Democrats trying to unseat each other IV

[lpetrich]

But did the Democratic establishment line up behind Zohran Mamdani? Instead, Andrew Cuomo is running a sore-loser campaign as an independent, along with Mayor Eric Adams, who decided not to compete in that primary and also run as an independent. With Curtis Sliwa as the Republican, it looks like they could split the anti-ZM vote rather badly. The general election, unlike the primary election, is first-past-the-post, and they may be wishing that that election was ranked-choice voting, like the primary election.

Cuomo’s Mayoral Strategy: Everyone Else Drop Out - MSN

But they don't seem to want to do so, and AC claims that he will drop out if he does not poll very well.

Seems like he wants to do to ZM what Buffalo mayor Byron Brown did to India Walton after she primaried him back in 2021. In the general election, he ran a sore-loser campaign as a write-in, he accepted lots of big money to run campaign ads, and he won.

Buffalo's new chapter: Brown resigns as new acting mayor Scanlon takes the helm - 3:21 PM, Oct 15, 2024 - "Brown gave one final farewell early Tuesday morning as he will depart city hall to become the next president and CEO of Western Regional Off-Track Betting."

When states adopted sore loser laws - Ballotpedia - all but CT, IA, and NY.

 

[lpetrich]

Saikat Chakrabarti Wants to Remake the Democratic Party - Jacobin

He hopes to build a national movement around an ambitious program called the “Mission for America” that aims to transform the US economy through aggressive government planning and investment — a kind of spiritual successor to the Green New Deal.

Mission for America at the New Consensus think tank.

The interview starts with some background.

Back in the 1970s, America felt unstoppable. We had just put a man on the moon, built the interstate highway system, had decades of rising living standards and wages, and were including more and more people in society through the civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and other movements.

Then about how his very poor parents were recruited by a US immigration office to come to the US.

In the United States, my dad was able to get a job within a week of arriving despite having no connections, and, on a single income, was able to afford a solid, middle-class life for me and my family. Growing up, I had everything I needed: a roof over my head, food on the table, and a great public school education in Fort Worth, Texas.

He wants the US to do what it had done over the 1930's to 1970's - rising standards of living and great national achievements.

 

[bilby]

The second round eliminated all but ZM and AC, because their combined votes were not as much as the ZM-AC difference. This resulted in nearly twice as many votes being transferred to ZM as to AC, and ZM got 56.4% and AC 43.6%.

This makes me laugh, because I frequent the conments section at The Register, where they allow members to post anonymously, presumably to encourage gossip from insiders who don't want to be identified. Such posts are attributed to a generic user called "Anonymous Coward", presumably to discourage its over-use, and of course, that gets abbreviated to AC.

So I read AC automatically as "Anonymous Coward".

This system has also inspired a number of users with names such as "Androgenous Cowherd", which also makes me smile.

 

[lpetrich]

Saikat Chakrabarti was rather apolitical at first.

After college, I came out to San Francisco the first chance I got to work in tech because I naively believed tech would be a way to fix the biggest problems in the world. After working in tech for a few years though, I knew the answers didn’t lie there. So I quit.

He made a list of social problems that he wanted to do something about: inequality, poverty, and climate change. When he heard Bernie Sanders talking about those problems in his 2016 campaign, he joined BS's campaign, working as a programmer and an organizer.

One of his fellow campaigners got the idea to build a slate of Congressional candidates that would run on some platform, a 400-headed Presidential campaign. That was implemented in Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, though neither BNC nor JD recruited anywhere near that number of candidates. Despite planning to act like a political party, a crucial decision was to run the candidates in the two major political parties, all but one candidate as a Democrat. That made for much greater political viability, and avoided suspicions of being a spoiler.

Then mentioning working on the Green New Deal and his return to San Francisco "after ruffling a few too many feathers in DC".

He didn't want to run for office, but after seeing the Democrats' lame response after Donald Trump was elected a second time, he decided to run. Nancy Pelosi, in particular, didn't think that the Democrats didn't do anything wrong. "Here in San Francisco, even those who have supported Pelosi for decades and deeply respect her past work believe it’s time for change. But because of the deeply hierarchical nature and deference to seniority in the Democratic Party, no one else is willing to risk their political career by running against her."

 

[lpetrich]

Saikat Chakrabarti:

For most people, the American Dream is dead. Their kids are not going to do better than them. People are having to work longer hours to be able to afford less and less. This trend has been getting worse for about fifty years now.

