(Although Trump Is The GREATEST Evil, Not Merely A Greater Evil)
Generally speaking, Republicans are so terrible that no matter how bad the Democrats are they never seem that bad. The lesser evil is working well for them… except when they get outplayed. Let me give you an example: Montana. A tape just came to light of Tim Sheehy, the multimillionaire presumptive GOP Senate candidate running against Jon Tester, saying that he’d like to privatize healthcare. That would be not just Obamacare but also the hospital system, Medicare, Medicaid… Listen to that tape (at the link); the guy’s living in the 1950s… or 1920s. “Healthcare,” he said, “worked before health insurance existed. Each town had a doctor that would drive to your house, take care of you and you’d pay him. And guess what? It worked. It worked when you actually paid a doctor for services provided. And then we started getting into this HMO, insurance, mega-conglomerate structure.” Simplistic of course but in a way he’s right— it did work… for multimillionaires like himself. For lesser folk— well too bad.
Kadia Goba, the Semifor reporter who broke the story, noted that “Sheehy’s talk of privatizing the healthcare system is the kind of rhetoric Republicans in D.C. have desperately been trying to disassociate themselves from in recent years. The party has largely avoided the topic of healthcare in general since their failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, a politically disastrous effort that led to months of party infighting and eventually helped cost them the House. But they have been sucked back into the issue since last month thanks to Donald Trump, who has repeatedly promised that he will try to repeal and replace Obamacare again if elected for a second term. In response, GOP lawmakers have largely played down the possibility of a new push for repeal... Polling shows [ObamaCare] has become more popular among both parties over the years. As of May 2023, about 6 in 10 Americans had a favorable view of the healthcare law, according to KFF’s tracking survey.”
In any case, taking away people’s health insurance, is a bad look for the GOP and, even in Montana, Sheehy’s tape is going to be a tremendous help for Tester, especially with swing voters in places like Missoula, Yellowstone, Gallitin, Ravali, Lewis and Clark, Cascade and Silver Bow counties.
Tester is an interesting guy. I’ve known him since he was in the state legislature, then an avowed populist. Since getting into the Senate… well, I guess he votes as progressively as he feels he can and still get reelected in such a red state. He certainly beats other statewide Democrats. But, his ProgressivePunch lifetime crucial vote score is the 6th worst of any Dem in the Senate— or 4th worst if you don’t count Sinema (I-AZ) and Angus King (I-ME). ProgressivePunch’s algorithm looks kind when it accounts for how red Montana is, rating him a “B.”
Funny enough, Chris Murphy also rates a “B” and he’s from a solidly blue state, Connecticut. I remember when Murphy was first elected to the House; he joined the New Dems. He’s been OK as a senator but he’s not on my list of people-I’d-like-to-see-run-for-president. (Admittedly there aren’t many senators on that list aside from Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley and… no one else.) Yesterday, the National Prospect caught up with Murphy, to discuss what ails America, including monopolies, an issue he’s been very good on. “To Murphy,” wrote Luke Goldstein, “the issue of corporate concentration runs deeper than just consumer pricing and equitable growth. It strikes at the core of why Americans feel powerless about the fate of the country. People have a palpable, though not always articulable, sense that the most crucial decisions governing their daily lives are now being made far away from their communities in corporate boardrooms, rather than by elected officials in the halls of government or by extension themselves. Many of the country’s morbid symptoms, in Murphy’s estimations, trace back to this friction between the public and their corporate overlords.”
Murphy told him that “The disease is a really deep, insidious one rooted in the fact that people feel like they have no control over their lives any longer… in politics we often treat the symptoms, not the disease, and that’s what I’m trying to address.” And Murphy blames, at least in part, “forty years of neoliberal policies.” Obviously he’s not just pinning the tail on the Republicans if he’s talking about 40 years. The presidents in the last 40 years: Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W Bush, Obama, Señor Trumpanzee, Biden. Trump is just about himself but the other 5 can all be described as neoliberals or at least of promoting neoliberal policies, policies that have been destructive to much of the country through “deindustrialization, business-friendly trade policies, declining unionization rates, and runaway poverty.”
