Joe Biden & Kamala Harris Have Won

President-Elect Joe Biden Jr.
& Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris

This has been a nightmarish year on so many levels, from the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, to the Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor murders, as well as many others, at the hands of police and extrajudicial forces, to the current economic crisis (the second major one in less than two decades, yet again under an inept Republican administration) and ballooning wealth and resource inequality, to the devastating effects of climate change (hurricanes and tropical storms, wildfires, etc.), and on and on, but if I can identify one possible ray of light, troubled though it may be, it would be the Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's historical and groundbreaking defeat of Donald Trump and Mike Pence in the recent presidential election. Four years of malign incompetence, brazen criminality, incoherent domestic and external policies all keyed to and driven by the narcissistically warped vision thankfully met with a major NO MORE from US voters, and now Biden and Harris are the President-Elect and Vice President-Elect of the US, and will, attempted coups by Trump and the GOP notwithstanding, assume office on January 20, 2021.

They defeated Trump despite the Covid-19 pandemic (or, more likely, as a result of his catastrophically horrendous response to it), which meant markedly reduced in person campaigning and canvassing by Democrats; evident and relentless voter suppression across the US; threats of continued Russian interference; Trump's seeming attempts to destroy the United States Post Office by appointing as Postmaster General his supporter Louis DeJoy, who gutted branches all over the US by removing sorting machines and reducing hours; and a steady drumbeat of disinformation, misinformation, and anti-voting rhetoric from the President, his supporters, various other agents of disruption, and at times the legacy media, which amplified--rather than countering--Trump's message of a "rigged election" and "voter fraud." (We very well may look back and find that in fact he was, as usual, projecting about his own attempts to steal the election this year.)

In the end, Biden and Harris received more than 80+ million total votes, the most ever, 7 million more than Trump and Pence's 73+ million, and 306 electoral votes, the exact total Trump received in 2016, when, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, he labeled his victory a "landslide." The Biden-Harris combo won back three states-Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania--that Barack Obama had won in 2008 and 2012, but which Clinton lost in 2016 by slender margins, while also winning two more, Arizona and Georgia, that a Democratic presidential candidate had not won since Bill Clinton in the 1990s. They make history with Harris becoming the first woman Vice President, first Black woman VP, and the first Asian American VP.  She also is the first graduate of an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to serve as VP, and the first member of a Black sorority to hold that office as well. She will be the second VP not to be White (Charles Curtis was the first) and the second in an interracial marriage. Biden will be the oldest man elected to the presidency, and the second Roman Catholic president, and a decidedly devout one, after JFK. 

The next President and Vice President
of the United States of America

Ideologically Biden has tended to be a conservative to moderate Democrat, with a problematic legislative history, especially during his Senate tenure, of support for racist, pro-corporate policies, while Harris, at least in the US Senate, is considered one of the most liberal US Senators based on her voting record, though her records while California's and San Francisco's Attorneys General were more mixed, sometimes quite progressive and at other times conservative (pro-police). (I should note that in the Democratic Presidential primary I again voted for Bernie Sanders, but have contributed the campaigns of both Harris and Biden.) Both have expressed support for and voted for neoliberal economic and social policies in the past, and during the primary campaign, neither would consistently commit to programs that progressive and Democratic Socialist branches of the party endorsed, like Medicare for All or Single Payer health insurance, or the comprehensive Green New Deal. That does not mean, however, that they cannot be pushed towards more comprehensive, popular, paradigm-shifting policies, but their political backgrounds, especially Biden's suggest moderate rather than radical changes. But I am going into the next four years with clear eyes, and have set my expectations low. The first tests of this will be how they deal with this pandemic, which has worsened as Trump's malignant time in office winds toward its close.

Whatever they do achieve will depend in significant part on which party controls the US Senate, whose fate hangs in the balance as Georgia's two Senate seats head to runoffs, but also will hinge on the Democrats' ability to retain their control of the House, where their margins for error plummeted as Republicans regained a number of the seats they lost in the 2018 midtarms. How Biden will govern given the challenges, which mount daily, facing the country and his administration, remains to be seen, but if he can take any lessons from Trump's four years, and the eight Biden served as VP under Obama, they might include grasping the nature of the contemporary zombie Republican Party and its overriding goal of nihilistically holding power; the appeal of economically populist policies and politics and the effect of government largess for the 99% (remember 2012?) vs. the abject failure of neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy and libertarianism, especially amidst a pandemic and its aftermath; the importance of transparency, openness and regular communication with the nation; liberal interventionism in foreign policy should be a dead letter from now on; and the absolutely fundamental concept of not forgetting and ignoring your base voters, as Obama frequently seemed to and Trump never did, which, in Biden's case, comprises Black and other BIPOC voters, especially Black women, young people (Gen Z and millennials), seniors, urbanites and many suburbanites, educated middle class voters, and working-class and poor voters, even if and as he works to expand his coalition. 

It is one thing to clean house when it comes to Trump's lawlessness, recklessness and incompetence, but replicating the worst aspects of the Obama years will imperil not only Biden's tenure and doom Democrats but the nation and the globe. I cannot predict how the next four years will turn out, but it will be refreshing to have Trump out of the White House, whatever damage he attempts as a private citizen, and, as when Obama was president, we will have to press Biden and Harris, as FDR said, to do what is needed; in fact, echoing FDR, we will need to make him (them) do the right things, for all of our sakes.

The Postmodern Dystopic: One Year/Year One of the Trump Presidency

President Donald J. Trump & former FBI
Director James Comey, January 22, 2017
(Photo © NBC News)

On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America. His presidency really began, however, on the night of the national election last fall on November 8, 2016, when he defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton, by a 77 vote margin in the Electoral College and despite a loss of nearly 2,868,691 popular votes. Or, one might even argue, it began before he was formally elected, while Barack Obama was still the legal president, when Trump's rise signaled a shift, long underway, in our election process and public discourse that his victory only confirmed. In saying this I am not referring to the now steadily amassing body of evidence that suggests that Russia involved itself extensively in the 2016 election, and had numerous ties of various sorts to the Trump campaign. What I am suggesting is that Trump's ascent, from his declaration of his candidacy in the summer of 2015 forward, marked him out as the emblem not only of the contemporary Republican Party, for which he is the standard bearer, but underlined where our politics and society had begun to head during latter years of Bill Clinton's and all of George W. Bush's presidency, and which has found its true tribune in him.

Before I say anything more, let me note that I have found these last 12 months so exasperating, depressing, maddening, and absurd to the point of outright laughter by turns--though I have also been trying to convey in personal conversations that in some ways they still do not approach the insanities of 2001-2008, a period this country has still not recovered from, which in part has made Trump's rise possible--that I have not registered here, as I once might have, every significant outrage committed by this president or his allies and defenders. First, there are too many and they come in such steady and heavy flurries that they would make a snow-cloud jealous. Second, it really would require someone with the patience of Job--or an army of fact-checkers--to keep up with the daily tide of lies, misstatements, half-truths, and misinformation, let alone the innumerable questionable and potentially actionable violations of rules and laws that this administration seems to engage in. We currently have one major political party, the Republicans, who hold all the reins of federal power, utterly in his thrall, and a second, the opposition Democrats, who still have not reckoned with the opponent they face nor with the shifts in the broader social and public discourse that demand that the the Democrats change how they function in order not just to remain a viable party for the future, but a potential backstop against the complete dismantling of our society.

