Month: November 2016

In the discussion of what went wrong, very little has focused on the advertising.  This is probably wrong headed – Clinton based much of her strategy on TV advertising.

This was her closing ad – and the only to run in significant numbers in Michigan.

https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKDHioNLb4I

A friend from the Sanders campaign involved in the ad campaign thought, and indeed had heard, that it was an attempt at copying the Sanders closing argument in Iowa.

Sanders had Paul Simon’s “America”, Clinton’s had Katy Perry’s “Roar”.

Here is the Sanders ad:
https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nwRiuh1Cug

There is no doubt the Sanders ad worked in Iowa.  I had people mention it when I canvassed.

The campaigns were in completely different places at the time. This is actually one of the few positive ads I saw from Clinton.  Virtually all of her advertising was negative.

The Sanders ad was meant to tall a story. From individuals coming together to form a movement. So the family, the farmer, the small businessmen to the small crowd to the large crowd. It was mean to convey how one voice coming together could change the world. It was brilliant

 By the time it aired everyone knew in Iowa what Sanders was for.

I don’t think people ever had the same sense with Clinton.  Her policy positions were not featured in her advertising – and if you went back and looked at Bills advertising in ’92 the contrast would be remarkable.

The Clinton ad was similar in ways – capturing the different reasons why people were voting for her. But – and I admit I am a Sanders guy – I don’t think it fit where her campaign was at the time.

There was a landslide to win in 2016 – one seen in the trial heats between Obama and Trump late in October and trial heats between Sanders and Trump.

The problem I think is the Clinton campaign never made the message of what they were for very clear in their own ads.  As a result their closing ad doesn’t work – and Sanders ad did.

To work ads like these need a predicate that comes before.  The Clinton campaign never built one.

This week’s video is from Sleigh Bells:

The song was featured in a key scene toward the end of season one of Jessica Jones. The rest of their work is worth checking out.

See you next week, when I have another one up.

Laurie Penny, The New Statesman: No, identity politics is not to blame for the failures of the left

All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicised than others. The notion that the politics of identity and belonging have been allowed to overwhelm seemingly intractable issues of class, power and poverty is, in fact, entirely correct – but this is not a problem for the traditional left. It is a problem for the traditional right, which has pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy for centuries, pitting white workers against black and brown workers, men against women, native-born citizens against foreigners in a hierarchy of victimhood that diverts energy and anger away from the vested interests bankrolling the entire scheme.

Tell me who in the current group of Democratic elected officials understands that in practical terms at the core of their being.  Note that Bernie Sanders is still independent, was savaged for not having this at the core of his being, and although an important voice in the Democratic caucus (in contrast with the Democratic Party), has influence really only among 10% of the people required to win national elections.

This goes again to the question of who is the opposition coalition and what they stand for.

What won the election was the idea of exclusion and the freedom to exclude.  Laurie Penny rightly asks who really benefits from that result?   The cabinet appointments should make the answer to that question pretty apparent.

Who will stand against that idea of exclusion for the sake of collective bargaining in real populist power?

In the aftermath on the housing crisis that led to the Great Recession, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it called Death to My Hometown.  Here are some of the lyrics:

I awoke on a quiet night, I never heard a sound
The marauders raided in the dark
And brought death to my hometown
They brought death to my hometown

They destroyed our families, factories
And they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains
The vultures picked our bones

So, listen up my sonny boy, be ready when they come
For they’ll be returning sure as the rising sun
Now get yourself a song to sing
And sing it ’til you’re done
Sing it hard and sing it well
Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves who came around
And ate the flesh of everything they found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Who walk the streets as free men now

They brought death to our hometown, boys
Death to our hometown

It’s a stirring protest song set to Celtic marching music. And it identified the correct culprits. There’s not a word in there about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac giving mortgages to underserving blacks or homeowners getting unwarranted debt relief from dishonest brokers.

A real populist uprising might have gone after the greedy thieves whose crimes went unpunished instead of elevating a reality-show fraudster with narcissistic personality disorder and dozens of petty scores to settle.

But Trump at least gave the middle finger to an establishment that enabled the housing crisis and looked the other way as families and factories were destroyed over the last several decades.

Even this isn’t good enough to prevent the the return of the robber barons, though. Not when former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin is going to be Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn is in line to be his director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Let’s go into the Wayback Machine:

In late 2007, as the mortgage crisis gained momentum and many banks were suffering losses, Goldman Sachs executives traded e-mail messages saying that they would make “some serious money” betting against the housing markets.

