dieselpunk-progressive-blog

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Let’s You and Him Fight

The last week has been a real eye-opener for me, regarding the rift currently splitting the people who consider themselves the legitimate opposition to the reactionary government currently running the United States at almost every level, in almost every local. Although the best known, most publicized conflict is between those people generally labeled as being the “Bernie wing” and the “Clinton wing” of the current Democratic Party, there are fractures along lines of race, sex and class which seem to run very, very deep. In an age of ever more selectively available media, it’s easy (perhaps even unavoidable, now) for these various camps to see their differences and quarrels through a lens which distorts them to Wagnerian heights of drama. Meanwhile, the people generally regarded as the ‘bad guys’ (the Steve Bannons and Robert Spencers of the nationalist Right) continue to advance their agenda and gain a stronger grip over the institutions of the United States, through the actions of men like Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions and Scott Pruitt, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

So why is it so hard for people, who all see themselves as the champions of the opposition, to unify and present an effective, organized front? Largely, it is because they can’t agree on what, exactly, they are actually fighting for. They can’t even agree on what they are fighting against, beyond the most generic platitudes about white nationalist fascism.

My eyes were first opened to the scope of these divisions in the last week. When the Women’s March organization, which is recognized as being largely the product of women of color, announced that they’d secured Bernie Sanders to be one of the key speakers at their coming conference, a great many people, myself among them, were thrilled. Aside from being an indication that Senator Sanders’ agenda of economic justice was continuing to gain further support, it seemed to show that the divisions caused by the 2016 Democratic primary contest were, finally, beginning to heal and fade. Then came the cold water, in the form of a statement from the leadership of the pro-Clinton EMILY’s List. It seemed the group was ‘disappointed’ with the Women’s March for inviting Sanders. They were also ‘reaching out’ to ‘help improve the program’. Across social media a debate broke out, which seemed to split women into two factions: those who wanted Sanders there and those who didn’t.

The camp which wanted Sanders to address the Women’s March felt that the organization was perfectly capable of deciding for itself who to invite. They pointed out that Sanders’ economic agenda includes strong support for issues which women should be universally in favor of: wage reform, expanded child care, universal health care and body autonomy, free of the ‘religious objections’ which are only thinly veiled misogyny. They also argued that an organization primarily oriented around women of color did not need, or want, white women telling them how to go about being feminist. My personal experience in this first twenty-four hours or so, was that the majority of women of color I was exposed to in social media wanted Sanders there. They saw his agenda as reinforcing the agenda of women generally, and found his economic priorities complimentary to their social priorities.

On the other side of this particular skirmish, were those women who said very clearly that no man has a right to address a women’s group. They held that inviting Sanders was either a tragic mistake made by wayward sisters, or outright treachery against the cause of all women. In any event, the message was clear that popular feminism, noticeably lead by pro-Clinton groups, was appalled. They insisted that the Women’s March had failed, by not inviting a prominent woman leader (such as Hillary Clinton!) to speak in the slot occupied by Sanders. It was, they insisted, demeaning to all women to have to sit quietly and be spoken to by a man at their own event. In all, the impression was given that Senator Sanders had somehow manipulated his way into delivering a patronizing lecture about women’s issues to women, as if they needed to be told what their priorities were.

Setting the larger conflict between Sanders people and Clinton people aside, the point here is that these two groups of women are not talking about the same things. Those who supported Sanders speaking were focused on concrete economic policy, and those who opposed it were focused on unity among feminists. Obviously these two strains of thinking do not have any kind of mutual exclusivity, and should be able to coexist. Nonetheless, this became part of the continuing conflict over the soul of the opposition to the current regime.

Now it would be easy to focus on this fight, and no doubt someone should go into the details, but the point here is that this conflict, and a hundred others, aren’t being resolved. Instead they continue to fester and drive wedges, furthering the isolation of people who should be allies against a greater, and very real threat. But instead, people bunker down, raising up walls of selectively chosen media around themselves. And the real problem with echo chambers isn’t that they enable our solipsism, it is that they deny us allies.

By isolating and insulating ourselves from the ideas, convictions and voices of those who do not automatically reinforce our existing opinions, we are cutting ourselves off from even the possibility of collective effort. We like to quote the platitude that there is strength in numbers, and this is a true statement but, in order to access that strength, we must gather the numbers. And that means that a lot of people in this country are going to have to develope something which targeted media and social media have largely robbed us of in the last twenty-some-odd years. The ability to tolerate things that make us uncomfortable.

This doesn’t mean agreeing to support policies that we disagree with; not, in any case, at the street-level of organization, which is where the rifts need to be mended first. No, in this case, tolerance means simply not alienating ourselves from someone who mostly agrees with us. It mean that when someone at the  PTA meeting says they’re more concerned about feeding their family than maximizing relative economic advantages, you don’t assume they’re uneducated technophobic Luddites and avoid them. It means that when a woman who’s family is struggling to keep their home says that wages are more important to her than the gender of a candidate, you don’t call her Suzy Homemaker and put her on mute. It means you don’t vilify the person of color who thinks that universal public college is more beneficial than increasing enrollment quotas and making it easier to take on large amounts of debt.

No doubt some people are offended at the phrasing in the last paragraph, and that is the point. Note the phrasing, the deliberate use of the word ‘you’. Some readers, who already agree with these perspectives, are cackling and feeling empowered and mentally wagging their fingers at the caricature of those who found it accusatory, presumptuous or just insulting.

Now let me put the shoe on the other foot.

Unifying in opposition is going to demand a certain amount of tolerance for people and ideas that are less-than-perfect. It means that you don’t walk away because a candidate has to work with business leaders. It means that when a woman tells you she feels ignored when discussion of the minimum wage doesn’t explicitly mention the pay gap, you don’t call her an economically privileged sell-out. It means that when a woman of color says she doesn’t feel represented by a white male, you don’t lecture her about prioritizing identity over policy.

The point here isn’t that ‘everyone is guilty’, but rather that ‘everyone is needed’. These days, we cannot afford to alienate or ignore potential allies. And that means that everyone, absolutely everyone is going to have deciding whether or not they can work with people aren’t going to either reinforce or leave unchallenged their biases, privileges, or assumptions. The fascists have the advantage here, because they pre-selected for uniformity. Despite the atrocious methods and goals, we can’t deny the fact that they do organization and solidarity very well. Those of us who value personal liberty and expression, by necessity, have to work a lot harder at getting along with one another.

That raises another point. What exactly is it that the opposition is actually opposing? There seems to be more than a little confusion about this. Some people are pushing back against the oligarchy run from Wall Street. Others are focused on fighting for reproductive freedom. Most seem more-or-less on board with supporting transgender Americans, but TERFs nonetheless demonize us and many women are afraid to criticize other women for these hateful behaviors. We have the Black Lives Matter people, but a lot of them don’t see a connection between economic empowerment and the ability to control and regulate the justice system. The list goes on.

It has often been said that nothing unifies people like a common enemy, but how do we identify the common enemy when there is so much factionalism, reinforced by so much selective media consumption? Is it possible to identify a common enemy when we no longer share a common language, a common discourse. Probably not.

On the other hand, perhaps defining ourselves negatively isn’t a very good strategy after all. After all, that’s what American politics has been doing for the last seventy years (at least) and where has it gotten us? Right where are. Still, an opposition has to be against something, but that doesn’t mean it should be defined by that statement in the negative. Instead, let opposition give us a general direction of movement (in this case away from chauvinistic white male nationalist fascism ) and let us be defined by what policy goals we are actually seeking to enact.

What that agenda will look like is going to be determined by speaking with, and listening to, one another. Even and especially people who make us uncomfortable. Nobody can reasonably expect to get everything their own way, and everyone needs to examine themselves to see if they aren’t, at least subconsciously, trying to do exactly that. Everyone needs to listen and observe, and be honest about the unintended consequences of their agenda might be. Globalization, as one example, may have been intended to improve economic conditions for all, but it nonetheless created an entire underclass of alienated, derided and dismissed economic ‘losers’. Each and every individual member of either ‘the revolution’ or ‘the resistance’, needs to start by getting over the idea that they either have all the answers, or that they have a monopoly on all the facts, let alone any universal truth or enlightenment.

