Clueless Capitalists

Posted on April 5, 2016 by MZR
What has happened to the traditional reservoir of support for America’s market economy?

Apr 11, 2016 | By Irwin M. Stelzer

Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and Irving Kristol have two things in common. All three recognized the extraordinary ability of market capitalism to produce goods, services, and wealth. And they hoped, believed, and feared, respectively, that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

The time may have come when these keen observers of the capitalist system are being proved right. Not because the state will have taken over all the means of production and distribution, as Communists and socialists would have it—or merely the “commanding heights of the economy,” as Lenin would have it. The state no longer needs to own the means of production and distribution in order to control the economy, allocate capital to whatever purposes the state deems most desirable, and set prices, including the price of labor. To do that, it needs three things: a willingness to use regulation as a tool of control; the power to tax and subsidize; and a decline in the acceptability of capitalism, especially among the classes that have in the past benefited from its enormous productive power.

Donald Trump sees capitalism as a system in which businesses succeed by buying the approbation of politicians in power, no matter which party. Dollars buy access to those in positions to confer favor, no matter their beliefs. Doing business requires something other than the best product at the best price; it requires favors from the people in a position to grant them. His candor on the subject is not an adequate defense. Hillary Clinton takes a different view. The great wealth produced by capitalism is a sort of honey pot, and the game for a political leader is to figure out how to dip into it. Perhaps it takes getting elected to a high office; or establishing a seemingly charitable foundation; or getting in a position to dole out favors and collect IOUs to be cashed at just the right time; or linking all of the above and shaping it into a single large spoon with which to do the dipping, leaving no trace, as our colleague Daniel Halper lays out in detail in Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.

To Ted Cruz capitalism is a wonder, as indeed it is, but also a merciless Darwinian process that requires, among other things, deportation sans pitié, taxing what workers buy rather than the incomes of the wealthy, abolishing the sensibly porous but nevertheless useful fence that assigns some territory to religion without making it a key feature of democratic government, and featuring disdain for the political process that underpins capitalism but requires pragmatic adjustment and, dare I say it, compromise if it is to continue to play that role.

To Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most transparent of the lot, capitalism is a system to be changed by a “revolution.” No, not the bloody sort practiced by his socialist predecessors when he was honeymooning in the Soviet Union. And no, not one engineered by dispossessed horny-handed sons of toil seeking to be freed of their chains, but by a young army of privileged college students who should be forgiven for they know not what they do, owing to the absence of courses in Western civilization and an appalling lack of interest in the work of the Founding Fathers.

In short, no need to seek among the various aspirants to the leadership of our nation anyone with a belief in capitalism as it has until recently been understood: a system in which individual producers compete to offer individual consumers the best product at the best price, staying within the law while doing so, a law that introduces into the system noneconomic social values agreeable to a majority of the population. No need to hope that we will find such a one as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a vigorous interventionist but one who sought to save, not destroy, capitalism by making markets work better to produce goods and jobs, and distribute essential benefits such as electricity and decent housing more widely. Or a John F. Kennedy, who understood that the purpose of tax policy was to keep the goose laying golden eggs. Or a Ronald Reagan, who understood that government is more often the problem than a solution, and that it could better provide solutions by making the supply side of the economy more supple rather than by artificially manipulating the demand side. All in their own way, and in all probability well aware of what they were doing, were seeking to preserve capitalism, by reforming it if necessary.

Some overstepped at times, some fell asleep at the switch at times and were too timid to deploy the tools at their disposal, but none sought what Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders have in mind for us: a stint in office that has no consistent understanding or fondness for the traditional underpinnings of America’s functioning capitalist system.

No need here to detail the many ways in which government has used its power to regulate by replacing capitalism’s market with rules, despite the fact that the problems could be met by greater, rather than less reliance on prices. Consumers are content to have their electricity made by burning coal, yet instead of making them pay for the environmental impact we will simply regulate the industry out of existence. Consumers make it clear in the market that they prefer large to small, European-style vehicles, but manufacturers are instead told what mix of the two they must turn out. Consumers want to buy health insurance policies that do not have premiums inflated with reimbursements for services they neither want nor need, but regulation prohibits the sale of such policies, which insurers would dearly love to make available to consumers who would dearly love to buy them. Homeowners who were led to believe that in a free-market capitalist system their homes were their castles find that government can snatch those homes away to permit developers to build parking lots or shopping malls in order to increase the tax revenues of the government that did the house-napping.

Equally, there is little need here to lay out in painful detail how the power to tax and subsidize has become the power to destroy capitalism’s ability to provide consumers with the goods and services they crave. Consumers want cheap electricity; government wants expensive wind machines and solar installations. So it pays well-connected businessmen to build such facilities, using taxes on consumers to fund that wealth transfer. Government thinks we should drive electric vehicles, so it takes money from the paychecks of middle-class workers and hands checks to those wealthy enough to afford $85,000 Teslas. Government thinks you should smoke less and is probably right, so it raises taxes on cigarettes and bans smoking within several hundred feet of federal buildings while the former speaker of the House contentedly puffed away in the office provided him by taxpayers. Travelers are willing to pay for more parking at airports, but cannot express that preference with hard cash because politicians have reserved spaces for themselves rather than bid and pay for them on an open market and taxes travelers to make up for the lost revenues needed by airport operators.

That this creates cynicism there is no doubt. That politicians’ personal behavior and ethical bent removes them from the ranks of possible defenders of the capitalist system is equally certain. Which is the least of our problems. More damaging to the sustainability of that system is the behavior of the corporate sector. The deeds of the financial sector are well known: lavishly rewarding the very executives who were not so long ago bailed out by taxpayers; slipping in charges for services that consumers neither want nor knew they were being charged for; foreclosing on loans of men and women serving overseas in the military to protect the livelihoods of the bankers ordering the foreclosures.

But there is more than the banking sector putting people off the system. High-tech billionaires, many of them major contributors to the party in power, demand and get more visas to allow them to import high-tech workers from abroad after engaging in a conspiracy not to compete for domestic workers, thereby keeping salaries down and depressing the supply of Americans who might, were wages set in the market rather than in Silicon Valley intercorporate communications, be available for those jobs. Hedge fund entrepreneurs, surely in the top .001 percent of earners, work the corridors of power to arrange to have their compensation taxed as if it were capital gains and not income, something that offends even Donald Trump, perhaps because he was too busy setting up a university to have time to open a hedge fund. General Motors’ inattention to quality results in deaths in cars manufactured during a time when it was operating with a taxpayer bailout. Drug companies, clearly entitled to profit from their wonderful research, go a step further and prevent the reimportation of drugs they are willing to sell at lower prices to Canada.

Capitalism has always had its discontents. But the vast majority of Americans accepted it, warts and all, because it produced a dazzling array of goods and services at reasonable prices, while at the same time distributing income in a way that made those goods widely affordable. Air conditioning, refrigeration, washing machines—not to mention the electricity that powered them—became available to almost all Americans, in the case of electricity with a major assist from a government now dedicated to making it more costly for them to use it. Today, a sales clerk in a department store lives better than most of her customers did in the middle of the last century. If some jobs paid more than others, no matter: With hard work a man (mostly men, then) could earn enough to live decently and to help his children do even better. Public schools worked well, and the brightest could get a decent education even if they were the poorest, witness the brilliant products of New York City’s public universities.

That was then, and this is now. Capitalism continues to produce a cornucopia of goods and services that makes life ever-more satisfactory. But as Robert Gordon argues in his interesting The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the inventions of 1870-1970, notably the internal combustion engine and electricity, had a far greater positive impact on the living standard of Americans than the current innovative output of Silicon Valley. That is debatable, but what is not is that the quality of the public goods that made America a land of opportunity has declined: I ask readers of a certain age to compare the public educations they received with those on offer in Baltimore, Washington, New York, and other major cities afflicted with teachers’ unions, kids coming to class from appalling housing projects and fatherless homes. And it is these public goods on which the middle class, with its incomes stuck, although at reasonable levels by historic standards, must rely as it pursues the American Dream, which, despite reports to the contrary, still lives, although its hold on life is more tenuous than it once was.

