Green New Deal and corporate globalization

Free trade as idealized by those who successfully pushed in recent decades is a very good thing. It binds nations together making us all better off and less likely to go to war. It raises productivity as nations do what they are good etc. etc. etc. But even those who pushed free trade like Bill Clinton and Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong have admitted that it create losers. Academic and corporate pundits admitted there were downsides but little was done about it.

And so Trump could run against bad trade deals and demagogue immigrants and foreigners. Corporate free trade did not lead to rising living standards and a better world. It is here where the usual liberals blame Republicans and whitewash the actual arguments.

In order to work a Green New Deal will need to raise the living standards of everyone and make economic justice a reality. That's what the "New Deal" part is. That's what globalized trade didn't have. It was paired with reducing the welfare state and labor rights. If you want the Green New Deal to work and to evolve to a sustainable economy that will allow human civilization to survive that means no doing what was done with free trade. It means creating a new kind of economy that works for everyone while weening us from fossil fuels and stopping climate change.

This means government will have a large role to play.

Ready to Start

multiverse and Hope Punk / sci-fi

Jamie Peck tweets:

Books I recommended today: The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. At its best, sci-fi helps us envision what revolution and post-capitalist society might actually look like. Plus: more fun than Marx!

How the “golden straitjacket” led to “yellow vests”:

The French Protests Do Not Fit a Tidy Narrative by Matt Taibbi

Yemen, farm bill, Planned Parenthood

Bad news about Yemen, but surprisingly good news about the Farm bill and Planned Parenthood. Senate Democrats kept Republicans from cutting SNAP from the Farm bill and prevented them from attaching work requirements. The Supreme Court (really Roberts and Kavanaugh) decided to let a lower court ruling stand that would allow Planned Parenthood to receive Medicaid funds.

"Lawmakers in Louisiana and Kansas had sought to defund the group. Planned Parenthood then brought suit to overturn state laws in an effort to preserve its Medicaid services."

multiverse a third time

Another post about the multiverse. I found a new podcast (for me) by Chalie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz - both writers whose writing I've enjoyed before - called Our Opinions are Correct.

Here's an episode titled "We're in the wrong timeline."

non-evangelical white working class

The foundation of Trump's coalition is cracking 

by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

(CNN) -- Cracks have emerged in Donald Trump's hold on his core constituency of white working class voters, new data from the 2018 election reveal. 

Though Republican candidates almost everywhere registered large margins among white voters without a college degree, Democrats ran much more competitively among the roughly half of that group who are not evangelical Christians, according to previously unpublished results from the 2018 exit poll conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, a consortium of media organizations including CNN. 

Democrats, the analysis found, ran particularly well this year among white working-class women who are not evangelicals, a group that also displayed substantial disenchantment in the exit poll with Trump's performance. Those women could be a key constituency for Democrats in 2020 in pivotal Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where relatively fewer blue-collar whites are also evangelical Christians. 

Nationwide, nearly three-fifths of blue-collar white women who are not evangelicals voted Democratic in last month's House races, while an equal number said they disapproved of Trump's performance in office, the analysis of exit poll results found. That was well over double the Democratic share of the vote among non-college white women who are evangelical Christians. And while Republicans last month still carried a majority among working-class white men who are not evangelicals, Democrats attracted about twice as much support from them as they did among the equivalent men who are evangelicals. 

"It's another overlay to the conclusion that there are some parts of the white non-college population that are open to Democrats and can be moved a few points in your direction," says Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic analyst of voting trends who now serves as a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. 

Though these distinctions sound like fodder for a cocktail hour argument at a political science faculty lounge, they actually inform a backstage debate simmering among Democratic strategists about 2020. This debate has clear implications for the message the party develops over the next two years and the kind of nominee it chooses against Trump in the next presidential election. 

...

The Irish backstop

The Irish backstop

multiverse again

In October I had a post about the Multiverse and it's growing use in popular culture.

Counterpart is beginning its second season on Starz tonight and it's another show in which there is more than one universe. On Counterpart, there are two parallel universes which are in a state of Cold War and have diplomatic relations. The second Earth is different in various ways, but similar in many.

Now that the midterm elections are over and the Law is closing in on our President - Federal prosecutors allege that he committed a number of felonies - people of a more liberal or progressive temperament may feel that the universe is righting itself again.

Macron raised taxes on fuel and sparked the yellow vest movement which rioted and burned cars. Macron backed down.

Leftist AMLO is now President of Mexico. 

Still, scientists and most on the Left are very worried about impending climate disaster. Only a Green New Deal can save us. So politics has become very serious and very depressing.

