Why Voting to Stop Trump Is the Only Choice in 2016

After July’s conventions that anointed Hillary Clinton as Democratic presidential candidate and transformed the Republicans into the Archie Bunker party, the left is engaged in heated discussions about its orientation to November’s election.

Jill Stein of the Green party claimed that voting for her party was “saying no to the lesser evil and yes to the greater good.” This may sound good as a slogan, but it makes voting an individual moral choice, replicating the reduction of society to a collection of individuals that is the hallmark of a neoliberal, consumer-choice world.

Is there a mass movement today that is motivated by the progressive policies of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein? While there is a pervasive populist sentiment that has a distorted reflection in the Republican and Democratic parties, political anti-corporatism is concentrated among white liberals. What is certainly going on is an awakening of minorities to their social strength, and at this historical moment among Native, African and Latino Americans there is an overwhelming hostility to a potential Trump presidency. The left is in danger of isolating itself from this movement if it insists on its moral purity.

Electoral activity is no more than a strategic choice in the course of building a wider movement.  In this specific instance, while voting for the Greens in a state like Massachusetts will not affect the overall result, in a state like Michigan it could be crucial. The first-past-the-post electoral system limits the number of viable parties to two, making a vote for the Greens a symbolic gesture at best, and a spoiler at worst.

There are practical effects from voting, as Noam Chomsky points out, whether or not it offends someone’s individual conscience. He challenges the assumption “that voting should be seen a form of individual self-expression rather than as an act to be judged on its likely consequences … The basic moral principle at stake is simple: not only must we take responsibility for our actions, but the consequences of our actions for others are a far more important consideration than feeling good about ourselves.” He recalls the ultra-left faction of the peace movement minimizing the dangers of a Nixon presidency in 1968, resulting in “six years of senseless death and destruction in Southeast Asia and also a predictable fracture of the left.”

A Trump presidency has a high probability of inflicting much greater suffering on marginalized and already oppressed populations than a Clinton administration, he considers; it would even strengthen the elite within the Democratic party because “far right victories not only impose terrible suffering on the most vulnerable segments of society but also function as a powerful weapon in the hands of the establishment center, which, now in opposition can posture as the ‘reasonable’ alternative.” As far as the “lesser evil” argument goes, he says “this sort of cost/benefit strategic accounting is fundamental to any politics which is serious about radical change. Those on the left who ignore it, or dismiss it as irrelevant are engaging in political fantasy and are an obstacle to, rather than ally of, the movement which now seems to be materializing.”

Stein would argue that voting Green is a step in the creation of an independent third party, or as Socialist Alternative suggests, a “new mass party of the 99 percent.” But the history of the US shows that for an independent party to be established, it has first of all to be based on a real movement within society, closely connected with that movement, not outside of it. Socialist Alternative’s activities at the Democratic convention were directed at a political minority, organizing a highly visible walkout and encouraging Sanders supporters who came with them to join the Greens. They may have a limited success with a number of them, but the majority of Sanderistas at the DNC intend to stay within the party and not leave the field open to the right.

Members of the Sanders delegations at the DNC told In These Times: “Most delegates weren’t Bernie-or-Bust. We all understand that, ultimately, Trump needs to be defeated, and that—especially in swing states—you need to support Clinton.”  “Bernie’s not the ceiling of what we can achieve in the Democratic Party. He’s the floor … In the coming years there’s a lot of space for us to fight, both within and outside the Democratic Party. I don’t think all political change is going to happen in the Democratic Party. It’s just one field of battle.” “I think the Democratic Party is a battleground. You can either play on it to win, or you can abandon it to the enemy. And I would rather play on it to win.”

Sanders was the figurehead of a political movement that was oriented to restoring the New Deal philosophy of earlier Democratic administrations. Likewise Trump is the figurehead of a white backlash against the growing status of minorities while their own economic prospects slump. Both express an anti-establishment sentiment in society, but in different partisan ways.  Trump’s supporters are going to vote for him no matter what he may say. That is because their vote is not based on rational choice but on desperation – the major parties have ignored the plight of the working class in the deindustrialized Rust Belt and Trump is the only one speaking to them – and that could be a key issue in the mid-West.

Conservative author J.D. Vance explained: “What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by.  Heroin addiction is rampant.  In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes.  The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a ‘stepdad’ only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit … And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops. … Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.  He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas.  His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground.  He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.”

The Democratic strategy after their convention is to turn to disaffected middle-class Republicans rather than try to win over the white working class. But its plight is not something that can be written off as a political manifestation of right-wing extremism that can be countered by a left policy, as Stein does. There is a real social crisis here that requires the agency of the oppressed themselves to resolve. A radical, progressive agenda imposed from outside without any meaningful means of achieving it is not going to impress these people because they have been patronized and ignored for so long.

This movement is one driven by economic collapse and complete loss of confidence in the ruling elite. Widespread police abuse legitimized by the “broken windows” and “zero-tolerance” philosophies has undermined state legitimacy, and Black and Hispanic communities have begun to defend themselves; white workers are being written off and this is driving them into Trump’s arms. Clinton is certainly not the answer to these problems, but it will be infinitely easier to campaign on them under her presidency than under Trump’s. He will empower the police and security forces to do more than put protesters on trial: he will arm them to imprison and assassinate his critics.

The struggle continues: Sanders’ supporters ready to keep up the fight for social justice

Bernie Sanders has annoyed political pundits and party strategists alike with his stubborn insistence on taking his campaign all the way to the Democratic party convention in July. On Tuesday evening he told supporters in Santa Monica, after the California primary: “We are going to fight hard to win the primary in Washington DC. And then we take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia.”

The New York Times described his speech as one of “striking stubbornness” that “ignored the history-making achievement of his Democratic rival.” Although Clinton has presented her delegate count as a victory for women’s rights, it is more a victory for the Democratic party machine, aided by the media that announced her presumptive nomination for presidential candidate on Tuesday, just before voting began in California and five other primaries.

Even after Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren had formally endorsed Clinton on Thursday, Sanders’ supporters backed his decision to carry on. Iliana Jaime, 18, a high school senior, welcomed the stance and said she wanted Sanders to remain in the race until the convention next month. “I don’t think a revolution ends with a certain number of delegates,” she said. “It’s crucial he keeps going until the end. His impact is really obvious in a lot of ways aside from just being president. It would kind of be giving into the system that he is trying to reject if he did drop out at this point.”

Sanders told a rally in Washington DC that the campaign would go on because it is “based on a vision that our country must focus on social justice, on economic justice, on racial justice, on environmental justice. And when the overwhelming majority of young people support that vision, that will be the future of America.”

The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote that “Clinton may take the nomination, but Sanders surely has won the political debate. … He has astounded even his supporters, winning more than 20 contests, 10 million votes and 1,500 pledged delegates, the most of any true insurgent in modern history. He has captured the support of young voters by record margins. And he did so less with personal charisma than with the power of his ideas and the force of the integrity demonstrated by spurning traditional deep-pocketed donors in favor of grass-roots fundraising. … Sanders has already nudged Clinton to the left on key issues during the campaign, including trade policy and the minimum wage. The Democratic National Committee made one important concession last month by allowing Sanders to name five strong progressive allies to the platform committee (though the DNC also vetoed one Sanders pick, National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro, on the strange grounds that it did not want labor leaders on the candidate’s lists).”

