Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
Dispensing poisoned water to the thirsty internet every day
A ProPublica article, Heeding Steve Bannon’s Call, Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the GOP — and Reshape America’s Elections, reports on how deep the sentiment in the fascist Republican Party (FRP) is about not allowing an election to ever be stolen again. Once again, the power of dark free speech to con people into blatantly false beliefs and behaviors that flow from them is clear and undeniable. The FRP action is aimed squarely at undermining election integrity and especially not allowing democrats to win elections. ProPublica writes:
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” Bannon said on his show in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
It is too early to know how important or effective this movement will be. The laws that FRP state legislatures have already passed to both suppress votes and to rig elections in the FRP’s favor will be relevant. ProPublica also looked onto whether there was a similar democratic surge at the precinct level, but found no significant surge. Some or most rank and file Republicans believe the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen, which would explain why they are increasing their local level presence in elections in some areas.
At present, it is reasonable to draw some conclusions. First, the infrastructure needed to subvert elections and democracy is now being put in place, at least in some states and key areas of the country. Second, the belief among many of the FRP’s rank and file that the 2020 election was stolen is intractable and that false belief will probably not change any time soon, if ever. Third, because of that it is significantly possible, maybe likely, that the 2022 and 2024 elections will be adversely affected, maybe literally flipped for some races, by the FRP for the benefit of the FRP and its elite supporters and to the detriment to democracy and the rule of law.
Steve Bannon is probably right to try to move the deceived and angry rank and file at an increased presence in local elections. The FRP cannot win free and fair elections honestly, so they have to suppress votes and rig elections to win dishonestly. By now, it is clear that the FRP leadership and elites have to keep harping on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. If they did not, there would be no effective way to move the rank and file who have lost faith in election integrity to act to “protect” elections as they are now.
Questions: Is this more evidence of a malicious FRP attack on democracy and elections, or is it just democratic politics with little or no anti-democratic intent? If there is no anti-democratic intent in Bannon’s precinct strategy, then (i) exactly what is the point of it, and (ii) exactly what pro-democracy actions are all those deceived and pissed off Republicans planning to take in the next election that were not already taken in the last free and fair election?
I’m so glad that Nicolle Wallace posted this segment from her show (Deadline White House) yesterday, this short (2-ish minutes) video with Steve Schmidt.No one can say it
quite like Steve can.
View link here: Schmidt’s remarks begin at about the :50 mark.
From the linked video-
"COVID might be the medical cause of their deaths, but what
they were killed by was:
-Misinformation
-Lies
-Malice and the immorality of political leaders who would
risk their [constituents] lives in a big con for the purpose of appeasing a
base, a ratings god in the form of Fox News, and the constellation of right-wing
sites that would fuel all this insanity in the country.
-[It's] irresponsibility contrary to the public good for selfish
[political] purposes."
This story is told in this 30 minute podcast. A transcript of the interview is also at that link. It is a story about corporate business tactics and attendant "public relations" (company propaganda) that CIGNA, a big health care company, routinely employed to keep profit margins high while maintaining a caring public image. Presumably, CIGNA, and all other for profit health care companies still use these tactics to keep costs as low as possible.
By now, it should be clear to everyone that for-profit health care companies operate with an intractable conflict of interest. Specifically, they make more money when insured people do not get health care services. Therefore, in capitalism like with any other company, CIGNA did its best to deny paying for health care services as best it could. The podcast interviews a former senior public relations executive, Wendell Potter[1], who worked for CIGNA. Once Potter accidentally came to realize what he was involved in helping CIGNA do to its customers, his conscience kicked in and he had to get out.
According to Potter, everything he did was legal, but often misleading. The corporate deceit he helped instill in people led to some bad health care choices by patients and to some preventable patient deaths. His job was to make CIGNA look caring and honest to the public, while maximizing profit by being uncaring and dishonest.
One episode involved CIGNA dragging its feet about deciding to pay for a teenage girl's liver transplant after she developed leukemia. The company did not want to pay for the transplant so it delayed making a decision. The company delayed so long that the girl's liver had deteriorated to the point that the transplant was considered experimental and therefore not covered by the insurance policy. Bad publicity arose from this case, so CIGNA decided to pay for the transplant even though it was no longer covered. The girl died before she could get her new liver.
Other parts of the interview discuss other sleaze tactics that health care insurance companies routinely employ to avoid paying for health care services. Most civilized industrialized countries have had the common sense to take profit out of their mainstream health care systems. The inherent conflict of interest simply cannot be made to go away any other way.
