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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months ago

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The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

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azspot · 30 days ago

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When Joe Biden was running in 2020, I expected him to exhibit this sort of centrist drift as president. In fact, he did the opposite, appointing Lina Khan at the FTC and Jennifer Abbruzzo at the NLRB and carrying out the most progressive and pro-worker economic agenda of any president in my lifetime. Why did lifelong moderate Joe Biden, the credit card industry’s favorite senator, end up doing so much good economic policy? One major reason is that after a tightly contested 2020 primary campaign that Bernie Sanders looked for a time like he might win, Biden made the choice to bring the left wing of the party into the fold, rather than slamming the door in their face. He created a formal “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force” that hammered out a set of policy recommendations for his term. He gave progressives like Elizabeth Warren significant input into staffing decisions for parts of his administration. After watching Democratic presidents freeze out the left for decades, I failed to anticipate Biden’s willingness to allow the left some real policy power. It was a political decision, and it doesn’t mean that Biden himself is a resounding progressive, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Biden presidency produced hugely important tangible victories for progressive economic values.

Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What.

#biden #election2020

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simply-ivanka · 4 months ago

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Why the Left Is Throwing Biden a Lifeline

AOC and Bernie Sanders are betting the President will reward their loyalty in a second term.

Wall Street Journal Editorial July 11, 2024

President Biden is phoning friends across his party to rally support, so pay close attention to who is answering the call. His staunchest defenders are on the left, while moderates in swing districts are asking the President to withdraw from the race. There’s more than 2024 electoral calculation behind this highly revealing political turn.

No one outside the Biden family has been more fiercely pro-Biden since the President’s debate flop than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Queens firebrand promised reporters that Mr. Biden won’t leave the race and pledged to campaign for him through Election Day. This show of faith came after she said she “spoke with the President extensively” over the weekend. A Commander in Chief pleading for support from an often critical House backbencher is something to behold.

Another stalwart for the President is Sen. Bernie Sanders, who says he believes Mr. Biden can still win—if he campaigns on the Bernie agenda. Even Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been denouncing Mr. Biden’s Israel policy for months, is now in the Save Biden camp. This week she said “he’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back.”

There’s an ideological method to this loyalty. Ms. Omar has a point about Mr. Biden’s first term. While the President campaigned as a moderate uniter, in office he has tried to be the second coming of FDR.

Despite losing the 2020 primary to Mr. Biden, Sen. Sanders gave his endorsement in return for Mr. Biden signing up to the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. The agenda included drug price controls, an expanded child tax credit, massive green energy commitments, and Build Back Better entitlement expansions. Only Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stopped him from delivering on more or less the entire Bernie Sanders policy wish list.

If progressives save Mr. Biden now and he goes on to win re-election, the left will be well positioned to cash in again. Mr. Sanders is clear about what he expects in return for sticking with Mr. Biden. In his statement defending the President, he urged Mr. Biden to support a national “living wage,” a payroll tax hike, medical debt cancellation and much more. “Biden and Democrats can win this election if they address the needs of the working class,” he said.

The desperate President is turning to the left because he knows these Democrats don’t face electoral challenges. Progressives are running in safe seats or in Democratic states where Donald Trump has no chance to win. But in his desperation, Mr. Biden is also making a possible second term even more hostage to the left. Bernie and AOC have plenty of unfinished policy business they hope to get done if Democrats control the White House and Congress.

Things will work out for progressives even if Mr. Biden wins but doesn’t make it through the entire four years. Their dream scenario would be for President Biden to win, then retire and pass the Oval Office on to Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran as a whole-hearted progressive in the primaries in 2020.

Mr. Biden’s political vulnerability, and his turn to progressives for a lifeline, raises the policy stakes even higher for the November election. Bernie Sanders may believe social spending is free, but his political fee is steep.

#wall street journal #editorial #trump #trump 2024 #ivanka #AOC #president trump #donald trump #america #americans first #repost #america first #democrats

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thatstormygeek · 3 months ago

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The Democrats are a Big Tent Party less in the celebratory, inclusive sense, and more in the way you might feel if you arrived at a group camping trip to find that there were not individual accommodations.

“Fuck. It’s just one big tent.”

Awareness of this dynamic is acute in the party’s left wing. That’s because, at least in my lifetime, they have almost always been the losers in the internal power struggle, a minority faction alternately wheedling and hollering as the moderates and the neoliberals steered the ship confidently to the right. This was true during both the Clinton years and the Obama years. It took the ascendance of Trump, a crisis that neither party’s establishment was ready for, to weaken the neoliberals’ hold on the party’s controls. The realization that they were the ones who had fucked up the country enough to make Trump’s ascendance possible made them seem a little less omniscient than before. Even after Biden was able to beat back the challenge of Bernie in the primaries, it was clear that progressives were strong enough in the party to make real demands. Biden acquiesced to a “unity task force” that produced a set of progressive policy demands as he took office. Biden’s domestic policy team, particularly at the FTC, the NLRB, and his economic advisers, were markedly more progressive than those in past Democratic administrations. Unions had more clout in the White House. Things had ticked to the left, domestically at least. Biden was not radical enough to see his way to not helping Israel incinerate thousands of children, but he did some good economic stuff. Keynes would be proud.

Let me suggest a way for the congenitally hapless Democratic Party to break out of its natural inclination to be forever locked in a dispiriting battle between being those who want it to be a party of social progress and those who want it to be a more polite version of the Republicans, a Chamber of Commerce party without all the discomfiting talk about genital examinations in high school sports. Let me name a single constituency, a single faction, that is capable of uniting the vast majority of Democrats around it. This is a group that can pull in construction workers and engineers, house cleaners and home builders, teachers and civil servants, bank tellers and airline pilots, baristas and Hollywood actors. Yes: It is organized labor. Is it “populist?” Sure. Is it “progressive?” Intrinsically, if not in its branding. It is the big tent that Democrats aspire to be. Put labor at the heart of the Democratic Party. Build the party around that. ... Labor does not need to try to represent America. It is America. Yet neither party has thought to claim it. Republicans hate it, and the Democrats have long been happy to make organized labor a junior partner, a desperate little dog fed on scraps, an afterthought that doesn’t require much attention because it has no other choice but to stick with you, given the options.

The left wing of the party, I’m sure, would get on board with this setup. (Those who rose with Bernie Sanders over the past decade have notably evolved closer to this position in recent years, as they recognized that labor must be the foundation of any mass progressive movement.) The Hollywood liberals would accept it—they’re all union members themselves. The normies of party, the regular folks who just don’t want Trump, could easily be made to see the appeal of an institution representing every type of working person, even if they don’t know much about unions. The money wing of the party, the Tony Wests and Reid Hoffmans, would not like it. But fuck them. They should be the junior partners in this coalition. There is an entire party of capital sitting right across the street. The rich people who have enough moral fiber to not want to hop on board with fascism in order to protect their fortunes are left with one choice: the Democrats. Get on board, fuckers. If this sound harsh, understand that this is essentially the message that Democrats have long sent to organized labor itself—a group that has tens of millions of members, not just a few.

#us politics #labor rights #hamilton nolan #representative government my ass #ostrich dems #unionize

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kp777 · 1 year ago

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By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Sept. 20, 2023

"This historic victory," said the youth-led Sunrise Movement, "marks the beginning of a new era in the fight for a Green New Deal."

After years of pressure from environmentalists and progressive lawmakers, the Biden administration on Wednesday announced a new program aimed at training tens of thousands of young people in skills and jobs critical to combating climate breakdown, from land and water conservation to clean energy development.

Inspired by the New Deal's popular Civilian Conservation Corps—a popular decade-long program that employed millions of young men—the Biden administration's American Climate Corps (ACC) will establish a paid training program with the goal of providing "pathways to high-quality, good-paying clean energy and climate resilience jobs in the public and private sectors," according to a White House fact sheet.

The administration estimates that the program, established via executive action, will train more than 20,000 Americans, "putting them to work conserving and restoring our lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, deploying clean energy, implementing energy-efficient technologies, and advancing environmental justice."

Specific pay for the training program has yet to be disclosed.

The new initiative was unveiled days after dozens of U.S. lawmakers and advocacy groups sent letters imploring President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to launch a Civilian Climate Corps to "prepare a whole generation of workers for good-paying, dignified, union jobs, and build the workforce we need for the robust green economy of tomorrow."

The youth-led Sunrise Movement, which spearheaded the advocacy groups' letter and has been organizing in support of a Civilian Climate Corps for years, celebrated the announcement of the ACC as "a response that begins to meet the moment and show young people how their government can work for them."

