Perhaps the greatest difficulty I have talking about the economy is that most people don’t understand what an economy is.
An economy is what people produce and the relations that make that production possible.
An economy is not money. Printing more money does not automatically increase the size of the economy as various episodes of hyperinflation clearly indicate, but also as the giant printing of money in the last five years should have shown to people.
Money is created by printing in a fiat economy, whether it is physically printed or not. When a bank creates a loan it simply adds numbers to various accounts, and it does not have to “have money to loan”. The same is true of brokerages offering loans for stock purchases and so on. There is no direct organic relation between the amount of money in the economy and the amount of economic activity.
Moreover it is quite possible to increase the amount of money in the economy while decreasing activity. When a huge loan is taken out to buy a company, and then the company has employees slashed and plants closed, real economic activity decreases, even as the amount of money increases. When you insist on 15% profits and obtain them by refusing to do needed maintainance, firing employees, doing stock buy-backs and so on, real economy activity decreases.
If you measure the output of an economy in money you get a very distorted picture of what is actually going on. There is less employment in the US in percentage terms than there was at peak, and absolute numbers are only now about getting even, yet people have been blathering on about a “recovery”.
It is quite possible for people to be doing things that are, on net, negative. Every dollar earned by the financial industry in the 2000s was lost and then more in the financial collapse: real damage to real productive capacity was done. We were earning more money, GDP was increasing, and (at least) houses were getting built, but the cost was offshoring and outsourcing of jobs and decreased actual wellbeing (it is in the 2000s that American height, for example, began to decrease.)
Money is not the economy, and increases in money do not necessarily mean the economy is getting better or even bigger, let alone actually increasing the welfare of the population.
Now increases in money SHOULD reflect increases in the welfare of the people, or at least in the size of the economy. Money should have an organic relationship to the economy. But for it to do so we must want it to.
Take the classic post-war economy (pre 70s.) You can borrow money if you have a house or a business. The house is valuable not so much because you can live in it, but because living in it means you are close to a job. It is the job that allows you to afford the house, and if you lose the job, the house still has value because there are other jobs nearby for someone else. If you do not believe this, I invite you to look at what happened to housing prices in Detroit when the auto industry left that city.
The house is secondary, though, the jobs come first. A farm has value because you can grow food and sell it, a business has value because it makes money. All of these things, presumably, produce goods or services that people want or need, and if you no longer want to run your farm or business, someone else can. A loan just allows you to take some of the future value of what you own, and use it today.
Economic financialization seems like an extension of this system. If you have a money flow of any type, why not borrow against it? Why not borrow against its appreciation? Why not then sell those money flows for money today? There are three problems: the first is pyramiding. You borrow against a money flow, then you use leverage and buy other money flows and then you leverage on them, and soon the underlying asset is a tiny fraction of the money you have. (No leverage on loaned money is thus the first principle of avoiding problems, loaned money is already leverage.)
The second problem is printing money with no underlying asset at all. When the Fed is creating 82 billion out of midair every month, half of which is spent on treasuries, there is no organic relation to the underlying economy.
The third is that some people get to borrow money for much less than other people. Banks get prime (or less). Large investors get close to prime, ordinary people get Prime ++, if they can get less than 20% on a credit card. This is justified by “risk”, but the risk is mostly that the person doesn’t have access to essentially free (prime rate) money. It also distorts the economy, because it favors financial companies since the interest rate is the cost of money, and the cost of money is a cost of business, which means financial operations are cheap even before you get to the fact that financial operations also have access to the highest amounts of leverage.
The problem here is that finance creates NOTHING of worth itself. It exists (or should exist rather) only to facilitate creating goods and services with actual value: food, housing, entertainment, medicine, art, philosophy and so on. Those goods and services, or rather the people, equipment and relationships that produced them, are the economy. Finance’s purpose is only to help allocate money between those activities, and it is only one mechanism of allocation. The market will not allocate money properly to many goods because it undervalues the future (so, for example, education, especially in the humanities and basic science), cannot account for externalities not embedded in the valuation system (that you are getting sick from my pollution is not the market’s problem), and cannot value anything that is not denominated in cold hard cash (like love, or friendship or a sunny day free of smog or the health of someone who doesn’t make money.)
Any society which makes all or most of its decisions about how to allocate money through the market mechanism will be hell on earth and will devalue those things most important to human happiness and meaning. It is not an accident that the depression rate in the US has increased by an order of magnitude in the last hundred years.
If you give outsize money returns to finance then, it drives out actual productive investment in the real economy. If you make the market your primary method of allocating funds, it doesn’t allocate resources to the future or to intangibles and ignores externalities which are key both to long term growth and avoiding negative outcomes (like your kid having cancer, or your spouse dying of cancer, or your sibling having a debilitating case of depression.)
But the problem is worse than this. Money, as my friend Stirling Newberry has noted, is permission: it is the right to decide what other people do with their time. Money lets you buy up people who spend all day lobbying government, it lets you create political movements, it lets you buy up think tanks and universities, it lets you create your own mercenary army. If you are throwing off more money than other industries, it lets you take over those industries. It lets you buy government, and thus control the rules.
If some group, in an economy, has a consistently higher rate of return than other groups over a long period of time, they WILL become dominant in that society absent a reaction by violent men. Period. Because they can use that money to decide what other people do. This is true not just of finance, it is true of any group of people controlling a bottleneck resource (see: oil, among others).
