Alternatively, Democrats could give midterm voters something to believe in

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Friday March 21, 2014 · 2:04 PM PDT

2014/03/21 · 14:04

President Obama, on Democratic difficulties in midterm elections:

President Obama complained Thursday that Democrats “get clobbered” in midterm elections, blaming a “toxic” atmosphere in Washington for suppressing key Democratic constituencies.
“The challenge is that our politics in Washington have become so toxic that people just lose faith,” Obama told a group of top Democratic donors gathered at the home of former Miami Heat star Alonzo Mourning. “They say, ‘Y’know what, it doesn’t matter, I’m not that interested, I’m not gonna vote.’ And that’s especially true during the midterms.”

Obama noted that young, female, black and Hispanic voters were more likely to vote in elections with a presidential contest.
“Suddenly a more representative cross section of America gets out there, and we do pretty well in presidential elections,” Obama said.

“But in midterms, we get clobbered, either because we don’t think it’s important or because we get so discouraged about what’s happening in Washington that we think it’s not worth our while. And the reason today is so important, and the reason that I’m so appreciative for all of you being here is because we’re going to have to get over that. This is a top priority.”

It's not that he's exactly wrong. He isn't. But he's missing the point. Read More

Dear Third Way: Economic Populism Works. Especially in tough districts.

thereisnospoon

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Thursday March 20, 2014 · 6:27 AM PDT

2014/03/20 · 06:27

Markos Moulitsas and the execrable Third Way are in a minor media tussle at the moment. Markos correctly pointed out that in both the House and Senate, the Democratic caucus has shifted significantly to the left over the last 10 years with the defeats of many conservative Democrats. The usual Third Way flacks Bennett and Kessler were given a megaphone to respond in Politico magazine that those conservative Democrats usually lost seats not to progressives, but to Republicans.

It's a fair point, but Markos has far the better of the argument. The issue is clouded by the specter of the 2010 redistricting and subsequent GOP gerrymandering, which made many House seats held by conservative Democrats unwinnable for either Blue Dogs or progressives. Bennett and Kessler would have readers believe that only an embrace of conservative Democrats and their policies will enable the Party to take the House back from Republicans.

thereisnospoon

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Sunday March 02, 2014 · 11:00 AM PST

2014/03/02 · 11:00

Adolph Reed has made a recent splash with his essay in Harper's Magazine and subsequent interview with Bill Moyers. His thesis essentially states that the Left spends too much of its time attempting to elect politicians that we believe will solve our problems, when in fact those politicians often betray us--in part because we have no solid liberal movement to hold them accountable.

That's not a new message, of course, but its blunt restatement is causing some consternation among a certain set of comfortable center-left types who either don't believe that a return to a pre-1980s liberal ethic would be a good thing, or that the intransigence of Republicans and the rightward shift of the country over the last few decades renders anyone to the left of President Obama an irrelevant afterthought in American politics.

It's hard not to sympathize with those working in the trenches against hardline conservative opposition every day, growing frustrated with what they consider to be progressive magical thinking. Those of us working in the everyday knife battle for the next electoral and news cycle know that it's sometimes frustrating to hear people argue for a more robust liberalism when the fight just for a $15 minimum wage looks like a monumental, 10-year struggle.

But that view loses sight of how we got here in the first place. There's a reason the country is in place where a $15 minimum wage seems like a nearly impossible fight, and the Left broadly speaking shares in the blame for our predicament. If we ever want a country that operates on different ideological footing, we won't just need to defeat the conservative opposition. We need to change our own tactics--and our own ideas.

thereisnospoon

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Wednesday February 19, 2014 · 2:54 PM PST

2014/02/19 · 14:54

Now that Comcast is apparently going to be merging with Time Warner, net neutrality is dead, and vertical integration is all the rage, it's worth remembering the glorious benefit Americans are getting from all this free market magic:

More below the squiggle...

thereisnospoon

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Monday February 10, 2014 · 1:43 PM PST

2014/02/10 · 13:43

Republicans are very upset that people who are working just to hold onto health insurance might be willing to quit the labor force because the Affordable Care Act will allow them to. The notion that someone might devote their time to writing poetry instead of droning away at some awful job just to cover an insurance CEO's yacht fee positively incenses them:

thereisnospoon

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Saturday February 01, 2014 · 10:50 AM PST

2014/02/01 · 10:50

One of the frustrations of being a climate activist is that far too many people simply do not understand the stakes. Climate issues are often forced through an "environmentalist" lens, wherein issues that should rightly be discussed as a matter of planetary survival are instead talked about as a matter of public health. So the Keystone pipeline becomes about potential spills and wildlife impacts. Fracking becomes about earthquakes and groundwater pollution.