"Three years ago, I sat on then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders' Unity Climate Task Force and shared one of Sunrise Movement's top priorities for the future administration—a Civilian Climate Corps, a visionary jobs program to put thousands of young people to work in real career pathways fighting for their future," Varshini Prakash, the Sunrise Movement's executive director, said in a statement Wednesday.

"Now, after years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis," Prakash added. "With the ACC and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible."

"We're often asked how President Biden can win the support and enthusiasm of young people. He's gotten our attention. Keep going."

Biden previously embraced the idea of a climate corps as he crafted what was known as his "Build Back Better" agenda, which included tens of billions of dollars in funding for such a program.

But due to opposition from oil and gas industry ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and other right-wing Democrats—as well as the entire Republican congressional caucus—the administration agreed to dramatically pare back its agenda and approve the Inflation Reduction Act, which included a number of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry but not a climate corps.

NPRreported that the ACC is "likely to be smaller in scope than early proposals" and is "much smaller" than the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Biden administration did not say how much it plans to spend on the new program, which "will rely on existing funding sources," according toThe Washington Post.

Nevertheless, climate advocates welcomed the ACC as a critical first step while urging the Biden administration to do more to phase out fossil fuels.

"We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to address the climate crisis, and the Biden-Harris administration establishing an American Climate Corps—with specific opportunities for youth to work in climate resilience careers—is a historic effort to meet this moment," said Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous. "The Climate Corps will mobilize young people, workers, and federal resources in a way never seen before."

Keanu Arpels-Josiah, a member of Friday's for Future NYC, argued that "a climate corps is important but the executive actions we desperately need are those that will directly and swiftly phase out fossil fuel expansion and production."

"A climate corps that focuses solely on promoting renewables doesn't do the job," said Arpels-Josiah. "It won't undo the Biden administration's damage in approving climate bombs like Willow. It won't end new fossil fuel projects and phase out existing projects in the timeline we need for our generation to survive."

In a memo released Wednesday, the Sunrise Movement called the establishment of the ACC "a show of the strength of young people in the national political arena" and "a hopeful pivot by the Biden Administration towards a 21st century New Deal society."

"Moves like the creation of the American Climate Corps harken back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision of government—meaning American government has a responsibility to invest directly in its people to provide relief, reform, recovery, and good jobs in collaboration with and support of organized labor," the group wrote. "This historic victory for Sunrise and the rest of the climate movement marks the beginning of a new era in the fight for a Green New Deal."

A number of federal agencies will be involved in supporting and implementing the new program, including the Department of Labor, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and AmeriCorps.

The Biden administration also announced Wednesday that "five new states—Arizona, Utah, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Maryland—are moving forward with state-based climate corps that are funded through public-private partnerships, including AmeriCorps, which will work with the American Climate Corps as implementing collaborators to ensure young people across the country are serving their communities."

Other states, including California, Maine, and Michigan, have already established climate corps programs.

"This past summer we saw record climate disasters, record labor strikes demanding good, meaningful work, and major climate protests led by young people," Prakash said Wednesday. "We're often asked how President Biden can win the support and enthusiasm of young people. He's gotten our attention. Keep going."

#american climate corp #acc #biden administration #green jobs #climate change #climate action #environmental action #climate crisis #joe biden

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reasoningdaily · 1 year ago

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ezra klein

One of my longtime obsessions as a policy reporter is the question of wealth. Most of American politics, most of American economic policy, I would say, is about the question of income — what wages look like, whether they’re rising or falling, for whom. When we talk about inequality, we’re typically talking about income.

But wealth is as important — I think maybe more important. We don’t measure it as well, but it says more about what a family, what a person can actually do under duress. It says more about how they can invest in their future. It says more — knowing their wealth can often tell you a lot more than their income can — about the long-term prospects of that family.

And wealth has this other quality, again, different than income, which is that it is where the past compounds into the present, where injustices of the past compound into the present, where the benefits of the past, the privileges of the past compound into the present. Wealth is where the long story of a family or a country makes a reality of the moment.

And for that reason, it’s uncomfortable. Wealth is uncomfortable because what does it mean to inherit? What does it mean to ask people to pay up for the sins of those who came before them? But on the other hand, much more so than income, if you don’t do anything about wealth, it just compounds, and the inequalities of a society go greater and become more present every single day.

So for all those reasons, I’ve long been interested in policies that would do something about the wealth gaps we have.

Often, what we do is we make policy to make wealth inequality worse. In the time, I’ve covered politics, we’ve made the estate tax a lot looser. We’ve made the thresholds beneath which it doesn’t apply much higher. You can pass down millions of dollars before you get taxed now.

We also have just a ton of tax policy meant to help people build wealth, which is great. We help people buy homes, and we help people go to college. And we help people do all these good things. The problem is you can only get that policy if you have some wealth to put into these advantaged accounts in the first place.

What we don’t have a lot of is policy that helps people who don’t have wealth build it. And so I’ve been very intrigued by this idea that the economist Darrick Hamilton and others have put forward called “baby bonds,” which would be this proposal to simply give people wealth — everybody. Now, not everybody would get the same amount. You get a lot more if you were poor than if you were rich, if you did not have wealth as a family than if you did. You would not be able to use it for anything. It’s circumscribed. It’s a wealth-building policy, not just a policy to help people spend.

But more so than anything else out there, it has this potential to all in one swoop really shift the wealth distribution of the country, really make sure that everybody has a chance to enjoy the benefits of wealth as opposed to that being something that is reserved for those who got it from generations before them but that those who did not have that luck simply are left without.

Darrick Hamilton is a professor of economics and urban policy at The New School. He served on the Biden Sanders Unity Task Force and was an adviser to Bernie Sanders. His ideas have been picked up into lots of pieces of federal legislation, and baby bonds, in particular, has been introduced by Cory Booker and Ayanna Pressley in Congress, not in its exact form of his but in a pretty close one.

So this is a policy actively under consideration. It’s something you could imagine passing at some point in the future if it were something Democrats prioritized, if it were something that they wanted to make the thing they did if they got power again. So should they? That’s what I wanted to talk to Hamilton about. As always, my email [email protected].

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Darrick Hamilton, welcome to the show.darrick hamilton

Thank you, Ezra. Pleasure to be on with you.ezra klein

We talk a lot in American politics about income, about wages, but something you write that sticks in my head is that, quote, “Wealth is the paramount indicator of economic prosperity and well-being.” Why?darrick hamilton

Think about what you can do with wealth that you can’t do with income. If you have a child that’s about to enter college, chances are your income is not going to be able to afford the choice to send that child to any school that they could actually get into. Some schools just simply might be too expensive.

If you’re faced with a legal challenge and you want to hire a high-priced attorney, the cost will be such that you will have to use some wealth, and income probably couldn’t afford you that attorney. We can think of other things as well.

So even aside from economic security, if you want to do things with your life, suppose I realize that my passion isn’t to be a professor. But I really have this innovative idea, and I want to bring it to market. Well, if I have capital, I’m better positioned to bring that idea to market. If I want to move and purchase a house somewhere, basically the point is that wealth affords you economic agency in ways that income does not.

Income is largely used to pay your expenses that happen on a periodic basis, whereas wealth gives you the ability to withstand shocks and the ability to make investments. Ultimately, wealth gives you choice in ways that income does not.ezra klein

There’s a line I’ve seen you use that that brought to mind, where you and co-authors talk about wealth as being a way to fully participate in the market. What do you mean by that?darrick hamilton

Think about income. If you are a worker, you can’t just simply decide that you want to leave your job and do something else. But if you have wealth, if you have a stock of assets, it gives you the freedom, the choice to, really, negotiate with whatever it is you bring to market, be it your labor, or your innovation, or some ideas. So wealth with that stock, that provides you, really, agency to make choices.ezra klein

So I think people, particularly who listen to this podcast, are probably somewhat familiar with looking at the American economy through the lens of income and inequality. What changes, either in the data or in the distribution, when you begin to look at it through the lens of wealth inequality?darrick hamilton

Wealth is so concentrated in the United States. Very few people own a great deal of the wealth, and of course, if we look at race, that becomes even more dramatic. So if we compare inequality and domains of income versus wealth, essentially there is no comparison. We can cite statistics, but the gist of it is very few people own most of the nation’s wealth.ezra klein

Well, let me cite some. You cite numbers from 2019 that suggests that the top 10 percent of households own about 70 percent of all wealth, 70 percent, and so that’s twice the net worth of the bottom 90 percent of households combined. This is one of those places where, I think if you marinate in it for long enough, you begin to really feel the unfairness in the economy.