You can solve this one of two ways: you can make sure no one gets these consistent outsize returns in the first place (remember, basic economics, if an industry is making more than average profits, they are not in a competitive market, there is an inefficiency). Or you can just take their excess profits away from them.
IF you choose not to do so, because they have bought the system and created an ideology that says it is unfair to take money away from people who are given a systemic advantage by being allowed to create money from thin air and/or borrow it at prime when no one else can; or that the people allowed to control oil production should be allowed to keep all its benefits because they created the oil, or some such, then those people WILL come to control your society and they will create it in their image.
I will discuss at a later day happiness and meaning (and even eudomania), which should be the sane goal of any political economy. I will discuss how to design an economy which works for everyone. But the first thing to realize is that you must want that, and you must believe it is Just that your society be run that way.
If you do not believe that it is moral and right and just to tax people who have a structural advantage in your economy (and that structural advantage can and will exist if you remove the State entirely), if you do not believe you are allowed to redistribute, if you do not understand what the economy is for (creating the good life), if you do not believe in not allowing concentrations of private power based on position, then you will not keep whatever prosperity and good life you have, because those who win the game (and someone always will) will buy up the game and change the rules to ensure their continued wealth and power. They will do so in a way that will cost you your liberty, your health and your prosperity.
There will always be winners and we don’t want to change that. Let them win, let them enjoy winning in their time, but do not allow them to buy the system, to destroy the actual productive capacity of the system, or to try and make money the sole determinant of how decisions are made. Doing so, letting market mechanisms work until they don’t, then continuing to use them anyway: refusing to enforce competitive markets and keep markets doing what they do well and only what they do well, is why we had a financial collapse, why we’re in a depression, and why we have a catastrophic climate change episode coming our way which will kill a billion people or more. It is why we are seeing a long term decline in happiness in market democracies, why we have soaring rates of depression and chronic disease, rising chronic unemployment, and a host of other social ills.
An economy exists to fill the needs of the people in it, material and non-material. It has no other purpose.
(This is a comment elevated from my post on why Democrats and Obama don’t do what progressives want. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)
by Jerome Armstrong
In the fall of 2002, I was busy putting together about a 10-page memo for Joe Trippi on how Howard Dean could win the upcoming Presidential campaign. And it had revolution written throughout. Fundraising, organizing, communicating, the whole thing. In that document was laid out the fifty state organizing campaign, how blogs would build the movement around Dean, and how small dollar online donors could become bigger than the John Kerry’s decades-long amassed donor mailing list. Nothing short of revolutionary. If you’ve read Trippi’s book, you’ll see that he gained insight into applicable tactics from the rip roaring 90′s Raging Bull financial commenting site. I was also on those boards (for better or worse– or much worse), so we were both of similar mind when Joe got the opportunity to take over managing the campaign, on the possibilities. We also saw what McCain did after New Hampshire, with online fundraising, in 2000. It was quite fantastic. Heady days. But the point is that it was all revolutionary for the campaign, especially so being the primary for Democratic President. The electricity of the netroots movement emerged right alongside Howard Dean message that was anti-Bush, anti-war, and full-bore partisanship.
And if you experienced that ’03 campaign, you gained insight into those revolutionary tactics. If you did not, then they didn’t make up what you brought to your next campaign. And the experience didn’t need to be one of being on the winning side either. I have to credit a book that Nate Wilcox had me read for understanding this, by my looking at what happened with TV and how it changed political campaigning, by Ray Strothers called “Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting”.
So, in 2003, we on Dean’s campaign had a big advantage on the rest of the campaigns. Dean, for the most part, knew the message to use. The campaign knew exactly what tools to use to grow. None of the other campaigns (Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman) could figure the internet part out (save Clark’s nascent campaign).
Howard Dean’s Strategy
As we entered the Spring of 2003, the Dean campaign staff gathered together with early bundlers for a strategic retreat in Vermont at the Trapp family lodge. Trippi had always worked on separate presidential campaigns against Paul Maslin. So, wanting to work together, he had brought him on as Dean’s pollster. They put together a campaign strategy that made sense. In short, rely on the internet-based strategy to grow the campaign up to the caucuses and primaries. Dean would lose to Gephardt in Iowa, placing second. Then, followed by Dean winning first in New Hampshire, he’d thereafter steamroll to the nomination. This plan went awry by the Fall though, when public polls came out showing Dean way ahead in Iowa too. Maslin tried to temper Dean’s expectations, but Dean decided a sweep was a must, and the whole campaign strategy was changed. Iowa all of a sudden meant everything.
Dean For America
Second, also from that March 2003 Trapp family lodge meeting. Trippi, Markos, Zephyr, Matt Gross and a few others and myself sat out on the front lawn early into the next morning, drinking and talking about what we were in the middle of transpiring. Finally, around 2 am, the staff comes to shut us up for the night, as the other guests are complaining. As we are ending and walking in, I ask Trippi what’s going to happen when it looks like Dean might win. At the point, it was still unfathomable to most, but I could tell it wasn’t a new thought to him, but instead something he’d been mulling quite a bit, and he replied: “the moment when the insurgent becomes the frontrunner is the moment when he either becomes the establishment or…” and just looks at me, like he was waiting for me to answer, but his face gives me no clue as to how to answer. My thought is that, ‘well yea, the insurgent throws down the revolution,’ but that answer didn’t phase the ‘what happens next’ look on Trippi’s face.
Fast forward about 6 months, I get onto the campaign elevator in the morning, arriving late as usual, same time as Trippi and his wife Kathy Lash. She turns to me and says, “Dean is going to be on next week’s cover of Time and Newsweek.” My first thought was to get them both signed by Dean, which I did later, but I turned to Joe and said to his nodding up, “I guess this is that moment”.