This is, ultimately, why people keep voting for anyone campaigning on bold, sweeping economic and political change. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a populist who would fight for Main Street, not Wall Street. In 2016, Trump campaigned against both parties to drain the swamp. In 2020, Joe Biden even pitched an ambitious economic vision with Build Back Better.

...
But the biggest reason Trump won was he was, once again, the change candidate who would blow up a system voters believe is broken, and [Kamala] Harris represented continuing the status quo.

...
Ultimately, Democrats did not actually do that badly against Trump. Both Republicans and Democrats have been routed way worse many times over in the past several decades. But it’s still insane that anyone could lose to someone as reckless, undisciplined, and unpopular as Trump. Yet, Democrats somehow managed to lose not once but twice to Trump, even when they had four years to see the threat coming the second time around.

He lists three reasons.

"First, Democrats don’t know who they stand for." Despite BS and AOC getting big audiences for their anti-oligarchy message, much of the rest of the party ignores that, and the leadership continues to court the donor class.

"Second, Democrats have neither an explanation for why working- and middle-class Americans are sinking nor a vision for how to reverse that." Donald Trump has an explanation, even if a very bad one: too many immgrants and not enough concern with "real" Americans. The mainstream of the D Party is also short of a great vision, only wanting minor tinkerings with the status quo. Obamacare wasn't even Bismarckcare, for instance.

"Third, Democrats are seen as weak, incompetent, and sluggish." SC experienced that at first hand in his time at DC. "The party felt like a slow, bloated corporation, completely blind to the rapidly changing world around it." Not responding very fast to Trump's outrages, for instance. The party had little interest in new media, ignoring proficient users of it like AOC, preferring instead to dial for dollars and to try to avoiding displeasing big donors.

 

[lpetrich]

SC's interviewer mentioned class deslignment: workers becoming alienated from center-left parties that had been their home for much of the 20th cy.

SC then described FDR's great achievements, despite neither him nor the D party being obvious champions of the working class when FDR became President.

He did that by bailing out every American’s life savings right after taking office and averting a total banking system collapse — and explaining exactly what he was doing directly to Americans on the radio with the same kind of thrilling suspense and drama that Trump uses (though Roosevelt’s version was strategic and caring as opposed to chaotic and cruel).

Then supporting numerous government agencies and activities that helped people.

He unequivocally stood by unions so that the wealth from this new economy would be shared, creating the middle class. He trash-talked oligarchs and Wall Street, supported women’s rights, and even cautiously began hinting toward racial equality toward the end of his presidency.

Afterward, "For the Democratic Party, the crime his successors committed was to think their job was to shut down Roosevelt’s project." How did that happen? "One was that Southern white Democratic congressional leaders believed it was their duty to dismantle planning institutions that had been interfering with the supply of practically indentured black workers in the South." Such Dixiecrats eventually left the D Party for the Republican Party, making it the party of Jefferson Davis.

"Another twist was that Northern tycoons and the free-market ideologues they funded were running think tanks and employer associations devoted to brainwashing Americans against any kind of economic planning or coordination."

 

[lpetrich]

SC:

But when neither party is clearly improving workers’ lives, other issues start determining elections and which party workers will vote for — just as they did before Roosevelt.

... In the 2000s, a failed war in Iraq followed by the Great Recession severely damaged trust in our government, and people started voting for outsiders pitching dramatic economic and political change.

... In A Crisis Wasted, Reed Hundt describes how Obama had an instinct that we should respond to the Great Recession with something bigger and more transformative, some kind of moonshot. But he was shot down by advisors like Larry Summers.

... Here’s the good news: Democrats can reverse this trend by doing what Roosevelt did. If we present a plan for delivering dramatic improvements to workers’ lives, and then follow through on that with urgency, purpose, and clear communication, we will become the home of the working-class again.

What, in particular? That's the subject of his Mission for America. He then discusses "mission mode" for fixing the economy.

1. Mission mode begins when a new leadership comes to power that calls the country to a mission that will transform the entire economy — not just some piece of it.
2. They make comprehensive plans for executing the mission. They don’t just pass some policies and take their hands off the steering wheel, as we do today.
3. They create institutions to finance and execute these plans.

That's very ambitious.