While early on Clinton was able to leverage her appeal among African American voters, especially in the South, by the end of the campaign Sanders appeared to have overcome his early missteps with this section of the American public. The Washington Post reported: “Summoning congregants last week in a historic East Oakland sanctuary that helped give rise to the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party, he spoke passionately about the plight of many blacks: Too many children are raised in poverty, too many youths can’t afford to go to college and can’t find jobs, too many adults are locked in jails. The system is rigged against them, and he vowed to change it. The audience rose in applause and affirmation. There were hurrahs and smiles and shouts of ‘Amen!’ ”

Sanders has headed a movement that is not going to go away after the presidential election. Unlike Obama’s campaign in 2008, the movement is independent of his campaign organization, being based on a grassroots bottom-up approach rather than a top-down model. In particular, he has energized youth to support his social democratic program. The Huffington Post commented: “Sanders has not demagogued his way into relevance among the impressionable youth. He has simply stated their legitimate grievances directly and forcefully. Young people have been hit hard by the country’s economic anemia. It’s not surprising that they gravitated to the candidate calling for a major overhaul of the system. … Bernie Sanders did not create the movement that political pundits like to credit him with. He has, instead, spent a year serving rather effectively as the voice of people left behind by a broken economy. And until that economy is fixed, the movement will not go away, no matter who rises to lead it.”

A major survey of youth voters between 17 and 19 years old found overwhelming support for Sanders: 1.94 million voted for Sanders compared to 727,000 for Clinton. The Guardian reported: “Jasmine Brown, a student at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina, is one of those young voters. She grew up two hours east of Orangeburg in Georgetown, where, according to the 2010 census, 24.1% of people live below the poverty line, a figure that rises to 34.9% for those younger than 18…. Brown came away from [Sanders’ rally] inspired. She would go back to Georgetown, back to the projects where she grew up, to tell young people – some of them in danger of going down the wrong path – that there was hope for the future. … She travels back to her home city every weekend, revisiting the Georgetown projects where she grew up, speaking to students from her old school.”

Brown says many students look up to her as someone who came from that neighbourhood and made it to college. “I don’t brag about what I’m doing, but I let them know: ‘Just because you’re from this area you can go out and, you know, do big things’.” Even if Sanders does not win the nomination, Brown says, she will continue to support him away from the presidential race.

While most of Sanders’ supporters will vote for Clinton in November to keep out Trump, many of his passionate volunteers will turn to state and local political fights to advance the ideas of the campaign. “Brand New Congress,” co-founded by the former director of organizing technology in the Sanders campaign, intends to impact the 435 Congressional seats up for election in 2018. “The idea is to pull in people who have not necessarily been involved politics before, people who are not willing to compromise their principles, people who truly believe that we can regain our democracy,” Yolanda Gonzalez, a BNC Team Leader told AlterNet.

Gonzalez, a teacher for 20 years, was the Latino Outreach Coordinator for the Bernie Sanders campaign and has spent a large part of the past year volunteering for campaign events in the Southwest. “These same volunteers [that] are often dismissed by campaigns are super organized and passionate about the political revolution,” Gonzalez explained.

The House and state elections are the battleground that the plutocratic elite is also aiming for with their checkbooks: billionaires like the Koch brothers have given up on the presidential race because of the disarray in the Republican camp. Trump’s nomination has coincided with a fragmentation of the campaign after his racist attacks on the judge in the fraud case against the real estate “Trump University,” which stepped over a line even for conservatives.

It’s possible the Democrats will take both the Senate and the House in November, because of the Republican meltdown; but what will dominate the political future of the United States is the social movement that has built up rejecting Clinton’s neoliberalism and Trump’s racism.

The Shifting US Political Landscape: A Dawning New Consciousness Against Politically Engineered Wealth Inequality

The US presidential primary campaign has brought into sharp relief social shifts that have transformed the political landscape and confused ideological allegiances. These shifts reflect a changed consciousness among voters about politically engineered wealth inequality. That voters across the country flatly reject the neoliberal policies that pass for conventional wisdom among both Reaganite Republicans and Clintonite Democrats is a much more important story than calculations of possible delegate counts at national conventions.

These shifts have fractured the Republican social coalition built under Nixon and Reagan between business and social conservatives. In states where Republicans gained majority control in 2010 as a result of the Tea Party vote, legislatures have been moving to restrict social freedoms embraced in the rest of the country. In North Carolina, the state rushed through a bill in the dead of night to prevent local towns creating ordinances protecting the rights of transgender people to use the bathrooms of their choice, and also removed general protections against discrimination on religious and racial grounds. In Georgia, on the other hand, the governor vetoed a similar bill because of pressure from big business groups.

Washington Post correspondent Dana Milbank explains: “Corporate America is traditionally conservative, reluctant to react to social controversy and divisive issues. But as public sentiment shifts dramatically on gay rights and as pro-equality millennials become a large bloc of consumers, business is shedding its reticence. … When the Georgia legislature took up legislation giving religious groups the right to deny services to gay people, corporations by the dozen voiced their objections. Disney and Netflix said they would stop filming in Georgia, and the NFL said the bill would jeopardize Atlanta’s hopes of hosting the Super Bowl.”

By moving further to the right on social issues, a third of the Republican electorate has isolated the pro-business elite, who have now lost control of their party’s apparatus. While the party leadership consistently lowered taxes on the super-rich and its legislators and lobbyists achieved affluence, it delivered nothing but job losses and uncertainty to their working-class white voters. This is what Donald Trump was able to exploit in his demagogic anti-immigrant appeals to the Republican base. According to the Pew Research Center, between 2008 and 2012 “more lower-income and less-educated white voters shifted their allegiance to Republicans. These voters had fled the Democratic Party and were angry at Mr. Obama, whom they believed did not have their interests at heart. But not all of them were deeply conservative; many did not think about politics in ideological terms at all … For many blue-collar Republicans, anger against Mr. Obama now extended to their own party’s leadership, whom they viewed as not only failing to stand up to Mr. Obama, but also as colluding with him to make their lives worse.”

At the same time, the international role of the US has blown back into its political life. Glenn Greenwald argues that when Trump advocates waterboarding for terrorists he is merely stripping away the pretense over what the US has actually done. Tom Engelhardt reflects that while Washington seems unable to function effectively, the so-called war against terror has transformed the public acceptance of domestic surveillance and authoritarian rule to the extent that it has created “something like a new system in the midst of our much-described polarized and paralyzed politics.  The national security state doesn’t seem faintly paralyzed or polarized to me.  Nor does the Pentagon. … In this ‘election’ season, many remain shocked that a leading candidate for the presidency is a demagogue with a visible authoritarian side and what looks like an autocratic bent. All such labels are pinned on Donald Trump, but the new American system that’s been emerging from its chrysalis in these years already has just those tendencies. … a Trumpian world-in-formation has paved the way for him.”

On the Democratic side, the strong showing of the Sanders campaign has brought new social layers into political activism, in opposition to the party establishment and union bureaucracies. The overwhelming and enthusiastic support he has received from millennial youth has a huge significance, according to University of Massachusetts professor Richard Wolff. It means that “a fundamental shift in American politics is underway,” he says.  “The fact that he has done as well as he has done, getting an excess of 40 percent or even closer to half the votes in so many states and winning as many states as he has is an unspeakable change in American politics and will have enormous ramifications for the future.”