The messages, released Saturday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, appear to contradict statements by Goldman that left the impression that the firm lost money on mortgage-related investments.

In the messages, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, acknowledged in November 2007 that the firm had lost money initially. But it later recovered by making negative bets, known as short positions, to profit as housing prices plummeted. “Of course we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess,” he wrote. “We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts.”

He added, “It’s not over, so who knows how it will turn out ultimately.”

In another message, dated July 25, 2007, David A. Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, reacted to figures that said the company had made a $51 million profit from bets that housing securities would drop in value. “Tells you what might be happening to people who don’t have the big short,” he wrote to Gary D. Cohn, now Goldman’s president.

Sound like vultures to me.

And what about Mnuchin?

Critics have raised many questions about Mnuchin’s financial dealings, from a lawsuit over pocketing profits in the Bernie Madoff case to his suspiciously quiet exit from the Hollywood production company Relativity Media just before it took huge losses and filed for bankruptcy. Just his association with “vampire squid” Goldman Sachs has motivated some anger. But another part of Mnuchin’s history is more relevant: his chairmanship of OneWest Bank, a major cog in America’s relentless foreclosure machine.

Even among the many bad actors in the national foreclosure crisis, OneWest stood out. It routinely jumped to foreclosure rather than pursue options to keep borrowers in their homes; used fabricated and “robo-signed” documents to secure the evictions; and had a particular talent for dispossessing the homes of senior citizens and people of color.

Sounds like he “ate the flesh of everything he found.”

I’m trying to work my way through what’s happened to our politics and our country, and that will come at its own pace. But I can’t get over how badly our country’s elites misjudged the fury they created, nor how stupid that furious reaction has been.

Electing Trump as the solution for this is dumber than starting a land war in Asia. It’s just deplorable.

The Republicans have issued a legal complaint against Jill Stein’s recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan on the basis that Stein is the one legally compelling the recount, but the only possible beneficiary is Clinton. That clearly implies Clinton could possibly benefit. They also allege coordination in fundraising. I don’t know the law on coordination, but the assertion that Clinton could benefit, but Stein could not, implies that the recount could give Clinton victory in the state. If the “benefit” in question is merely the PR benefit of an increased vote total not changing the outcome, Stein is as likely to benefit as Clinton. The only benefit that could possibly accrue to Clinton, but not to Stein, is victory in the contest, and that is only true if you consider victory a realistic possibility in Clinton’s case, but not in Stein’s.

By making this argument in court, the GOP has put itself on record as acknowledging the possibility that the recount could turn the states to Clinton.

Here’s a good site to track developments, which the liberal press is mostly not covering:

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-11-30/the-latest-stein-to-seek-presidential-recoun
t-in-michigan

foreign policy vision:

Special Bonus, also apropos:

Having worked as a county coordinator for ACORN perhaps gives me some unique perspective on how Voter ID laws are likely to play out in real life. But if I know firsthand, the designers of these laws have known from strategic, psychological, statistical and practical points of view that the laws would cause lower turnout in poor urban neighborhoods. In other words, the laws are designed to do the exact opposite of what I was trying to do with ACORN.

Though it’s difficult to quantify the effect of voter suppression in 50 states, Hajnal reports in a new study that after Texas implemented a strict voter-ID law, Latino turnout dropped sharply between 2010 and 2014, and the gap between white and Latino turnout increased by 9.2 percentage points. In the rest of the country, the gap between white and Latino turnout decreased over the same period.

Wisconsin adopted a tough photo-ID law, and in Milwaukee, where a large number of African Americans don’t drive or have licenses, turnout declined in 2016 by 41,000 compared with 2012, a 15 percent drop. Turnout was significantly lower than in 2004 and 2008 as well. The dropoff was steepest in the poorest precincts.

“No matter how hard one tries to attribute this to lower voter interest in this election, the stark drop must be attributable to impact of the photo-ID rule,” argues Kristen Clarke, head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

It’s very difficult for Americans who live in car-based communities to understand and avoid being judgmental about mass transit-based communities. In 2004, I was working out of a North Philadelphia office in a heavily black neighborhood. I needed dozens of workers, so I had a lot of interviews and hiring to do. And I had a lot of paperwork.

When I placed an ad in the paper for low-wage temporary work, a line formed down the stairs from my second story office and half way around the block. The applicants ranged in age from 16 to 60, but most of them were under twenty-one. They did not drive. Their families did not own cars. Some of them had photo IDs from school or even from a library or gym, but almost none of them had a driver’s license.