On October 2016, as I watched the election unfold, I wrote a post entitled "Our Postmodern Election(s)." (Jeet Heer later wrote an article in New Republic that expounded on some of these themes while exploring other ones in relation to this president.) It had its limitations, and on the key point of Trump's electability, I was wrong. One of my dear colleagues recently decried the idea that Republicans, let alone this president, have taken up postmodernism and run with it, though I think it is a foregone conclusion that they have, and as I tried to assert in that earlier blogpost, the postmodern condition (and, in many ways, an essentially neoliberal framework) underpins our entire society, including our politics, so it is not merely the GOP that has adopted and warped a postmodern worldview, but, more broadly, it defines this society itself to an estimable degree. I won't restate that post, but I think it's fair to say that "truth" has no fundamental relationship to how Donald Trump operates, unless one takes the Platonic (in the sense of his The Republic) and, perhaps more correctly, Nietzschean views that truth is what the ruler--or Übermensch--or similar corporate entities declare it to be.

In fact, as Trump has made clear for decades and especially over the last few years, especially with his championing of the Birther conspiracy, verifiable factualness, material evidence, reasoned argumentation, and science-based statistics have no bearing whatsoever on what he believes, let alone how he acts and moves through the world. Yet it is not Trump, but large numbers of Americans who reject verifiable facts, appeals to any authority but that of their feelings and those who agree with them, even what we might call objective reality itself. Additionally, both the mainstream media, by manufacturing consent (as Noam Chomsky brilliant argued years ago) and "normalizing" Trump's actions, and numerous parallel organs of reportage and pseudo-reportage, have served to make a muddle, at least for a sizable number of people, of what "truth" might look like. Figures like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich are quite aware of the tenets of postmodernism, as the latter pointed out in a New Yorker profile earlier this year, and have made great use of them. This is a feature, not a bug, of how they and the Right have come to operate.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary
Dr. Ben Carson, at his confirmation hearings
(Copyright © NBC News)

In that earlier post, I did not believe that American voters would elect Trump. Or rather, that enough white voters would not be so appalled by his campaign and behavior that they would vote against him. (My predictions about the Senate were closer to how things actually turned out.) As I say above, I was wrong. Despite admitting that he had forcibly kissed women and groped their private parts without their permission, while also pursuing married women "like a bitch," he received 52% of white women's votes. Since taking office, he has lurched from crisis to crisis, now so numerous it's hard to keep track of them. In this regard, he has made Obama's first year, which included addressing inherited national and global financial crises and multiple wars, while also trying to pass a stimulus bill, a comprehensive health insurance bill, and a bill to rein in Wall Street's excesses, look like paint drying. Trump's first year has also transformed the slow-rolling catastrophe of Bush's inaugural year into a series of surprising but nevertheless dull anecdotes, 9/11 notwithstanding. In January I thought about regularly posting on the Trump administrations scandals, which seemed to be accruing as soon as he entered the Oval Office, and then again, after his first 100 days, which seemed to mark yet another low-point in his tenure. But one could pick any point over the last 11 months, or before, to find evidence of the debacle this presidency is turning out to be, and so it might perhaps be best to say that like the classic figure of synecdoche, any point is representative of the whole, and metonymically, the Trump administration is synonymous with corruption, disruption, and a sense of foreboding and rolling disaster.

If, as Aristotle once pointed out in the Nichomachean Ethics that "Man is the rational animal," while also arguing that there also was an irrational component to human existence, Trump has exemplified that this country's most powerful man is the dominating and dominant "emotional animal" whose main goal is to satisfy his own psychological needs and energize those of his core supporters. This would be worrying in any leader, but it should be especially concerning to have such a person at the head of the most powerful government and military on earth. One effect has been to keep not just his government, but the entire national and globe in a state of disquiet, dis-ease, since the demands and effects of his emotional needs and outbursts cannot be contained within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trump campaigned like a right-wing racist nationalist and has seeded his government and presided like an ultraconservative white supremacist authoritarian. He appointments to his Cabinet, save one or two, are to the right of the kinds of people George W. Bush placed in office, and his Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, has positioned himself so far to the right that  Antonin Scalia, the justice he replaced, would be envious. Significantly and in Orwellian fashion, many of the people Trump has placed in positions of power actively and openly seek to undermine or destroy the very organizations they are running, and ensure, as his formally dismissed but still potent advisor Bannon championed, the "deconstruction of the administrative state," or rather, the federal government as we have come to know it.

Several Cabinet departments, among them the most important like State, appear to be in disarray and withering on the vine, at a time when world affairs, made so precarious in part through prior US attempts at creating a "New World Order" and "nation building," are approaching a precipice. To take one example, the chief means by which the United States has kept North Korea's nuclear ambitions and aggression in check has been through diplomacy and partnership with allies and, in some cases, hostile countries that have a vested in interest in containing the North Korean government. Under Trump, however, we keep inching nearer and nearer to outright war with the North Korean government, a turn of events that would most certainly lead to cataclysm, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of people in South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, the United States, and countless other countries if nuclear weapons were involved. Yet Trump at times appears to be undermining his Secretary of State, former oilman Rex Tillerson, who, for his own part, appears to undermining the State Department itself, through a bungled reorganization that has led to numerous empty bureaus and widespread understaffing. One major lever of power the US yields, through its wealth and influence, for good or bad, is soft power via diplomacy, yet even in a crisis zone like Korea, under Trump and Tillerson, we lack an ambassador to South Korea since Trump, in one of may steps against precedent, summarily canned all of Obama's ambassadors shortly after taking office.

Rather than detailing the numerous crises, scandals, failures, and so forth that have occurred under Trump's watch, though a number of sites do have lists, cheat sheets and more notating the Trump administration's mis-actions through this month. It should suffice to note that beyond appointing Gorsuch to the court; striking down many of Obama's executive actions; succeeding in most of his appointments to his administration; and presiding over the growing economy bequeathed by his predecessor, Trump had no major successes in the legislative arena until the recent monstrous tax cutting bill, a massive giveaway to billionaires and corporations, which still requires reconciliation between the House and Senate and could yet end up another of his failures. In his account, by contrast, he has been the most successful president since Abraham Lincoln, though unlike each of the various men to hold the office before him, he is the least popular president at this point in his term, with a majority, upwards of 50% in many polls, disapproving of his governance.

United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley
(Copyright © CBS News)

Among the low lights thus far of Trump's tenure, and this is hardly an exhaustive list, once could mention:

• his constant attacks, deflections and projections on and mis-representations of the free press, his opponents, his former campaign opponent Hillary Clinton, his predecessor Barack Obama, the US intelligence services (including the CIA and FBI), and even fellow members of his party;
• the repeatedly attempted Muslim ban (which, after revision, was finally allowed to take effect); 
• firing the FBI director, James Comey, initially for one set of reasons proposed by his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, only to contradict them on television and later to the Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador, in the Oval Office (more about this below);
• his dismissal of Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who had warned him about General Flynn;
• the resignation of his now convicted National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, after 24 days, for allegedly lying to the Vice President about his contacts with Russia (more about this below); 
• the repeated failure in his attempts to legislatively repeal the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare (though he continues to shred it by other means); 
• his equivocation on the white supremacist Unite the Right tiki-torchlight march and subsequent murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville;
• his failed response to Hurricane Maria's battering of Puerto Rico, which remains in dire condition;
• his flipflops on the DACA policy, leaving countless young undocumented Americans in legal jeopardy, and his rescission of the refugee policies for Haitians and Salvadorans;
• his illiberal pardoning of Arizona prison chief and avowed racist Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted on a misdemeanor charge for contempt of court, because he was disobeying a judge's order to stop racial profiling.