He has also energized rank and file trade unionists to buck their leaders’ reflexive support for the candidate most favored by the party establishment. A group calling themselves “Labor for Bernie,” formed last June, have succeeded in helping Sanders win the endorsements of more than 80 union locals and four national unions, including the postal workers, communications workers, and nurses’ unions. Labor Notes reports: “The Food and Commercial Workers came out for Clinton in January. But a month later, Northern California UFCW Local 5, whose 28,000 members work in grocery and food processing, endorsed Sanders. The executive board vote was 30 to 2, according to Mike Henneberry, the local’s director of communications and politics. He said the local hasn’t gotten any pushback from the International. ‘For us, it was not a very difficult decision,’ he said. ‘Compare an individual who’s been supporting workers since he was mayor of Burlington with someone who’s been on the board of Walmart’.”

Similarly, although the leadership of the SEIU service employees’ union have endorsed Hillary Clinton, the largest public sector union in New Hampshire came out for Sanders. Clinton only supports a minimum wage of $12 while the union is campaigning for $15.  “I never thought I would see involvement like there was when Obama ran,” said SEIU Local 1984 vice president Ken Roos. “But people were stopping me in the hall at work, or even in the street—they would say, ‘Bernie’s the man, we gotta go for Bernie.”

The political class is swinging behind Clinton to suppress this movement from below. Sanders’ victories, however large, are ignored by the media, or explained away as only appealing to liberals in predominantly white states. When Sanders won over 70 percent of the primary vote in Washington and Hawaii, and 82 percent in Alaska, CNN described the states as “largely white and rural.” However, a third of Alaska’s population is nonwhite, 15 percent being indigenous Americans, while Hawaii has never had a white majority. The huge turnout for caucuses in Washington state also brought in many nonwhite voters. Sanders press secretary Erika Andiola told Democracy Now: “Bernie’s supporters are very, very pumped up. You know, they’re very excited about going out to caucus. And it’s a lot of young people, it’s a lot of new voters. … [In Yakima county in Washington state] about 45 percent to 50 percent of the community there is Latino—very diverse county. Bernie had a rally there. We had 7,000 people turn out. We ended up winning the county by 75 percent or 76 percent.”

Regardless of who wins the nomination for the Democrats or the Republicans, these social changes and the new anti-plutocratic consciousness among voters of both parties will shape the outcome of the presidential election in November. That will pit the popular result against the entrenched deep party and state systems that Obama was unable to budge and which voters across the spectrum are rejecting.

What Victory for Bernie and Trump in Michigan Means: American Workers Vote Against Neoliberalism

What the voting in the US presidential primaries has revealed so far are some important realignments in the social consensus underlying the two-party system. A surprise win for Bernie Sanders in the key rustbelt state of Michigan upset political commentators and the Democratic establishment and has led to renewed attention on class issues submerged under decades of neoliberalism. Meanwhile,  Trump’s win in the state’s Republican primary underlines the fact that he is the only Republican candidate to address working class fortunes directly.

Sanders’ consistent opposition to free trade deals contrasted sharply with Bill Clinton’s implementation of NAFTA in the 1990s: the state lost more than 46,000 jobs in the last 25 years because of that single deal. Exit polls reported that “nearly six in 10 voters thought trade took away American jobs – and nearly six in 10 of people who said that, backed Sanders. … This echoes the Republican side of the primary. More than half of voters thought that trade cost jobs; four in 10 of them backed Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton had relied heavily on identity politics to give her the vote, as it had in Nevada and South Carolina, and pollsters assumed that the black population of Detroit would go for Clinton in the same way. Instead, according to Politico, Sanders’ “appeal to youth voters busted through the color line – Clinton won blacks 60-40 (not 80-20, as she did in her Tuesday win in Mississippi) – and Sanders fought her to a draw among under-40 African Americans. … And she barely held on to win Genesee County, home to Flint, the emotional focal point of her Michigan effort – and, in many ways, her entire campaign.”

Sanders campaigned through the whole state, appealing to white and black workers alike, while Clinton focused on African American communities like Flint and Detroit in east Michigan. The New York Times reported: “Mr. Sanders crisscrossed the state, speaking to more than 41,000 people, and his campaign opened 13 offices and hired 44 staffers to carry his message. He also visited places that were largely overlooked by the Clinton campaign, including Traverse City and Kalamazoo.”

The rejection of candidates favored by the Republican establishment in that party’s primaries is evidence that their voters are motivated by more than resentment of immigration, since all the candidates have voiced opposition to legalizing undocumented people; they are antagonistic to what they perceive as a corrupt political system that has betrayed them, and consider the wealthy Trump to be independent of corporate manipulation.

Trump’s rallies attract disparate groups, ranging from white supremacists to people angry about jobs being outsourced abroad.  This creates a potent mix of people susceptible to group hysteria as Trump makes his outrageous attacks on Muslims and immigrants; but while the media focus on these remarks, the bulk of his populist message denounces trade agreements and America’s economic decline.

According to Guardian reporter Thomas Frank, a study carried out by a union-affiliated group found that the main attraction of Trump for white working-class voters in Cleveland and Pittsburgh was his blunt approach to these questions. “As far as issues are concerned, ‘immigration’ placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: ‘good jobs / the economy’,” notes Frank. “‘People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,’ is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey ‘confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future’ and that ‘there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another’.”

The likelihood of Trump becoming their presidential candidate has thrown the Republican party establishment into panic mode. But the party is now too fragmented to be able to mount a strong alternative. The Republican-controlled legislature has reinforced Trump’s claim to better political management skills by its own undermining of government legitimacy, from the threat of government shutdown in 2011 to its refusal to even consider any candidate nominated by Obama for the Supreme Court. Moreover, in the debates “Trump, Cruz, and Rubio ascribe to Barack Obama any and all problems besetting the nation … the Republican critique reinforces reigning theories of presidential omnipotence. Just as an incompetent or ill-motivated chief executive can screw everything up, so, too, can a bold and skillful one set things right.”

The much more diverse Democratic voters are not in disagreement over policy so much as their judgment of the candidate most likely to defeat the Republicans. In fact, Trump has succeeded in energizing new sections of the Democratic base to prevent him coming to power. He has done more than the Democratic leadership to rouse voters’ enthusiasm since they are as guilty as the Republicans of undermining working class jobs and have moved well away from a New Deal perspective. Sanders seeks to restore this orientation, but while he appeals to millennial youth who are bearing the brunt of the continuing recession, many older Democrats see Clinton as the safer candidate to beat Trump.

Candidates’ support is also connected with their attitudes to the Obama administration: while Sanders is favored by white liberals critical of Obama’s presidency, most African Americans are supportive of Hillary Clinton, since they see Obama as having achieved small victories domestically. Black youth who face unemployment, police harassment, and huge college loan debt are far more sympathetic to Sanders.

Latinos who are critical of Obama for failing to carry out promises on immigration reform gave Sanders a victory in Colorado on Super Tuesday, where they make up nearly 15 percent of eligible voters in the state. Juan Gonzalez pointed out there has been a 40 percent increase nationwide since 2008 in the number of eligible Latinos that could vote in the coming election. He added: “You’ve seen Univision say that they’re going to use all of their television stations and their networks to promote a 3 million-voter registration drive among Latinos. I think what’s actually needed is more of a Freedom Summer campaign by the Latino youth of America, similar to what happened in the civil rights movement … where thousands of Latino youth go into their communities and say, ‘You’re not going to deport our parents. We’re American citizens, and we’re going to make a stand in terms of Basta Trump’.”