One good way in which we seemed to have slipped into a different universe is the way socialists are mainstreaming. After I graduated college in the early nineties, I identified as and became a socialist or leftist as I believe the Democrats and Bill Clinton were too rightwing. I wanted America to be more like Europe and the Scandinavian countries. I agreed with prominent leftists of the time like Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, etc. (many of whom are still around.)

So it's weird to see democratic socialists being elected to Congress and to state legislatures and funny to watch the corporate media report on it. With Trump's victory, it's apparent things aren't working. Then there's Brexit, etc. Here's NBC reporting from the above link:

"We're working under the ideology of what’s best for the working class. What’s the most human. We organize for social democratic reform," she continued. "We're organizing for reform — we want to transform the status quo, because what we know of the status quo isn't working." 

Members, who self-identify as everything from communists to liberals to Marxists to socialists, vote on a platform during the organization's biennial national convention. At the most recent convention in Houston in 2016, members pushed for a focus on Medicare For All and strengthening unions — and also emphasized gaining more elected representation.

The DSA saw membership surge after Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., beat longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in June, Cohn said. It was 44,000 members strong prior to her victory, and 4,000 more people joined within a week of her win. Now, the organization has 55,000 members, Cohn said.

Back to the Multiverse. The CW's DC world uses it a lot. Flash, Supergirl, Green Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow. (Guilty pleasures.) Tonight three of them have a crossover event in which they travel to another different universe.

It would be nice to see more alternate universes where things are a little better. I guess that's what many TV shows actually present in order to entertain and distract. They hide the really bad stuff. The unsaid painful truths.

Still, seems like many shows are set in worse universes. The Handmaid's Tail. In SyFy's Nightflyers, Earth's civilization is headed for collapse and our only hope is a Hail Mary-pass space mission to try to catch the attention of a passing alien ship which has so far ignored all communications.

The National Geographic channel has a dramatization of the colonization and exploration of Mars. It's pretty realistic as there are competing corporate-commercial and scientific interests.

Ready Player One was on cable and set its story in a dystopian future where people spend most of their time in a virtual reality. The plot involves a corporation's attempt to gain control of it.

As Theresa May's government falls apart in the UK over Brexit, there's a good chance a real socialist - Jeremy Corbyn - may come to power in an advanced nation for the first time in the Neoliberal Age. And it looks like Bernie may run again in 2020.

If either or both win, it would be very weird, like we were in a different universe. Of course many of us glum leftists expect Capital won't sit back gracefully - like we saw with Syriza in Greece. Still it would be a glorious victory a Corbyn win could embolden America's Left even more.

I wonder if the growing interest in the multiverse and alternate realities is - along with the need for more storylines for TV - a result with the growing acknowledgement that luck has a lot to do with where people end up in life. Our elite and conservatives, as Chris Dillow points out, seem blissfully unaware of this fact.

Better or worse luck may change things enormously for someone.

Hope Punk on NPR

While Trump's use of the ancient forces of fear and greed to win the Republican primary and beat Hillary was scary and blew a lot of minds, the reaction in the midterms was good to see as well. People got politically active and supposedly it was the largest turnout since World War I. Also the way the way the alt right has been deplatformed and pushed back by antifa, etc has been good to see. Although we should work to prevent the condition conducive to the rise of the populist right from occurring in the first place.

immigration

Mass Immigration Creates Problems For the Left. Tighter Borders Can’t Be the Solution. by Eric Levitz

(h/t Interfluidity)

Child allowance

Just Write Families Checks by Bryce Covert

Hungary and Poland go rightwing after austerity

When left-leaning parties support austerity, their voters start to embrace the far right

recession calls

Bruce Bartlett

Third, it is beginning to look almost certain that there will be a recession before 2020. 

Shirley Collins & The Albion Band - Murder of Maria Marten

The Clash - Armagideon Time

Green New Deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal shows the radical choice facing the Democrats by Grace Blakeley

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly-elected socialist congresswoman for New York, joined the Justice Democrats and the Sunrise movement at a sit-in at the office of Nancy Pelosi. The 29-year-old - the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives - did so to demand that the Democrats immediately develop a Green New Deal for the US economy. This programme – a huge, co-ordinated programme of public investment aimed at decarbonising growth – would be the most radical and transformative economic proposal put forward by any US party since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. 

The rationale for targeting Pelosi – the incumbent House Minority Leader and aspirant Speaker - was clear. As soon as the Democrats reclaimed the lower chamber, Pelosi used her platform to suggest that the party “work together” with Donald Trump to promote a bipartisan agenda in the interests of all Americans.

As with Barack Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship, this sounds appealing. But it neglects the conflict that exists at the heart of US society: the division between those who live off work and those who live off wealth. 

