Bernie blasts Wall Street donations, while Hillary claims that their big money is harmless

By Roger Bybee

Milwaukee, Wis.

Coming off his smashing 60%-38% victory in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders delighted his supporters by ripping into “the rigged economy and the corrupt campaign finance system that supports it” in Thursday night’s debate with Hillary Clinton at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In broad strokes, Sanders effectively laid out his fundamental appeal to America. “The American people bailed out wall Street, and it’s now time for Wall Street to help the American people,” he thundered.

But Clinton pulled off one of her most skillful debate performance thus far, pumped up by an audience of 700 that appeared to contain far more administrators and professors than students, who have been captivated by Sanders’ campaign. She artfully peppered her remarks with specific references to Wisconsin issues and villains like Gov. Scott Walker, and kept up her familiar theme that she alone is capable of actually delivering real change rather than merely outlining grand reforms.

Still, Sanders managed to drive home his basic message by launching big punches. He called for reining in Wall Street, generating millions of jobs via rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, opening up opportunities through making public universities free, and creating a cost-efficient, genuinely universal healthcare system.

But Sanders reminded his listeners that none of this is possible without exciting people who have given up on the political system and feel that voting and other action is futile.  “As president, I can’t succeed in making these changes, no one person can make these changes, without the involvement of people who now feel left out of a system dominated by billionaires. We need a political revolution.”

Meanwhile, Clinton acted like a boxer trying to tie up a stronger opponent by clinching herself for much of the debate to many of his progressive policy aims.  At a number of moments, Clinton seemingly attempted to merge her identity with President Obama in order to jab Sanders by equating his criticisms of her positions with vicious attacks on the president.

For example, Clinton turned a question about foreign-policy leadership into a diatribe on Sanders’ departures from Obama’s positions, which emerged on issues like healthcare reform that retains big insurers in command and “free trade” agreements that foster offshoring of jobs.

In an apparent attempt to land a knockout punch, Clinton denounced Sanders for making “the kind of criticisms of the president that I expect to hear from Republicans.”

Sanders retorted, “That is a low blow. I worked with him closely for seven years. He’s responsible for enormous progress over the time when he came into office, with America losing 800,000 jobs a month.

Sanders then admonished Clinton, “In our country, as a senator, I have the right to disagree. I have voiced criticisms of him when I differed, as I’m sure you have.”

Sanders topped off his counterattack by reminding Clinton, “I’m the only person on this stage who did not run against Barack Obama,” referring to Clinton’s highly contentious campaign in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Among other issues where they clashed, Sanders and Clinton differed clearly on financial reform. Clinton insisted that the Dodd-Frank bill adequately safeguards us from another Wall Street collapse. Sanders responded “I voted for Dodd-Frank, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.” 

“Three of the four biggest banks are now bigger, six banks have assets equivalent to 58% of our GNP, and they issue two-thirds of all credit cards,” he said. “If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would be calling for breaking up the big banks.”

Clinton defended her considerable campaign contributions from Wall Street by once again linking herself to President Obama, claiming that he raised considerable funding from Wall Street without it affecting his administration.  

Clinton’s version of history conveniently erases the central roles granted by the Obama Administration to big-time Wall Street players like Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, and Steven Rattner. Summers and Geithner’s pro-banker tilt helped to produce the failure of programs to halt the tide of home foreclosures.  The Rattner-led bailout of GM and Chrysler, which imposed virtually no conditions on job creation in the US, substantially increased offshoring of auto-industry jobs.

Sanders sharply contested Clinton’s claim of a benign effect from Wall Street contributions: "Let's not insult the intelligence of the American people. Why in God's name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess for the fun of it — they just want to throw money around."

Clinton had perhaps her best moment of the night in her closing statement, where she vividly outlined the numerous dimensions on which Americans feel deprived of power and their dignity.  “We need to address of the poisoning of our water like in Flint, the miners left behind in coal country, the institutional racism, the sexism that women face, and people in the LGBT community who may get married on Saturday and fired on Monday. “

She even launched into a defense of labor that resonated strongly, declaring,” Here in Wisconsin, we have to stand for unions under attack from ideologues and demagogues like Scott Walker who are taking away bargaining rights and destroying the middle class.”

In an obvious swipe at Sanders’ stress on the effects of economic inequality, Clinton sniffed, “I am not a one-issue candidate. This is not a one-issue nation.”

Following the debate, Sanders supporter Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, dismissed Clinton’s suggestion that Sanders has somehow treated issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia too lightly.  Suggesting that Clinton was a late-comer in her willingness to portray inequalities in the strongly progressive terms, Turner responded, “Bernie’s been strong on all of these issues for years. He was progressive before progressive was cool.”

While Sanders’ performance in the Milwaukee debate was strong, it also revealed some areas where he could refine his approach to Clinton.

CLARITY ON REAL HEALTHCARE REFORM: Once more, as she has in past debates, Clinton suggested that Sanders’ “Medicare for All” proposal would somehow endanger the gains won through Obama’s Affordable Care Act. With stunning complacency about the spread of high-deductible health plans,  pervasive “unaffordable underinsurance,” and tens of millions still without any insurance, Clinton insisted,  "The last thing we need to do is throw our country into a contentious debate over health care.”

Clinton even argued incorrectly that Obama’s healthcare reform has provided healthcare to 90% of all Americans, when in fact 29 millon remain uninsured. Clinton called for retaining the central role of profit-driven insurance companies in healthcare, insisting that private insurance was part of America’s approach to healthcare.  In reality, private for-profit insurers consume about one-third of all healthcare spending.

While Sanders forcefully made the case for “healthcare as a right for all Americans,” he seemingly failed to explain clearly and concisely exactly how Medicare for All would substitute small monthly taxes in place of the much larger premiums and co-pays now afflicting America’s working families. Despite his long advocacy for single-payer healthcare and his deep familiarity with it, he still has not quite discovered how to lay out his plan in concise and comprehensible terms. 

TALKING ABOUT WISCONSIN: With his strong ties to the Wisconsin Left, why did Sanders fail to make any specific references to state issues?

In contrast, Clinton—much less steeped in state activism-- made several powerful connections to Wisconsin level concerns as with the police killing of an unarmed African-American man, the nation-leading rate of black incarceration, and who even denounced Walker’s union-busting. 

Bernie Sanders has been meeting with labor and progressive leaders in Wisconsin since 1995. Over the last dozen years, he has spoken at almost every day-long “Fighting Bob” gathering of thousands of Wisconsin progressives, named after Wisconsin’s feisty Progressive Gov. Robert LaFollette who won the passage of numerous reforms benefitting workers, small farmers, and the democratic process. In the bitterly-cold days of early 2011, Sanders traveled to Wisconsin to excoriate Gov. Scott Walker for his legislation to revoke essential union-representation rights to almost all public employees.