These shifts in electoral allegiances make it by no means certain that Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, but if she does, she will have to adopt much of Sanders’ platform in order to defeat Trump’s populist appeal. Either way, new sections of the American working class have been energized by the redrawing of class lines in political discourse.

Waking Up to the Minority Vote, the New, Decisive Force in Post-Obama Politics

The South Carolina Democratic primary voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate, by a margin of 50 percent over Bernie Sanders. Rather than analyzing the meaning of this vote, the media and the campaign professionals immediately turned to the candidates’ prospects on Super Tuesday, when a large number of states hold their primaries.

However, there are some important messages here which are obscured by a narrow focus on the political process. African Americans in South Carolina turned out in unprecedented numbers to participate in the primary – 6 out of 10 voters were black. And of those, 83 percent voted for Clinton. The Associated Press reported that in exit polls about 7 in 10 voters said they wanted the next president to continue Obama’s policies, indicating ideological agreement with Clinton’s strategy of building on his legacy.

The first thing to note is that the result should be seen as a class vote against the possibility of a Republican president. The relentless media reporting of Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda, together with the pronounced right-wing rhetoric of the Republican debates, are perceived rightly as a threat to black workers. Trump has succeeded in making abundantly explicit the racist basis of the Republican party, empowering extreme white supremacists, and making the Republican brand anathema among minorities. This goes a long way to undermining the Republican strategy of delegitimizing Democratic presidents and may lose them the Senate.

African Americans voted pragmatically for what they saw as the best candidate to defeat a Republican, and specifically, Trump.  Janell Ross commented in the Washington Post: “Black voters in South Carolina cast 6 in every 10 Democratic primary votes, according to CNN’s exit poll data. That ratio is huge — and sets a record-high in South Carolina black voter participation rate. The previous high was 55 percent, set in 2008, when the first black president was on his way to being elected. … these are its outcomes when black voters are convinced of their ability and authority to fundamentally shape American democracy. It is a result that should begin to crush the popular and often repeated myth that black political behavior in 2008 and 2012 was nothing more than a blip, a fleeting kind of emotion-only engagement inspired by a singular and history-making black candidate.”

Second, although a number of prominent black intellectuals like Michelle Alexander and Cornel West are highly critical of the Clintons’ record of legislation in the 1990s that led to mass incarceration of African American men and the dismantling of poverty programs, that message hasn’t reached the black working class. The history that black people remember is the vilification of Bill Clinton by the Republican Congress over the Monica Lewinsky affair, and, as Toni Morrison indicated by calling him the “first black president,” identified with his being hounded by the establishment.

Third, most black workers get their politics from their local churches and mainstream Democratic party leadership. And that was pro-Clinton and anti-Sanders. “A host of well-known, influential and well-connected black elected officials and leaders of civic and religious institutions have made their support for Clinton quite clear. And they have done everything possible to identify themselves as people opposed to a Sanders candidacy. … And, almost as if to say that the shooting death of an unarmed black person is the modern uber-black experience, the Clinton campaign has collected endorsements from several grieving black relatives. The mother of Trayvon Martin has even stumped for Clinton and explained her pro-Clinton voting rather logically in some detail. … Clinton [frames] issues like childcare and the gender wage gap, voting rights and criminal justice and gun policy reforms in ways that make their importance to black voters clear.”

Her political positioning as a champion of African American workers was prefigured in the Nevada primary. Clinton’s victory there was mainly due to the votes of casino workers in Las Vegas, who thanks to the efforts of Nevada senator Harry Reid were given time and opportunity to caucus at their places of work. In These Times contributor Steven Rosenfeld reported from one of the casinos: “Calvin Brooks, a Louisiana native, has been a bellman for 19 years in this hotel. Speaking slowly and deliberately, he explained why Clinton was his choice. ‘This is a union state. This is a union city. The president that we need today is somebody that will stand with us, to keep us together as a whole,’ he said. ‘My mind is made up for Hillary, someone who has been in the White House, not around it’.” Erlinda Falconer, an African-American women and blackjack dealer at the casino for 18 years, told Rosenfeld: “The majority of us realize how serious this election is and the impact it will have on our country and state. This is very, very important. There’s a lot on the line This isn’t a popularity contest. This is trying to get back on track.”

While earlier in the campaign Sanders took on board the criticisms of Black Lives Matter activists, he was too late to the party. Radicalized black youth may have challenged Clinton over her role in the 1990s, but they haven’t influenced the older majority. On Wednesday she was confronted at a fundraiser in Charleston by Ashley Williams, a Black Lives Matter protester, who demanded she apologize for the consequences of her husband’s 1994 crime bill and for having called black youth “super-predators” in a 1996 speech on crime.

Moreover, white progressives have difficulty dealing with race. Sanders’ attempt to reduce racial issues to economics are in line with his social-democratic outlook. But this perspective is inadequate to deal with the complex interrelations of class and race in America. The Washington Post commented: “Clinton doesn’t shy away from race. Sanders talks about race, too, of course. But he seems to do so at a remove, and his attempts to make a convincing link between his economic message and race continue to fall short. … Clinton openly talks about the necessary role that whites must play in healing and bridging the racial divide.” This has resonated with African Americans who resent being told that they are responsible for dealing with white resistance to acknowledging the role of slavery and the defeat of Reconstruction in American society.

Whoever wins the nomination and presidency, the social, cultural and demographic changes in the US are asserting themselves in the elections. The narrative of an “anti-establishment” vote is being superseded by a class consciousness that empowers African American and Latino voters. The realities of class struggle in America today require tackling racism head-on, something that the left has not attempted since the 1930s when the American Communist party sent members into the South to organize black and white workers into unions, risking their lives in the process.

Rather than tying the fortunes of the left to Sanders’ coat-tails, it needs to address the movements that have built up around this election and build an inclusive and pluralist movement that takes the heritage of the Occupy movement into new territory.

A Dead Justice and A Split Court: Deadlock and Uncertainty Threatens the Legitimacy of the US State

Overnight the death of justice Antonin Scalia has made the role of the US Supreme Court a major issue in this year’s presidential elections. It has also undercut activist moves by the Supreme Court conservative majority to curb presidential power and roll back liberal laws on abortion, public sector unions, affirmative action, and political representation.

There is no pretense any more that the Court is an impartial body standing above politics. Within an hour after the announcement of Scalia’s death, the Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, vowed to block any Obama nomination – implicitly rejecting the legitimacy of the 2012 election and the authority of the presidential office. So it appears that for the next 11 months at least, the court will be split 4-4 between liberals and conservatives.

Scalia was a pugnaciously partisan ideologue, constructing a rigidly “originalist” interpretation of the constitution that rationalized the reversal or gutting of liberal laws by prioritizing legal texts over legislative intentions. He was part of the majority that struck down the Voting Rights Act and upheld Citizens United. Activist Bianca Jagger tweeted: “I have never forgotten this quote ‘Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached’.”

The implications of some of the court’s recent rulings now come sharply into focus. One in particular is the conservative majority’s shock decision last week to place a hold on implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan that set emission standards on power plants. A lower court had already rejected state and coal industry appellants’ demand that the regulations be blocked while the case was heard, and normally the Supreme Court would have waited until the lower court had made its decision. The hold has the effect not only of neutralizing Obama’s regulatory agenda, but also sabotages international agreements on curbing carbon emissions.