Also:

• his attacks on Black football players and other athletes protesting state and police violence on and racism against African Americans and other people of color;
• his establishment of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, admirably bi-partisan, but headed by a man, Kris Kobach, known for racist views and who has actively worked against expanding democracy and voting rights;
• abandoning the Paris Climate Accords, leaving the US only one of 2 nations not to sign on;
• losing two Communications Directors, Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, within the span of six months, while also forcing out his chief of staff, former RNC head Reince Priebus;
• his advocacy for the Dakota Access pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline (which actually burst not long ago, leaking 210,000 gallons of oil);
• his appointment of new commissioners who are vowing to repeal net neutrality;
• his use of a slur against Native Americans during a ceremony to honor Native American military heroes, the famous "Code Talkers," while standing before a portrait of President Andrew Jackson, whose record of extensive anti-indigenous policy and violence is well-documented;
• his promotion of anti-Muslim videos, including one considered to be fake, posted by a fringe, extremist white nationalist British political group;
• his constant tweeting, through which he has advanced conspiracy theories, false information, and unilateral policy without alerting his administration (such as banning transgender troops in the military without first discussing this or consulting with his Joint Chiefs of Staff)

To conclude the list, Trump is now campaigning for and recording robocalls for a man, Roy Moore, who has been credibly accused of molesting a 14-year-old girl and assaulting another teenager, was twice removed from the bench, and whose ideas are so far out of any mainstream that he repeatedly lost out in prior attempts at runs for statewide positions in a state dominated by his party. And the above list does not even touch upon the administration's possible violations of the Emoluments Clause of the US Constitution; the Hatch Act; the Logan Act; and other ethical or legal landmines. Nor does it include the debacle of the Al Hathla Raid in Yemen, which faces a humanitarian crisis in part because of US-supported actions by the Saudi Arabian military, or the Tongo Tongo ambush, in Niger, which still remains unexplained to the wider public.

Amidst all of this, as a backdrop, Congressional panels in the House and Senate, as well as a Special Counsel, lifelong Republican and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, continue to investigate the Trump administration for obstruction of justice in the firing of James Comey and its ties to Russia before and after the 2016 election. The investigation includes the various revelations in MI5 agent Christopher Steele's "dossier"; alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's server and the accounts of other DNC and Democratic officials, as well attempts on state and local voting systems; the Trump campaign's ties to various Russian officials, oligarchs, and emissaries, as well as Russian, Russian-allied and foreign banks and institutions; the Trump campaign's links to Wikileaks; other alleged Russian forms of and attempts at meddling in the US election process; and the Trump campaign and administration officials' financial ties to other foreign entities like Turkey, Ukraine, and so on. (And there may be even more that I have not listed under investigation.) The bizarre scene earlier in the year, involving the Russian Ambassador and Foreign Minister, in which the US press were effectively barred, is just one of many strange moments in this administration's shadowplay with Russian.

(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Gary R. Herbert
swears in Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. as U.S. Ambassador
to Russia during an Ambassadorial Swearing-in
Ceremony at the Utah Capitol Saturday, October 7, 2017.
Mary Kaye Huntsman is in the middle.

Among Mueller's actions so far have been to indict former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort and his adjutant Rick Gates on felony charges; to secure a felony guilty plea from former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos; and to gain a felony guilty plea for lying to the FBI from Michael Flynn. Attorney General Sessions, special advisor and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., and many other Trump campaign and administration officials, including the President himself, may find themselves caught up in the FBI's net as well, as a fundamental line propagated by Trump from the very beginning of his campaign, that he had no ties to Russia, now looks increasingly like a falsehood, and the President's actions since taking office have not advanced the perception that he views Russia as a hostile foreign power, as his predecessors and most of the US's allies, all have.

But--and this is a major point, beside this backdrop, as I have labeled it, Trump's power to disrupt remains. To give but one very contentious example, he could fire Mueller, it seems, creating a constitutional crisis if the GOP were unwilling to stand up to him, and whereas even some very conservative Senators expressed faith in the investigation months ago, they now appear to be wavering. The conservative head of one Congressional committee, California Republican Devin Nunes (temporarily?) recused himself after troubling contacts with the White House. Although several Democrats, led by Congressman Al Green of Texas, have introduced Articles of Impeachment, nothing can happen unless either the Republican majority decides to act upon them, which is not assured even if the Congressional committees and Mueller identify possible material evidence of collusion, coordination, and financial crimes, or the Democrats win an airtight House majority and a significant enough one in the Senate in 2018. The former is not inconceivable; the latter is much more of a stretch.

In our postmodern political and social climate, there is no guarantee that even in the face of proof of obvious crimes the GOP in Congress, let alone Republicans across the US, would sanction impeachment of Trump, nor agree with attempts by Bob Mueller to indict him or his family members, if it came to that. Nor is it a lock that the Congressional Democrats, unlike those of the 1970s or 1980s, would have to have the will and fearlessness to take Trump and his administration on either. Thus far they have done a mostly lackluster job challenging him publicly or creating a compelling counternarrative to energize voters to oust the GOP. For the Republicans' part, they very well might argue, as some seem to be doing and, as one, a "anonymous source linked to the Bush administration" told journalist Ron Suskind in the October 17, 2004 issue of The New York Times Magazine:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That empire under Bush was a putative failure, but Trump's has quickly taken shape and continues to emerge. Truth may have an implicit "liberal bias," as some wags like to say, but nearly one year of Trump has shown us that the liberal imagination, and liberal, democratic and republican structures remain imperiled when a leader decides, with the support of millions, to create and enact his own reality. At the rate things have occurred this year, we should all, whatever our perspective, be very concerned about what will await us at this point one year from now. 

Our Postmodern Election(s)

Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton at the second presidential debate

at Washington University in St. Louis.

Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times        

The Presidential election is less than a month away, and as J's Theater readers are probably aware, unlike the 2008 election or even the 2012 edition, I have hardly written anything about it. I could chalk it up to the farce that I've found the entire campaign season to be since early 2015, and to exhaustion after the last eight years of political paralysis and crisis in Washington (I did and continue to support President Barack Obama, though I have many criticisms of his policies), but more than anything, I wanted to move away from writing about electoral politics, which I had done quite a bit during the final, horrible years of the George W. Bush administration, as well as before and during the 2008 and 2012 elections. It's hard, however, not to write something about the debacle underway, so here are a few non-systematic thoughts. I should begin by saying that I supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, and will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in November.

The Postmodern Election
Postmodernism is dead, long live postmodernism. During the 2004 election, journalist Ron Suskind famously reported in the October 17, 2004 issue of  The New York Times Magazine on the chasm between what an anonymous source linked to the Bush termed the "fact-based community" and the faith based, epistemically closed world of turn of the 21st century conservatives around the sitting president:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

One way of reading this statement is an assertion of raw Nietzschean reshaping of the truth to the dictates of power. It would not be out of place in any dictatorship, or, to be less strident, any real political power center anywhere.

Another way to look at it is as postmodernism in its contemporary and diffuse, political form. We now live in a society in which multiple, conflicting "truths," which is to say subjective or discursively shaped impressions of reality, do not and cannot cancel each other out. Instead, much like postmodern stylistic antecedents of the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards, they sit side by side, often awkwardly and, unlike their literary and artistic predecessors, often antagonistically, rendering any possibility of a unifying, ideologically coherent master understanding or reading of reality not impossible, but difficult and often futile. Our politics now consist of contrasting regimes of truth, some as manufactured as any work of fiction on a library bookshelf, which hold sway and constitute "reality," or the kinds of "new realities" that Suskind's interlocutor was talking about, thereby allow agents of that reality--Congress, corporations, what have you--to reshape reality as they see fit.