Well, what came next first is that Dean tried to become the establishment candidate. By November and December 2003, the formal endorsements. First Labor groups, then Al Gore & Bill Bradley, were rolled out. Tom Harkin in Iowa. Dean’s poll numbers grew higher. The fundraising numbers went through the roof, but a funny thing was happening with grassroots internet support. It was coming to a standstill around 600,000. I was running all of the online advertising for the campaign, so I firsthand saw the efficacy and resulting metrics for every ad we put out there. We were growing in fundraising, but the movement wasn’t getting bigger. It got so bad, that Nicco Mele had to fudge up the email signup numbers that were public on the website some days (due no doubt in part to Clark’s campaign which I’ll mention below), and we had to figure out techniques to do more than juice them going higher.
What Happens Next read more…
By Jerome Armstrong
I want to say something about the role of a blogger, just to try and frame the expectations and limitations inherently in place. The blogger is like that first follower in the famous Derek Sivers video, that is: “the first follower is the person that transforms the lone dancing guy into someone leading a movement.” So, when I saw Howard Dean dancing solo among the Democrats, at a Democratic Party gathering up in Seattle in June 2002, I started blogging, ‘hey there’s a guy dancing here’ I’m dancing now too, and so on, and a movement started…
This is the arena of politics, the politicians are the ones that have to be the crazy lone dancer for there to be bloggers to stand up and dance along. That’s their role. So its not a correct frame to say “FDL didn’t go down with the ship against ACA” in spring ’10, when already, the the only ones that came forward to dance, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, both stopped, and became supporters. No dance, nothing to follow; the music has stopped.
As for the modern day (2001-2013) Democratic Party’s politicians. They’ll dance quite a jig during the campaign. When in power, they’ll dance on an populist issue here or there, usually when it’s not likely to have much a chance of passing. Mostly though, they just look busy while holding up the wall.
And it’s not about ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ but about the politicians moment on the stage. When a leader starts dancing, the early followers jump in, and a movement starts. If the leader stops dancing, that’s when a movement dies. If, however, even in losing, they kept on dancing, that’s a movement that will live another day.
This is something we see play out over and over on both sides of the aisles, among the populist progressives and libertarians, usually against the old guard. A dance starts, they laugh first, then get pissed, start fighting, charge in using whatever it takes, claim ownership of the floor, and shut down the dancer.
(This a comment elevated from my post on the failure of the why progressives don’t get much of what they want from politicians. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)
Let us talk, today, about violence, resistance and revolution. It has been observed that armed populations often seem to be more free, equally it has been observed that armed populations live in a state of misery and anarchy, as in most failed states, where virtually everyone is armed.
An armed population, alone, means little. For all of the talk about how important it is to have Americans armed so they can “resist tyranny”, the fact that America is awash in guns has done nothing significant to stop the erosion of civil liberties and the rise of plutocracy. Indeed many of those screaming loudest for policies which ensure their own poverty, the power of the rich, and thus the decline of effective democracy are the most heavily armed.
Guns alone mean little.
America’s founding fathers wanted Americans to have guns and be in well regulated militias. In this, as in many things, they were wise. A militia, properly oriented towards the community it serves, is an organized body of citizens who have military training and are used to fighting as a group. They have ties to the community, and there is not more than one militia per community, they also have ties to whatever local government exists. If enough of these militias decide, as groups, to resist the government, they can do so.
Individual violence is not a threat to the state. The threat of assassination can act as a brake on the activities of politicians (though I, of course, would never suggest it). It is notable that the concrete barricades and ludicrous overprotection of DC politicians, especially the President, picks up exactly as plutocracy gets underway. Say what you will about Nixon: he went to meet protesters, at night, with a single aide and no bodyguards. He was not afraid of his own citizens, even those who disagreed with his policies. It is unimaginable that Clinton, Bush or Obama would do such a thing.
To some extent the right wing gets some of what they want because they are armed, and every once in a while their crazies “go off”. Rhetoric justifying violence is regularly issued by the right wing, and it works: when a political attack occurs, it’s almost always against someone perceived as a left winger. The days when there was any chance of being beaten up by a “union thug” as a pol are long gone, let alone having a genuine anarchist blow up your building, but you can still be shot in the head by a right winger.
Moreover people have simply not understood the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Mexico. The modern toolkit of violence is amazing at area denial. If the US government starts losing control of chunks of the US, what it will look like is Mexico or Iraq: places where they can’t go without police cars or tanks blowing up, sporadic attacks by people who fade away. Terror against the police and their families. It will not be some great glorious slugging match between armies, because anyone stupid enough to fight the US that way will lose.
The problem with modern insurgency technologies, however, is that you can’t protect anything. So you can deny the writ of the state, you can create places where they can only go in force, you can make it so they control the ground their boots are on and nothing more, but you can’t create a sub-state, because they will find it and destroy it: any facilities you build or staff they’ll bomb; any public leadership they’ll assassinate and they’ll kill as much of the secret leadership as they can.
Modern states, and especially the US state, after Iraq and Afghanistan, are very aware of this. This is one of the main reasons for the rabid scramble to surveil everything: not just online, but offline. Put cameras, drones, satellites, listening devices (many cameras now eavesdrop) everywhere they can, add in recognition software and behaviour algos, and scoop everything up. The first sweep is algos, looking for behaviour that seems consistent with being a threat or even that is just unusual (Fred’s not doing what he usually does, let’s flag that.)