Murphy, wrote Goldstein, is trying to visualize a political realignment and a “path toward rethinking how the Democratic Party came up short with voters and can regain its footing. Murphy readily admits that just a few years ago he wouldn’t be focusing on this topic for a series. ‘I was guilty of accepting this paradigm we were stuck in and in which we assumed we had to live with this massive concentration of corporate power,’ said Murphy. ‘I had no living memory of government using its power to break up monopolies… When you make those first pilgrimages out to Silicon Valley, it’s easy to get sucked into the idea that they sell you that they are just working for the common good and don’t pay attention to how big we get, because in the end, we’re trying to solve the same problems you’re trying to solve.’”
Murphy’s shift on antitrust speaks to a broader evolution that’s taken place in the Democratic Party under President Biden. But a total overhaul is not complete.
I pressed Murphy about why, despite executive actions, Democrats in Congress weren’t able to move forward in the last session on new antitrust legislation, such as the American Innovation and Choice Online Act or the Open App Markets Act, when they controlled both the House and Senate. He didn’t blame it on Senate Republicans or on party leadership, despite ample reporting that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was the main impediment holding up votes on both bills last year. His theory was more systemic, in opposition to colleagues like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who led the legislative push at the time and insisted that she had the votes.
“I think there is still a sizable portion of the Democratic Party that is sort of stuck in its addictions to neoliberal economics that concentrated and globally integrated markets can deliver prosperity. I still think this party has not made a firm break from neoliberalism,” said Murphy.
For his part, Murphy has not taken up a signature antitrust issue yet, but is more focused on highlighting where existing antitrust law can be enforced more stringently. In some key areas, his past policy work has some overlap with antitrust. A duopoly on gun ammunition production has corrosive effects on consumer access to firearms, as well as increasing costs for local and state governments forced to purchase from them to supply police forces. Consolidation in military suppliers has hollowed out the country’s defense industrial base.
“There is growing concentrated power in virtually every industry,” Murphy said. “So no matter what area of policy you care about you’re going to very quickly confront the impacts of that power on the market.”
Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute, has a new book coming out, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying The Working Class And What To Do About It. In an essay for CommoDreams.org yesterday, he wrote that the Democrats must choose between Wall Street and the working class. “The Democrats,” he wrote, “want it both ways. The Party of the New Deal claims to be still championing the working class while it is also working to enrich Wall Street. The obvious goal is to secure campaign cash from the wealthy while, at the same time, attract working-class votes. After all, the thinking goes, working people don’t have any place else to turn politically. Certainly not to the Republicans, the historic party of the bosses. But this thinking is wrong, and this approach hasn’t worked. And it’s still not working. The more the Democrats have supported Wall Street over the past four decades, the more the working class, especially the white working class, has drifted away. Even after the anti-civil rights southern Dixiecrat exodus from the Democratic Party in the Nixon years, white working-class support for the Democrats remained strong. Jimmy Carter in 1976 gathered a solid 52.3% of the white working-class vote. Bill Clinton in 1996 received 50.0 percent, again a strong showing. But by 2012, Barack Obama won only 40.6 percent. And in 2020, Joe ‘Six-Pack’ Biden stumbled to a meager 36.2 percent of the white working-class vote. And it’s not just the white members of the working class who are defecting. Recent polling reveals that Black and Latino working-class voters also show declining support for Democratic candidates.”
The real cause of working-class defections from the Democratic Party has been (and still is) mass layoffs. Working people got fed up with losing their jobs again and again, and they saw that the Democrats, who claimed to represent them, did little or nothing to stop the carnage. Since 1996, approximately 30 million of us have gone through a mass layoff (defined as 50 or more workers let go at one time.) Many more than once. Our research demonstrates clearly that in the key ‘Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, when mass layoffs go up the Democratic vote goes down.
…Why aren’t Democrats giving “more of a damn?” Because if they really helped working people meet these economic challenges, they would lose favor with the barons of Wall Street and their corporate cronies.