The future will be a cooperative endeavor. That is an absolute fact, inasmuch as it will result from the simultaneous interactions of all the operations of all the participants, and all the interactions of second and third order consequences. The only actual question is whether or not we will also be working in opposition to ourselves.

#feminism #politics #bernie sanders #hillary clinton #womens march #emily's list #resistance #Our Revolution #intersectional feminism

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Family Matters dropped this episode about police brutality in 1994, and it’s just as real almost a quarter century later.

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Dear Rei cosplayers at NYCC

If it were me you ran up to, grabbed my skirt and yanked it up to see if I had anything that wasn’t there, I would have put you to the ground and you would be banned from NYCC

Forever

Cosplay is not consent

Being trans is not consent

Attending cons, IS NOT CONSENT

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

“Resist” isn’t sufficient. It is not a strategy for winning or a goal in it’s own right.

Too often I hear term “resist” in the context of being a loyal neoliberal Democrat. That isn’t enough. The policies and decisions of the DNC over the last forty years have cost them their legacy, their base, and their place in governance all across the country.

You have to have plan of attack. You have to offer the voters an alternative vision which meets their needs, materially and emotionally. Flopping around in the center-right and crying about moderation and identity are not going to motivate the Independents. Yes, you won a popular majority for the Presidency in the national...but you lost the electoral map, and you lost state and local contests at all levels.

Clearly, the strategy of appeasing Wall Street on economic issues while offering token social justice has failed. Yes, identity matters...but the identity that a rapidly increasing number of people are finding themselves tied to is that of ‘working poor without economic stability’.

So, yes, by all means, resist the Cheeto and his horrific racial-ethnic agenda. Please, continue to push back against his destructive policies against transgender citizens. But start figuring out how to address the underlying issues that drove so many blue state voters to him in the first place. Employment. Wages. Cost of living.

And remember that Franklin D. Roosevelt predicted this more than seventy years ago:

Trump has just announced Muslim Ban 3.0. It is FAR, FAR worse than the versions that came before it. Muslim Ban 3.0 bans ALL IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Chad and North Korea, in addition to ALL VISITORS OF ANY KIND. That means NO ONE from these countries will be allowed to get visas in to the United States anymore - not tourists, not businesspeople, not family reunions, not anything. The only exception is students from Iran (F, M, and J visas) - students from all the other countries are banned. This means that Iranian-Americans are now completely cut off from our families inside of Iran, who are now forbidden from visiting. This means Americans of Syrian, Somali, Libyan, Chadian, and Yemeni heritage are now cut off from family, friends, neighbors, loved ones. This means no weddings, no funerals, no visits to grandma and grandpa, no seeing cousins, no nothing. There is no exemptions for family. And this is INDEFINITE. Unlike the previous versions which were 90 days each and had to be renewed, this is FOREVER. Imagine the families broken up, the lives torn apart, the connections shattered. The people caught in the middle. My heart is broken. We must resist. There are no other options.

#democrats #donald trump #resistance #roosevelt #progressive #politics #economy

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Academic Political Cowardice and Capitulation

Harvard recently extended, and then shamefully withdrew an invitation to Chelsea Manning to speak as a Visiting Fellow. Although the school first made a point of citing Ms. Manning’s outreach to traditional American media outlets to blow the whistle on war crimes being committed by Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, after the resignation of one of their staff (a former CIA deputy director, Michael Morrell) and a complaintive letter from current Director Mike Pompeo, Harvard withdrew their invitation.

The obvious political pressure from the Central Intelligence Agency of the transphobic Trump administration is inescapable, and has kicked up a glorious firestorm of debate around the intersection of transphobia and a fascist form of patriotism which proclaims that war crimes committed by the Unites States are, because we did it, somehow perfectly acceptable and even laudable. One might be forgiven for wondering which, if not both, of these points of view was what motivated Dean Doug Elmendorf to, in a span of less than twenty four hours, to reverse the invitation to Ms. Manning. Or, to be charitable, perhaps he is simply cowed by the thought of backlash from Washington, should he not knuckle down to the personal opinions of the current regime?

Certainly the CIA has plenty of practice in engaging in unseen operations of character assassination and destabilization that could very easily make life difficult, or even untenable, for Dean Elmendorf. To be fair, however, we are likely looking at the behavior of someone trying to protect a personally lucrative relationship with one of the most powerful and unaccountable agencies in the United States.

This does, however, call into question the motives and meanings behind Harvard’s previous decisions. Such as retaining the infamous Sean Spicer, who seems to lauded for his blatant and well documented peddling of lies...or as he (in true Orwellian style) prefers to call them, ‘alternative facts’. Perhaps Harvard and her Dean think of ‘alternative facts’ as a good intellectual exercise for the young men and women who will walk from those once-hallowed halls into the halls of governmental power? To quote from a recent discussion at the NYT:

“Dean Elmendorf has painted himself and Harvard's Kennedy School into a corollary. He's been quoted as saying that Ms. Manning's disinvitation is due to the realization that Harvard disagrees with her point of view. Therefore, in the absence of prior error, all those others who were previously invited must have opinions which are wholly supported by Harvard's Kennedy School. Therefore, Harvard's Kennedy School must intolerant of dialectic inquiry and the honest debate of disparate positions.” (C.P. Miller; Sept. 15; NYT)

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

A Response to A Recent Salon Reprint

The original topic was about Clinton going forward, her general cluelessness about her 2016 campaign failure and general scapegoating of literally anyone else. 

When she says: I accept responsibility for my mistakes, and then gives a 500 pages of "why it was anybody else's fault"... We have a right to question her sincerity. Look, you may have trouble believing this, but I think she still ahs a shot in 2020...but only _IF_ she can set the ego aside, genuinely embrace the needs of the Independent majority ahead of her own financial gain, and come to the people as an authentic, if flawed, and above all human person. What does that take? Well, start by using the national platform to acknowledge that the effective political stratgey of the 1990's has created an economic disaster for most Americans today. Own it, apologize for a lack of foresight, and then propose a solution which both actually solves the problems of a tepid, unreliable job market with low wages that do not keep pace with the rate of inflation, and which the average American voter can see and touch with their own experiences and expectations. That, all by itself, would make her an instantly viable 2020 prospect again. Next, admit that the solution to the student debt crisis probably should not be more debt, which is what her proposed loan scheme fundamentally was. Admit that bankers should have no place in the educational system and that promoting debt as a route to higher education for the last thirty-some-odd years was a bad idea. Then propose a publicly funded solution, preferably including the hiring of more tenured professors. I might suggest requiring student to do, say, three hours of community service each week as part of the deal. Finally, just get behind single-payer. Admit that the commoditizing of health and suffering is not merely unethical but fundamentally inhumane. Suggest a phased-in Medicare-for-all, whereby citizenship becomes the only requirement for recieving any and all non-elective care, paid for by a progressive income tax, to be administered locally by State and Local governments, with the Federal government only being responsible for collecting and distrubting funds. There: I just made Clinton President in 2020. She can literally do nothing else and still win. War industries? Ignore'em. Immigration reform? Whatever. Infrastructure investment? Get out of here. Those three things I just described for you will get Herself elected in 2020, IF she can just stop trying to prove how much better she is. I mean I get it! Yes, the 1960's happened and her time at law school was awful. Sexism is a thing! But right now, economics matters infinitely more than identity, and if she hopes to continue having any kind of a career, then she's going to have to look i the mirror, and do the hard thing: change what she sees.

