June 30, 2017
Some Mid-Summer Thoughts About the Democratic Party
or
They Want Our $ & Our Votes, Not Our Minds and Full Engagement…
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Part One:
I recently attended an event for Democratic Gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous, a Bernie Sanders’ backer, in Friendsville, Garrett County. That county is the Western-most Maryland one, “Red” as they get, and I learned that Mike Dreisbach, co-owner of Savage River Lodge, an eco-tourism business, was chosen to oppose Annapolis Delegate Wendell Beitzel in District 1A. Beitzel is a Republican Right power broker who led the fight for fracking, a cause which was defeated in the legislature this spring, a nationwide first, which all Marylanders can be proud of. It’s not clear if Dreisbach’s “nomination” happened at the Western Maryland Democratic Summit held at Rocky Gap Resort on April 28-29, 2017, or through another process prior to that.
What I'm curious about, more than the choice, if this information is accurate, is the process, and indeed, the operating assumptions behind the Democratic Summit. I moved to Allegany County, to Frostburg, just East of Garrett County, in August of 2014, and one of my first civic tasks was to register to vote. I did so as a Democrat, my lifelong party since the 1972 Presidential Election. Despite voting in every major election since then, serving as a paid party canvasser in 2006 in Montgomery County, and in the home stretch of that election, co-managing a GOTV office in Takoma Park, and having attending the fraught “unity” fund-raiser on June 1, 2016, the Colbert-Lewis Dinner at the Ali Ghan Country Club, and therefore, one would think, placing myself on a contributors’ list, or some type of contact list, I've never received, by any means, notice of Democratic Party events in Western Maryland. One would have thought that signing the register for the big dinner might have triggered future party outreach. Apparently not.
So I’ve had to educate myself online about this annual Western Maryland Democratic Summit which has been “a happening” for more than a decade, though direct conversation about it has been eluding my ears. I find this very strange for a party whose vote totals in Garrett and Allegany Counties of Western Maryland, as in most of Red State rural America, shows it badly needs every voter it can attract.
I am not a tag-along registered voter. My writings about politics, the environment and the political economy go out to many prominent Democrats in our area, including our Congressman, and Senate staffers. They also now go to Democratic Party county chairpersons throughout Maryland as well as many elected Democrats in Annapolis. In our Presidential election this past November, I served as an Allegany County election "judge."
Back in January of 2008 I wrote an essay, a short book, really, called A Citizen’s Guide to the Missing Green Rail Vision (for the MD/Metro DC Region.) As best as I could judge then, (and since) no one had ever published a systematic analysis about what would be required to fill in the “missing green rail vision,” the extensions and interconnections that are necessary to make the system truly regional. And to reconnect the state capital, Annapolis, to the existing rail system, as it was in the 19th and early 20th century. Annapolis elected officials, and presumably Senate President Mike Miller, Maryland’s permanent governor, seem to want no part of that. The unspoken reason, it has been suggested to me, is that the powers that be of both parties don’t want to give the Baltimore poor any easy transit to lobby for their unmet needs.
My essay was therefore greeted in total silence by Democratic Party officials: they are still in defensive mode on the issue of mass transit today, bogged down in a micro-management mindset, an analysis of a decaying Metro system that is caught in the broader currents of Neoliberalism’s failed austerity politics, despite the greater DC area being surrounded by some of the most affluent suburbs in the nation, with many fortunes in real estate having been made, upper middle class property owners having prospering too by rising real estate values, even as vital transportation services continue to decay. May the ghost of Henry George rise up on those largely untaxed “unearned increments” of societal-generated wealth.
Even the individual pieces of an expansion – the Purple Line and Red Line – have run into hornets’ nests of local and fiscal opposition, but the deeper reality in the realm of American political ideology is that the Republican Right hates mass transit, as they do all large and expensive government initiatives, the current nightmare in Washington over healthcare being another prime instance. Is the decaying of the old Metro system, a project of the “Great Society” days of LBJ, anything more than a particular example of the neglect of American infrastructure at the hands of the Neoliberal mindset in both parties? That is a mindset that can’t think or fund big to meet its basic citizens’ needs: for jobs and health care and housing, much less to meet what one developer in the DC area once called the “moral imperative to get people out of cars” to combat global warming.