That's a frustrating tragedy. Let's be very clear: if the human race continues to burn fossil fuels for the next 30 years at the rate we've been burning them up to now, our species (as well as most other species on the planet) may not survive. Most people either cannot emotionally grasp that statement, or refuse to believe it's true. But it's true.

If all of the oil in the Canadian tar sands is extracted and burnt, it's game over for the planet. That's what the fight over Keystone XL is really about. If all of the oil in the California shale is extracted and burnt, it's game over for the planet. That's what the fight over fracking is really about. Industrial spills, toxic leeching, groundwater pollution--none of it will matter. If tens of millions of Americans die early of cancer because of the toxins involved, that would still be a molehill compared to the mountain that is climate change.

Human beings are empathetic creatures. We have a hard time with large patterns and dissociated effects. It's much easier to care about kids getting poisoned by toxic ground water. But as long as the arguments are all about toxicity, they get scuttled into an "environmentalist" wastebasket, drowned out by the lure of corporate profits and increased tax revenues.

The fight isn't about whether one or two generations of Americans get cancer early or not. The fight is about the very survival of life on Earth as we know it.

(More below the squiggle...)

thereisnospoon

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Wednesday January 08, 2014 · 10:44 PM PST

2014/01/08 · 22:44

One of the biggest differences between a neoliberal and a progressive is whether they talk about our current economic difficulty as a somewhat-larger-than-normal downturn that will soon correct itself, or a fundamental shift in the realities of 21st century economics.

That word "reality" tends to come up frequently in these discussions, as progressives tend to point to a world that no longer functions well by the norms of 20th century industrial capitalism, while conservatives and centrists try to promote business more or less as usual. Apropos of that reality, here's Krugman:

But that was a long time ago. These days crime is way down, so is teenage pregnancy, and so on; society did not collapse. What collapsed instead is economic opportunity. If progress against poverty has been disappointing over the past half century, the reason is not the decline of the family but the rise of extreme inequality. We’re a much richer nation than we were in 1964, but little if any of that increased wealth has trickled down to workers in the bottom half of the income distribution.
The trouble is that the American right is still living in the 1970s, or actually a Reaganite fantasy of the 1970s; its notion of an anti-poverty agenda is still all about getting those layabouts to go to work and stop living off welfare. The reality that lower-end jobs, even if you can get one, don’t pay enough to lift you out of poverty just hasn’t sunk in. And the idea of helping the poor by actually helping them remains anathema.

Will it ever be possible to move this debate away from welfare queens and all that? I don’t know. But for now, the key to understanding poverty arguments is that the main cause of persistent poverty now is high inequality of market income — but that the right can’t bring itself to acknowledge that reality.

That sounds familiar. Here's what I wrote yesterday about Frank Luntz' supposed meltdown: Read More

More goodies for the asset class

thereisnospoon

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Thursday December 19, 2013 · 1:30 PM PST

2013/12/19 · 13:30

Danny Vinik notes in Business Insider that most federal housing subsidies are going to those with household incomes over $100K, while a whopping $34 billion in subsidies are going to household over $200K. Needless to say, households making over $200K are in the top 5% of incomes nationally.

Here is the chart:

This is madness on so many levels. First, of course, is the fact that the aid should be going to those who are most in need, not those least in need. It's true that $100K household doesn't go very far in the highest-cost-of-living areas, but the overwhelming majority of people even in those areas make far less than $100K household and still need to put a roof over their heads. Renters in particular are getting hosed in this economy.

But second, the country needs to be rethinking the very idea of housing subsidies. It's going to be painful process to roll back 30-40 years of outrageously stupid economic policy, but it must be done.

thereisnospoon

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Sunday December 15, 2013 · 10:56 AM PST

2013/12/15 · 10:56

Joe Scarborough, speaking at the Reagan Library:

“We’ve got to make sure that we nominate a candidate like Reagan who believes that freedom and less taxes and less regulations and more opportunity are just as relevant to an 18-year-old Latino starting his career in South Central Los Angeles as it is a 65-year-old hedge funder in Greenwich, Conn.,” he said.