For income, if you want more of it, you have to go out and work for it. You have to go lift a box or have a new idea or write marketing copy or something. But wealth isn’t like that. What you’ve got to do to get more money from wealth is just let your money go out there and make money on its own.

So the number here that, I think, is really striking is real household income, the money people work to get, it grew by about 30 percent between 1989 and 2018. The S&P 500 grew by about 400 percent. So if you’re working a job and getting raises, you can make more money over decades. But if you just had enough money that it could sit there in the S&P 500, it went up by multiples, and you didn’t really have to do anything new to get that at all.

So this gets to something that’s become very famous in policy circles in the last couple of years, which is Thomas Piketty’s famous R is bigger than G equation. So I was hoping, for folks who aren’t familiar with it, you could walk through it.darrick hamilton

R over G, all right, so —ezra klein

You sound excited already. [LAUGHS]darrick hamilton

The rate of return to capital has grown and continues to grow at a much faster rate than overall growth, and that is how society has been structured. And if you don’t have interventions from an entity like the government sector to allow for some redistribution, oftentimes due to tax code, then you end up in a perpetual cycle, where those that have the benefit of capital continue to grow their capital.

And then here’s the other point. That growth rate and capital certainly can transform political situations to benefit capital in the first place. So in other words, it’s not just economic growth that becomes compounded. The power associated with that increased wealth translate into ability to influence the political structure and system so as to have a feedback to grow your wealth even more.ezra klein

Yeah, I was going to get into this later, but maybe we should get into it now, which is that I think can be easy to hear this conversation about wealth and markets and think of this as an automatic process of capitalism. But even putting aside the way we structure markets, there is a huge amount of tax policy — I think the estimate I saw on one of your papers was over $700 billion a year — that is designed to wealth build. And on the one hand, that policy is facially neutral. It’s there for, in theory, anybody, but you need to have wealth to use it.

So do you want to talk a bit about what the tax code is doing here and the way we are manipulating, increasing, and advantaging wealth in the tax code?darrick hamilton

Yeah, the extent to which our tax code incentivizes wealth and capital growth, it centers on existing wealth and capital growth. Now, it need not be that way. We could use the tax code in a way to promote new wealth.

There’s the famous study called “Upside Down” that came out of Prosperity Now that shows that we spend about in excess of $700 billion in promoting asset development in the United States. And what are things associated with asset development? The different ways in which we tax capital gains versus wages, the different ways in which we treat homeowners versus renters — so you’re able to deduct the interest payments on your mortgage from your taxes whereas a renter doesn’t have that access.

So we may even think, as a society, that’s a good thing. Wealth is good for society. But the problem is to whom that tax code benefits. So the more accurate estimate of $700-plus billion: About a third of that will go to people earning over $1 million. The bottom 60 percent of earners will receive about 5 percent of that distribution.

So one could reimagine a tax code that spends similar amounts of money but does it in a more distributionally fair way. Because, as we’ve been talking, a lot of that is associated with having existing capital in the first place. So the government is strategically directing public resources in a way to promote even greater growth of those that have wealth to begin with.ezra klein

And I want to get at one of the dynamics in this, because a lot of this is very well meaning.

So there’s a great statistic in one of your papers about how fewer than 3 percent of Americans have what are called 529s, or Coverdell accounts, which are these tax-advantaged accounts to save for education.

And it’s great, right? Helping people put money away for kids’ college in a tax-free way, helping them build for the future, you don’t have to be running any kind of scheme to make America unequal to think that would be great.

But most people don’t have them because most people can’t save that much money in them. And so I think we’re used to thinking about tax policy as being unequal when it’s designed unequally. But you can have a policy or accounts that are totally neutral. Anybody can take advantage of them. But if you don’t have money to put into them, you can’t, and so in effect, they become a way that people are pretty wealthy can keep a lot of money tax free that, if you are not that wealthy, you don’t have access to anything like that.darrick hamilton

Fundamentally, wealth begets more wealth, and if we have a society that uses the tax code the privilege existing wealth, that only enhances that framework, that equation. But again, if we could reimagine the tax code, there’s nothing wrong with promoting wealth for the American people. The problem is how we do it and to whom it’s distributed.

So if we set up structures, incentives, and straight-up grants that allow people to get into an asset that can passively appreciate in a more egalitarian way, that would be better. That same amount of money could be used to facilitate a down payment for somebody to get into homeownership who otherwise wouldn’t get into homeownership. And it’s still growing the nation’s saving and wealth but doing it in, what I would say, a more fair, just, and even productive manner.ezra klein

I’m going to put a pin in that because I want to get to that policy, but I want to go through a couple more pieces of the wealth context first. And one thing here that I want to be careful about — we keep talking about wealth as if it’s one thing, and the examples I’ve used so far are things like stocks and homes. But the composition of wealth, what we measure as wealth, includes a lot of things. And the composition of what wealth people have changes as you go up and down the class ladder.

So could you talk a bit about the different types of wealth and how the wealth that people in the working class have, if they have it, tends to be pretty different than people in the richer segments of society?darrick hamilton

That’s right. If we get into issues of diversified portfolios, we know that it’s better to not have all your eggs in one basket. But one needs to realize that if you have a little egg to begin with, it’s hard to spread it amongst many baskets.

So in the American case, the asset that most people start out with — and again, it’s for those individuals that are able to get into substantive ways to generate wealth and assets — it’s often a home. As such, the composition of their wealth is often primarily in a home in a large percentage way. But as you grow your wealth, you’re able to use that additional wealth to diversify your financial portfolio. Then you start to get into things like stock ownership and potentially even business ownership.ezra klein

And that gets us something, I think, important here, which is, at the beginning, you gave the example of wanting to start a business, or sending a kid to an expensive school, or maybe needing to get a lawyer. If you’ve got a bunch of stocks sitting around and your wealth is in stocks and you need to sell some of them to do that, so be it.

If your wealth is in your home, it’s not that that isn’t real. You can sell your home. But there’s a lot that comes along with selling your home, from having to move to another home to it maybe being a very emotionally important part of your life and the place where your kids grew up. There is a difference, I think, between having your wealth tied up in the place you live and having it invested in a hedge fund.darrick hamilton

If we look at financial wealth as the sole category, these disparities that we started out describing in the beginning, they grow even wider, which is your point. We also think about the benefits of a home, you really need a residence, some place to actually live, and also the attachment that comes along with social ties.

But we offer various other amenities with your home as well, such as the school. The quality of your school is attached to the neighborhood that you live in. Those that can afford affluent neighborhoods in a home to match often are in better school districts so that their kids even end up with a better hand when they become an adult and begin the process of wealth building.

[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra klein

We’ve talked here a bit about wealth inequality and wealth composition. Tell me about the Black-white wealth gap.darrick hamilton

Now, that’s dramatic. The Black-white wealth gap is such that the typical Black household throughout American history has rarely had more than a dime for every dollar as the typical white household, not just wealth as an outcome but its functional role, what it can do for you. So we end up in locked-in inequality, and what makes it more pernicious is that locked-in inequality is often defined by the race that you’re born into.ezra klein

And so this is probably a point to ask. Are we talking here about means or medians? And how are those two measures different? And what does looking at one of them get you that looking at the other one misses and vice versa?darrick hamilton

If we were to look at mean — the differences we’re citing are even more dramatic. If we were to look at the mean wealth difference, Black people as a group own about 3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Black people make up well over 12 percent of the nation’s population but own about 3 percent of the wealth.

I think a fair number is to use the median if we’re thinking about differences across race because then you want to look at what’s typical about a Black experience versus a white experience. But if we look at the mean, the mean is more dramatic because America has a wealth inequality — period. So we have a problem with a concentration of wealth regardless of race. But it becomes more pernicious when we look at race.

We have a small few that own an enormous amount of our nation’s wealth, and that small few is overwhelmingly white. So we can have racial justice, where we would have a more fair distribution of wealth, and that would be great. But that still wouldn’t achieve economic justice. So in the dimensions of wealth, we need to be concerned with both economic and racial justice.ezra klein

Just imagine, as a thought experiment, we passed a policy that really solved or deeply narrowed — and we’ll talk about a policy like this — the median wealth gap. So the typical Black household, the typical white household, now they look pretty similar or much more similar, at least, from wealth but does nothing really on the mean wealth gap because your Bill Gates and your Elon Musks and so on, they’re unaffected by this policy.