And yet our nation, to the tune of trillions of dollars, has committed itself, once again, to futile ventures overseas, in the Middle East, “projects” that have no end in sight and have become, unspoken to the American people, a continuation of the “Great Game” waged by imperial power Great Britain in the 19th century. I pay attention to what Larry Wilkerson and Andrew Bacevich have to say on foreign policy, but I don’t think they were on the speaker’s list I eventually found for the Democratic Summit, and I know they weren’t speakers or panelists at the Ideas Conference put on by the Center for American Progress on May 16th, the national “mirror” of the Western Maryland event.
Therefore, I guess I’m supposed to conclude that I must “wise up” and "get the message." Yet, maybe, I just don't like the message, the one of tiny increments of change, and the indirect one of omission and exclusion. The one I see being sent is that a registered Democrat has to chase down party operations and events. Their participation then...depends...on what, exactly? It would seem that the implicit philosophy is the opposite of voter "outreach." And as I've just learned from some further Googling, the charge to attend this Summit was $80.00 regular, and $35.00 for student tickets. Can that be right? It must be a printing error. I've never heard that mentioned about the Summit, in hearing only bits and fragments about previous ones, referenced just in passing mind you: nothing substantive. Conversations about Democratic Party doings “out here” are rare, so forgive me if I’m misconstruing something here. It’s like feeling one’s way through a dark house in a power outage, as we wait for a solar array that would power Frostburg and Frostburg State University independently of the broader grid.
Thomas Frank was correct in Listen Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? It seems to me that those ticket prices are right in keeping with the upper- middle class understandings that form the premises of the Democratic Party today, the one that has lost two-thirds of geographical America, as recorded in state house defeats across much of the country.
Thus the format and the price would seem to contradict the sentiments expressed by Delegate Bill Frick of District 16 in Montgomery County, who told reporter Greg Larry of the Cumberland Times-News that the party needed to reach out to the working class and he added that "'Those are the folks we fight for...But we need to reestablish that interpersonal connection. We need to make sure they understand we are out there advocating for them…I don't think the problem is the policies. I think our policies are aligned with the interests of the everyday working men and women of Allegany County. I think that the challenge is the branding and perception. The Democrats are the ones pushing to reduce the price of prescription drugs, and from getting ripped off by the Wells Fargo’s of the world not the Republicans. We need to get the messaging right. We need to get out there and shake hands and re-introduce as the party of the little guy.'"
Of course if the Western Maryland gathering were serious about that, they would have invited Thomas Frank to give one of the speeches, since he has spent hundreds of pages demonstrating that party members like Delegate Bill Frick have gotten the story upside down: the history of the Clinton led Democrats ever since Jimmy Carter being the opposite message: not legislatively easing labor’s right to organize, not significantly increasing the minimum wage, not promoting a national industrial policy and making sure other voices were heard on our “China policy” besides “American multinationals,” if that term hasn’t become too much of an oxymoron for businesses which have broken with their nation state moorings.
The AFL-CIO, which ought to be the angriest of all of working people’s ostensible champions, has become so ensnared under the Neoliberal Democratic spell that they don’t even deliver their own Labor Day messages any more. They have produced no modern day Eugene Debs, or even Walter Reuthers, Douglas Frasers, or William Winpisingers. There has been mass incarceration for racial minorities but President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder kept Wall Street out of jail. And instead of FDR's Second Bill of Rights Quantitative Easing was the course served for the recovery of the investor class.