It’s not a win/win game. Mass layoffs are part and parcel of how corporate executives and hedge funds extract billions of dollars in profit. Those mass layoffs are very often used to finance stock buybacks, a legalized method of stock manipulation that was severely restricted by the Securities and Exchange Commission until 1982. Since corporate executives get most of their pay in stock incentives, jacking up the price of shares through stock buybacks is the quickest path to great wealth. The same goes for the Wall Street stock-sellers who force their way onto corporate boards and then demand massive stock buybacks to enrich themselves. Today nearly 70 percent of all corporate profits go to stock buybacks.
…Most of the Democratic Party, unfortunately, has drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. They believe that placating Wall Street and large corporate interests will strengthen the economy, improve the U.S. position in the global economy, and produce better paying jobs at home. That’s understandable when you view the economy through the elite lens of high salaries, growing 401(K)s, and the stock market, which seems to go up and up and up. But good luck selling that vision to laid-off workers.
Those workers remember that the Democrats eagerly supported the massive deregulation of Wall Street during the Clinton administration. They also remember Democrats pushing trade deals like NAFTA and China’s admission into the WTO, which led to millions of manufacturing jobs rushing to Mexico and China. And that the Obama administration refused to punish and remove the Wall Street executives who crashed the economy in 2008-09 with their reckless gambling, enabled by deregulation championed by both political parties. Instead, the Obama administration bailed out Wall Street while distressed homeowners got nothing. That’s 16 years of Wall Street coddling by Democratic administrations.
Democratic leaders may have thought this was too complicated for working-class people to understand. But they were wrong. Working people know who is prospering at their expense. They have learned the hard way that their former allies, the Democrats, have failed to protect them from the ravages of free-market capitalism. They understand that the Democrats are wooing the well-educated and affluent elites, society’s most powerful. They also know that far too many Democrats look down on white workers, tarring them as racist, sexist, homophobic xenophobes. When Democrats show such disdain it’s not unreasonable for working-class folks to switch allegiances.
Without protection from the Democratic Party or from a sizable labor movement, it’s not unreasonable for working-class people to think that supporting business interests and Republican policies might help save their jobs. This logic is especially strong in non-union situations, which today account for 94 percent of the business sector. If there is no Democratic Party or labor union to save your job, where else can you turn?
…Halting or slowing down mass layoffs requires real nerve. The Democrats would have to use all the levers of power (executive orders, legislation, regulation, the bully pulpit, etc.) to pressure Wall Street to stop cancerous stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts. Although the task would be difficult, there are plenty of levers to pull. At this point, however, the required New Deal muscle memory to tame corporate power is fading away.
Zach Shrewsbury is the Blue America-endorsed candidate for the open West Virginia Senate seat. He’s running on a platform that addresses the legitimate aspirations of working families and last night I asked him about this dichotomy within the Democratic Party. He told me that “Working Class people especially in Rural America feel forgotten about by the Democratic Party and in desperation they turn to the Republicans who are always there to feed their fears... but at least they are getting fed. Democrats are at an absolute crossroads now. They can return to fighting for working people or they can remain beholden to corporate interests. Sadly I believe most will remain with their money and corporate overlords because they lack courage and conviction. The Democratic Party has a very hard time practicing what it preaches; as this article has said they'v wanted it both ways for decades-- and people have caught on. NAFTA was disastrous for the working class. The most recent to memory was the Wall Street bailout and that's when the swing to the corporate-right really picked up speed. People saw who the party cared about and it wasn't them and their families. Especially in West Virginia we can use the coal mines as a great example of how layoffs happen multiple times a year for miners throwing families into disfunction. It happened under the eye of the Democratic party for decades here. Now in desperation people have switched to the Republicans for help. Democrats could have stepped in across the nation to stop similar situations but chose corporate money and decided to brand the white working class especially as racist, sexist etc, which played right into the Republicans hands. Working class people need Universal Health Care and a party that will fight for it not compromise every time Republicans throw a fit as well. The party is at its last chance to redeem itself in the eyes of working people and right now it's failing."
"My campaign," he said "is trying to show the working class that we can advocate for ourselves, we can run against corporate-owned politicians of both parties and we can do it on a progressive platform. Democrats would be smart to follow this lead if they ever hope to regain the faith of working class Americans.”