This is a well-worn path that all industrialized countries have followed to build and upgrade their economies. There are no examples of countries that created broad prosperity and made huge structural changes just through slow, piecemeal reforms.

...
This also isn’t the standard social democratic path of redistribution and social programs (though that is part of the story for making sure the newly created wealth gets distributed fairly), and it isn’t the neoliberal path of deregulation and withdrawal of the public will from markets and enterprise. It is something different.

 

[lpetrich]

Then discussing AOC's Green New Deal.

At the time we launched the GND, the Left was focused largely on shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure — the movement to “keep it in the ground.” Meanwhile, moderates were just trying to figure out what the right price of carbon should be.

He wanted to introduce two main ideas:

1. Solving climate change shouldn’t pit prosperity against the planet.
2. The scale of ambition of climate proposals being put out by Democrats needed to dramatically increase.

That's good. Avoiding CO2 emission should not require going back to a preindustrial economy. Renewable-energy development enables avoiding CO2 emission while maintaining a full level of industrialism.

Our strategy was to insert these ideas onto the national stage by using the huge spotlight AOC had after her surprise victory over Joe Crowley. After she won, the media all wanted to write the AOC vs. Nancy Pelosi story. So we decided to give them what they wanted — but on our terms.

Not much of the GND was ever implemented, but it put renewable-energy development and climate-change mitigation on the political map.

The GND resolution was only an outline of a comprehensive plan — the entire resolution is just fourteen pages. The Mission for America is a successor to the GND — a much more detailed plan for actually getting every piece of the GND done.

 

[lpetrich]

On that subject, I've seen Greenies complain that AOC ripped off the GND from the likes of the Green Party. But the GP has mainly run vanity Presidential campaigns, while AOC run as a Democrat and got the GND on the political map.

The Mission for America doesn’t actually hearken back to the New Deal so much as it does to the World War II period and the period in preparation for the war when Roosevelt began the great upgrade of the economy. Looking back, the big lesson is that the country could have started rebuilding right after the Great Crash. They didn’t need to wait for war. But they were bound by ideological dogmas that made it impossible — just as Democrats and Republicans were after the 2008 crash and as they still are today.

...
When a real existential crisis emerges, the political class often finally sees through its own blinders to the obvious solutions. That’s what happened when US leaders saw that we were going to have to enter World War II, and it’s what enabled us to finally do what we needed to build the kind of industrial base to get us out of the Great Depression.

...
Labor needs to be an active participant in planning the mobilization in the Mission for America — just as they were in the mobilization for World War II, and just as they are today in many European countries. And incidentally, those countries build projects faster and cheaper than in America.

 

[lpetrich]

SC also wants

... universal health care, universal childcare, paid family and medical leave, and raising the minimum wage. I also believe our gross levels of income and wealth inequality need to be reversed, and that will only happen if we increase taxes on the richest and end all the tax loopholes.

Also that

We must also end the corrupting influence of money in our politics. This is the number-one polling issue in the country.

... And for the record, I am not taking any corporate or lobbyist money in my campaign.

Foreign policy?

... I believe we need to stop bombing and sanctioning countries every chance we get. ... We need to have a complete change in our foreign policy to become one where we follow international law and do business with other countries instead of coercing them. ... I’ve also been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as well as the race to war with Iran. If elected, I’d be a vote to end all military aid to Israel.

Will AIPAC consider him threatening enough to heavily fund Nancy Pelosi? Also advertise how she is running against some villainous Republican, so that that Republican will make it into the top two and not SC. Something like what Adam Schiff did, so he would not have to run against Katie Porter in the general election.

Finally, we need to end corruption in our government. This is a no-brainer. This includes banning members of Congress from owning or trading stocks and banning the revolving door between Congress and the lobbying industry.

 

[Derec]

[*]Raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over the next five years by passing the Raise the Wage Act

$17 by 2032 is reasonable. It should also be automatically adjusted for inflation.

[*]Support every American’s right to join a union by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.

I disagree with this. The US union system is a mess and unions should not be given even more power.
The issues I have with the unions:

• Many are overly powerful. Take the longshore union. Since so much trade goes through maritime ports, this union can kneecap the economy by striking. That results in highly inflated wages and the union successfully resisting efforts to modernize. That means that US port operations are stuck in the 20th century and have to pay too many workers too much ($200k/a is not uncommon). Frank Sobotka won after all, to the harm of the rest of us.
• They are overly political, including on issues that have nothing to do with their raison d'être. For example, some unions are inserting themselves in the issue of the Gaza War. Some unions even have expressed solidarity with celebrity cop-killer Wesley Cook.

