly, however, it did not draw out that the origin of these changes lies in the policies pursued by the Fed and other major central banks in response to the 2008 financial crisis. The reduction of interest rates to ultra-low rates and the massive purchases of government bonds via quantitative easing enabled the speculation that set off the crisis to continue and expand.

But it did point to their effects, noting that “structural changes in the financial system over the past decade” had “increased the reliance on market-based intermediation to finance growing levels of debt.” In other words, debt has increasingly been financed outside the banks.

Using guarded language in order to cover up the role of financial authorities after 2008 in creating the conditions for another crisis, it noted that “developments in the lead-up to the pandemic may have contributed to the severity of the reaction in financial markets in March.”

“Following a long global recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, the outlook for growth and corporate earnings had weakened by early 2020 and become more uncertain. Real interest rates have fallen over the past decade, with both authorities and market participants predicting a ‘lower for longer’ environment.”

This decline in finance costs reduced debt burdens, encouraged further debt accumulation which, coupled with declining asset quality and lower credit underwriting standards “meant that firms became increasingly exposed to the risk of a material economic downturn or an unexpected rise in interest rates. Investors had therefore become more susceptible to sudden shifts in market sentiment and a tightening of financial conditions in response to shocks.”

The report lauded the intervention by central banks saying that unless it had taken place “it is highly likely that the stress in the financial system would have worsened significantly.” This is a considerable understatement. What took place in mid-March was a total freeze of the financial markets and had it continued the ability of the US government, along with others, to finance their debts would have been called into question.

However, the report did make clear that nothing had been resolved.

“The measures taken by central banks were aimed at restoring market functioning, and not at addressing the underlying vulnerabilities that caused markets to amplify the stress. The financial system remains vulnerable to another liquidity strain, as the underlying structures and mechanisms that gave rise to the turmoil are still in place,” it said.

In fact, there has not even been a return to the status quo ante because, just as took place after 2008, the very actions of the Fed and other central banks have changed the structure of financial markets, creating the conditions for another, even more severe, crisis.

This is because, as the report acknowledged: “The need to intervene in such a substantial way has meant that central banks had to take on material financial risk.”

This is another major “structural” transformation in the global financial system. The days are long gone when central banks merely functioned as so-called “lenders of last resort.” They are now active participants in an increasingly crisis-ridden financial system.

And their actions in response to the March crisis have only served to fuel the speculation that led to it as evidenced by the rise of financial markets, with Wall Street reaching record highs on Monday, as the destructive force of the pandemic intensifies.

The report also pointed to so-called “moral hazard issues.” These arise from the belief by investors and speculators that the “aggressive policy actions” following the March crisis mean the central banks will again intervene to bail them out if their increasingly risky methods of profit accumulation lead to another crisis.

Two conclusions arise from the FSB report. First, that the actions of the central banks in fuelling still further speculation have only created the conditions for another crisis, with even more devastating consequences for the mass of working people.

And second, the case for the taking of the entire financial system into public ownership under democratic control is unassailable.