With this surveillance, the hope is to be able to stay on top the new technology of violence and area denial: we know where you go physically, online, what you buy, who your friends and family are. We know you, we can predict you, and if you get out of hand we know where to find you so we can grab you or kill you.
Historically the more the State needs its citizens to fight, the more power they have. You get universal male suffrage, generally, when you have the draft, you get selective male suffrage when part of the population fights and is required to fight (is not replaceable. You can replace US soldiers, Greek hoplites came from a class which could not be replaced with someone else.)
Even so human soldiers are a clear point of failure. They may not shoot their fellow citizens, and the more of them you have, the more likely it is they won’t shoot. Thus automated warfare: not just aerial drones, but ground robots, which are no more than a couple decades out. It’s a lot easier to kill someone from remote, when you don’t smell what humans smell like when their guts are ripped open, when you can turn off the sound on the screams.
If there is violence against the state, it will look Iraq or Afghanistan, not like the American Revolution. Add in other new techs like 3D printing, and you have an insurgency where virtually anyone with a minimum of tech skills and a few parts can make weapons. Some household chemicals which can’t be banned, and you have bombs. Drones will not, ultimately, be weapons of the strong, either, but weapons of the weak: they are not hard to make and if technically savvy people get motivated, they will be more than able to make their own air and ground drones.
The… issue, here, is the inability hold ground and protect infrastructure. What happens in this type of war is that it is difficult to land a knockout punch. So the country becomes a place where you have low (or high) grade terror, places where no one can go, and constant atrocities on both side as they try and destroy the will of the other side to resist, punish their enemies and cow the local population into obedience.
An armed population gives ruling class pause when it is not fully under their control and is organized by local elites not fully under the control of the central elites. But if those local elites go too wrong, you get armed militias imposing local shakedowns at best, tyranny at worst (see: Klu Klux Clan.) It gives more pause when they need that armed population to fight external foes who are actually an existential threat (Islam, again, is not an existential threat to the US.) It gives them pause when they fear assassination and need to maintain close contact with the population and not hide behind guards and walls all the time.
One must also recognize that despite its apparent overwhelming power, the US military is absolutely horrible at anti-insurgency. Take a map of Afghanistan or Iraq and plunk it down on a map of the continental USA.
The US is… big, very, very big. If the US military could not crush insurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan, if one ever gets seriously underway here, why do you think it could in America? Hmmm?
Thus, again, blanket surveillance and remote or (ultimately) automated killing machines.
If anyone wants to defeat a first world State, on its own ground, they will either need the mass active (not passive) support of the population, before the killing machines become active, or they will need to rethink, or more likely, adaptively learn, how to defeat the surveillance state. The model for this, of course, is Hezbollah, who runs a secret army and in certain respects, almost a secret state. You must have your own ways of communicating which cannot be tapped. You must know how to avoid the surveillance of the enemy, or take it out. You must know how to move without triggering the algorithims, and you must figure out some way to protect the organs of your nascent state, whatever they are, from destruction.
It may come to this, but we should hope it doesn’t, because civilization will be laid waste by it. The other route is the failure of ideology. The USSR did not fall in battle, it fell when the decision was made not to use the troops, by men who did no longer believed enough in the USSR to kill or die for it. A vast ennui had swept the USSR, they simply no longer believed in their form of communism. Done.
One problem with that is that it happens when it happens, and it may not happen for a long time: plutocrats don’t need any grand belief in anything more than money and passing it on to their heirs, and the people who fight for them don’t need to believe in much more than money either. Absent a belief to unify them against the ruling class, they’ll kill for their lords and masters.
The second problem was also displayed in Russia: if you don’t have an ideology to replace the old one that’s better than the old one, your society can go downhill fast. Russians were vastly worse off after communism than during communism. By some metrics they still are. America failing and accepting, say, Chinese state capitalism might not be a good thing.
The best way of overthrowing a state is to undermine belief in it and replace that belief with belief in something new and something better. Do those things, and while some violence may be necessary, you will find when push comes to shove that the state is rotten and can hardly fight, because those running it do not believe in it and those fighting against it are fighting for something not just against something.
Absent powerful external enemies, belief is what makes states, and it what destroys them, and even in cases where there are external enemies, great nations tend to rot from within before falling to outside foes, if they do not renew themselves first.
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(This post is written by Pachacutec, not by me. Pachacutec was a long time blogger at FireDogLake, and deeply involved in Netroots Strategy through 2009. – Ian)
By Pachacutec:
I read with interest my old friend Ian’s take on the failure of the progressive blogosphere, or “netroots,” from its beginnings in the early 2000’s until now. Ian and I had a little exchange about it on twitter, and he invited me to blog my take. Bottom line: I think Ian gets it partly right, but oversimplifies what happened.
Ian thinks the problem was essentially a moral failure:
So progressives have no power, because they have no principles: they cannot be expected to actually vote for the most progressive candidate, to successfully primary candidates, to care about policy first and identity second, to not take scraps from the table and sell out other progressive’s interests.
He also thinks progressives are more tribal than Tea Party conservatives are:
Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.
[SNIP]
The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary. They are feared.
I don’t want to get distracted by this last point, but let me just state my opinion that Tea Party, liberals, and anyone else you can name are all tribal as hell, and just as tribal as each other. What made the Tea Party different in electoral effectiveness was Koch brothers’ money. There were moral failures in the netroots, most spectacularly in the ways that various people responded to scarcity, the dearth of any money to be made and food to be bought out of full time activist liberal blogging. But that’s not the big reason for progressive bloggers inability to translate online passion into raw political power.