And so on the one hand, you have really dramatically changed the wealth gap on one measure and barely changed it on another. What have we solved in that world? And what haven’t we solved?darrick hamilton

We haven’t solved economic justice. Now, we’ve redressed racial justice, which, again, would be no small feat. And if I were to flip your framing slightly, Ezra, and say we can close the mean racial wealth gap, hypothetically, by creating simply a class of Black billionaires, so that the mean distribution across race was equal. But that would still leave large racial disparities between the typical experience. In other words, a handful of Black billionaires would not solve our problem but could, at least in theory, close the racial wealth gap.

I’ll add one other thing to make the point crystal clear. The mean wealth of a white family in America is close to $1 million. We know that the typical experience of a white family is not a millionaire experience, but that’s because of that high concentration of wealth that drags the distribution in a skewed way towards $1 million. The more typical experience of a white household is in the hundreds of thousands range. I believe it’s closer to $200,000. So if we were to use the mean and not the median, we would not exactly be using the accurate pinpoint to understand the typical experience between a Black and white household.ezra klein

One of the reasons I think the Black-white wealth gap is unusually important to focus on is a question of racial justice is that it’s where the story of our past compounds into our present. And you’ve done a lot of work on both the shape of it now but the causes of it. So how do you understand how America ended up with a wealth gap like we have?darrick hamilton

Many of us are well familiar with our history, and we know that America has had a sordid history in its treatment of Black people, beginning with slavery. And it’s been characterized as the original sin of America, where you had people literally living in bondage and serving as capital assets for a white landowning plantation class.

We also know — and we led this conversation up — with how wealth is generated. It’s generated mostly passive. We know that it’s intergenerational, that households that have children are able to bequest to their children a capital foundation that allows them to not only have wealth but grow their wealth. So we understand how wealth is created, and we understand the history of America is such that Black people started out in bondage.

And then another pivotal point that should be made is that a white asset-based middle class didn’t simply emerge. It was public policy — policies like the Homestead Act, policies like the G.I. Bill, establishments like fair housing authorities that facilitated long-term mortgages at very low interest rates that provided the capital and the structure so that white families can get into things like a home and, in the case of a G.I. Bill, a college degree without the albatross of educational debt to get into a managerial or professional occupation.

Ira Katznelson has a phenomenal book called “When Affirmative Action Was White,” which really lays this out. What Ira Katznelson also describes in this book is the ways in which that policy was designed — or that set of policies — were designed, implemented, and managed that benefited white people and, to a large extent, excluded Black people.

So let’s give an example. Imagine a Jim Crow context for which one is trying to apply their G.I. Bill to purchase a home in an area. Well, the choice said that you have to purchase a home is much more limited if you’re Black. The access to go to a bank and receive a loan to provide a mortgage associated with that initial capital is very different if you’re Black.

I think the estimate that Ira Katznelson offers when we think simply about higher education and not even homeownership, that the G.I. Bill provided enough capital for Americans to rival that that we spent on the Marshall Plan that played a large part in rebuilding Europe.

So this surge of government resources enabled a population and also enabled institutions that benefited white people at the exclusion of Black people.

When Black people were able to accumulate assets, when they were able to overcome circumstances and actually accumulate wealth, it never received the political codification to be immune from malfeasance, terror, threats and outright theft, the ways that white people property ownership was afforded.

A big example would be Tulsa, Oklahoma when we had the Race Massacre in which a community that was at least working to middle class was decimated overnight.

And then, of course, this was not isolated. There were many examples, where physical destruction, even if it’s not leading to the actual physical terrorism that decimated Tulsa, Oklahoma for Black people, the threat of violence, the fear, the threat that, if you don’t engage in a certain way, if you don’t act a certain way, if you are not kept in your place, you literally could lose your life. That has impacts on a community and on a population’s ability to generate wealth.

So this is our sordid history. But what is important for this conversation that we’re having, Ezra, is that the paramount indicator of not just economic security but economic agency in one’s life has been structured in America through public policy such that we have this large gap of about one dime for every dollar, which is an implicit economic indicator of our historical past.ezra klein

One statistic I’ve seen you use that I find unbelievably striking here because I think the myth in America, the belief, oftentimes, is, look, you get a college education, get a job, you get ahead. And that’s available to anybody now, even if it always hasn’t been.

But something that you and co-authors have found is that households in America headed by white high-school dropouts have more wealth on average than households headed by Black college graduates. That’s pretty remarkable.darrick hamilton

And that’s the beauty of trying to describe that we have structural racism in America. You can simply point to descriptive indicators that we all associate as the keys to success and find out that not only do we have disparities across race at various indicators of whether you’re married, not married, highly educated, not highly educated, formerly incarcerated, never been incarcerated. But these disparities grow as we move up into higher status indicators.

So the disparities across wealth get larger at higher levels of education. The disparities across wealth don’t subside when people get married. They actually get larger. With the statistic you cited earlier, you can look at the highest status indicator for Black people, like a college degree, like being married or whatever the domain we want to look at, and look at the lower indicator for white individuals and see that, in something like wealth, the disparities are often such that the white person is better off in wealth than the Black person, even though the Black person has the highest status indicator. It dispels this myth, this notion that all you have to do is do these things and you’ll be fine.

Of course, within group, more education is associated with better outcomes, but across groups, the disparities remain and even get larger. And that’s not a coincidence. That’s a structure.ezra klein

One point you’ve made is that one thing you see in the data is that a reason it’s often hard for Black families to build wealth — and this gets to this whole broader context you’re describing — is that, as they do build wealth, there are more people who need their help in their communities and their families, and so there tends to be more — if you’re somebody, who you’re part of a middle-class or upper-middle-class family and you get some money, odds are that people around you don’t need it that much.

But if you’re somebody who’s the only person in your family who’s got into college, and it was a huge effort for the family to put you through college, and now you’re a doctor, let’s say, but a lot of people around you don’t have much and they need help with medical bills, or fall behind on rent, or whatever, and you need to help them, that puts a brake on wealth accumulation that somebody from a wealthier family just doesn’t have as much of.

I was curious if you could talk a bit about that dynamic and what you see of it.darrick hamilton

And of course, that’s personal. I’ve been able to acquire resources in ways that other people in my family have not, both immediate as well as extended family, and I well understand the demands to want to provide for others so that they can have a good economic experience and not be vulnerable. Altruism isn’t the problem. That’s a good thing. But it’s a problem that these structures of inequality extend well beyond the individual but have large spillover effects as well.ezra klein

So one thing I take from all this is that it’s just really hard to change wealth distribution, that you actually need real policy to do it. And this is something we were talking about earlier. We have put a lot of policy into place to do it. We have all these tax breaks. We’ve also cut the estate tax a lot over time, so we’re taxing wealth a lot less than we have at other points in American history. But you have a pretty big policy idea that has been taken up in Congress that would do quite a bit here called baby bonds, so tell me about the baby bonds concept.darrick hamilton

Baby bonds just recognizes the ways in which wealth is generated. Wealth begets more wealth. We know that the difference between low-wealth and high-wealth individuals began with capital.

So what baby bonds does is it provides a birthright to capital. It says, irrespective of the economic situation in which you’re born into, we will endow you with capital, such that, when you become a young adult, you can purchase an asset that provides that passive savings, that passive appreciation, where you get economic security. You get economic agency that comes along with wealth as a birthright.ezra klein

So how much capital are we talking about?darrick hamilton

Conceptually, enough so that the individual, when they become a young adult, can be able to get an education without debt, have a down payment to get into a home or some capital to be able to bridge with a business loan to start a business. That’s the idea.

The program is structured such that the average account would be about $25,000, but they could rise upwards to $50,000 for those that are born into the most wealth-poor family.

Now, that’s the policy described at the federal level. If we think about state-level policies, where they don’t have the purchasing power that the federal government has, they are constrained in an annual way based on their budgets. We’ve seen places like Connecticut be able to come up with an endowment of about $3,200 for all Medicaid-born babies.

So Connecticut, Washington D.C., and various other states, they’re not waiting on the federal legislation. They’re beginning to try to redress intergenerational poverty, given the constraints of their fiscal budgets, with as little as $3,200 at birth. And that $3,200 at birth, it will be managed similar to other state pension programs, where the treasurer of those states or those localities try to grow the accounts as large as possible. And there are estimates that, in the case of Connecticut, a child born into poverty, as measured by being a Medicaid birth, could have about $10,000 when they become a young adult to contribute towards some down payment, some nest egg, so that they can build wealth.ezra klein

Let’s hold on the bigger proposal, the federal proposal, for a minute, the one that could be up to $50,000 for somebody born into the most wealth-poor households. So as I understand it, there’s strictures on what you can use that money for. You can use it to go to college. You can use it to buy a house. You couldn’t use it, I guess, to invest in Bitcoin, or to fund your gaming habit or to buy gym membership or just to help out your family members. I don’t want to put this all as leisure spending. Why? Why not trust people to spend the money the way they need to spend it?darrick hamilton

And let’s be fair. This policy will not be — I’ll use this word again — the panacea to redress all of the economic insecurity that we have. There is the difference between income and wealth, and both are critical and important for individual, family, and community well-being. So the program is restricted not to be paternalistic but to ensure that it’s being promoted in a way to actually build wealth.