[*]Promote sectoral bargaining — where workers across an entire industry negotiate wages and conditions together, not just at individual companies — to raise the wages of millions of Americans.

How is that not creating a de facto monopoly of labor?

Crackdown on wage theft — the most common form of theft in the United States — by making intentional and repeated wage theft a felony punishable with jail time.

If there is actual wage theft, that should be prosecuted. [citation needed] on the claim that it is the "most common form of theft in the United States". More common that say, shoplifting, especially in cities like SF, LA or NYC?

Guarantee every worker the legal right to bathroom, water, and rest breaks.

Doesn't that already exist?

"Make public college tuition-free" - then noting how his adopted state had tuition-free public colleges until half a century ago.

I already spoke about how German system of tuition-free universities would not be feasible here. There is this idea in the US that colleges and universities should be for everyone, even if the student barely graduated high school (or GED) and can barely do math or read.
I don't know what system California had until ca. 1975, and he does not elaborate. Were college admissions a free-for-all like they are these days? Did they have remedial math and English back in 1970s?

"Fund public schools" - "I will fight to fully fund our schools, raise teacher pay, and improve learning outcomes."

You cannot improve learning outcomes by just throwing money at the problem thoughtlessly.
US actually spends a decent amount per student on K-12 education.

So the overall spending is not really the problem here. How the money is spent is. More to teachers and materials involved in teaching, less for administrators or football and basketball coaches. In some schools coaches get to teach subjects they are not qualified to teach leading to poor outcomes.
Also, inserting politics into education wastes money and perverts the purpose of public education.
Then, there are standards. Oregon doing away with graduation standards because of "equity" or SF trying to prevent students from taking algebra before the 9th grade, again for "equity", is not ging to lead to better outcomes, no matter how much money you throw at it. Quite the opposite!

"Enshrine reproductive rights" - "Although we are lucky to live in a state that protects reproductive freedom, Trump’s Project 2025 made clear that the goal is a national abortion ban." Then mentioning how Democrats spent nearly half a century counting on the Supreme Court to protect abortion rights without codifying abortion rights into law. "I will not make that mistake."

Yes, it was a mistake not to codify abortion rights into federal law when they had large majorities. Even if that had required compromising with some members of the Democratic caucus on trimesters and such, it would have been worthwhile.

What explains this disastrous policy? Trying to get the soft anti-abortion vote?

I think there are/were Democrats that are not as gung-ho about abortion and would have insisted on limits that the more lefty members would not have agreed to. After all, Democratic Senate members had included everyone from the likes of Kamala Harris to the likes of Joe Manchin. It's a big tent that requires compromise even when you have a large majority.

 

[ZiprHead]

$17 by 2032 is reasonable. It should also be automatically adjusted for inflation.

 

[ZiprHead]

If there is actual wage theft, that should be prosecuted. [citation needed] on the claim that it is the "most common form of theft in the United States". More common that say, shoplifting, especially in cities like SF, LA or NYC?

Per Gemini:

Wage theft, the illegal underpayment or non-payment of workers, is a widespread problem in the US, costing workers billions of dollars annually. Estimates suggest that employers steal upwards of $50 billion each year, impacting millions of workers. This includes violations of minimum wage laws, overtime pay, and other forms of non-payment for hours worked.

Key Statistics and Findings:

• Annual Cost:
  Experts estimate that wage theft costs American workers up to $50 billion per year.
  
  
• Minimum Wage Violations:
  In the 10 most populous states, 17% of eligible low-wage workers reported being paid less than the minimum wage, totaling $8 billion in stolen wages annually. Extrapolating to the entire country, this figure could be as high as $15 billion.
  
  
• Overall Impact:
  Wage theft affects a large number of workers, with an estimated 4.5 million individuals experiencing some form of wage theft each year.
  
  
• Impact on Low-Wage Workers:
  Low-wage workers, women, people of color, and immigrant workers are disproportionately affected by wage theft, often due to their concentration in low-wage jobs.
  
  
• Comparison to Other Crimes:
  The estimated annual cost of wage theft ($50 billion) far surpasses the total losses from robberies, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts combined.
  
