Ep 420: (Blaze It!) Trump Wins The Very Easiest Thing

News of the week for 12/22/17 Great, Trump got tax cuts for the rich from a Republican Congress. Not exactly a miracle, but don't tell Mike Pence and Ben Carson that. Driftglass gets five minutes to rant about David Brooks, and hooray! J20 Protestors are found not guilty and Twitter proves that Both Sides Don't is really catching on! More at http://www.ProLeftPod.com, where we have a new Patreon and GoFundMe account in addition to our Paypal account.

(skip to the 6:00 mark to bypass opening banter)

The same "credible news outlet"s that were just dying for a claim about a Democrat so they could retreat to their "both sides do it" comfort zone?

The "credible news outlet"s that have long been so eager for salacious news about a Democrat that if you pointed over their shoulder and said "Holy shit! Is that Bill Clinton's penis?" their heads would whip around so fast they'd snap their own necks?

Those outlets?

Hammer it constantly the way they hammered "tax & spend".

Episode 417: Burn the Lifeboats, It's Mueller Time

...and the Top Tovarisch is strangely silent about leaks lately.


Just Putin it out there.

...they both swallow, and lose, certain substances with amazing alacrity.

I'd love to see a study about how much job and wage loss that is written off as due to automation and offshoring has actually been due to (or triggered by) financial games by the people in control of the companies.


When this sort of thing comes up it's always instructive to break out the 1991 Philadelphia Inquirer series by Bartlett and Steele:
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inq_HT_WhatWentWrong1991.html

Inflation was high, foreign competition was on the rise, computerization was beginning to have real impact on traditional trades (e.g., typesetting), etc. The New Deal framework had become creaky in places and clearly needed updating. The framework needed some modernizing, and to portions of the Democratic establishment, some degree of deregulation and privatization seemed like a more flexible structure.

Add to that the fact that relations with unions had become strained, over the Vietnam War and other things, and they were a major source of resistance about changing things.

There was also a geopolitical aspect: the economy of most ex-colony nations was resource extraction, in which most of he population was poor peasants ripe for revolutions the Soviets were happy to encourage. If they had some form of industry and a middle class dependent on it, there would be more internal stability and less volatility. Or at least, so the thinking went.

Then also consider the Democratic Party's internal structure and how it was evolving at the time. Coming off the blow-out of McGovern by Nixon, dealing with the New Left who attacked the Democratic establishment for its role in supporting the war in Vietnam, demographic shifts away from traditional centers of Democratic power, changes to the primary system to get away from the "men in a smoke-filled room" method of selecting candidates (or perception thereof), the rise of television advertising, etc.

Heap on top of that changes to what was allowed in terms of campaign financing, both from new laws and court decisions.

Those began a shift toward a more open method of choosing candidates than had been the case, with TV advertising and exposure rising in importance. Politics has always been a money game, but TV ads added rocket boosters to it, and that means more backing from wealthier donors, most of whom are ok with neoliberal changes that improve returns on their portfolio.

Enter 1980, when fifteen years of conservative efforts to pry apart the Democratic coalition come into full flower with the "Reagan Democrats" who give Reagan a blow-out win.

To avoid droning on even further, suffice to say that the intellectual climate, political math, incentives, and disincentives for charting a more "pro-business" neoliberal path outweighed the comparable factors arguing not to do so.