We gave the example of being born into families that are not so affluent, thereby might very well require needs on individuals that are able to attain social mobility.

If you would have offered me a baby bond when I was a young adult, when I was coming into the working age of my life, graduating from college, graduating from school, it’s likely I would have had a relative who could have used that money in order to avoid some really detrimental circumstance, like being evicted, like being able to pay a light bill, like being able to address some of their immediate income needs.

Now, those things are critical and important, and I would have been happy to be able to make those contributions if I had the money. However, it wouldn’t have grown my wealth.

So I think we need to restrict the accounts not because we don’t trust people to make astute decisions for themselves, because we need public policies that are really aimed at the attribute for which we want to address. That’s the whole purpose of why you might want to restrict it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]ezra klein

So in the first part of our conversation, we talked about the size of wealth inequality in America. We talked about the Black-white wealth gap in its mean and median forms. Some analyses have been run on this idea. What would this do for those? Which gaps would it close, and which gaps would it not?darrick hamilton

Naomi Zewde, she has this great simulation study that projects the impact of baby bonds on the Black-white wealth gap, and she calculates that, for recipients of the account, the young adults that would actually receive the account, it would cut the racial wealth gap in half, by 50 percent. And that’s one generation.

Imagine what it can do for subsequent generations. It can trend us towards closing the racial wealth gap. And we’ve been focusing on race, but there’s a lot of wealth-poor white individuals in this country as well. And they absolutely would benefit.

So to me, this would be a program that is an automatic stabilizer in the sense that not just for the immediate recipient generation but future generations as well and to the extent that capital grows and generates inequality in America. We have a policy that, in perpetuity, trends us towards a society that affords people regardless of the income that they’re born with, the race in which they’re born to have access to something as critical as capital so that they can actually have an opportunity to build wealth.ezra klein

So the numbers we’re talking about here for the poorest families are pretty big, $50,000, and I think it is reasonable for somebody to hear that and say, yeah, it would be nice. But there’s no way we can afford to functionally have I like to think of this as a universal basic wealth program. What would the cost of it be? And how could it be paid for?darrick hamilton

So I got two lines of critique. One is the universal basic wealth aspect. It’s universal in the sense that everybody would have access to wealth. It would not be basic in the sense that everybody wouldn’t get the same level of wealth as an endowment.

But the main question that you raised, and we should address it. The cost of the program would be $100 billion in total. $100 billion seems like a big number. $50,000 to the most wealth-poor person seems like a big number, but we need to put that number in context.

Let’s put that number into context of one of the ways in which we began this conversation. The Federal Government is already subsidizing the assets of American people to the tune of well over $700 billion a year, so we actually can afford to pay for this. We actually have already spending in effect that’s promoting asset development.

So with the existing pool of resources that we’re using in the tax code, we could take a portion of that and do something that’s dramatic as redress these problems that we started off talking about, this massive wealth inequality that we began with, this racial wealth gap that has been structured in an immoral way since the inception of our country.

So to me, there’s a lot of good news for $100 billion. We really can achieve an egalitarian society that affords everyone the benefits that come along with wealth.ezra klein

I think one worry here would be — so imagine we pass it tomorrow. You have this generation of kids, when they turn 18, they have $50,000 or $50,000 that’s been growing in the markets, more or less, depending on where they started out. And now, all of a sudden, you have this profusion of, say, higher-ed educations that there’s this whole generation that’s about to graduate with more money, particularly people who maybe wouldn’t have had access to places like them beforehand. Or that all these people have money burning in their pockets and they want to try to convert it to money they can use, so somehow maybe they could pull in a house, but they can’t spend it on many things.

You can imagine two things happening here. I think one is a lot of predation, and the other is inflation. And I think that’s a particular concern in higher education, where we’ve seen that before, where, if there’s a lot more money people can suddenly spend on higher education, the higher-ed organizations raise prices and figure out ways to part people with that money without necessarily giving them a lot more for the dollar. So when you’re talking about a big bang policy like this, how do you make sure it doesn’t just get eaten up by highly informed, clever, and not even always malicious, just self-interested actors?darrick hamilton

Ezra, I think you’re spot on with that question, and I think it’s a huge concern. We know history has taught us that two forms — one is, if we know there’s going to be a cash infusion into a population, a great deal of individuals, corporations, and other institutions are going to figure out ways in which they can usurp some of those resources in order to benefit themselves. And that potential biggest predator in this program very well could be universities and colleges that simply inflate their tuition to absorb the accounts in a way that it doesn’t have a real effect.

So to redress that, you will definitely need to include financial protections in the program. One of the benefits of, say, the investments going towards a home, it wouldn’t be enough resources to literally purchase a home. It will require some form of a mortgage, so through federal protections to define what are the criteria to receive that mortgage and the criteria by which banks and other financial institutions could issue that mortgage, that becomes another check by which government can regulate the program in a positive way.

Similarly, if you go get a business loan, you can’t get a loan for just any business. There’s some criteria. So that becomes another implicit check to redress some of the potential financial malfeasance, especially if government regulates the type of loans that can be coupled with the account.

Let me also say that it would be great if this program was coupled with other programs, like tuition-free public education. I think, in the 21st century, we need things well beyond baby bonds. We need a package of public goods aimed at ensuring that people have the essential resource without which they simply are vulnerable, and capital is clearly one.

And in the 21st century, not just a high school degree, but a college degree becomes another essential element. So if you had tuition-free public universities, that would be a constraint on tuition costs that could avoid some of that inflation that you’ve been describing.

And then one other feature of the program, I don’t think we should require people to use the accounts once they turn 18. Indeed, there should be provisions for an account that provides a normal rate of return and be accessible for when the child becomes an adult and also is ready to use the account.ezra klein

So another criticism is wealth inequality is bad. Wealth concentration is bad. But for everything we talked about earlier, there are distinctive dynamics to the Black-white wealth gap that reflect specific historical horrors visited upon Black Americans. And so a race-neutral policy simply isn’t the right way to approach that. How do you think about that?darrick hamilton

I’m an advocate for reparations. I think reparations and baby bonds address complementary things but not the same things. Reparations is a retrospective racially just program that does two things.

It requires atonement. It requires truth and reconciliation. It requires the federal government to take public account and atone for the state-complicit malfeasance that have taken place in the past and led to the conditions that exist today.

So that’s not empty. That’s valuable because a lot of the rhetoric by which we make policy today is grounded in narratives and norms, and it’s often grounded in narratives and norms that position Black people as deadbeats, as welfare queens, as predators themselves, as undeserving, undesirable, as a drain on public budgets. Now, of course, that doesn’t just affect Black people. That limits our ability to deal with white poverty as well.

So that reparations leads to a different framing and understanding of both poverty and inequality, that not only offers dignity to a population that has been stigmatized, that has been demonized throughout American history, but also creates new pathways and understanding in a more accurate and a more just way of thinking about poverty and inequality, not just for Black people but for all people going forward. Whether we’re ready for it today or ready for it tomorrow, we should commit to it and commit to it as a movement because it is the right thing to do.

That should be reason enough. But it will not be enough to really provide for the economic security and the access to wealth in a forward-looking way. It will redress the past, and it will put Black and white people on a far more even keel in both economic and political contexts.

But we know what capital does. Capital consolidates, iterates, and it excludes. In other words, wealth begets more wealth, and wealth builds upon itself.

So even if we redress the past, going forward, capital will concentrate amongst certain entities in American society, and we need a natural stabilizer. We need an automatic stabilizer. We need a public policy that, in perpetuity, ensures that everyone has access to a capital foundation, particularly in their formative years of being a young adult so as to build wealth. We need to go well beyond subsistence programs, which are critical and necessary but really will not build wealth.ezra klein

Let me ask you about one final example before we wrap up here, which you talk about in your paper, which is SEED OK, the SEED for Oklahoma Kids experiment. They were put in for — at least for a treatment group, a $1,000 into a 529 Savings account, the kind of account we talked about earlier for pretty poor kids, and then they tracked what happened to that treatment group and their parents against groups that didn’t get that $1,000. What did they find?darrick hamilton

There are great lessons from that SEED OK experiment that could inform us about baby bonds. In addition to the wealth building attributes associated with baby bonds, the SEED OK showed us that families knowing that their child is going to receive this endowment when they become a young adult invested more in that child, tried to promote that child to double down on their education.

