brainiac conspiracy

Why We Have Elections

Used to be we held them so we could choose between political parties with widely diverging policy agendas. Nowadays it's more like an academic exercise to give us the impression that the people who lead us still care about us, ere we start building bonfires and barricades:

The 101-year-old club boasts a unique mix of politicians, administration officials, rainmakers, top military brass and corporate leaders from all over the country: Billionaires Warren Buffett, David Rubenstein, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Marriott and Steve Case; Chief Justice John Roberts, White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sandra Day O’Connor, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Vernon Jordan, to name just a few.

It’s a cross-section of power brokers so influential that almost every president has made a pilgrimage to the annual gathering. President Obama has addressed the group twice: a week after his inauguration in 2009, and again in 2012 when he joked about escaping the White House bubble: “One of my big goals this year was to get out and be among everyday, ordinary Americans---like the men and women of the Alfalfa Club.” Big laugh [...]

“I’ve never seen a dinner like it anywhere else,” said Raul Fernandez, tech entrepreneur and vice chairman of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the company that owns the Washington Wizards and Capitals. Fernandez will be inducted at the 2014 dinner Saturday in the crop of new members---affectionately referred to as “sprouts”---that includes Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Sens. Timothy M. Kaine and Kelly Ayotte, Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson, McDonald’s chief executive Donald Thompson, Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson, former head of General Dynamics Jay Johnson, James A. Baker IV and financiers C. Bowdoin Train and William Grayson.

Yeah, I know, abortion rights, homo marriage, gun safety . . . sure, there are a raft of issues where the parties differ. But when when it comes to challenging the existing economic order in this country, the only freedoms we have are, basically, fake freedoms. There's a reason why income inequality is so terrible, and Team Democrat is nearly as responsible for it as Team Republican.

---Baron V

Good Times

I'll never quite understand the nostalgic reverence some people in the D.C. news media have for the decade of the 1980s. You know, like it was this mythic time when political gamesmanship came to a stop once Happy Hour rolled around, and Tip & Ronnie™ would hash out their differences over shots of Old Crow in the Oval Office. Morning in America for the shining city on a hill! Those of us who were actually alive and working in those days, however, remember the first explosion of homelessness to hit America in decades; the first explosion of AIDS casualties, which our government couldn't even bring itself to acknowledge; and the first explosion of crack cocaine, which was aided and abetted by our government as part of a Mafia-style gun-running operation. Also too, horrible unemployment and ketchup-as-vegetable. But I guess all that matters is that some Democrats and some Republicans sat down in a room one day and decided that it would be an awesome idea to cut rich peoples' taxes in half, and so, bipartisanship. If only we could put our differences aside and do it again.

---Baron V

Smart Guys

One thing that's amusing about the neoliberal Third Labels No Way types who dominate our fiscal policy debate is how they think our economy works, i.e., that in a low-tax, low-wage, deregulatory state like the one they prefer, that you can have both a thriving middle class and a thriving billionaire class. But in our market-driven economic system, where virtually every transaction creates winners and losers, and where a disproportionate number of transactions create no wealth whatsoever but are simply rent extractions, that just isn't possible. No such state has ever existed. Shit, even the Pope gets that.

Naturally, that's why we hippie leftists are the real "dead enders".

---Baron V

Channeling The Zeitgeist

Embrace The Suck.

When someone such as Paul Ryan is considered a voice of moderation in our politics, you really have to wonder if liberalism as a philosophy of governance isn't officially and forever dead. If so, we'll have to face the fact that it was Team Democrat that killed it. Maybe it's time to join the Greens after all.

---Baron V

The Progressive Alternative

Nobody knows for sure if Hillary Clinton is going to run for President three years from now. Probably she will, but it's pure speculation at this point. That said, progressive-left types such as your humble blogger shouldn't just clear the playing field in the event that she decides to run. Sure, a more leftist "protest" candidate might not be able to compete with the Clinton fundraising machine, and no politician from either party has such high name recognition. But that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't attempt a challenge. Besides, one never knows that it might succeed. I don't think many people would have told you that Barack Obama would have beaten Clinton back in 2007, and while Obama didn't run as the "progressive" alternative, I think it's fair to say that most progressives gravitated toward him during the primary season on expectations that he would govern more liberally than he has.

