THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
During an interview aired on Monday’s edition of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Kyle Rittenhouse said that he was “used for a cause” by his former attorneys, Lin Wood and John Pierce and that he stayed in jail longer than he needed to because Wood and Pierce were “trying to raise money so they can take it for their own benefit, not trying to set me free.”
Rittenhouse said, “I was in jail for 87 days, and this goes — this follows in with Lin Wood, who — Lin Wood was raising money on my behalf, and he held me in jail for 87 days, disrespected my wishes, put me on media interviews-which I should never have done, which he said, oh, you’re going to go talk to The Washington Post, which was not a good idea. Along with John Pierce, they said I was safer in jail instead of at home with my family.”
He added that his time in jail was “87 days of not being with my family for defending myself and being taken advantage [of], being used for a cause by these — by John Pierce and Lin Wood, trying to solicit — not solicit, trying to raise money so they can take it for their own benefit, not trying to set me free.”
Rittenhouse further stated that he could have been out of jail by mid-September, but his lawyers wanted to keep him in jail until November 20.
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
Biden lied about his undergraduate degree and his majors, lied about his rank in law school, lied aboutscholarships and educational aid he had received, lied about his stance toward the Vietnam war while in college, lied about his plagiarism of other politician's writings andspeeches, lied about the circumstances around his first wife's fatal accident, lied about how he met his second and current wife, and lied about the affair they were having when they were both married. MARK CHRISTIAN
Most recently and dramatically, Biden lied abouthis knowledge of his son's shady dealings, liedabout his own involvement in corruption and ribery,and lied about his current presidential agenda andwhat he wants to implement in regards to energy,fracking, court-packing, health care, education, andCOVID among other issues.
MARK CHRISTIAN
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
The White House has seen some troublesome children over the centuries but I do not think there has ever been the son of an Oval office occupant as totally disgusting, amoral, and anti-American as Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s designated bagman. ANDREA WIDBURG
Hunter Biden, China, electric batteries, and child slavery
Not to mince words, Hunter Biden is a disgusting human being. It’s not just the drugs, the strippers, the abandoned children, the prostitutes, the sleazy self-pornographic videos, or his latest art scam. It’s also that he has no compunction about doing business with some of the world’s worst actors or with people hostile to America. The latest example is the news that, back in 2016, Hunter Biden’s investment firm—and keep in mind that he’s always been his daddy’s bag man—helped broker a deal that sold a valuable African cobalt mine to a state-backed Chinese company. Cobalt, of course, is essential for the batteries running the electric cars the Biden administration is trying to force Americans to buy.
In 2016, an investment firm founded by Hunter Biden with several Chinese partners was cut into a complex $3.8 billion transaction that transferred 80 percent of Congo’s Tenke Fungurum mine from an American company to Beijing-backed China Molybdenum.
President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, was the sitting vice president when the deal was struck.
The mine is one of the world’s largest sources of cobalt — and China’s control of the mineral “presents a critical vulnerability to the future of the U.S. domestic auto industry,” Biden’s White House reported in June.
Here’s the funny thing: We’re being asked to believe that “Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s involvement with the sale”—at least according to a White House spokesman who talked to The New York Times.
So, what’s wrong with Hunter’s conduct in this regard? So many things:
Image: Child slavery in an African cobalt mine. YouTube screen grab. The eight-year-old boy laboring in the dirt and mud had gone without food for two days when this video was shot.
The climate change con and the green energy scam will destroy America’s economy and the modern American lifestyle. We function at the level we do because of fossil fuel—and, absent a commitment to nuclear energy, renewables will never provide even a fraction of the energy America needs to maintain its current standard of living. China, of course, is making no promises whatsoever to cut back its coal and petroleum use any time soon. It intends to grow both its manufacturing sector and its military using old-fashioned fossil fuels.