While it's easy to point the finger at Fox News as the main progenitor of this situation, critic Bob Somerby has shown on his Daily Howler site how, since the 1990s in particular, the legacy--supposedly "liberal"--media have been repeatedly at fault, nearly sinking Bill Clinton's presidency with the fake "Whitewater" and "Travelgate"s scandals, their embrace of "truthiness" and creating false equivalencies between candidates such as George W. Bush and Al Gore, while also penning damaging, untrue stories or inflating created narratives (those Gore "sighs") about the latter candidate, thereby helping to ruin his chances of victory in 2000; and vitally aiding in the push to send US troops into the debacle that we now know as a the Iraq War. These are only a few of the many examples from the last 20 years, but the process has been underway for quite some time.

I hate to say because it represents real cynicism, but I think this situation is only going to get worse no matter who wins, and it will require a deep and thorough reckoning from people on all sides to think through how ideologically requisite critiques of the status quo and the political, social and economic spheres, which is to say, attempts to understand and challenge the dominant discourse and the systems that constitute it, can function without a complete dismissal of any baseline of factuality or, to put another way, any recourse to a foundation of empirical and coherent truths. As far as this election goes, it seems, it's a wash.

Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders was the candidate the Occupy Movement made possible; he was, to some extent, the one who, in political and economic, if not symbolic and social terms, they--or we--had been waiting for.  Given the deep vein of frustration about the slow and unequal recovery, wage stagnation for most workers and student loan debt for millennials, and the steadily widening post-Great Recession wealth gap, Sanders spoke to an enthusiastic constituency on the left. Indeed he went further than nearly any major candidate I've seen in recent years in offering a vision and proposing policies that would fundamentally reform and transform our economic system for the better. It was, to paraphrase, Noam Chomsky, a kind of New Deal 2.0., and badly needed. At the same time, however, Sanders sometimes came off as a one-note herald--important though that one-note was!--who did not seem to grasp how important and necessary it was to take a more intersectional approach to the country's pressing issues and challenges.

His relentless pursuit of addressing economic inequality, the rigged tax system, corporate power, and Wall Street's manipulation of Congress, was and remains invigorating, but he also has seemed blind at times to our longer and more problematic history, including the basic fact that Black Americans in particular have never started out or been on the same economic, political or social footing as White Americans, despite all attempts by the the GOP, Libertarians, some Democrats, and others, to dehistoricize our past. (He did attempt to respond to and incorporate some of the important critiques put forward by the Black Lives Matter movement.) To put it another way, he critiqued the structural depredations of late US and global capitalism, but did not always appear able to articulate how structural racism, misogyny, etc. have intersectionally inflected the economic situation we find ourselves in today. Also, having witnessed now for most of my adult life how our political system works, it was also clear to me that, like most previous progressive Democratic candidates, Sanders wasn't going to surmount the hurdles erected by the legacy media or the Democratic National Committee, beholden as both are to Wall Street and global corporations. Yet even in failure Sanders' candidacy has proved to be invaluable. He was there to push the party, the discourse, and his main opponent leftward, and to some extent, his efforts have worked.

Hillary Clinton
So, instead of Sanders, we have Hillary Clinton. She is brilliant; she is accomplished; she has a long record of public and governmental service. She would--and likely will--become the first woman president in the history of the US. That will be a major achievement, particularly in symbolic and historical terms; it's easy to forget that only 100 years ago, women in the US could not even vote in presidential elections. As New York's junior US Senator Clinton voted reliably along socially liberal lines, but  then as she has again and again during this campaign, she has shown that her initial instincts are usually primarily neoliberal in economic terms and neoconservative in global interventionist terms. (The recent Wikileaks document dump of emails to her campaign chief John Podesta suggest that her core beliefs are decidedly pro-market and "open borders," and that she views progressive positions as nothing more than a "public face" to gain political and electoral support.) One reason I absolutely could not support Clinton in 2008 was because of her vote for the Iraq War, against all better judgment and evidence, and the Patriot Act. Little in her campaign suggests to me that she has completely reoriented her thinking about the path she has helped to lead us down. And yet, other than voting for Jill Stein, who will not win, or not voting at all, what choice do we have but to vote for her, and for every possible progressive candidate running for Congress, and then demand that they not reprise the 1990s or early 2000s?

Moreover, her history on race and racism leave a great deal to be desired. Beyond her role in the Clinton administration's triangulatory economic and social policies, which often had a racial--and racist--component. More than a few commentators have noted Clinton's adoption of conservative language pathologizing black adolescent criminals in the 1990s, and her support of the odious Welfare Reform legislation, Three Strikes laws, and so forth, and her failure to speak out initially about Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows policies. In fact, I can recall how her husband left his federal judicial court nominee Lani Guinier twisting in the wind because of conservative screeching about her eminently reasonable approach to the voting system, at which point Hillary Clinton cut her longtime friend loose as well, greeting her with the casual and dismissive "Hey Kiddo" when they ran into each other in the White House.

As I acknowledge the reality of Hillary Clinton's record, I want to aver that I believe she will govern along mostly along the lines laid out by President Obama, who has enacted far more socially progressive legislation and some economically progressive policies than he is given credit for, and if she improve and advance some of his signature policies and goals, like climate change and renewable and clean energy, a Medicare-for-all or public option for the Affordable Care Act, closing Guantánamo and winding down the wars in the Middle East, while also reforming the prison-industrial complex, rethinking immigration policy to make it fairer and not just another element on global corporations' wish lists, making college free or subsidizing public higher education, especially community colleges, more fully, and addressing police and state violence against black and brown people, she will be more transformative than she ever imagined. What's clear is that she won't have to lay the foundation, since it's already there. Her major challenge will be to deal with the recalcitrant and ideologically purist--extreme--Republicans in Congress. Given the ongoing collapse of the Trump campaign, she might even have a Democrat Congress to work with, at least for two years, so she had better be ready to hit the ground running.

Donald J. Trump
Under the circumstances of most presidential elections since 1944 or so, a candidate who launched his formal campaign with hateful, racist, and lie-ridden attacks on a friendly, neighboring country and ally, its people and people who have immigrated from it and their descendants, would probably have met enough censure to drop out of the race immediately.* That did not happen with Donald J. Trump, however. Instead, as became clear by the middle of summer 2015, to a large degree because of pockets of dissatisfaction and rage on the right, and because of his incessant lying and hateful rhetoric against Mexico, Muslims, China, immigrants, Latinxs, Black people, women, war heroes, the disabled, and his fellow primary candidates, as well as his outrageous, unworkable, substance-free policies, like building a wall on the US's southern border or rounding up Muslims and putting them in detention camps, he was soon polling as the Republican to beat. Infamously, a roundtable of media commentators, whose performance around Trump's run has been atrocious over the last year and a half, laughed out loud as Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) tried to warn them that Trump might win. He got the last laugh but we got Trump as the Republican nominee.

There has been a great deal of commentary about Trump's candidacy since his launch, about his support and supporters, and so on, and I will not rehash it here in full. What I will say is that he has run his campaign, beginning with the GOP primary through the general contest against Clinton, like a reality show, which shouldn't be surprising since his fame today primarily derives from his successful show The Apprentice (which I watched, often with some amusement in its initial years). What does seem surprising to some pundits, however, is that his political persona derives from the simulacrum he presented there. Instead of a business leader or entertainer-as-candidate, however, we have gotten The (Bullying, White Supremacist, Lying Narcissistic, Sociopathic) Authoritarian. (Is there any question why Vladimir Putin spurs Trump's feelings of bromance?) This new reality show, in which we're all playing part, whether we want to or not, has excited a core of white mostly male voters whose support of him tracks well with people polling strongly on feelings of racial resentment and backlash, His quasi-populist proposals, involving revoking free trade, tearing up the US's NATO commitments, and limited family leave, have also appealed voters unhappy with Clinton's candidacy, and with the two victories and tenure of President Barack Obama.