Candidate Clinton said Senator Sanders’ policy proposals were Utopian and unaffordable, famously backed up by Democratic leaning centrist economists in the New York Times, (here at: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/23/1489977/-Citizens-If-James-Galbraith-and-Bill-Black-don-t-have-any-standing-where-does-that-leave-you ) which wouldn’t print James Galbraith’s rebuttal. Yet where was the discussion of the mechanism (and the authority) – electronic keystrokes by the Federal Reserve – which let trillions of dollars flow to troubled banks, here and abroad, and other corporations, during and after the Great Financial Crisis? No such “public” largesse was available for drug plagued rural America, our urban ghettos, or millions of evicted homeowners on the chopping block, the end result of the decades of financial creativity on Wall Street. No relief for the working class – and much of the middle class. I refer interested parties to L. Randall Wray’s fuller explanation of these matters in his important book, Modern Monetary Theory (2012).
And, it almost goes without saying, Nature got no “moral equivalent of war,” a World War II type mobilization that would fight global warming – and provide full employment.
And if Delegate Frick is correct, then why could I find no vision for an economic alternative to jobs via fracking for natural gas in Western Maryland, where Senate President Mike Miller was “all in” for fracking, which he said constituted the only economic opportunity on the horizon for the region? That was a clear example of Democrats having no vision for a different American economy. Given the power and institutional longevity of Senator Miller, that’s a shocking realization.
No wonder, then, that the reporter who wrote about the “closed” Western Maryland Democratic Summit tagged the event in the opening lines of his article by called it a meeting of the Democratic “elite.” That reporter does write for a very conservative paper, but in this case, until I get better evidence of how the event is put together, he was closer to the mark than the Delegate from District 16 in Montgomery County was.
And Frick’s comments took me back to the devastating, and true, insight from Nicholas Lemann’s review of the latest books about Bill Clinton, which appeared in the June 8 edition of the New York Review of Books, under the title “What Happened to Clintonism?” – and this from a writer who thought Clinton expressed the best of what was possible in the 1990’s:
Clinton as ex-president has become a highly visible participant in a distinctive subculture that globalization has created, one in which the focus of liberalism has moved from the state to philanthropy by billionaires, and from the nearby working class to the faraway very poor. That has made him into the kind of foil that Trumpism feeds on. The question about him now is whether he can shed his liabilities sufficiently to offer real help, at a moment of dire need, to the party which he has devoted his life.
Well, I’m not holding my breath for a late Bill Clinton conversion. In one very real sense, though, Delegate Frick is correct: the party, via the Clinton’s policies on trade agreements and free flows of capital, did benefit the working class. The problem is, it was mostly the working class in China, where tens of millions of rural peasants left agrarian life for assembly line life in the cities, and their standard of living rose, at least in some common measures of material improvement.
For most of the American working class, they haven’t been grateful to the Democratic Party for a long time, for decades in fact. I did sense something major was amiss, and feeling ominous for the nation: that’s why I called for a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Working Class, to hear out their grievances, here in October of 2015: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/2/1427190/-Dear-Bernie-We-Need-a-National-Truth-Commission-on-what-happened-to-the-Working-Class . Yet in a revealing commentary on progressive “fragmentation,” this idea couldn’t win a hearing even inside the “rank and file” of The Nation magazine. Explaining why will be the focus of some future writings.
I think, for now, the public opinion polls have answered that question, fragile as they are in capturing the shifting Zeitgeist: Bernie Sanders has the highest standing and trust level of any American politician. And some, but not all, of the policy answers.
Is this any way to run a party? For those of us who didn’t get notice of the Western Summit, or couldn’t afford the prices, can we get transcripts or videos of the proceedings? So far, the most comprehensive reporting I’ve read comes from a Republican blogger, Ryan Miner (here https://aminerdetail.com/category/western-maryland/) Contrast these obstacles to the ready, almost instant availability of the proceedings of the People’s Summit held in Chicago, June 9-11th.
Part II
One of dilemmas for Democrats in Red State regions is what kind of candidates to run. Obviously, it should be someone not completely at odds with the cultural mores of the district. But what about the content and the message, as opposed to cultural "body language"?