As part of the relentless push for green energy, leftists are enacting policies forcing people into electric cars. Not only must the energy to charge those cars must come from somewhere, but the cars also won’t work without a battery—and those batteries are entirely dependent on cobalt. That’s where we get to Hunter’s role in selling a massive cobalt mine to a Chinese Communist Party-owned company.
So, even as the Democrats relentlessly force Americans into electric cars, Hunter played a huge role, while daddy was Veep, in handing to the Chinese (our primary geopolitical rival and, let me say it, enemy) an essential element required to make those batteries. That’s just wrong.
But there’s something even more deeply wrong with what Hunter did. Cobalt mines in Africa run on slave labor—child slave labor:
The likelihood that the mine involved in the sale that Hunter helped broker (and by that I mean from which he profited, which or not he was directly involved in the deal) uses child labor is enormous. This is especially true given that China has no problem with slave labor, whether it’s convicted criminals or people arrested simply for being Uighurs.
As an aside, China also happily harvests organs from these same prisoners so that it can profit from organ transplant surgeries. I don’t see China being squeamish about six-year-old African children—and China is loathsomely racist against Africans—working and dying in cobalt mines.
No matter how you look at it, Hunter Biden’s involvement in the sale is bad: It’s bad for American national security, it’s bad for America’s economy and lifestyle, and it’s morally bad because it means that Biden’s son (and probably Biden) profited from this sale and from the child slavery that almost certainly accompanies it.
The White House has seen some troublesome children over the centuries but I do not think there has ever been the son of an Oval office occupant as totally disgusting, amoral, and anti-American as Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s designated bagman.
Nancy Pelosi, a horrid woman equally as without heart and soul, on Tuesday refused to have the names of the thirteen soldiers killed in Kabul read out on the floor of the House. That should permanently indict her for being the wicked witch she is. She is more devious, more calculating than the irresponsible Biden but every bit as beyond redemption as he is. She will do anything to try to convince the American people, for whom she has only contempt, that whatever she and her party do is righteous no matter how loathsome and totalitarian. PATRICIA McCARTHY
Feinstein has come under scrutiny for China-related matters before. She said last year that China was "growing into a respectable nation" and cautioned against holding China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic. Feinstein also employed a suspected Chinese spy as a congressional aide for nearly two decades. She supported expanded trade relations with China while her husband sought business deals in the country.
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
There it is. That's the issue. To begin, you have the corrupt family Biden. They've been scamming us and our system well for almost fifty years. The man is supposedly worth over 250 million dollars. How is this possible on his salary? It's not. So where did his wealth come from? Not from being a brilliant businessman. DAVID PRENTICE
Report: Hunter Biden Profited from Joe Biden Losing Energy Race with Communist China
Hunter Biden profited from helping a Chinese firm acquire cobalt mines from an American company, according to a report released just days after President Joe Biden admitted the United States is “losing our edge” on Communist China in control of the essential natural resource.
“We risked losing our edge as a nation, and China and the rest of the world are catching up,” Biden admitted last week.
Communist China controls much of the raw minerals needed to create clean energy. A mineral named cobalt is specifically in high demand because it is used for the production of battery-powered vehicles.
While electric cars are highly subsidized by the United States government in order to reduce “climate change,” car manufactures must deal with China to obtain batteries made from cobalt.
Cobalt is found in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than two-thirds of the world’s cobalt supply originates, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In recent years, American elites have allowed — if not enabled — Chinese-backed companies to buy “two of the country’s largest cobalt deposits over the past five years,” the New York Timesreported.
One of those companies is a private equity firm registered in Shanghai in which Hunter Biden reportedly owned a stake, along with business partners Eric Schwerin and John Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz. (John Kerry was Secretary of State under Barack Obama and now is President Biden’s climate envoy).
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Secretary of State John Kerry attend the meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the Warsaw NATO Summit on July 8, 2016, in Warsaw, Poland. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Hunter, Heinz, and Schwerin “joined Chinese partners in establishing the firm in 2013, known as BHR and formally named Bohai Harvest RST (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company,” the Times reported.