Ruthless public relations
Unlike those countries, the US is not civilized. We operate with a capitalist for-profit system. Americans are told they get the best health care in the world. We are not told that we do not necessarily get the best health care in the world. We are also not told that we pay more for health care than any other country in the world. And, we are also not told by the American health care insurance industry that tens of millions of Americans either have no insurance coverage or, they have coverage in theory but cannot actually afford to pay for the deductibles from their "cheap," minimal coverage insurance policies to get payment. Many of them rely on free medical services when, where and if they can get it. Thus, even though Americans pay more than any other country with universal health care systems, we still have tens of millions who are not in the system and get little or no care unless they can afford it on their own.
If memory serves, estimates of deaths from lack of health care in the US before Obamacare ranged from ~20,000/year to ~45,000/year. Not sure what it is these days. That's another fact that the health care insurance industry prefers to not talk about. In capitalism, uninsured people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and either get over whatever it is that ails them or drop dead. There's no room in capitalism for any profit-impairing sentiment.
Profit and opacity
This insurance industry loves opacity. For example, people cannot do cost comparisons. Also, when people sign up for Part C of Medicare (Medicare "Advantage" plans -- the advantage is to the insurance companies, not the taxpayers), the insurance industry is brought into the picture and the government moves out. The government pays the companies to handle Medicare and we all know what that means, i.e., the conflict of interest is baaaack! Part of the deal with Part C is that the insurance company negotiated and/or bribed our corrupt federal government into keeping the profits from Part C that the companies make. One estimate is that Part C is worth tens of billions/year, which is why we are constantly bombarded with TV ads trying to coax people out of regular Medicare and into private sector Part C.
Questions: Would it be better to leave US health care as a mostly for-profit system, or do what other countries with universal health care systems do and socialize it to mostly or completely get rid of the conflict of interest? Is it even politically possible to socialize medicine in the US? Do you like being deceived and lied to about health care, or does that not happen in the US? Is the US health care system corrupt and opaque, or merely just doing what for-profit companies do, e.g., maximizing profits while minimizing transparency?
Footnote:
1. Potter used to run a cute little website called the Potter Report. It looks to have been abandoned. There he reported on the fun and games of the industry he used to work for. For example, this is part of the last post of March 14, 2019:
Months after advising the Democratic Party to abandon the idea of “Medicare for All,” a former U.S. senator has been hired by a lobbying firm whose clients are leading the fight against changes to the nation’s health care system. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a Washington, D.C.-based law and lobbying firm, announced on Wednesday that former Sen. Joe Donnelly is joining the firm as a partner and will be counseling clients in the health care and financial industries.
In my prior life as an insurance executive, it was my job to deceive Americans about their health care. I misled people to protect profits. In fact, one of my major objectives, as a corporate propagandist, was to do my part to “enhance shareholder value.” That work contributed directly to a climate in which fewer people are insured, which has shaped our nation’s struggle against the coronavirus, a condition that we can fight only if everyone is willing and able to get medical treatment. Had spokesmen like me not been paid to obscure important truths about the differences between the U.S. and Canadian health-care systems, tens of thousands of Americans who have died during the pandemic might still be alive.
On a task force for the industry’s biggest trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), we talked about how we might make health-care systems in Canada, France, Britain and even Cuba look just as bad as ours. We enlisted APCO Worldwide, a giant PR firm. Agents there worked with AHIP to put together a binder of laminated talking points for company flacks like me to use in news releases and statements to reporters.
I spent much of that year as an industry spokesman, my last after 20 years in the business, spreading AHIP’s “information” to journalists and lawmakers to create the impression that our health-care system was far superior to Canada’s, which we wanted people to believe was on the verge of collapse. The campaign worked. Stories began to appear in the press that cast the Canadian system in a negative light. And when Democrats began writing what would become the Affordable Care Act in early 2009, they gave no serious consideration to a publicly financed system like Canada’s. We succeeded so wildly at defining that idea as radical that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), then chair of the Senate Finance Committee, had single-payer supporters ejected from a hearing.
While it’s true that Canadians sometimes have to wait weeks or months for elective procedures (knee replacements are often cited), the truth is that they do not have to wait at all for the vast majority of medical services. And, contrary to another myth I used to peddle — that Canadian doctors are flocking to the United States — there are more doctors per 1,000 people in Canada than here. Canadians see their doctors an average of 6.8 times a year, compared with just four times a year in this country.
Then there’s quality of care. By numerous measures, it is better in Canada. Some examples: Canada has far lower rates than the United States of hospitalizations from preventable causes like diabetes (almost twice as common here) and hypertension (more than eight times as common). And even though Canada spends less than half what we do per capita on health care, life expectancy there is 82 years, compared with 78.6 years in the United States.