Children had better grades, as a result, from that endowment than they otherwise would have without that endowment. Children had better outlooks on life. They had higher aspirations, knowing that they were going to receive that account when they became an adult.

The good thing about baby bonds is it has spillover effects well beyond promoting the wealth of an individual that receives the account.

It can literally change the horizon by which poor families and Black families engage with the state. These are groups that are often engaged in punitive ways with the state — where the state is imposing a fine, where the state is saying you can and can’t do this.

If the state were to offer an endowment, I think it will promote civic engagement.

I think that Black families, poor families, and other marginalized families will see the state in a different light, and it will lead to more civic engagement, which will benefit us all as a society.

It will also change the horizon of that child with regards to things like education. If you’re going to receive an endowment, you very well might be incentivized to invest in attributes like schooling such that you’ll benefit to a greater extent from that endowment when you become a young adult.

In addition to changing the horizon by which a family thinks of the state so as to promote civic engagement, it also can create more touch points in a positive way by which the state can engage with families in a productive way.

I suspect that prenatal care will become greater utilized amongst low-income families as a result of baby bonds. If an expectant mother understands that this account is being established, well, it creates an opportunity where we literally could send out literature promoting these are the types of steps that you should pursue in order to have a healthy child, which could promote more healthy children and greater lifestyles going forward.

But it need not end at prenatal care. Just like Social Security, where we get estimates of our Social Security accounts periodically, and it provides a point in which the state can send literature and information to households, we can use the point of baby bonds to have positive interface of the state and the population so as to promote more healthy living for the recipients and our society at large.ezra klein

I think that’s a great place to end, so I’ll ask our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?darrick hamilton

Three books, well, you heard me talk about “When Affirmative Action Was White” by Ira Katznelson. That is foundational for me. It’s foundational for me because it demonstrates what government can do in order to promote the human rights of all of us, to promote a great society for all of us. The lesson from “Affirmative Action Was White” was that, if we’re going to do it this time, we need to make sure that we design, implement and manage the policies not in an exclusive way but in an inclusive way.

The second book, which is foundational for me, is “Racial Conflict and Economic Development” by Arthur Lewis. Anybody trying to understand the intersections of politics, economics and identity group stratification or racial disparity, I highly recommend that you read that book.

And then finally a book that I’ve read more recently by Natalie Diaz, who is an Indigenous poet. The book is called “Postcolonial Love Poem.” Natalie has this incredible way of presenting social theory in prose in ways that link people to the environment. It has had huge impact in my understanding about society in general, and it did it with poetry in a way that words themselves matter in our understanding and are critical if we want to come up with social policies to move to a better society.ezra klein

Darrick Hamilton, thank you very much.darrick hamilton

Ezra, I appreciate you so much. Love your podcast. Thank you.

#Why This Economist Wants to Give Every Poor Child $50 #000 #american racial wealth gap

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buddylistsocial · 4 years ago

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Mark Levin: Joe Biden's ‘Communist Manifesto’ Will Destroy Every Aspect of Our Culture and Society

Mark Levin: Joe Biden’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ Will Destroy Every Aspect of Our Culture and Society

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s joint political platform with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) amounts to a “communist manifesto” that will destroy America, warned Mark Levin, author of Unfreedom of the Press and radio show and television host, on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

After Biden took the Democrats’ presidential nomination, his presidential…

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#2020 Election #Bernie Sanders #Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force #communism #Donald Trump #Green New Deal #Joe Biden #Mark Levin #Marxism #Neo-Marxism #Politics #Racism #Radio #socialism

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skypalacearchitect · 3 years ago

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As President Joe Biden looks to cut an infrastructure deal with Senate Republicans by dramatically curtailing the size and scope of his American Jobs Plan, activists with the youth-led Sunrise Movement gathered outside the White House Friday morning to make clear that compromising on climate action to appease the GOP is unacceptable.

Varshini Prakash, Sunrise's executive director, said in a statement that by rolling back his infrastructure ambitions to cater to Republican lawmakers, Biden is betraying the young people who helped him win the presidency.

"I was invited to the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force to help Biden craft policy that was in line with what is necessary to meet the crises facing our nation," Prakash said. "Biden moved towards us, promising us a future, and in exchange, we worked tirelessly to get him elected. We held up our side of the deal, but now that Biden is in power, that promise of co-governance with progressives and young people has disappeared."

The president has "spent more of his time meeting with a Republican Party who to this day contests he is the democratically elected president," Prakash continued. "It's time to meet with us, the young organizers that elected him, instead. This moment demands an infrastructure package that will stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process, and we won't stop until he delivers."

Sunrise activists arrived at the White House with a series of demands, including:

No compromise, no excuses. Democrats must take their power seriously and stop negotiating with a GOP who is not serious about climate action or delivering for the American people.

Meet with the people who elected you. We demand that Biden sets up a meeting with Varshini Prakash and other youth organizers to hear our demands on infrastructure. Negotiate with us, not the GOP.

Pass the boldest jobs and climate package with a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps. Coming out of a global pandemic where we are facing massive unemployment and the constant threat of the climate crisis, we need an infrastructure package that includes a CCC that would put over 1.5 million Americans to work in good paying jobs while combating climate change and building a sustainable future for our generation.

Friday's action marks Sunrise's first White House protest directly targeting Biden since he took office in January, but the group vowed in a press release that it "will not be the last." The organization has previously called on the president to support $10 trillion in spending over the next decade to combat the climate emergency and create millions of good-paying union jobs.

"Sunrise Movement is using this protest as a call to action, recruiting young people from across the country to join them for an even larger rally in late June," the group said Friday.

The demonstration came amid growing progressive backlash against Biden's compromise offer to Senate Republicans, an infrastructure proposal that would slash the president's initial American Jobs Plan in half and leave in place the 21% corporate tax rate established during the Trump administration.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) warned Thursday that he "would have a very difficult time voting yes" on Biden's latest proposal, which Senate GOP negotiators are expected to counter as early as Friday.

"No Republican vote in favor of an infrastructure package should supersede our mission: to build an America that works for the people, not for massive corporations," said Bowman. "Getting Republicans on board is not necessary. Getting the American people back on their feet is."

Progressives have long feared that any bipartisan deal Biden reaches with the GOP would come at the expense of ambitious climate action, which Republicans oppose. In their latest offer to the White House, a group of Senate Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) called for just $257 billion in new spending over eight years, slashing Biden's proposed investments in renewable energy and other priorities.

"If we learned anything from this year alone, the GOP is not the party that I think Biden idealizes," Ellen Sciales, Sunrise's press secretary, told Politico on Thursday. "Voters in 2022 and 2024, young people, are not going to ask whether or not Joe Biden was kind to Shelley Moore Capito—they don't even know who that is. They're going to see whether or not he dealt with the climate crisis and created millions of good jobs."

#sunrise movement #joe biden #environmental activism #u.s. politics #skypalacearchitect

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rjzimmerman · 4 years ago

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Excerpt from this story from CBS News:

At the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden said point-blank that he does not support the Green New Deal — a progressive plan which not only aims to aggressively tackle climate change but also encompasses many other issues like social justice, jobs, housing and health care.

In response, President Trump pounced on what appeared to be an opportunity to underscore that point to Biden's base, saying, "That's a big statement… you just lost the radical left."

But this was not actually a new position for Biden. Instead, he explained, "I support the Biden plan that I put forward" — a $2 trillion proposal that is more narrow and less aggressive than the far-reaching Green New Deal.

Although it is true that Biden's climate plan does not fully match the Green New Deal, there are many similarities. That's because over the last few months the Biden campaign made a deliberate effort to consult with more progressive factions of the party through the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, a committee which included climate and environmental justice activists like the Sunrise Movement — a group instrumental in the design of the Green New Deal. Biden has committed to some, but not all, of the task force's recommendations.

"Joe Biden's climate plan isn't everything, but it isn't nothing at all," Varshini Prakash, the founder of Sunrise Movement, told CBS News in an interview for the recent CBSN special "Climate in Crisis." She said if he is able to make good on those promises, it would represent a "seismic shift in climate policy at the federal level."