  
• Limited Enforcement:
  Despite the scale of wage theft, the US Department of Labor recovers only a small fraction of the stolen wages.

 

[Derec]

Welcome immigrants

What, all of them?

Let me be clear: The Trump administration's immigration agenda is cruel, authoritarian, and profoundly un-American. ICE is a personal police force for Trump now full of masked agents in unmarked vehicles picking people up off the streets and disappearing them with no due process. Claiming this is about immigration is a farce.

Both parties neglected the issue for too long. This kind of stuff is the consequence. Europe should take note, because their immigration problem are even worse than ours, and their governments are even more tone-deaf.

In Congress, I will stand up to President Trump’s authoritarian immigration policies. I'll vote to repeal dangerous laws like the Alien Enemies Act that the administration uses to detain and deport people without trial.

Just because a law may have been misapplied, does not mean it should be repealed either. Maybe rewritten/reformed.

I’ll rein in ICE by making it illegal to detain people at courthouses

Why should it be illegal to detain people in courthouses. What should be illegal is for local law enforcement and court systems to aid and abet illegal immigration. Take for example the murderer of Kate Steinle, José Inez García Zárate. He was previously deported five times. In 2015, he was in federal custody when SF Sheriff's Department requested him for an outstanding drug warrant, but released him less than three weeks later instead of giving him back to the feds because of SF's "sanctuary city policies". That's when he picked up a gun he says he found and shot Kate Steinle dead. He got away with the murder too, as the SF jury only convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Do you think policies that release even criminal illegals are in any way defensible? Especially when the illegal was already in federal custody and was then requested by the locals, only to be released? I am sure Saikat supports such policies, but do you?

and use Congressional oversight powers to investigate ICE for civil rights abuses. We need a fighter in Congress who will protect sanctuary cities like San Francisco from federal intimidation and ensure families aren't torn apart by deportation.

There should be oversight of ICE, but there should not be any "sanctuary cities", much less "sanctuary states".

However, we can’t just settle for playing defense against the Trump administration’s racist agenda. We need new leaders who will follow through on their promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform. We need immigration reform that expands legal immigration pathways, reunites separated families, and treats asylum seekers with the dignity they deserve.

US is already very generous with legal immigration. We do not need to expand legal pathways. The asylum system needs to be reformed, but in the opposite direction of what Saikat and his Ilk want. Asylum has been abused by hordes of economic mass migrants and therefore needs to be restricted. US immigration system should also move away from luck based "lottery" and also should include things like cultural compatibility and willingness to integrate, which includes learning English.

Even if it must be conceded that the US cannot accept *every* potential immigrant.

That is obviously true and should be conceded by everyone. I doubt Saikat would admit that, even though he must know it is true.

I'd propose assistance in finding other countries willing to take such would be immigrants.

Well we can't do that for the entire war, but I definitely think we can and should do that for people we have some responsibility for. Like Afghan translators and the like. Not all of them are good fit for immigration into the US, and instead of bringing them all here with minimal vetting, the Biden administration should have facilitated their immigration into safe Muslim countries.

End the wars

Laudable goal, but quite naïve.

We need to stop bombing and sanctioning countries every chance we get.

So he does not want us to sanction countries like Russia and Iran either? And it can be argued that Trump has not done enough bombing. He stopped bombing the Houthis. Had he not done that, they may not have attacked these cargo ships which resulted in the deaths of several innocent sailors.
And it seems much of Iranian nuclear program has survived, which means that further bomb runs will be needed.

We’ve destroyed our standing with the world and our unhinged foreign policy is leading us to ruin.

No. Arming Ukraine over Russia, or trying to prevent the theocrats in Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon is not destroying our international standing. Neither is attacking Iranian vassals who are attacking civilian shipping - again, we are doing way too little of that!

We need to have a complete change in our foreign policy to become one where we follow international law and do business with other countries instead of coercing them.

Doing business with most countries is great - Trump is a deranged idiot for his obsession with punitive tariffs against friendly countries. But sanctions and military force have their place. Anybody who does not see that does not live in the real world.
International law? Where is international law when Russia invaded Ukraine? Or when Gaza attacked Israel? Or when Iran funds and supplies terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis with near impunity?

We should be doing the modern day version of the Marshall Plan, except this time to help developing nations create their own clean, sustainable, and prosperous economies — that would be a win-win for the United States and the world.