That is only in part because the marginal addition to the quality of life by the latest app is less than the addition of electricity. It is because Americans are less willing to accept the distribution of the bounty of capitalism as fair. Here is where both progressives and conservatives have much to answer for. Progressives, with their thousands upon thousands of regulations, have stifled growth, leaving the pie much smaller than it need be. But conservatives, by focusing until recently only on increasing the size of the pie—greater incentives to innovation, freer trade, constraints on trade-union work rules—ignored just how that pie is to be sliced. Yes, freer trade probably increases global efficiency; it also forces unskilled Americans—unskilled in part because the education system failed them—to compete with $1-per-day Asian labor while conservatives extol the virtues of free trade. And placing the burden of enhancing growth on monetary policy, which increases the value of assets held by the better-off at the expense of the value of savings and pensions held by the less-well-off, adds to inequality and loss of faith in capitalism.

Fortunately, Americans complain, and worry, and note that the incomes of the counties around our nation’s capital, populated by lobbyists, bureaucrats, and politicians, are among the highest in the nation, but so far are inclined to stick with capitalism if not with the entrenched political class. During the Great Depression, when poverty was rampant—real poverty, not lack-of-a-flat-screen-television-set poverty—and the unemployment rate hit 25 percent, Americans continued to believe that a responsive government, rooted in democratic capitalism, would be more in their interests than the other models on offer—national socialism in Germany, fascism in Italy, communism in Russia. After World War II, when the head of General Motors, then the symbol of American economic prowess, professed that what was good for his company was good for America, cynical guffaws were at a minimum. And when America was called upon to protect not only itself but most of the rest of the world from Communist imperialism, its citizens were willing to bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend in the cause of freedom. Now, corporate America is more tolerated than revered, and any candidate suggesting that we bear a burden in the cause of freedom is quickly retired from consideration.

So, as Lenin once asked in another context, what is to be done? It would be difficult to argue that the solution lies in a new attitude from the self-seeking political class, members of which believe that the long run is the time until the next press conference and the very long run the time until the next election. Rather, the answer must come from those who benefit most from American capitalism, but whose benefits are determined by a system of corporate governance that is seriously in need of repair that would turn over power to the shareholder-owners of the companies: CEO compensation in owner-run companies is well below that characteristic of companies where pliant boards selected from a roster of friends of the CEO set pay and perks.

Note that few resent our self-made billionaire entrepreneurs: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the late Steve Jobs—these men are more capitalist icons than capitalist running dogs, to borrow a phrase from the rulers of China’s 1.4 billion souls, including 3.6 million millionaires. In Irving Kristol’s formulation, these are “real person[s] .  .  . who took personal risks, reaped personal rewards, and assumed personal responsibility for [their] actions.” And there seems to be little anger at LeBron James, or Steph Curry, or other sports millionaires.

If corporate compensation could be made legitimate by relating it broadly to performance, profits, and attention to the public interest, and if businessmen could understand that (Kristol again) “the populist temper and the large corporation coexist uneasily in America,” they might take a different view of many important issues. Increased minimum wages set by legislatures might seem no more artificial than executive compensation set by friendly directors. Trade agreements that enhance the prospects of exports might be examined for their impact on more vulnerable American workers. Demands that consumers be protected from misrepresentation might seem more reasonable in light of recent history in, say, the banking and auto industries. The long-run survival of the system that sustains them might be seen to require restraint, the recalibration of moral compasses to point in the direction not of what an executive can get away with, but towards what Adam Smith called “the fortune of others.”

If that noble thought is not enough to make our corporate chieftains weigh the effect of what they do on the probability of the survival of market capitalism, perhaps an appeal to self-interest will. Let them survey the political scene with a cold eye, and ask where they will be if populism, for which I have great regard, turns really nasty, driven by a sense that the current system has to be destroyed if prosperity is to be more equitably shared.

Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Sanders, Socialism and the Shafted Generation

Posted on March 28, 2016 by MZR
  • Robert Kuttner Co-founder and co-editor, ‘The American Prospect’  March 28, 2016

Once again, Bernie Sanders has demonstrated, with a trifecta of big wins in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington State, that he has broad and enthusiastic support, especially among the young. Equally astonishing is the large percentage of voters who say they are attracted rather than repelled by Sanders’ embrace of socialism.

But if you bother to conduct your own focus group among Americans under 40, neither phenomenon should be surprising. Except for those graduating from elite universities, with either full scholarships or wealthy tuition-paying parents, this is the stunted generation — young adults venturing into a world of work, loaded with student debt, unable to find stable jobs or decent careers.

This is also the post-Cold War generation, for whom Soviet communism is a distant memory (along with reliable jobs). For this generation of Americans, capitalism is not exactly a good word, nor is socialism a bad one.

And this is the generation that finds employer-paid health insurance hard to find; often the “Bronze” version of the Affordable Care Act, with its high out-of-pocket payments, is all they can afford; a generation paying too much of unreliable incomes in rent, and putting off the dream of home-ownership and having children.

So, when a candidate comes along calling for free college education and free universal health care, and far higher minimum wages, it sounds pretty fine. And if capitalism means the one percent making off with everything that isn’t nailed down, then maybe Sanders-style socialism is worth a try. So say the young.

Private frustrations and longings have at last become politicized. And well they should be. Because the reality of the rules of the game turning brutally against the young has nothing to do with technology or the immutable realities of the digital economy — and everything to do with who gets to write the rules.

The policy-wonk types like to point out that the Sanders program would require a huge tax increase.

And indeed it would. But as long as the tax hike is on the upper brackets, that only adds to the appeal of the program. During and after World War II, the top marginal tax rate was north of 90 percent, and this was the era of a record economic boom.

At the heart of this generational revolution is the vanishing good job. Until recently, the claims of a new, on-demand economy, made up of short-term gigs, was challenged by economists, even liberal ones.

It was kind of a new category that didn’t show up in the data. You could debate whether Uber and Task Rabbit and kindred companies were good or evil, but they just didn’t affect that many workers.

Now, belatedly, this shift is being confirmed. The economists are right — most of the unreliable jobs are not on-demand gigs. Rather, they are other forms of lousy “contingent” work. That category includes temping, contract work, on-call workers, workers hired by staffing agencies, workers with no job security, and inferior forms of conventional employment like adjunct college professors who can make less than minimum wage, Ph.Ds and all. (So much for the education cure.)

Jobs that used to pay decently are being turned into inferior jobs, whether in the manufacturing economy or the service economy. Yes there is an uptick in entrepreneurship, but for every young person who creates a company like Amazon, there are tens of thousands working in its warehouses.

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, reports a 60 percent increase since 2005 in the proportion of U.S. workers who have these inferior forms of employment.

The Labor Department, denied adequate funding to update its numbers, had not revised its count of contingent workers. So two eminently mainstream economists, Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton (one of the very people carping about the cost of Sanders’ program) hired the Rand Corporation to do what the labor Department should be doing — surveying actual current workers.

Katz and Krueger analyzed the results. And guess what? They confirmed in rich detail what your local 28-year-old could tell you: Real jobs are getting harder and harder to find. No wonder the uptick in GDP growth is not impressing voters, especially younger ones.

So Sanders is likely to continue making off with the youth vote. Even if he falls short of the nomination, this is bad news for Hillary Clinton. Whatever her other virtues, most young Americans don’t see her speaking to the realities of their condition.

This also presents a real conundrum for mainstream moderate liberal economists like Katz and Krueger. Altering these trends will require radical reforms, not adjustments at the margins.

Sanders’ program may cost a lot of money. It may be socialistic. And it may require Congressional majorities that will be a long time coming. But Sanders has the loyalty of the kids because he is speaking truth.

—

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Bernie Is Mainstream

Posted on March 11, 2016 by MZR
  • Peter Dreier E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College

GASTON DE CARDENAS via Getty Images

Although his opponents seek to paint him as too far left, Bernie Sanders’ views are mainstream. At Wednesday’s Washington Post-Univision debate in Miami, for example, Hillary Clinton argued that Sanders’ ideas are not realistic and too expensive. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is,” Clinton said. In fact, the ideas that Sanders has injected into the campaign are hardly radical. Sanders is in sync with the majority of Americans on most key issues.