In the case of Trump, the media have been his major abettors, even more so than the Republican Party, which, in real time, took its time coming around to supporting him. There are quite a few Republicans who still refuse to back Trump; one, John Kasich, was one of the leading contenders for the Republican slot, and had he won probably be 10 points ahead of Clinton at this point. Not just Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC, which I've taken to calling Trump Central, turned their screens over to him for hours at a time. None could be bothered, for example, to examine in a sustained way at his tax plan, which would balloon the deficit and federal debt and widen the inequality gulf without resulting positive Keynesian effects, or, until recently, deeply investigate the fact that he probably had gamed the federal tax system and not paid taxes for years, as New York Times bombshell underlined. In fact, it has taken nearly the mainstream media nearly the entirety of the election season to investigate with any doggedness Trump's multiple corporate fiascoes and reliance on taxpayer dollars to keep his bankrupt businesses afloat, his allegedly criminal interactions with Cuba, his flawed and potentially illegal shenanigans involving his foundation, corporate activity and campaign, his sham of a university, and so much more.

His arrogance and self-absorption have finally blown in his face, however. During his first debate with Hillary Clinton two weeks ago, he was the clear loser in terms of substance and style. In it she came off as calm, unflappable, eminently knowledgeable, moderate Democratic politician prepared to handle anything he or the moderator, Lester Holt, threw her way, and to step into the presidency tomorrow. Trump, however, descended quickly into petulance, talking and at times yelling at and over her, mansplaining, uttering patches of peeved gibberish, and finally expressed exasperation that he was faltering against so fully against someone he had clearly underestimated. The debate crystallized what many people, I included, already knew about the two candidates. The Vice Presidential debate last week appeared to boost his running mate, the ultraconservative Indiana Governor Mike Pence, more so than him.

The true showstopper, however, might be the Washington Post's publication on Friday of a 2005 Access Hollywood audio and videotape featuring a live-mic'd conversation between Trump and show host (and George W. Bush's and Jeb Bush's first cousin) Billy Bush, in which Trump utters misogynistic vulgarities and appears to admit to sexual assaults with impunity, saying that he has regularly "kissed" women without their permission, because he is famous and can get away with it, that he has even "grab[bed] 'em by the pussy." Similar recordings, from his appearances on The Howard Stern Show, also have been released. The resulting firestorm was swift and has steadily grown, though he issued a videotaped non-apology early Saturday morning.

Trump's campaign is looking increasingly doomed, with dozens of Republican officials denouncing him, renouncing support for him, and urging him to drop out of the race. Trump will probably hold onto his diehard base, but his support from educated white women voters, whom he must have for any chance of winning, looks increasingly dim. I should note that he's on state ballots across the country no matter what; the cutoff date was September 1. Should he drop out or should his running mate, Gov. Pence, step down, the Republican Party, through the RNC, would be tasked with finding a replacement, either by convening all the national delegates or via an executive board vote. The leading candidate would like be Ted Cruz.

Ratf*cking & Dirty Tricks
One element of the election that I don't think has gained enough coverage is the use of dirty tricks, not just by the two campaigns, but by foreign countries. As we learned this past summer, the Democratic National Committee's servers and accounts were hacked, possibly by Russian state or private actors, or some combination of both, and other major, non-corporate hacks have occurred as well. Information dumps, many of them laundered by Wikileaks, have dribbled out periodically, with one of the most damaging concerning the machinations the DNC former head Debbie Wasserman Schultz's took to ensure Sanders did not win the nomination. As I note above, I figured from the campaign's start that, based on who runs and funds the Democratic Party, this was a foregone conclusion, call it cynicism, realism, pragmatism, or nihilism as you see fit.

In any case, it managed to enrage many Sanders supporters in advance of the Democratic convention, in Philadelphia, from which Clinton nevertheless emerged with a noticeable bump in the polls. The recent emails, which appear to be authentic, again portray Clinton in a bad light. I'll be interested to see what we learn after the election's conclusion about foreign influence and domestic dirty tricks--or ratf*cking as it was called during the Nixon campaign; I imagine it's far more extensive than most voters, or even many journalists, envision. (A Nixon operative, Roger Stone, is closely allied with Trump's campaign.) What's been a bit dismaying is how easily people seem to fall for such things, but then the people behind trickery of this sort tend to understand how human nature and our emotions, even when dealing with obvious propaganda, work, while most of us, unfortunately, do not.

The US Senate
Most predictions I've seen suggest that the GOP will retain the House of Representatives, though were Clinton to ride a wave-type election, it could flip. Only a year ago what appeared more likely was that the Democrats would take back the Senate by a slender margin, thereby enabling a newly elected Democrat's plans, or giving them the power to frustrate a Republican's. The Democrats currently hold 44 seats, with 2 held by independents who caucus with them, and the Republicans hold 4, meaning that the Democrats would need to gain 4 seats to control the Senate if they win the Presidency, with the Democratic VP breaking the 50-50 tie, or 55 seats if they do not win at the top of the ticket. 10 Democratic seats were up for grabs, versus 24 Republican ones.

Right now, those four net seats seem tenuous, though not out of reach. Democratic candidates in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania seem poised to win and take seats from incumbent Republicans. In Nevada, however, the Democratic seat held by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is in currently leaning towards the Republican candidate, Congressman Joe Heck. This would mean only a net gain of 3 seats, and not enough to allow the VP to cast tie votes. Should Nevada, which was trending mildly toward the GOP until recently turn more blue, Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic candidate, could slip, and seal the Democrats' control. Another seat on the line belongs to New Hampshire Republican Kelly Ayotte, who has been leading her challenger, Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan. A recent Ayotte gaffe, in which she called Donald Trump a "good model" for children, along with a shift toward the Democratic ticket, could send her home on November 8. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site suggests that it could either be 50-50 or 51-49 on behalf of the GOP at this point, but again, the volatility of events and the electorate's feelings about the choices before them suggest that even with the best models we won't know until November.

Bill de Blasio's [Near?-]Victory (& Secret Weapon) + UPDATE

Dante, Chiara, Bill and Chirlane de Blasio
(© David Handschuh, New York Daily News)

Below I've posted bit of silliness from one of my little drawing notebooks, though this post is about the serious and very positive outcome of last night's New York City Mayoral primary, which was the victory (perhaps without a runoff) of Brooklyn City Councilman Bill de Blasio over his Democratic rivals Bill Thompson (the 2009 opponent of retiring Mayor Mike Bloomberg), City Councilor and Bloomberg ally Christine Quinn, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, former City Comptroller and Councilman John Liu, and several other candidates. De Blasio needed 40% of the vote to avoid a runoff against the second-place finisher (Thompson, who finished with 26%) and appears to have just crossed that line, but all the votes have not yet been counted so if his margin does not hold up, there will be a runoff election in three weeks. The possibility of this became Bill Thompson's chant last night.   Even if there is a runoff, de Blasio is leading in the polls, and will likely trounce the mumbling Republican victor,  Joe Lhota, former MTA head and deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani. The three Republicans running together received fewer votes that third-place Democratic candidate Quinn, a portent of what the outcome will be in the general election.