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Coming of Rage

Several publications in the last few days have been been making hay about the Progressive movement in these United States, especially as many of its leaders, organizers, luminaries are currently gathered in the nation’s capital to discuss the movement, its issues and the prospect of trying to draft Senator Bernie Sanders to be their candidate and leader. The formation of a Third Party, at the National level, has been talked to death. I am 100% on board with the idea, but until it can been shown to have legs, by actually getting a sufficient number of registered voters to sign on in all the States, there's nothing gained by having Sanders join the debate just now.

The man is a registered Independent, and while he may not necessarily owe the Democrats any special loyalty, his current efforts to advance the objective of universal healthcare is best served by using them. And I use that phrase advisedly; Sanders is using the DNC to move his signature issue forward, and the strategy is working. Look at how the senior leadership in that Party is fracturing around the issue. Even the obvious shills like Kamala Harris are coming around and supporting him. They've realized that the issue of healthcare has become (thanks to Sanders' tireless efforts) the single most important, and effectively only, issue for 2018.If this strategy succeed, as it is increasingly looking like it will, in allowing Democrats to recapture a significant number of seats in Congress and in the various State and Local contests next November, that will leave Sanders as the architect and mastermind of the most important issue-oriented political sweep in the last eighty years. That gives him sufficient political capital to write the agenda for the Democratic Party, if he chooses. That may include another run at the White House in 2020, but it also may not.

Sanders tried to make it plain in 2015 that he was running a campaign for the purpose of reframing the discussion about Progressive issues. Nobody took it seriously until he was shown to have legs as a presidential candidate, and even then the focus was on the candidate, rather than his agenda. This is changing and it seems that some people are starting to recognize that the man is playing a very different game than anything seen in the national forum in recent, and possibly living, memory.

Although the “official” campaign season for the 2018 midterms hasn’t opened yet, Democrats have been licking their wounds, organizing their agenda and, in the case of one Hillary Clinton (remember her?) throwing as much blame as possible at anyone but themselves. Sanders, however, quietly shed the ‘D’ he’d adopted for the 2016 election and continued his campaign for the issues that brought him to prominence in the first place: healthcare, education, the minimum wage and an end to the endless military conflicts that our young men and women die in, seemingly every day. The fact that the voters who’d been energized by the Sanders Presidential campaign have remained energized by the Sanders Political Revolution has taken the political class by surprise. Some Democrats have sought to capitalize on this outpouring of energy, while others have resisted the insurgency as entrenched political establishments always do.

The irony of Boomer Democrats struggling to maintain the status quo in the face of a popular political movement primarily motivated by the nation’s young people should be lost on noone. And it is a movement, not (as some Democrats and their allies seem to believe) an organization. Sanders is the leading figure, the most instantly recognizable and vociferous proponent of Progressivism in these times, but he is not it’s leader, chairman or president. Those in the neoliberal Democratic salons and boardrooms keep calling out for the Senator from vermont to “reign in”, “moderate” and “calm” the millions of Independent and nominally Democratic men and women who support Bernie Sanders, or his agenda, or both. What these self-appointed judges of reason and experience fail to grasp though, is that Sanders isn’t maneuvering for their backing, he’s maneuvering them back.

The conversation about the causes that Sanders champions has changed drastically in the last eighteen months. at the beginning of 2015, the basic assumption by all-but-all of office-holding Democrats was a patronizing, “pie-in-the-sky” view of universal healthcare. Today there are a myriad of leading Democrats either backing Senator Sanders’ Medicare bill, or else proposing their own. Even among the most powerful and influential of policy crafters (looking at you, Jon Gruber) are calling single-payer the coming thing. What happened to create this sudden warmness towards something that former candidate Hillary Clinton called “a free pony”?

Bernie Sanders started a movement, nationwide, which has made itself heard, and loudly, by the Democratic establishment. Yes, they had to get their ears cleaned out (along with their clocks) by the humiliating loss to Donald Trump. Clearly though, have come to understand that they cannot continue to embraced Wall Street economics while paying lip service to middle-class, blue-collar needs and championing token social justice. They are hemorrhaging voters, members, and most painfully, money. As such they are salivating at the prospect of tapping Bernie’s movement. Where the difficulty for the establishment Democrats lies, however, is in their desperate desire to capitalize on the economic populism while simultaneously retaining their vast pools of corporate campaign finance. Since the ascension of the Clinton-established, Koch-funded Democratic Leadership Council, the Democrats have been largely dependent on Wall Street for their funding. Should they actually embrace the economic causes of the current generation, however, they will lose that income stream all but overnight, and the idea of relying on the actual voters is terrifying to a generation that lived through the Reagan Revolution. Sanders demonstrated that small donations can fuel a national election, but the very real question have how reliable that funding will be, over the long term and for literally thousands of candidates at the Local, State and Federal levels.

As we have seen, though, the national conversation about politics and government is changing, and Sanders’ movement, his Political Revolution, is largely responsible for that. There are plenty of people who want the man to declare for 2020 right now, and a fair number of Clinton holdouts who will continue to blame him for Clinton’s catastrophic failure to win against the most unpopular political candidate of all time. The only thing which is absolutely clear is that Sanders himself isn’t going to telegraph his plans for 2020, and he is going to use the enormous influence he’s developed to force the Democratic establishment to make a public choice about where their interests lie. If they break for the neoliberal status quo of the last thirty-five years, then the voters and funding and agenda of Progressives and Independents will likely coalesce around a new leadership, probably in orbit around Senator Sanders himself. If, on the other hand, they break left and follow the populist economic movement, the Sanders’ has proven that his agenda of issues-driven campaigning is what will speak to the next generation of American voters.

No matter which way the DNC ultimately breaks, Sanders and the electorate should win, and big.

#hillary clinton #democrats #2018 #2020 #progressive #American Politics #political movements #bernie sanders #our revolution #democratic party

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Identity Mistakes

So yesterday saw a new identity politics screed published on The Hill’s website, written by (surprise, surprise) a former Clinton staffer. Apparently this voice from the wilderness has come to inform us that the future of the Democratic Party rests with following Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris! And why is this? What is the great visionary message these two supposed luminaries bring to guide the wayward? Well, according the author, one Michael Starr Hopkins, their single most important message is that they are young (in that weird, comparative sense of the word we reserve for politicians) and, most importantly, they have vaginas.

Hopkins analysis boils down to apologetics for the masterful failure of Clinton’s 2016 Presidential bid, pining for the “energy” the Obama campaigns and a sideways potshot or two taken at Senator Bernie Sanders and his supporters. The conclusion is, of course, that Sanders and “the left” are responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s inability to convince voters in what had, previously, been thought of as unassailable Democratic strongholds, that she would champion working class causes. Hopkins likes to blame this on “soft support from the Bernie wing”, despite the established fact that over eighty percent of Sanders’ supporters ultimately voted for Clinton, in spite of herself. One could be forgiven for wondering how better than four-out-of-five constitutes “soft support”, and what the threshold for presumable “hard support” would be.

It is in this frame that Hopkins choose to tell us that Gillibrand and Harris are the wave of the future, assuring us all that, “..the future of the Democratic Party appears to be female.” He exhorts with their supposed, relative lack of controversy! We are to be enthused by the absence of “baggage” in the form of controversial husbands! Above all, Hopkins wants us to be aware that these two conquering warrior queens, “hold no punches and have been criticized for exhibiting the same political aspirations as many of their male counterparts.”

Two which I am compelled to ask the question, “So what concrete actions have they taken to warrant our trust?” Of course by just asking about tangible policy work, I have marked myself as the enemy. But if either of these woman are going to assume the reigns of power, mantle of leadership, or whatever your metaphor of choice is, they are going to have to be able to answer some very basic, very hard-nosed questions about issues which, despite making contemporary, corporate-sponsored Democrats very uncomfortable, are nonetheless important the same voters who turned away from that Party in ’16.