The New York Times commented: “A clear majority of Americans, including many Republicans, agree that global warming is or will soon be a serious threat. Nearly two-thirds said they would support domestic policies limiting carbon emissions from power plants. But flexibility, a generous time frame for compliance and public opinion were not enough to sway 27 states that sued to stop what they call a ‘power grab’ by the federal government and Mr. Obama’s ‘war on coal.’ Many of these states depend heavily on coal-fired plants for their power and many are run by Republican governors, who either willfully disbelieve well-established climate science or find it politically impossible to take steps necessary to reduce emissions.”

The majority’s decision was also an unprecedented challenge to the legitimacy of executive action. Talking Points Memo noted: “the eagerness of the court to intervene in the implementation of the Clean Power Plan also plays into a larger narrative of a conservative Supreme Court preparing to wage war over how Obama has used his executive power. Coupled with how the Supreme Court has framed a blockbuster immigration case heading its way, the stage is set for the court to engage in the question of whether Obama’s executive powers need to be reined in.”

It stood to concretize a split between the three branches of government, encouraged by the polarization of state legislatures, a stalemate in Congress, and Republican ideological denial of the dangers of global warming that prevents a rational energy policy. Essentially, the erstwhile Court majority had openly set itself up against public opinion and thrown in its hand with the oligarchical opponents of any kind of regulation.

According to ThinkProgress: “This particular challenge to the Clean Power Plan does not arise in a vacuum, however. It is really only one face of a multi-faceted effort to shrink the powers of the presidency and prevent agencies like the EPA from carrying out their lawful authority. Last November, at an annual convention of the Federalist Society — a conservative legal organization whose members include several sitting senators and three Supreme Court justices — the gathered attorneys appeared obsessed with various plans to limit agency actions. … The states challenging the Clean Power plan rely heavily on a 2014 opinion by Justice Scalia suggesting that ‘clear congressional authority’ may be necessary when an agency takes a novel regulatory action. … The challenge to the Clean Power Plan… is also one of the most ambitious attempts to rethink the role of government to reach the Supreme Court in years. And five justices thought this challenge had enough merit that they halted the Clean Power Plan before any lower court had even considered those rules.”

Since Congress is likely to be deadlocked for the indefinite future, such a challenge to the legitimacy of the executive branch’s actions would have made it virtually impossible for it to function. A Democratic president, whether Clinton or Sanders, would have found the power of the office severely curtailed.

Scalia’s death has brought this challenge to a screeching halt. Under the court’s rules, 4-4 split decisions will not set precedents and will leave intact the lower court rulings under review. Linda Hershman pointed out in the Washington Post: “Most of the country, though, is governed by appeals courts dominated by Democrats. The suit against Obama’s environmental initiative, which the Supreme Court just stayed, came from the liberal D.C. Circuit, which had unanimously refused to grant the stay. Now the Obama administration can simply have the Environmental Protection Agency come up with a slightly different new plan and run to the liberal D.C. courts to bless it and refuse to stay it. … Even if the GOP blocks [Obama’s] nominee, the policy outcomes would be very similar to what they’d be if the court had a liberal majority.”

UPDATE: Talking Points memo notes: “Even if a Republican president ultimately names Scalia’s successor, the conservative legal movement will have suffered a dramatic setback by virtue of how many important cases it had queued up for this year that will be thrown into turmoil by a court with only eight justices and the potential for 4-4 tie votes. … the Supreme Court’s critics have been … pointing to a pattern in which a right-leaning justice sends a hint that the court is ready to take a case targeting some particular precedent, which in turn prompts legal activists to rush to get a case like that to the court’s doorstep. Legislators in red states have meanwhile pushed the envelope in legislation — with, for example, laws that restrict abortion access and voting rights — on the assumption they’d face friendly terrain if challenges to the laws made it to the Supreme Court. That advantage is no longer a given.”

Obama now has eleven months to craft his legacy. And the stakes in the presidential election have been raised significantly. As Josh Marshall commented: “Regardless of what happens with Justice Scalia’s replacement, there will be likely at least three other Justices to be appointed over the next 4-8 years of the next President’s term. The stakes on all the issues people care about—from abortion to guns, from campaign finance and voting rights to affirmative action and the environment, depend upon 9 unelected Justices who serve for life.”

Despite the Republicans’ plans to prevent Obama appointing a new justice, he must do so in order that government continues to function. He must not allow the extreme right to provoke a constitutional crisis that would benefit only the plutocracy in its economic and political assault on working poor and middle class Americans. Otherwise the US will further lose state legitimacy and become as fractured as the Republicans themselves.

Trump and the Young Americans: Do You Remember Your President Nixon?

According to the media, the most significant political event of 2015 was the meteoric rise of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries. Trump kicked off 2016 with a new campaign ad that ramped up fearmongering to new levels, featuring his demand to halt entry of all Muslims into the US, together with a mash-up of photos of the San Bernardino killers, Islamic State fighters, a US warship firing cruise missiles, exploding buildings and footage of migrants supposedly crossing a desert border.

Stoking up fear is as central to Trump’s strategy as it is to the Republican leadership’s. It enables him to promote himself as a Bonapartist strongman: too rich to be corrupted, able to overcome Congressional deadlock with his no-nonsense “management” skills, and capable of directing arbitrary acts of military retaliation. US News & World Report’s Mort Zuckerman comments: “He swoops in on his helicopter and proudly asserts, ‘Hey, I’m rich.’ Why pretend? His wealth conveys the impression he is incorruptible and thus above our campaign finance system which now allows politicians to garner unlimited funds from unidentified wealthy donors and corporations. … The public likes Trump’s self-description as a strong leader who will take charge, rip up opponents and make the big problems go away.”

The sensationalist media reporting of terror attacks energizes his supporters’ xenophobic resentment at demographic change that reduces their privileged access to resources and opportunities. And this resonates with the Republican base. The Washington Post found that the threat of terrorism was the most important political issue for 39 percent of Republican voters, outranking by far domestic issues like tax policy or healthcare, and half of all Republicans named Trump as the candidate they would most trust to handle it. Commentator Josh Marshall noted that December’s Republican primary debate was marked by “repeated invocations of fear, the celebration of fear, the demand that people feel and react to their fear. This was logically joined to hyperbolic and ridiculous claims about ISIS as a group that might not simply attack America or kill Americans but might actually destroy the United States or even our entire civilization.”

But it’s not only the Republicans. Since so many Americans live precariously from paycheck to paycheck, the disruption of a symbol of civilizational stability – like Paris – creates the fear of a descent into chaos, a breakdown of order, endangering life and property. Muslims are then demonized by the authorities as the unreasoning, nonhuman embodiment of this scenario. Tom Engelhardt notes that in 2015: “Hoax terror threats or terror imbroglios shut down school systems from Los Angeles to New Hampshire, Indiana to a rural county in Virginia. The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, citing terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, cancelled a prospective tour of Europe thanks to terror fears, issuing a statement that ‘orchestra management believes there is an elevated risk to the safety of musicians and their families, guest artists, DSO personnel, and travelling patrons’.”

The other side of this heightened fear is the increased political influence of minorities and women, codified by Trump and other Republican candidates as “political correctness.” One of his supporters, a retired college administrator, explained how her frustration with political correctness connected with her hostility to minorities. “When we wrote things [at her college], we couldn’t even say ‘he’ or ‘she,’ because we had transgender. People of color. I mean, we had to watch every word that came out of our mouth, because we were afraid of offending someone,” she said. “And you look at these people who have never worked and they’re having babies and they’re getting free rent and free food stamps and free medical care. … Something has to be done because we’re shrinking, we’re being taken over by people that want to change what America is. You can’t say it nicely,” she added.