Marshall Plan wasn't about giving pallets of cash to hostile regimes. It required the military defeat of the enemy first, followed by an occupation and removal of the hostile ideology from power. Another swing and a miss from Saikat.

I’ve also been a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as the race to war with Iran. If elected, I’d be a vote to end all military aid to Israel.

Not very surprising that a fan of a Nazi collaborator would also hate Israel. Or that he would like the regime in Tehran.

I believe Congress—not the president—should decide when America goes to war. I support repealing outdated Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) and backing legislation like the National Security Powers Act to end forever wars, close legal loopholes, and make sure no president can unilaterally drag the U.S. into conflict.

The Congress is too unwieldy for action. That's why the president does have authority to act alone for a time, until the Congress has time to act.
And the strikes against Tehran regime's nuclear facilities were well overdue. And more of that is needed, not less. Same goes for bombing Houthi terrorists and pirates.

Great. I'd reduce Presidential power in a LOT of other ways, making the US semi-presidential. Congress ought to accept responsibility for running much of the Executive Branch.

Do we really need a prime minister in addition to president, à la France? He would not be able to get this through Congress anyway, even if he were to get himself elected though.

"Protect the LGBTQ+ community" - stating that his adopted city has long been a center of LGBTQ+ activism.

Sure, but at the same time, not every stupid idea thought up by the activists needs to be adopted or defended by Dem politicians. There needs to also be room for disagreement on policy without immediately being attacked or dismissed as a "homophobe" or "transphobe".

 

[Derec]

Fix inequality and the national debt with a wealth tax on billionaires

Wealth taxes are difficult to implement and a wealth tax that only targeted billionaires would not even bring that much.
US billionaires have a collective net worth of about $6.2T. A 3% wealth tax as proposed by Warren would bring in $186G of extra revenue, if we assume perfect collection. A 6% tax as proposed by Bernie would bring in $372G. That would not even cover half the interest, much less substantially help pay down the national debt.
There is also the issue that most of billionaires' wealth is in the stock of their companies. Paying 3% or 6% of wealth every year would mean forced sales that would depress the value of the stocks (also reducing the revenue wealth taxes bring in, as well as the value of retirement portfolios of regular people) and would gradually erode the ownership of their companies.

Imposing a wealth tax on billionaires may sound good on an election platform, but it's not a great idea in reality.

From 1975 to 2023, the balance of incomes have been shifted from the bottom 90% to the top 10% of income earners to the tune of $79 trillion dollars — with the vast bulk of that going to the top 1% of the top 1%. ...

It is interesting that for top 10% he has figures, but for 0.01% he only offers vague "vast bulk of that". I am skeptical. In any case, if either wealth inequality or deficits are a real concern, tax reform must also address the merely rich - physicians and lawyers making high six figures for example - and not just the relative handful of billionaires.

There is perhaps no better example of this massive “reverse Robinhood” wealth transfer than our government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis — under both Republicans and Democrats. After Wall Street got carried away with reckless speculation on an unprecedented scale, the leaders of both parties literally bailed out Wall Street’s biggest losers while millions of ordinary Americans lose their homes and life savings — a national trauma that created the Tea Party and set the stage for Trump’s rise.

A lot of things set stage for Trump - both parties ignoring illegal immigration and #BLM riots in the years before his first election for example. I think he is misrepresenting the events of 2008 quite a bit - for example, protecting the banking system was necessary, but that gos beyond he scope of this thread.

Incredibly, nearly all of the CEOs and other leaders who led our economy to ruin not only kept their jobs but were rewarded with trillions of dollars of support from the government. ...

Which CEO was "rewarded with trillions of dollars"? The entirety of TARP was $442G and it actually made a modest profit for the government.

Then about how he had a middle-class upbringing and went on to help build the payment processing company Stripe. As a result, he became a centimillionaire, at least on paper. "I’ve seen how, thanks to our rigged casino economy, the rich get richer without lifting a finger while everyone else struggles to hang on to what they have."

"Casino economy" implies that success and failure of companies is just blind luck. "Without lifting a finger"? Building up a business takes a lot of work.

Did I work hard at Stripe? Sure. But did I work harder than a teacher at SFUSD or a nurse at UCSF? No way. Do I think people should be rewarded for starting great companies? Absolutely. But should our economy be organized as a winner-take-all battle for survival?