Further, with the debate set in Milwaukee, Sanders had a good chance to reinforce the legitimacy of democratic socialism based on the city’s almost continuous line of democratic socialist mayors from 1910 to 1960, with the late Frank Zeidler remaining a beloved figure and Congressman Victor Berger, a particular personal favorite of Sanders, remembered for his courageous stance against WWI.

Yet it was Clinton who frequently discussed Wisconsin issues in a lively way.

A RELEVANT CONTEXT FOR KISSINGER DISCUSSION:  To most effectively explain to youthful audiences the significance of both Hillary and Bill Clinton boasting of her relationship with Henry Kissinger, widely despised as a war criminal in progressive and Democratic circles in the 1970’s and 1980’safter his conduct as secretary of state under Richard Nixon.

But to reach a younger audience, Sanders needs to find a much more up-to-date reference. For example, he might consider framing the point by describing Kissinger as the “Dick Cheney of his time.” 

Older progressives have an indelible memory of Kissinger’s place in history, recalling his scorched-earth policy in the Vietnam War and the invasion of Cambodia, his coordination of a US-led a coup against the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970, his secret approval of dictators’ Operation Condor death squad operation in southern Latin America, and his signaling of US government’s backing for Indonesia’s takeover of East Timor. Further, in the 1980’s, Kissinger served as a paid consultant for the repressive Chinese dictatorship, and late pushed for congressional approval of the Permanent Normalization of Trade with China which open the floodgates for a massive outflow of US manufacturing jobs to China.

However, given the frequent adulation of Kissinger as an elder statesman in the mainstream media, few young people will catch the full significance of Hillary Clinton’s ties to the reviled Kissinger’s without Sanders introducing this with a more current reference. 

CLINTON’S WALL STREET TIES DESERVE MORE PROBING: Maggie Haberman, writing  in Politico about Hillary’s much-discussed fees pf $675,000 for speeches to Goldman Sachs, summarized her talks in these terms:“ Clinton offered a message that the collected plutocrats found reassuring, according to accounts offered by several attendees, declaring that the banker-bashing so popular within both political parties was unproductive and indeed foolish. 

“Striking a soothing note on the global financial crisis, she told the audience, in effect: We all got into this mess together, and we’re all going to have to work together to get out of it. What the bankers heard her to say was just what they would hope for from a prospective presidential candidate: Beating up the finance industry isn’t going to improve the economy—it needs to stop.”

Haberman’s article adds more urgency to the demand that Clinton produce transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs, as well as immediately providing plenty of ammunition for Sanders to use.

Sanders also has an opportunity to question Clinton about her views on Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s advocacy of the proper relationship between US presidents and Wall Street: “politicians should naturally reside in a state of more or less constant accommodation with Wall Street."

Perhaps Sanders might also find an opportunity in future debates to probe Clinton’s six years as a member of Wal-Mart’s board of directors.

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and University of Illinois visiting professor in Labor Education. He edited The Racine Labor weekly for 14 years. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.

Once again, a Wall Street Journal columnist is undone by bad math & a lack of business skills

By Marc Jampole

I’m beginning to wonder if not being good at business math is a requirement for getting a regular column on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Time and time again, columnists use fallacious quantitative reasoning to build their case. Whether overestimating the impact of the minimum wage on overall employment, supporting the laughable illogical Laffer Curve, not recognizing the economic boon that alternative fuels and environmental regulation will bring or underestimating the costs of war, the rightwing often plays fast and fancy with numbers.

It’s so much in their nature to lie with numbers, that rightwing pundits do it even when they don’t have to take. Take, for example, Daniel Henninger’s excoriation of the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president in an article titled “Trump Among the Canaries.” I don’t agree with Henninger on many things, but he is correct when he says that the Donald “has been floating in an inch-deep pool of policy and shows no inclination to expand his pre-existing knowledge of anything.”

One great point that Henninger makes is that Trump’s proposed 45% tariff on goods imported from China is unrealistic and will harm the U.S. economy. But then he displays some of the stupidest thinking with numbers I’ve read this year when he writes: “Wal-Mart has 1.4 million employees in stores filled with foreign-made consumer goods. With a 45% price increase, many won’t be working for long.” 

Does Henninger really believe that a 45% increase in the tariff paid to import Chinese goods into the United States will lead to a 45% increase in prices? If he does, he’s an unsophisticated fool with so little experience in the business world that he should not be writing for a business newspaper or commenting on economic matters.

The cost of merchandise is not the only factor that goes into the price that people pay at Walmart, or anywhere else. There is also transportation (a factor that will now be reduced substantially over the short term as soon as the merchandiser has unwound the long-term gas contracts it entered into when oil prices were much higher), store and warehouse space and equipment, labor costs, marketing and advertising, insurance, information technology, legal, other administrative costs and the cost of borrowing. And let’s not forget about profit. When costs go up, businesses always have the option of eating the additional expenditure and making slightly less money.

It would be great if we knew exactly how much Walmart pays for the merchandise it sells. Unfortunately, Walmart lumps what it pays for merchandise into a line in its annual financials that also includes “the cost of transportation to the Company’s distribution facilities, stores and clubs from suppliers, the cost of transportation from the Company’s distribution facilities to the stores, clubs and customers and the cost of warehousing for the Sam’s Club segment and import distribution centers.” That number is just under 76% of revenue. If the cost of product were half this number and Walmart insisted on maintaining its healthy profit margin, a 45% increase in the tariff would result in 17% increase in store prices. Still steep, but not the 45% increase in prices that Henninger threatens will occur.

Henninger would have had a good point, even if he didn’t present a misleading picture. But it seems to be encoded into the DNA of rightwing pundits to manipulate numbers and do bad math.

Forgetting about factors in an economic analysis is something that Trump himself does, most egregiously when he claims that he made good business deals when he took three business entities into bankruptcy. The number the Donald forgets, of course, is the hundreds of millions of dollars of losses incurred by investors. His bragging about his billions in assets neglects the fact that a passive investor would be worth twice as much as Trump is after his three decades of businesses deals.

In truth, Trump has been an unsuccessful business person. And with his seemingly unsophisticated understanding of simple pricing matters, it looks as if Henninger would be just as bad as Trump if he had to quit his sinecure at the WSJ and get a real job.

What progressives have been waiting for! The OpEdge endorsement for Democratic nominee

By Marc Jampole

When I think of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I always imagine an enormous rock that weighs thousands of tons and symbolizes American society. Bernie and Hillary are charged with moving the rock one mile down the road. Hillary talks of using ropes, winches and pulleys and of humans working together to slowly move the rock to where it needs to be. Sanders, by contrast, thinks he can fly over the rock, pick it up and instantly transport it.

