GOP's Special Weapon: The Democratic Party

A good reason it is safe to assume that the GOP will remain the dominant party and retain the White House -- provided Trump doesn't blunder into a nuclear war, and provided Wall Street doesn't plunge the global economy into a second recession in ten years -- is that there is an existential split within the Democratic Party. The Bernie-vs.-Hillary, socialists-vs.-capitalists, young-vs.-old divisions have not been mended, but they have not blown up either; rather, they are frozen in an unhealthy stasis.

The Democratic Party's hope of taking back the House of Representatives in 2018 is dependent on how it does in California. But California, the aircraft carrier of Democratic power, is locked in a nasty, potentially litigious, leadership battle for the state party, as Adam Nagourney describes this morning in "Democratic Fight in California Is a Warning for the National Party":

California Democrats face a critical political challenge in 2018 as they seek to capture as many as seven Republican congressional seats, most of them in Southern California, a central part of the national party’s effort to win back Congress. California is heading into a potentially turbulent governor’s race next year as Mr. Brown — a widely respected, stabilizing force in Democratic politics — steps down after two terms. The party could also be enmeshed in a Senate race if Dianne Feinstein, who is 84, does not seek re-election next year.

The fight in this bluest of states has national repercussions for Democrats facing similar struggles about what the party should stand for — and how aggressive it should be in challenging Republicans — as it prepares for the 2018 congressional elections.

[snip]

Steve McMahon, a Democratic consultant who advised Howard Dean, the Vermont governor, when he ran for president in 2004, compared what is happening with Democrats in California to the Tea Party’s emergence in heavily Republican districts in 2010.

Mr. McMahon said these struggles would probably move the party to the left, with one immediate result: Democrats in places like California will come under increasing pressure to support single-payer health care, much the same way opposition to the Iraq war, a central issue for Mr. Dean, became a litmus test issue for Democrats in 2004.

“You tend to see these kinds of things first in areas where there is single-party dominance,” Mr. McMahon said. “You’re going to start seeing this in other parts of the country in Democratic primaries — typically in districts where there is not an effective voice on the right. There will be those left-further left primaries in those districts where the further-left nominee will win.”

I don't see it that way. Yes, there might be some rhetorical platform drift leftward. But I don't see the moneybags yielding any substantive control. Look at the primary result in the Seattle mayor's race. Despite there being a cornucopia of Bernista candidates to choose from, Obama's U.S. Attorney, Jenny Durkan, the neoliberal's choice, trounced the field -- and this in the progressive's Oz, where the "Fight for $15" was won and where a firebrand socialist sits on the city council.

If the moneybags keep control of the Democratic Party, Republicans maintain their majority.

Election Day: Emerging Class Consciousness in West Coast Tech Cities

"All politics is local" is a largely useless statement ascribed to Tip O'Neill, known in American history for being the liberal Democratic Speaker of the House during the Age of Reagan. The idea that the statement is supposed to convey is that politics boils down to basic interactions between a representative and his/her constituents. The "rubber" always meets the road in some sort of idealized speech act where the honest pol knocks on a door in his/her district and gets an earnest earful from a thoughtful, engaged citizen. Since most people have do not have any sort of basic interaction with public officials -- elected, appointed or otherwise -- it begs the question, doesn't it?

Politics in the West are elections where the "Haves" spend money, usually a lot, to elect the representative of their choice, someone who will continue the gravy train running on time, shuttling more and more wealth to the top of the income pyramid; meanwhile, the "Have Nots," assuming they bother to vote, and assuming they have a clue, struggle to find someone or something on the ballot that might steer the gravy train, even just a little bit, in their direction.

Politics is a question of "Which Side Are You On?" Are you with capital or labor? Our -- meaning basically everyone on the planet -- current impasse is based on the fact that politics increasingly forecloses a choice of sides. It is a choice between capital or capital. No labor option is allowed.

It is election day today. It is an off year. The big election year is next year, but there are high stakes on this ballot. Locally, in the Emerald City, socialist firebrand Kshama Sawant, an exceedingly rare politician who is fighting the good fight, is headed for reelection. It would be an enormous, mind-bending upset, completely off the charts, if her faux-multicultural challenger, a corporate shill, were to triumph. It is not going to happen. The Sawant campaign has been disciplined and well-funded (by individual donations as well as some labor union independent expenditures). Labor cannot lose the Sawant race, something it is well aware of. So no stone has been left unturned.

Locally the race to watch is in District 1. If Lisa Herbold can defeat Shannon Braddock, surmounting the largest independent expenditure campaign in the history of Seattle, we can pronounce with some certainty that there is blossoming old-school "Which Side Are You On?" class consciousness in one the West Coast tech hubs.

Two good articles appeared yesterday in the national edition of The New York Times providing insight into the politics of the tech-booming West Coast. "San Francisco Ballots Turn Up Anger Over the Technical Divide" by Conor Dougherty and "Battles in San Francisco, but Not in Mayoral Race" by Adam Nagourney describe a situation similar to the one in Seattle. New commercial construction spurred on by the tech industry is radically altering the cityscape and dislocating longtime residents.

Nagourney opening paragraphs pretty well sum up the situation prevalent in the metropolitan West Coast tech hubs:

SAN FRANCISCO — This city has been racked by battles over development, a homeless population that spills onto its stoops and sidewalks, rocketing housing costs and increases in violent crime. With its gleaming new buildings and influx of Silicon Valley wealth, San Francisco has the fastest-growing income inequality gap in the nation.

And on Tuesday, when voters here go to the polls for municipal elections, they will see a ballot that captures that turmoil and the deep divisions over the city’s future. There is an initiative to impose a moratorium on new construction in the Mission District and another to severely restrict short-term rentals, as well as a $310 million bond to create affordable housing. 

A Board of Supervisors race in the northeast corner of the city, which includes Russian Hill and North Beach, has turned into a war over development between the two factions that rule politics here: moderate Democrats and the far left.

The factions would be more appropriately named the "corporate Democrats" and the "popular left."

We'll see what happens. But one thing is for sure: Those canyons of new commercial construction I walk through every morning on my way to work, the ones Amazon is building to house its new headquarters, those are not going away. They will change the city forever. San Francisco and Seattle are moving in a Manhattan direction. There will be a reaction. The question is how robust and how class conscious it is. District 1 Herbold vs. Braddock should provide us an indication.

Black Lives Matter Creates a Stir in Seattle

The hubbub in the Emerald City over the weekend was the disruption of a Bernie Sanders campaign rally at Westlake Mall by Black Lives Matter activists. I had gone to bed early Saturday evening because I had a 10K to run early the next day. I was in a deep sleep dreaming about tracking dirty slushy snow on the expensive carpets of a rich man's home when I awoke to the sound of knocking at my door. The knocking repeated itself several times. Concerned that it might be the building super with an issue having to do with the new kitchen plumbing that had just been installed in my apartment, I lumbered out of bed and opened the door.

No one was there. But then my downstairs neighbor suddenly appeared. She is a friend, a retiree, whom I have known for years. She and my next-door neighbors were either on their way to or returning from Sanders' appearance at the University of Washington. She handed me a book -- Bernie Sanders' The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class (2011). I was disoriented with drool on my chin. I apologized for my state and thanked her for the book. She apologized for waking me. Then she was off, and I went back to bed.

The next morning I left the apartment early, 6:30 AM, to run that race. Stuck on my front door was this post card from my neighbor:

So she had been to the Westlake event and was upset by the Black Lives Matter activists commandeering the microphone and hijacking Sanders' appearance. I understand that. My first reaction was that it was a provocation or dirty trick orchestrated by the Clinton campaign. What better way to guarantee that Sanders cannot broaden his appeal to blacks and Latinos than by driving a wedge between the white liberals and progressives that are flocking by the thousands to see Sanders as he tours the country?

But the important thing to do here is not to react. Read the statement that was posted to Black Lives Matter Seattle:

PRESS RELEASE: Black Lives Matter Seattle ‪#‎BowDownBernie‬ Action 

MEDIA CONTACTS: Marissa Johnson (360) 840-6234 blacklivesmatterseattle@gmail.com 

Black Lives Matter Seattle organizers and supporters take over Bernie Sanders’ rally at Westlake on Saturday, August 8, 2015. 

Today BLM Seattle, with the support of other Black organizers and non-Black allies and accomplices, held Bernie Sanders publicly accountable for his lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement and his blatantly silencing response to the ‪#‎SayHerName‬ ‪#‎IfIDieInPoliceCustody‬ action that took place at Netroots this year. 

Bernie’s arrival in Seattle is largely significant in the context of the state of emergency Black lives are in locally as well as across America. The Seattle Police Department has been under federal consent decree for the last three years and has been continually plagued by use-of-force violations and racist scandals amongst their rank and file. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has refused to push any reform measures for police accountability, not even the numerous recommendations of his self-appointed Community Police Commission. The Seattle School District suspends Black students at a rate six times higher than their white counterparts, feeding Black children into the school-to-prison pipeline. King County has fought hard to push through a plan to build a $210 million new youth jail to imprison these children, amid intense community criticism and dissent. The Central District, a historically Black neighborhood in Seattle, has undergone rapid gentrification over the past few decades, with Black people being displaced from the only neighborhood that we could legally live in until just years ago. While white men profit off of the legalization of marijuana, our prisons are still filled with Black people who are over-incarcerated for drug offenses. 

This city is filled with white progressives, which is why Bernie Sanders’ camp was obviously expecting a friendly and consenting audience for today’s campaign visit. The problem with Sanders’, and with white Seattle progressives in general, is that they are utterly and totally useless (when not outright harmful) in terms of the fight for Black lives. While we are drowning in their liberal rhetoric, we have yet to see them support Black grassroots movements or take on any measure of risk and responsibility for ending the tyranny of white supremacy in our country and in our city. This willful passivity while claiming solidarity with the ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement in an effort to be relevant is over. White progressive Seattle and Bernie Sanders cannot call themselves liberals while they participate in the racist system that claims Black lives. Bernie Sanders will not continue to call himself a man of the people, while ignoring the plight of Black people. Presidential candidates will not win Black votes without putting out an explicit criminal justice reform package. As was said at the Netroots action, presidential candidates should expect to be shut down and confronted every step along the way of this presidential campaign. Black people are in a state of emergency. Lines have been drawn in the sand. You are either fighting continuously and measurably to protect Black life in America, or you are a part of the white supremacist system that we will tear down in the liberation of our people. 

On this, nearly the one year anniversary of the ruthless murder of Mike Brown, we honor Black lives lost by doing the unthinkable, the unapologetic, and the unrespectable. Out of radical love for our Black brothers and sisters, we put our lives and our bodies on the line to testify to their persecution and resilience. We join together in Black love to #SayHerName and declare that #BlackLivesMatter, understanding that our love will disrupt the complicity and corruption of our anti-Black society; GOP, Democrat, and otherwise. 

There is no business as usual while Black lives are lost. We will ensure this by any means necessary. 

With the strength of our ancestors and for the future of our children, 

Black Lives Matter Seattle Co-Founders 

Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford

#BowDownBernie
#SayHerName
#IfIDieInPoliceCustody
‪#‎NotOneMoreDeportation‬‪#‎FreePalestine‬‪#‎MikeBrown‬#BlackLivesMatter

What they say is true. Now my hope is that they would continue their confrontations by going after other campaigns, such as Hillary's. If all they do is hector Bernie Sanders, then clearly the end result is a provocation that benefits other candidacies. Eric Garner's daughter, Erica, speaking yesterday at the anniversary of Mike Brown's killing, justified the shutdown of the Sanders event:

Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, applauded the activists who climbed on stage with the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and demanded an opportunity to talk about police killings during an event in Seattle on Saturday. Mr. Sanders left the event without addressing the crowd. 

“We got to hold our elected officials accountable,” Ms. Garner said. “If he’s not going to talk about our issues, he shouldn’t talk at all.”

But Sanders can't be the only elected official targeted; if so, then Black Lives Matter is just doing the dirty work of the mainstream frontrunners.

When I was active in the Nader-era Green Party, we were criticized all the time for not being a viable progressive movement because we had no black support. Somehow -- and this is the absurdity -- the Democratic Party was more progressive because it had the overwhelming allegiance of blacks. This is poppycock. But the same skewed logic is being applied to the Sanders campaign. This is from an otherwise complimentary piece by Adam Nagourney, "Similarities Aside, Bernie Sanders Isn’t Rerunning Howard Dean’s 2004 Race":

And while there are similarities in the crowds both men draw — overwhelmingly white, for the most part liberal activists — this is not the Democratic Party Mr. Dean was seeking to lead in 2004. The party is younger and more ethnically diverse now, in a way that Mr. Sanders’s crowds are not. The liberal wing of the party, or what Mr. Dean liked to call the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” has undergone its own maturation over the years, its ambitions readjusted after it watched Mr. Dean lose and President Obama turn out to be something short of an unfaltering ideological ally. 

“Sanders gives me a sense of déjà vu, not just the level of excitement that he generates among people who desperately want an alternative to the establishment status quo, but also the irrational cherry-picking of news to convince themselves that victory is just around the corner,” said Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos and the organizer of the first Netroots Nation convention, as it came to be known. 

“I was knee-deep in the Dean movement, so I remember those big exciting crowds, but I also remember ignoring the fact that they were almost exclusively made up of young, white, fairly affluent and educated people,” Mr. Moulitsas said. “And Sanders’s are no different, ill reflecting a modern Democratic Party that is at least 40 percent minority and overwhelmingly female.” 

In Seattle on Saturday, Mr. Sanders was confronted by protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement who climbed onstage and demanded an opportunity to talk about police brutality and to note the anniversary of the fatal shooting by a white police officer of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man, in Ferguson, Mo. Mr. Sanders stepped aside and finally left the event without addressing the crowd. 