Now, it's also possible---likely, even---that Barack Obama is sui generis, that there's no other Democratic candidate on the horizon who can hope to recapture the energy and excitement of his first presidential campaign. But there's still a need for a candidate who can inspire the liberal base to turn out on election day and vote for down-ticket progressives, even if they have hold their nose and voter for Hillary Clinton. That won't happen without a vigorous challenge from the left. I have no idea who's going to attempt it, but it needs to happen all the same. Besides, a lot of our most "populist" policy positions---like raising taxes on rich people, raising the minimum wage, increasing Social Security, and reining in a runaway surveillance state, are actually---the horror!---popular with voters. Sounds like a pretty good formula for winning elections, no?

---Baron V

Why We Have Elections

People have a diverse range of opinions on matters of policy, and ideally, election season is the time when the full range of them are aired in a public forum so voters can weigh the merits of the candidates' respective arguments. No opinions should be arbitrarily excluded in the name of "party unity," which is mainly a construct devised to preempt vigorous debate. It's like this: if Hillary Clinton is Team Democrat's standard-bearer in 2016, I will almost certainly vote for her because, in our winner-take-all electoral system, I will have no other viable option. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't view the 2016 primary season as an opportunity to critique Clintonian neoliberal economic policies that have been tried and proven to be abject failures for everyone but corporations and rich people. If that means a "challenge" from the left, then so be it. Our political climate is healthier when everyone gets to be heard, not just the voices the party leadership approves of.

---Baron V

Bipartisan Consensus

Your humble blogger ruminated over this yesterday, but it bears repeating that it's basically a bullshit talking point that's pimped by people in positions of power and privilege like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Friedman to uphold an existing status quo that---amazingly and coincidentally!---just happens to enrich and empower them. "Ramming through" legislation has been the rule, rather than the exception, in our history, and compromise, such as it exists, has been an eleventh-hour expediency, not a default mode of governance. If there was a signature weakness of the current administration, it was its refusal to acknowledge this cold hard political reality until it was too late in the game to do anything about it.

When people vote for liberal governance, they expect liberal governance. When they don't get it, they'll punish you for it. That was the lesson of the 2010 midterms. Then again, it could be that Team Democrat no longer believes in liberal governance but only plays at being liberal on TV. That's too bad because America could really use a bonafide liberal political party these days.

---Baron V

Five Years Later

Well, we've certainly learned some important lessons since that historic night, haven't we. First, after 20 years of Clintonite-corporatist influence, we have to admit to ourselves that Team Democrat at the national level has been organizationally overrun by DLC-Third Label-No Way types who have more in common, philosophically, with 1960s Republicans than they do with 1930s New Dealers. Accommodations are grudgingly made for liberals like Grayson and Grijalva and Bernie Sanders, but power is not permitted to reside in them; they are window dressing for the base. Second, we've learned that rich people are morally superior beings who are essential to the functioning of the state since they must never be imprisoned, no matter how much money they continue to steal from us. Third, no crimes against humanity, however odious, of any previous administration must ever be adjudicated. Fourth, the President reserves the right to assassinate any person, anywhere, at any time of his choosing. Fifth, people who attempt to expose egregious abuses of power in the federal bureaucracy are seditious traitors who must be pursued and prosecuted. Sixth, the gradual privatization of our health and educational institutions must continue apace because the looting must never be allowed to end. Seventh, incompetent executives who run their businesses into the ground must never suffer the consequences of their own bad decision-making; on the contrary, they must be fed with constant infusions of money to finance the next generation of asset bubbles. Eighth, we must continue to hasten mass extinction events with an all-of-the-above energy policy that contaminates our groundwater and fouls our beaches and shorelines. Ninth, chronic high unemployment is the natural order of things because our only responsible fiscal policy is one that stifles economic growth. And finally, no policy of any kind must ever be pursued too aggressively, no matter how many elections you win, if it runs the risk of offending Republicans.