Here’s a brief run-down:

Big Business

  • About three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans — including 84 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 62 percent of Republicans — believe that corporations have too much influence on American life and politics today, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. In contrast, only 37 percent think that labor unions exercise too much influence.
  • The Pew Research Center discovered that 60 percent of Americans — including 75 percent of Democrats — believed that “the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy.”
  • Fifty-eight percent of Americans said they would support breaking up “big banks like Citigroup,” a key plank of Sanders’ platform and the goal of a bill that Sanders sponsored in the Senate.
  • Seventy-three percent of Americans favor tougher rules for Wall Street financial companies, versus 17 percent who oppose stronger regulation.
  • Sixty-four percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, factories and cars and requiring utilities to generate more power from “clean” low-carbon sources.

Progressive Taxation

    • More than three-quarters of Americans (79 percent) think that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes, while 82 percent believe that some corporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
    • Sixty-eight percent of Americans favor raising taxes on people earning more than1 million per year, including 87 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and 53 percent of Republicans.

Inequality and Poverty

    • A strong majority (66 percent) say that wealth should be more evenly divided and that it is a problem that should be addressed urgently.
    • Ninety-two percent of Americans want a society with far less income disparity than currently exists in the United States. Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, according to the professors at the Harvard Business School and Duke University who conducted the survey. But when asked to pick an ideal level of income disparity, Americans prefer the more egalitarian level similar to the one in Sweden (although without identifying the country by name) to that in the U.S. What’s more, the rich and the poor, and Democrats and Republicans, are almost equally likely to choose the Swedish model. For example, 93.5 percent of Democrats and 90.2 percent of Republicans preferred the level of income distribution that exists in Sweden.
    • Sixty-nine percent of Americans — including 90 percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents, and 45 percent of Republicans — believe that the government should help reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else. Eighty-two percent of Americans — including 94 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents, and 64 percent of Republicans — think the government should help reduce poverty.

Money in Politics

  • Eighty-four percent of Americans think that money has too much influence in politics. Slightly more Americans (85 percent) want an overhaul of our campaign finance system
  • Seventy-eight percent of Americans think that campaign spending by outside groups not affiliated with candidates should be limited by law.
  • A majority of Americans (54 percent) believe that money given to political candidates is not a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. In other words, they disagree with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

Minimum Wage and Workers’ Rights

  • A recent poll by Hart Research Associates found that 75 percent of Americans (including 53 percent of Republicans) support an increase in the federal minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020. Sixty-three percent of Americans support an even greater increase in the minimum wage to $15 by 2020.
  • Eighty percent of Americans favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members. Even more (85 percent) favor requiring employers to offer paid leave to employees who are ill.
  • A significant majority of Americans support the right of workers to unionize, despite several decades of corporate-sponsored anti-union propaganda. Eighty-two percent believe that factory and manufacturing workers should have the right to unionize. A vast majority support the right to unionize for transportation workers (74 percent), police and firefighters (72 percent), public school teachers (71 percent), workers in supermarkets and retail sales (68 percent), and fast food workers (62 percent).

Health Care and Social Security

  • Over 50 percent of Americans (including one-quarter of Republicans and nearly 80 percent of Democrats) say they support a single-payer “Medicare for All” approach to health insurance, something Sanders has long advocated. Only 36 percent oppose the idea. 12 percent are neutral.
  • Seventy-one percent Americans support a public option, which would give individuals the choice of buying healthcare through Medicare or private insurers. This was part of Obama’s original health care plan but the insurance industry lobby killed it, thanks to every Senate Republican and a handful of Senate Democrats, led by Senator Max Baucus of Montana.
  • The Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans want to lift the income cap on Social Security to require higher-income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all of their wages. Most people still don’t realize that workers who earn more than $118,500 a year don’t contribute on their full income and that simply removing that tax loophole for high earners would close the lion’s share of Social Security’s modest long-term funding gap. Legislation introduced by Senator Sanders and Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon would apply the same payroll tax already paid by more than nine out of 10 Americans to those with incomes over $250,000 a year. Census Bureau data shows that only about 5 percent (1 in 18) of workers would pay more if the cap were scrapped, and only the top 1.4 percent (one in 71 workers) would be affected if the tax were applied to earnings over $250,000.

Higher Education

  • More than three-quarters (79 percent) of Americans think that education beyond high school is not affordable for everyone in the U.S. who needs it. Seventy-seven percent believe that higher education institutions should reduce tuition and fees, while 59 percent and 55 percent respectively agree that state governments and the federal government should provide more assistance. The average tuition bill for students at a public four-year college has increased by more than 250 percent over the past three decades. More than one-third (35 percent) of 2000-2014 college graduates report graduating with more than25,000 in undergraduate student loan debt, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The recently graduated college class of 2015 has an average debt burden of $35,051 per student, the highest ever. Sanders introduced legislation to make four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free, paid for through a tax on Wall Street transactions.

Same-Sex Marriage

  • Today, 60 percent of Americans believe it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to marry, according to the Gallup poll, a figure that is likely to increase in the coming years, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is legal. But in 1996, only 27 percent felt that way. That year, then-Congressman Sanders was one of only 67 House members to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition of gay marriages.

Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame. A longer version of this article appeared in The American Prospect.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

The UnDemocratic Democratic Primary

Posted on March 9, 2016 by MZR

Matt Rhoades
Chairman, America Rising

March 8, 2016

If you want to know more about America Rising PAC’s efforts to Stop Hillary Clinton, check out our site HERE.

I’ll admit it — I might have been wrong when I predicted last month that the Democratic primary was going to be a “long slog.”

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) promises he’s in the Democratic primary to stay, but that pledge may soon fall victim to simple arithmetic and an arcane Democratic Party process known as “superdelegates.”

A casual observer of politics may wonder: how is that possible? After all, heading into yesterday’s contests, Senator Sanders has won nearly half of the primaries and caucuses held to date: of the 20 contests held so far, Sanders has won eight, while former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-NY) has 12.

Yet, Senator Sanders trails by a more than two-to-one margin in the delegate count: of the 2,383 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, Secretary Clinton has amassed 1,130 delegates, while Sanders stands at 499.

So what’s going on here?

The DNC doesn’t allocate delegates by simply heeding the will of the voters. Instead they calculate their tallies from a combination of “pledged delegates,” which are earned from the actual votes of real people, and “unpledged delegates,” better known as “superdelegates.”

Superdelegates consist of Democratic officeholders, as well as 21 “distinguished members,” a group made up of former presidents, vice presidents, DNC chairs, etc.

In non-political speak, “distinguished members” are really Democrat political insiders and D.C. powerbrokers, not the everyday voters Democrats claim to represent. ABC News recently reported that, “dozens of the 437 delegates in the DNC member category are registered federal and state lobbyists, according to an ABC News analysis. In fact, when you remove elected officials from the superdelegate pool, at least one in seven of the remainder are former or current lobbyists.”

Dozens of Lobbyists Will Be Democratic Presidential Delegates
Hillary Clinton holds a substantial edge among a particular and little-noticed kind of delegate to the Democratic…abcnews.go.com

To put the influence of these insiders in stark context: in 2016, there are 712 superdelegates up for grabs, making up nearly 30 percent of the magic number.

Having spent her last quarter century in Washington, it should surprise no one that Secretary Clinton is dominating Senator Sanders with superdelegates, 458 to 22.

As an insurgent candidate, Senator Sanders’ candidacy is fueled by grassroots energy across the country inspired by his socialist message. Yet his chances of getting his party’s nomination are slim and getting narrower by the day.

This scenario is reminiscent of the early 1980s and the original implementation of superdelegates.

According to CNN, the DNC created the process in 1982 “as a continuation of the effort to bring the experienced, more MODERATE members of the party to the convention to act as a ‘ballast’ against the passions of other delegates.”

In 1984, superdelegates powered the “establishment” candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale (D-MN), over the “insurgent,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson(D-IL), a point not lost on Jackson, who became one of the system’s loudest and most vociferous opponents. In the subsequent election, Jackson blasted superdelegates as “voodoo politics,” and noted that, “when people are inspired and hopeful, they work diligently. When they feel they have not been treated fairly, they are discouraged.”