There were no banks in their neighborhood, but an inability to open a bank account was the only liability I could detect. They simply did not need a driver’s license, and the younger among them didn’t need a photo ID to go out drinking or for any other purpose.

But this made hiring them more difficult especially when combined with the fact that they generally had no idea where their birth certificates were, had no passports, and often couldn’t supply their Social Security card. I lot of my time got tied up with helping people figure out how to get enough documents in order that I could pay them.

But that was a sign of something else. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street and a few gas stations nearby, but 95% of the jobs in the neighborhood were off the books. Those who worked had to take mass transit or walk a long way to get to their place of employment. When someone like me showed up looking to make 60 hires, most of them weren’t prepared for it.

Now, if they wanted to get a state-issed identification card rather than a driver’s license that they did not need, they could do that by traveling to the south side of the city and making a couple of transfers. It would cost them to get there and back, and it would cost them to get the ID card. But let me put things in a little perspective.

In order to get my employees paid, I had to get everything cleared from ACORN’s New Orleans’ office, and they weren’t the height of efficiency. Often the checks would come in and one or more would be inexplicably missing. Of course, I was the first person to take blame for this and it was my responsibility to solve it. What quickly became clear is that these checks, as paltry as they were, were going to go straight to PECO to keep the lights and heat on in their apartments. People weren’t working for shopping money.

This was also clear to me from sitting in ACORN’s office where the majority of the visitors were coming in to get assistance in avoiding losing their homes after deceptive mortgage deals resulted in initial teaser rates followed by unsustainable balloon payments.

In this community, most everybody was living close to the edge, and taking a cab to a train to a bus to get to the Division of Motor Vehicles so that they could spend twenty-five bucks on a voter ID card wasn’t a sensible financial decision.

I was trying to organize these folks into voter registration and get out the vote teams. I was very successful at doing it, and I learned a tremendous amount from them. They were hard workers. They were thrilled to have a legitimate paycheck for however brief a time. My best hires would be successful in almost any setting provided they had the opportunity and the training.

But they were all American citizens with the right to vote. And, the voter ID laws were designed to frustrate their ability to exercise that right.

I hear people say that it’s not much to ask for people to have a damn driver’s license. I want to shout expletives at those people, but I try to explain instead.

All people should be able to vote without it costing them anything. Inventing a problem that doesn’t exist (in-person voter impersonation and double voting) to deny these folks their right to vote is wrong.

It’s wrong but it works.

And it may have won the election for Trump.

It’s true that Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008, but he lost it in 2012 and Clinton took a shellacking there this year. Even Evan Bayh couldn’t carry the Hoosier State which seems to have come down with a case of Trump Fever. It’s unlikely that Joe Donnelly would be serving in the Senate if he had not had the good fortune to run in 2012 against Richard “God Loves Rape Babies” Mourdock, and Donnelly is definitely one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2018. There have already been a series of articles written about Donnelly (as well as other red state Democrats like Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, and Claire McCaskill) that argue he will feel compelled to cooperate with President Trump. However, when it comes to confirming Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health & Human Services, Donnelly is in the “Hell No” caucus.

Today, U.S. Senator Joe Donnelly announced that he will vote against Congressman Tom Price, a leader in pushing for Medicare privatization, who has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Price, the current House Budget Committee Chairman, was an architect of the Republican budget that would end the Medicare guarantee to seniors and transform it into a voucher program. In addition he has helped lead discussions on overhauling and privatizing Medicare and has said it is a top priority.

Donnelly said, “Tom Price has led the charge to privatize Medicare, and for this reason, I cannot support his nomination. I am ready to work with anyone who wants to improve access to quality health care for Hoosier families and seniors, but the nomination of Tom Price would put us on a direct path to end Medicare as we know it, which would raise health care costs and break a fundamental promise to seniors. I have fought to protect Medicare, and I will continue to oppose efforts to privatize Medicare or turn it into a voucher program.”

Last week Donnelly reiterated his commitment to Medicare and his opposition to privatizing Medicare, saying in part in a video message, “Let me say unequivocally to you now: I have fought to protect Medicare for this generation and for future generations. I have opposed efforts to privatize Medicare in the past, and I will oppose any effort to privatize Medicare or turn it into a voucher program in the future. If my colleagues have pragmatic ideas that strengthen Medicare, reduce the costs of care, crack down on waste, fraud and abuse, count me in, but if they want to phase out Medicare, or privatize the system, count me out.”