By extension, of course, so must their surrogates, champions and cheerleaders. It isn’t enough to say that there is no controversy surrounding Harris, to simply proclaim that she has some mystical power to conjure up “party unity”, which is a myth in it’s own right. One thing jumps off her record immediately: why can’t she explain her failure, as State Attorney General of California, to prosecute Robert Mnuchin? Could it possibly have something to do with his support for her political career? And given the importance that Independent voters, Progressive and otherwise, have attached to financial corruption in the last several years, why on earth would Hopkins want to ignore this, and risk the rise of a new DNC leadership which is just as unpalatable to their base? Given the lack of answers to such questions from the Democrats, it’s easy to understand why so many people around the United States are exhausted with the empty promises of identity politics.

Which is not to say that identity doesn’t play an important role in the modern American body politic. But as a political strategy, deployed by the Clinton-led, Koch-funded Democratic Leadership Council, identity politics is not addressing the concrete, tangible, real-world, day-to-day lives of voters. It is absolutely true that Black Lives Matter, and those Lives need stable, reliable employment with a living wage, if they are going to care for themselves and their families. They also need reliable, accessible, and affordable healthcare. And the need advanced education, especially if we’re going to expect them contribute to society in the face of a rapidly changing, rapidly globalizing economy!

The same is true of all demographics: black, women, Latino, men, or any part of the LGBT umbrella. Yes, there absolutely are unique challenges and struggles for every demographic in our society, but the foundational issues which affect everyone, regardless of demography, have become overwhelmingly important. The simple fact is that people who don’t have a basic level of humane, economic stability in their lives do not have the luxury of time or effort to spare in championing the various struggles represented by identity. Worse yet, when people are struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, they don’t have the luxury of empathy for anyone outside their immediate tribe. If you really want a multiracial, multi-ethnic, broad spectrum social investment in the struggle for Civil Rights...you can’t have poor white families and poor black families and poor Latino families viewing each other as competition for basic subsistence!

Whence cometh this struggle? Who are the guilty parties? Start by looking at the people who abandoned economic justice for corporate campaign money after the DNC got its teeth kicked in by Ronnie Ray-gun in 1980. Then look to the ones who’ve been propagating this transfer of national prosperity into corporate hands. The Clintons tore down Glass-Steagall, and Harris has taken money from those who profited by that act. These facts are known by many, freely available to all and cannot be buried or papered over by the mainstream, corporate media. not that anyone should suggest that a paid agent of the current political establishment would use their voice in television and print media to try and unring the bell...

The point, however, is that trying to motivate voters by demographic appeals has been demonstrated to be a weak strategy in the current climate. While there will always be hyper-tribalists, the majority of Americans aren’t going to vote for a candidate because they share a few demographic traits. If that were the case, Congress would be an enormously more diverse place than it is, along line of not only sex and ethnicity, but also personal wealth. Almost everyone in Congress is a millionaire; almost nobody in the general population is a millionaire. Clearly, the idea that demographics are destiny is deeply flawed, at best. If the DNC truly wants to mobilize voters and regain their broken crown, they are going to have to take the path away from identity politics, and start cutting a new path through the thickets of economic justice and financial reform. It is going to be hard, it is going to be painful and it is going to taking hard stands against entrenched, wealthy interests. But in the end, it will work. We know this because it has worked in the past. The most unarguably successful President of the last hundred years was an economic populist. Franklin Roosevelt one four terms, a feat unequalled before or since. And he was a Democrat. Running on a “leftist” platform. He was a wealthy, white, male, college educated member of the upper class...and he understood that if the economy doesn’t work for everybody, then the long-term trajectory of politics will be towards despotism.

We are seeing this, now, in real-time. The Trump Presidency, as abhorrent as it has been so-far, is only a prelude. If the cause of economic justice is not taken up by the Democrats, then it will be taken up by someone else. And they will motivated more by anger and revenge than any idea of measured and carefully deliberated justice. These are the proverbial torches and pitchforks, and they are going to happen. Hell, they’re happening already. Occupy Wall Street was merely a prelude, the opening movement in this is Charlottesville. All those angry white men didn’t show up because they loved Bobby Lee, they showed up because they feel alienated and excluded from the national interest, both economically and politically. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this material.

People tend to forget, but the Nazis in Germany were elected. They were elected by people who felt alienated, powerless and hopeless. The global economy (which was starting to reemerge after WWI) was crumbling around them thanks to a crash which started in the American Stock Exchange (sound familiar?) and the Nazis capitalized on that anger.

The point, of course, is not that angry white men should be given special attention. It is that when it comes to kitchen table issues, it doesn’t matter what your race, sex, gender or ethnicity are. What matters is whether or not you feel confident that you’ll be able to feed, clothe and house your children.

#politics #democrats #economy #identity #justice #black lives matter #demographics

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Daddy Fearest

A little over three weeks ago, when President Trump made his ban of transgender people from serving in the armed forces know, I found the anger and outrage to overcome my fear and shame, and came out to my father, in an email. I’ve been agonizing over this for almost two years, but finally realized that I had to do something, if I was ever going to get any resolution, let alone tried heal from the extensive damage the man did me, both directly and indirectly.

I sent the email, and then very, very carefully did not say anything else. I knew that it was going to be ugly, and chose to let him make the next move, if any. I very, very deliberately was not going to make him feel like I was ambushing him. After three weeks without a response, however, I couldn’t wait any longer. I sent him a text at around 9PM on Wednesday, August 23rd:

“I suppose I'm not surprised you haven't answered yet, but admit that I'm frustrated and angry. I'm intelligent enough to understand silence as being rejection, but I suppose I just assumed you would, at least, have the courtesy to _tell_ me that you were going to cut me out, and why. Whatever the case, I continue to hold out hope. If you decide return my email, or text, I'll be here when you're ready to talk. If not, then not...and I hope you'll understand me when I say that, even as angry as I am, you are still my father, and I want you to be a part of my life, and this family.”

Almost twenty four hours laters, he final deigned to reply, telling me to calm down.

I could be more philosophical about it if I hadn’t already waited for three weeks, keeping my peace and not saying anything else. Meanwhile, he couldn’t just say, “That’s a lot to take in all at once. I’ll write back when I’ve thought it through better.” No, apparently it was better to leave me guessing and eaten up by anxiety to the point of nausea and insomnia.  And some people wonder why I have such an impossible time with commitment and trust.

When I close my eyes, and I can still see the old house on Orleck Place, in Murphy Canyon. I can picture him standing in the little front hallway, a giant to my child-self. I can see the little girl I should have been, trying to get to him, running down the hallway and never reaching him...and he does not see or hear me. I was a lost and confused, frightened and angry little girl during the divorce, and all I knew then was that I needed daddy to put things right. And in every meaningful way, I’m still that child hiding under her bed. That’s the worst part, possibly. Because I can’t stop needing his approval and love, I’m going to stay trapped there.

For going on thirty years, I’ve been a prisoner of fear and shame, and a paralyzing obsession with rejection and abandonment. Our fathers are supposed to keep us safe and help us grow up, not be the bullies who casually hurt us and trap us in a broken childhood. And that selfish, abusive man will not lift a finger to save his daughter.

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

A Single Man (2009) dir. Tom Ford

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Ger-manliness

At the risk of offending my friends and relatives across the pond, back in Dear Old Blighty, Ladies and Gentleman, it is my duty to report to you all that the Germans have just administered the most savage burn since The Blitz. But this time, instead of a badly improvised protracted campaign of disorganized assaults on justice, peace and liberty in the name of a egomaniacal, megalomaniacal narcissist, the people of Germany have instead delivered a targeted, precision truthbomb against one.

Seventy years on, and I think it’s time we all told the German people, just in case they continue to arbor any anxiety or doubt in the matter, that we are proud of them, and by damn, they should be to.

#trump #potus #politics #stern #germany #nazism #whitepower #altright #hitler #truthbomb

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Transitory Agenda

So it would seem that the Commander in Cheeto is finally getting  chance to prove that, as President, he can make a thing happen simply by ordering it. On the whole, it is good to see that he isn’t getting to rule by edict in general, it is sad that he is being allowed to vent his frustrations at the trans community. We are now told that the White House expects to have real, grown up orders for the Pentagon, instructing them in the witherto’s and whyfor’s of their new policy of excluding transgender Americans from serving their country.