Jackson Links Fairness With Aid to Party Ticket
Arriving in California to face his last big test of the 1988 presidential campaign, the Rev. Jesse Jackson served…articles.latimes.com

In 1984, Jackson won 19 percent of the popular vote, but received only 10 percent of the delegate count. The facts are indisputable: whatever the motivation, superdelegates had a chilling effect on the first viable African American presidential candidate, re-routing and suppressing the will of the voters in favor of the establishment choice.

Ironically, Jackson’s lead negotiator against the DNC’s superdelegate process was Harold Ickes, who has since become a close Clinton confidante and a senior advisor to a pro-Clinton Super PAC, and stands to benefit in 2016 from a process he fiercely opposed in 1984.

Ickes has new love for superdelegates
Harold Ickes sweats the details. In 1973, while working on the New York mayoral campaign of Bronx Borough President…www.politico.com

Far be it from me to give Democrats advice. But if I were Senator Sanders trying to chart a path forward to the nomination, this description of the 1988 presidential race by Karen Tumulty, then of the Los Angeles Times, would give me chills: “With his stirring oratory and populist message, Jackson has mobilized hundreds of thousands of voters who have not participated in elections before.”

Those words are as fitting of Reverend Jackson in 1988 as they are of Senator Sanders today and so are the likely outcomes of their candidacies.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Top 10 Bedrock Principles Built On Marketing Sand

Posted on March 8, 2016 by MZR
Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

The End of American Idealism

Posted on March 7, 2016 by MZR

Charles M. Blow MARCH 7, 2016

Sometimes it’s hard to shake the uneasy feeling that we are witnessing the dissolution of an idea that was once America.
From Our Advertisers

The country is still a military superpower and an economic and innovation powerhouse, but so many of our institutions are proving to be either fundamentally flawed or deeply broken.

This thought kept creeping into my mind as I watched Thursday’s Republican presidential debate in Detroit. It seemed to me the zenith of a carnival of absurdity, as the candidates descended into what appeared to be a penis measuring contest.

I kept thinking with dread, “One of these men might actually be the next president” — either the demagogue from New York, the political arsonist from Texas or the empty suit from Florida. (I see no path for the governor from Ohio.)

In another political season, liberals might greet such a prospect with glee. But this is not that season.

On the Democratic side, the leading candidate is a hawkish political shape shifter, too cozy with big money, whose use of a private email server has led to an F.B.I. investigation, and who most Americans don’t trust.

(Around two-thirds of Americans don’t trust either party’s front-runner.)

Her lone opponent is a self-described democratic socialist who seeks to cram sweeping generational changes — hinged on massive systemic disruptions and significant tax hikes — into a presidential term. And he says that he will be able to do this with the help of a political revolution, one that has yet to materialize at the polls.

One of these people will be the next president of the United States.

And this is the country of which they will take the helm:

We are a country stuck in perpetual warfare that is now confronting the threat of the Islamic State terrorist group. The Republican candidates have proposed the most outlandish approaches to that threat, including everything from war crimes such as torture and killing terror suspects’ families to carpet bombing in the Middle East until we can see whether “sand can glow in the dark.”

Our government is broken. We have a legislative branch that increasingly sees its role as resistance rather than action. There is an opening on the Supreme Court that Republican leaders in the Senate, in a breathtaking and unprecedented move, are saying they won’t let this duly elected president fill.

The appointment may fall to the next president.

But that same Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, swinging the door wide open to allow to the ultrawealthy to have nearly unlimited influence on the electoral process.

No wonder a 2014 study found that America has effectively transformed into an oligarchy instead of a democracy.

And yet, that is an idea that most Americans are pathologically incapable of processing. We suffer from a blithe glacialism, occasionally cursing the winds that carry our demise, but mostly hoping against hope and pretending that evidence of things seen and felt is either faulty or fleeting. It is not.

We have millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, but comprehensive immigration reform remains a thing we bicker about but never move on.

Our infrastructure is in shambles, but in a country where the bridges are crumbling, Republican candidates are obsessed about building a border wall. The city of Flint was poisoned as officials sought to pinch pennies.

Global warming continues unabated, most likely intensifying the severity of extreme weather — from droughts to hurricanes to blizzards — and yet last month the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Our educational system, from pre-K to college, serves the wealthy relatively well, but leaves far too many without access, underprepared or drowning in debt.

We are plagued by gun violence and mass shootings and yet no one is moving forward on meaningful solutions.

America’s middle class is shrinking. According to a December Pew Research Center report: “Fully 49 percent of U.S. aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29 percent in 1970. The share accruing to middle-income households was 43 percent in 2014, down substantially from 62 percent in 1970.”

Our criminal justice system has made a mockery of the concept of equal justice with its racially skewed pattern of mass incarceration. Not only is the United States “the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails — a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years,” according to the Sentencing Project, but the group also points out:

“More than 60 percent of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the ‘war on drugs,’ in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.”

The list of woe is a mile long.

There is palpable discontent in this country among those who feel left out and left behind in the bounty of America’s prosperity.

How long can the center hold? How long can the illusion be sustained? How long before we start to call this the post-American idealism era?

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Corporate Totalitarianism, or Not

Posted on March 2, 2016 by MZR

Wesley Hitt via Getty Images

Corporate totalitarianism means total control by corporate interests. If they want a war, they get a war. If they want GMOs, they get GMOs. If they want fracking, they get fracking. If they want big banks to control our monetary policy, big banks control our monetary policy. If they want a tax break, they get a tax break. If they want the TPP, they get the TPP. If they want to deregulate to the point of complete irresponsibility to our children and to the earth, they deregulate as much as they care to. And if they see a way to profit from the vulnerability of the old, the disadvantaged, the poor, the young, or the sick, then they are given the right to do so.

Through their control of politicians, political parties and corporate media, they do everything necessary to make sure that political candidates who resist them get nowhere near the levers of power. It is not by accident that they have created Trump, protected Clinton, and sidelined Sanders.

To those who say there is no political revolution, I say that if it’s true then that’s very sad — because there should be. What’s happening in the United States today is a corporate coup of the U.S. government, and anyone who isn’t grieving that must not be looking.

At what point do you think this expression of collective ego, this newest formation of an ancient aristocratic idea, is going to wake up and say, “Okay, you can have your country back”? They will never say this. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

And if we do not wake up soon, the window will close on our capacity to say to them, “Actually, we thought about it, and we prefer that our government be of the people, by the people and for the people, after all.”

No person or party leadership whose politics seek to compromise with the new totalitarianism will do anything more than soften the edges of this controlling force, improve its PR, and take some of the extreme sting out of the pain it causes. Still, in that case, the pain will only get worse. And ultimately one of the greatest experiments in human possibility will have slipped through our fingers — for the simple reason than that we allowed it to. Because they put us to sleep. Because they numbed our outrage. Because they sedated our conscience.

And thus they will have won. Or not. This is the generation that gets to decide.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

An Open Letter to the Republican Establishment

Posted on March 1, 2016 by MZR

Posted on Mar 1, 2016

By Robert Reich

Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s website.

You are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party.

You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaker unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes.

All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations.

But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price – and about to pay far more.

First, as you may have noticed, most of your companies aren’t growing nearly as fast as they did before the Great Recession. Your sales are sputtering, and your stock prices are fragile.

That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers. As you’ve pushed wages downward, you’ve also squeezed your customers so tight they can hardly afford to buy what you have to sell.

Consumer spending comprises 70 percent of the American economy. But the typical family is earning less today than it did in 2000, in terms of real purchasing power.

Most of the economic gains have gone to you and others like you who spend only a small fraction of what they rake in. That spells trouble for the economy – and for you.

You’ve tried to lift your share prices artificially by borrowing money at low interest rates and using it to buy back your shares of stock. But this party trick works only so long. Besides, interest rates are starting to rise.

Second, you’ve instructed your Republican lackeys to reduce your and your corporation’s taxes so much over the last three decades – while expanding subsidies and bailouts going your way – that the government is running out of money.

