A Brief Note On the Election

The results of yesterday's election, in which Republicans Donald J. Trump and Michael Pence defeated Democrats Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine by winning a majority of Electoral College votes (about 290 so far) versus 230 and despite losing the popular vote, was a difficult day for so many of us. Making it even worse, the obstructionist GOP caucus also retained control of the US Senate and House, and will now have the power to give President Trump whatever he asks for--or they can convince him wants, including a far-right jurist to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia. As I told a friend and colleague, we've lived through times as tough as these and worse, and we'll get through it if we stick together, though we'll suffer along the way.

 The first step, though, is acknowledge that Trump's victory occurred, recognizing the many people and things that made it possible, and then not throwing up our hands in sorrow, anger and apathy, and allowing him to steamroll over everyone and everything.

This election reminds me a lot of 2000, only torqued up a few hundred notches. That one also included a Democratic duo winning the popular vote yet losing to the Republican ticket, after over a year of grotesque media malpractice, and lots of liberal handwringing about how the successor of a popular president could lose. Republicans and the media salivated over having an allegedly "compassionate conservative" "businessman" take over the reins of government, promising us reform and a new path. Most voters then, as now, and particularly African American and Latinx voters, rejected it. The true outcome, however, would become clear shortly thereafter when the US suffered through rolling blackouts, the beginnings of warantless wiretapping, a major trading firm (Enron) collapse, and finally, in spite of warnings and red flags, the worst terrorist attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. I hope and pray that horrors of this magnitude do not befall us under Trump and Pence, though after the experience of that earlier election, I am trying to steel myself for whatever may unfold, and remind myself, organization, coalition-building, dialogue, and resistance, in every way are key.

There were some bright spots in yesterday's election, however: The US Senate will now have the most women of color in its history, with the election of Kamala Harris (CA), Tammy Duckworth (IL), and Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) joining Mazie Hirono (HI), all of whom are progressive Democrats. Also, the Democrat Maggie Hassan eked out a win for the New Hampshire Senate seat, so the Democrats will have 48 votes (46 + Bernie Sanders and Angus King), meaning they'll be able to provide some semblance of a check on Trump, McConnell and Ryan. I'm holding on to this, and to the knowledge that we won't give up, because we cannot, and will keep fighting for a better future for all of us. That's what my ancestors did, what my parents did, and that's what we must do.

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.

Ryan's Hope

Too many things going on for a real post, so instead, a very recent animation. (It's crude, but hey, I tried to complete it in less than an hour.) UPDATED: I slowed down the frame per second rate because C mentioned that it was too hard to read the scrawl, er, text, beneath the images. I also added a few splashes of color.) This was not sponsored by or coordinated in any fashion with Obama-Biden 2012. (As if.)

Ryan's Hope (or Some truths about the GOP VP nominee)

Tea Partier Brown Wins Massachusetts Senate Seat

When will they learn? Just a few days ago I posted on how President Barack Obama is governing like a moderate Republican.  The Democrats in Congress, to their detriment, also have decided to cast their lot with their corporate masters rather than the people. At no point have the leaders (except Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, on rare occasions) made any attempt to defend this approach, or liberalism or progressivism in general, leaving a void that has been amply filled by the tiny minority of the country that agrees with the Tea Party activists, and exploited by the GOP, with their corporate media allies. And now we see the tangible result in tonight's Massachusetts special election to fill Teddy Kennedy's former seat. By a 52%-47% margin, Bay State voters installed a Tea Party-identified, Birther-linked, pro-torture, anti-LGBTQ, sexist, right-wing corporatist Republican masquerading as a "independent" everyman named Scott Brown. (I guess that means Marco Rubio will not be the first Tea Party Senator if he's elected.) He defeated establishmentarian Democratic state attorney general, Martha Coakley, a lackluster campaigner who wasn't helped by the situation in Washington. Brown's election seriously endangers the seriously flawed health insurance reform bill, echoing the debacle of 1993-94. If they fail to pass this bill, the damage to Obama and the Democrats will be incalculable.

Amerikkka, the Beautiful

Plus ça change, SAMO ™.

The chairman of the Republican Party of Arkansas called Wednesday for state Sen. Denny Altes, R-Fort Smith, to apologize for e-mail comments attributed to the Senate GOP leader by a television station.

[...]

In the e-mail on the television station’s Web site, the message attributed to Altes states that he’s for “sending the illegals back but we know that is impossible.

“ We are where we were with the black folks after the revolutionary war [sic]. We can’t send them back and the more we p *** them off the worse it will be in the future. So what do we do,” the e-mail states. “I say the governor needs to try to enforce the law and sign the letter of understanding... and at least we can send the troublemakers back. Sure we are being overrun but we are being outpopulated by the blacks also. What is the answer, only time will tell.”