Now, some of you may think your humble blogger is being a bit too hard on the President, and who knows, perhaps he is. And yes, I remember the Ledbetter Act, the SCHIP expansion, the Pigford farmers settlement, and the credit-card fee reforms. More significantly, the administration saved an important domestic manufacturing industry, for which they deserve much credit. And certainly, gay men and lesbians have more freedoms today than they had five years ago. But most of the legislative achievements have been small-ball efforts, and the three that notably weren't---the Recovery Act, the Goldberg Act, and the Dodd-Frank bill---were either utterly inadequate to the challenge at hand, or outsourced too many policy decisions to the same people who blew up the world and who keep driving us into bankruptcy. What I am saying is, five years ago this country needed, and was apparently ready for, in the President's own words, a "fundamental transformation". By and large, we didn't get it. Most of the same problems that plagued us then are still plaguing us now. Granted, in a divided government, a President can only exercise so much power in the crafting of legislation. But a President can drive the debate over the content of legislation, and commonsense solutions that have been tried elsewhere and succeeded---a second New Deal, breaking up the banks, and single payer---were never even considered, let alone debated, and he and his teammates deserve to take their fair share of criticism for that. Neoliberal corporatism has been hollowing been out the Republic for the last three decades; a smart guy like the President should have been able to recognize this, and charted a different course.

---Baron V

Two Hours of Bullshit

A.k.a., the monthly roundtable of the very serious dude-bros:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there are regulars. Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’ Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential representatives from the right.

The fact that the President devotes any time at all to talking policy with a psychotic like Krauthammer, a serial liar like Gigot, a sociopath like Friedman, or warmongers like Goldberg and Hiatt is Exhibit A for everything that is wrong and stupid about his style of governing. You're never going to be able to propose smart policy if you keep soliciting the advice of people who have wrong about everything, and the other "regulars" are only a modest improvement. If the President really enjoys the "intellectual sparring," how about some sparring partners who might provide a real step up in weight for him? Who would these people be? Oh I dunno, maybe someone like Amy Goodman, or Thom Hartmann, or Duncan Black, or Digby Parton, or even Rachel Maddow, for Chrisssake. These are all liberal opinion-influencers with strong national public profiles---and yes, I know they don't write for the Post or the Times or the Journal, so their opinions don't count for shit, but there are tens of millions of people in this country who think the same way they do, and most of them vote for Team Democrat---that is, when the administration gives them a compelling reason to do so. Matter of fact, they're the party's activist base, and shutting them out of the discussion only invites more disillusionment and distrust with the President's dedication to advancing a more liberal agenda. We went through this once already, during the debates over the Goldberg Act and the 2010 midterms. Do we really want a repeat performance?

---Baron V

The Extremes

No, it's not the name of some '60s Motown vocal group, it's

the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict . . . There's a lot of noise out there, and the pressure from the extremes affect how lot of members of Congress see the day-to-day work that's supposed to be done here.

You know, it's bad enough to read "both sides do it" from the usual sources at the Beltway Racing Form, but hearing it from someone who is smart enough to know better, it really, like, gets annoying. First, because lefty bloggers generally don't make any money---writing thousands of snarky anti-corporatist blog posts will do that to you---and second, the only "extremes" on our side are people who have no pull and no influence in Team Democrat's locker room. People like Cynthia McKinney make speeches at indy bookstores and college radio stations. People like Ted Cruz, by contrast, get to write actual policy. Big difference! Maybe I'm reading too much into it---it's happened before---but it sure seems emblematic of the "corporate culture" of official Washington and how it helps to feed lots of lazy media analysis.

---Baron V

Pipe Dreaming

Sure, in a more perfect world, we'd have more than two major political parties, and if the geniuses who authored the Constitution had bestowed a parliamentary system of government upon us, we likely would have them. But they didn't, so we don't, and there's no way a truly viable third party can be formed in this country without, literally, billions of dollars in start-up capital. This means, of course, that the party will have to be bankrolled by a bunch of rich people, and we have already seen what happens when rich people float the idea of a third party: the usual Third Labels No Way Bloomberg Elect! party with a policy agenda that is, essentially, Republicanism minus the gay-bashing and slut-shaming. For those of us who'd like to have a genuinely liberal party to represent us, our choices are (a) join the Greens and cast a series of cranky protest votes (which I've been tempted to do more than once), (b) renounce our citizenship, move to some country that has a Socialist party and join up, or (c) most sensibly, keep working to reform Team Democrat. Don't know if we can ever pull that off anymore, but at least the party infrastructure is already in place; we just need to mint better Democrats.

---Baron V

The Village People

They view the world in the strangest ways:

"When our son was playing Little League in McLean" in the Virginia suburbs, "it was not at all unusual to be leaning over the fence with a Republican U.S. trade representative on one side and a Democratic senator on the other side, talking about the big issues of the day, like shouldn't that shortstop be one step to his left?" Galen said. "You don't see that anymore, because everybody goes home for the weekend. There's no camaraderie. There's no shared experience."