That means many of the things you and your businesses rely on government to do – build and maintain highways, bridges, tunnels, and other physical infrastructure; produce high-quality basic research; and provide a continuous supply of well-educated young people – are no longer being done as well as they should. If present trends continue, all will worsen in years to come.

Finally, by squeezing wages and rigging the economic game in your favor, you have invited an unprecedented political backlash – against trade, immigration, globalization, and even against the establishment itself.

The pent-up angers and frustrations of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever yet getting nowhere, and who feel more economically insecure than ever, have finally erupted. American politics has become a cesspool of vitriol.

Republican politicians in particular have descended into the muck of bigotry, hatefulness, and lies. They’re splitting America by race, ethnicity, and religion. The moral authority America once had in the world as a beacon of democracy and common sense is in jeopardy. And that’s not good for you, or your businesses.

Nor is the uncertainty all this is generating. A politics based on resentment can lurch in any direction at almost any time. Yet you and your companies rely on political stability and predictability.

You follow me? You’ve hoisted yourself on your own petard. All that money you invested in Republican Party in order to reap short-term gains is now reaping a whirlwind.

You would have done far better with a smaller share of an economy growing more rapidly because it possessed a strong and growing middle class.

You’d have done far better with a political system less poisoned by your money – and therefore less volatile and polarized, more capable of responding to the needs of average people, less palpably rigged in your favor.

But you were selfish and greedy, and you thought only about your short-term gains.

You forgot the values of a former generation of Republican establishment that witnessed the devastations of the Great Depression and World War II, and who helped build the great post-war American middle class.

That generation did not act mainly out of generosity or social responsibility. They understood, correctly, that broad-based prosperity would be good for them and their businesses over the long term.

So what are you going to do now? Will you help clean up this mess – by taking your money out of politics, restoring our democracy, de-rigging the system, and helping overcome widening inequality of income, wealth, and political power?

Or are you still not convinced?

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable

Posted on February 29, 2016 by MZR

He’s no ordinary con man. He’s way above average — and the American political system is his easiest mark ever

By

The first thing you notice at Donald Trump’s rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd.

Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such problems.

At the Verizon Giganto-Center in Manchester the night before the New Hampshire primary, Trump bounds onstage to raucous applause and the booming riffs of the Lennon-McCartney anthem “Revolution.” The song is, hilariously, a cautionary tale about the perils of false prophets peddling mindless revolts, but Trump floats in on its grooves like it means the opposite. When you win as much as he does, who the hell cares what anything means?

He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he’s perfected over the past months. It’s a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a little U.S. Open-style applause back in the direction of the audience, his face the whole time a mask of pure self-satisfaction.

“This is unbelievable, unbelievable!” he says, staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts. There’s a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off the road, but it’s a packed house.

He flashes a thumbs-up. “So everybody’s talking about the cover of Time magazine last week. They have a picture of me from behind, I was extremely careful with my hair … ”

He strokes his famous flying fuzz-mane. It looks gorgeous, like it’s been recently fed. The crowd goes wild. Whoooo! Trump!

It’s pure camp, a variety show. He singles out a Trump impersonator in the crowd, tells him he hopes the guy is making a lot of money. “Melania, would you marry that guy?” he says. The future first lady is a Slovenian model who, apart from Trump, was most famous for a TV ad in which she engaged in a Frankenstein-style body transfer with the Aflac duck, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.

She had one line in that ad. Tonight, it’s two lines:

“Ve love you, New Hampshire,” she says, in a thick vampire accent. “Ve, together, ve vill make America great again!”

As reactionary patriotic theater goes, this scene is bizarre – Melania Knauss didn’t even arrive in America until 1996, when she was all of 26 – but the crowd goes nuts anyway. Everything Trump does works these days. He steps to the mic.

“She’s beautiful, but she’s more beautiful even on the inside,” he says, raising a finger to the heavens. “And, boy, is she smart!”

Before the speech, the PA announcer had told us not to “touch or harm” any protesters, but to instead just surround them and chant, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” until security can arrive (and presumably do the touching and/or harming).

I’d seen this ritual several times, and the crowd always loves it. At one event, a dead ringer for John Oliver ripped off his shirt in the middle of a Trump speech to reveal body paint that read “Eminent Domain This!” on his thorax. The man shouted, “Trump is a racist!” and was immediately set upon by Trump supporters, who yelled “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at him until security arrived and dragged him out the door to cheers. The whole Trump run is like a Jerry Springer episode, where even the losers seem in on the gags.

Trump at a rally in Lowell, Massachusetts, this year. His events have the feel of a ‘Jerry Springer’ episode. Mark Peterson/Redux

In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: “Trump! Trump! Trump!” It’s a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address.

It’s a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a pussy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of “watermelons,” while his opponents’ balls are more like “grapes” or “raisins.”

Trump’s balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. “I never expect to hear that from you again!” he says, grinning. “She said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible.” Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world – in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school – the candidate beams.

What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower.

In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

President Donald Trump.

A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.

It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.

It’s been well-documented that Trump surged last summer when he openly embraced the ugly race politics that, according to the Beltway custom of 50-plus years, is supposed to stay at the dog-whistle level. No doubt, that’s been a huge factor in his rise. But racism isn’t the only ugly thing he’s dragged out into the open.

Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

Trump has dominated with a chokehold on 25 to 40 percent of the Republican vote. Gerald Herbert/AP

The ninth Republican debate, in Greenville, South Carolina, is classic Trump. He turns these things into WWE contests, and since he has actual WWE experience after starring in Wrestlemania in 2007, he knows how to play these moments like a master.

Interestingly, a lot of Trump’s political act seems lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is “Ravishing” Rick Rude, an Eighties champ whose shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell ticket holders they were “fat, ugly sweat hogs,” before taking off his robe to show them “what a real sexy man looks like.”

Watch the similarities between wrestler “Ravishing” Rick Rude and presidential candidate Donald Trump:

In Greenville, Donald “The Front-Runner” Trump started off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush. Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never missed a chance to rip him for being a “low-energy,” “stiff” and “dumb as a rock” weenie who lets his Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.

Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites. The Bushes are half that conspiratorial picture, fronts for a Republican Party establishment and whose sum total of accomplishments, dating back nearly 30 years, are two failed presidencies, the sweeping loss of manufacturing jobs, and a pair of pitiable Middle Eastern military adventures – the second one achieving nothing but dead American kids and Junior’s re-election.

Trump picked on Jeb because Jeb is a symbol. The Bushes are a dissolute monarchy, down to offering their last genetic screw-up to the throne.

Jeb took the high road for most of the past calendar year, but Trump used his gentlemanly dignity against him. What Trump understands better than his opponents is that NASCAR America, WWE America, always loves seeing the preening self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair. In Greenville, Trump went after Jeb this time on the issue of his brother’s invasion of Iraq.

“The war in Iraq was a big f … fat mistake, all right?” he snorted. He nearly said, “A big fucking mistake.” He added that the George W. Bush administration lied before the war about Iraq having WMDs and that we spent $2 trillion basically for nothing.

Days earlier, Trump had gleefully tweeted that Bush needed his “mommy” after Jeb appeared with Lady Barbara on a morning show.

Jeb now went straight into character as the Man Whose Good Name Had Been Insulted. He defended his family and took exception to Trump having the “gall” to go after his mother.

“I won the lottery when I was born 63 years ago and looked up and I saw my mom,” Jeb said proudly and lifted his chin. America loves Moms. How could he not win this exchange? But he was walking into a lawn mower.

“My mom is the strongest woman I know,” Jeb continued.

“She should be running,” Trump snapped.

Jeb Bush (with his brother) was on the defensive after Trump turned him into a symbol of a corrupt system. Daniel Acker/Getty

The crowd booed, but even that was phony. It later came out that more than 900 of the 1,600 seats were given to local and national GOP officials. (Trump mentioned during the debate that he had only his wife and son there in comparison, but few picked up on what he was saying.) Pundits, meanwhile, lined up to congratulate Jeb for “assailing” Trump – “Bush is finally going for it,” The New York Times wrote – but the exchange really highlighted many of the keys to Trump’s success.