Just a few months ago De Blasio was listing in fourth place behind Quinn, Weiner and Thompson, but the combination of increased exposure to Quinn's record, Weiner's disastrous scandal, and Thompson's waffling on the New York Police Department "stop and frisk" policy opened up a space for one of the two most progressive candidates running. (Liu's politics are decidedly to the left of the other Democrats, and he was an outspoken critic of "stop and frisk," but the whiff of financial impropriety, linked to his prior campaign and a major funder, kept him in single digits throughout.)  What boosted De Blasio's profile were his insistent push for economic policies that differed from those of the Bloomberg era, and the brilliant debut of a campaign commercial featuring a 15-year-old, brown-skinned prodigiously afroed young man named Dante, who speaks personally about the "stop and frisk" policy, and who reveals only at the political ad's end that he is, in fact, Bill de Blasio's son. Perhaps there was no direct correlation, but after the ad aired, de Blasio's star began to rise and it soared all the way to the campaign's end. It neutralized Thompson's support among black voters and reflected for Democratic-leaning voters a reality, embodied by de Blasio's family, of the city most of them live in; not just one brimming with hipsters and billionaires, but the largest, most racially, ethnically and religiously diverse city in the US. De Blasio also won over women and LGBTIQ voters from Quinn, who, had she emerged as the front-runner, would have been New York City's first woman and lesbian (i.e., openly gay) mayor.

De Blasio will face an array of challenges when he takes office. First among them will be negotiating both back wages and new contracts with the city's various unions. There will also be the issue of future pension funding, a responsibility that is the direct purview of the city's comptroller, a job that former Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer won over former governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, but over which the mayor will have some say. Another pressing issue will be to find a way, at a time of tremendous, increasing economic inequality and government complacency about unemployment and the housing crisis, to create more and better-paying jobs for poor, working-class and middle-class New Yorkers. Under Bloomberg the city has increasingly expanded its tech sector, but the job opportunities remain stratified, with little for average New Yorkers in a city that is already among the most expensive in the world. Whether De Blasio will continue the positive, visionary aspects of Bloomberg's tenure (quality-of-life improvements like the bike lanes; advance planning and transformation of the city's infrastructure in preparation for mega-storms caused by global warming, etc.) is unclear. De Blasio might have visionary plans of his own that will benefit a wide array of city residents and visitors. He inherits a city that works in many ways but doesn't in others. Building upon the former while addressing the latter are tall challenges, but de Blasio looks more than capable enough to meet them.

UPDATE: As of today, Friday, September 13, 2013, 70,000 votes remain to be counted in the Democratic primary. These emergency, absentee and affidavit ballots, mainly in predominantly black neighborhoods, could break for Thompson or de Blasio, or perhaps for another candidate, so they should be counted. I must note that in 2009, Mike Bloomberg defeated Bill Thompson by only 50,597 votes total, in the general election for the mayorship. So counting and certifying all the votes is crucial, and Thompson should stay in the race until this happens, even if that means a run-off. De Blasio still seems poised for a victory in that contest, and in the general race against Joe Lhota.

Fiscal Cliff/Austerity Bomb/Phantom Crisis

There have been many excellent reports online about the alleged "fiscal cliff," which is not a cliff at all but more of a "slope," and which really merits a far better metaphor of the kind that Paul Krugman and others have devised, the "austerity" bomb. A while ago, I wrote about what was behind the push for austerity, and I urge J's Theater readers who have not already read Krugman's column today, "Fighting Fiscal Phantoms" to review it, because he not only names the chief player behind the "fiscal cliff"/"deficit scold" testeria, but summarizes why it is hardly what we're being told it is, including by the White House, with the complicity of one of Krugman's employers, the New York Times. His column crystallized for me what I've long thought about why we keep running into this crisis around taxes, the social safety net (i.e., "entitlements"), the government's role, and the establishment media's unwillingness to spell out what's really at stake (or its willingness participate in manufacturing consent by playing up the crisis). When you have multimillionaires like Goldman Sachs's chief, Lloyd Blankfein, hopping aboard Trojan horses like "Fix the Debt" despite the fact that his company has gorged at the government's troughs, the game and fix are clear enough to me. Here are my thoughts, adapted from an email I sent to some friends and broken down into numbered points, about what's really behind the current fiscal cliff crisis.

The GOP and conservative Democrats, agents of the plutocracy (or the 1%, or oligarchy, or billionocracy, whatever designation you like), seek to:

1) slash the social safety net now so that there will be less need later to keep marginal and capital gains tax rates, especially for the 1% and corporations, at even the current historically low levels--making it likely that any future necessary tax increases will disparately impact the middle and working classes and the poor;

2) under the rubric of "tax reform," steadily ratchet down marginal rates on the 1%, lower corporate rates, zero out capital gains taxes, eliminate estate taxes, cut all loopholes that do not benefit plutocrats, and allow various territorial tax schemes that allow the 1% and corporations to avoid US taxes and play other federal, regional or territorial tax regimes against each other;

3) lock in spending for the military and any programs (like Fed Reserve spending) that benefit the top 1%, Wall St., military-industrial complex beneficiaries, and if it takes a war or three to guarantee it, so be it; 

4) privatize as much of the remaining government as possible, so that those with the access and assets can feed off all the new revenue streams and what remains of a severely weakened, defunded governmental system;

5) rhetorically demonize government, via the corporate media (which has a stake in picking the bones of the government dry) to blame it for its failure to address the needs of the 99% (or 47%), while destroying and sucking every last dollar out of it.

Speaker John Boehner, President Barack Obama meet
to discuss the "fiscal cliff," November 16, 2012
(Carolyn Kaster/AP, csmonitor.com)

But it doesn't have to be this way at all. There was a Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus that progressives in Congress have seemed incapable of championing, and the result is that the GOP, neoliberals and the establishment media see fit not merely to sneer but to bury it altogether. Even short of the Progressive Budget, though, the default of returning to the Clinton-era tax rates, which involve much more than the federal marginal income tax rates (the top being a relatively low 39.5%; top economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty recommend a much higher rate of around 70%), but also capital gains taxes, the estate tax, the alternative minimum tax, and payroll taxes, just to name a few, is a better option that the austerity push with safety net cuts we have before us. De jure austerity has been a complete failure in Europe, and de facto austerity here, in the form of government cuts over the last 3 years, has kept the US economy from growing as robustly as it could. Furthermore, there are fairly simple fixes for Social Security that do no involve raising eligibility or reindexing it, while Medicare's and Medicaid's problems, more difficult to resolve, need not entail raising or restricting eligibility; a single payer system or Medicare-for-all would do more to lower health care costs and ensure Medicare's future than the fixes the GOP and Democrats are proposing.

Krugman states very clearly what I learned in introductory macroeconomics. We are not anywhere close to the Federal Reserve's inflation target for full employment. Price stability is not its only mandate, and the people and corporations sitting on cash will put it to better use as we approach the 4% target. Additionally we will not go bankrupt or encounter the problems of Greece or any of the other European peripheral countries because we have our own central bank and control our own monetary policy and currency. US monetary policy over the last five years has had a beneficial effect on the economy, and the libertarian Republican Ben Bernanke is hardly about to turn into Andrew Mellon or Paul Greenspan. We will not encounter the problems South Korea did in its debt crisis because most of the debt is in our own currency, and primarily owed to the US or American creditors. The cries about a weaker dollar overlook the fact that even in a weakened global economy weak dollars help the US with exports, providing a necessary jumpstart for the economy, and improving our balance of trade.

One thing that Krugman has been begging the President and Congress to consider is the basic Keynesian principle of borrowing now, with borrowing costs at near historic lows, to underwrite a massive jobs and infrastructure bill. We can more than make up the costs by increased revenues from higher tax rates and increased employment, and we will set ourselves up for even greater economic prosperity in the future with an improved and expanded infrastructure, a better educated populace, and an economy that is powering forward. Lastly, cram down legislation, which the banks and Wall Street have fought, and which their agent Timothy Geithner has worked hard to prevent, would be the best plan for the housing crisis. It's unlikely to happen, but that coupled with all the other strategies above, and a vibrant safety net that protects vulnerable Americans, would really help the economy in ways all the tax cuts in the world to billionaires never could.