I read with horror the details of the campaign Jon Ossoff ran in Georgia and asked myself, thinking back to the way the Republican Right started out with Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964: don't patience and fidelity to a clear set of ideas, especially about the political economy, pay off in the long run? (Setting aside for now the awful content of the Republican Right’s ideas.) Based on what I've read about Ossoff, observers couldn't figure out what he stood for except being contra-Trump. Yet I also learned “fiscal conservatism” was a good part of his message. We call it Neoliberal Austerity over on the left and Mark Blyth wrote the book about it, “The History of a Dangerous Idea: Austerity, in 2013, the most passionate book about economics I’ve read since Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Passionate without jettisoning tight reasoning and a lot of evidence for his conclusions. (Readers who would like to have a “Syllabus for a New Political Economy,” a list of the 25 or so books I think would help Democrats construct an economy to serve all our citizens, just send me an Email and I’ll zip it out to you. A one pager.
Of course that's what missing in Western Maryland: any public debates about what Democrats would do differently about the economy, aside from continuing President Obama's course. The reality is accepting some early losses knowing that the only way to change the foundational ideas that a failing system is built upon is to put new, clear ones on the table. The Federal Reserve policy (called Quantitative Easing) has been great for the upper middle class and the one percent (another debate is what the next 19% is all about, and Thomas Frank has some thoughts on that) , but not for the bottom 60%. This isn’t just an American problem. Globalized financial capitalism is failing here and it's failing in Western Europe too. The world's surplus capital, in the hands of the 1-20%, is not being invested wisely on behalf of the broad citizenry. Delegate Bill Frick may think it's clear where the current Democratic Party stands in relation to the working class, but the Clinton history and Obama's too, demonstrate the classic centrist two-step: feint left and govern from the center-right. Such governance – largely deferring to markets - has left the fate of two-thirds of our citizens in the hands of market forces, which are neglecting them. Badly.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the world’s leading financial journalist, dropped me a note this winter in response to one of my Email postings. He’s been on my mailing list for a long time, and that was the first time I ever heard from him. He has gotten the message, how dangerous the situation has become in the West, although we likely don’t fully agree on the solutions. I mention this exchange, a private highlight of my “career” as a writer, such as it is, to stand in contrast to all the Democrats, like Senate President Mike Miller, whom I’ve never heard from. Strange, don’t you think?
The dangers of our historical moment, especially the election of Donald Trump, have alarmed other cautious people close to the centers of power as well. For example, even at, of all places, the Clinton's think tank, the Center for American Progress. That organization broke with 30 years of Neoliberal labor market policy to propose a scaled down, modest jobs guarantee program for those without college degrees, modeled on the Marshall Plan of the late 1940’s and the WPA from the New Deal (remember that?) . Here's what they sent out at 2:30 AM the night before: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2017/05/16/432499/toward-marshall-plan-america/
I was so startled by the language, which might have come out of my own essay on the rise of Trump (here at http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue79/Neil79.pdf) that my hopes soared that the idea might spread: the “taboo” forbidding intervention into labor markets on behalf of workers had been broken…
But alas, this positive development seems now more a sign of desperation than the signal of a major break with Neoliberalism and a new direction for the party. The party participants at the “Ideas” Conference on May 16th (also not open to the public) couldn't have cared less. Despite the pre-conference mailing on the “Marshall Plan for the working class” (well, a part of it, at least) there was no sustained engagement with the speakers on the idea, a jobs guarantee. It’s a complex idea that many have been working on for decades, and good things that might come from it will still take a lot of hard work, clarification of means and ends, and much public education. Instead of that from the party stalwarts, we got the traditional micro-policy favorites and more obsessing over the big, bad Russian Bear. Nothing about the Chinese Dragon who just a few years ago was accused of hacking many, and by some, all major corporations and most sensitive U.S. government agencies. See here, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/10/chinese-national-security-officials-hack and here: http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/13/technology/security/chinese-hack-us/index.html
Therefore, we need a new direction for the Democratic Party. That’s what Senator Bernie Sanders has come to understand here in his speech at the People’s Summit in Cleveland in June: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0KiVubDr8
Sanders says, bluntly, that the Democratic Party is a failed party.