Trump seeks to mask this economic divide by scapegoating alternative adversaries – the US’s immigrant and Muslim populations - while pursuing policies that serve the interests of his true constituency: the wealthy elite. Tax cuts, deregulation and the erosion of the social safety net have all served to redistribute the wealth produced by the working people of America to corrupt and unaccountable elites. 

That Pelosi would even consider compromising with such a man - and such a programme - is revealing of the priorities of the Democratic establishment. Because the old Democrats, who receive billions of dollars from Silicon Valley and Wall Street, have as little interest in exposing the wealth/work divide that shapes the US economy as Trump himself.

 ...

Panera Democrats

Dave Weigel in Feb 2017

Honestly the funniest 2018 result would be: Dems win the majority based on suburbs after reporters spend two years canvassing rural diners

The resistance is organized and ready in district where Trump is visiting by Garance Franke-Ruta

Democrats Say Their First Bill Will Focus On Strengthening Democracy At Home

51 Percent Losers by Matt Karp

A Defeat for White Identity by Ross Douthat

Podcasts

Saturday Night Live did a skit about a hypothetical podcast award show where they had impersonations of Pod Save America - "Bros Save America" - and Marc Maron.

Here is a good blogpost on Chapo and podcasts.

They're popular b/c we can listen to them while exercising, driving, cooking, doing chores, etc. Plus they can be very entertaining and informative. I listen to Chapo Trap House, The Bruenigs, Doug Henwood's Behind the News (which was first and still is a radio show), and Ryan Avent's Left Anchor. Sometimes I will listen to other podcasts like Current Events's or Harmontown, but those are my regulars.

Avent had a good podcast about the mid-terms. He has the opinion, not that common on the Left, that a candidate's talent matters more than ideology, which kind of makes sense. Still a lot of lefty ballot initiatives won: ex-felons voting, minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, legalizing marijuana, fair districting/anti-gerrymandering, etc. And Republicans running ads about their opponents supporting M4A didn't seem to matter.

Provisional

An epiphany of sorts. On Bill Maher's show, Sarah Silverman - when asked about the red state people she meets on her show - said there's a difference between the liars and those being lied to. The "lied to" are often good, nice people, but they're like cult members. They believe what they believe.

Maybe this is also how parents treat kids. They believe the kids don't know what's best but try to treat them as good people. But kids can detect insincerity and patronizing adults. So you either have to be a good actor our authentically believe they're good kids for you to get past their bullshit detectors.

I think the approach by @interfludity or @briebriejoy is the best, one where you are open to people who believe differently than you. It is the best long-term strategy even if at the moment the instinct is to close ranks with your tribe and just best the other side.

The wealthy liars and the white supremacists - like Tucker Carlson - are beyond the pale, though, in my opinion. I don't care if people protest outside their homes. The liberal elite don't really care if a stagnating economy is driving the working class into the fascists' arms. We shouldn't over do it when comes to the liberals' worries about the discourse and about being civil.

Hence the appeal of the dirtbag and irony left. Feels good to give the establishment the finger, just ask a Trump voter.

Proud Boys and danger of fascism

Brazil electing a fascist, among other things, has people on edge. Some people I follow on Twitter, Dan O'Sullivan and journalist Jason Wilson* were critical of what Amber Frost said on her bonus Chapo podcast about Brazil (which figured a photo and music from the movie Brazil.)

Frost basically downplayed the danger of the Proud Boys in the US saying their like "MS13 to Rose Emoji" and Sullivan and Wilson took offence.

I agree with both sides. On Wilson's side, I agree that alt right groups are a danger and should be fought by Antifa (although I have qualms about doxxing.) I've read that the Antifa strategy has worked and that the alt right groups are in disarray after Charlottesville. Trump's election gave them a boost and they came out of hiding, but basically they've been beaten back down. Internet companies are shutting down their access to various infrastructure also so they can't recruit or communicate. Still there were recent incidents in Portland and New York City as reported on Ryan Avent's podcast and elsewhere. It's being reported that Republicans are "adopting" the Proud Boys. Still I think Frost is sort of right, but I wouldn't give Wilson a hard time about his alt right beat if that is what she has done in the past, which is what he suggests. We should take the alt right seriously even if they are laughable. These people should be on the left.

Yes the Brownshirts were underestimated, but I don't think the Proud Boys are. Yes they should be confronted but I don' think we're in danger of a fascist takeover with Proud Boys leading the way. Still it's unnerving to be contemplating the idea, and one hopes the stewards of the economy have learned their lessons.

Maybe Nov. 6 will mellow people out some.

*about whom I don't know that much, but they seem standard liberal left.