Sometimes political correctness campaigns in colleges can be disproportionate and teachers’ speech needs to be protected; however, as well as sometimes showing a lack of judgment, youth are proving they want to tackle deeply-rooted racism and sexism and insist on real changes in what is socially acceptable. Protests at the University of Missouri over the racial insensitivity of the administration forced the resignation of the president and chancellor in November; the dean of students at Claremont McKenna in California also resigned after an email she sent to a Latina student saying she would try to better serve minority students who “don’t fit our CMC mold” surfaced. At Ithaca College in New York State, protesters accused the college president of responding inadequately to an incident where an African-American graduate was repeatedly called a “savage” by two white male alumni.

The heightened militancy of college students over institutional racism is closely connected to the rise of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. According to Al Jazeera, “Jonathan Butler, the Mizzou graduate student who went on a hunger strike to bring about Wolfe’s resignation, has said that the former college president’s demise started with ‘MU for Mike Brown,’ a Black Lives Matter-affiliated student group formed in solidarity with the uprisings in nearby Ferguson over the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. At Boston College, student organizer Sriya Bhattacharyya has also cited the importance of BLM: ‘At the core of all these [campus] movements is the unifying belief that black lives matter’.”

Al Jazeera also pointed out that the media has ignored activism at the high school level. After the white police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were not indicted, “high school students across the country organized solidarity protests in Seattle; New York; Denver; Oakland, California; Minneapolis and Boston. In February, about 250 high school students in Santa Fe, New Mexico left school to protest constant testing and the state’s new mandated exam. In June, Milwaukee high school students walked out of class to protest against the county executive takeover of low-performing schools. And this fall, high school students in Allentown, Pennsylvania, organized a district-wide student walkout demanding the resignation of the superintendent, the inclusion of a student representative on the school board and summer youth employment opportunities. There were also student walkouts in Chicago; Berkeley, California and Philadelphia that occurred this fall.”

Whoever the candidates are in this year’s presidential election, 2016 is going to be all about the growing power of these young Americans and their determination to fight unprosecuted police killings of young people of color. To quote David Bowie: “We live for just these twenty years. Do we have to die for the fifty more?”

“We are the 99 percent” movement opens up a new historical moment

“Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” has announced that “A new uncompromising movement against NYPD’s notorious Stop & Frisk program began yesterday [Friday] as hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Harlem State Office Building to Harlem’s 28th precinct. At the station, Cornel West, author and Princeton professor, Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Rev. Stephen Phelps, interim senior minister of Riverside Church, and dozens of others were arrested in an act of non-violent civil disobedience. Among those arrested and protesting was a large contingent from downtown’s Occupy Wall Street.”

This extension of the OWS protest is an important step in broadening the campaign. An “Occupy Harlem” protest is due to start next week, and if successful will not only challenge the unconstitutional police harassment experienced by African-American and Latino youth in New York, but also involve these youth with OWS’s struggle against bank control of the political system. This would be a huge breakthrough for the movement.

OWS’s direct action tactics have also re-energized the unions, not at the leadership level, which is still oriented to the Democratic leadership, but at the more militant base. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that on Friday “dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters joined the picket line outside Sotheby’s, the Manhattan auction house, where 42 unionized art handlers have been locked out in a labor dispute since July 29. ‘Walking around in a circle outside that building is not an easy job,’ said Jason Ide, the 30-year-old president of Teamsters Local 814, which represents the handlers and commercial movers. ‘When they show up, our guys feel a real kick because they care’.”

The reason the protests resonate with so many different social groups is because of the long-term deterioration in people’s living standards which is now accompanied by an acceleration of job layoffs and increased poverty since the bank crash of 2008. This is grudgingly verified by Businessweek, “Income and wealth inequality in America have been growing for decades with little public outcry. The catalyst for the [OWS] movement now is that during the worst financial crisis since the Depression, there is a perception that Wall Street and the wealthy were taken care of while average folks suffer. That isn’t a fringe view. … One of the critics of the Wall Street demonstrations cited a survey showing that three-quarters of the protesters favored higher taxes on the rich. In major U.S. media polls – by the Wall Street Journal/NBC News and Bloomberg News/ Washington Post – two-thirds of the public agree.”

This is very different from the Tea Party whose support from conservative whites stemmed from blaming government for their loss of privilege. The televised search for a Republican presidential candidate reveals the Tea Party’s shrinking base by its increasing extremism and denial of human empathy for the sick, gay soldiers, and unemployed. The vicious demonization of OWS by Tea Party spokespeople like Glenn Beck reflects the fact that their support relied on a monopoly of a populist rhetorical space.

The mass support for the Occupy protests is not going to fade away, since a much greater banking crisis is on the horizon. Bank failures in Europe and the euro’s convulsions threaten to hit Wall Street hard, and in defiance of regulatory bodies Bank of America has moved some of its toxic exposure to the European debt crisis from its subsidiary Merrill Lynch to the main Bank of America account where they are insured by the FDIC and ultimately become the liability of the taxpayer.

At the same time, the government is paralyzed by the rightward ideological push of the Republican Tea Partiers, which Obama’s administration has implicitly accepted by setting up the bipartisan “Gang of Six” to agree on a $1.5 trillion reduction in the federal budget which will further contract the economy leading to further job losses, and dismantle the social safety net. This in turn will draw many more into support for the OWS movement’s confrontation of the political system.

The historical moment we are in is a different one from the period of resistance to union-busting laws in Wisconsin, which was the precursor to the OWS movement, even though only a few months have passed since then. At that time, the Tea Party Republicans appeared ascendant by using their control of the state legislature to steamroller through their agenda. The union leaders led the reaction against them which focused on reversing state laws, although this was extended by the occupation of the state Capitol building in Madison.

Democratic legislators and the graduate students’ union in Wisconsin led the occupation from the beginning, and it was this occupation of public space that became the focus for large demonstrations of support. The occupiers organized themselves with the same kind of horizontal democracy as OWS, although the mass movement still considered Wisconsin Democrats its leadership. The defection of 14 state senators to Illinois was a form of direct action within the political system that denied governor Walker a quorum on his anti-union budget bill, and gave validation to mass actions in Madison and around the state.

However, the union-led movement had difficulty connecting with other struggles in Wisconsin against bank foreclosures and other social issues because of their focus on restoring collective bargaining. Despite these limitations, in a state divided between Democratic-voting cities and mainly Republican rural areas and Milwaukee suburbs, Wisconsin Democrats showed energy and commitment to an election recall campaign which succeeded in reducing Walker’s senate majority to one, and are set on recalling Walker himself next year. The success of the “Occupy Wall Street/We are the 99 percent” movement is now rebounding back on Wisconsin and “Occupy” protests are springing up around the state and taking up social issues on a much broader front.

This will become a problem for the Democratic party leadership nationally, since they are heavily indebted to Wall Street, but on the other hand must respond to the mass movement (particularly at the local level). The divisions which will inevitably manifest themselves within the party open up opportunities to replace corporate Democrats with progressives who support the aims of OWC, which would be a parallel expression of the occupation movement.

Will Obama default on government’s debt to Social Security?

The question that has dominated the headlines recently asks if the Republicans are crazy enough to engineer a debt default, or will they retreat at the brink. But this is the wrong question. What really should be asked is how have the super-rich been able to frame the agenda of the Obama administration and control Congress?