Trump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say. And yet the press congratulated the candidate stuffed with more than $100 million in donor cash who really did take five whole days last year to figure out his position on his own brother’s invasion of Iraq.

At a time when there couldn’t be more at stake, with the Middle East in shambles, a major refugee crisis, and as many as three Supreme Court seats up for grabs (the death of satanic quail-hunter Antonin Scalia underscored this), the Republican Party picked a strange year to turn the presidential race into a potluck affair. The candidates sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent they can’t even lose properly.

One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins.”

The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March. Trump has a chokehold on somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of the Republican vote, scoring in one poll across every category: young and old, educated and less so, hardcore conservatives and registered Democrats, with men and with women, Megyn Kelly’s “wherever” notwithstanding. Trump the Builder of Anti-Rapist Walls even earns an estimated 25 percent of the GOP Latino vote.

Moreover, there’s evidence that human polling undercounts Trump’s votes, as people support him in larger numbers when they don’t have to admit their leanings to a live human being. Like autoerotic asphyxiation, supporting Donald Trump is an activity many people prefer to enjoy in a private setting, like in a shower or a voting booth.

The path to unseating Trump is consolidation of opposition, forcing him into a two- or three-person race. Things seemed headed that way after Iowa, when Ted Cruz won and Marco Rubio came in third.

Rubio’s Iowa celebration was a classic. The toothy Floridian leaped onstage and delivered a rollickingly pretentious speech appropriate not for a candidate who just eked out wins in five Iowa counties, but for a man just crowned king of Jupiter.

“For months, they told us because we offered too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance,” he thundered. Commentators later noted Rubio’s language was remarkably similar to Barack Obama’s florid “they said our sights were set too high” 2008 Iowa victory speech.

The national punditry predictably overreacted to Rubio’s showing, having been desperate to rally behind a traditional, party-approved GOP candidate.

Why do the media hate Trump? Progressive reporters will say it’s because of things like his being crazy and the next Hitler, while the Fox types insist it’s because he’s “not conservative.” But reporters mostly loathe Trump because he regularly craps on other reporters.

He called Fox’s Kelly a period-crazed bias monster for asking simple questions about Trump’s past comments about women, and launched a weirdly lengthy crusade against little-known New Hampshire Union-Leader publisher Joseph McQuaid for comparing Trump to Back to the Future villain Biff Tannen. He even mocked the neurological condition of Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for failing to ratify Trump’s hilariously fictional recollection of “thousands” of Muslims celebrating after 9/11, doing an ad hoc writhing disabled-person impersonation at a South Carolina rally that left puppies and cancer kids as the only groups untargeted by his campaign. (He later denied the clearly undeniable characterization.)

But Trump’s thin-skinned dealings with reporters didn’t fully explain the media’s efforts to prop up his opponents. We’ve long been engaged in our own version of the high school put-down game, battering nerds and outsiders like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich while elevating “electable,” party-approved candidates like John McCain and John Kerry.

Thus it was no surprise that after Iowa, columnists tried to sell the country on the loathsome “Marcomentum” narrative, a paean to the good old days when reporters got to tell the public who was hot and who wasn’t – the days of the “Straight Talk Express,” “Joementum,” etc.

“Marco Rubio Was the Real Winner in Iowa,” blared CNN. “Marco Rubio’s Iowa Mojo,” chimed in Politico. “Forget Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio Is the Real Winner of the Iowa Caucuses,” agreed Vanity Fair.

Rubio, we were told, had zoomed to the front of the “establishment lane” in timely enough fashion to stop Trump. Of course, in the real world, nobody cares about what happens in the “establishment lane” except other journalists. But even the other candidates seemed to believe the narrative. Ohio Gov. John Kasich staggered out of Iowa in eighth place and was finishing up his 90th lonely appearance in New Hampshire when Boston-based reporters caught up to him.

“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he lamented. Kasich in person puts on a brave face, but he also frequently rolls his eyes in an expression of ostentatious misanthropy that says, “I can’t believe I’m losing to these idiots.”

But then Rubio went onstage at St. Anselm College in the eighth GOP debate and blew himself up. Within just a few minutes of a vicious exchange with haran​guing now-former candidate Chris Christie, he twice delivered the exact same canned 25-second spiel about how Barack Obama “knows exactly what he’s doing.”

Rubio’s face-plant brilliantly reprised Sir Ian Holm’s performance in Alien, as a malfunctioning, disembodied robot head stammering, “I admire its purity,” while covered in milky android goo. It was everything we hate about scripted mannequin candidates captured in a brief crack in the political façade.

Marco Rubio stumbled badly after Iowa. Charles Ommanney/Getty

Rubio plummeted in the polls, and Kasich, already mentally checked out, was the surprise second-place finisher in New Hampshire, with 15.8 percent of the vote.

“Something big happened tonight,” Kasich said vaguely, not seeming sure what that thing was exactly. Even worse from a Republican point of view, Dinkley McBush somehow finished fourth, above Rubio and in a virtual tie with Iowa winner Ted Cruz.

Now none of the three “establishment lane” candidates could drop out. And the next major contest, South Carolina, was deemed by horse-race experts to have too tiny an “establishment lane” vote to decide which two out of that group should off themselves in time for the third to mount a viable “Stop Trump” campaign.

All of which virtually guarantees Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday. So he might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit. It’s hard to recall a dumber situation in American presidential politics.

“If you’re Trump, you’re sending flowers to all of them for staying in,” the GOP strategist tells me. “The more the merrier. And they’re running out of time to figure it out.”

The day after Rubio’s implosion, Trump is upstate in New Hampshire, addressing what for him is a modest crowd of about 1,500 to 2,000 in the gym at Plymouth State University. The crowd here is more full-blown New England townie than you’ll find at his Manchester events: lots of work boots, Pats merch and f-bombs.

Trump’s speeches are never scripted, never exactly the same twice. Instead he just riffs and feels his way through crowds. He’s no orator – as anyone who’s read his books knows, he’s not really into words, especially long ones – but he has an undeniable talent for commanding a room.

Today, knowing the debate news is in the air, he makes sure to plunge a finger into Rubio’s wound, mocking candidates who need scripts.

“Honestly, I don’t have any teleprompters, I don’t have a speech I’m reading to you,” Trump says. Then he switches into a nasal, weenie-politician voice, and imitates someone reading tiny text from a crib sheet: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s so nice to be here in New Hampshire, please vote for me or I’ll never speak to you again … ”

The crowd laughs. Trump also makes sure to point a finger at the omnipresent Giant Media Throng.

“See all those cameras back there?” he says. “They’ve never driven so far to a location.”

The crowd turns to gape and sneer at the hated press contingent, which seems glad to be behind a rope. Earlier, Trump had bragged about how these same reporters had begrudgingly admitted that he’d won the St. Anselm debate. “They hate it, but they gave me very high grades.”

It’s simple transitive-property rhetoric, and it works. The press went gaga for Rubio after Iowa because – why? Because he’s an unthreatening, blow-dried, cliché-spouting, dial-surveying phony of the type campaign journalists always approve of.

And when Rubio gets exposed in the debate as a talking haircut, a political Speak n’ Spell, suddenly the throng of journalists who spent the past two weeks trying to sell America on “Marcomentum” and the all-important “establishment lane” looks very guilty indeed. Voters were supposed to take this seriously?

Trump knows the public sees through all of this, grasps the press’s role in it and rightly hates us all. When so many Trump supporters point to his stomping of the carpetbagging snobs in the national media as the main reason they’re going to vote for him, it should tell us in the press something profound about how much people think we suck.

Jay Matthews, a Plymouth native with a long beard and a Trump sign, cites Trump’s press beat-downs as the first reason he’s voting Donald.

“He’s gonna be his own man,” he says. “He’s proving that now with how he’s getting all the media. He’s paying nothing and getting all the coverage. He’s not paying one dime.”

Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.

His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.

Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politcs, big pharma and insurance companies. Dennis Van Tine/Corbis

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. “The insurance companies,” he says, “they’d rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding …  It’s so hard for me to make deals  … because I can’t get bids.”