#Joe Biden #Green New Deal

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cherryblossomshadow · 15 days ago

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The Rashida Tlaib For President Scenario

There is more than one way to win leverage for Palestine.

Hamilton Nolan

Dec 16, 2023

As 2023 draws to a close, the left wing of American politics finds itself in its most familiar position:

being told to suck it up and fall in line.

An election year looms. The Democratic president faces a far worse fascist Republican rival … Even as protesters fill the streets around the country, the Left finds itself mostly ignored in Washington. Their objections are met with the classic sneer:

What are you gonna do, vote for Trump?

Joe Biden’s 2020 election, and at least the first couple of years of his administration, are notable for the fact that he did open the door to the left wing of the party, giving it significant influence—something that was not often true with his Democratic predecessors. In May of 2020, after Biden had more or less clinched the nomination, he formed a “Unity Task Force” in which his people came together with people picked by Bernie Sanders to create a set of policy recommendations that definitively set the White House on course left of where it would have gone otherwise. Likewise, Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and their allies had a hand in the selection of personnel that resulted in some picks that have been meaningfully more progressive than Biden-world would have naturally been. In a vacuum, if you had asked me in 2019, I would have expected the Biden administration to suck in the same basic ways the Clinton and Obama administrations did.

That has not been the case, and it is because Biden allowed himself to be pulled left. That stuff matters.

Things are looking grimmer going into 2024. The relevant question for us now is: Why did the Left manage to get real influence with Biden four years ago, and how can we make that happen again, fast?

The simple answer is that in 2020, Bernie was running for president.

Even though he lost, he ran a very competitive campaign. He had a large base of support. He had significant political capital. Biden, a man with little internal ideology, is a pragmatist, and recognized that a coalition approach would be stronger than waging an intra-party battle with disgruntled progressives.

It is true that a Biden loss to Trump would be a catastrophe, and should not be brushed off idly; on the things that Biden is good on, Trump is bad, and on the things that Biden is bad on, including Israel, Trump is worse. That doesn’t mean, though, that there is no political room for the Left to maneuver.

I do not believe it would be possible to mount and run a successful primary challenge to Biden at this point. It would be possible, however, for a left wing candidate to launch an independent presidential campaign explicitly designed to suck votes away from Biden in key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc.

Any member of “The Squad” could launch such a campaign, but the most obvious candidate would be Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, and the loudest and bravest voice speaking out against US policy on Palestine.

So I will refer to this as the Tlaib Scenario, as shorthand. It would be a campaign created not to win the presidency, but to create negotiating leverage inside of the Democratic Party. “Listen to us,” it would say to Biden, “or we’re all going to hell together.”

Politics is not just a two-dimensional winner-take-all game between red and blue teams. When evaluating proposals like this, it can be useful to think less like a political pundit and more like someone who is negotiating a union contract. (Please unionize your workplace in order to understand this comparison.) One interesting feature of contract negotiations is that

when the union rep walks into the room with the employer to negotiate, the ideal position for them to be in is that of the person saying, “I can only hold these maniacs back for so long!”

In other words, it is valuable for the employer to believe that the workers themselves are a bunch of angry, irrational zealots, bent on retribution against the evil boss, who should be pacified at once before they do something crazy. Then, the union negotiator becomes the voice of reason, trying to help the boss navigate a safe path away from potential chaos. “I know the workers are asking for a lot of money here,” the union rep can say sympathetically, “but they’re pissed. They’re ready to strike. They don’t care if this whole damn company fails. Help me help you.”

Today, the proposition to the Left is: Vote for Biden, as is, because your only alternative is worse. With a left candidate in the race, that proposition would no longer apply. You can be sure that a significant enough number of leftist voters would gravitate to a candidate like Tlaib. The relationship between the Democratic Party and the Left would then change. It would go from, “Biden is the best you have, so accept it,” to, “Biden needs to do something to earn the votes of those on the Left.” That change is significant.

Likewise, the negotiating leverage of Rashida Tlaib would change drastically. Today, she and her allies are relatively isolated, a minority inside the Democratic Party. (A growing minority, yes, but not growing fast enough to stop the bombs.)

As a presidential candidate, she would become someone who held Biden’s reelection in her hands.

Her ability to play spoiler would mean that somehow talking her down would become a necessary step in the Biden’s campaign success. He would be forced to deal with her.

If Candidate Tlaib could extract a positive policy change that could save thousands of Palestinian lives, she could end her threat to undermine Biden and consider it a success.

And what would be the rational response from Biden, in this scenario? The rational response, with his own future on the line, would be to negotiate a meaningful enough change in his policy towards Israel and Palestine to convince Tlaib not to torpedo his reelection. Democrats could get mad about a left wing challenger to Biden, but ultimately math is math. If Tlaib could credibly threaten to pull five percent away from Biden in those swing states—and I think that she could—then

they would need to negotiate with her or lose.

And, after a lot of screaming, they would.

The beneficiaries of those negotiations would be the Palestinians.

#i post #i quote #link to article #substack #hamilton nolan #The Rashida Tlaib For President Scenario #rashida tlaib #primaries #democratic primary #us politics #bernie sanders #unions #union negotiations

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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The conservative movement is cracking up

I'll be in Stratford, Ontario, appearing onstage with Vass Bednar as part of the CBC IDEAS Festival. I'm also doing an afternoon session for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library.

Politics always requires coalitions. In parliamentary democracies, the coalitions are visible, when they come together to form the government. In a dictatorship, the coalitions are hidden to everyone except infighting princelings and courtiers (until a general or minister is executed, exiled or thrown in prison.)

In a two-party system, the coalitions are inside the parties – not quite as explicit as the coalition governments in a multiparty parliament, but not so opaque as the factions in a dictatorship. Sometimes, there are even explicit structures to formalize the coalition, like the Biden Administration's Unity Task Force, which parceled out key appointments among two important blocs within the party (the finance wing and the Sanders/Warren wing).

Conservative politics are also a coalition, of course. As an outsider, I confess that I am much less conversant with the internal power-struggles in the GOP and the conservative movement, though I'm trying to remedy that. Books like Nathan J Robinson's Responding to the Right present a great overview of various conservative belief-systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson/#arguendo

And the Know Your Enemy podcast does an amazing job of diving deep into right-wing beliefs, especially when it comes to identifying fracture lines in the conservative establishment. A recent episode on the roots of contemporary right-wing antisemitism in the paleocon/neocon split was hugely informative and fascinating:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-in-search-of-anti-semitism-with-john-ganz/

Political parties are weak institutions, liable to capture and hospitable to corruption. General elections aren't foolproof or impervious to fraud, but they're miles more robust than parties, whose own leadership selection processes and other key decisions can be made in the shadows, according to rules that can be changed on a whim:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Which means that parties are brittle, weak vessels that we rely on to contain the volatile mixture of factions who might actually hate each other, sometimes even more than they hate the other party. Remember the defenestration of GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? That:

https://apnews.com/article/mccarthy-gaetz-speaker-motion-to-vacate-congress-327e294a39f8de079ef5e4abfb1fa555

Even outsiders like me know that there's a deep fracture in the Republican Party, with Trumpists on one side and the "establishment" on the other side. Reading accounts of the 2016 GOP leadership race, I get the distinct impression that Trump's win was even more shocking to party insiders than it was to the rest of us.

Which makes sense. They thought they had the party under control, knew where its levers were and how to pull them. For us, Trump's win was a terrible mystery. For GOP power-brokers, it was a different kind of a nightmare, the kind where you discover that controls to the the car you're driving in high-speed traffic aren't connected to anything and you're not really the driver.

But as Trump's backers – another coalition – fall out among each other, it's becoming easier for the rest of us to understand what happened. Take FBI informant Peter Thiel's defection from the Trump camp:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel was the judas goat who led tech's reactionary billionaires into Trump's tent, blazing a trail and raising a fortune on the way. Thiel's support for Trump was superficially surprising. After all, Thiel is gay, and Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, openly swore war on queers of all kinds. Today, Thiel has rebuffed Trump's fundraising efforts and is reportedly on Trump's shit-list.

But as a Washington Post report – drawing heavily on gossiping anonymous insiders – explains. Thiel has never let homophobia blind him to the money and power he stands to gain by backing bigots:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

Thiel bankrolled Blake Masterson's Senate race, despite Masterson's promise to roll back marriage equality – and despite the fact that Masterton attended Thiel's wedding to another man.