Debt-Limit Ceiling Blues II (The Fix Is In) + Video: James Baldwin

President Obama signing the bill to raise the debt limit ceiling (Pete Souza/The White House)

So the bill to raise the debt-limit ceiling has passed both houses of Congress and the President has signed it. The GOP, the President and presumably a large number of Democrats in both the House and Senate got what they wanted, which is a plan to impose massive cuts to discretionary spending, with potential cuts to the social safety net and non-discretionary sectors of the government down the road, and above all no guarantees of future federal income tax increases whatsoever, including no repeal of the deficit-expanding Bush tax transfers to the rich.  We currently are suffering through 9% unemployment, with about 25 million of people are more jobless, many of them for years, and perhaps double that in underemployment. We are still facing record domestic housing foreclosures. The economy is barely growing and contracted far more severely than previously estimated between 2007 and 2009.  There simply is not enough demand to power the economy forward, because millions of people have little or no money, and millions have no jobs or are barely working. 

Despite this the President and Democratic leaders--save House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (R-CA)--could not be bothered to make a compelling, let alone a weak case, to the American people that an all-out push, using all the levers of the federal government and Federal Reserve, to create jobs would lower the deficit by ensuring more revenues.  They were silent about the fact that reverting to the Clinton-era rates, in conjunction with the Affordable Care Act (the health insurance reform bill), would also dramatically lower the deficit at least by the same margins or more as the current bill's spending cuts. Because, it's clear, the fix was in. The President, the Democrats and the Republicans, for all their pantomime, they achieved their main goal: not to raise any additional federal taxes on rich people. That's it. That's what this is all about.

Oh well. My federal legislators took opposing sides on this mess. I did my usual spiel of calling and sending emails, but my Congressperson, Albio Sires (D-NJ), still voted for this horrible, job-and-Democratic-Party-killing legislation. My two US Senators, Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, however, were among the 26 members of that body who voted against it. Senator Menendez said that "it simply does not force shared sacrifice as the American people have demanded," while Senator Lautenberg rightly said, "This legislation was a shakedown, not a compromise." As the American people demanded. Not that anybody leading either party really cares about what the "American people," if multiple polls or economic statistics or indicators are to be believed, demand or want or, most importantly, need. Not that following failed economic policies will lead to more failure. Ideology and politics are the most important thing, as is the chimera also known as "centrism" or "bipartisanship" or whatever label it assumes, particularly when invoking "tax reform." Because that "centrism" or "bipartisanship" ensures one thing these days: not to raise any additional federal taxes on rich people.  Don't believe me? Here's Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner stating it quite clearly to George Stephanopoulos (h/t Digby) during an ABC interview yesterday:

TIM GEITHNER: Get this budget agreement in place behind us so we remove the threat of default in the economy. Pass these trade agreements to help expand exports. Find a way to help make sure we can expand investment infrastructure so more people particularly in construction get back to work, and find ways through tax reform we can strengthen —

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: How can you strengthen investment when you’re calling for overall deficit reduction?

TIM GEITHNER: Well, you have to figure out a way to pay for it responsibly but there -- we've got a long term tradition of making sure we finance infrastructure over time in a way that's deficit-neutral. We can do that. We can afford to do that.

Nice work if you can get it....

≈≈≈

87 years ago today, the one and only James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem.  I think of him as one of the most important and still undervalued figures in 20th century American life. An author, preacher, public intellectual, political activist, cultural pioneer, sage and mentor, and fearless figure, Baldwin blazed multiple paths that I and countless others have, with deepest gratitude to him, since trod. 

I cannot but think that were he still alive, as overjoyed as he would have been at the election of President Obama and his political gifts, he also would be dismayed at his policies, and might also be speaking out, as one of the nation's eminent octogenarians, on a range of issues affecting us today. What, I wonder, might he think of many of the other shifts in racial, gender and sexual politics since the end of the Reagan era? What might he say about same-sex marriage or where the LGBTQ movement has gone?  How would he appraise contemporary American literature and culture, and African-American arts, letters and culture more broadly? How might he talk about contemporary France and Europe more broadly, where he spent a large portion of his life? I do often wonder. 

When I was younger I often wished I could have met him, but unfortunately never had an opportunity to do so, but several of my friends of mine did, and his passing in December of 1987 was the trigger for the founding of the Dark Room Writers Collective, to which I belonged for many years.  Baldwin's name and spirit were frequently invoked there, and as they have been in many other creative spaces in which I have spent time. Here is a video from the film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, that offers a glimpse, a tiny one, of who he was.  Enjoy.

From Third World Newsreel's James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket

Debt-Limit Ceiling Blues (Or Obama the Moderate Republican, Revisited)

Though the looming disaster of the US Congress's failure raise the debt-limit ceiling, a procedural vote that has been fairly routine in the past, has been a topic I've debated writing about for weeks now, what provoked today's post was seeing yet again in a New York City MTA station--23rd St., at 6th Avenue to be exact--a young mother, with children (this young woman had both a 5-6 year old and an infant who could have been no more than half a year old) begging for cash to feed herself and her children. That, and thinking about the ongoing US 9-16% unemployment/underemployment rate, and reading in yesterday's New York Times about the extremely disturbing racial and ethnic wealth gap, caused to a huge degree by the 2008 economic collapse, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent explosion of joblessness and underemployment, guided me to today's entry. Seeing yet another young woman, with a child in tow, begging for money to feed herself and her child, on top of reading about the grim economic statistics particularly facing Black and Latino Americans, during this ongoing Great Recession (though it's allegedly "over") and then watching this sickening Grand Guignol play out in Washington, DC over the debt-limit ceiling vote, the deficit and the debt, is enough to make me want to go Robespierre.

Yes, I know the contemporary Republican Party is far to right even of its most recent White House incarnation, George W. Bush, let alone its icon, Ronald Reagan, and includes a raft of fantasists, nihilists and anarchists who would make William Godwin or Mikhail Bakunin jealous. Yes, I grasp that even with a near filibuster-proof majority, the Democrats in the Senate were too fractious to pass much of the legislation that their counterparts in the House, under Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), pushed through over and over. And yes, I know that almost immediately upon taking office President Barack Obama cast himself as a "centrist," hovering above the fray and rejecting what liberal, progressive and even some conservative economists argued were policies to address the employment crisis and rebuild the country after the bursting of the housing bubble and the gross dereliction of the Federal Reserve, ratings agencies, and Wall Street. His approach initially was more of the neoliberal same. Yes, I know that we have an establishment, mainstream media consisting of millionaires and millionaire wannabes, the children and heirs of millionaires or friends thereof, who are insulated from the problems millions of Americans face, and are more eager for "centrism" and "consensus" and splitting the difference and never calling the GOP out, even if these same media types vote for Democrats or call themselves "liberals" in secret.