Hunter, Heinz, and Schwerin reportedly owned 30 percent of the BHR while 70 percent of BHR was “controlled by Chinese investors that include the Bank of China, according to records filed with Chinese regulators.”
It should be noted the Bank of China possesses close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Just after then-Vice President Biden left office with Barack Obama in 2016, Hunter, Heinz, Schwerin, and Bank of China successfully “bought and later sold a stake in CATL, a fast-growing Chinese company that is now the world’s biggest maker of batteries for electric vehicles.”
The Times also reported that in 2016, a Chinese mining company, China Molybdenum, bought a cobalt mine for $2.65 billion from an American company named Freeport-McMoRan.
Through a complex web of transactions via shell companies, Hunter’s company, BHR, was reportedly a part of the purchase of Freeport-McMoRan with China Molybdenum, by raising money from Chinese investors to purchase ownership shares in the mine.
The transactions concluded with China Molybdenum owning 80 percent of the mine — a classic tale of the elites benefiting from the United States’ managed decline.
Hunter’s company reportedly obtained a ten percent share in the mine, which he sold to China Molybdenum from a Washington company named Skaneateles — which he also owns a stake in.
Skaneateles reportedly still owns a stake in BHR, though the Times reported Hunter “no longer holds any interest, directly or indirectly, in either BHR or Skaneateles,” according to Hunter’s lawyer Chris Clark.
It is unknown how much Hunter profited from using his network of connections while his father was vice president. Emails from Hunter’s laptop indicate “he was told on multiple occasions by his business partner Eric Schwerin that he could expect to receive significant payments from BHR beginning in 2019,” the Daily Caller reported in May.
The complex financial maneuvers have allegedly caught the eye of the FBI. In December of 2020, CNN announced the FBI had been investigating Hunter and his associates since 2018 for violating “tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China, according to two people briefed on the probe.”
The probe is reportedly still ongoing.
Nevertheless, Hunter’s business dealings have likely come at the expense of the United States. Instead of working to keep the United States in control of mines and natural resources across the globe, Hunter presumably divested the United States of energy resources by peddling his government connections.
On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.
Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.
That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.
This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.
It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).
It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.
Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.
In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:
The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.
Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.
The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.
Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.
He has announced that he will bring up the National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $778 billion for the military in a single year (nearly half the 10-year Build Back Better budget) and the anti-China United States Innovation and Competition Act before taking up the social/climate measure passed by the House. This could delay consideration of Build Back Better until next year, something Manchin has hinted at, likely killing the legislation.
All of the so-called “progressives” promoted by the pseudo-left, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, voted for the House bill on Friday, demonstrating the DSA’s role as an arm of one of the two main parties of US imperialism.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
Now it is perfectly clear what this actually means. Under conditions where the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they have dropped any attempt to raise corporate or personal income tax rates for the wealthy The only significant change Biden and the Democrats are seeking to make to Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tax giveaway to the oligarchy is to increase its scale.
This is a devastating exposure of the fraudulent claims of the DSA and similar organizations of the upper-middle class that progressive change is possible within the framework of the capitalist two-party system and that the Democratic Party can serve as an instrument of social change.
House Democrats approved hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for their wealthy, blue state donors with the passage of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act.”
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) oversaw the passage of the filibuster-proof $1.75 billion budget reconciliation package that would deliver billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest residents of blue states if approved by the Senate and signed by Biden.
As part of the package, the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap would be increased from its current $10,000 to $80,000 which would effectively amount to a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans living in blue states — paid for by working and middle class Americans.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has noted that “a household making $1 million per year will receive ten times as much from SALT cap relief as a middle-class family will receive from the child tax credit expansion.”
(Chart via Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
“Roughly 98 percent of the benefit from the increase would accrue to those making more than $100,000 per year, with more than 80 percent going to those making over $200,000,” CRFB analysis has found.