Of course, the military leadership has long been used to being required to adhere to unneeded and unwanted objectives (the engine development for the F-35 comes to mind). Not that the clown show in the White House would ever accept the idea that banning transgender Americans from uniformed service isn’t a sound military decision move debated and demanded by the Joint Chiefs. Or at least, we assume it to be the Joint Chiefs, as the Cheeto has never named any of ‘his generals’ who actually called for this ban. Nor do any seem to be volunteering to vouch for it. A cynical American citizen might even suggest that the ban has nothing to do with military realities, and everything to do with appealing to the Donald’s last remaining political allies: the bigots who want to go back to having somebody to feel superior to.

Since the Cheeto’s election, violence against transgender American citizens has been on the rise, with spectacular attacks on their persons and property. This is no exaggeration, and has included incidents of fire bombing against veterans of the armed forces, simply because they happen to be trans. We’ve also seen the resurgence of bathroom bills in those states where the foul-fingered vulgarian draws most of his support.

#politics transgender transban transveteran Trump

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

How to Apologize

This morning I read an interesting little screed by a neoliberal apologist by the name of Paul Waldeman, writing for the Washington Post. And I gotta tell you, this was a special kind of passive aggressive apologetics, all the more appropo for being written in advance of and specifically regarding Hillary Clinton’s upcoming campaign memoir, ‘What Happened’. The fact that this man, and I can only assume his colleagues, feels the need to deflect criticism of the book before it even becomes available to the public is so very, damnably telling. It’s almost as if Waldeman is anticipating specific criticism...as if he could predict what content might possibly arouse the ire of those inclined to be less-than-charitable towards Mrs. Clinton and her allies.

What Waldeman makes his salient point, is the idea that Clinton has been subjected to a demand for public, energetic, and penitent self-flagellation for her failure to win the election. Now in all, absolute fairness, his point that nobody else who has failed to win the White House (at least in living memory) has been expected to make a public show of contrition for that failure. Someone less kind than myself would point out that nobody else managed to lose to Donald Trump, but I’ll beg their pardon and decline the license. Trump himself, beyond his identity as an outsider, was irrelevant to the Clinton campaign. They never had to beat him, they had to overcome Clinton’s own unpopularity, which they failed to do in a spectacular fashion.

Like Waldeman, I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Mrs. Clinton’s opus, so I will by-and-large reserve my opinion. However, as it pertains to the idea of seeking forgiveness, of looking to explain failure and hopefully correct such in the future, I must take issue with the man’s implication that their is some injustice in expecting an explanation for how how Clinton managed to not only lose the election, but specifically, to lose the faith and support of long-time Democratic strongholds among the working class. That same class which the Democrats purportedly champion.

Because that’s what this really comes down to, Mr. Waldeman. Clinton didn’t lose this thing at the margins, and she didn’t just lose for herself. She lost a core constituency of the Democratic Party, going back over seventy years. And she didn’t have to. And it completely misses the mark to simply say, Oh, she took some people for granted. She completely ignored a constituency which has suffered economic displacement and alienation as a direct result of the policies endorsed and pursued by her, her Party and her husband (who I only mention because he was the sitting President who signed off on these things in the 90′s).

Maybe you can make the argument that it is entirely unfair to ask her to be the scapegoat for roughly forty years of Democratic Party policies. But you know, we call the people who stand for the office of the Presidency their Party’s standard bearer. They are the face and representative of their agenda, and of their actions. So yes, actually, Mr. Waldeman. Mrs. Clinton has a lot apologize for, and if she needs primer to get started on that, she should reread Schumer’s piece in the Times. Because the Party’s move towards Wall Street in the 80′s was a direct result of the efforts she and her husband made via the DLC organization which they founded (and which the Koch brother’s funded). Because giving up on economic justice and security, in the name of chasing token social justice has resulted in people being forced to try cobbling together 3.5 part time jobs in order to feed and house their children, who they rarely get to see or actually raise, do to working sixty or more hours a week. Because giving up even talking about single payer in 2009, in the name of getting Republican votes, which then never materialized, resulted in a massive transfer of public funds into private hands via insurance subsidies. And, because of a host of other reasons too numerous to list.

Maybe it is unfair to ask Clinton to apologize for all of that. But then again, maybe it was unfair of her and the Democrats to alienate and exclude and ridicule millions of hardworking American citizens, then demand their votes.

People only demand apology, Mr. Waldeman, when they expect to continue a relationship. When they want to work together. Apologies are part of the price of forgiveness, which is what Mrs. Clinton and her party need right now, if they plan to return to national politics. But that forgiveness will be predicated upon their ability, as voiced by Mrs. Clinton, to acknowledge exactly what they did wrong. Because it is in that, sir, that we find sincerity, and that is the foundation of trust in politics.

And it is trust, for the Clintons, and for their Party, which is lacking right now.

#politics Clinton Democrats apologies WhatHappened WashingtonPost PaulWaldeman

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Back by Popular Demand

Since the election, I’ve made a point of keeping my mouth mostly shut about politics, both for my sanity and that of my friends and family. But as we’re now past the half time show for this first year of the Trump administration, I find that my sanity is more endangered by my silence than by my engagement. The maddening bit, though, is that it is not the Donald’s performance as the nation’s executive which is driving me insane, but rather the general failure of the Democrats to provide any sort of organized, motivated and effective opposition.

As I repeatedly pointed out during the 2016 primary season, there has been a general sea-change in the political, economic and social values of these United States. This coincides, unsurprisingly, with the massive impact of economic globalization and the emergence of the Millennial Generation as the newest, fastest growing and soon-to-be-if-not-already largest voting block in the United States. In a great many ways, Millennials reflect the energy and attitudes of their Boomer grandparents, who are currently fighting them tooth-and-nail for both political and economic power. But the real irony of this, is that the Boomers, are fundamentally doing the same thing; they, however, are now taking the role of intransigent elders determined to forestall the socio-economic evolution of the country. One might now entertain an energy-policy based on harnessing the speed and torque of the Kennedy Brothers in their graves.

Of course, the parallels are not exact. Most prominent in it’s absence is the character of a genuine, external existential threat to the American way of life, or just American life, despite the continued saber-rattling of North Korea. There’s also the greatly diminished (though not extinct) role of institutional racism and sexism, although these two insidious evils remain and continue to adapt for survival in an increasingly egalitarian society. And the struggle for justice and social enfranchisement of the LGBT+ alliance has added new dimensions as well. But perhaps the single most important difference between the second decade of the 21st Century and the sixth decade of the 20th, is that we find ourselves confronted by the same evils which threatened to consume the nation all through the first half of the last century. These are evils which cross all boundaries of race, religion, sex, gender and ethnicity. These are the evils of economic concentration and fashionable ignorance.

The antitrust and antimonopoly laws of the early 20th Century, combined with the economic reforms and regulations instituted during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration created the framework for the expansion of the greatest economic power in the history of the world: the American Middle Class. Living wages, guaranteed retirement benefits in old age, restraint of market speculation by commercial deposit banks; all these things, and more, made it possible for American citizens to invest in their own futures. Home ownership, which really should be thought of as investment in a community, became a reality for most citizens. So did the expectation that their children would due do better than their parents. People could afford to buy the sort of manufactured goods the fueled general economy, and as a result kept more-or-less everybody employed. The odds that very many people were going to get rich this way were nil, but for people who lived through the chaos of the late 19th Century, the deplorable income disparity of the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and two World Wars, stabile, moderate economic growth and prosperity was Heaven on Earth.