My role in the netroots was part activist blogger and partly as a guy trying to find a way to get sustainable funds into progressive blogs. That meant I purchased and paid close attention to metrics of progressive blog audience demographics. One reason we didn’t become a destabilizing political force, able to shape policy and elect politicians, was because we just lacked the demographic reach to do it. We thought (hoped) we could be a populist wave for change. Turns out we were just a current.
Progressive blog audiences mostly reached more educated white boomers, and, with some exceptions, more men than women. Progressive blog audiences geographically reached all over the US, but their very dispersion made it difficult to get anything going on the ground where people of like mind could coordinate together. That limited audience reach and growth that could translate into coalition building and political power.
It’s true, as Ian hints, that our white boomer audiences were still mostly people who believed in institutions. They grew up that way. They were collectively shocked at the direction of the country and the corruption of media and government in the Bush years, but they were not radicals. They still believed in these institutions. Most wanted reform, not fundamental systemic change. They still listened to a lot of NPR.
This is what Ian is getting at in his argument, though I don’t see this so much as a moral failure as it is a lack of educated boomer tribal experience, a function of cohort. These boomers believed in the American Dream, but the next generation coming up is having a very different experience in its formative years. I see this as more of a systems phenomenon, related to how generations learn and form their assumptions, than as a collective moral failing.
Some bloggers tried to get around their weakness in organizing people on the ground by allying with unions, whose whole infrastructure of politics was about people taking collective action locally. But it was an uneasy alliance for tribal reasons: blog audiences were not working class and were far less diverse than the membership of service employee unions.
Without funds to amplify or rapidly escalate their local reach, the way the Tea Party has had, the netroots got bypassed by the fundraising and organizing machine of Obama campaign, which tapped the rising demographic wave ready to be plucked on the center-left: young people, women and people of color.
The 2008 primary wars were the worst time for progressive blogging, because the ugliest sides of latent liberal tribalism between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp were in full bloom. Obama held the netroots in contempt and allied with establishment forces and hedge fund money to suck all the organizing life out of the netroots. That’s what constitutes the “failure” Ian describes, but with hindsight, I don’t think there was any way we could have overcome all of these systemic obstacles. We lacked money, we were too narrow in our reach, too unorganized, and as a result, we could not overcome establishment efforts to beat us back.
We did have a partial victory with Lamont over Lieberman, where we succeeded in creating a local presence. However, as Ian points out, Lieberman won as an Independent. We have, in part, both the Clintons and Obama to thank for this. As validators, they helped Lieberman. Obama travelled right through Connecticut during the campaign and avoided an appearance with the Democratic nominee, Ned Lamont, reneging on a non-public promise. Lieberman had been his mentor in the Senate. None of this was an accident. Bill Clinton talked up Lieberman, in spite of the fact that Holy Joe made much of his name pontificating about Bill’s penis.
Still, the Lamont campaign showed the establishment that the netroots really had to be dealt with. Obama performed the hit, in what we have come to know as his signature Quiet American style. There were no drones involved, unless you want to use the word to describe paid and unpaid tribal attack hacks, rather than flying death machines. Either way, Obama never likes to leave fingerprints or get his hands visibly dirty.
What remains of the netroots is not a movement in itself but a continuing current. Some people came through this very clarifying period for one’s character scarred but with their integrity intact. Duncan (Atrios) and Digby still document the atrocities. Howie Klein fights the good fight for grass roots candidates and against the DCCC. Joe Sudbay works persistently and effectively for gay equality and disenfranchised immigrants. Marcy’s persistent OCD and ability to connect the dots influences the influencers and the debate on the NSA. Ian shakes his fist at us, challenges us and reminds us of things we try not to think about because we just want to get through our day. Even Tom Matzzie, who has left politics, pops up from his embedded perch to fuck with Michael Hayden. There are others as well, I’m just citing examples to make my point.
Collectively, we failed at our most lofty ambitions, though we didn’t fail at everything. But with climate change and the time it will take for a possibly more radicalized youth cohort to effect more radical economic and social change, it may all be too late. Then again, it took decades between God and Man at Yale and Ted Cruz. There is something to be said for just finding a way to hang around and keep the narrative alive. It’s about all we can still do, and below the level of institutions, there are signs the culture may be catching up.
(This a comment elevated from my post on the failure of the progressive blog movement. It is written by Jerome Armstrong, not by me. Jerome was the founder of MyDD (Kos’s Blogfather) and co-author of Crashing the Gates, among other things- Ian)
by Jerome Armstrong
I didn’t see Lieberman’s 2006 win in quite as pinnacle a light at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been, had we followed it up more often, and won.
Yet I certainly peg the crux of lost movement with the rise of Obama’s campaign. It was an awful place to be in with Clinton vs. Obama, in the 2008 primary. My basic impulse (after Edwards –who had the populist message– imploded) was, like many bloggers (not the masses), to go with Clinton because she at least showed signs of being accountable to the netroots movement, unlike Obama. He didn’t need the netroots for his message and candidate-movement, he had places like Politico to push out of, and was basically an identity-politics cult for many new to politics that flooded the blogs.