This is something akin to the Sally Quinn Theory of Governance, which posits that all of the ills of official Washington can be cured with better cocktail parties and social mixers as opposed to, say, debating policy and winning elections. The possibility that this mindset might actually have helped to promote the legion of the insane to positions of prominence and power never seems to cross their minds. Too bad the rest of us are the ones who have to pay for their terrible judgment.

---Baron V

Guessing We'll Compromise

If recent history is any guide, that is. No, Team Democrat won't trade off any of the Goldberg Act to get the debt ceiling raised, but I'm guessing we will probably see another crappy austerity trial balloon floated, hopefully not as bad as the current regime but likely so, in the name of common-sense consensus. Only the particulars will be different this time. (Chained CPI? Job-creator tax reform?) And, as always, the hostage-takers will collect their ransom, assure Team Democrat that everything is settled, then reappear the same time next year with yet another bomb threat. We've been riding this Ferris wheel for the last twenty years. You'd think our side would've learned the lesson by now.

---Baron V

Silly Question

If it was so easy to get the crazy people to capitulate on presidential appointments by threatening to dump the filibuster, why the hell hasn't Team Democrat tried this tactic before? And why aren't they going to keep trying it for judicial appointments and every piece of legislation that's bottled up in the Senate? I mean, great, I'm glad to see they finally flexed a little muscle, but if they want to really impress me, they need to do it again and again, and again some more.

Also too, why the hell did they feel they had to sacrifice the NLRB nominees? It was just another concession to the crazy people when none needed to be made. Regardless, though, this finally exposes just how phony the "We didn't have the 60 votes" trope has always been. They've never needed 60 votes, only 50 plus the Vice President. Yes, there's a potential danger in the Senate becoming a wholly majoritarian legislative body, but given the raft of social legislation that needed to be enacted (and wasn't) in the President's first term, and considering the enduring unpopularity of the crazy people's party, it always was, and still is, a risk worth taking.

---Baron V

Organizing For Inaction

There must be something in the D.C. municipal water supply:

The banks have hired longtime, influential Washington hands to deflect regulatory and political pressure to strengthen their finances and to sell assets. Regulators and some lawmakers have raised concern that large banks remain "too big to fail" and could require another government bailout in the event of a new financial meltdown [...]

Stephanie Cutter, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, and Ed Gillespie, a former Bush administration official, are providing strategic advice to Bank of America on several issues, including efforts to break up the banks. Morgan Stanley recently hired Michele Davis, a top aide to former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, to help bolster the firm's credibility in Washington.

I guess it doesn't really matter whether you play for Team Socialist or Team Teabilly: once you've made it as a power player in official Washington, it's all about the gravy train. Public service, that's for saps.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

The persons who mentor other persons in the science of starving their grandparents:

After a group photo session outside, Gilman described for me his team’s efforts to do centrist consciousness-building at Brown University. It held a Rhode Island Fiscal Summit featuring as keynote speaker the financier Steve Rattner, a member of Fix the Debt, the Peterson-funded Washington lobbying group. It took pictures of students holding a white board on which they’d written thoughts on “what the debt means to me.” And it got students to sign a “Contract with the Future” that called for finding “compassionate ways to reduce entitlement commitments.” This did not go over so well with everyone: “One person said, ‘If you touch Medicare, don’t talk to me.’” Gilman said he kept his cool with this reply: “I don’t think that’s the right way to have a productive conversation about a sustainable future.”

Alas, the competition judges---Chelsea Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, and fiscal commission chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson---awarded Brown only second place. The gold went to the University of Virginia team led by Lena Shi, a genial Charlottesville native who describes herself as a “moderate” who believes “there are perspectives from both sides that are very helpful.” Her team had hosted Senator Mark Warner, the moderate Democrat, for a speech on the debt. (“Both sides have got blame on this,” he told students.)