Of course the capital interests of Wall Street and big business across the country were universally opposed to anything that seemed to cut into their profit margins. This isn’t anything new today, nor was it in 1902, when the coal miners of the country went on strike, threatening to not only halt the machinery of American Industry, but to literally freeze the country to death for want of heating fuel that winter. The tide of power between capital and labor, or more correctly private and public interest, has shifted back and forth for centuries. But the post-Industrial world has seen that balance of power shift almost exclusively into the hands of private interest. FDR worked hard to create economic circumstances that engaged as much of the population as possible in participating in both the productivity and prosperity of the nation. Since then, private interests have worked long and hard to shift as much of that prosperity to themselves as they can. It isn’t practical to make moral judgements about this fact, it is simply a natural law of human behavior: given the opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of strangers, with whom they have no personal ties or empathy, and expecting no social consequences, a significant number of people will do it.

Birds sing, grass grows, and Wall Street makes money.

The problem with this lies in that the balance has been shifted too far towards private interest, for too long. We can say this because we can observe conditions that closely parallel those of the aforementioned periods of economic turmoil. Debt-to-earnings ratios are entirely out of control, large amounts of public money are being used to subsidize extremely high-risk private business decisions, income disparity is close the same levels as the Gilded Age and roughly half of the US economy is now focused on trading paper instead of building goods. And just to put the cherry on top we’re already starting another mortgage bubble, because people have been taught to see their house as a commodity to be traded, rather than a roof over their heads. We have people working more hours, earning fewer dollars, that are worth less, while the price of the basic goods and services they need are climbing, because lax interest rates have driven inflation. And behind it all are the very wealthy private interests which invest billions in buying political campaigns, in order to promote more of the same policies.

Of course, while this is happening, we somehow have an electorate which paradoxically has the greatest access to information, and the lowest levels of education and comprehension, in history. It is tempting to point fingers at the national media organizations, but the real culprits are the voters.

Yes, the voters. Us.

Over the last twenty-some-odd years we have gotten into the comfortable habit of ignoring public discourse and conflicting views which challenge our assertions and assumptions, in favor of conveniently prepackaged, pre-analysed and above all demographically targeted infotainment. It began with the Cable News Network (for those of you too young to remember CNN’s origins) and and spiraled completely out of control since then. There are now just six corporations which completely control all of the information available via the mainstream media, and this gives them the power to control what the content of our national discourse is.

Ah hah, some of you are now saying, I don’t have to rely on the Big Six, I can use the internet! Bravo, you; now take a quick turn around your browser of choice and take a look at what the most prominent search results for current events are. You will notice that, baring your particular local news, they are all covering the same dozen or so stories, from one of approximately five points of view: far left outsider, left insider, centrist/moderate, right insider or far right outsider.

Viewed another way: HuffPo, MSNBC, CNN, FOXNews and Breitbart.

And you are perfectly fine with this, because you can look at that list and pick one of them out, saying to yourself, well, those guys get it mostly right. Damn near every single voter in this country (and most non-voters) are convinced that their particular view of public policy is unambiguously Right. As a result, we don’t take the time to hear what each other are saying, and so we have no idea about the frustrations, fears and needs of our fellow citizens. We are complicit in our atomization and alienation from one another, and the absolute worst part of this is that we are proud of it.

It doesn’t matter if the discussion is about climate change or confederate statues. One half of this country simply assumes that their prejudicial caricature of the other is all there is to them. Does anyone really believe that the overwhelming majority of angry white men who tried to start a riot in Charlottesville, Virginia were actually upset over the removal of a statue that most of them had probably never known was there a week earlier? Of course not. Most of those guys are worried about their jobs, their homes, their families and their economic stability in general. But those issues aren’t being discussed, and when someone brings up those realities, they get dismissed with words like ‘privilege’. As if, somehow, being white and male makes any given person immune to the exact same economic turmoil that has ravaged everyone else in this country for the last thirty-some-odd years.

Yes, the statistics matter. Yes, white males are as a group less likely to have been damaged by globalization, the mortgage bubble, student debt, etc. But that only means that the number of those who’ve been damaged is smaller, not that they are each less damaged as individuals. And why does that fact matter? Because when lump all white males in a box, and ignore their individual circumstances, you are alienating them. You are saying that their needs and fears don’t matter and denying them a stake in society. And as a result, you turn them into an enemy. Worse, the very small number of actual reactionaries can them recruit these people. This is exactly how ISIS does it.

This is exactly how the Nazis did, and still do, as demonstrated in Charlottesville. These guys listen to and sympathize with the genuine racists and Nazis, because nobody else is listening to them or giving them a stake. And the same is absolutely true of women, Millennials, Latinos, Christians and every other demographic subset in the United States. You can’t just try and sweep them up into a bloc and hang a two word label them. You can’t just speak to people’s identity; you must address their actual, concrete needs.

Women are more than a set of reproductive organs; they need jobs that pay a living wage. African-Americans are more than the descendents of slaves; they need comprehensive health care, now. Latinos are more than exploited migrant labor; they need education to provide their children better opportunities. And literally everyone needs us to stop sending our sons and daughters to kill and die in foreign countries.

All this means we have to actually step outside our echo chambers, leave our social media bubbles, and make the effort to hear what someone is saying, rather than what we’re assuming about them. We have to work, hard, at correcting our ignorance of our fellow citizens, and stop being proud of it.

Both of these two points, about the corruption and imbalance of economic power and the atomization of the electorate, form the foundation of my tremendous frustration with the Democratic Party in the wake of the Trump Presidency. I would have thought that the general decline in party membership as a percentage of population should have indicated that they needed to make a serious course correction in their policy positions and agenda. I cannot avoid pointing out not only their inability to defeat a narcissistic reality television personality with all the vocabulary and maturity of a cranky five year old, but the fact that they lost the faith and loyalty of the working class voter in three of the states hardest hit by forty years of Republican economic policies.

And so, I return to the fight in earnest. The concept of ‘the resistance’, as it it spoken of by the current Democratic Leadership, is laughable at best. Have we forgotten that the Republicans were ’the resistance’ during the eight years of the previous administration? This accomplished little, and now they’ve swept into power again, we can see how much work they actually put into developing eventive policies to put into the legislative process. For the Democrats to follow this exact same playbook at this point isn’t just insufficient, it is positively counterproductive. The fact that instead of developing a platform oriented around the clearly Progressive push in modern American politics, they want to attempt to garner votes with a rebranding campaign, does nothing to inspire enthusiasm for them. It seems, in fact to fly in the face of Chuck Schumer’s New York Times piece. He started signaling that the Party was ready to change tack and move in line with the now more left leaning electorate, but such an agenda, with definable, concrete objectives, has yet to manifest.

The new slogan for the new brand (A Better Deal) is vague, undefined and is very obviously the product of a corporate focus group trying to evoke the legacy of FDR without committing to the actual policies he put in place. Aside from wondering how much they had to pay Papa John’s Pizza to forego legal action, the first question that any reasoning American citizen should ask is, ‘Better than what?’

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

#politics Democrats Progressive Left government election OurRevolution DNC DLC economics racism feminism identitypolitics

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Sense and Sensitivty

As we approach the end of the primary season, difficult decisions for the electorate emerge. Senator Sanders has been instrumental in helping to fully awaken the voters, dissatisfied with the course of American politics, who were already stirring. The suffering caused by decades of supply-side economic policy, a neo-colonial foreign policy, and the systematic corruption of our politics by the tremendous influx of money from the corporate sector, have all contributed to creating the reality of what an increasing number of social scientists identify as the new American Plutocracy. The day-to-day hardships, suffered by a large and rapidly growing portion of our citizens, has reached a crisis point; every day, more and more prosperous, hard-working, formerly optimistic Americans are forced out of the middle class, and every day, more and more are forced to make Sophie’s Choices, between paying the rent, or putting gas in the car, between buying groceries or clothes for their growing children.

