Shutdown is the least of Democrats' problems

The embarrassing cave-in from the ill-advised government shutdown ploy of the congressional Democrats won't be their biggest problem in November. Rather, it will be their dishonest opposition to the Republican tax reform that will come to haunt them.

Even leaving aside the powerful effect of the long-overdue reduction in corporate taxes, the impact on personal income taxes will resonate in the middle class. Nancy Pelosi might think a hundred dollars a month in saved taxes is "pathetic," but for many people that means a welcome addition to discretionary spending. Besides, for many people, the savings will be much greater.

In the meantime, Trump is going to outmaneuver them on the Dreamer issue. Not all the media bias and invective in the world will keep people from seeing what is going on.

On top of that comes Trump's inspired choice to attend Davos. The Times may trumpet that Trump's "isolationism" (why are they still pushing that tired old chestnut?) will isolate him, but the photos of him dining congenially with top executives from Germany and other countries belies that. Dick Durbin can do his best to poison the domestic well but he is sitting at home while Trump is meeting with the president of Rwanda in Davos.

Total bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

The only thing more stunning than the hypocrisy and cynicism of the Democratic leadership in Congress in this government shutdown is the cluelessness and stupidity of the lawmakers who follow them. After excoriating the Republicans for tactical moves that shut down the government, Schumer and Pelosi now imitate those tactics in the belief that Republicans will be blamed and it will give them a further edge in November midterms.

So is Hillary Clinton masterminding this stupidity? It is as tone deaf and cynical as anything she attempted. In my humble opinion, Democrats are making a disastrous miscalculation. Just because the mainstream media is playing along with their game doesn't mean that most people won't see through this and it will boomerang against them.

I have never been convinced that Democrats have a lock on midterms just because Trump is so repellent. And this, I think, will seal the deal for the Republicans.

Regarding the mainstream media. I have thought the rampant bias and dishonesty in reporting was due to their being prisoners of a bubble that has skewed their perception of reality. But I'm beginning to think that it is purely cynical dishonesty with an economic motivation.

Nobody wants objectivity. The New York Times and Washington Post have come to realize that they get more subscriptions and readership by pandering to their blue state audiences than by honoring traditional standards of balance and objectivity. The Times bragged that their subscriptions went UP when Trump was elected, acknowledging their new role as a full-fledged left-wing rag. It is an existential question for these legacy media.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the pundits and bloviators, people aren't stupid. A reckoning is coming for the media and for the Democratic Party.

Groupthink

Another insightful analysis by Thomas Continetti in the Free Beacon bewails the bias in the press that Trump has no pushed into the open. Among other things, he blames groupthink fostered by social media. I'm not sure it's social media so much as cultural isolation.

When I was writing my political column for MarketWatch, the editors gave me totally free rein to pick my subjects, write my columns, express my opinions. It was a liberating experience and I'm grateful to them. Only once did I take part in an editorial conference call, shortly before the November election. to coordinate coverage of the big event. I was astonished -- and that is a mild word for my feeling -- at the groupthink evident in the call. The disdain for Trump (and his supporters), the unshakable conviction that Hillary was going to win skewed the whole conversation as editors and columnists divvied up how to cover her victory. I kept quiet. In my columns, I'd already repeatedly expressed my concern that Trump was on a path to victory because of Hillary's flaws and his ability to find issues that people cared about.

All this only got worse when he won, and that is the point of Continetti's column today:

The forces that brought Trump to power are alien to the experience of the men and women who populate newsrooms, his supporters unlike their colleagues, friends, and neighbors, his agenda anathema to the catechism of social liberalism, his career and business empire complex and murky and sensational. Little surprise that journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy.

And again:

Especially when the depletion of veteran editors, the relative youth and inexperience of political and congressional reporters, and the proliferation of social media, with its hot takes and quips, its groupthink and instant gratification, makes the transition from inquiry to indignation all too easy.
There is still excellent journalism. I would point, for starters, to the work on charter flights that led to the resignation of Tom Price. But the overall tone of coverage of this president and his administration is somewhere between the hysterical and the lunatic.

I don't know how this ends, but I can't think it's helping media any.

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Starting afresh

My column for MarketWatch, Darrell Delamaide's Political Capital, ended yesterday after nearly 10 years. I mostly refrained from writing on this blog in order not to give any ammunition to critics about any biases betrayed here. Now that I'm free from that constraint, I will repurpose this blog to continue my political commentary. These blogs will be more informal, and generally much shorter, than the column.

In the latter months of writing the column, I was often accused of being too sympathetic to Donald Trump, of defending him, even of being a right-wing hack. Even before he announced his candidacy, when he was talking about single payer healthcare and expanding Social Security, I said he bears listening to. A dinner party guest here rejected that notion, saying she would never listen to anything that racist, misogynist creep said. She's probably still not listening to him, but 63 million people did and voted him president.

I don't like Trump, I didn't vote for him and never would. I think in many respects he does represent a danger to the world. But the one-sided, biased reporting on him and his administration has mostly served to degrade the media, not him. Anything I have to say that might seem to support his point of view is partly to correct that failure.

So, for instance, the tax plan announced yesterday is, in my opinion, in large part a reasonable, even very constructive plan. In particular, corporate tax reform is long overdue. It drives me crazy when lamestream media simply lumps it all together as "tax cuts for the rich and companies." These are such completely different things, Reducing U.S. corporate tax to 20% from 35% only brings it in line with other industrial countries, A onetime reduced penalty for repatriating foreign profits is also a reasonable and overdue measure. Both have the potential for significantly increasing investment in this country.

The other thing that caught my eye was Trump abandoning notions of public-private partnerships for infrastructure investment. This, too, is a positive step. At their best, these "partnerships" only impose another tax on Americans in the form of tolls for roads and bridges. At their worst, they are an invitation to graft.