According to the post, the Thiel faction's abandonment of Trump wasn't driven by culture war issues. Rather, they were fed up with Trump's chaotic, undisciplined governance strategy, which scuttled many opportunities to increase the wealth and power of America's oligarchs. Thiel insiders complained that Trump's "character traits sabotaged the policy changes" and decried Trump's habit of causing "turmoil and chaos…that would interfere with his agenda" rather than "executing relentlessly."

For Trump's base, the cruelty might be the point. But for his backers, the cruelty was the tactic, and the point was money, and the power it brings. When Trump seemed like he might use cruel tactics to achieve power, his backers went along for the ride. But when Trump made it clear that he would trade opportunities for power solely to indulge his cruelty, they bailed.

That's an important fracture line in the modern American conservative coalition, but it's not the only one.

Writing in the BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller and Lee Hepner describes the emerging conservative split over antitrust and monopoly:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-there-an-establishment-plan-to

Antitrust has been the centerpiece of the Biden Administration's most progressive political project. For the left wing of the Dems, blunting corporate power is seen as the necessary condition for rolling back the entire conservative program, which depends on oligarch-provided cash infusions, media campaigns, and thinktank respectability.

But elements of the right have also latched onto antitrust, for reasons of their own. Take the Catholic traditionalists who see weakening corporate power as a path to restoring a "traditional" household where a single breadwinner can support a family:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/when-capitalism-becomes-tyranny-with-sohrab-ahmari

There's another reason to support antitrust, of course – it's popular. There are large, bipartisan majorities opposed to monopoly and in favor of antitrust action:

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Antitrust_Policy_poll_results.pdf

Two-thirds of Americans support anti-monopoly laws. 70% of Americans say monopolies are bad for the economy. The Biden administration is doing more on antitrust than any presidency since the Carter years, but 52% of Americans haven't heard about it:

https://www.ft.com/content/c17c35a3-e030-4e3b-9f49-c6bdf7d3da7f

There's a big opportunity latent in the facts of antitrust's popularity, and the Biden antitrust agenda's obscurity. So far, the Biden administration hasn't figured out how to seize that opportunity, but some Dems are trying to grab it. Take Montana Senator John Tester, a Democrat in a Trump-voting state, whose campaign has taken aim at the meat-packing monopolies that are screwing the state's ranchers.

The right wants in on this. At a Federalist Society black-tie event last week during the National Lawyer's Convention, Biden's top antitrust enforcers got a warm welcome. Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's top antitrust cop, was praised onstage by Todd Zywicki, whom Stoller and Hepner call "a highly influential law professors," from George Mason Univeristy, a fortress of pro-corporate law and economics. Zywicki praised the DoJ and FTC's new antitrust guidelines – which have been endlessly damned in the WSJ and other conservative outlets – as a reasonable and necessary compromise:

https://fedsoc.org/events/national-press-club-event

Even Lina Khan – the bogeywoman of the WSJ editorial page – got a warm reception at her fireside chat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FwdAxOSznE

And the convention's hot Saturday ticket was "a debate between two conservatives over whether social media platforms had sufficient monopoly power that the state could regulate them as common carriers":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwoO7bZajXk

This is pretty amazing. And yet…lawmakers haven't gotten the memo. During markup for last week's appropriations bill, lawmakers inserted a flurry of anti-antitrust amendments into the must-pass legislation:

https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/fsgg-approps-bill-must-support-enforcers-not-kneecap-them/#

These amendments were just wild. Rep Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI) introduced an amendment that would give companies carte blanche to stick you with unlimited junk fees, and allow corporations to take away their workers' rights to change jobs through noncompetes:

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/118th-congress/house-report/269

Another amendment would block the FTC from enforcing against "unfair methods of competition." Translation: the FTC couldn't punish companies like Amazon for using algorithms to hike prices, or for conspiring to raise insulin prices, or its predatory pricing aimed at killing small- and medium-sized grocers.

An amendment from Rep Kat Cammack (R-FL) would kill the FTC's "click to cancel" rule, which will force companies to let you cancel your subscriptions the same way you sign up for them – instead of making you wait on hold to beg a customer service rep to let you cancel.

Another one: "a provision to let auto dealers cheat customers with undisclosed added fees":

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-118hr4664rh/pdf/BILLS-118hr4664rh.pdf

Dems got in on the action, too. A bipartisan pair, Rep Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep Lou Correa (D-FL), unsuccessfully attempted to strip the Department of Transport of its powers to block mergers, which were most recently used to block the merger of Jetblue and Spirit:

https://www.congress.gov/amendment/118th-congress/house-amendment/640

And 206 Republicans voted to block the DoT from investigating airline price-gouging. As Stoller and Hepner point out, these reps serve constituents from low-population states that are especially vulnerable to this kind of extraction.

This morning, Jim Jordan hosted a Judiciary Committee meeting where he raked DOJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter over the coals, condemning the same merger guidelines that Zywicki praised to the Federalist Society:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7jxc8dp8erhe1q3wpndre/GOP-oversight-hearing-memo-11.13.23.pdf?rlkey=d54ur91ry3mc69bta5vhgg13z&dl=0

Jordan's prep memo reveals his plan to accuse Kanter of being an incompetent who keeps failing in his expensive bids to hold corporate power to account, and being an all-powerful government goon who's got a boot on the chest of American industry. Stoller and Hepner invoke the old Yiddish joke: "The food at this restaurant is terrible, and the portions are too small!"

Stoller and Hepner close by wondering what to make of this factional split in the American right. Is it that these members of the GOP Congressional caucus just haven't gotten the memo? Or is this a peek at what corporate lobbyists home to accomplish after the 2024 elections?

They suggest that both Democrats and Republican primary contesters in that race could do well by embracing antitrust, "Establishment Republicans want you to pay more for groceries, healthcare, and travel, and are perfectly fine letting monopoly corporations make decisions about your daily life."

I don't know if Republicans will take them up on it. The party's most important donors are pathologically loss-averse and unwilling to budge on even the smallest compromise. Even a faint whiff of state action against unlimited corporate power can provoke a blitz of frenzied scare-ads. In New York state, a proposal to ban noncompetes has triggered a seven-figure ad-buy from the state's Business Council:

https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/noncompete-campaign-raises-state-lobbying-18442769.php

It's hard to overstate how unhinged these ads are. Writing for The American Prospect, Terri Gerstein describes one: "a hammer smashes first an alarm clock, then a light bulb, with shards of glass flying everywhere. An ominous voice predicts imminent doom. Then, for good measure, a second alarm clock is shattered":

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-10-business-groups-reflexive-anti-worker-demagogy/

Banning noncompetes is good for workers, but it's also unambiguously good for business and the economy. They "reduce new firm entry, innovation by startups, and the ability of new firms to grow." 44% of small business owners report having been blocked from starting a new company because of a noncompete; 35% have been blocked from hiring the right person for a vacancy due to a noncompete. :

https://eig.org/noncompetes-research-brief/

As Gerstein writes, it's not unusual for the business lobby to lobby against things that are good for business – and lobby hard. The Chamber of Commerce has gone Hulk-mode on simple proposals to adapt workplaces for rising temperatures, acting as though permitting "rest, shade, water, and gradual acclimatization" on the jobsite will bring business to a halt. But actual businesses who've implemented these measures describe them as an easy lift that increases productivity.

The Chamber lobbies against things its members support – like paid sick days. The Chamber complains endlessly about the "patchwork" of state sick leave rules – but scuttles any attempt to harmonize these rules nationally, even though members who've implemented them call them "no big deal":

https://cepr.net/report/no-big-deal-the-impact-of-new-york-city-s-paid-sick-days-law-on-employers/

The Chamber's fight against American businesses is another one of those fracture lines in the conservative coalition. Working with far right dark money groups, they've worked in statehouses nationwide to roll back child labor laws:

https://www.epi.org/blog/florida-legislature-proposes-dangerous-roll-back-of-child-labor-protections-at-least-16-states-have-introduced-bills-putting-children-at-risk/

They also fight tooth-and-nail against minimum wage rises, despite 80% of their members supporting them:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/04/leaked-documents-show-strong-business-support-for-raising-the-minimum-wage/

The spectacle of Republicans in disarray is fascinating to watch and even a little exciting, giving me hope for real progressive gains. Of course, it would help if the Democratic coalition wasn't such a mess.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/14/when-youve-lost-the-fedsoc/#anti-buster-buster

Image: Jason Auch, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctic_mountains,_pack_ice_and_ice_floes.jpg

CC BY 2.0

#pluralistic #trustbusting #antitrust #schisms #infighting #conservativism #millionaire on billionaire violence #jim jordan #lina khan #jonathan kanter #federalist society #trumpism #class struggle #labor

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