It is quite an exaggeration to call our economy a "winner-take-all battle for survival". And nurses and even teachers make decent money.

... the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Pramila Jayapal. This bill creates a wealth tax on the top 0.05 percent of American households by having them pay 2 cents for every dollar of wealth over $50 million, and 3 cents for every dollar of wealth over $1 billion.

So that would bring far more revenue than a wealth tax focused solely on billionaires as he said above. Does Saikat have any projections about just how much?

It would still have all the problems of a wealth tax - accurately determining wealth, forced sales of large quantities of stock etc.

I will also fight to reverse the Trump tax cuts and end tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid paying estate taxes. Creating a fair tax system will not only reverse the decades of wealth transfer from the working and middle class to the ultra-rich, it will allow us to fund programs like universal healthcare, universal childcare, and public transit.

I support ending estate tax loopholes, and in general closing tax system loopholes. I think the tax system should be significantly simplified anyway. However, I doubt that it would come close to funding this spending wish list.

 

[Derec]

Per Gemini:

By "source", I was hoping for more than AI slop.

Wage theft, the illegal underpayment or non-payment of workers, is a widespread problem in the US, costing workers billions of dollars annually. Estimates suggest that employers steal upwards of $50 billion each year, impacting millions of workers. This includes violations of minimum wage laws, overtime pay, and other forms of non-payment for hours worked.

Assuming Gemini is not just hallucinating here, who are these estimates by? How credible are they? "Estimates suggest" is about as credible as "some say".
Furthermore, only deliberate non-payment is "wage theft", as theft requires intent. If underpayment was done as an honest mistake, it should be rectified, but it is not criminal. And I bet often it is employee filling out their time card (or electronic equivalent) wrong that may result in underpayment.

 

[Derec]

But did the Democratic establishment line up behind Zohran Mamdani?

Why should they? He is not a proper Democrat anyway, but a "Democratic Socialist".

Instead, Andrew Cuomo is running a sore-loser campaign as an independent, along with Mayor Eric Adams, who decided not to compete in that primary and also run as an independent.

I dislike that term, "sore loser". I think partisan primaries are a scourge of our democracy, and people trying an end run around it should not be shamed.
I prefer jungle primaries. Everybody votes for a pool of all candidates. Top two advance, so the winner is guaranteed to have the majority, not just plurality, and it's going to be the strongest two from the primary facing of against each other.

With Curtis Sliwa as the Republican, it looks like they could split the anti-ZM vote rather badly. The general election, unlike the primary election, is first-past-the-post, and they may be wishing that that election was ranked-choice voting, like the primary election.

Yes, the socialist may win with a minority of the vote.

Cuomo’s Mayoral Strategy: Everyone Else Drop Out - MSN

That would be smart. He has the best chance I think. And for the good of the city, and the country, it is imperative to stop Mr. Cardamom.

 

[Derec]

Saikat Chakrabarti Wants to Remake the Democratic Party - Jacobin

Jacobin, the commie rag, likes him. That's a red flag, literally and figuratively!

He hopes to build a national movement around an ambitious program called the “Mission for America” that aims to transform the US economy through aggressive government planning and investment — a kind of spiritual successor to the Green New Deal.

Mission for America at the New Consensus think tank.

The interview starts with some background.

Back in the 1970s, America felt unstoppable. We had just put a man on the moon, built the interstate highway system, had decades of rising living standards and wages, and were including more and more people in society through the civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and other movements.

Saikat is too young to remember the 70s, as am I. But from what I read, it was not like this at all. There was the Vietnam War, Watergate, stagflation and Malaise. There was a lot of unrest and far-left groups like Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground that did things like setting bombs. Not to mention Iran falling to the Islamists and our embassy personell being taken hostage.

He wants the US to do what it had done over the 1930's to 1970's - rising standards of living and great national achievements.

Slim Charles dropping wisdom.

 

[Derec]

He made a list of social problems that he wanted to do something about: inequality, poverty, and climate change. When he heard Bernie Sanders talking about those problems in his 2016 campaign, he joined BS's campaign, working as a programmer and an organizer.

Each of those is difficult to tackle by itself, much less all three at the same time. And they are not just difficult because of the scale or the costs involved, but because they have a lot of interconnected parts that behave in highly nonlinear manner.
Also, some degree of income/wealth inequality is good to have. You don't want a society that forces everyone to be at the same level, which is socialist ideal, but not really approached even in actually existing socialist societies like the Soviet Union.