The left-wing Tax Policy Center has assailed the tax cuts for billionaires, comparing it to the package’s tax increases on middle class Americans.
For instance, the package gives a tax cut to 66 percent of Americans earning more than $1 million annually while 78 percent of Americans earning $500,000 to $1 million will get a tax cut. At the same time, 27 percent of Americans earning $75,000 to $100,000 would see a tax increase along with 19 percent of Americans earning $50,000 to $75,000.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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.
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!
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!
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.”
Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe Biden, not the incumbent President of the United States, according to the New York Times.
Under the August 9 headline, “The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts,” three reporters wrote:
While Wall Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to President George W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr. Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.
This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
The donors are already pressuring Biden to pick a business-friendly candidate for vice president, and Biden is signaling a hands-off policy toward Wall Street:
In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are still being hammered out … in July, the candidate spoke of the need for corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be legislative.
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in 2018.
Notably, the article did not mention one of Wall Street’s greatest heartburns with Trump — his on-again, off-again popular push to reduce the immigration inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and real estate customers.
Trump’s popular lower-immigration promise could reduce the federal government’s policy of annually inflating the new labor supply by roughly 20 percent. If implemented, it would force CEOs to pay higher wages and would pressure investors to transfer some of their new investments from the coastal states to the heartland states.
In the last few months, Trump has zig-zagged on his low-immigration promises as his poll ratings stay under Joe Biden’s numbers. But on June 22, Trump blocked several visa worker pipelines and promised regulations to ensure that CEOs are forced to hire Americans first.
In contrast, Biden has promised to open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere.
Those policies are catnip for Biden’s supporters in the technology sector, including former Google chief Eric Schmidt, who is urging the federal government to let companies hire more of their professional workforce from overseas.
Wall Streeters’ resentment towards Trump was noted in one quote from a former Goldman Sach’s investor, James Atwood: “For people who are in the business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a while ago.”
However, Trump can only be hired or fired by the voters.
Mike Lee's #S386 bill creates a Green Card Lite program for 300K Indian workers. Lee is backed by Fortune 500, which wants to inflate the Green Card Economy (IOW, indentured foreigners working US jobs to get 140K p/a green cards). Estb. media is silencedhttps://t.co/fcAB4CbJgk
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
“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.
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.”
“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.
There's little doubt that today's Democrat Party is the party of the rich. Actually, that's an understatement. Far more than billionaires are involved. A better expression of reality would be to say a fundamental core of Democrat coalition is the managerial class, also known as the elite. These are the people who run the media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, the big corporations, the universities and schools, the investment banks, and Wall Street. They populate the upper levels of government bureaucracies. These are the East and West Coasters.
The alliance of the affluent with the Democrat Party can be seen in the widely disproportionate share of hefty political donations from the well-to-do going to Democrats and a bevy of left-wing causes. It's also why forty-one out of the fifty wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats.
BLOG: DEMS LOVE SOCIALISM FOR ILLEGALS TO KEEP THEM COMING AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE AND SOCIALISM FOR BANKS. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF IT!
Bernie Sanders is an exception. But he's an anomaly viewed as dangerous to the party, which is why he's being crushed by the Democrat establishment.
Why do the wealthy align with the Democrats? The answer may seem counter-intuitive, but it is really quite simple. It's surely not ideals or high-minded principles. Nor is it ignorance. Rather, it boils down to raw self-interest.
In his book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Christopher Caldwell notes that rich Americans think themselves to be as vulnerable as blacks. They are a relatively small minority of the population. They fear being resented for their wealth and power and of having much of that taken from them. Accordingly, the wealthy seek to protect what is theirs by preventing strong majorities from forming by using the divide and conquer principle.
As R.R. Reno writes when reviewing Caldwell's book: "Therefore, the richest and most powerful people in America have strong incentives to support an anti-majoritarian political system." He goes on: "Wealthy individuals shovel donations into elite institutions that incubate identity politics, which further fragments the nation and prevents the formation of majorities."