But, I view the clincher happening a bit later, with Bill Halter’s loss in the 2010 Democratic primary in Arkansas. That is when it really ended. The whole Labor-Netroots coalition, Accountability Now, the blogs went all-in big (still barely united) with MoveOn and PCCC. Over $10 million to defeat a BlueDog that gave us this crappy corporate ACA debacle. But Obama did all he could behind to the scenes to defeat Halter. Obama dissed Lt. Gov Halter by embracing Lincoln (Michelle Obama once came to Fayetteville and recognized all of the politicians on the stage — Lincoln, and even Republicans — while ignoring Democratic Lt Gov Bill Halter standing behind her). Obama mailers pushed the LR area African-American vote into Lincoln’s camp in the run-off. Lincoln was a rural democrat– a base of voters that Halter took away from her. Obama being just neutral would have meant a Halter victory. But it wasn’t just the Lincoln victory, it was the way that national Democrats reacted to Halter’s message that convinced me the movement was finished. It took the attack site that we put up, BailoutBlanche.com, for me to see clearly what had happened.
This rising against the Democrats that aligned with the banks was the defining issue if this was to be a populist progressive movement within the party in 2010. We rolled it out with Bill’s campaign, and it struck her hard. Halter’s numbers soared among rural Democrats, taking on the banks was the top polling issue. Halter was gaining on the issue, overtook Lincoln, and the Democratic Party backlash against him was immense (it’s when Obama got involved heavily too). Halter buckled, and made us take down the website. A symbolic cave. Lincoln won the run-off by 4 percent.
Another flawed candidate progressives sided with? Sure, but it really didn’t matter in the big scheme of things. When Democrats sided with the banks in 2008, and the progressive movement balked at primary challenges against those bankster-sponsored incumbents in 2010, it was all over.
The night of Halter’s loss, I sunk into a couch at the Excelsior in Little Rock across from PCCC’s Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor. We all just slumped over speechless. So yea, contrast that with the highpoint party we had when Lamont defeated Lieberman in the ‘06 primary in Connecticut– when MoveOn’s Tom Mattzie was busting open the biggest champagne bottle I’d ever seen. This is where we arrived 4 years later. When, after having $10M to spend in a primary against a incumbent that sided with the banks and defeated the public option in the Senate, all it proved was that the sitting Democratic President was against us.
I would agree with your general basis of criticism, that of our movement being non-ideological to a fault, but I am not convinced that is a defining feature of the reason for the failure. First, we just have to recognize that Obama (and Clinton, for that matter) are hugely compromised politicians. Flawed liars, and the most responsible for the failure of enacting a “progressive” agenda. And second, that the Democratic Party as an establishment voice can be summed up pretty much the same way. Wellstone and Feingold are gone, and no one else has stood up.
You know, when Markos and I wrote Crashing The Gates, just when we finished the draft, I had an OMG moment, saying to him–”you know, we haven’t said at all what we meant by ‘progressive’ throughout the book.” I threw in a link in the footnotes to something about it moving things forward, but really, it made me pause to wonder at my faith that they meant what we meant. So, I’ve had to accept the failure to grasp that insight. We thought it was just about using tough tactics and the rest would follow. Because we knew it was the moment for the Democrats to have a massive majority. Fuck, weren’t we naive?
I left the Democratic party after 2010– threw away the whole Gravy Train Democratic consulting gig. Sure, I didn’t like the way that my entire world got dropped. I too put some years into it. As a sort of cleansing, last cycle I went to work helping to primary some incumbents in both parties for a rich Texan PAC, and managing libertarian Gary Johnson’s internet campaign. I felt a lot clearer and cleaner having done the partisan purge. It made me realize that libertarians and progressives have a lot more in common than do either libertarians with the Republican party or progressives with the Democratic party. I’ve also come to believe that this alliance is where the next movement is. It scares the shit out of the major parties, and the Government as a whole.
Yesterday, I was out on the DC Mall with this alliance. Against the surveillance state. Syria was another moment. SOPA also, and Audit the Fed. It’s a paradigm shifter, and it’s going to happen more and more. It could turn into something even bigger.
The alliance of progressives and libertarians (lets call it that for lack of a particular name for now) isn’t, for the most part, going to attract the purity-partisan types, the Democratic socialites like Tom Watson of Joan Walsh, or Daily Kos (though maybe Markos will get around to writing his “Libertarian Democrat” book and make a sea change there), but it’s going to happen regardless.
The oomph of the Democratic party in the blogosphere today can be summed up with a cursory glance at posts and comments on Balloon Juice, Little Green Footballs and Booman Tribune. They bend over backwards to justify the party bailing out banks, the nation going deeper into debt with global military expansion, and spying on citizens, yet they’ll nitpick that a libertarian is willing to allow abortion to be a state issue. They are more concerned with attacking truth-tellers like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden than they are keeping anyone accountable or demanding transparency. That’s what they are really good at– justifying why the powerful should stay so and attacking the ones who challenge power. And, if needed, providing a handy social lifestyle issue to keep the division. There’s no energy left. Nothing that inspires people that are pissed off and want change. Just finger-pointing at the other team. It’s become pointless and principle-less tribalism.
We saw a big step with the netroots organizing last decade. It was the most exciting thing to happen within the Democratic Party in decades, but I now view it in a wider scope, without the partisan obstacle.I don’t think it’s over. It is dark. The internet is still hopeful for organizing a revolution. What I saw happen with the movement against Obama invading Syria tugged at my attention. Maybe we still could have some real transformational shifts happen, in the US and globally. I hope so. I’m counting on it to keep my sanity from making the traditional American blitz. When things get too tight, picking it all up and moving further west… to some remote pacific island. No wifi, just yoga 
In the early 2000s progressive blogging seemed like a big deal. At the first Yearly Kos, as it was called then, big name politicians came and kissed our ass. We were covered by major newspaper and TV outlets. Etc…
Today, we are nothing.