Then mentioning working on the Green New Deal and his return to San Francisco "after ruffling a few too many feathers in DC".

You mean the Nazigate?
AOC’s Chief-Of-Staff Wears T-Shirt Featuring Nazi Collaborator

He didn't want to run for office, but after seeing the Democrats' lame response after Donald Trump was elected a second time, he decided to run.

What did he expect them to do? Dems do not hold many cards right now. The loss of not just the presidency, but of both chambers of Congress as well, left them impotent.

Nancy Pelosi, in particular, didn't think that the Democrats didn't do anything wrong.

That would be a really stupid thing to have said, if she said it. [citation needed]

"Here in San Francisco, even those who have supported Pelosi for decades and deeply respect her past work believe it’s time for change.

I agree that there is time for a change. Both generational and in terms of priorities and direction. I do not think this change should be toward socialism though.
It is also silly to think that Kamala Harris, of all people, lost (and dragged downballot races with her) because she was not too far left enough. She was one of the most left wing senators, and in the 2020 race, she contested the left lane with Bernie and Warren.

 

[Derec]

For most people, the American Dream is dead. Their kids are not going to do better than them. People are having to work longer hours to be able to afford less and less. This trend has been getting worse for about fifty years now.

How does he define American Dream? One definition is just a comfortable middle class life: suburban house with a picket fence, two cars, two and a half kids, and a dog. Another is to become extremely successful, which has always been rare.

I assume he means definition one. I think one big reason is that people want more. Bigger cars, bigger houses.

You can see how houses got bigger since the 1970s even as households got smaller. You also have the issue of population growth. US population in the 1970s was 203-226M, compared to ~330M now. As more and more people want to live in and near desirable cities, the real estate prices there must needs increase substantially. As Mark Twain is supposed to have said: "buy land; they're not making it anymore". They are certainly not making any more land on the island of Manhattan or the San Francisco peninsula.
One reason cars have gotten so expensive is that government regulations mandate features. There is a law recently passed that mandates tech to prevent DUI in all new cars. How many thousands will that add to the price of every new car?

This is, ultimately, why people keep voting for anyone campaigning on bold, sweeping economic and political change. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned as a populist who would fight for Main Street, not Wall Street. In 2016, Trump campaigned against both parties to drain the swamp. In 2020, Joe Biden even pitched an ambitious economic vision with Build Back Better.

Yes, simplistic answers tend to be popular with the masses. That's why so many young people are drawn to socialism.

But the biggest reason Trump won was he was, once again, the change candidate who would blow up a system voters believe is broken, and [Kamala] Harris represented continuing the status quo.

Well, she was the sitting vice president. But as we see from Trump, blowing up an imperfect system is not necessarily an improvement.

Ultimately, Democrats did not actually do that badly against Trump. Both Republicans and Democrats have been routed way worse many times over in the past several decades. But it’s still insane that anyone could lose to someone as reckless, undisciplined, and unpopular as Trump. Yet, Democrats somehow managed to lose not once but twice to Trump, even when they had four years to see the threat coming the second time around.

That is true. The election was relatively close. And Dems lost many close Senate and House races.
And he is right that Dems lost to an almost uniquely unsuitable candidate. I think one big reason for why this happened is that the Biden people did not want to admit him not being up for it. Had he withdrawn from the race in Summer 2023, there would have been a proper primary and Dems would likely have won. Water over the bridge at this point though.

"First, Democrats don’t know who they stand for." Despite BS and AOC getting big audiences for their anti-oligarchy message, much of the rest of the party ignores that, and the leadership continues to court the donor class.

Yeah no, I do not think going further left toward AOC/Bernie wing would have helped.

"Second, Democrats have neither an explanation for why working- and middle-class Americans are sinking nor a vision for how to reverse that." Donald Trump has an explanation, even if a very bad one: too many immgrants and not enough concern with "real" Americans. The mainstream of the D Party is also short of a great vision, only wanting minor tinkerings with the status quo. Obamacare wasn't even Bismarckcare, for instance.

Trump had a point with too much migration into the US. His approach has been wrong, but he did identify a real problem.
Obamacare was the best Obama could do with Congress even having large majorities. And it was a major improvement to the previous system.