But even taking all of these things into account, I find myself coming back to a basic question, and it centers on the president: was there any need whatsoever for Barack Obama to yoke the necessary, usually "clean" debt-ceiling limit vote to a crazy attempt to ram through "Shock Doctrine" style deficit cuts, including to vital social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, when before and since the 2008 economic collapse two basic economic facts have always been apparent: 1) creating JOBS would have the effect of lowering the deficit and government spending, because more jobs mean more tax revenues AND in the absence of jobs, people necessarily draw more on the invaluable social safety net, thus increasing the deficit and requiring more borrowing; and 2) by allowing all the Bush tax cuts to expire--ALL OF THEM--resetting them to the marginal tax rates under Bill Clinton and with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in place, the country would plug a $4 TRILLION deficit hole over 10 years.  At almost no point since he took office, and certainly at no point whatsoever since the Republicans won the House in 2010 in part by terrifying seniors over claims that Obama had cut Medicare (!) through implementation of Obamacare, has the president made either of these facts clear. The first is so self-evident that it would likely have only needed to take root with a little nurturing, while the second definitely needed to be restated by every liberal in Washington, though it's increasingly clear that neither will get much airing, because the endgame of the current and future circuses involving Obama, the Democrats and the Republicans is to permanently lower taxes on the rich, gut social safety net programs, and transfer more of society's burdens onto the middle-class, working class and poor. Ancien régime, c'est nous!

Back in January 2010, after a year of exasperation at our then-new president, whom I not only enthusiastically voted for but helped to elect (both to the presidency and to his prior seat, as the junior US Senator from Illinois), I posted a blog entry, "Is Barack Obama Really Colin Powell," asking whether in effect we had elected a moderate Republican--Colin Powell--rather than a liberal Democrat to the nation's highest office. As is often the case with these blog posts, it merited little response, but that did not surprise me.  Since Barack Obama's election, I have often felt loath in criticizing the president, and family members and most of my friends have not wanted to hear any criticism from me or anyone else of the president, certainly not from his diehard opponents on the right, nor from those who, appealing from the left and having supported him, have felt great disappointment what portended to be a transformational presidency rapidly slips away.  Despite some early positive signs, such as his appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court, which remains, I think, one of the most important achievements of his presidency; his signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009; and decision to bail out of General Motors and Chrysler, again and again whenever Obama has tended to choose neoliberal or sometimes even conservative options over liberal or progressive ones, and the former tendency has grown stronger over the last year, particularly after the Republican assumption of the House in 2010.

Even when I wrote my earlier post, was still willing to give Obama an opportunity to show that in fact he was not what I feared, someone seeking not only to extend Bill Clinton's neoliberal economic approaches (i.e., Rubinomics, which was exactly the route he took, appointing as Treasury Secretary Wall Street agent Timothy Geithner and as his chief economic advisor former Harvard University president and notorious bully and deregulatory guru Larry Summers), but many of the worst supply-side economic theories of Ronald Reagan and the neoconservative geopolitical and military approaches of George W. Bush. Well, one year later, I think it's clear that my worst fears have not only been confirmed but exceeded. In that earlier post, I even mentioned that Obama had thus far avoided Herbert Hoover's approach, in 1929, of tepid governmental approaches coupled with austerity, volunteerism, and market-based boosterism, and that a president Powell might very well have taken the earlier Republican president's model as his own, but as of July 27, 2011, it's fair to say, as The New Republic's John Judis argues, that President Obama has doubled down on Hooverism, not only adopting his predecessor's rhetoric, but intensifying the failed economic policies such that he has called for greater spending cuts and inadequate tax increases that exceed even the expectations of the average Republican voter! Obama's Deficit Commission, also known as Simpson-Bowles, was unable to agree on a recommendation because several of its clearheaded Democratic members and more obstinate Republican ones refused to be railroaded into buying into the economically problematic approaches that have long been pushed by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Foundation, and similar right-wing and libertarian propaganda outfits, whose endgame is, as I suggested above, lower personal and corporate federal marginal tax rates  (Peterson is a billionaire so he benefits handsomely, as would his heirs), privatization or gutting of social safety net programs (privatized Social Security would benefit Peterson, a hedge funder, and also flood Wall Street with cash), and increased economic burdens on middle-class, working-class and poor people (because in the absence of a safety net, we're on our own).

President Obama & House Speaker
John Boehner, R-OH, on the
first green as they golf
at Andrews AFB, MD
Saturday, June 18, 2011.
Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Now, I read enough blogs and websites (via fastnewsReader and other apps!) to grasp that I was not alone in my appraisal of Obama back in January 2010.  Since then, though, I have read more and more folks coming to a similar conclusion and level of dismay. One of my favorite bloggers (and public intellectuals), who has been repeatedly proved right in his assessments and predictions, is Nobel laureate and Princeton University professor Paul Krugman, who, I should note, was critical of Obama's centrist stances during the primary season. (Krugman has, at the same time, praised Obama when praise is due.) Today, Krugman simply posted on his New York Times Conscience of a Liberal blog, "Obama, the Moderate Conservative." Krugman linked to a Fiscal Times piece by former Reagan economic advisor Bruce Bartlett asking, "Barack Obama: The Democrats' Richard Nixon." There is Salon writer Michael Lind's persuasive "Why the GOP Should Nominate Barack Obama in 2012," which walks through some of the same points I made back in 2010, though we all know that would never happen. Another online writer I regularly read, the brilliant gadfly lawyer Glenn Greenwald, posted months back that in fact Obama was not being forced to push such extreme plans--let's note again, to the right of even average Republican voters--but that he wanted to: "Obama's 'bad' negotiating is actually shrewd negotiating." And, to be fair, as Greenwald notes, some commentators, like Digby of Hullabaloo, warned even before Obama took office that he was pushing for that hideous "Grand Bargain" establishment Washington and New York's elite want so badly: cutting Social Security and Medicare, and lowering personal and corporate taxes to ensure the social safety net can never be adequately funded again. I could go on, but I'll stop here because it's numbing to continue.

So what about that young woman and her two children, seeking money just to eat, or the others I've written about on here, or the millions I haven't mentioned, all around us, barely hanging on? Well, they're nowhere in mind among those participating in the Washington carnival as it's unfolding. All the "fiscal austerity" we're being subjected to means things will get even worse for her--and everyone else, except the billionaires, bondholders, corporate execs, etc.--before they get better.  We may have a something akin to a budget default if the President cannot persuade the two houses of Congress to pass one of the two competing horrid bills they've submitted, or, in the absence of such, refuses to invoke the 14th Amendment to honor the nation's debts. (We should never forget that the Treasury very well could print money until forever if it wanted to.) We may or may not get some of the severe cuts-coupled-with-inadequate revenues that the President/Republicans/Washington establishment/Wall Street are jonesing for, but it's unlikely we're going to see him or any other major Democratic politician (Bernie Sanders, I-VT, is an independent) not only call for a major jobs program but vocally defend the social safety net at the very moment when its existence is proving invaluable. It's unlikely Barack Obama will face a third-party primary challenger from the left or even a viable left-leaning third-party candidate in the general election, since the various third-party organizations now being touted are just more center-right establishmentarianism seeking tax cuts and a gutted safety net, i.e., failed GOP policies. Would I vote for someone primarying Barack Obama? I don't know. Would I vote for a 3rd party candidate like Ralph Nader? I didn't in 2000 and I'm not sure I would in 2012. Would I just not vote at all? On top of this, and I gather the people in the White House just don't care, are clueless or have some hidden strategy I just can't grasp, the possible GOP nominee may run on an economically populist program given the president's intransigence on addressing the unemployment problem, she or he will very likely be even worse, since current GOP plans would do even more severe damage to the fragile US economy, as conservative policies are demonstrating in the UK right now.  In terms of Obama's GOP challenger, I still think John McCain would have been worse on every issue, but then again, other than Justice Sotomayor, can I be sure of that?

Right now, we're stuck, and liberals and progressives might want to think very carefully about how to proceed, given the lack of any channels to anyone running anything in Washington these days. I hate to end on such a down note, but we're in a very ugly place right now, and that young woman and her two children, and millions more like them, will be hanging on by a wing and a prayer and the beneficence of others, while the people in Washington, including the President himself, fight their damnedest to give even more of what's left of this country to those who already have almost all of it.