This extended metaphor captures the major difference between these two long-term progressives. Bernie focuses on the final goals, which he implies are quickly and readily achievable, whereas Hillary focuses on what we can do now to nudge us to the goals. For both candidates, I think these goals include a hybrid economy with a strong middle class, bolstered by a government that provides universal healthcare, keeps quality public education inexpensive or free, cleans up our environment, fosters the transition to renewable fuels and protects the rights of all minorities in a secular society that embraces diversity.

Healthcare provides a good example of their differing approaches and appeals. Bernie is calling for universal Medicare, which Republicans, aided by the Dark Money billionaires, will vehemently oppose and use as an issue to destroy a Sanders presidency. Hillary, who was bruised badly in her own attempt to install universal health coverage in the 1990s, is right to want to improve the Affordable Care Act, as opposed to ripping it up and starting from square one. She wants to push the healthcare rock further to where it would be if the United States were a European social democracy. Sanders thinks he can pick up the rock and fling it down the road. Sanders statements on foreign affairs are similar: he states emphatically that we have to get rid of ISIS in a tone that suggests that he will do it. But we never hear the details of how. In a sense, Bernie creates a cult of the strong man who will get it done, just as Donald Trump has.

The appeal of this superman approach by Trump and Sanders may reflect the same cultural imperative as the spate of superhero movies that seem to have dominated the box office over the past 10 years. It would be lovely indeed if someone could solve the problems by virtue of her-his special powers—but that would also border on fascism. Interestingly enough, Democratic voters seem to be splitting by age. Younger voters who have grown up on superhero culture are gravitating towards Bernie, whereas older voters who have largely eschewed these comic-book-cum-video-game-cum-special effects extravaganzas are gravitating towards Hillary.

Sometimes when I look at Bernie Sanders, it’s like looking into a mirror (although he has more hair on the top of his head and no beard)…Jewish, an avowed socialist, a bit of a nudge when it comes to intellectual matters. Hey, that’s me. I can’t help but love the guy.

But when I look at Hillary Clinton, I see someone just as intelligent, quick-witted, progressive and caring as Bernie. Plus I see a list of accomplishments which make her perhaps the most qualified person ever to run for President of the United States, for these reasons:

·         High intelligence: How can anyone deny that Hillary is both highly gifted intellectually and a lifetime learner? So is Bernie, BTW.

·         Past experience: Only the rabid right would call her time in the Senate and as Secretary of State anything other than successful. Bernie has enjoyed success as the loyal opposition, for which he should have our undying gratitude. Hillary has actually been in charge and gotten things done.

·         Lack of hypocrisy: Hillary has never said one thing and then hypocritically did something else, for example, rail against the Affordable Care Act and then sign up for Obamacare, as Ted Cruz has done, or advocate against gays all the while trolling public bathrooms for same-sex quickies, as Republican Senator Larry Craig did.

·         She admits when she’s wrong (like Obama!): She admitted her mistake when she voted to allow Bush II to begin the ill-fated Iraq War and supported the harsh crime laws during her spouse’s presidency that led to the mass incarceration of minorities for victimless crimes.  She also admitted that it was a mistake for her, like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell before her, to use her private email for government matters.

·         She has a cross-cultural understanding of social cues, which means that she won’t embarrass herself by saying or doing the wrong thing, as Mitt Romney constantly did during the 2012 presidential campaign. Romney publicly revealed a secret briefing that many had undergone over the decades but that everyone else had the good sense to keep confidential. Romney also broke the cardinal sin of retired Chief Executive Officers, which is not to criticize the new administration unless involved in a hostile takeover; Mitt criticized the London Olympics (unfairly, too, as it turned out) even though he was a past CEO of the Olympic games. Far from making these “bull in a china shop” mistakes, Hillary seems to enjoy tremendous respect among the people of the world and world leaders. While Bernie may end up being too abrasive, I’m sure he will do a better job in representing us among the world’s countries than any of the Republican candidates would.

·         She is competent running an organization: Hillary seemed to have done a good job of running the State Department, even during the Benghazi disaster. The differences between running a small city, as Bernie did, and the State Department are enormous.

·         Science-based decision-making: Hillary has never said or written anything that tried to deny science. Contrast with the Republican candidates: all of them deny science in one way or another regarding a wide variety of issues, including global warming, science teaching, women’s fertility issues, gun safety and economics. I’m not saying Hillary is always right, but that she always reasons from the facts and not from what she wants the facts to be. So does Bernie.

There are certain issues on which I am closer to Bernie than Hillary, such as what the minimum wage should be, the abolition of capital punishment and the possibility of making public universities free to all. But on some other issues, I prefer Hillary’s stands, such as gun control and the way by which we will achieve universal healthcare. We’ve already detailed some of Hillary’s mistakes.  As for Bernie, his neglect of whistle-blowers when he was chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee looks like a lesser version of Bush II’s approach to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war. His gun stands remind me of the triangulation of another former president, Hillary’s spouse.  In short, both have made decisions they regret and compromises that make their true believers wince.

When elected, we can expect Hillary to hit the ground running because she has lived through the mistakes that young, first-time presidents like her spouse and Obama have made. She will not need a learning curve—she already knows the political process with all its pitfalls. Bernie’s oppositional politics may hamper him as he tries to scrounge up Republican votes to support needed legislation.

In a recent Facebook exchange, a Sanders supporter averred that Bernie would not be as large of target for Republican dirt during the fall campaign. That’s a very naïve statement. Anyone who thinks the Republicans won’t go after Bernie with a vengeance is living in a dream world. They will constantly bludgeon him with three large and spiky clubs: They’ll hammer him about being a godless, un-American socialist. At 75, they will say he’ll be too old to start a first term as president. They will figure out a dozen code phrases to remind the public that he’s Jewish. We in our progressive universe of cities and college campuses don’t care about his religion, but believe me, there is still a lot of hidden anti-Semitism in the country, especially in rural areas. Evangelicals will not find it inconsistent to support Israel, but hate “the Jew.”

Hillary has withstood 24 years of false accusations about Whitewater, the suicide of Vince Foster, her supposed role in a cover-up of her spouse’s affairs, Benghazi, her emails and her foundation. She is used to not melting in the heat of Republican lies. Additionally, many have grown tired of all the dirt thrown at Hillary that never hits or sticks. We have come to discount it. The dirt on Bernie will be fresh and therefore make more of an impact with independents. Finally—and this point is very subtle—the Republicans excoriate Hillary for what she did and does. They will excoriate Bernie about what he is—an aging Jewish socialist. You can change what you do, but not who you are. (For the record, I hope neither Bernie nor Hillary change either!)

Both Bernie and Hillary come off well in debates compared to the no-nothing liars running for the Republican nomination. But in town hall meetings and one-on-ones, when there is time to give a more nuanced presentation, Hillary soars. She thinks on her feet and she has command of the facts. Her explanations always make sense. She takes no leaps of logic, nor does she depend on widely-believed myths. She is definitely a progressive. Her style reminds me of a female Barack Obama—friendly, studied, compromising.

Finally there is the issue of sex. It’s about time we elected a woman president, years after England, Israel, Germany, India and many other nations have done so. If we were talking about Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina, the sex of the candidate wouldn’t be an issue at all, because both are incompetent liars. And really, it doesn’t matter in Hillary’s case either. Man or woman, black or white, gay or straight, Methodist or Muslim—Hillary Clinton is as qualified to be president by virtue of her abilities and accomplishments as anyone who has ever run for the office.

Thus, I’m going to continue to give the love to Bernie. But I’m going to support Hillary Clinton and vote for her in my state’s primary. 

Dark Money shows how difficult it’s going to be to recapture our democracy from rightwing billionaires

By Marc Jampole

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money does a thorough job of dissecting the 40-year campaign of a small coterie of billionaires to change the American political agenda for their own selfish ends. She explains the process by which our country has reached the point at which it is overwhelmingly centrist-looking-left but controlled by right-wingers, especially at the state level. It explains how the Democrats could outvote the Republicans by millions and still not have a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. It explains why the mass media focuses on inessential issues such as the deficit or promulgates ridiculous myths such as the social value of lowering taxes and the idea that science is unsure about global warming.

The ultimate reason for the current state of American politics and public life is money. In this case, money spent over the past 30+ years by a small number of billionaires who wanted to lower their taxes and end regulation that cost their businesses money. The main organizers of this group have been Charles and David Koch, two of four sons of industrialist and rightwing funder Fred Koch, an original founder of the John Birch Society.

These rich folk have included among others Richard Mellon Scaife, the DeVos, Bradley and Olin families, Phillip Anschutz, Peter Singer and Sheldon Adelson, but most of the organizing has come from Charles Koch.

According to Mayer, their long-term game plan, hatched in the mid-70s, came partly from a memo by Lewis Powell before he joined the Supreme Court and a white paper put together by William Simon after he was Secretary of the Treasury. It started with secretly starting and financing think tanks that churn out position papers supporting their rightwing political views, e.g. government is always bad, the free market solves all problems, a minimum wage leads to unemployment, unions constitute restraint of trade, taxes should be lowered on job creators—the entire package of lies still peddled by Republican candidates, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and a horde of think tanks. They also invaded the universities, feeding them with money to study economic, political and social phenomena from a rightwing perspective. Mayer does an especially good job of showing how Koch money has turned George Mason University into a center of phony rightwing research. One of the more successful think tanks has been the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the organization that writes all the anti-union, voter suppression, gun rights and shaft-the-poor legislation that Republican legislators have passed in recent years.

For years Koch has held secret seminars for his billionaire pals in which he outlined issues, discussed strategies and shared information on how to establish layers of nonprofit organizations to hide the names of donors and how much they have given.

From the think tanks, rightwing ideas spread to the general public through the news media, especially the rightwing media which used to consist of a few hundred radio stations but now includes the vast Fox broadcasting empire. At a certain point, the Kochtapus—a description of the Koch network of fellow billionaire contributors—began to invest millions in supporting specific candidates. After Citizen’s United, the ultraright ratcheted up candidate investment. Along the way, they found it easier to control local and statewide elections than national ones.

The 30 or so rich individuals or families Mayer mentions as part of the Dark Money network fall into one of three categories:

1.      Their business interests have depended either primarily or substantially on government contracts, which explains why the ultraright hates government but loves military contracts and subsidies for oil and gas.

2.      Owners of companies that have gotten into trouble for not following environmental, financial or other regulations and owe or have paid the government a ton of money or are involved in litigation with the government.

3.      People who are both, which include the Koch brothers who are the closest people to being pure evil as I have ever encountered in reading or real life.

In other words, these billionaires will often wrap themselves in a flag and say they are trying to preserve and enhance our freedom, but their desire is to create a government that bows to their selfish interests. For all of the billionaires, the only thing that matters is money and power, but others are motivated by their religiosity, racism or love of guns, which partially explains the alliance these plutocrats have made with the religious right and the gun lobby.

While Mayer does an excellent job of shedding light on all of this dark money, she doesn’t put the experience of the last 40 years of rightwing insurgency financed by a handful of the ultra wealthy into the context of U.S. history. Around the time of Simon’s call to action, which was general, the progressive sociologist William Domhoff laid out in great detail how to control American policy decisions in his public policy model. Domhoff constructed a complicated flow chart that describes in advance exactly what the Kochtapus did: Start by controlling research and universities, then public policy, and finally legislation and legislators. Domhoff is illuminating a process that has controlled American policy since at least the turn of the 20th century. The controlling interests have always been the ultra wealthy and have always skewered to the right. What differs with the current bunch of oligarchs is the vastly larger sums of money involved, that they have concealed so much of their activity behind multiple layers of organizations and that so much of the ruling elite has turned its back on the compromises made with the New Deal.

Mayer doesn’t mention it, but I believe that the massive tax break that Reagan pushed through Congress early in his first term has led to the great increase in the money that these billionaires have contributed to controlling the American political process. The tax cut both freed up more money for them to throw around and by making them richer, gave them more incentive to fight against social welfare programs and for lower taxes. I believe Thomas Piketty made a similar argument in Capitalism in the 21st Century as to why incomes for chief executive officers skyrocketed after the Regan tax breaks.

Dark Money is a depressing book, but one I recommend that everyone who cares about the future direction of our country read.

How do we fight the forces of Dark Money? To my mind, progressives, liberals and centrists must vote for the Democratic candidate this year, no matter who it is, and more important, to vote Democrat in every off-year election. A mildly progressive president won in 2008 and 20012, but his victory was neutralized to a large degree because of the election of 2010, which determined who was going to set the boundaries of Congressional districts.

Like Obama and Hillary Clinton, most Democrats tend to be extremely progressive on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy issues, but much less so than the Republicans. The loud cry of people like Elizabeth Warren drives the more mainstream Democrats even further left. Voting for Democrats, but driving the party further left is the only way we can stop the United States from becoming a land of rich and poor with fake elections controlled by a handful of selfish and very wealthy people.

I was wrong when I said transgendered should use public bathroom of their genitals. See original OpEdge article at Vox Populi: http://voxpopulisphere.com/2016/02/01/marc-jampole-5/

By Marc Jampole

Last week, when I wrote that the transgendered should use the bathroom for the sex of their genitals, I was wrong. Two friends pointed out that a transsexual will often dress and look like the sex with which she/he identifies and to use the bathroom of the other sex would be disruptive. One friend rightfully worried that there are still enough unenlightened individuals around that if a transgendered female who has not had surgery uses the men’s room, she risks getting beat up.

I did note that the problem is easy to fix while giving people more dignity and privacy: Have unisex bathrooms with stalls that are actually little rooms.  Until that happens, it is best that transgendered people use the bathroom of the sex with which they identify, but always in a stall.

I haven’t changed my mind about the rest of the article, which proposed using genitalia to determine which public shower rooms, sports teams and scholarships are appropriate for a transgendered person who has not had surgery. You can see the article at Vox Populi.

We are talking about inherently ambiguous situations which surgery immediately and profoundly clarifies, certainly for the rest of the world and perhaps for the transgendered individual as well. 

Editorial: Cheer Low Oil Prices

People in the oil patch are singing the blues over falling prices for crude, as the price per barrel has dropped from $107.26 in June 2014 to $30.67 on Jan. 26. That put the brakes on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) operations, which use more expensive and environmentally hazardous drilling techniques to get to hard-to-reach oil and gas reserves. That’s tough for the oilfield workers and the communities that profited off them, but it’s good for the neighbors whose groundwater was put at risk or complained of earthquakes that seem to coincide with the drilling.

The drop in oil prices also is good for drivers, of course, as the average price for regular unleaded gasoline dropped from $3.68 per gallon in 2014 to $1.83 per gallon in late January, according to AAA, as crude oil supply continues to outpace demand. Gasoline prices dipped to $1.209 at a gas station near Houston.

Republicans are loathe to give President Obama any credit for the drop in gas prices, although they were willing to blame Obama in 2012, when the nationwide average price for regular gas hit $3.60 as he was running for re-election.

In truth, the president has marginal impact on oil and gas prices, but Obama’s policies allowed domestic production to nearly double over the last several years while the administration also pushed vehicles to become more fuel-efficient. That forced foreign oil producers to find new markets while the demand for fuel in Europe and developing countries is weak.

The glut in oil and gas has sent the oil industry into its worst tailspin since the 1990s, Clifford Krauss noted in the New York Times (Jan. 7). Forty American and Canadian oil companies have filed for bankruptcy protection in the last year or so, and industry reports have predicted more pain in 2016.

But Austin-based economist Angelos Angelou says lower gas prices are good for the economy — even in Texas. “Higher oil prices tend to benefit specific regions of Texas, as well as the US, and certain parts of the world. But lower prices put a lot more money into people’s pockets,” he told KUT radio in Austin.

Angelou estimates the lower prices give consumers $23 billion annually, just in Texas. Meanwhile, the slump has caused layoffs in the state’s energy sector costing $9 to $10 billion, Angelou says.

The state comptroller reported that in the 12-month period ending in November, Texas lost more than 30,000 jobs in the fossil fuel sector and an additional 36,000 jobs in manufacturing. But overall, the state gained179,000 jobs during that period, thanks in part to big increases in the health care and hospitality industries.

Angelou says the future of the Texas is “bright” for 2016 because many different industries make up the state’s economy.

“We are far more diversified than the media portrays,” Angelou says. “It’s not all about the oil and gas industry. We have ports. We have finance and technology. We have the medical centers in Houston and other places. So it’s not just the one single sector economy like Saudi Arabia, or Russia, for that matter.”

Even with the falling oil prices hurting oil and gas producers, the big integrated oil companies can make some of that up in the refining end of their operations.

Exxon Mobil reported third quarter earnings of $4.2 billion, down 47% from $8.1 billion profits for that quarter in 2014, while Chevron’s third quarter profits of $2.04 billion was a 64% drop. Exxon’s stock price in the past year dropped from a high of $93.45 to a low of $66.55 and rebounded to $77.15 on Jan. 26. Chevron dropped from a high of $112.93 to $69.58 and was $85.17 on Jan. 26, as the price of oil fluctuated between $29 and $32.

Both Exxon and Chevron executives credited “downstream” earnings from the refining end of their businesses as well as cost-cutting with maintaining profits.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is running out of financial assets because of the reduced revenue from lower oil prices. But the Saudis refuse to curb their production without action from others and Russia has been pumping at record levels.

We suspect that a major reason that Republicans are opposed to improving relations with Iran and relaxing sanctions on Iranian businesses is because American oil and gas producers don’t want to see Iran resume exporting oil, which would keep the downward pressure on oil prices. Iran hopes to export more than 500,000 barrels a day once the sanctions are fully lifted.

President Obama should restore diplomatic ties with Iran, welcome it back to the community of nations, and encourage more Iranian oil exports. At the same time, we must speed up the pace of turning to renewable fuels such as solar, wind and hydroelectric power to replace fossil fuels. When the day comes that the world can keep its lights on and run cars on renewable fuel and make gasoline obsolete, we can let the Mideast nations fight their own grudges and let Exxon and Chevron figure out a new way to keep their profits up.

Don’t Break the System Any Further

As we await the results of the Iowa caucuses, national political commentators once again are casting shade on Iowa and New Hampshire as the leadoff states that start trimming the field of presidential candidates.

Iowa has 3.1 million people, and while its ethnic breakdown — 92.1% white,; 5.6% Latino, 3.4% black and 2.2% Asian — doesn’t reflect the rest of the country, Iowa is a swing state with a relatively well-educated populace (91% high school graduates vs. 86% nationally). New Hampshire is even less representative, with 1.3 million people, 94% white, 3.3% Latino, 2.5% Asian and 1.5% black —and 91.8% high school graduates.

An underfunded candidate can run in Iowa and New Hampshire and conceivably can reach most if not all of the counties in both states without having a billionaire backer and/or a super PAC. If he or she connects with voters in one or both states, that candidate deserves to be taken seriously by the news media, which otherwise only treat candidates seriously if they have billionaires backing their multi-million-dollar ad buys.

Iowa legitimized Barack Obama in 2008 when he won the caucuses with 37.6% of the vote, showing a black man could attract white voters, while Hillary Clinton finished third behind John Edwards. Before that, many black voters supported Clinton, believing that Obama couldn’t possibly win. After Iowa, black Americans reassessed Obama, who finished second in New Hampshire to Clinton but blew her out in South Carolina, 55.4% to 26.5%.

On the Republican side, in 2008 Republicans preferred Mike Huckabee, while eventual nominee John McCain finished fourth but went on to win New Hampshire. In 2012 Rick Santorum eked out a narrow win in Iowa by 34 votes over eventual nominee Mitt Romney, who went on to win New Hampshire with 39.3% while Santorum finished fifth with 9.4% and was swept under.

This year, Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator who still speaks with his distinctive Brooklyn accent, has earned credibility as a presidential candidate by spending time in Iowa and drawing large crowds there with his populist rhetoric.


On the Republican side, Donald Trump has shown that rural Iowans will support a wealthy blowhard New York real estate developer, though evangelical Christians might be able to pull off a victory for Goldman Sachs-financed blowhard Ted Cruz. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, however, has not campaigned much in Iowa and the caucus results probably will show that his appeal is confined to the East Coast and New York TV studios. Christie might do better in New Hampshire, but South Carolina should spell the end of his national ambitions.



Without Iowa and New Hampshire, campaigns would be run almost entirely in Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles, and you’d only hear from those candidates who are anointed by the billionaire donors and executives at the news channels, who have had little use for Sanders or other progressive populists, much less discussion of sensitive political issues that the business elites are trying to sneak through, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and telecom companies’ attempts to reverse net neutrality.

And remember, Iowans watch those early TV attack ads so the rest of us don’t have to. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2016

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Copyright © 2016 The Progressive PopulistPO Box 819, Manchaca TX 78652

Selections from the February 15, 2016 issue

COVER/Dave Johnson
Government run like business poisoned Flint

EDITORIAL
Cheer low oil prices; Don’t break system further 

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

WILL DURST
Real State of the Union

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Stop the TPP

DISPATCHES
Lead may be in tap water near you;
Doubts grow about Cruz citizenship;
Trump ranks as biggest liar;
Latino vote growing;
Dems hope for Senate majority;
Gun thugs menace moms;
Teachout runs for Congress;
DC appeals court denies stay on EPA Clean Power Plan;
What will make US go renewable?
William F. Buckley was no fan of Trump, either ...

ERIC BLUMBERG
The momser and the mensch

ROBERT BOROSAGE
The Democratic choice: change or continuity

LES LEOPOLD
Is Cruz an anti-Semite as well as a hypocrite?

SETH SANDRONSKY
California and Keynes

ART CULLEN
Ofelia Valdez is a woman of great courage

ANTHONY NEWKIRK
Bernie Sanders and social democracy

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Uncle Sam as modern-day gargoyle

SAM URETSKY
Let’s hear it for New York values

JOHN YOUNG
‘Action bias’ does little to help public schools

WAYNE O’LEARY
The savior

JOHN BUELL
Shining a light on dark money

MIKE KUHLENBECK
The billionaires’ utopia

DONALD KAUL
The year of Donald Trump

and more ...

Many similarities between Donald Trump & Ronald Reagan, with but one difference: Trump’s smile is turned upside down

By Marc Jampole

Like many people who don’t inhabit the alternative universe known as 21st century American conservatism, I have been cogitating a lot about why Donald Trump has sustained his popularity among those who affiliate with the Republican Party. After poring over a list of his stands on and approaches to the issues, his background, his attitudes towards politics, his demeanor, speaking style and other pertinent aspects of his candidacy, the answer hit me with the strength of an epiphany.

Donald Trump is popular because he is just like Ronald Reagan in all significant ways, except for one: Reagan spoke with a smile of hope, whereas Trump prefers a frown of angry fear.

Let’s take a look at the many ways Trump resembles Reagan. Trump is still active, but I’ll make my comparisons in the past tense for ease of reading:

Both served as omniscient hosts for television shows. Before TV, both had mediocre careers, Reagan as a B movie actor and Trump as a real estate developer who sent properties into bankruptcy multiple times, lost billions of his investors’ dollars, and achieved a net worth about half of what it would have been if he had passively invested the hundreds of millions he inherited from his father into stocks.

Both started as progressives, but then moved far right before beginning their political career. Both campaigned as anti-establishment, anti-government outsiders, cultivating dissatisfied and resentful voters who were convinced someone or something had taken away their birthright, a group comprising to a large degree whites without a college education who voted the Democratic Party line before 1980.

Both were divorced, non-observant secularists with what some might label amoral pasts who nevertheless found lots of support among very religious Christians.

The economic platform of both depended on lowering taxes and removing government regulations to transfer wealth and income from the middle and lower classes up the socio-economic ladder to the rich and super-rich.

Both supported building up our armed forces and advocated a robust use of the military to resolve foreign conflicts and prosecute foreign policy. Both articulated foreign policy stands with bluster.

Both painted a vision of America based on a mythical past and declared confidently that he would return the country to those halcyon days.

Both demonized innocent groups and turned perceived enemies into one-sided all-evil comic book villains.  Both appealed to our worst natures in matters involving race and charity for the poor. One minor difference here that reflects our loss of civility in the public sector—Reagan would always talk in polite, a well-understood code, such as “welfare queens,” whereas Trump mixes code with vulgar explicitness.

Neither was a master, or even an apprentice, of the everyday details of developing and pursuing policies, preferring to talk about and consider only the larger picture.

Although one cultivated a westerner’s demeanor and the other thought he epitomized the Big Apple, both were old-fashioned, town-and-country, meat-and-potatoes, American songbook types who reflected a pre-rock-and-roll mentality and zeitgeist, one in which women play an inherently inferior role. Neither gave a hint of enjoying intellectual pursuits. Both artificially processed their hair to appear younger.

Both tended to make their points using anecdotes instead of facts. Both proved to be quite able to fabricate realistic-sounding lies to support their views. Neither ever backed down from a lie once told, and often doubled-down by insisting on the veracity of his false statements. Consider the similarities between Reagan’s denials on the Iran-Contra scandal and Trump insisting that thousands in New Jersey cheered on rooftops as the Twin Towers toppled on 9/11.

The one salient difference between The Gipper and The Donald is that Reagan delivered his messages with a smile that told us that he was confident about the future. Reagan spoke optimistically about the glorious, limitless utopia in store for the country upon his election, which contrasted with four years of Jimmy Carter’s sour wailing about how bad things were. Now it’s Trump who is bemoaning the present, but instead of whining as the cartoonish media image of Carter did, Trump bellows aggressively, shows his teeth and brandishes his bloodlust, much as Segismundo in Calderón’s classic drama “Life is a Dream.” Interestingly enough, every Republican candidate is painting a similarly dire picture of the U.S. economy and society in alarmist terms that makes it seem as if we are on the verge of a complete collapse and invasion.

Facial expression aside, though, Trump is heir to the Reagan mantle. But times have changed. Conditions have worsened for most Americans, thanks in whole to the policies that Reagan advocated.

Trump’s bellicose sky-is-falling approach matches our anxious zeitgeist. Trump feeds off the panic felt by several groups: by evangelicals as they see the country accept gay marriage and a woman’s right to an abortion; by blue collar whites as they see manufacturing jobs continue to disappear and the ones that still exist generate less purchasing power than before; by nativists and racists who fear immigrants and minorities are taking over the country and that the government is giving away their hard earned dollars to support those they believe to be inferior; by gun owners fearful of a coming wave of gun control ordinances as Americans grow tired of gun deaths and injuries. Overriding all these anxieties is the fear felt by most Americans of another terror attack, which has caused some to become xenophobic and anti-Islam.

Thus, when Donald Trump speaks to his supporters, who years ago formed the core of Ronald Reagan’s constituency, all The Donald does is turn the Reagan smile upside down and makes it a frown.

I.O.C. will eventually regret decision not to require transgendered athletes to undergo reassignment surgery

By Marc Jampole

There are very few situations in public life in which the differences between males and females matter. In fact, I can only think of four:

1.      Only women can bear children.

2.      Men are faster and stronger than women, so we segregate the two sexes at the very highest levels of athletic competition. This segregation is not necessary for intellectual pursuits.

3.      Our society has developed a group modesty about the naked human body, especially when it is engaged in elimination functions. One way we enforce our body mores is to have separate bathrooms, locker rooms and shower rooms for each sex.

4.      Certain organizations and individuals establish scholarships or other financial aid for people of one sex, usually but not always female. These scholarships often compensate for the decades of discrimination women faced that led to an underrepresentation in certain professions, such as the natural sciences and engineering.

The first distinction between men and women I noted above does not affect a discussion of the rights of the transgendered, but the other three are at the nexus of the problem of assigning and defining sexual identity in a way that includes the transgendered and does not discriminate against them.

The avant-garde of political correctness is now parsing sexual identification into a number of categories: cis (someone who identifies with the sex “assigned” to them at birth by virtue of their visible genitalia) and trans, male and female, and, if we include sexuality, straight, gay, bi and the other varieties of love. Thus, someone can be a cis straight male, a bi trans female or any number of other combinations.

(FYI, I find it highly problematic to use “assigned” to describe the process of identifying the sex of a child at birth. What the real world does when a child is born is not the aggressive action of assignment, but the more passive act of acknowledging the sex of a child at birth as defined by its genitalia. What else do we have to go on at that point?)

This segmentation probably comes in handy on dating websites and has a sociological value, as well. On the other hand, sexual identification and orientation should matter not a whit when it comes to decisions related to hiring, firing, promotion, university admission, club admissions, government, healthcare and employment benefits, housing, business, shopping and congregating in public places.

But we can’t have a separate bathroom or separate professional basketball leagues for each of these types of sexuality. The question remains then, how do we define female and male in those few, limited situations when it matters? Let’s keep in mind that

best-guess estimates put transgendered people at two-tenths of one percent of the population (700,000 out of 322.3 million). According to one source, about one-third of all transgendered people have undergone surgery to obtain the genitals of the sex with which they identify, which means that defining who is a man or woman for the purposes of athletics, scholarship or bathroom use affects only about one out of every 691 people. That number will decline as acceptance of the transgendered grows in society and more select surgery.

In a sparsely covered announcement, the International Olympics Committee (I.O.C.) has said that moving forward it would allow transgender athletes who have not had surgery to compete in the Olympics. People identified at birth as female who now consider themselves male get a free pass, whereas those identified as male at birth who consider themselves female will have to pass a test showing that their testosterone level is below a certain point.

I think it’s a bad decision for several reasons: First of all, past scandals involving performance drugs, including East Germany’s women’s track team in the 1970s, suggests that the probability of abuse is high. Beyond that, for transgendered people who have not had surgery, we have to take them at their word that they are truly transgendered and not trying to game the system. There is also the issue of fairness—it’s unfair to set a higher bar for one transgendered sex than for the other.

Lawsuits or the loud outcry when the public sees someone who looks male competing in women’s track will quickly make the I.O.C. regret its decisions.

The I.O.C. should have required that transgendered athletes complete the process of transformation through having surgery. In fact, for those small numbers of instances when we must distinguish between male and female, the assignment of sex should always follow the genitalia.

  

Meanwhile, we should eliminate as many of the areas as possible in which we need to make sexual distinctions. There are quick and not-so-quick fixes for the challenge of bathrooms and preferential scholarships that involve eliminating the need for the distinction. We could easily switch to unisex bathrooms in which every stall is a separate room. I like the idea, but be forewarned that three things will happen: 1) Men will complain of long lines; 2) More sexual and drug behavior will occur in public bathrooms; 3) Most people will feel a greater sense of privacy and dignity not having to urinate three inches next to a stranger or see a stranger’s leg and shoe while unreeling toilet paper. Special scholarships and programs for women will disappear about a decade after workplace and other discrimination against women ends.  On the other hand, I see no way around the sexual wall that exists at the highest level of professional sports.

I know what I’m saying is going to anger and offend many transgendered people, possibly including two of my first cousins. I am so proud of both of them. They made a decision to come out of the closet that was particularly gutsy in light of the rigidly macho family we come from. I am delighted that they are happier people now, and it pisses me off when I hear someone make a derogatory comment about them or other transgendered people. I support their choice, and the choice made by all 700,000 transgendered Americans, those who undergo surgery and those who don’t. 

But in the public world, corruption and other forms of darkness always fill ambiguity, and there is no way we can remove the ambiguity that exists to the outside world in someone who proclaims he or she is transgendered and has not had surgery. I do not believe we unfairly discriminate against transgendered individuals to insist that they must have the genitalia associated with the sex of the team for which they want to play or the bathroom they want to use. It’s the only fair way to resolve the inherent ambiguity in the situation, e.g., someone with a penis who proclaims he’s a woman wants to play for the women’s team.  Remember that the situation is ambiguous only because they chose to make it so by not having surgery—which, by the way, should be covered under all healthcare insurance—to confirm what they know in their hearts to be true. 

Celebrity culture takes over politics: A reality TV flop endorses a reality TV star for president

By Marc Jampole

That reality television flop Sarah Palin was endorsing reality television star Donald Trump for the office of president of the United States has been known since late August, when Mint Press covered it. The Mint Press story said that in return Trump might give Palin a cabinet-level position in his administration. Fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of Mint Press stories are ignored by the rest of the news media. In this case, the story never mentioned a specific endorsement speech.

At the time I wrote, “The news is pure hot air—the insubstantial stuff of which the celebrity news is constituted. Everyone knows that there is no way Trump will get nominated by the Republicans, and if he runs as an independent, there is no way he will win the election.”

Fast forward to two weeks before the Iowa caucus and half of what I predicted may turn out to be false. We may very well see the Republican Party nominate Donald Trump as its presidential candidate. 

Nothing has changed about the incompetent Palin. She has managed to become a has-been in three professions—politics, reality TV and news-casting. Palin disappeared from the political radar, I think, because her ignorant opinions and frequent misstatements scare off all but the small base of rightwing Christian fundamentalists who were always her primary audience. For that base to matter to Trump or any other candidate, there would have had to have been a larger audience for Mamma Grizzly’s reality show. As it turns out though, Palin’s name matters a little bit in Iowa. Her second attempt at endorsing Trump comes the same day that Iowa Governor Terry Branstad asked Iowa caucus-goers to vote for anyone but Ted Cruz. The push-and-pull of Palin and Branstad so soon before the caucus may help Trump defeat Cruz, which would mark the beginning of the end of the Canadian’s candidacy.

The announcement itself was pure Barnum & Bailey. Someone living off a long-tarnished reputation endorsed someone known to the American people primarily as a business celebrity. This was the perfect Kodak moment for the 2016 campaign, which represents the apotheosis of American celebrity culture. Since the 1960 election of John Kennedy with fewer than 50% of the vote, the news media have gradually taken the focus of their election coverage away from issues and placed it on the same concerns that dominate celebrity news: Gotcha’s and mistakes. Personality clashes. What others think. Family life. Hobbies. Speaking style. Charisma. Skeletons in the closet. Long-time grievances and jealousies. Insulting other candidates. The latest popularity contest. The race for money. 

In every election, ever more time and space is devoted to “celebrity issues” and ever less time to economic, social, international and environmental issues. Moreover, since the turn of century, at the same time the media has been celebritizing our news, reality TV in all of its formats has grown to dominate broadcast and cable television.

Today’s announcement thus marks the final stage in the blurring of political news and celebrity entertainment. It is an announcement that resonates as loudly in the world of reality TV as it does in the world of politics.

Virtually every cable news show made the Palin-loves-Trump announcement the focal point of news coverage for the day. An army of pundits and experts appeared, each spinning the announcement to support his or her own opinion or speculation on where Iowa and New Hampshire voters, the Republican Party and the country are headed and why. Lots of hot air with very little content. Imagine an “American Idol” in which the judging took 50 times longer than the singing, and instead of three judges, there are 60 or 70.

Treating the nominating process as if it were a reality show distracts the American public from considering carefully what the candidates say they will do. It keeps us from realizing how bad the Republican program is for anyone who isn’t rich and privileged, because we’re too busy analyzing the gotcha’s and trying to figure out if the non-Trumpeteers will coalesce behind Cruz, Rubio or someone else. In the process, each candidate becomes redefined as a celebrity brand that we can describe in a few sentences, as opposed to the pages it would take to describe their positions on important issues.

Whither The Base?

By CHARLES CULLEN

As I watch the Republican three ring circus I’m tempted, like many Americans, to turn to news coverage. It’s a coping mechanism I suppose; the last breaths of a politico drowning in front of something he’s never seen before and cannot explain.  And as I watch the mainstream a troubling thought continues gnawing at me. Every talking head keeps yammering about the Republican base.  Which candidate will best appeal to the Republican base?  How big is the Republican base in vote-rich states? How does the Republican base feel about Donald Trump?  How will the base react to the Trump/Cruz slap fight?  These, and myriad base-related questions are discussed by TV experts, guests, and even candidates on an endless, 24-hour loop. But I often find myself wondering if a Republican “base” exists in the way that we’ve always understood it to.  Just so I’m clear; I’m defining “base” as the largest group of voters in a party that pretty much agrees on various fundamental issues even if they may disagree on certain niche issues.  For fun and clarity, here’s my idea of a Democratic “base” voter: they recognize the lunacy of “trickle-down,” they don’t think one is “playing the race card” just because one mentions race, they are incredibly unlikely to believe in a War on Christmas, they care very much about poverty and access to healthcare, and they don’t believe the President is a secret Kenyan/Muslim/Commie-Nazi, etc.  You could probably throw a few more common ground issues in there and *bam* there’s your generic Democratic base voter.  They exist.  I know this first hand.

I’m not so sure about the Republican base. Donald Trump can and will out-racist all but the most hardcore racists.  But some of his economic comments (and his policy, vague as it is) are suspiciously populist. In fact, a group of self-identified “Fiscal-First” Trump voters were asked to examine Sanders and Trump in a purely economic light, and many supported the Bern for economic reasons though they were quick to note that Sanders would never make it out of the Democratic Primary.  

So what happened? There used to be a recognizable Republican base. In fact, they marched in virtual lockstep. Nightmarish proof was the last RNC. A creepily named Reince Priebus presided over a dutiful crowd of fellow travelers. The trains ran on time. The appropriate dog whistles were blown. Aside from a few true libertarians (i.e. not just people embarrassed to admit to being Republicans in polite company) whose presence seemed even stranger bathed in the harsh light of so many very republican Republicans, everyone was basically in agreement with everyone else.  It was the perfect antecedent to the DNC, where, as always, everyone found a way to politely argue about everything.   I even wrote about the weirdly stark contrast at the time.

Now things seem completely turned upside down. I’ve always agreed with retired 4 Star General and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous quote, “My Party is full of racists,” and, in quite moments I wonder if I’m giving his party a fair shake. But, excluding the very small group of Trump economic voters, who say they’d be just as happy to vote for Bernie Sanders, the common denominator among Trumpsters seems to be their unadulterated racism. That, and they, like Sanders supporters, seem sick of playing what feels like a rigged game as the middle class rockets closer to being renamed the high-end poor. The creeping problem is that Sanders will point out that systemic poverty disproportionately crushes minorities. He’ll do so until his crazy looking hair seems to be rebelling against his head, and his accent begins to make him sound like some sort of gangster alien. Trump, in contrast, never seems to mention that the poor are far more likely to be anything but white. Or, if he does mention the hue of poverty, he chalks it up to an epidemic of losers. Moochers. There’s always a reason for the impoverished to remain trapped in poverty.  They deserve it.  

We could write this off as a fringe candidate getting away with being a lunatic if the craziest things Trump’s said cost him voters. But rather than costing Trump voters his attacks on every minority seem, statistically at least, to earn him followers. The Mexicans=rapists press conference, followed by the still inexplicable “who’s doing the raping” phone call sent his campaign into hyper-drive. Just about every time he’s attacked an ethnic group he’s surged. 

The lulls come when he abandons this garbage and actually tries to address other issues. Again, it’s detrimental to his numbers when he isn’t being outlandishly racist. So what can we conclude when the front runner’s best strategy is to shout the most offensive thing rattling around in his head? Yes, one could point out that Ted Cruz is threatening Trump, but Cruz expresses the same racist ideology. Cruz just does so in a generally nicer, slightly veiled way. It’s politically calculated racism that contrasts well with howling Trump racism. That means we can, as part of our trip down the Republican rabbit-hole, remove the Cruz voters who are just afraid of sending a clown into a general election.  We can also remove the Trump economic voters … though some still seem uncomfortably comfortable with leaving out the racial component of poverty. We can do all of that and we’re still left with a huge group of “Republican” voters. A colossus of Cruz and/or Trump supporters. A base, if you will. So that is what the modern Republican party, writ large, has become.  

Were they always this way? I’d like to think not. The Dixiecrats aren’t that far removed from memory. I’d like to think that pre-Obama/secret Kenyan hatred, modern Republicans were not this racist and xenophobic. I’m desperate to find another reason—any other reason—why the two most anti-minority candidates are collectively crushing the field.  Unfortunately, the staggering weight of just about every metric combined with all the evidence seems entirely stacked against me. There is one hateful issue that the base now agrees upon. It even rallies around it. There simply isn’t any other conclusion to be drawn.