Senator Sanders has brought these issues, taboo in the political arena since Ronald Reagan’s conservative sweep against a Democratic Party unable, or unwilling, to respond to the needs of the American Citizen. For thirty years, the party of Roosevelt has been held hostage, and like a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, has embraced the motives and demands of their captors. We have been told, for decades now, that we must be willing to compromise, and every time we complain about the loss of our jobs, the failure of wages to keep up with inflation, the eroding of our public schools or the literal collapse of our infrastructure, we are told of the great gains in social equality; we are expected to treat the freedom of LGBT people to serve openly in the military, and get married, as a nigh-miraculous achievement, instead the long overdue acknowledgement of basic human rights. These same LGBT people are still regularly the victims of hate crimes which are often vicious and even fatal, yet society is being told to pat itself on the back. Meanwhile, more and more of these people, like all Americans, are slipping into poverty, watching as the wealthy elite off-shore their jobs and as reckless banks gamble away their savings. There’s your “Participation Award”.

The Democratic Primary contest, between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, has at last exposed this disconnect between those who are secure in this economy, and those who are excluded. Those who need structural reform of our economy and politics, now, cannot afford to wait for incremental advances; they need food now, they need homes now, they need good paying employment to provide for their families now. For many in the Democratic Party, those who can afford the time and resources, these might seem like puerile demands. These might seem like picayune details, or some type of puritanical extremism. In reality, it is a call to action, and an opportunity for the Democratic Party. It is a chance to renew the promise of the New Deal, to reawaken the legacy and spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and make this, the 21st Century, another American Century. It is the opportunity to engage ourselves, as a nation, to harness the same spirit of unbridled American passion and commitment, to the prosperity and innovation that will make our country the leader of the nations of the world.

It is also a sterling opportunity for the Democratic Party to regain the overwhelming support of American voters not actually registered with their party.  The fact is, no matter how much party loyalists want to ignore it, that most of the American electorate isn’t registered to any party, let alone theirs. It has always been incumbent upon the parties to earn the support of Independent voters, and right now, in purely political terms, the Democratic Party has an all but unprecedented chance to garner the kind of support that will not only win them the White House, but control of both the House and Senate, and a chance to appoint a slate of new Supreme Court Justices. Gambling all this on partisan infighting is madness, but this seems to be precisely what is happening. It is plainly obvious that Hillary Clinton has spent the last eight years planning for this year’s primary, expecting to make a second run for the Presidency. It is equally obvious that she, and the Party Leadership, expected her to run essentially unopposed. Since Bernie Sanders has entered the race, however, that plan has been badly damaged. As the Senator has campaigned, successfully, on the vast gulf of income inequality, bad trade agreements, corrupt political financing and a myriad of other structural issues; he has motivated and mobilized a vast swath of Independent and new voters. This is not because Bernie Sanders himself is a captivating orator or exceptionally charismatic, but because he has correctly identified the concerns of these voters. Hillary Clinton, whose entire campaign began, essentially, as a promise to maintain the status quo, has been banking on loss aversion to carry her against the Republican nominee. The problem with this sort of campaign, however, is that it only works as long as people are more afraid of what they might lose, than they are angry about what they have already lost. A status quo argument only works as long as the status quo is considered acceptable, and for many millions of voters, and many more every day, it is not.

The recent coalescing and growth of the “Bernie or Bust” movement has made many Democrats, particularly among the leadership, extremely uncomfortable, as well it should. The movement highlights the extreme gulf between those Democrats privileged enough to endure the status quo, with its inherent rate of political and economic decline, and those who are not so privileged. The tone of the movement is seen as being irrational, puritanical and incapable of understanding, let alone agreeing to, compromise. This is not the case. What we are prepared to compromise upon, however, may not be recognizable to the rank and file. The Democratic partisans want us to back them on maintaining the ACA, on preserving Planned Parenthood and on pushing for the rights of the LGBT community. Well and good, these are things that most of us, if not all, are in favor of, and even those who aren’t necessarily in favor, will at least support them in order to get the Democratic Party behind the kind of structural economic changes they need to preserve the American middle class. It is true that some of Bernie Sanders’ supporters are vehemently against Clinton, but very few aren’t willing give her their support.

That support, however, will not come unconditionally; it will not come without certain very specific and explicitly expressed guarantees. There are a few, very specific concessions that we expect from Clinton. We want acknowledgement of the failures of Democratic “Third Way” policies, we want Clinton and the Democratic leadership to, very simply, admit that they surrendered too much of the economic security and independence of the American people, in order to gain Big Money funding, and win elections. We want the guarantee that Clinton and the Democratic Party will seek a Constitutional Amendment to end Citizens United and end all dark money political contributions; all Americans are entitle to an equal voice, especially when money is equated to speech, and all Americans must be accountable for what they say in the public forum. We want a constitutional Amendment guaranteeing a full education of every American citizen, from kindergarten through our public universities; education is the foundation of our innovation driven, technological economy, and the guarantor of the citizens’ informed consent to government. We want a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing a livable minimum wage, indexed to inflation, and guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, regardless of race, sex, gender or ethnicity; part and parcel to this, we expect our citizens who are dependent upon Social Security to receive at least this level of support. As a show of good faith, we expect Hillary Clinton, if she is the nominee, to asking Bernie Sanders to be her Vice President, to act on her behalf in organizing and supervising the fulfillment of these requirements.

Given these concessions, it is all but impossible to imagine that the overwhelming majority of Bernie Sanders’ supporters will not throw their entire support, in full enthusiasm, behind this Unity ticket, on this Unity platform. We are not an intransigent cult of childish ideologues. We are Americans who are suffering, badly. We do not expect any heroic rescues, but we demand that our politicians, our representatives in our government, be working for us, not a cabal of wealthy elitists. We are not only willing, not only able, but eager, very eager, to work with them in meeting these needs, because we are Americans, and we understand the necessity and value of coming together in a desperate and righteous cause. The only way this fails, is if the Party loyalists refuse to meet us. In the end we will either make it succeed together, or make it fail together.

#bernie sanders #hillary clinton #democratic primary #democracy #bernie or bust #politics #government #compromise #election #reform #democrats #dnc #revolution #political revolution #progress #progressive #lgbt #lgbtq

[dieselpunk-progressive-blog]

Hoosier Favorite

With the Indiana Primaries now come and gone the mood is tense on all sides, Democratic and Republican, for a number of very good reasons. On the Republican side of the house, Donald Trump continues to lead heavily, much to the consternation and horror of the Republican Party establishment. Fully aware of the massive vulnerabilities the man brings to their Presidential bid, given his frankly offensive, cavalier statements regarding women and minorities, the GOP leadership has been busily trying to undermine the multi-millionaire mogul and television star. Recently, his chief competition for the Republican nomination, chiefly Ted Cruz, the most disliked man in the history of Washington D.C. (and most recent casualty of the primary season, having now suspended his campaign), and John Kasich (who nobody outside of Ohio had ever heard of before January) had called an unofficial cease fire; the plan being to attempt denying “The Donald” enough pledged delegates to clinch the party nomination, ahead of the convention. These two political picadors had taken up the task of trying to force a contested convention, in the hopes that after the failure of the first round of balloting, Trump could be elbowed out by the party regulars. Not that Ted Cruz, or his cadre, are in any way regular; the Tea Party caucus has made obstruction into performance art.

Which is, naturally, the heart of the problem the Republicans in the capitol building have had for a good long while now. What seems to be escaping the Elephants in the room, is the elephant in the room. Congress, largely because of the obstructionist tactics initiated by the leaders of the GOP establishment in D.C., is currently more dysfunctional and less productive than it has been in living memory. Mitch McConnell’s proclamation that the Republican contingent in the national government would make their chief priority defeating and derailing any and all initiatives launched by the Obama White House set the stage for and brought to life the Tea Party; this radical “grassroots” movement (which turned out to be more like AstroTurf, courtesy of Koch Industries) culminated in the election of a new slate of conservative legislators is the 2010 mid-term’s. This group has proven to be absolutely opposed to not only the President himself, but also to any form of cooperation between the legislature and the chief executive. While initially welcome to the Republican Caucus, this band of nigh-anarchists would ultimately derail any attempt at actual governance, and wind up completely overthrowing the nominally more moderate conservative leadership.