Some of the rotten fruit of the wealthy taking this approach include multiculturalism, massive immigration of diverse people, resistance to encouraging assimilation, racial strife, trying to turn white males into pariahs, and the promotion of gender confusion. Through it all, society is bombarded with the Orwellian mantra that "diversity is strength," as if repeating it often enough can make it so. It is also why patriotism and a common American culture are so disparaged today. Those from the upper strata of society project the idea that if you're a flag-waving American, you must be some kind of retrograde mouth-breathing yokel.
The wealthy as a groups are content to dissolve the glue that holds the U.S. together. And it is all done to enhance and preserve their power, wealth, and influence. This is why they so hate Donald Trump. He strives to unite people and the country, although you'd never know that that is what the president is doing if you live in the media bubble. Trump's MAGA agenda is an anathema to the managerial class.
To quote Reno one final time:
The next decade will not be easy. But it will not be about what preoccupied us in the sixties, and which Caldwell describes so well. Rather than the perils of discrimination we are increasingly concerned with the problem of disintegration — or in Charles Murray's terms, the problem of "coming apart."
Trump and the GOP he is molding are the vehicles to restore and strengthen national solidarity. Trump said at the Daytona 500, "No matter who wins, what matters most is God, family, and country." That is not the Democrat agenda. As seen in Democrat politicians, their policies, and the behavior of their major contributors, the aim is to further weaken the social and national bonds in America. There is a lot at stake here. If solidarity wins, the Republic can survive and prosper. If the Democrats and their wealthy cohorts do, then the middle class withers, the Republic dies, and the rich and their managerial class get to rule the roost. That is what it comes down to.
ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. ALL BILLIONAIRES WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS, AMNESTY AND HELL NO TO E-VERIFY!
In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.
This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Democrats: The Party of Big Labor, Big Government...and Big Business
There is a widespread perception that the Democrat Party is the party the working class and the Republican Party is the party of big business. Even though Republicans on average received slightly more from corporate employees prior to 2002, the overall difference between both parties from 1990 to 2020 is statistically insignificant (Table 1). In fact, Democrat reliance on big labor gradually shifted toward big business following the involvement of solidly Democrat corporate giants in 2002, and from 2014 to 2020, Democrats consistently surpassed Republicans in corporate donations (Tables 1 & 2).
Based on data compiled by Open Secrets, Soros Fund Management, Fahr LLC (Tom Steyer), and Bloomberg LP ranked among the top ten for political contributions that gave over 90% to Democrats. In sharp contrast, the right-leaning Koch Industries made the top ten only in 2014. In nearly all other years, Koch ranked well below the top twenty.
Whether or not this trend is long-term, there is no denying that large corporations on average no longer lean right. But what does it mean to be "the party of big business"? Donations are not definitive evidence. What ultimately matters is what politicians do once they get elected.
Many liberals believe that big government is needed to "rein in" big business and that in the absence of federal intervention, corporations will "run roughshod" over the average American. Many liberals also believe that corporations are the main beneficiaries of laissez-faire economics and that free-market conservatives who want to scale back regulations are somehow "in the pocket" of big business.
In reality, the opposite is true: big business and big government
go hand in hand because government meddling in the economy
encourages rent-seeking by businesses that can afford to pay
for the lobbyists. This crony capitalism grew exponentially as
a result of New Deal regulations that squeezed out competitors
during the 1930s. Establishment politicians and well
connected corporations are beneficiaries of the myth that big
government and big business are adversaries because it hides
their unholy alliance.
In all fairness, neither party has had a monopoly on the dispensation of corporate welfare: the TARP funds that propped up financial institutions deemed "too big to fail" during the Great Recession were released by the Bush administration. In addition, establishment Republicans are no better than Democrats at stemming the flow of illegal immigration because big businesses reap the benefits of this cheap labor without incurring any of the social costs.