The Blair Mountain battle was a labor vs coal mine owner conflict that occurred August 25 to September 2, 1921 in West Virginia. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. About 100 miners were murdered and many more were arrested. Local law enforcement, mine owner mercenaries and federal troops crushed the miners fighting for decent work conditions. The United Mine Workers union saw major declines in membership, but long-term publicity led to some improvements in working conditions.
What enraged and scared the bejesus out of capitalist mine owners was the union of poor whites, blacks and immigrants who rose together to protest barbaric work conditions.
Because the miners lost, the historical story was told by the victors. The winner's story was a pack of lies told by coal companies and the co-opted, craven mainstream media of the time. The winners portrayed the uprising as a caused by miners who were portrayed as products of an ignorant, moonshine-drunken culture, not the vicious capitalist industrial autocracy of the time.
In the short term the battle was an overwhelming victory for coal industry owners and management. UMW [United Mine Workers] membership plummeted from more than 50,000 miners to approximately 10,000 over the next several years, and it was not until 1935 – following the Great Depression and the beginning of the New Deal under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – that the UMW fully organized in southern West Virginia.
This union defeat had major implications for the UMWA as a whole. After World War I, as the coal industry began to collapse, union mining was no longer financially sustainable. Because of the defeat in West Virginia, the union was also undermined in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. By the end of 1925, Illinois was the only remaining unionized state that could compete with them in terms of soft coal production.
Once union mining became financially unsustainable, non-union mining had to replace it. In the old days, workers always got the shaft when economic forces and capitalism dictated it. That is just how raw capitalism run by human beings worked and still works to the extent modern society will tolerate it.
Question: What is best, unregulated, brass knuckles capitalism backed by force imposed by private and public armies, reasonably regulated capitalism, socialism, or some combination of two or more of those, e.g., significantly or mostly socialized medicine with a reasonably regulated electronics sector?
Armed Blair Mountain miners surrendering to federal troops
The NPR program Throughline broadcast a 64 minute episode, American Socialist, about Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926). Debs was a restless mind. Among other things, he worked in the railroad industry and then as a city clerk for Terre Haute Indiana and a state legislator before becoming a political activist. Debs had an understanding of and sympathy for regular people and their plights. Many workers worked 14-16 hours/day, 6 or 7 days a week. The work was often crushing.
In the early days there were no worker protections or labor unions. Workers were routinely injured, killed or their health broke due to overwork. In some places there were company towns and when economic times turned bad, workers were not paid enough to pay for rent and food. That kept them in constantly increasing debt to the company. In bad times, companies cut worker pay so that the impacts on the flow of wealth to owners and shareholders was minimized. There was serious poverty in cities like East St. Louis, where starving men, women and children begging for food roamed some of the streets, presumably streets where they were allowed to roam.
Debs quit the railroad in East St. Louis after a friend was crushed to death by a locomotive. He moved back to Terre Haute and determined he would do what he could to improve working conditions for railroad workers. That's when he ran for city clerk and was elected. While he was a clerk for Terre Haute, he tended to not impose fines on prostitutes because fines were not imposed on their customers. After two terms there, he was elected to the Indiana state general assembly.
In the state legislature, Debs introduced a bill that would hold Railroad companies liable for the deaths and injuries of their workers. The state House passed his bill, but Indiana Senate gutted it by removing enforcement measures. This experience led Debs to lose faith in the political process. It began his transition from a capitalist who wanted meaningful reform to a socialist. Debs left politics and moved on to labor organizing and writing articles for newspapers. Early on he argued for capitalist reform.
Debs became disillusioned because labor groups that were forming were fragmented and often competed against each other. The biggest union, the AFL led by Sam Gompers was exclusive, women and racial minorities were mostly excluded. Debs believed there was more strength in labor unity than in fragmentation based on worker skill level, race and sex. Debs then founded the American Railway Union (ARU), which attempted to unite railway workers nationwide. Debs tried and almost succeeded in getting the ARU to accept black workers, particularly the black porters who worked for the Pullman rail car company. That close failure might has altered the course of labor history in the US. Without the porters, the ARU had to resort to tactics that eventually led to the breaking of the union.
One of the program's two hosts and co-founders, Rund Abdelfatah, commented on the issue of divided labor: "When we allow ourselves to be pitted against each other, we gut our own chances of success."