The US national debt has escalated because of two things: wars of choice in the Middle East and Asia, and tax cuts for the super-rich. Under Bush, the budget went from fiscal surplus to a debt of $3 trillion. But the debate in Washington has centered on cutting spending, including Social Security and Medicare entitlements. There is an impasse at present because the Republican party as a whole has been captured by the wealthy extreme right who have pressured legislators to sign no-tax increase pledges.

Paul Krugman blames political commentators for not reining in the Republicans. “A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. ‘Has the G.O.P. gone insane?’ they ask. Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye. … Here’s the point: those within the G.O.P. who had misgivings about the embrace of tax-cut fanaticism might have made a stronger stand if there had been any indication that such fanaticism came with a price, if outsiders had been willing to condemn those who took irresponsible positions.”

Apart from his over-estimation of the political influence of commentators, Krugman has avoided an important fact — there has been a struggle for control of the party by right-wing ideologues who have made it their mission to eliminate moderates. Moreover, they actively enforce their ideology by Mafia-style policing of candidates in the primaries.

The Washington Post reports that “… today’s GOP adheres to a ‘no new taxes’ orthodoxy that has proved far more powerful than the desire to balance the budget. … This orthodoxy is now woven so deeply into the party’s identity that all but 13 of 288 GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes. The strategist who invented the pledge, Grover G. Norquist, compares it to a brand, like Coca-Cola, built on ‘quality control’ so that Republican voters know they will get ‘the same thing every time.’ … The work of reducing the national debt must be done entirely by shrinking government, he said. Any compromise that includes taxes would hinder that goal and taint the Republican brand…. How is the pledge enforced? Typically, Republican candidates sign the pledge to avoid attack in the primary. Once in office, violators might find that Norquist has contacted Republican voters in their state or district to inform them that their senator or representative is having “impure thoughts,” as he put it. …”

Norquist’s elitist anti-tax ideology found a fertile base in the new super-rich: the elevation  of rentiers to the ruling elite who cohere together around a rejection of collective responsibility and the social functions of the state. Capital gains taxes are seen as  a burden on the accumulation of unearned wealth, but they are also opposed by a constituency of company executives and managers whose compensation is based on stock options and who are aggressively anti-taxation and anti-regulation. One measure of the growth of this constituency is the number of billionaires in the US, which has grown from 13 in 1985 to more than 1,000 today. According to CNBC “This unprecedented wealth has been sparked by advances in technology that have allowed leaps in productivity and in turn created money. An explosion in global trade allowed that money to be invested all over the world. The result is that extraordinary sums have rained down on hedge fund managers, private equity partners, real estate tycoons and entrepreneurs.”

The sociologists Judie Svihula and Carroll L. Estes describe how an ideological social movement seeking to privatize Social Security has been built by a broad network of well-funded think tanks, private foundations, and conservative politicians. “A confluence of corporate, political and religious interests asserting the morality of self-responsibility and the answer of the market” have institutionalized this movement and gained it societal consensus. Starting in the conservative politics of the Reagan era, the growing number of think tanks funded by billions of dollars of private wealth, reached its apex with “the 2008 founding by Peter G. Peterson of a billion-dollar foundation to promote the ideas of fiscal responsibility and capitalism that is touting the unsustainability of three entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” [“Social Security Privatization: The Institutionalization of an Ideological Movement”, Svihula and Estes, pp217-231, Social Insurance and Social Justice, Springer 2009]

Robert S. McIntyre, writing in The American Prospect, describes Peterson like this: “Peter G. Peterson, as he cheerfully admits, is not a member of the middle class. He’s a rich Republican Wall Street investment banker. But in his crusade against deficits and entitlements, he adroitly poses as a champion of the middle class. Given his circumstances, it’s not entirely surprising that Peterson is an outspoken opponent of the federal government’s two most progressive programs: the graduated income tax and Social Security. What is odd is that his pose as a friend of the common American succeeds; that he publishes in liberal journals like the Atlantic and the New York Review; and that he enjoys a largely uncritical press. [B]ecause Peterson cloaks his goals in the rhetoric of progressivity, the press has fawned over him. The misleading notions that entitlements are running up the deficit, stealing from future generations, and maintaining the elderly in affluence while young people suffer, have become received wisdom for many. Peterson’s bottom line is that the middle class gets too much from government and pays too little for it, while corporations and the rich deserve a break. Curiously, that’s not how he sells his program.” [The American Prospect. June 23, 1994, qtd in SourceWatch.]

This careful cloak of liberalism meant that when Obama initiated The National Commission on Fiscal Reponsibility and Budget Reform in 2010, it was “rife with those who were involved with the Peterson Foundation-funded America Speaks town halls. This includes the likes of Paul Ryan, Judd Gregg, and Kent Conrad, all of whom, not surprisingly, also partook in the Peter G. Foundation-lead April 2010 ‘Fiscal Summit,’ also known as America’s Crisis and A Way Forward.”

The American Prospect’s Mark Schmitt writes, “[I]n the complicated relationship here between a private foundation, built on the wealth of a single individual, and a public, government effort[,] [t]he two are co-piloting what looks from the outside like a joint project, with the privately funded project convening meetings that involve the same people and producing vast amounts of research and advocacy that reinforce the fiscal-crisis message and inform the commission. The Peterson Foundation was the primary advocate for the establishment of the public commission, was aggressive about its structure and composition, and now is running parallel to it and nudging it in what it sees as the right direction.” [The American Prospect. April 29, 2010, qtd in SourceWatch.]

Sourcewatch concludes: “On Dec. 1, 2010, in the aftermath of six lengthy meetings of the 18-person Commission, a controversial report titled “The Moment of Truth” was released to the general publicwith many of the suggested austerity measures strongly resembling those suggested in the Peterson-lead America Speaks town hall meetings, the Peterson-funded National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, as well as those positions that Peterson has pushed for throughout his life. These include raising the retirement age for Social Security to 69 by the year 2075, decreasing the cost of living benefits for Social Security recipients, imposing new limits on Medicare health insurance programs, and ending several middle-class tax breaks, the elimination of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the capping of jury awards in malpractice cases, and a major reduction in corporate income taxes.”

These positions underlie the compromise proposals on the budget being considered now by Obama and Boehner. “Talks focused on sharp cuts in agency spending and politically painful changes to cherished health and retirement programs aimed at saving roughly $3 trillion over the next decade. … the White House acknowledged that the emerging agreement is “to the right of the Gang of Six” — a bipartisan Senate debt-reduction framework unveiled this week — and far removed from what Democrats have said would be acceptable.” reported the Washington Post.

But until 2010 and the rise of the bogus Tea Party movement, whenever voters have known details of anti-tax schemes, they have defeated them in polls. It’s not an accident that Tea Party candidates were vague about what they actually intended to do. In 2008-9, anti-tax initiatives in a number of states like Massachusetts, North Dakota, and Oregon were defeated. “In Washington State and Maine, voters rejected so-called TABOR (‘Taxpayer Bill of Rights’) initiatives that would have created rigid tax raising formulas that would have crippled those states’ capacity to provide services like education, health care, emergency services, and public safety. … Across the country, over thirty state legislatures raised taxes to deal with deficits this year and a number have specifically targeted tax increases on the wealthy – a bugaboo of the rightwing. And at the ballot, the anti-tax right has just lost and lost.”