If both parties are playing this game, what is the basis for labeling the Democrat party "the party of big business"? What policies from Republicans support small business?
Free-market conservatism benefits small businesses because the government does not pick the winners and losers by means of subsidies, tax breaks, and cumbersome regulations. You will not see policies like these coming from Washington in a major way because proposals for shrinking the federal government rarely see the light of day in Congress.
Based on data collected by Gallup and Thumbtack, red states far outscore blue states in small business friendliness (Table 3). This may be why less affluent Americans are fleeing states that score abysmally like California, Illinois, New York, and Hawaii. This might also be why small business–owners are more likely to vote Republican.
The Trump administration has been good for businesses of all sizes mainly due to the unprecedented rate at which it scaled back stifling regulations. This may be why some of the president's highest approval ratings now come from small businesses.
Donald Trump set himself apart from the ruling class when he latched onto the third-rail issue of illegal immigration and called out the corporate darling Jeb Bush (AKA "Low Energy Jeb") for his lack of grassroots support. This may explain in part why Bain Capital, the firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, switched teams and contributed solidly Democrat in 2018. In 2012, Democrats accused Bain Capital of destroying jobs by systematically dismantling the companies it bought off. Times have changed...
Small businesses generate well over half of all new jobs. Most importantly, many are family-owned, have strong ties to their communities, and provide upward mobility for millions of Americans who never attended college. The Democrats' undermining of this quintessentially American institution is shameful and disqualifies it as the "party of the working class." Contributions from big labor do not count toward "labor-friendliness" because mega-unions care more about recruitment than about the welfare of working Americans. This is why the SEIU supports blanket amnesty for illegal aliens.
Democrats fed up with the corporate status quo are now choosing their own anti-establishment candidate, not realizing that socialism is just a more impoverished version of the crony capitalism they are rejecting. Many Sanders-supporters are also morally shallow because they want to harness the power of the state to muscle in on the wealth of Americans who borrowed responsibly and worked hard to pay their bills.
After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said, "This Constitution ... is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism ... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government." If Democrats implement the dystopian policies of California on a national level, their corporate allies will do fine. It is small business–owners and working-class Americans with nowhere to flee who have the most to lose. Be careful what you wish for.
To view the tables below, click the links.
Table 1: Top contributors to Democrats and Republicans as compiled by Open Secrets.
*The red lettering highlights a funding advantage for Republicans. The blue lettering highlights a funding disadvantage for Republicans.
**Based on a T-test, the difference is insignificant at P = 0.46
Table 2: Top ten contributors to Democrats and Republicans by category (union, corporate, and ideological) as compiled by Open Secrets:
*In 2008 Goldman Sachs donated 74% to Democrats. All other groups in this column donated between 40 and 69% to both parties. This column does not differentiate between giving equally to both parties and giving 70–79% to Democrats or Republicans.
**This number includes the "City of New York." Although it is officially listed as "other" by Open Secrets (not corporate, union, or ideological), I was personally informed by someone from the organization that Michael Bloomberg was the main source of this funding.
Table 3: Small business scores states scored by Thumbtack ranked according to their Democratic advantage by Gallup:
*GPA scores are based on the following numerical equivalents: A = 4, B = 3, C = 2, D = 1, F = 0, A+ = 4.3, A- = 3.7, etc.
** Not scored.
***Mean GPA ± standard error. Based on a T-test, the difference is significant at P = 0.00001.
Grim Reaper Mitch to Pelosi: I'm Going to Kill Your Stimulus Plan
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just got some bad news from Mitch McConnell. Any talk about another stimulus isn’t going to happen. She may draft a bill, but it’ll meet a swift death in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mitch is the legislative grim reaper for most of what the Democratic House sends his way (via The Hill):
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hit the brakes Tuesday on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) plan to move ahead with a fourth stimulus package that would include major infrastructure spending and other Democratic priorities.