Debs was sort of imprisoned (a 'soft' house arrest) for leading a strike against the railroads. At this time he could have all kinds of visitors, and socialists approached Debs to try to recruit him. Debs' logic included his observation that the Republican Party was the party of the big capitalists, while the Democratic Party was the party of the little capitalists, leaving no party on the side of the workers. Debs resisted socialism a couple years more, but eventually accepted that it was the only realistic alternative to the two-party system of his time.
Debs later ran for president 5 times, once from prison. In 1897, he founded the Social Democracy Party of America based on the remnants of the old ARU. He was vilified by some as an anarchist and others as a dictator. His speeches against Woodrow Wilson arguing resistance to the World War I military draft landed him in jail under the Sedition Act. Wilson called Debs "a traitor to his country."[1] Debs argued strenuously that the American people had no say in making war. He saw World War I as a rich man's pursuit using the blood of the people as a consumable in the effort to make money for themselves.
Debs and the American socialist movement scared the bejesus out of hard core capitalists. They used their own private militias, state and local police and the US Army to fight against and murder striking workers. But over time, some of the more astute and less rigidly ideological among the elites realized that some worker concessions would be needed or things might really get out of hand and actual socialism could rise in America. Things like the 40 hour work week, some worker protection laws, and the beginning of a social safety net eventually came into being. The capitalists opposed it all, but over time they were forced to civilize themselves at least enough to co-opt the socialists by making some concessions and keeping workers as divided among themselves as possible. All of that continues to this day.
Capitalist tactics have not changed. Capitalism has one and only one universal or nearly universal moral imperative, profit without social conscience, despite some recent squeaks to the contrary.[2] Maximize profit, minimize risk, externalize worker and environmental damage as much as possible, whenever possible by any means possible, legal or not. That's the capitalist moral mindset. It does not look to be merely amoral.
Personal observations and comments
For what it's worth, this broadcast really resonated personally. The mental journey that Debs went through from capitalist reformer to socialist (presumably also with some capitalism reformation) is akin to a mindset reassessment I'm going through now. The corrosive moral rot of capitalism's constant assertion that it is just business and amoral, is pure deceit. It's a Big Lie. The moral rot inherent in unregulated capitalism is a significant source of the degradation of American democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. To me, unregulated capitalism is inherently demagogic and autocratic-plutocratic. In my opinion, the high stakes political fight we are in now is a continuation of the fight that Debs engaged in long ago.
That fight is corrupt, autocratic, Christian nationalist Republican Party demagoguery fighting hard and dirty for power and wealth concentrated among the chosen elites against a fragmented, divided and distracted urge for democracy with less demagoguery fighting for more distributed power and wealth.
Regarding socialism, capitalists always paint it as a failed ideology and point to the worst of the worst examples. The ideology has never dominated in America, so how it would work here is an open question. Capitalists also always vilify European socialism, but (i) they never mention the fact that many European countries have populations that are happier than Americans, and/or (ii) they downplay happiness as something not important.
Questions:
1. Is it reasonably accurate to boil current American politics mostly down to a fight between forces that want authoritarianism with power and wealth concentrated among the elites against forces that want democracy and civil liberties with power and wealth more distributed among the masses?
2. Is it correct to argue that unregulated capitalism is (i) often or usually inherently immoral and/or (ii) inherently anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian?
3. Does American public education do a great, good, mediocre, bad or God awful job of teaching children the sordid, violent history of American labor and the role of heavily vilified, slandered and lied about people like Debs?
Footnotes:
1. For context, President Wilson mounted a massive federal government propaganda campaign manned by over 150,000 people to deceive and con the American people. The goal was con mostly reluctant Americans into supporting World War I and volunteering to fight in that mindless, hideous slaughter. The tactics that Wilson's "Committee on Public Information" (1917–1919), used included vicious propaganda. One favorite tactic included the still-popular modern tactic of tarring people who oppose war as traitors. Does that sound familiar and contemporary? It should because it is.
Looking back one can now reasonably ask, was the real traitor to the American people Wilson or Debs?
2. Nobel prize laureate Milton Friedman publicly argued that CEOs with a social conscience were subversive because they tended to be damaging to profit.
Dave Daubenmire is a man so obsessed with a domineering vision of masculinity that he encourages bullying, particularly when it is directed at homosexuals. Further, he argues that not allowing Christians to bully gays is a form of bullying, and that this is only one of many reasons America has been "sissified."
Dave Daubenmire’s $100 Million Plan to Fund His Right-Wing Culture War
Radical religious-right activist Dave Daubenmire has teamed up with anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Sherri Tenpenny to launch a new organization called The Christian Revolution that is designed to be a funding mechanism to support right-wing activists and causes around the country.
