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“Bi-Partisanship” and “Compromise” Do Not Equal Fairess or Justice--And Kills People
PLUS SHORT TAKES: Unemployment Insurance System Cluster-Fuck; Taxing Rich People; Netflix Robs Us;
| Jonathan Tasini | Feb 4 |
I actually wrote this a decade ago because it’s a recurring, corrosive cancer but re-upping the modern-day, pandemic-era view: “bi-partisanship” is a warm pile of shit. When someone is out to kill you, or your nation and community, making a deal for the sake of “bi-partisanship” or “compromise” makes no sense when the end result is injustice and a worsening of our lives.
But, “bi-partisanship” is clarifying. It is the glaring, loud “tell” that both parties accept the basic outlines of a corrupt, failed system. Sure, there is a difference in scale—and a significant difference of money, in some cases, if you look at the debate right now on the stimulus. It is blind, knee-jerk, failed leftist bloviating to not acknowledge that, yes, people will be somewhat better off in the short-term—in some cases, significantly better off—with Democrats running the show.
BUT…note, please, my use above of “SHORT-TERM”. Ideologically, the debate is between, on the one hand, really nutty people who never let the facts get in the way of their mouths (nutty peoples’ views on economics are quite widespread and not confined to QAnon wingnuts) versus people who are mostly sane but have bought the basic ideological framing of the system, especially when it comes to the economy.
You can only envision the idea of “bi-partisanship” if you also embrace the so-called “free market” system. The search for “bi-partisanship” is a thing because all sides accept the outlines of capitalism and some of the fraudulent ideas baked into the system for decades.
When you hear the never-ending media-pushed narrative that the country would be so much better off if only politicians would stop fighting and embrace “bi-partisanship”, it’s nonsense. While the noise of superficial arguing absorbs the chattering classes, in reality, every day, there is grand consensus that flows—that tax cuts are good, especially if tax cuts help “small business” and “the middle class”; CEOs are bright people who should be treated with over-the-top respect (as opposed to the actual workers who create society’s value); the “free market” is American Exceptionalism’s gift to the world; if you are unemployed it’s mostly your fault so unemployment benefits should be kept meager to make sure you get your ass back to work and don’t sit on your couch eating bon-bons; “free trade” is forward looking and good, while “protectionism” is backwards and bad; and…the list goes on and on.
I’m really going to focus in this post on the economy but I will make this basic point about foreign policy: “bi-partisanship” (you’ve heard the bullshit about “national security” rising above “partisanship”) has meant support for war after war, coup after coup, and unrestrained Pentagon, spending year after year. The cost in human life is immeasurable, here and around the world: the killing of millions of people outright in immoral wars AND the wasting of trillions of dollars over many decades that could have gone to serve the peoples’ needs.
To be fair, the “bi-partisan” curse is not a new phenomena foisted on the country by Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. Take health care.
Millions of people get sick every year or go bankrupt because of “bi-partisanship”. What do I mean? The collapse of health care “reform” in the 1990s—so-called “Hillarycare”—was certainly due, in part, to the corrupt insurance industry’s opposition to the Clinton healthcare plan. That’s the only narrative the Clinton world and their enablers wanted to spread around—and stiff-arm anyone else who would say that the real clear lesson for the people from the debacle of 1994 is that we had to kill the private healthcare industry and enact “Medicare For All” because you can’t negotiate with an industry that has no interest in the health of Americans and only cares about making obscene profits to pay CEOs outlandish salaries and benefits—a conclusion that is ignored by politicians who pocket campaign contributions from the insurance industry and Big Pharma.
Indeed, the conclusion Democrats reached from that experience is that what they needed to do to “reform” healthcare was act in a “bi-partisan” manner which meant negotiating with Republicans—and with the private insurance industry, in the service of safeguarding the “free market” (and, naturally, campaign contributions).
Cue the Obama-era, which gave us the Affordable Care Act, which passed without a single Republican vote—in fact, passed using reconciliation. Republican opposition to the ACA had nothing to do with any objection to coddling the corrupt private insurance industry—and, lo and behold, without a single Republican vote after seeking “bi-partisanship” for months to no avail, the ACA passed, with the wholehearted support of insurance companies who spent millions of dollars promoting the ACA because it essentially promised the industry millions of new customers paying expensive health care premiums.
Your lesson: with or without “bi-partisanship” the system remained intact.
Or take the ginned-up “deficit” hysteria: in 2010, Obama stood up the “bi-partisan” National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also known in short-hand as the “Deficit Commission” but more accurately described by many of us, including yours truly, as the Catfood Commission. Because we knew that the end result of this idiotic endeavor would be cuts to Social Security and Medicare, all in the name of “bi-partisan fiscal responsibility” to address the “deficit and debt” crisis—which, as I wrote in this book a decade ago (the updated edition came out in 2013), was, and is, a manufactured, non-existent crisis.