He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that’s impossible because of the influence of the industry. “I’m the only one that’s self-funding …  Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.”

Trump isn’t lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies have such a stranglehold on both parties that they’ve managed to get the federal government to bar itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.

“I don’t know what the reason is – I do know what the reason is, but I don’t know how they can sell it,” he says. “We’re not allowed to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price.”

It’s actually closer to $16 billion a year more, but the rest of it is true enough. Trump then goes on to personalize this story. He claims (and with Trump we always have to use words like “claims”) how it was these very big-pharma donors, “fat cats,” sitting in the front row of the debate the night before. He steams ahead even more with this tidbit: Woody Johnson, one of the heirs of drug giant Johnson & Johnson (and the laughably incompetent owner of the New York Jets), is the finance chief for the campaign of whipping boy Jeb Bush.

“Now, let’s say Jeb won. Which is an impossibility, but let’s say … ”

The crowd explodes in laughter.

“Let’s say Jeb won,” Trump goes on. “How is it possible for Jeb to say, ‘Woody, we’re going to go out and fight competitively’ ?”

This is, what – not true? Of course it’s true.

What’s Trump’s solution? Himself! He’s gonna grab the problem by the throat and fix it by force!

Throughout his campaign, he’s been telling a story about a $2.5 billion car factory that a Detroit automaker wants to build in Mexico, and how as president he’s going to stop it. Humorously, he tried at one point to say he already had stopped it, via his persistent criticism, citing an article on an obscure website that claimed the operation had moved to Youngstown, Ohio.

That turned out to be untrue, but, hey, what candidate for president hasn’t impulse-tweeted the completely unprovable fact or two? (Trump, incidentally, will someday be in the Twitter Hall of Fame. His fortune-cookie mind – restless, confrontational, completely lacking the shame/veracity filter – is perfectly engineered for the medium.)

In any case, Trump says he’ll call Detroit carmakers into his office and lay down an ultimatum: Either move the jobs back to America, or eat a 35 percent tax on every car imported back into the U.S. over the Mexican border.

“I’m a free-trader,” he says, “but you can only be a free-trader when something’s fair.”

It’s stuff like this that has conservative pundits from places like the National Review bent out of shape. Where, they ask, is the M-F’ing love? What about those conservative principles we’ve spent decades telling you flyover-country hicks you’re supposed to have?

“Trump has also promised to use tariffs to punish companies,” wrote David McIntosh in the Review‘s much-publicized, but not-effective-at-all “Conservatives Against Trump” 22-pundit jihad. “These are not the ideas of a small-government conservative … They are, instead, the ramblings of a liberal wanna-be strongman.”

What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don’t get is that most people don’t give a damn about “conservative principles.” Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn’t because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.

“We’ve got to do something to bring jobs back,” says one Trump supporter in Plymouth, when asked why tariffs are suddenly a good idea.

Trump turns to talk to the press after speaking at a campaign event in South Carolina. Jabin Botsford/Getty

Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she’s fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.

“We need someone who is just going to look at what’s best for us,” she says.

I mention that Trump’s plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt’s idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.

Donlon says she didn’t like that idea then.

Why not?

“I didn’t like him,” she says.

Trump, though, she likes. And so do a lot of people. No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.

Back in Manchester, an American Legion hall half-full of bored-looking Republicans nurses beers and knocks billiard balls around, awaiting Iowa winner Ted Cruz. The eely Texan is presumably Trump’s most serious threat and would later nudge past Trump in one national poll (dismissed by Trump as conducted by people who “don’t like me”).

But New Hampshire is a struggle for Cruz. The high point in his entire New England run has been his penchant for reciting scenes from The Princess Bride, including the entire Billy Crystal “your friend here is only mostly dead” speech for local station WMUR. The one human thing about Cruz seems to be that his movie impersonations are troublingly solid, a consistent B-plus to A-minus.

But stepping into the human zone for even a few minutes backfired. The actor Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya in the film, reacted with horror when he learned Cruz was doing his character’s famous line “You killed my father, prepare to die.” He accused Cruz of deliberately leaving out the key line in Montoya’s speech, after he finally slays the man who killed his father: “I’ve been in the revenge business for so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”

Patinkin believed Cruz didn’t do that line because Cruz is himself in the revenge business, promising to “carpet-bomb [ISIS] into oblivion” and wondering if “sand can glow.”

Patinkin’s criticism of Cruz cut deeply, especially after the Iowa caucuses, when Cruz was accused by Trump and others of spreading a false rumor that Ben Carson was dropping out, in order to steal evangelical votes and pad his lead.

The unwelcome attention seemed to scare Cruz back into scripted-bot mode, where he’s a less-than-enthralling presence. Cruz in person is almost physically repellent. Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz’s face.

He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally “a face in need of a good punch,” to describe Cruz. This may be overstating things a little. Cruz certainly has an odd face – it looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint – but it’s his tone more than anything that gets you. He speaks slowly and loudly and in the most histrionic language possible, as if he’s certain you’re too stupid to grasp that he is for freedom.

“The  … Constitution …,” he says, “serves … as  … chains  … to  … bind  … the  … mischief  … of  … government … ”

Four years ago, a candidate like this would have just continued along this path, serving up piles of euphuistic Tea Party rhetoric for audiences that at the time were still hot for the tricorner-hat explanation of how Comrade Obama ruined the American Eden.

But now, that’s not enough. In the age of Trump, the Cruzes of the world also have to be rebels against the “establishment.” This requirement makes for some almost unbelievable rhetorical contortions.

“Government,” Cruz now ventures, “should not be about redistributing wealth and benefiting the corporations and the special interests.”

This absurd Swiss Army cliché perfectly encapsulates the predicament of the modern GOP. In one second, Cruz is against “redistributionism,” which in the Obama years was code for “government spending on minorities.” In the next second, he’s against corporations and special interests, the villains du jour in the age of Bernie Sanders and Trump, respectively.

He’s against everything all at once. Welfare! Corporations! Special Interests! Government! The Establishment! He’s that escort who’ll be into whatever you want, for an hour.

Trump meanwhile wipes out Cruz in his speeches in a single, drop-the-mic line.

“They give Ted $5 million,” he says, bringing to mind loans Cruz took from a pair of banks, Goldman Sachs and Citibank.

The total was closer to $1.2 million, but Trump’s point, that even the supposed “outsider” GOP candidate is just another mindless payola machine, is impossible to counter.

At the South Carolina debate, Trump called Ted Cruz “a liar.” Jim Watson/Getty

The unexpectedly thrilling Democratic Party race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, too, is breaking just right for Trump. It’s exposing deep fissures in the Democratic strategy that Trump is already exploiting.

Every four years, some Democrat who’s been a lifelong friend of labor runs for president. And every four years, that Democrat gets thrown over by national labor bosses in favor of some party lifer with his signature on a half-dozen job-exporting free-trade agreements.

It’s called “transactional politics,” and the operating idea is that workers should back the winner, rather than the most union-friendly candidate.

This year, national leaders of several prominent unions went with Hillary Clinton – who, among other things, supported her husband’s efforts to pass NAFTA – over Bernie Sanders. Pissed, the rank and file in many locals revolted. In New Hampshire, for instance, a Service Employees International Union local backed Sanders despite the national union’s endorsement of Clinton, as did an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers chapter.

Trump is already positioning himself to take advantage of the political opportunity afforded him by “transactional politics.” He regularly hammers the NAFTA deal in his speeches, applying to it his favorite word, “disaster.” And he just as regularly drags Hillary Clinton into his hypothetical tales of job-saving, talking about how she could never convince Detroit carmakers out of moving a factory to Mexico.

Unions have been abused so much by both parties in the past decades that even mentioning themes union members care about instantly grabs the attention of workers. That’s true even when it comes from Donald Trump, a man who kicked off the fourth GOP debate saying “wages [are] too high” and who had the guts to tell the Detroit News that Michigan autoworkers make too much money.

You will find union members scattered at almost all of Trump’s speeches. And there have been rumors of unions nationally considering endorsing Trump. SEIU president Mary Kay Henry even admitted in January that Trump appeals to members because of the “terrible anxiety” they feel about jobs.