The reason is simple: we could not elect enough of our people. We could not instill sufficient fear. We could not defeat incumbents. We did not produce juice. Clark and Dean didn’t win the 2004 Presidential nomination. Dean was taken out in a particularly nasty fashion (via the manufactured Dean Scream.)
The turning point was when Joe Lieberman, though defeated in a primary, managed to be elected anyway. After the 2006 House capture by Democrats, Pelosi’s democrats betrayed the fundamental principles that the prog blogosphere stood for: they did nothing to stop the war, for example. The Prog blogosphere took it, and worse, most of the blogs that did come out against House Democratic Vichy behaviour, lost audience. (Yes, they did. I tracked this stuff carefully at the time.)
The nail in the coffin was the 2008 primaries. To put it simply, Obama bypassed the blogging gatekeepers. Commenters, whether free or bought (and yes, I believe many were on the payroll) capsized DKos and other major blogs. Obama did not need the gatekeepers, he simply bought out the movement. The bloggers were irrelevant. At least one major blogger acted as a conduit for Obama hits: was fed oppo, and put that oppo out there.
After 2008 everyone knew that they didn’t need prog-bloggers and that they didn’t really need to fear bloggers. (They may be annoyed by “Firebaggers”, they do not fear them.)
Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.
So progressives have no power, because they have no principles: they cannot be expected to actually vote for the most progressive candidate, to successfully primary candidates, to care about policy first and identity second, to not take scraps from the table and sell out other progressive’s interests.
The Tea Party, say what you will about them, gets a great deal of obeisance from Republicans for one simple reason: they will primary you if they don’t like how you’ve been voting, and they’ll probably win that primary. They are feared. Progressives are not feared, because they do not believe enough in their ostensible principles to act on them in an effective fashion.
That is why the progressive revolution of the early 2000s failed. If you want the next left wing push to succeed, whatever it is called, learn the lessons of the last failure.
(Note: I poured years of my life into the movement. Its failure is my failure, and I take no pleasure in it at all.)
1) Ideology is key. If you like (or were horrified by) my Baseline Predictions post, understand that the next two posts on ideology were about the solution. Our decisions about what to do are virtually always ideological. You cannot think about any complex subject without ideology, without idea structures mediating. You cannot decide what to do without making judgments that are mediated through you world-view.
2) We know much of what must be done. We know we need to do it. We have not done it. That suggests this is not a “practical” problem.
3) The structure of everyday life (job work, regimented schooling for children, passive entertainment, consumer “choice” that isn’t real choice) produces our world-view, our ideology. We are left passive and accepting of social arrangement, unable to see that there are different ways to live. We accept the world as it is, and accept systematic injustice, even injustice that directly and clearly injures us.
4) The problem of collective action is one part belief: people must believe they should do things differently.
5) Any social structure, including social structures which seek to change the dominant culture, if it can be bought out, will lose.
6) Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so. The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological. Rational people sell out.
7) The forms of the old world must be gotten rid of, and must be seen as anathema. You cannot save the world and keep American style suburbia as it is now. You cannot change the world so people are happy and healthy and prosperous and keep wage labor as your primary method of distributing surplus value to the commons.
8) You cannot keep profit, aka. greed as the primary driver of social decision making. Eating is for living, living is not for eating, to paraphrase Socrates.
9) Greed as primary driver leads to sociopathic behaviour being rewarded (read Barkin’s “The Corporation”). This means you select, systematically, people who act sociopathically or pyschopathically as your leaders. You get the behavior your reward, and right now our system rewards people for doing whatever it takes to make money, no matter what the costs to other people, to the environment or the future.
10) Most profits today are extracted value, they are not actual surplus value. Instead they represent destruction of actual economic productivity. Every cent the financial sector “earned” from 2000 to 2007 was destroyed, ten times over, in the crisis and the depression after the crisis.
11) Actual value is not rewarded. A janitor or a garbageman or a teacher or a nurse or an assembly line worker or an engineer produces real value. If the CEO does not come in tomorrow, so what? If the janitor doesn’t, everyone is complaining immediately. The people we call value creators today are mostly value extractors: their job is to squeeze hard, to monetize, not to create new products which are genuinely beneficial to the world, not to create workers who are well paid and thus able to provide demand, not to create better paying work, but worse paying work.
12) If you need a job to survive, you are always at the mercy of people who provide jobs.
13) The wage you are paid is based on the tightness of the labor market and how protected you are by government. It has virtually nothing to do with your personal skillset, except to the extent that skillset is in short supply. As programmers found out, corporations and government will do everything they can to make sure any specific labor shortage is reduced as quickly as possible.
14) You have power, as an ordinary individual, only if you act as a group and in solidarity. If you can be bribed to betray other ordinary people, they will play you off against each other.
15) Jobs aren’t a good way to distribute surplus, but if that is how you do it, you will only get surplus in a tight labor market. Central banks, the rich, corporations and government today all work systematically to make sure that there is no tight labor market. If there is no tight labor market, you can and will be replaced. If you can be easily replaced, there is no reason to give you any extra money, even if you are producing more than you did in the past. It is for this reason that for over 30 years now NONE of the productivity gains have gone to ordinary workers on aggregate.