That sounds nice in theory, but one has to ask what messages he's talking about that are supposed to appeal to an 18-year-old Latino from South Central. Let's imagine some of these hypothetical conversations:

"You don't need Medicaid or Obamacare subsidies, you lazy moocher. Get a health savings account with all that money you're not saving!"

Not likely to work.

"The reason your relatives can't get ahead isn't that there's endemic racism and exploitation of service workers. They're just lazy parasites! But if you go into a lot debt and major as an engineer, intern for a few years then take an awful job somewhere, maybe you can be out of debt by 40, if you don't have kids too early!"

That's not too appealing.

(More below the squiggle...)

thereisnospoon

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Thursday December 12, 2013 · 2:22 PM PST

2013/12/12 · 14:22

There's a growing political phenomenon out there of Democrats saying nice things about the economy because unemployment seems to be going down somewhat. That's a big mistake.

Americans who aren't part of the economic elite and the asset class can see and feel that the economy is still terrible. The official unemployment rate may be decreasing, but it doesn't feel that way to most--either because the unemployment rate isn't being measured like it used to, or simply because underemployment is so prevalent that it barely matters if you're making $30,000 a year at a service job if you used to make $70,000 a year at a skilled one that no longer exists. You may be "employed" per the official records, but the economy isn't going to feel any better to you.

thereisnospoon

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Tuesday December 10, 2013 · 9:43 PM PST

2013/12/10 · 21:43

Conservative hack Glenn Reynolds has a column in USA Today in which he attacks the President's focus on income inequality, with the usual bleating about government dependency and what not. Mickey Kaus agrees.

Reynolds' main thrust is that the nation should be more focused on fixing unemployment than on fixing income inequality. Now, the obvious progressive case can be made that we could have full employment rather quickly if we were willing to let corporations pay people $3 an hour, then watch then starve on the street despite being employed full-time in the service of their wealthy paymasters.

But let's ignore that argument for a moment. After all, Reynolds is right that human beings do crave the dignity of work to a certain extent and that too much idleness can breed social malaise. Fair point. More than that, unemployment represents at a certain level a waste of human potential (assuming that we count homemakers as employed, which is an important digression but not what I want to focus on at the moment.)

If Reynolds and his conservative brethren really want to emphasize work over welfare, then a government jobs program should be right up their alley. Lack of productivity is eliminated, as is any potential social malaise. A government jobs program would help distressed communities and wealthy communities alike, and reduce income inequality as a side benefit, particularly if the wealthy and corporations provide more in tax revenue-which they can certainly afford to do given record profits, stock markets, and inequality figures.

thereisnospoon

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Monday November 18, 2013 · 12:18 PM PST

2013/11/18 · 12:18

I've written often before about how much of the war between the American left and right is essentially the building of sand castles in the face of the oncoming tide of globalization, deskilling and mechanization of the workforce accompanied by catastrophic climate change. Much of what constitutes public policy battles in this country are fought between the one-percenters simply trying to loot what's left before it all crashes and burns, and neoliberals desperately trying to pump up asset prices and force everyone into engineering programs to disguise the destruction the of the regular wage economy. The far right and progressive left, meanwhile, are each trying to bring back the social and economic norms of the 1950s and late 1960s, respectively, in efforts of utter futility.

It's rare to find columnists who are asking themselves the right questions. It's rarer still to find ones who have the right answers. But it's when conservatives and libertarians ask the right questions and come up with their honest responses that we see the crippling danger of allowing them anywhere near the levers of power. Consider the example of Tyler Cowen, conservative/libertarian economist and pundit, writing in POLITICO Magazine, celebrating a future in which a few technically skilled "economic winners" in cities will lord it over a mass of rubes left behind in an era of mass mechanization:

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Alternatively, Democrats could give midterm voters something to believe in

Dear Third Way: Economic Populism Works. Especially in tough districts.

The Left doesn't just need better tactics. It needs a return to better ideas.

Americans: we love paying more for less

Republicans do not understand what it means to be human

The survival of the human race depends on fate of KeystoneXL and fracking

The Right can't handle the reality of the 21st century economy

More goodies for the asset class

Republican answers for a young urban Latino

Democrats shouldn't be crowing about the unemployment rate

The choices conservatives face on inequality

The glorious, dystopian future envisioned by our libertarian masters