“I know guys, union guys, who talk about Trump,” says Rand Wilson, an activist from the Labor for Bernie organization. “I try to tell them about Sanders, and they don’t know who he is. Or they’ve just heard he’s a socialist. Trump they’ve heard of.”

This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way – Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat – but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics.

Both propose “revolutions” to solve the problem, the difference being that Trump’s is an authoritarian revolt, while Sanders proposes a democratic one. If it comes down to a Sanders-Trump general election, the matter will probably be decided by which candidate the national press turns on first: the flatulent narcissist with cattle-car fantasies or the Democrat who gently admires Scandinavia. Would you bet your children on that process playing out sensibly?

In the meantime, Trump is cannily stalking the Sanders vote. While the rest of the GOP clowns just roll their eyes at Sanders, going for cheap groans with bits about socialism, Trump goes a different route. He hammers Hillary and compliments Sanders. “I agree with [Sanders] on two things,” he says. “On trade, he said we’re being ripped off. He just doesn’t know how much.”

He goes on. “And he’s right with Hillary because, look, she’s receiving a fortune from a lot of people.”

At a Democratic town hall in Derry, New Hampshire, Hillary’s strangely pathetic answer about why she accepted $675,000 from Goldman to give speeches – “That’s what they offered” – seemed doomed to become a touchstone for the general-election contest. Trump would go out on Day One of that race and blow $675,000 on a pair of sable underwear, or a solid-gold happy-face necktie. And he’d wear it 24 hours a day, just to remind voters that his opponent sold out for the Trump equivalent of lunch money.

Trump will surely argue that the Clintons are the other half of the dissolute-conspiracy story he’s been selling, representing a workers’ party that abandoned workers and turned the presidency into a vast cash-for-access enterprise, avoiding scrutiny by making Washington into Hollywood East and turning labor leaders and journalists alike into starstruck courtiers. As with everything else, Trump personalizes this, making his stories of buying Hillary’s presence at his wedding a part of his stump speech. A race against Hillary Clinton in the general, if it happens, will be a pitch right in Trump’s wheelhouse – and if Bill Clinton is complaining about the “vicious” attacks by the campaign of pathological nice guy Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to imagine what will happen once they get hit by the Trumpdozer.

Unless more of the GOP establishment candidates drop out, Trump will win the nomination. “If you’re Trump, you’re sending them flowers,” says one GOP strategist. Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

The electoral roadshow, that giant ball of corrupt self-importance, gets bigger and more grandiloquent every four years. This time around, there was so much press at the Manchester Radisson, you could have wiped out the entire cable-news industry by detonating a single Ryder truck full of fertilizer.

Like the actual circus, this is a roving business. Cash flows to campaigns from people and donors; campaigns buy ads; ads pay for journalists; journalists assess candidates. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the ever-growing press corps tends in most years to like – or at least deem “most serious” – the candidates who buy the most ads. Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.

Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage and see manipulative political ads on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities. Trump is right: Because Jeb Bush can’t afford to make his own commercials, he would go into the White House in the pocket of a drug manufacturer. It really is that stupid.

The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It’s now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won’t keep pulling the lever for “conservative principles,” or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won’t just keep voting Democratic on cue.

Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary.

Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star. It doesn’t know how to turn the cameras off, even when it’s filming its own demise.

The problem, of course, is that Trump is crazy. He’s like every other corporate tyrant in that his solution to most things follows the logic of Stalin: no person, no problem. You’re fired! Except as president he’d have other people-removing options, all of which he likes: torture, mass deportations, the banning of 23 percent of the Earth’s population from entering the United States, etc.

He seems to be coming around to the idea that having an ego smaller than that of, say, an Egyptian Pharaoh would be a sign of weakness. So of late, his already-insane idea to build a “beautiful” wall across the Mexican border has evolved to the point where he also wants the wall to be named after him. He told Maria Bartiromo he wanted to call it the “Great Wall of Trump.”

In his mind, it all makes sense. Drugs come from Mexico; the wall will keep out Mexicans; therefore, no more drugs. “We’re gonna stop it,” he says. “You’re not going to have the drugs coming in destroying your children. Your kids are going to look all over the place and they’re not going to be able to find them.”

Obviously! Because no one’s ever tried wide-scale drug prohibition before.

And as bad as our media is, Trump is trying to replace it with a worse model. He excommunicates every reporter who so much as raises an eyebrow at his insanity, leaving him with a small-but-dependable crowd of groveling supplicants who in a Trump presidency would be the royal media. He even waves at them during his speeches.

“Mika and Joe are here!” he chirped at the MSNBC morning hosts at a New Hampshire event. The day after he won the New Hampshire primary, he called in to their show to thank them for being “supporters.” To her credit, Mika Brzezinski tried to object to the characterization, interrupting Joe Scarborough, who by then had launched into a minute-long homily about how happy he was to be a bug on the windshield of the Trump phenomenon.

You think the media sucks now? Just wait until reporters have to kiss a brass Trump-sphinx before they enter the White House press room.

“He has all these crazy ideas, and [reporters] are so scared of him, they don’t ask him any details,” says Michael Pleyte, an Iraq vet who came all the way from Michigan to watch the New Hampshire primary in person. “Forget about A to Z, they don’t even ask him to go A to Trump.”

King Trump. Brace yourselves, America. It’s really happening.

 

 

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment

Is This the End of the Establishment?

Posted on February 23, 2016 by MZR

Posted on Feb 23, 2016

By Robert Reich

(David Goldman / AP Photo)

This post originally ran on Robert Reich’s website.

Step back from the campaign fray for just a moment and consider the enormity of what’s already occurred.

A 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who describes himself as a democratic socialist, who wasn’t even a Democrat until recently, has come within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, of all places.

And a 69-year-old billionaire who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party has taken a commanding lead in the Republican primaries.

Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’ magnetism or Donald Trump’s likeability.

It’s a rebellion against the establishment.

The question is why the establishment has been so slow to see this. A year ago – which now seems like an eternity – it proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoe-ins.

Both had all the advantages – deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want.

But even now that Bush is out and Hillary is still leading but vulnerable, the establishment still doesn’t see what’s occurred. They explain everything by pointing to weaknesses: Bush, they now say, “never connected” and Hillary “has a trust problem.”

A respected political insider recently told me most Americans are largely content. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years. The problem has been the major candidates themselves.”

I beg to differ.

Economic indicators may be up but they don’t reflect the economic insecurity most Americans still feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience.

Nor do the major indicators show the linkages Americans see between wealth and power, crony capitalism, declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and a billionaire class that’s turning our democracy into an oligarchy.

Median family income lower now than it was sixteen years ago, adjusted for inflation.

Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top.

These gains have translated into political power to rig the system with bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, trade deals, and increasing market power – all of which have further pushed down wages pulled up profits.

Those at the very top of the top have rigged the system even more thoroughly. Since 1995, the average income tax rate for the 400 top-earning Americans has plummeted from 30 percent to 17 percent.

Wealth, power, and crony capitalism fit together. So far in the 2016 election, the richest 400 Americans have accounted for over a third of all campaign contributions.

Americans know a takeover has occurred and they blame the establishment for it.

There’s no official definition of the “establishment” but it presumably includes all of the people and institutions that have wielded significant power over the American political economy, and are therefore deemed complicit.

At its core are the major corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; the billionaires who invest directly in politics; and the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers.

Arrayed around this core are the deniers and apologists – those who attribute what’s happened to “neutral market forces,” or say the system can’t be changed, or who urge that any reform be small and incremental.

Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “political revolution.”

The establishment is having conniptions. They call Trump whacky and Sanders irresponsible. They charge that Trump’s isolationism and Bernie’s ambitious government programs will stymie economic growth.

The establishment doesn’t get that most Americans couldn’t care less about economic growth because for years they’ve got few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

Most people are more concerned about economic security and a fair chance to make it.

The establishment doesn’t see what’s happening because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. It also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in bringing all this on.

Yet regardless of the political fates of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the rebellion against the establishment will continue.

Eventually, those with significant economic and political power in America will have to either commit to fundamental reform, or relinquish their power.

Posted in Marty's Blog | Leave a comment