The effect of both these plans will be to increase the federal deficit, which is fine by me. I have long made the argument that we can afford to substantially increase the deficit. The deficit is causing absolutely no harm now -- in crowding out private borrowing or pushing up interest rates, for instance -- and there's no evidence a bigger deficit would either. All these fables about saddling our grandchildren with a burden they will never be able to repay is nonsense, and most of the people who cynically peddle this notion know it. The federal debt will never be repaid, it will only be rolled over and serviced ad aeternam.

And while the Laffer Curve has largely been discredited, it may well be that some tax cuts will result in added growth and increased tax revenue to offset the cost of the cuts. I'm all for trying it.

Vox

Vox -- the self-indulgent site founded by Ezra Klein and some other bright 30-somethings -- is out of control. It seems determined to write itself into irrelevance with self-referential news judgement that totally bypasses the concerns of ordinary people.

Unless I'm missing something. But I think they will burn through their venture capital funding and then fold. Who is interested in anything they write?

Then there is the case of Matt Yglesias, a super-bright guy who used to come up with really interesting ideas. He is now on the way to becoming a parody of himself. His latest posting on Vox is a plea to do away with time zones and put everyone on Greenwich Mean Time, so we can go to work at 1400 and knock off at 2200. Wow, that's appealing.

Really? Really?? C'mon Matt,there's a lot of important stuff going on in the world. This is not thought leadership. This is outer space.

Atlanta serendipity

Our trip to Atlanta for a graduation turned out to be more fun than I anticipated. While Atlanta may not offer much of a destination for tourists, it appears to have a relatively high quality of life that we benefited from as visitors.

More by luck than anything else, we landed in a hotel within walking distance of the High Museum. We were surprised to see long lines and found out it was the final days of a big exhibit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. So we braved the line -- which, as much else in Atlanta, was handled with great efficiency -- and went through the exhibit. I had seen the big Frida Kahlo exhibit here in Washington and actually visited the Casa Azul in Mexico City, but this exhibit had a number of her self-portraits as well as the less well-known still lifes. Other highlights were some early paintings by Rivera, showing how he cut his teeth as a painter by mimicking the cubist lights in Paris, and several photographs of the two of them which were works of art in themselves. We dashed through some of the standing collection and were impressed by the number of well-known contemporary artists.

On Sunday, we walked up Peachtree Street from our brunch and wandered into Piedmont Park, a wonderful urban playground that was being put to good use. Our goal was the Botanical Garden, simply because it was a beautiful spring day. To our surprise, we once again stumbled into a rare exhibit -- the first ever in this country of some monumental plant sculptures -- mosaiculture -- that were truly phenomenal. There were two large butterflies made up of various plants as we entered the grounds, which we thought was just some ornamentation. But then we ran into two monstrous cobras, and an ogre, and some bunny rabbits, and dancing berries and realized this was not an everyday occurrence. So we sought out the fabulous Earth Mother and the shaggy dog.

The garden itself was quite nice, with spring blooms. The hothouse was too crowded and, well, too hot to enjoy and the edible garden was in the very early stages after spring planting, but the canopy walk, the fountains and the well-placed benches made it a very enjoyable visit.

We also had great luck with the food and saw much in the department to explore if we ever do go back. You never know.

The next American revolution?

I went to a talk at Politics & Prose yesterday with Gar Alperovitz, the historian and economist who teaches at Maryland, who was plugging his new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.

I like Alperovitz and quoted him once in a column. He's a radical progressive and drew a crowd to P&P much like Howard Zinn did. Most of what he said made a lot of sense.

He says we're in the midst of a systemic crisis, not a political crisis, because things don't change regardless of which party is in power. This is enlightening because it is obviously true that Democrats Clinton and Obama have been no more successful in changing the Reagan juggernaut than the Bushes, who weren't trying to change it. It explains why the elections in 2014 and 2016 offer little hope of improvement.

Alperovitz says we need to "put a couple of decades on the table" to get the systemic change he thinks we need. There's no guarantee we will get the change, he says, and we could just continue on the road to decay that we have been on for three decades. In any case, a couple of decades sounds optimistic to me.

The system that is in crisis is corporate capitalism. Part of the problem is that many of us think that the period from the 40s to the 60s, when labor unions were an effective countervailing force against corporate power, is the norm, when in fact that was the temporary aberration. What we've had since then -- the untrammeled power of corporations to avoid taxes, enrich the wealthy and impoverish the middle class -- is the real norm for corporate capitalism.

Alperovitz says we are in a pre-history of transformation, like the pre-history that preceded the Great Depression, creating the bases for change. He says the revolution will be the democratization of wealth, and he sees the beginnings of it in coops and credit unions, worker-owned businesses in Cleveland and elsewhere, state banks in North Dakota and elsewhere, and so on. He did not talk about crowdfunding or other forms of locavesting but perhaps this is in his book.

He asked the audience to abandon their practice of looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what lies ahead and also to drop their cynicism and pessimism and figure out what they can do to contribute to this pre-history of the revolution.

It's a great challenge and applying it to myself I realized that my foray into self-publishing and my devotion to blogging are part of the democratization of wealth. At least a dozen times, Alperovitz said "you won't read about this in the press," and if I'd had more patience I would have been curious to ask him why thought that was so. But the answer is obvious, because the press is part of corporate capitalism and that goes for book publishing, too.

I bought his book, though I'm not sure there's much more in it than was in his talk. I found it all quite validating. My own feeling of liberation from being able to self-publish my novel and put my blogs out there I can now see as part of a more generalized movement. My immediate fascination with Amy Cortese's Locavesting and my efforts to get these kinds of stories in the short-lived Sustainable Money all fit into the pattern described by Alperovitz.