16) The economy must be completely electrified. Energy must be made, to the largest extent possible, a capital good, this is a specific instance of the next point:
17) Supply bottlenecks cannot be allowed. Ever. Whenever one starts to form, it must be broken. Failure to do so is why the post-war liberal order failed and was replaced with neo-liberalism.
18) You cannot use up sinks (like carbon storage in the atmosphere) faster than they can be regenerated. Period.
19) You cannot allow degradation of food or environment. These are major causes of the degenerative and chronic diseases which are epidemic in our society.
20) You cannot allow significant unproductive consumption to be a major part of your economy. Suburbia, for example, is essentially pure consumption. All bans on productive work, agriculture, etc… in suburbia must be removed.
21) You cannot allow public goods, like education or health care, to be rationed based on ability to pay. Paying for schools through property taxes creates an education system which wastes the human potential of millions of people in an attempt to replicate class privilege. Ironically, the middle class is failing anyway, as the economic value of education has been destroyed.
22) The most important rule of all is this: your elites must experience the same life as ordinary people. They must go to the same shitty schools (no private schools, no enriched schools, no Ivy League). They must fly on the same planes and go through the same security (they don’t), they must use the same healthcare and stew in the same wards in the same rooms as the poorest of the citizens. They must eat the same food, rather than being able to buy high quality food the poor can’t. If they don’t experience what you experience, they will not care what is happening to you. And they don’t. Why should they when they’re the richest riches the world has ever known. The world is great, to the rich and powerful.
23) You have power to the degree you have solidarity, control your own government, and have the ability to support yourself without a job. If you cannot walk, if you have no ability to say “screw you”, then you are a slave, the only question is who you are a slave to. The people we feel worst for today are the unemployed who can’t even find a master.
24) People who actually create value must be allowed to keep enough of it. Right now they aren’t. Google takes almost all the value created by the people who actually make the web, for example. Wal-mart crushes its suppliers into the dust. A few key pipelines like App Stores, Amazon, and so on take almost all of the surplus value. Anyone who thinks 30% is a reasonable charge for an app store wants to see failure (this doesn’t mean no taxation, proper taxation takes away unneeded surplus, not needed surplus.)
25) A regular rate of return of 5% is reasonable. A world in which you have to make 15% or 30%+ to be viable is a world in which most businesses are not viable, and in which millions sit idle with nothing to do because there is nothing to do that can make those sort of returns.
26) Returns of 15% or more can only be made through fraud, exploitation or oligopolistic practices. Bad or fraudulent profits drive out real profits and real value creation.
27) The network effect is not something which should be rewarded with a 30% commission. Neither is the railroad effect “nice product you got there, son, but it doesn’t get to market if you don’t pay us our vig.”
28) We can all be prosperous, but we can’t all be rich. Having hundreds of billionaires is exactly why you haven’t had a real raise in 30 years.
29) Concentrations of wealth are used to protect that wealth and buy up the system. That is why they can’t be allowed. The first thing someone does who wins the market, is buy the market, and that means buying the government.
30) Government is either your worst enemy, or you best friend, depending on whether it is controlled by the public, by private interests or running rogue. But government is also the only major organization which can work for ordinary people. Every other organization has another purpose. As such, you must control government if you want prosperity.
31) Government, under whatever name, is needed to do things we must do together for the greater good. When it does not exist, you get Somalia. Great cell phone service, but your daughters get pulled out shacks at 2 am and raped, or you buy your safety by submitting to an oppressive set of relgous laws.
32) You cannot have large standing armies and keep liberty. Period.
33) You cannot give private entities the right to print money without extremely strict limits and not expect unreasonable concentration of money, which means power, which means the government gets bought out and you lose both your liberty and your freedom.
34) Biodiversity is wealth, it is where the great biochemical advances and products of the future will come from. Every time we kill a species, we impoverish our future.
35) We are going to require a transnational body with armed forces to enforce environmental controls.
36) Fines no longer work to control economic activity, we will require outright criminal bans and tough enforcement to stop rapacious corporate behaviour.
37) If you must have the cheapest devices, you are requiring a woman in the Congo to be raped and rivers in China to be polluted. Fixing this is not an individual action, it is a collective action problem, it can only be fixed by government and by terrible things like, oh “tariffs”.
38) Free Trade is meaningless if you don’t have full employment. It is a rounding error at best, harmful at worst.
39) Capital flows cannot be allowed to move faster than trade flows and really shouldn’t be much faster than labor flows.
40) The functionless rich cannot be allowed to keep the money they have. Use it for actual new production, or lose it.
41) Inflation is not a bad thing below about 10% or so. There is no good evidence it reduces growth, and it does break up concentrations of wealth. We are terrified of inflation because we know our wages aren’t rising faster than it is.
42) People who make a bad loan, should lose their money. There is no such thing as free money, and bondholders need to learn that. Concomittent, bankruptcy must be easy to get: economic cripples, unable to discharge debts are not in our economic interest. It is especially abhorrent that bankruptcy cannot discharge student loans.
43) An economy in which people are free to do what they love, free of fear of losing everything, is far more economically productive than one in which people are forced to do things they hate to make ends meet.
44) The right thing to do, ethically, is usually the right thing to do economically. Helping the distressed is good for the economy. Universal healthcare that doesn’t give extra money to insurance companies is good for the economy. Believe it or not, not dumping pollution into air and not poisoning food… is good for the economy. Feeding the poor is… good for the economy.
If you’re ever not sure what the right economic policy is ask yourself what the kind thing to do is. You’ll be right nine times out ten, and the remaining one time you’ll still be doing something good.