Yet Mr. Sanders’s appeal shows no sign of fading. And in a sign of self-confidence — and a tribute to Mr. Dean’s signature argument, when he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that the party had to compete in all 50 states — Mr. Sanders is campaigning in such unlikely Democratic states as Louisiana and Texas. It appears to be working: He walked out to a rally in Arizona to find 11,000 people waiting to hear him on a Saturday night.

The important takeaway here is that Sanders, for all his lily whiteness and his passive militarism, is not going to go away. His crowds are the most substantial of any presidential candidate. Sanders, as his book The Speech makes clear, is addressing the most salient political issue of our times and that is the complete capture of the government by a destructive oligarchic elite.

But Black Lives Matter is not going anywhere either. Let's hope an accommodation is reached between the two.

Why I Went Vegan: Seeing an Old Girlfriend, Reading Jurek's "Eat & Run," Watching Aronofsky's "Noah"

By the end of spring the year before last I had given up eating red meat. The motivators were a nasty case of food poisoning caused by eating at a cheap Chinese restaurant in the city of my father's residence and then reading Ted Conover's cover story in Harper's, "The Way of All Flesh: Undercover in an Industrial Slaughterhouse." I stuck to chicken and fish, and even scaled back on that.

I had been a vegetarian off and on, and not an entirely consistent one, for a few years as a teenager -- I think my junior year in high school and my freshman year in college. The motivation was not health but morality. If I couldn't imagine myself killing something in order to eat, I shouldn't eat it. Then, for whatever reason, societal norms took over and I returned to the fold of the carnivore, running with the pack for another thirty years.

Aging is guided by what is in your gene pool. If your father's vision began to fail him when he reached fifty, expect to get thee to an optometrist at around the same age. If high blood pressure runs in your mother's family, be prepared to deal with it when you reach the age it became an issue for your mother.

My voyage to veganism began in earnest last winter. Several things happened to hasten me on my way. For one, I became very sensitive to salt. I had been indulging in frequent trips to the olive bar at my local supermarket. I guess I overdid it. I began experiencing nasty arrhythmia. Arrhythmia is unsettling, unpleasant, worrisome. Knowing that high blood pressure runs in my mother's family, I decided to take corrective action by radically reducing my sodium intake. I also limited meat consumption to once a week (with a sushi option on an additional day if I felt like it) and strictly kept coffee consumption to two-to-three cups per day. It worked. The chronic arrhythmia disappeared. Diet regulation was a huge success.

Then, next up, in the spring an old friend/girlfriend came to town on a business trip and she looked me up. When I first saw her in the lobby of her hotel I didn't recognize her. Why? She appeared to be in her thirties. I hadn't seen in her 25 years. This made no sense to me. She should have looked like me, gray and almost 50. It turns out she is a vegetarian and has been for years. The fact that she looked so good, so young, made an impression on me. (And she still drinks!) Diet has to be a key factor.

Soon after my meeting with Maura, I read ultramarathon legend Scott Jurek's Eat & Run. Jurek is a vegan who became a vegan primarily for competitive advantage, not for hippy-dippy Gaea holism. He makes a compelling case that peak performance requires a plant-based diet. It is a terrific book. If you liked Born to Run, Eat & Run is a must-read.

But what pushed me to become a vegetarian again for the first time since I was a teenager, and then on to the virgin territory of veganism, was seeing Darren Aronofsky's Noah this past autumn. Aronofsky connects meat-eating with the Biblical fall from grace and the despoliation of the planet and the great flood. The Serpent corrupts Adam and Eve, and part of that corruption is the belief that man has to eat meat to be strong. He doesn't.

So for the last couple of months I have eaten a plant-based diet. (My one failing is that I have yet to excise the splash of half & half I put in my morning Starbucks before I get on the train. At home I use soy creamer. Starbucks does not offer soy on its condiments counter. I am going to ask for it. I've just been lazy. This morning I'll do it.)

All in all it is much easier than you think. Beans and tofu and nuts provide me all the protein I need. The only difference I feel is that I feel better. My default state is much cleaner.

In the autumn I had a moment of sadness where I looked around my studio and realized that before I die I wouldn't be able to finish reading all the books I have accumulated.

Jerry Brown was in Fresno the other day for a ceremony marking the start of construction on a segment of the high-speed LA-to-SF train. Adam Nagourney had the story, "To Gov. Jerry Brown, a Legacy Project; to Critics, a Runaway Train":

“It’s going to take long,” he said. “It’s kind of touch and go, like am I going to make it to the end here.” 

The year “2030, you may think that’s around the corner,” he said. “I’ll be 92 in 2030. I’m working and pumping iron and eating vegetables. I want to be around.”

The overarching rationale for going vegan, besides the obvious moral imperative, is simple and Brown captures it: There is a lot to be done, and I want to stick around to do it.