In that spirit, I ask once again: are there publicly available transcripts or tapes of the meetings, panels, discussions at the party Summit held at Rocky Gap? Or is secrecy and exclusion of even party members - as in the Georgetown "Ideas" conference - now implicit party policy? At least the Center for American Progress immediately posted a large number of the speeches and panel discussions, here: https://www.americanprogress.org/events/2017/03/01/427110/the-2017-ideas-conference/
For those who think the Democratic Party, and/or the progressive “movements” which contribute most of its activists, its “rank and file,” will have an easy time shifting gears, to come up with a unifying progressive platform, I ask you to visit the video of the young activists on the “Resistance Panel,” and watch how they walk away from the “rediscover” the white working class direction and progressive economic ideas in particular. Here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLjma-vOxQ
To be clear, I think that most of the American working class, outside of full time union officials, wouldn’t be able to afford participation in either of these two events, Georgetown and Western Maryland; and please note that the policy people who have worked on the jobs guarantee policy, FDR's Second Bill of Rights, a new CCC and WPA, for more than a decade, also were not invited.
To the presenters at the conferences, and all Maryland Democrats, I recommend Nancy Fraser’s provocative, yet illuminating essay on where the party has been for the past 30 years: “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser I say provocative because she has said, in more than one speech, that there is nothing inherently “progressive” about feminism. She can’t say that, can she? What in the world does she mean by that? That feminism has been able to get along quite well with vast overall economic inequality under Neoliberalism?
Now I don’t expect the Democratic Party to be exclusively about economic policy, but given the election and the economic realities for most of us, that has to be the core premise, the key building blocks of a better foundation, for a new New Deal based on the Second Bill of Rights from 1944. FDR said those rights were the material basis for the “right to live,” which I would slightly amend to a progressive version of, rejoinder to, the “right to life,” another way of saying that “necessitous men are not free men.” And that there are ethical, spiritual and religious dimensions to how we treat individuals – after they’ve left a woman’s womb.
And the new party premises would be universals which apply to all parts of the fragmented movements which make up the “blocks” of the current Democratic Party, many of which threaten to launch us into the riptides and cross currents of identity politics. For example, and not to shy away from controversy: which offers the most direct help to the most black citizens, and outreach to white rural America at the same time, the right to a job via a new CCC and WPA, and a broader “jobs guarantee program,” or the call for Black Reparations? I have no trouble making the excellent moral case for those reparations, but I also know from many decades in American political life that such a call can never be limited to just black citizens: it will launch, if not catapult, fresh Native American demands, Irish demands (for their treatment before the Civil War), women’s demands for their historical unpaid work caring for us all, the shameful treatment of early Chinese immigrants…Reparations will fuel a white “ backlash” that will make the one against Civil Rights and LBJ, and Van Jones’ “whitelash” against President Obama” - look mild by comparison. (At the same time, as mass incarceration and the many black dead at the hands of law enforcement continually demonstrate, and juries’ unwillingness to charge those responsible, not all black oppression issues are economic: clearly recognized.)
So here’s a proposed line-up for a debate the Democratic Party in Maryland needs to have: how about a panel to consider Black Reparations vs the Second Bill of Rights, consisting of Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, DeRay McKesson, John F. Pfaff and James Forman Jr. The last two names surfaced as the authors of books, and in a review of them by David Cole of the ACLU, which appeared in the June 22 issue of the New York Review of Books entitled “The Truth About Our Prison Crisis,” which in good part challenges the main arguments put forth by Ms. Alexander about the causes of our “New Jim Crow” legal and law enforcement system in her famous book from 2010. And let me add someone to address the white working class, especially in rural America: Professor Shannon Monnat of Penn State, who, way back in December of 2016 wrote “Deaths of Despair And Support for Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” here at http://aese.psu.edu/directory/smm67/Election16.pdf I’m wondering why I’ve never heard it mentioned “ out here” in the post- election discussions, and outpouring s over the drug problems? It deserves a wide reading.
“Universal Rights”: that’s the message that needs to be heard in Western Maryland, as well as in much of the rest of Red State America. And the content of the programs that would flow out of that Second Bill of Rights, just to reassure the de-centralizing “local”greens of Western Maryland, who were the force behind banning fracking legislatively this Spring, and other creative economic ventures out here; these programs can be as local and green as can be designed in the open public forums that ought to propose them: locally conceived, federally funded, although we need to get a state pilot program up and running to be ready when such programs, out of economic and ecological restorative necessities, and emergencies, have to scale up in a hurry.