---Baron V

Things Are Different Now Because Everything Has Changed

And America has lost her innocence and we can't rely on oceans to insulate us from the world's problems anymore, and the framers never envisioned the threats we face because everything has changed and things are different now. Taken in the aggregate, it's a nonsensical line of logic that's devoid of any real meaning, but it sounds dramatic enough---hey, we all like to think we're bending the arc of history in our own time---and because of that, it's a line that our political leaders like to advance whenever some law-enforcement issue garners national notice as a way to draw attention to themselves. But no matter which hoary bromides they chose to employ, what they're basically saying is that because they failed at their jobs of protecting the public, the plebes now need to accustom themselves to living under authoritarian rule:

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

---Baron V

Glimmers of Hope

Dont' see how this deal survives the Lower Chamber, but for what it's worth, it's encouraging to see that at least some of our leaders are capable at times of engaging in a rational dialogue, though the creation of a Simpson-Bowles-type gun commission will probably only ensure that nothing further gets accomplished beyond scolding juvenile gamers and godless Hollywood for their collective moral depravity. But in our era of deranged discourse and endless false equivalencies, I guess we take our victories wherever we can find them.

---Baron V

Slow Learners

Changing demographics may favor our side, but alas, our leadership doesn't:

The best way to defeat the conservative, ideologically driven GOP, Democrats say, is to field non-ideological “problem solvers” who can profit from the fed-up-with-partisanship mood of some suburban areas. These districts will offer some of the few competitive House campaigns in the country.

“You pick your strategic high ground and force them to fight on it,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has begun a particularly early effort at traveling the country and working the phones to lure Strouse and others like him into races.

Israel’s approach is a variation on the model used by then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the campaign committee chairman in 2006 when Democrats took over the House in George W. Bush’s “six-year itch” midterm. Emanuel sought out centrists and conservatives to run in rural districts, particularly in the South.

But after the GOP 2010 wave and the redrawing of district lines, most of those seats have been locked away for Republicans.

And if Team Democrat fields another slate of Blue Dogs, those same Congressional seats will be locked away for Republicans for another decade starting in 2020.

Here's a bit of helpful advice: first, forget the South outside of northern Virginia, south Florida, the heavily Hispanic counties in south Texas and the major metro areas (Atlanta, Houston, Memphis, etc.). The rest of the region is a lost cause, period, and a great deal of money and manpower could be saved by simply shutting down the party's operations there and shifting resources elsewhere. Much of the same goes for the Plains states and the Mormon West.

Second, learn the lesson of the last off-year election: non-ideological "centrist" politics may be preferred by the serious persons of the Washington policy establishment, but real-life voters hate them, and for obvious reasons:

There are no passionate, vocal groups of voters eagerly demanding that government be more solicitous of corporate interests and more willing to start wars overseas. There are not many large voting blocs requesting the offshoring of whole industries. To be a "centrist" is necessarily to champion the interests of concentrated power and wealth and to ignore and deride as "populist" insanity anything that stands in the way of those interests. Who has ever heard of an explicitly anti-populist political insurgency? Insurgents always set themselves up as the independent outsiders who will stand up for the people against the establishment.

People don't vote for any political candidate simply to "get things done." They want candidates to "get things done" on behalf of policies that they believe in, whether it's single-payer health care or banning abortion or infrastructure spending or going back on the gold standard. They want candidates who they can trust to stake out a policy position and then fight to enact it, not to start cutting deals with the other side the minute they're sworn into office. Yes, that type of behavior is considered statesmanlike in Washington, but everywhere else in the country, it's called unprincipled hackery, and it's a proven formula for losing elections.

---Baron V

Of Course They Lost

The policy war, that is, because they assumed---what, again?---that the crazy people would stop acting crazy after they lost the election because unicorns and flying spaghetti monsters. So now Team Democrat is stuck with an austerity budget that will remain austere forever, or at least until the crazy people threaten to do more crazy things like shutting down the government, at which point more cuts will be offered up in exchange for future agreements, etc. You just have to wonder how long it's going to take before they realize that whenever they reach any kind of "agreement" with the crazy people, the crazy people will go back on their word, scream to the media that it's the Democrats' fault, and wait for people like Glenn Kessler to start handing out Pinocchios to both sides. That's just how things in official Washington work.

And bitching about the need for filibuster reform doesn't cut it. You need to change the rules to get things done, then change the damn rules and stop whining about the crazy people.

Honestly, you can see why so many people in this country are so alienated from our policy discussions when the only two groups of legislators that are allowed to sit at the bargaining table are the group that doesn't give a shit about governing and the group that's utterly incompetent at it.

---Baron V