In 2016, Bernie lost and Hillary lost. But did they lose fair and square? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha… really? You think politics or elections are fair? Maybe in some fantasy world but in this world I’m pretty sure that Bernie and Hillary have been around long enough to know exactly what the deal was before they decided to run.
Politics is a swamp of moneyed and entrenched competing interests all trying to put their fingers on the scale. That is true in the primary as well as the general election. Our presidential candidate, whoever it may be, will face swift boating, ratf*cking, gerrymandering, voter suppression, unfair press, billions in right wing super pacs, online trolls and attack ads bankrolled by the likes of the Koch Brothers and Putin.
Anyone who is expecting a level playing field and a fair fight should stay home. For anyone who steps up and wants to be President, the buck stops with them. They go into this knowing that they are promising their supporters and the party that they can overcome all the above and more and come out victorious. No excuses, no scapegoats, no whining. The ultimate responsibility for the campaign is 100% on the candidates shoulders. That’s what it takes if you want the position of the most powerful person in the world.
Show Me the Money!
Recently, there has been talk about Democratic big money donors meeting because they are concerned about the possibility of someone winning the Democratic nomination who if elected would make some radical changes to how the economy is regulated and how taxes and spending are structured and prioritized. Coincidentally those policies are likely to cost those donors a sizable chunk of their wealth. Why would anyone find it shocking that they are concerned? That’s just politics as usual. People with power and influence accumulated over decades don’t like other people threatening their positions.
For years potential candidates had to go hat in hand to these big money bundlers and Super Pac financiers to raise the money needed to even consider entering a race. Shocking news: donors donate to politicians they agree with. No one was getting bribed to change their vote. No one was being bought off. Just like I send my $27 bucks to politicians I agree with Billionaires send their money to politicians they agree with. But what was the effect of having billionaires act as gate keepers - because it was the billionaires who determined who could have enough money to mount a campaign?
“The party must overcome a long history of collusion with the right, from President Bill Clinton’s capital gains tax cut (which enriched the top 1%) and financial market deregulation (which helped bring on the Great Recession), to the 2008 bank bailout (which offered too little to displaced workers and homeowners facing foreclosure). Over the last quarter-century, the party has sometimes seemed more focused on winning the support of those who live on capital gains than those who live on wages.”
People Vs. Money in America’s Midterm Elections
By Joseph E. Stiglitz – October 11, 2018
It’s no accident that when big money got to pre-select who we got to vote for that we saw at the same time an explosion of income inequality and those same big donors amassed obscene amounts of wealth. Was that their intention? Who knows and who cares, because that was the result. The lesson? If you want to know who will benefit from a candidates policies when in office look at who is financing his or her campaign. It’s said politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. What will the prose look like? It will be a mirror image of the donors political and economic views. That’s why they donated, to get someone who agrees with them in office. It is a more accurate predictor than what a candidate promises on the campaign trail to get votes. That’s common sense and decades of real world data, not conspiracy.
But something new in campaign financing has happened. Bernie Sanders campaign is not being backed by bundlers and Super Pacs and he is raising just as much money as could be raised by billionaire funding. For the first time those who live on wages have as much power in selecting candidates as those who live on capital gains. Agree with Sanders or not, that is a game changer.
A Political Revolution
Bernie likes to point out that he is seeking a political revolution. Now correct me if I’m wrong but never in human history have the powers that be rolled out the red carpet for revolutionaries and handed them the keys to the Bastille. Look at what is at stake in the chart below.
Does anyone really think that they are going to allow an old 60’s activist Robin Hood and his band of merry millennials to just ride in and make off with their wealth?
A recent series of behavioral experiments by social-psychologist Paul Piff were run centered on the game of Monopoly. Random players where given unfair advantages of which both players were aware. The goal was to study how “a privileged player in a rigged game behaves”. Despite the fact that privileged players knew the game was unfairly rigged in their favor after just fifteen minutes of play for each game, the researchers began noticing “dramatic” behavioral changes in the advantaged players. The takeaway was that wealth and status turns most people into entitled sociopaths. It’s just human nature.
That’s the effect of just 15 minutes playing a game of Monopoly, imagine the negative effect on human behavior when we are talking about $$$$billions accumulated over decades playing a rigged game. Despite the fact that millions of lives, global economic sustainability and the environment were sacrificed to acquire that wealth under the current rigged system, those billionaires are convinced they earned every penny fair and square. They deserved it because they are smarter, better and superior to those who have failed to reach their exalted hard earned status (even if most of them inherited it). That money belongs to them and the unwashed masses aren’t going to steal it from them.
To complicate things further the bubble economy that has been created as an engine of wealth transfer from the many to the few is not sustainable. It crashed in 2008 and we are likely to see an even bigger crash before 2020. The banks that were too big to fail are bigger than 2008, corporate debt is higher, new financial scams invented by Wall Street have made an at risk system even more fragile. Another financial crisis will make the political landscape even more volatile and raise the stakes exponentially all round.
If Sanders does well in the first primaries and it looks like the system that has made the 1% richer then Pharaohs is truly threatened, get ready for this to get very, very ugly. With what is at stake that really should not be a surprise to anyone. If all else fails and Sanders looks like he will be the nominee I expect to see a coalition of Democratic and Republican “moderate” billionaires try and draft Mike Bloomberg for a third party run. In the end you will see that class is thicker than party affiliation.
Every election it is said that it is the most important election of our lives. This time it is not hyperbole. We are only 12 years away from irreparable damage to our environment and one election away from the end of American democracy and the rise of a Fascist nativist state. Don’t expect a civil or fair fight. This will quickly devolve into a no holds barred cage match worse than anything we have seen before. However nasty it gets in the Democratic primary it will just be a warmup for the all out war that will be the general.
So buckle up and support the candidate of your choice. Make sure you demand that that candidate take full responsibility for the awesome and impossible task facing them. Then whatever the outcome in the primary, whether you think it was fair or not, vote against Fascism. Think of the Democratic candidate you least want to be the nominee: Sanders, Gabbard, Biden, any of them are infinitely superior to the orange Hitler and the end of democracy.