There is no shortage of work that needs to be in America today, work that isn’t getting done, despite the fact that we’re short about 20 million jobs. Back in the 1930’s, one of FDR’s first programs during the famous first 100 days was the Civilian Conservation Corps. Among the many good things those young men accomplished, besides building from scratch several of our fine Western Maryland State Parks, like New Germany, was to plant millions of trees, mostly for wind and soil erosion control. Today, a new CCC will be much more diverse than just young men, and the task will require more sophisticated training: for planting today ought to include multiple objectives: to remove greenhouse gasses and fix nutrients into the soil, to fight pollution and erosion and heat islands, and also to at the same time to supply future food and fiber and building materials…it can be done; fighting global warming isn’t all about just the power sources and electric grid, it’s about what we plant and how we treat the soil. That’s according to a new organization pushing this direction: https://bio4climate.org/ And let me once again call upon the University of Maryland scientists: time to step up and get involved, put some of your research findings into the design of the work that our people and environment need. We need many more Herman E. Daly’s.
And no, Ben Jealous, John Delaney and Tom Perez, a scaled up “apprentice” programs from the traditional building trades and woven into new high school programs won’t accomplish the same thing, will fall far short of the need: if the economy was in as good shape as Mrs. Clinton and President Obama have said it was, then why wouldn’t these ancient economic pathways for carpenters, electricians, plumbers, heavy equipment operators, and so forth, been expanding on their own due to increased “market demand” aided and funded by the businesses who say they can’t find enough people with the right skills? And the opportunities provided by tending to our neglected infrastructure, as James Galbraith has written (see https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/trump-deliver-growth-jobs-infrastructure-james-k-galbraith ), while it might help these old AFL crafts, is not going to reach all those who struggle with criminal records upon release, the “castaways” from Mass Incarceration, and the millions stigmatized with records of drug abuse, (the modern day “unemployability” equivalent of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter) and inadequate incomes for the able elderly barely getting by on Social Security, which has been stiffed for increases for how many years running now? L. Randall Wray and Stephanie Kelton are economists who think we are about 20 million jobs short of where we should be in pre-Great Financial Crisis projections, with those projections lowered to make the dismal performance less obvious. Here at: http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/full-employment-are-we-there-yet
The heart breaking aspect to contemporary thinking about the political economy, aside from the near invisibility of significant dissent over the past 30 years of Neoliberalism, is that even a near catastrophe like the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 could not break through the conceptual dams preventing direct job creation by the public sector. That’s why I thought it was significant when the Center for American Progress put their toe in the water of a limited jobs guarantee, which turned out to be a “False Dawn.” Only in the Great Depression – the complete collapse of capitalism - did we get to a CCC and WPA, and eventually, out of the experience of Depression and World War, to the Second Bill of Rights in 1944. Today we have the daunting, incongruous landscape of the top 20% “thriving,” and the bottom 60% stagnating – and much worse: descending or lapsing into alcohol and drug abuse, and middle aged suicides. So the real question is when the mainstream Democrats finally realize that the private sector alone is not going to deliver the goods of full employment, combat global warming, or provide alternatives to the cycles of mass incarceration and the dangerous employments of the underground economy, which have in other lands, via the drug cartels, produced failed states, and what they are going to put forth as an alternative.
From what I project from the works of Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016), Satyajit Das (The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth is Unattainable and the Global economy is in Peril, 2016), and of course, Thomas Piketty ( Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) the structural problems are deeper, and global, rooted in the harsh patterns of globalizing Neoliberal capitalism, and millions here in the US and Western Europe are waking up to the fact that this system is vastly indifferent to their fate, to the fact that they have become eminently “disposable.”
Given these slow dawning realities, this is a hell of a way to run a party in a democracy, and in a society - “on the brink.”
Sincerely,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD