Month: February 2020

On November 12, 2019, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman waxed hopefully that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would enter the Democratic presidential primary race and, twelve days later, he got his wish. I admire Thomas Friedman. He’s written a handful of books that should be required reading for college freshmen. His 2012 book That Used To Be Us, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, who is currently serving as Director of the American Foreign Policy program at Johns Hopkins University, is a veritable blueprint for fixing the plethora of problems that plague our country today, from staying on top of developments in information technology to better managing our energy consumption crisis, though the conclusions drawn by the book are hard to square with Friedman’s unabashed support for Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which recently-deceased Pulitzer finalist Jean Edward Smith called, in his 2016 biography of George W. Bush, “the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”

Friedman’s article, titled Why I Like Mike in a confounding rhetorical invocation of Dwight Eisenhower that one hopes is coincidental, was timely as rectal cancer. Demonstrating precisely how out of touch the initiate consistently appear to be, he laments that the word ‘billionaire’ “has become a dirty word and a disqualifying status for many in the left of the Democratic Party.” Friedman is no stranger to billionaires: his late father-in-law was worth a cool $1.2 billion, and Bloomberg donated to the language arts museum Friedman’s wife Ann is building in DC, hosted within the famed Franklin School where Alexander Graham Bell made the first wireless voice transmission. One might be convinced there are non-political considerations at play into why Friedman likes Mike, though he does disclose the conflict of interest in his article. He goes on to write: “Bloomberg is a long shot. He knows that. But I believe his entry into the race — even if it doesn’t propel him to the head of the ticket — will highlight some of these issues that are vital to Democrats’ success and increase the odds that they will produce a presidential candidate with the attributes needed to both get elected and govern effectively.” Wait, what?

One is hard pressed to surmise what Bloomberg is adding to political discourse that is so crucial to the Democrats’ ability to win the White House in November. He’s hardly a contender; he’s neither a powerhouse of political might, nor a particularly charismatic or imposing figure. Mini Mike, as he’s been dubbed by President Trump in what is no doubt an affectionate attempt at camaraderie with his fellow New Yorker, is 78 years old, nine inches shorter than the President, and he claimed non-Democrat affiliation between 2001 and 2018. One of his signature policies as mayor of New York was stop-and-frisk, an NYPD practice of detaining and searching civilians based on reasonable suspicion, which resulted in a predictably disproportionate focus on blacks and Latinos. While he has apologized numerous times, one remains skeptical: his claim that he cut stops by 95% is undercut by the over 600% increase in police use of stop-and-frisk during his first ten years in office, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Contrast this with the fact that the previous Democrat to hold the highest office in the land, Barack Obama, was the first sitting US President to visit a federal prison, appearing on the Vice Special Report titled Fixing the System, which scrutinized the cyclical incarceration of non-violent drug offenders. “This could have been my son,” President Obama said when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. It is puzzling to think of what trajectory the Democratic Party might take in moving from Obama to Bloomberg. Of course, Mayor Bloomberg is merely a symbol for another phenomenon that the Democrats must contend with: the rising popularity of democratic socialism. The people want it, even if the party elites do not.

Suddenly, Bloomberg is boasting more than a hundred mayoral endorsements, including that of Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who praised him for his apology over stop-and-frisk. This week, Friedman has penned another piece insisting that a failure to put the former New York Mayor on the ticket is tantamount to handing the election to Donald Trump. How is it that Bloomberg, who hasn’t even qualified for every debate, is suddenly the Democratic darling? To wit: he’s not. He’s merely the ultimate establishment candidate to counter the ultimate anti-establishmentarian, Bernie Sanders, whose successes in Iowa and New Hampshire have got the liberal powerhouse scrambling to knee-cap the Vermont populist. John Kass, writing for the Chicago Tribune, confirms that the fear of Sanders in the Democratic Party is made manifest in the “Media Adulation of Mike.” David Graham of The Atlantic piles on in his piece It’s Bernie Versus Mike Now. Columbia University professor John McWhorter, also writing for The Atlantic in a recent contribution, admits that Bloomberg “flunks the wokeness test,” but concedes that we cannot disqualify him because Trump is the bigger threat. Jennifer Rubin, in one piece for the Washington Post, and Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler in another joint piece, confront Sanders’ perceived unelectability. Before the New York Times Editorial Board, Sanders garners almost no nods for endorsement. “I don’t tolerate bullshit terribly well,” he says to a frigid room of dubious and indignant faces looking back at him.

Bernie Sanders, a “self-styled socialist,” took his oath as mayor of Burlington, Vermont in April, 1981. US News & World Report ranked him as one of America’s best mayors in 1987. In 1990, he was the first Independent elected to the House of Representatives in forty years, defeating the Republican incumbent. He was reelected seven times before winning a Senate seat in 2006 (in part with the help of Senator Obama of Illinois, and the endorsements of Harry Reid, Howard Dean, and Chuck Schumer). This is not the record of someone who is ostensibly unelectable on the national stage. In fact, in his 2016 run against Clinton to clench the party nomination, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses, and 46% of pledged delegates. He has already dominated the current race, coming in neck-and-neck with Buttigieg in Iowa, and winning the New Hampshire primary. WPA Intelligence and FiveThirtyEight both show Sanders dominating in the upcoming Nevada caucus, with reports that he has as much as a ten-point lead. Bloomberg, on the other hand, hasn’t won a single delegate, unlike Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar.

It isn’t hard to see why Sanders is so popular. In his youth, he attended the March on Washington, where Reverend King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech. He was arrested and fined in Englewood for demonstrating against school segregation. Nor did his mayorship and congressional runs mellow him out. “Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker… has passed more [amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor] … than Bernie Sanders,” Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone. He went on to praise Sanders’ ability to form coalitions across party lines as an Independent and dubbed him the amendment king. He wrote, “For all the fuss over his “socialist” tag, Sanders is really a classic populist outsider. The mere fact that Sanders signed off on the idea of serving as my guide says a lot about his attitude toward government in general: He wants people to see exactly what he’s up against.” In 2013, Sanders touted Elizabeth Warren as a Presidential contender. However, when she declined to run, Sanders stepped in.

In his announcement on May 26, 2015, Sanders said, “”I don’t believe that the men and women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where billionaires own the political process.” True to this ethos, his campaign rejected large donations from corporate interests, the finance industry, and Super PACs. Taibbi chimed in from his platform on Rolling Stone: “He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person.” After his defeat by Hillary Clinton, he endorsed the former Secretary of State in July. Emails from the DNC leaked out in June and July, revealing leadership favor for Clinton over Sanders, and indicating that the DNC conspired to help Clinton win the nomination. Sanders responded on CNN: “It is an outrage and sad that you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying to undermine my campaign. It goes without saying: the function of the DNC is to represent all of the candidates—to be fair and even-minded. But again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is revealed now is not a shock to me.” One almost hears the echo of this sentiment years later, confined to the conference room where Sanders met with the unimpressed New York Times Editorial Board: “I don’t tolerate bullshit terribly well.” One is left to wonder why a panel as distinguished as the New York Times Editorial Board seems so eager to do precisely that, as does everyone else that dismisses Sanders. Is it that they’re too cynical to believe in him, or too naïve to comprehend the institutional grift that Sanders has been fighting for so long?

Friedman’s out-of-the-blue praise of Bloomberg seems colored by establishment favoritism in light of the DNC’s actions against Sanders, as well as Clinton’s recent comments about the former rival that endorsed her in good faith after the rigged defeat of his campaign. Affirmed by Lacey Rose of The Hollywood Reporter, Clinton is quoted as saying of Sanders in an upcoming Hulu documentary, “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician.” Bloomberg is played up, perhaps inadvertently, as the next Hillary Clinton. Recent reports indicate he may be considering her as a running mate, as if he could ever get far enough in the race to address such considerations. The contrast between sides within the Democratic establishment couldn’t be sharper: stop-and-frisk, or march on Washington? Billionaire, or rejection of corporate donations? What exactly compels one to dismiss a man as painfully genuine as Bernie Sanders, to put a man that marched in Martin Luther King Jr’s wake and risked arrest to fight against segregation beneath a wealthy (landed, planter-class) enabler of racial policing tactics? What possible offense, other than integrity and popularity, has Sanders committed? In a word: socialism.

The ire comes from a willful misunderstanding of the word, a semantic frustration that likens the social programs of FDR, developed to help the working class during the Great Depression and the rural folk suffering from the desolation of the dust bowl, with the Great Purge of Stalin under totalitarian communist rule. To fall into such totalitarianism, the democratically elected leaders must close their eyes and ears, the courts must ignore all infringements of constitutionalism, and the putative Comrade Sanders must be wholly devoted to stark villainy in this, the twilight of his political life. Of course, the very thought is laughable. Sanders’ brand of socialism is a devotion to using social programs within the confines of capitalism to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable groups in our country, and provide public services that move the country into a position where we can begin to rank as well as our international neighbors in healthcare access and outcomes, education, public transportation, infrastructure, and more. In short, items that were once deemed crucially important, but have fallen by the wayside since the Reagan years.

From the fateful stock market crash in 1929 known as Black Thursday to 1933, America endured a great contraction–what Anna Schwarz and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the post-crash recessionary period in their 1963 book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 – 1960. Manufacturing output decreased by a third, pricing deflation made debts harder to repay, unemployment rose from 4% to 25%. The depression hit hard. Many lost their full-time work status, subsisting on piecemeal wages from reduced employment. To make matters worse, another problem was brewing in the farm belt. Over-planting and harvesting of wheat drove prices down, which led unknowledgeable farmers to plant twice as much. The over-tilled soil wanted for dryland farming practices. Coupled with a lack of steady rainfall, an immitigable disaster dubbed the dust bowl plundered Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Texas (famed documentarian Ken Burns produced a stellar four-hour PBS documentary that recounts the full impact of the dust bowl on America during the depression). One Amarillo dust storm rose 10,000 feet into the air and blew with winds of 60 mph. There were few safety nets at the time. Without the FDIC (which wouldn’t be enacted until three months into FDR’s first term), bank deposits weren’t insured, and depositors lost their savings. Private charities were few and far between. And while the Federal Reserve could have mitigated the effects of the initial crash and calmed the stampede-like financial panic, they exacerbated the circumstances through inaction, rather than fulfilling their duty to oversee and manage monetary policy. The causes of the disaster on Wall Street are extensively discussed by academics and economists. Ben Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and successor to the notorious Alan Greenspan, has written extensively on the subject.

Franklin Roosevelt became President in 1933, bringing a series of reforms, regulations, and social programs to aid the desperate men and women across the United States. The SEC was formed and the Truth in Securities Act passed in order to prevent corporate abuses and to “provide full and fair disclosure of the character of securities sold in interstate and foreign commerce and through the mails, and to prevent frauds in the sale thereof,” constituting the first regulation of securities at the federal level. The Works Progress Administration, working in tandem with the Public Works Administration, built America’s infrastructure: roads, bridges, and sidewalks; schools, playgrounds, museums, and libraries; courthouses, post-offices, community centers, and city halls; hospitals, utility plants… These agencies oversaw the creation of hundreds of thousands of miles of road, reforestation of overworked lands, and flood control projects. The Rural Electrification Administration brought electrical power to remote areas in a time when little more than 10% of US farms had access to electricity. The Resettlement Administration, later folded into the Farm Security Administration, built relief camps for migratory workers, set up homestead communities, educated hundreds of thousands of farm families, provided millions of dollars in loans to tenant farmers, and had a small-scale yet highly influential documentary photography program. The Social Security Administration provided welfare benefits, unemployment insurance, and retirement pensions. The National Youth Administration helped millions of youth find jobs, train for vocations, and aspire to higher education levels. The subsequent skilled labor pools were essential for the coming war industry economy. The Civil Works Administration provided jobs for over three million men. The Civilian Conservation Corps targeted young men, providing work relief for over three million enrollees across nine years. The CCC planted trees, built roads, fought fires, dug ditches for irrigation, repaired service buildings, managed wildlife and insect ecology, and built flood barriers. An accurate list of CCC accomplishments would take up pages and, in fact, how the Roosevelt Administration handled the depression fundamentally changed America and how we view government and its handling of national crises.

In 1935, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace purged the Agriculture Adjustment Administration of its communist employees, which did nothing to alleviate the accusations against the President and his administration. “FDR was called a socialist and a communist,” President Obama said during an interview on Late Night with David Letterman in 2009, a statement Politifact rated as True. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, you’ll know his father George from Gerald Raney’s superb rendition of the legendary Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To in HBO’s Deadwood, didn’t approve of FDR’s tax hikes for the wealthy, opposing the incumbent president with all the might his press could muster. The similarities, perhaps not reproducible with an allegorical map-key preciseness, are striking when one thinks of the Sanders-Bloomberg schism in Democratic politics today.

In Marxist theory, socialism is a transition between capitalism and the realization of pure communism. In American history and left-leaning policy-making, it has a looser, broader meaning: regulatory policies that seek to eradicate trenchant economic inequality. Historically, talks of inequality go hand-in-hand with injustice. Michael Eric Dyson wrote that Martin Luther King, Jr. had by 1968 become “more critical of economic inequities, pointing out that America practiced ‘socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.'” Sanders posted this quote from his Twitter account in August 2018, and he’s stood by this concise view of democratic socialism consistently throughout the years. We think of it today simply as responsible tax money allocation, which pays for public services like firefighters, policemen, essential repairs to our national roads, inspection of meat packing plants, and the maintenance of our water treatment systems. This simple governmental mandate has been vilified throughout modern American history. Thomas Dewey called it “creeping socialism” in 1939. Herbert Hoover said that FDR’s policies were leading America on a “march to Moscow.” On the other hand, Truman called socialism a “scare word,” and John Nichols’ 2011 book on the subject was playfully titled The “S” Word, a tongue-in-cheek jab at the fear-mongers in this work bearing the subtitle A Short History of an American Tradition.

The horrors of socialism continued after FDR was dead and buried. Truman oversaw the administration of Roosevelt’s GI Bill, increased public housing construction and facilitated government involvement in the mortgage process, and passed the Employment Act of 1946, which aimed to “promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” Following Truman in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower would be unelectable by the modern GOP’s standards of economic governance. The top marginal tax rate under Ike was 90% according to Bernie Sanders in 2015 in an exchange with debate moderator Nancy Cordes of CBS News, which has been affirmed by Politifact. Eisenhower also subsidized the agriculture industry during the drought, oversaw the development of the interstate highway system and the creation of NASA, and he authorized the creation of ARPA, later DARPA, which invented the forerunner to the modern internet (Sorry, Al Gore). Kennedy established the Peace Corps and raised the federal minimum wage. He passed the Area Redevelopment Act, which provided funding to struggling regions of the country. The Housing Act of 1961 funded urban renewal projects, public housing, and authorized federal mortgage loans for individuals that couldn’t qualify for public assistance. He signed legislation to assist with job training, increased regulation of pharmaceutical manufacturers, and grants for the construction of institutions of higher learning. He tried, and failed, to pass: legislation that devoted billions of dollars to educational aid for the states; a healthcare bill that subsidized nursing costs for the elderly; and a bill that would have established a department consistent with the modern HUD. LBJ gave us Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, legal aid services, and the Job Corps. Nixon created the EPA and supported the Family Assistance Plan, which was reduced by Congress to the Supplementary Security Income program incorporated into the Social Security Act.

Now we’re setting the stage for modern America. Under Nixon, the top marginal tax rate fell to 70%. It fell again under Reagan, this time to 50% (and down again to 35% under George W. Bush). The pension system was largely dismantled for the riskier and lower-yielding 401k program, providing tax benefits for employers. His Reaganomics programs cut taxes for the rich under the assumption that the savings enjoyed by the wealthy would fall upon the poor beneath them like a gentle rain in springtime. This didn’t happen. “If you want to increase investment, give money to the poor and the working people,” Noam Chomsky said in the documentary version of his book Requiem for the American Dream. “They have to keep alive, so they spend their incomes. That stimulates production, stimulates investment, leads to job growth and so on.” The wealthy don’t spend their money at that downtown knick-knack shop, they don’t buy a used Honda at the local dealership, they don’t swing by the grocery store for jelly beans, and they have no reason to set foot in a Half Price Books. 

It is an elitist theory that wages are self-stabilizing, that employers will pay what they should to well-deserving employees, and that underpaid employees are undeserving, lazy, inferior. The reality is that if the dogs beneath the table are waiting for a slice of bread, and all that the master throws is a handful of crumbs, the dogs will either fight over those crumbs, or rise up and feast on the master. If gutting the man with the bread isn’t an option, the dogs will eat each other out of desperation. Look to Victor Frankl’s famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles the author’s experience in a concentration camp during World War II. He speaks of indecent prisoners, fellow jews who have risen to the rank of kapo: functionaries that tortured their fellow prisoners for personal gain and preferential treatment. We see this bit of human social psychology playing out today on a larger scale, though with less severe stakes. Rather than question why your lot is so meager, you blame those with less for deserving their misfortune, even when it’s apparent that the system is rigged against you. Or, accepting your meager lot, you serve the master in exchange for a slightly bigger portion of goulash.

In fact, it was the policies of Ronald Reagan that turned the middle-class into the working poor. President George H.W. Bush called the supply-side tactics “voodoo economics” before he became Reagan’s Vice President.  According to French economist Thomas Piketty, higher taxes on the rich brings down the wealth of the elites, and raise up the working people into a middle class. This is progressive taxation, putting excess wages into the hands of the workers and dis-incentivizing the fleecing of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. “After all,” writes Thom Hartmann in Salon, “why take another billion when 91 percent of it [is] just going to be paid in taxes?” John Komlos writes, “Under Reaganomics, the ultrarich [sic] had their taxes cut sharply — by about half. A millionaire who was paying $700,000 in taxes in the 1970s saw her taxes cut to $350,000 in the 1980s. But what was he or she going to do with the $350,000 windfall? Some spent it on conspicuous consumption, but many decided to fund think tanks and hire economists to support their ideology, while others used the windfall to influence politicians and shape laws. And so the tax cuts became a vicious circle in which wealth begot more wealth and still more influence.” The best assessment of wages I’ve come across is from comedian Chris Rock. ““I used to work at McDonald’s making minimum wage,” he says in his routine. “You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? “Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it’s against the law.”

The routine Republican practice of cutting the marginal tax rate and gutting the social programs that make our country great has brought us to where we are today. The signature policies of great men like FDR and Eisenhower are derided as socialism. Business-as-usual is dismissed as communist propaganda. Facts and history are forgotten or manipulated. Military spending keeps going up, while our focus on infrastructure, healthcare, and education fall by the wayside. Are we getting anything in return for our GOP-led ideology? Well, according to all possible metrics, no.

According to the Pew Research Center, academic achievement in the United States stands in the middle when compared to other countries, ranking 38 of 71 in math, and 24th in science. In spite of this, we spend more on education per student than almost any other country. Our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, but that doesn’t lead to better outcomes. We are grossly outranked in life expectancy and infant mortality by other nations, access to healthcare and its affordability is far more restrictive here than abroad, and yet costs are projected to continue growing at an alarming rate. Insulin rationing is becoming more common as the life-saving drug is increasingly unaffordable. What about infrastructure? According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we score a D+. Wage growth? No, wage stagnation.

If these abysmal statistics weren’t enough to start a movement, the increasingly tenuous grasp on our democracy may have been the breaking point, enough to shock the national consciousness into embracing a so-called socialist. It’s bad enough to tolerate a current-POTUS that eschews humility, intelligence, and class on a daily basis, but hey: it’s democracy, right? You win some, you lose some. It hasn’t felt that way, though. In the 2000 presidential election, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote by 500,000 votes, but lost the election. Adding insult to injury, the Republican-leaning Rehnquist Court handed the election to Bush, a decision that might have been palatable if it didn’t come with an order to stop counting the disputed votes–a decidedly undemocratic mandate that retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has since regretted. In 2016, a series of events weakened the belief of the people in America democracy. First, the GOP denied the incumbent president’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing. Then there was the the behind-the-scenes dealings of the DNC that clenched the nomination for Clinton over Sanders. Lastly, of course, was the outcome of the election itself, almost as hotly contested as the 2000 decision of Bush v. Gore: Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes, but failed to win enough electoral votes, a reminder to many of the increasing obsoletion of the Electoral College (there have only been five times in history when the winner of the popular vote failed to win the election; three times in the 1800s, and twice in the past twenty years). To make matters worse, an investigation led by Robert Mueller concluded that Russia interfered in the election in a manner that was “sweeping and systematic” and “violated U.S. criminal law,” resulting in twenty-nine criminal indictments. President Trump dismissed the findings and busied himself gutting the internal workings of the federal government through sheer ineptitude, which became the topic of author Michael Lewis’ fascinating book The Fifth Risk, published in 2018. Attacks on democracy haven’t slowed, either. Last October, Senate Republicans blocked two election security bills, and last week, they blocked even more. Recently, Mitch McConnell called the prospect of making Election Day a federal holiday a “power grab” by Democrats.

Cue Bernie Sanders, the self-styled socialist. Is there any doubt why, in such a climate, a man like Sanders has become so popular?

In this age of information, the muck-raking smear campaign that equates historical American socialist practices with the Iron Curtain of the Stalin Regime emboldens Sanders’ supporters. When you are fighting against an unfair concentration of wealth, those who are currently enjoying that concentration are going to slap back. Our short memory–the financial crisis, worse than the Great Depression, was only twelve years ago–is a boon to the elites. The same wealthy caste that deregulated the mortgage industry, doled out shitty mortgages like hard candy knowing that securitization prevents lenders from worrying about whether or not the borrowers will default, and then turned a blind eye while Moody’s gave AAA ratings to these sacks filled with subprime mortgages, ultimately leading to a global financial catastrophe, wants you to think that affordable healthcare is going to break into your home and smother your children with a pillow.

The sad reality is that the vision Sanders has for America is consistent with what is already being done in other nations of the world (Britain has had national healthcare since 1948). “We don’t want to be like Venezuela!” his opponents cry. No, perhaps not. How about Australia? Japan? Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Finland, Singapore, Iceland, Portugal, Israel–no one is taking out a second mortgage in these countries in order to afford chemotherapy. No, that only happens in the United States.