Progressives Every Day: Mandates, Marijuana, and Memos
Progressives Every Day: Mandates, Marijuana, and Memos
It could be worse is not good enough.
Welcome to a Monday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I’ll get to the news and headlines soon, but first, I’ve got some thoughts on how President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet is shaping up.
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What’s Good Enough?
Instead of going through each of the nominations one by one, I want to take a step back and look at the overall politics and thought process behind his choices.
Simply put, Biden is delivering exactly what the beleaguered American people are demanding.
Millions of Americans donated their time and money in a historic recession to ensure that Joe Biden could put BlackRock executives and lobbyists for the military-industrial complex in charge of the government. The masses insisted that Biden install appointees who have the same kind of conflicts of interests as Trump’s conniving swamp monsters, so long as they posted the occasional plucky tweet and pretended to care about working people and the victims of drone bombing. They gave him a loud and clear mandate to accept corporate donations for his inauguration. The working-class activists put their lives on their line during the COVID summer to go door-to-door in support of a modest increase in the tax credit they receive to buy healthcare. And undoubtedly, responding to the worst economic crisis in a century with incrementalism tweaks will ensure that Democrats win big in the next few elections and establish a coalition that guarantees majorities for years to come.
Obviously, I’m kidding. But to be honest, I’m not surprised that Biden is getting the old neoliberal band back together, summoning them out of lobbying firms (or “consulting” firms they started themselves) and corporate boardrooms for another go-round. That’s who he is. But the nominations thus far confirm to me that his team misunderstood why Biden won the Democratic primary and election, don’t seem to grasp the reason why so many people on both sides of the aisle are close to lighting the world on fire, and how short a rope they’re going to have.
Biden won the nomination not because people loved him or believed in his decidedly mixed-at-best policy record, but because every other moderate candidate dropped out at the same time and insisted that he was the one guy who could beat Trump. After the primary, progressives fell in line because they knew defeating Trump was of existential importance. There was no endorsement for his kind of corporate-friendly politics or inherently cautious policy-making. Biden didn’t win thanks to his promise that “nothing will fundamentally change,” and to assume that’s what people want is suicidal.
Not even Republican voters want the status quo. There’s a reason why people like Sen. Josh Hawley, dishonest and cynical as he is, always tweets about corporate power. Ted Cruz now rails against the “elites,” as if going to Harvard Law and being married to a managing director at Goldman Sachs makes him a working-class hero. They understand the public anger — they might use and abuse it to enact policies that hurt working people even further, but they understand it.
Now, it’s true that Biden’s team could be worse. There’s no formal role yet for Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel is still trying to weasel his way into some position after another 18-month stint on Wall Street. Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, nominees for the Council of Economic Advisers, are pretty progressive and very pro-worker. How much power they’ll actually have remains to be seen, but Bernstein is close with Biden, so that’s something.
Regardless, he certainly won’t be as powerful as Brian Deese or Adewale Adeyemo, the deputy treasury secretary nominee. Both are BlackRock vets who are being touted as some of the “good guys” at that financial Death Star, as if we should be excited by that. I understand that it’s important to steady hands with government experience in positions of power, but there had to be some people who didn’t exit the Obama administration and immediately cashed in at the largest and most hated asset management firm in the world.
No one’s asking for Democratic Socialists in those positions — they wouldn’t clear the Senate — but again, there had to be candidates without such obvious conflicts of interest.
It doesn’t help that the coverage coming out of Washington is so often misleading. The media has an inherent bias not just toward the establishment, but also conservative policy. It inherently casts all progressive ideas as radical, fanciful notions disconnected from reality, not sensible policies that are followed by all other wealthy nations.
The Wall Street Journal yesterday summed up the media’s attitude toward transformative government programs in this single line, tucked inside its story about the new nominees: “Mr. Biden’s economic team will face difficult decisions on how much the federal government should borrow and spend as the Covid-19 pandemic hangs over the economy.”
What difficult decisions? What are the options, really? As I noted yesterday, 14 million people are about to lose their skimpy unemployment benefits and 40 million people are facing eviction in January. Food insecurity is skyrocketing, as one in ten parents with young children report that their kids don’t have enough to eat. The decision should be easy: The federal government should borrow and spend however much it takes to ensure that people can eat, don’t get kicked out of their homes, have healthcare, and can live with dignity. Perhaps that’ll be limited by the Senate situation, but it shouldn’t be limited by Democratic ambition.
Anything less is accepting suffering as a matter of suffering. For some reason, there seems to be a baseline level of cruelty with which politicians and some members of the media feel comfortable.
I want to be pleasantly surprised with what Biden’s team does when it takes power. Maybe they’ll step up and push as many policies that help working people as possible. Perhaps the left actually will be able to push them toward as many structural changes as possible, depending on what happens with the Senate. I will be absolutely thrilled to have my skepticism proven wrong.
If they don’t, people are going to suffer and Democrats are going to be out of power very soon.
Important News and Notes
Homelessness in California: Gov. Gavin Newsom has come under some deserved fire for his very dumb decision to dine out at the French Laundry (with a lobbyist!) after demanding everyone else stay at home, but his effort to combat homelessness is thus far earning some very positive reviews.
Dubbed Project Homekey, the plan is using state money (provided via coronavirus relief funding) to buy distressed properties and turn them into supportive housing for the unhoused. It could add 6,100 more if its remaining purchases go through. Earlier this year, the Newsom administration’s Project Roomkey helped 15,000 people with temporary housing, though the leases on those rooms will expire at the end of the year.
Blazing in Florida: After Floridians voted to raise the minimum wage via ballot initiative earlier this month, activists are setting their sights on legalizing marijuana via popular referendum in 2022. Medical marijuana was passed via initiative in 2016. Ballot initiatives have become the only real way to pass progressive policy in Florida these days, though Republican control of all facets of the state government put even those accomplishments at risk (see the Jim Crow poll tax).
Elsewhere in Florida, former Tallahassee Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum may be caught in yet another scandal, this one over how his non-profit spent its money.
Buckeye Fate: Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper today announced that he will be stepping down from the post at the end of the year. He is by all accounts a good guy who took a job in a state that is turning increasingly red — Trump won Ohio by 8 points this year and Democrats couldn’t take advantage of the ridiculous corruption scandal that ensnared the state GOP.
Reclaiming a populist message: While the left was largely disorganized and ineffectual during most of the Obama era, its growing infrastructure and influence should make it far more formidable this time around. Several organizations, including Sunrise, Justice Democrats and New Deal Strategies (a campaign firm based in NYC) today put out this memo outlining the path they believe the party should take. The top item: reclaiming a populist message.
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