So, there’s a line in the sand from a Rust Belt Democrat.

Tom Price is a nut, and his birther-curious stance appears to be more than an act.

Sat next to Trump's HHS pick Tom Price on a flight a few years ago. Seemed decent enough til he said he wasn't sure of Obama's citizenship.

— jelani cobb (@jelani9) November 29, 2016

You have to wonder about a public official who feels compelled to raise the issue of the president’s citizenship with an African-American stranger he’s sharing a row of seats with on an airplane. If that man is a writer for New Yorker and a professor at Columbia University, all the more so.

Sarah Kliff has a good Vox explainer on the Obamacare replacement bill that Tom Price offered in the House, as well as the other plans that are getting bandied about. I think it’s safe to say that the Republicans are gearing up to do some deeply unpopular things with our health care system. This will be true for governors who want Medicaid money, insurers who want a system that is profitable and attractive to their customers, the elderly who want their Medicare guaranteed, veterans who like the veteran’s hospital system, people in their 50’s and 60’s who want affordable insurance policies, folks who have preexisting conditions and want protection from loss of coverage, and millions of people who won’t be able to afford the stingy subsidies on offer and will now lose their access to health care.

Sen. Donnelly is smart to oppose all of this, and to oppose it by going on the record early as opposing the man who will implement it all.

This isn’t the kind of obstruction and opposition that Rust Belt voters will punish.

Trump Strives to Undo 70 Years of Bipartisan U.S. Mideast Consensus | Tikun Olam |

In his place, the Wall Street Journal reports that Frank Gaffney has been tapped. He is the founder of the Center for Security Policy, perhaps the most Islamophobic think tank in Washington.

An NGO which monitors US hate groups, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, calls it

“… a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece
for the growing anti-Muslim movement
in the United States.”

About Frank Gaffney, Jr | SPLC |

Gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within, Gaffney believes that “creeping Shariah,” or Islamic religious law, is a dire threat to American democracy. In 1988, he founded the neoconservative turned anti-Muslim think tank Center for Security Policy.  He favors congressional hearings to unmask subversive Muslim conspiracies, and was even banned from far-right Conservative Political Action Conference events after accusing two of its organizers of being agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In His Own Words:

“We’re witnessing not just the violent kind of jihad that these Islamists believe God compels them to engage in, but also, where they must for tactical reasons, a more stealthy kind, or civilizational jihad as the Muslim Brotherhood calls it. We’re witnessing that playing out, not only in places in the Middle East but also in Europe, in Australia, in Canada and here in the United States as well.”  

Appointed in 1987, Gaffney was ultimately forced out of the Pentagon. The Washington Post observed at the time that within four days of Frank Carlucci’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, all his belongings were boxed in.

○ Fear Inc: Funding Islamophobia in America
○ McCain’s Dismissal of Bachmann’s Accusation – More Background [Frank Gaffney Jr.]
○ Neocons Covert Action and Ukraine Watch

The analysis of “a powder keg” or “Pandora’s box” or just plain common sense predicted what would pass in 21th century America with George Bush and Barack Obama on foreign policy in the Middle East. Could it get much worse with a mix of Trump, evangelical thought and the second coming of Christ?

Further reading …

○ Why They Don’t Want Us in Syria by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Who is more radical than Antonin Scalia?

In a 1989 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the right of protests to burn the flag in a 5-4 decision, with the late Justice Antonin Scalia siding with the protesters. He later said he based his ruling on a “textual” reading of the Constitution.

“If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag,” Scalia said in 2015 in Philadelphia. “But I am not king.”

I don’t like it when people burn the American flag, but I’m also disciplined enough not to voluntarily give their act power by reacting in a wounded way. I certainly don’t think the penalty should be “loss of citizenship or [a] year in jail!” as Donald Trump asserted in one of his latest tweets.

Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

Those softies on the Supreme Court decided way back in 1958 that stripping people of citizenship as punishment is “cruel and unusual” and therefore violates the 8th Amendment.

Obviously, most people react with visceral distaste when the flag is disrespected, and it’s politically popular to protect it, which is why Hillary Clinton thought it would be a swell idea to cosponsor a bill in 2005 that would fine flag-burners $100,000 and put them behind bars for a year. Some of us saw that pandering as an excellent reason to support someone else in the 2008 primaries.

It certainly makes it harder to criticize Trump for suggesting something similar, doesn’t it?

It’s also a reminder that Scalia’s unique form of extremism had its occasional advantages.