Social Security is not in deficit and does not contribute to the national debt. What has happened is this: by an accounting trick, the surpluses gained from Social Security and Medicare FICA withholdings have been appropriated by the Treasury and spent. Michael Brenner, Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, explains: “The way the dodge has worked is that money taken from the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds is replaced by Treasury IOUs. Since we have a consolidated budget, the numbers we see about deficits are misstated since they do not register those borrowings and IOUs as expenditures. They implicitly suppose that we’ll never have to make good on them. The budget in fact is not truly consolidated since those Trust Funds have a separate legal and financial standing from tax revenues and expenditures. The hope of our politicos is that we never will have to honor the IOUs if we can keep claims for Social Security and Medicare at an artificially low level and thereby access only the funds remaining after we SUBTRACT the IOUs. That’s the story behind the scare campaign that the Trust Funds are insolvent.”

Through his multiple think tanks and tame intellectuals like David Brooks of the New York Times, Peterson institutionalized his  entitlement-cutting agenda in Washington to such an extent that he has been able to frame the policy of the Obama administration. Peterson’s propaganda efforts on Social Security have met with little success with the general public, but resonated with the Republican conservative base and helped to push it rightwards.

In the New Yorker, George Packer sums up Obama’s position like this: “President Obama, responsibly acceding to the reality of divided government, is now the leading champion of fiscal austerity, and his proposals contain very little in the way of job creation. More important, he no longer uses his office’s most powerful tool, rhetorical suasion, to keep the country focussed on the continued need for government activism. His opponents’ approach to job creation is that of a cargo cult—just keep repeating “tax cuts”—even though the economic evidence of the past three decades refutes such magical thinking. What does either side have to offer the tens of millions of Americans who have settled into a semi-permanent state of economic depression? Virtually nothing.”

It’s not that Obama is enamoured of intelligent white men. He is a prisoner of their ideology because he has been trained in this ideology and has no alternative to it. Moreover, conservative Democrats like Jim Clyburn are very much in favor of benefit reductions – as long as they’re not called cuts – by pegging federal Cost of Living Adjustments to a new, stingier measure of inflation. Clyburn is a senior member of the Democratic leadership and was closely connected with the Deficit Commission. In an interview in 2010 he said “you cannot possibly not modify a program that at the time of its enactment, we had 17 people working for every one person that was a retiree. Today, you have about three people working for every one person that is a retiree. Now that is unsustainable.” He is uncritically repeating Peterson’s argument and bogus statistics about the unsustainablity of Social Security.

The last word belongs to the academic editors of Social Insurance and Social Justice: “The market paradigm has dominated the corridors of power, the airwaves, and cyberspace for so long that the alternative paradigm of collective good, the commons, and shared risk and responsibility has been seriously repressed. The national debate is now expanding to encompass conversations concerning the rationale and need for a safety net in the nation. As the failures of the market and the greed that has consumed the promise of our way of life are revealed, the case for social insurance becomes more apparent in the urgency of this political and economic moment.” [Epilogue, pp 437-8, Rogne Leah, Estes, Grossman, Hollister and Solway (eds), Social Insurance and Social Justice, Springer, NY, 2009.]

Republican Chokehold on Wisconsin Justice

As the legislation ending collective bargaining rights for state employees in Wisconsin comes into effect, the process of getting constitutional legitimacy for the law has produced extreme tensions within the judiciary. Narrowly re-elected Supreme Court Justice David Prosser expressed this by physically attacking fellow Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in a heated argument on June 13. “The facts are that I was demanding that he get out of my office and he put his hands around my neck in anger in a chokehold,” Bradley told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The immediate cause of the argument was the pressure exerted by the Wisconsin legislature to resolve the legal challenge to their budget bill. Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald had stated that the Wisconsin Republicans would introduce the changes as a budget amendment if the court did not act quickly.

Prosser and the three other conservative judges on the Supreme Court arrived at Bradley’s office concerned about delays in issuing the decision, voted on a few days previously. The encounter grew heated, according to the Sentinel: “Bradley asked Prosser to leave, but he did not and the justices continued to argue. Abrahamson said she did not know when her [dissenting] opinion would be ready, saying it might take a month. Prosser then told Abrahamson – with whom he has often clashed publicly and privately – he’d lost faith in her leadership. Bradley got close to Prosser and again demanded that he leave, with some sources saying she charged at him with her fists raised.”

The opinion was in fact released the following day, only eight days after the court had heard oral arguments in the case. The court ruled 4-3 on ideological lines in support of the collective bargaining bill, clearing the way for it to become law.

This is not the first time that Prosser had clashed with Bradley and Abrahamson. In March, it was reported that “As the deeply divided state Supreme Court wrestled over whether to force one member off criminal cases last year, Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a ‘bitch’ and threatening to ‘destroy’ her.” “I probably overreacted,” Prosser said later, admitting the incident, “but I think it was entirely warranted. They are masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements.”

But the recent outburst was about more than mercurial personalities. As an editorial in the progressive “Cap Times” comments, Prosser and the conservative majority made “an unprecedented reinterpretation of the state’s open meetings law that said rules requiring official transparency and accessibility do not apply to the Legislature. Only by gutting the open meetings law could the court’s conservative majority rule that the Legislature’s passage of Walker’s plan, which did not follow open meetings requirements, was legitimate.”

Abrahamson, as the senior jurist on the court, made a stinging criticism of the ruling. In her dissenting opinion, she wrote: “The order and Justice Prosser’s concurrence are based on errors of fact and law. They inappropriately use this court’s original jurisdiction, make their own findings of fact, mischaracterize the parties’ arguments, misinterpret statutes, minimize (if not eliminate) Wisconsin constitutional guarantees, and misstate case law, appearing to silently overrule case law dating back to at least 1891.”

The legal arguments in the ruling, and Prosser’s concurrence, “are clearly disingenuous, based on disinformation,” reaching “unsupported conclusions.” Abrahamson’s point is that the conservative majority’s judgment in support of Walker’s bill is so hastily reached that they have authored “an order … lacking a reasoned, transparent analysis and incorporating numerous errors of law and fact.”

What is the urgency driving the judicial and legislative Republican majority in Wisconsin? On his election, Walker rejected any possibility of working with Democrats or union leaders in favor of a head-on clash. Basing himself on an unholy alliance of local real estate interests, mining and manufacturing, together with the financial and ideological support of the super-rich and their front organizations, his strategy is to ram through a full menu of right-wing legislation so as to preempt resistance.

Unlike states such as New Jersey, where Democratic leaders voted with Republican governor Christie for measures to eliminate collective bargaining rights, 14 Democratic state senators in Wisconsin gave leadership and legitimacy to a mass movement against Walker’s budget bill. As a result, a deep-going and spontaneous recall campaign is progressing steadily to overturn the Republican lock on the legislature.

The impact of the Democratic senators’ action is shown by recall campaign volunteers like Zach Schuster. He was an intern in Sen. Mark Miller’s office when the senators hatched a plan to go to Illinois to deny their Republican colleagues a quorum to vote on Walker’s collective bargaining bill. “The day Mark left was a turning point for me,” says Schuster, a UW-Madison graduate with a master’s degree in water resource management. “That was the day politics went from being an abstract thing that I followed … to something personal.”

Corporate Democrats within the party need to be replaced with candidates like these Democratic senators, already committed to defending union rights, social security, housing and jobs by legislating to increase taxes on the super-rich and restore state regulation of banks and industry.