But, for the sake of “bi-partisanship”, if the Commission’s recommendations became law, seniors would go hungry because Social Security checks would be smaller (in real terms) or die because they couldn’t afford health care costs. The only saving grace? To adopt the Commission’s cuts required a 3/4 “bi-partisan” super majority—which a few folks stood in the way of (as I’ve always said, progressives have a lot of legit beefs with Nancy Pelosi but at least she had the gumption to say back then, in opposition to the president from her own party, there would be no cuts to Social Security or Medicare on her watch).
Now, zoom forward to today (you do know that “zoom” has other meanings, right? :) ). I mean, seriously, how foolish is the “bi-partisanship” chatter around the stimulus bill—as if this sacred “bi-partisanship” Holy Grail is worth sacrificing even one dollar from the proposed, quite modest given the crisis, $1.9 trillion stimulus, or other aspects of the bill being proposed by Bernie Sanders. Consider this:
For the sake of “bi-partisanship”—and the ego of Fifth Columnist Joe Manchin—the president is considering compromising on who gets relief checks. Keep this span of views in mind when you read the political nonsense spewed versus the reality of what people need:
The view from the wing-nut “let them starve” caucus that thought a one-time check of $600 was enough;
The view of the mainstream of the Democratic Party which is arguing for one-time $2,000 checks—with the sleight-of-hand accounting gymnastics in the current bill deducting the most recent, paid-out $600 to come up with $1,400 one-time checks…as if giving people the full PROMISED $2,000 check is bestowing a pile of riches on the average person who can’t find a job;
The view of what really should be done—if you believed not in “bi-partisanship” but actually coming to the aid of people who have no money for food—$2,000 every month until the pandemic is vanquished, and the unemployment rate declines for consecutive months to pre-pandemic levels, with special focus on making sure Black and Latino workers’ unemployment falls.
When “bi-partisanship” is a reason to oppose hiking the minimum wage to $15-an-hour (opposition coming most vocally from Fifth Columnist Joe Manchin), this is simply a cover for continuing the fifty-year robbery of the fruits of peoples’ sweat-of-the-brow and enriching people like Jeff Bezos:
The minimum wage should actually be around $22-an-hour if you look at productivity over the past 3-4 decades;
$15-an-hour is not a ticket to a vacation home on the Riviera. Working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year (in other words, not a single day off) would bring a person earning $15-an-hour a princely gross income of $31,200—which is just a bit over the federal poverty line for a family of four (and those poverty-line levels UNDERSTATE what it costs in the real world to survive)
Speaking of Fifth Columnist Joe Manchin, he is pontificating that West Virginia would be fine with a minimum wage of $11-an-hour—which would surprise a lot of West Virginians who are among the 16 percent of the state’s people who live in poverty, ranking the state 6th in the nation for the worst poverty level.
As long as “bi-partisanship” lives, we will never fix this country because “bi-partisanship is an acceptance of the “free market” system that got the people into the deep hole over many decades. But, the sad reality today is crystal clear: “bi-partisanship” is a feature not a bug because it sustains those in power.
Short Takes:
In this week’s episode of the Working Life podcast (sign up! It’s free!), you get two great conversations. First up: Michele Evermore and I talk about the utter disastrous unemployment insurance system. Michele is a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project and a leading national expert on the unemployment insurance system, and, without devulging anything, she’s going places!
Here you go (SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW!):
Then, remember during the presidential campaign when Joe Biden promised not to raise taxes for anyone making less than $400,000? I thought, “well, that’s dumb”. Why should someone making say $250,000—which puts them in the one percent—not pay higher taxes? I figured right then that that line-in-the-sand $400K number was a purely stupid political calculation—let’s not piss off the people in the suburbs who voted for Trump who we want to get. Really? Why not try a direct populist argument to reach a whole lot of people who are making under $100,000 and get angry about taxes because they have to pay a heavy load but see people making $250,000 paying a relatively small sum? Anyway, I talk with Matt Gardner, senior fellow at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, about taxing people above $400,000, and why other well-off people shouldn’t pay higher taxes as well.
Here you go (SUBSCRIBE TO THE SHOW!):
Here are two things that will not surprise you: Netflix’s U.S. income went from $1.7 billion in 2019 to $2.8 billion in 2020 because the entire country is hunkered down and camped out on couches while the pandemic rages AND on that huge boost in revenue Netflix is paying less than one percent taxes — 0.9 percent to be exact. It wouldn’t surprise you because Netflix is expert at tax dodging—especially by deducting hundreds of millions of dollars for stock options (in 2020 alone, $339 million worth), which is the king of all self-dealing scams…after all, it’s the CEO that gets the biggest haul of stock options (a far bigger financial windfall than a measly multi-million salary) and oversees, at the end of the day, the tax dodging. As ITEP points out: in the “first three years of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law, Netflix enjoyed $5.3 billion in U.S. income and paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 0.4 percent. It’s all perfectly legal and it’s legalized corruption.
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