“I think we need to wait a few days here, a few weeks, and see how things are working out,” McConnell said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”
“Let’s see how things are going and respond accordingly,” he added. “I’m not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items that they would not otherwise be able to pass.”
McConnell's remarks came the same day that President Trump encouraged Congress to pass a $2 trillion infrastructure bill as the next piece of coronavirus legislation.
Pelosi is also mulling a rollback of the SALT taxes, which would be nothing short of a giveaway to millionaires. And by the giveaway, it would be something of a $620 billion tax cut for them. Remember, this is the party of the working people, or so they say, and a part of me hopes she goes aggressive on this, so we can see Bernie Sanders gum up the Democratic works for a bit. There is no way a hardcore lefty would back this nonsense. Yet, there’s another reason why Mitch isn’t rushing on the House Democrats’ stimulus reloaded plans. They’re off. They won’t be back to work until April 20. And The Hill added that Mitch hasn’t forgotten about judges, adding that the Kentucky Republican’s motto is “leave no vacancy behind.”
THE OBAMA – BIDEN BANKSTERS CON JOB STARTED BEFORE HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE!
GET THIS BOOK!
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.
Congressman Ron Paul says, “Every libertarian and free-market conservative needs to read Obamanomics.” And Johan Goldberg, columnist and bestselling author says, “Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best and an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
If you’ve wondered what’s happening to America, as the federal government swallows up the financial sector, the auto industry, and healthcare, and enacts deficit exploding “stimulus packages,” this book makes it all clear—it’s a big scam. Ultimately, Obamanomics boils down to this: every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich, and those somebodies are friends of Barack. This book names the names—and it will make your blood boil.
Investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics. In this explosive book, Carney reveals:
* The Great Health Care Scam—Obama’s backroom deals with drug companies spell corporate profits and more government control
* The Global Warming Hoax—Obama has bought off industries with a pork-filled bill that will drain your wallet for Al Gore’s agenda
* Obama and Wall Street—“Change” means more bailouts and a heavy Goldman Sachs presence in the West Wing (including Rahm Emanuel)
* Stimulating K Street—The largest spending bill in history gave pork to the well-connected and created a feeding frenzy for lobbyists
* How the GOP needs to change its tune—drastically—to battle Obamanomics
Praise for Obamanomics
“The notion that ‘big business’ is on the side of the free market is one of progressivism’s most valuable myths. It allows them to demonize corporations by day and get in bed with them by night. Obamanomics is conservative muckraking at its best. It reveals how President Obama is exploiting the big business mythology to undermine the free market and stick it to entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. It’s an indispensable field guide to the Obama years.”
—Jonha Goldberg, LA Times columnist and best-selling author
“‘Every time government gets bigger, somebody’s getting rich.’ With this astute observation, Tim Carney begins his task of laying bare the Obama administration’s corporatist governing strategy, hidden behind the president’s populist veneer. This meticulously researched book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Washington really works.”
—David Freddoso, best-selling author of The Case Against Barack Obama
“Every libertarian and free-market conservative who still believes that large corporations are trusted allies in the battle for economic liberty needs to read this book, as does every well-meaning liberal who believes that expansions of the welfare-regulatory state are done to benefit the common people.”
—Congressman Ron Paul
“It’s understandable for critics to condemn President Obama for his ‘socialism.’ But as Tim Carney shows, the real situation is at once more subtle and more sinister. Obamanomics favors big business while disproportionately punishing everyone else. So-called progressives are too clueless to notice, as usual, which is why we have Tim Carney and this book.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Jr., best-selling author of Meltdown and The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to American History
*
• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Press (November 30, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596986123
• ISBN-13: 978-1596986121
Chuck Schumer Pushes Tax Cut for Richest 1% in Coronavirus Relief Bill
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
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
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 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).
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.
