Doom Report (Week -7: Stop Calling It Inflation!)

This week, many of my normal political shows collided, either in radical agreement, or complete contradiction.  While I’m not a political expert by any means, I do seem to have the advantage of apparently being the only person in the world watching all these sources at once.  At the very least, they’re definitely not watching each other.  Here, then, is my synthesis of the week’s news.

These are the shows I’ll be referencing throughout this week’s report; feel free to watch them yourselves and evaluate whether you think I’m fairly representing their views:

• On this week’s episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Bernie Sanders on “Rebuilding Trust & Efficacy in the Government”.  Stewart is of course the former host of The Daily Show, and is now back there one night a week; I trust I don’t need to explain who Sanders is.
• On this week’s episode of Some More News, Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll do a fairly in-depth post-mortem on the election somewhat incisively titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” Cody and Katy were writers for Cracked.com, where they worked on a faux news report à la SNL’s “Weekend Update” called “Some News”; Some More News is a continuation of that.  They’re super-progressive and not particularly fond of the Democrats.
• On this week’s episode of The Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich, Heather Lofthouse, and Michael Lahanas-Calderón do their weekly news roundup, this week entitled “Rage Against the Machine”.  Reich was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton (meaning he’s as old as Biden and Trump), and has been a professor and political pundit in the years since, mainly expounding on our growing income inequality (much like Sanders).  He cofounded Inequality Media; Lofthouse is the president of Inequality Media’s Civic Action org.  Calderon is their director of digital strategy, and the official Gen Z represntative on the panel.  These guys are fairly pro-Democrat and moderately progressive.
• This week, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Mehdi Hasan on his YouTube channel.  BTC is a staunch Democrat, and the only “serious” news source that I picked up during the writer’s strike that I still watch.  He’s often too pro-Dem for my tastes, but he also covers things I can’t get elsewhere.  Mehdi is a British-born journalist perhaps most famous having his MSNBC show cancelled during the early days of the genocide in Gaza; the network said that fact that he was Muslim was “coincidental.” Yeah, right.  This year he started a new website and YouTube channel called Zeteo (a Greek word meaning “to seek out the truth”); contributors will reportedly include Greta Thunberg and Bassem Youssef.  He’s fairly liberal and not afraid to drop an F-bomb, so I might watch some of the Zeteo videos.¹

So, first and foremost, we need to stop calling the horrible price increases we’re all dealing with “inflation.” I really think this is part of the messaging problem that the Kamala campaign was suffering from.  As I talked about in our last Doom Report, there does seem to be a strong concensus developing that a big part of Kamala’s defeat—if not the entirety of it—was because she toed the Biden party line that the economy is going great, even though people can easily see (and feel) that it really isn’t.  Mehdi Hasan talked about how the administration has done all these great economic things, but they aren’t getting “credit” for it.  BTC ate this up, since it reinforces the line he’s been harping on since the election: the right-wing media machine is very effective, and the left-wing media machine basically doesn’t exist.  And this, of course, is why voters were too stupid to realize that the economy is actually great.

I malign BTC, of course: he didn’t actually call the voters stupid.  Even Cody wouldn’t go that far, and he was hosting a video titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” But, in the first section, Cody opined that people aren’t stupid ... they just don’t know as much about politics as the rest of us.  You know, us smart people.  I’m being a bit unfair to Cody as well, but I think both of these takes are missing the point.  While it’s been reported that Google searches for “what are tarriffs” spiked after the election, understandably leading many to (figuratively) facepalm and wonder why folks couldn’t have Googled that before they voted, it’s still overly dismissive to ascribe this disconnect to ignorance.

So what, in my opinion, is the problem?  The problem is that the Democrats kept telling people that inflation was going down, and it was.  But prices aren’t coming down.  And that has nothing to do with inflation.  Inflation, as an economic term, is defined as follows: “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency.” But when prices are high because corporations are just gouging us—which they can do because Reagan (primarily following the philosophy his solicitor general Robert Bork) gutted antitrust enforcement—that ain’t inflation.  Bork tried to convince us that consumers benefit from corporate mergers in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, but 40+ years of actual experience (and data) show us that that’s bullshit.  If a corporation can raise prices, they will, and, during the pandemic, they could, so they did.  Why would they bother to bring them back down?  Well, in a marketplace with vigorous competition, they’d bring them back down because, if they didn’t, the competitors would eat their lunch.  But when you’re a company that controls 85% of the market (which is true of multiple industries in our country at this point), you’ve got no real competition, so fuck it: keep on gougin’.

So, when the Democrats were saying “inflation is down” and “the economy is much better,” they were right.  And also completely missing the point.  What they should have said is, “yes, you’re paying too much for everything these days, but it’s nothing to do with inflation: you’re getting screwed by corporations.”

And, here’s the fucked up part: as SMN pointed out, The Atlantic broke the story that Kamala wanted to go after big business, but apparently her brother-in-law Tony West—the chief legal officer of Über—wrote her a letter urging her not to do that.  So she didn’t.  So she lost.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying again.  But try to imagine how much different things would be if Kamala had answered the question “what will you do differently than Biden?” by saying “I’m going to go after these corporate oligarchs who are raping and pillaging our country and picking your pocket.” It makes for an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

Sadly, the Dems are not only not going to start doing that, they’re probably not going to start doing much of anything differently.  The people who advised Harris, as well as other Democratic strategists, are already looking for other people to blame.  In reponse to Maureen Dowd’s contention that “politically correct” language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC” are responsible for the Democrats’ loss, Katy Stoll responds:

Does she present any actual data that the term “BIPOC” alienated half of the country or more?  Let’s see ... no, no, that’s dumb.  Who needs data?  Data’s for wokes.  Also, as we already showed, there isn’t any data.  It’s just vibes.  But, beyond vibes, these people are transparently trying to cover their own asses.  Kamala Harris ran the campaign they wanted.  Joe Biden reads Matt Yglesias and watches Joe Scarborough.  They got the centrist, non-woke campaign they’re complaining that they didn’t, and now they’re scrambling to blame someone else, because that campaign lost.

Mehdi Hasan goes further:

We’ve seen ... all the team of advisors around Harris ... basically saying, we got nothing wrong.  We did nothing wrong, we’re not contrite, we have no apologies, we’d do it all the same.

Sure, it’s true that incumbents lost all around the world.  But, as Mehdi points out: okay, but why did they all lose?

They [Harris’ campaign strategists] keep going, “well, you have to understand: we inherited a really bad situation.  The internal polling was really bad.  Joe Biden was more unpopular than even you knew.” Then why the F did you not break with Biden ... ?  It actually makes it worse for them, not breaking with Biden, by them now admitting that they knew he was more unpopular than the public knew.  Because, then, the arguments were “oh, well, we can’t break with a sitting president”—you can if your internal polling is telling you that he is toxic and pulling you down.²

Blaming phrases like “Latinx” is just blame-shifting.  Sure, it’s true that, as a strategist pointed out in a clip that Katy showed, Latine people don’t themselves use “Latinx,” because it’s impossible to pronounce and it’s just weird.³  But to then extrpolate that that’s why Latine’s didn’t vote for Harris is just insane.  I’m not sure I want to go so far as Katy in saying that a lot of these liberal elites are just blaming minorities the same way that Republicans are, but it’s also fair to note that Maureen Dowd is absolutely a Boomer (and white): she’s just 6 years younger than Trump.

Look, at the end of the day, Jon Stewart nails the whole shebang right in the opening sentences of his interview:

But I got the sense that, what kind of happened to the Democrats was that they were in a position to defend a status quo that most voters—certainly, many—felt was no longer delivering for them.  ...  that many Democrats felt like: oh, no, we are improving your lives.  You just don’t realize it.

Sanders responds that, among other things, Citizens United has turned Congresspeople into employees of megacorps.  Which means that any party that wants to appeal to working class voters has two options: pretend that the system is working just fine, even when people can clearly see that it’s not, or .... you know, just lie.  Also known as, the Democratic strategy and the Republican strategy.  Sigh.

Reich bemoans that we now take democracy for granted (contrasting us with South Korea, who this week quashed a coup by barricading the doors of the National Assembly and just voting; Riech’s point was that democracy in South Korea is new enough that their people are still willing to fight for it).  But this is naïve: Stewart points out that defending democracy isn’t appealing to people for whom democracy is failing them.  Or, as BTC puts it:

By saying, “we have to protect our institutions; we have to protect our democracy,” for so many people out there for whom democracy (and our institutions) isn’t working, that is not the message they want to hear.  That is the message that’s going to push them away.

So what should the message be?  Mehdi points out that, with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, when the Dems put up an “establishment” candidate (e.g. Kerry, Hillary, Kamala, Al Gore), they lose.  When they put up a “Washington outsider” (e.g. Clinton, Obama), they win.  And that’s probably not a coincidence.  As Cody pointed out, Obama won by running on hope and change.  Maybe we didn’t get enough of that once he actually got in office, but that’s what he ran on, and he won.  Twice.  When BTC asks why so many Dems won House seats even though the country shifted to the right in the Presidential election, and mentions the success of Golden in Maine and Perez in Washington, and wonders if they won because they tacked right, Mehdi responds:

You mention Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: yeah, I don’t share their politics; they’re definitely to the right of me.  But, did they run right-wing campaigns, or did they run populist, authentic campaigns?  Did they say “right to repair” (in her case); ... “anti-monopoly” (in his case)?  All right, this is what we need to be talking about right now.  It’s not about whether you sign a tick-box of “I’m left,” “I’m right,” “I do these policies”; it’s about: Who are you fighting for? Do you have a fighting spirit? Do people know what you stand for? Are you authentic, or are you just a kind of, poll-tested, focus-group-tested, bland person who no one thinks is going to fight for them in Washington, D.C.?

Will the Dems do this?  Unlikely.  They’re still trapped by the corporate profit cycle.  Stewart and Sanders talked about the food corps spending all this money to design food which is making us diabetic, and then the drug corps spending all this money to develop drugs to cure our diabetes.  And they do this because it makes them money.  (I would have added that the insurance companies enable this.  You think you need insurance because otherwise you couldn’t afford medical care, but of course companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets and funneling the cash to big pharma and big healthcare companies such as United Health Care.  If no one could afford to pay those exorbitant costs, we’d all just die and the companies would go out of business.  Instead, insurance is enabling the whole cycle.  But I digress.)  Stewart asks Sanders what it would take for Congress to wake up and understand how badly things are going for ordinary people, but Sanders points out that they do understand: it’s just that all the corporate money prevents them from voting their conscience.  Stewart says that that’s depressing: it means they know they’re screwing us and it’s all cynical.  Sanders counterpoints that when megacorps have millions of dollars to devote to destroying you in your next election, and you realize that the guy who replaces you could be much worse, it’s not you that sucks, but the system.

Basically, as Cody and Katy point out, the Repubs have the Dems playing defense, and you can’t win playing defense.  These episodes—and my synthesis of them—contains several ideas on how they might turn that around into playing offense, but they don’t seem inclined to want to do that.  Hell, take a simple example: Cody points out that campaign strategists told Walz to “lay off” calling the Repubs “weird,” even though it was actually working.  Mehdi goes further and says Walz was “buried”; when Walz badmouthed the electoral college; the Harris campaign disavowed his remarks, even though the American public really hates the electoral college.  Yeah, Tim: stop saying all that stuff that actually appeals to people!  Walz was really hard-done by these “strategists.”

Gaza is another place where the Dems could have made some inroads, but dropped the ball.  Mehdi said that he had at first decided that Trump’s margin was so large that the loss of Muslim-Americans over the Dems’ Gaza policy must not have made any difference.  But he later reconsidered: sure, 65% of Muslims voted for Harris, but it’s also true that Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes (roughly).  If slightly more than 115,000 Muslim-Americans in those three states had switched from voting for Trump to voting for Kamala, she might well have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (and what delicious irony that would have been).  Impossible to say whether he’s right on that score, but he also points out that, even above and beyond the numbers, vowing to do better than Biden on the Gaza situation would have at least been a difference from Biden, the lack of which was, again, her biggest weakness.

I’m also pretty sick of hearing this, which Reich repeated this week:

Well, in fairness, she only had 3 months.

THE ENTIRE UK GENERAL ELECTION TOOK 43 DAYS.  Kamala had 107.  Shut the fuck up about not having enough time.

Speaking of United Health Care (as I was a few paragraphs ago), their CEO was assassinated this week.  There was a lot of hand wringing about how awful it is that some people on the Internet are ... shall we say ... lacking in sympathy over this incident.  Lofthouse and Reich had this exchange:

Heather: But, so what are the big take-homes from this?  Medicare for all?
Reich: Well, I would say ... you can’t use somebody’s death ... to do anything with.

On which I have to call bullshit.  This is the crap that Republicans say when there’s a school shooting.  When a tragedy happens is exactly the time to talk about the factors that led up to it, and how we can change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  And it is possible to say that the killing of this man is a horrible tragey on a personal level, and to feel overwhelming grief for his family, and to note that he made $10 million dollars a year and that UHC has made a policy of denying claims which has led to the deaths of thousands of Americans ... probably more.  If you need more info on how terrible a company UHC is, More Perfect Union has a good video on the topic.  Does that mean he deserved to die?  No, of course not.  It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that none of that is true.⁴

I have two big takeaways.  The first is that the Democratic party is not the answer.  I am strongly considering joining the Working Families Party.  It’s in some ways a faction inside the Democratic party (much like the Tea Party Republicans), but also in many ways a completely separate party, with a strategy for creating a third party alternative that doesn’t take votes away from one party or another.  Which sounds like a fantasy, but they’ve been working at it since 1998, and they’ve achieved some amazing things.  On the city council of Philadelphia, there are 2 WFP members to only 1 Republican; on the Hartford CT city council, there are 3 WFP members and no Repubs at all.  In a few states, such as New York, you can vote for the Democratic candidate on a separate line; this helps the candidates understand where their support is coming from.  Beyond some good articles on the Internet, there are 3 videos that I think help people understand who they are:

• quick intro by Maurice Mitchell, the National Director (brief)
• Building Blocks of WFP Power, a bit more info (informative)
• Maurice Mitchell on WFP Post-Election Mass Call, the WFP election response (inspiring)

Secondly, when I wrote my election reflections post, I went on for some time about how I hoped I was wrong about all my dire predictions.  I was somewhat pleased to hear Cody Johnston echo my words nearly exactly:

We have to assume Trump is going to do all the stuff he said he wants to do.  Granted, there are things that might prevent him from doing those things, and, if he is prevented from doing them, people are gonna call us alarmists for saying he’ll do bad stuff, but frankly, that would be great.  I would love—love—to be wrong.  I would love to prepare for the worst and for that to be a waste of time.  But that’s not gonna stop me from preparing.

Can’t sum it up better myself.

__________

1 But probably only the non-serious ones.  They have a series where they talk to comedians about news that sounds pretty interesting.

2 Yes, he actually said the letter “F” instead of “fuck.” It was early in the interview.  He loosened up a bit by the end.

3 If you need more details about this difference, there are good articles about that on the Internet.  Short answer: “Latinx” is a white people thing.

4 Speaking of More Perfect Union and healthcare, they just did a fantastic video on Medicare “Advantage”, which I, sadly, am rapidly approaching the age where I really need to know that.  Spoiler alert: it’s not particularly advantageous.