Enter, Donald J. Trump, millionaire, television star, and household name for more than three decades. What has made Trump a viable candidate, ultimately, is his very fine judgement of the emotional state of the nation. The inability of the polarized, paralyzed government to respond to the legitimate needs of the voters has left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths. Failing infrastructure, declining wages, lowered standards of living, over extension of the military, failing and unfavorable trade policies, even an actual decline in the average lifespan of the people, have all contributed to a state of frustration, anxiety and hopelessness. Even the irrational, low-information voters who elected the Tea Party obstructionists are beginning to get thoroughly fed up, albeit for completely the wrong reasons. Trump has tapped into that nebulous, national angst and directed it, rather expertly, at easily identified, highly visible and generally vulnerable scapegoats; Mexicans and Muslims being the most prominent. The fact that Trump has no kind of coherent plan to address correcting the actual causes of our national difficulties is of no importance and, in fact, runs entirely counter to his strategy; he has correctly identified the problems themselves, vindicating the emotional needs of a very large segment of the population, and he has provided them a sense of empowerment, by giving them a specific target for their anger and fear.

In a way, the fact that the Republican Party leadership seems to have been very, very slow to pick up on all this is somewhat reassuring. It means that they are, in fact, still able to observe reality and recognize that a purely irrational outlook is not just unproductive, but ultimately counterproductive.

Unfortunately, it also means that The Donald has had the better part of the last year to wage an essentially uncontested propaganda campaign. Now, they are desperately flailing, trying to find any legal means of blocking him from their nomination, while simultaneously trying to maintain the level of action that the man has been able to whip up. The matter is made worse by the fact that Trump is running, unsurprisingly, an insurgent campaign. Any action taken against him by the GOP fits neatly into the anti-establishment narrative that trump is running on, fueling his supporters even more. Not that they have much leverage to use against him in the first place. Unlike the vast majority of Republican candidates, the man has no need for their funding, at all. Trump can, and quite possibly will, fund himself straight through the general election, completely negating any influence the party might possibly have on him, even while the party itself remains completely dependent upon large money donations. It may seems absurd, if not outright disingenuous, that a multi-millionaire is campaigning _against_ the moneyed elite, but that is exactly what he’s doing, citing bad trade deals, rampant tax evasion and pervasive graft and corruption among government officials...alongside the barrels of jingoism, sexism, ignorance and generalized bigotry. Maddeningly, for both Republicans and Democrats alike, it’s working.

Speaking of Democrats, that side of this particular circus tent is no less contentious. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has taken a decidedly nastier turn in the last month. With credible allegations of voter suppression by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, it should come as no shock that Sanders’ supporters have become increasingly combative. Meanwhile, the rapidly narrowing window of opportunity for Sanders to claim the nomination has Clinton’s people becoming more and more irate over his stubborn refusal to drop out. The actual facts are simple enough but, as always, people find a way to make things personal. Being a Sanders’ supporter (full disclosure), I have difficulty feeling any sympathy for Clinton and her camp. Yes, we are well aware that Bernie is behind in the delegate count, and we further understand that it is getting less and less likely that he will be able to secure the nomination. We also understand that by staying in the race, forcing Clinton to actually compete, he is forcing her to expend resources that could be spent fighting off Trump, who is now free to focus his attention and resources on attacking her. Clinton s now caught in the horrific position of having to fight off attacks from both the left and the right, with now way to effectively distinguish herself favorably to either side. Attacking Sanders makes her sound like a watered down Trump, and attacking Trump makes her sound like a watered down, and disingenuous, Sanders; and we Americans are famous for our love of extreme dichotomy. Yet, the increasingly angry demands for “unity” ring hollow and smack of unctuous entitlement, and a smarmy, paternalistic, condescension.

To begin with, the narrative that Hillary Clinton is, somehow, entitled to the nomination or the Presidency is, by itself, hideously offensive, to not only Sanders’ supporters, but to anyone who values the principles of democracy. The idea that an elite political class has the right to determine our leadership for us is anathema to the principle of self-government. Yes, the electoral process can lend a veneer of consent, but in the end, when the process is restricted by a self-interested minority, what you have, in practice, is oligarchy. That may not be the intent, and may not be how Clintonistas want to see themselves, but that’s the way it looks from outside the circle of The Anointed One. Then we have the fact that, yes, the main stream media has in fact been denying Sanders’ campaign coverage, from the beginning. At first, this was understandable, he wasn’t well known and had little support. Yet, as the season progressed, the paucity of coverage persisted, despite massive growth in his rallies and donations. Maybe this was a blackout, maybe it wasn’t, but you can’t ignore the fact that the same corporations which own the vast majority of media outlets are all significant contributors to Clinton’s campaign! Is it any wonder that those Feeling the Bern, were feeling burned? The list of slights and grievances grows, from debate scheduling to sudden changes in campaign funding restrictions, to what many, including many officials, describe as outright voter suppression and ballot fraud.

So, understanding that Clinton’s campaign, and the DNC, have done nothing to reassure or win over Sanders’ camp, and in fact have done a great many things which leaves them feeling alienated, the petulant and angry demand that we all suddenly give up our priorities and our motivating ideals is more than frustrating, it’s downright infuriating. Why should we give Clinton our support, when she has done nothing to earn it? She claims to have great leadership, yet has trailed on every issue we care about, from the minimum wage to marriage rights, only changing her official position after the hard work was already done, and the political wind had shifted. She continues to insist we must send more of our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, off to die in foreign countries, protecting despots and dictators in the name of an ill-defined “war” on an ideology…which suspiciously seems to align with the interest American corporations have in exploiting resources and labor. We can’t even get her to commit to separating commercial and investment banking again, because that would be “too hard”…yet that was exactly we did in 1930. Given all this, are we genuinely supposed to believe that the woman who has built her entire fortune and power structure on corporate corruption of government officials is going to put genuine campaign finance reform into place, and end her own ride on the gravy train?

To the voters who support Clinton, for whatever reason, these may seem like picayune details, or unreasonable and puritanical ideological demands, or whatever the apologetic catch-phrase of the moment is. Too the voters who are backing Sanders, however, these are very real, very pressing concerns, held by an electorate which is not content to blindly trust people with a poor record of being trustworthy. Furthermore, maybe this is all completely baseless and unfair; Clinton might be the very soul of progressive ideology. The problem, though, is that she has not, and is not, doing anything to convince the people of it. Yes, I know, Mr. and Mrs. I’mWithHer, that you don’t understand how this isn’t already self-evident. Or, maybe you just feel that the certainty of the lesser evil is better than risking worse. Keep in mind however, that in November, it isn’t going to be the party faithful who elect the president; it’s going to be those Independents, who are presently throwing their support, their votes and their money, overwhelmingly behind Sanders, and who very likely will stay home, should he not be the nominee. This isn’t an argument for you to change sides, however; it is a call for you to convince the Independents, and the other Sanders’ supporters, why they should vote for Clinton, which is not the same thing as voting against Trump.

This is Clinton’s task, if she has any hope of winning. She has to find a way to win the trust of people who are not part of her political party, don’t like her, don’t trust her, and who see her as emblematic of the paralyzed and unresponsive, corporate-controlled government. Trump has already demonstrated that he has support among the Independent voters, and the GOP is resigning itself to his nomination, being desperate to regain power. If Clinton can’t counter that with Independent support of her own, and a lot more of it, then 2016 is going to be a rehash of 1980, with the prospect of much worse to follow. If the gridlock and socio-economic decline continues, the public will become even more irrational, which foreshadows very dark times indeed, given that this country has more military power than the next twenty-three nations combined. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

#bernie sanders #hillary clinton #donald trump #ted cruz #presidency #campaign #feelthebern #democracy #republican #democrat #politics #indiana