Tag: Bernie Sanders

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The Blues My Party Sings to Me

Well, I’m giving you another reprise of my stuff, this one from 2017. It demonstrates how little has changed for the Democrats over these 7-plus years. Today these very same issues are being debated after a withering election. The years have brought us myopia, hibernation, and head in the sand denial of political realities. Sadly, the Dems are still fumbling with their insularity. What’s now emerging are the compromisers.

I should say it used to be my party. The Democrats lost me even before the [2017] election: I thought both Sanders and Clinton were bad candidates and said so here, among other places.

Elections in America are built on fraud in its various forms. People accept that they have to buy in because as both parties are structured voters have no truly democratic choices. Or a Hobson’s choice as in 2016 for the Democrats. With Clinton they have a candidate who has been on the wrong side (by my standards) of many issues. But her political life was enabled by the transformation of the Democratic party to one that cultivates money and elitism in its many forms. The party abandoned the working classes, its real constituency, many years ago—yes, even before Bill Clinton, who put the cap on it.

Bernie’s ideals would seem to be at great variance with those of the neoliberal Democrats. Yet he is now one of them. That in itself is a kind of hypocrisy. His calls for a revolution are ridiculous: this guy is no Che Guevara. If he truly wants a revolution, let him start speaking out to black people, the immigrants, and the white working (i.e., nonworking) classes who have been sold out of the action for years.

I spent years working for the party at the local, state and national level. In Washington I did a stint at the DNC working on the Clinton healthcare campaign in ’93-’94, producing a series of videoconferences for Hillary. You can read about that here. It was important, hard work even if we lost the battle.

Now we are getting a slew of articles with nostrums and correctives about the chaos in the Democratic party, and here am I adding to the clutter. Donna Brazile, who caused some of the problems, chimes in, telling how the DNC was in the tank for Hillary all along. Which was pretty obvious from the start.

The issues for advocacy facing the Democrats are both social and economic in the broad perspective of electoral politics. Yet they seem to prefer debating issues of ideal politics and identity politics. They still don’t understand how to deal with the kind of economic populism that got Trump elected. Nancy Pelosi and the old guard have not yet proposed any kind of message that might conceivably attract voters of all stripes. It would be trite but true to say that the party needs to rebrand. But so far the best message they have come up with is “A Better Deal”—like something you’d get from Walmart.

Practical (not ideal) politics is about winning elections, and the Democrats need younger candidates who focus on issues that are real and vital to a majority of people. A number of fresh-faced challengers, like Kelly Mazeski in Chicago, are in the field but they need a driving message and the backing that only the national party can provide. Healthcare, which affects everybody, is the obvious issue for the party in 2018—that is, a fiscally sound universal program perhaps like the German system, not the unaffordable Medicare for All that has been proposed.

In other words, the best hope for Democrats is to speak intelligently to a real and comprehensive need.

The only path to success for the Dems is to offer up a vision of the future that will include, well, everybody—as Pope Francis said in his recent TED talk. There are two proposals that have been in the air for years that would be key not to just winning the next election but to serving the wants and needs of all the people. (Which in fact should be the key to winning elections—the reverse of identity politics.)

One idea is to develop a viable scheme to provide universal basic income (UBI) and make it available to everyone who votes. The other is universal health care. Before you laugh me out of the room, consider that the major controversy over both these ideas is not over whether they are needed but how to implement them.

The party has also failed to explain just what and whom it stands for. And they have called for litmus tests on things like abortion, opening up an old wound. There are too many whiners and not enough killers, according to David Krone, Harry Reid’s ex chief of staff. The Dems have few trained attack dogs or counter-punchers. . . .

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The Guilt-Laden Post-Mortems

Nobody likes to eat crow. So here’s David Rothkopf, another public intellectual who refuses to do so: “In my view, not only is Donald Trump a terrible choice to be our president, but that Kamala Harris would have been an exceptionally good leader for America.” Well, David, I endorsed her too, but it’s over and she was partly responsible for blowing it. So let us move on and hear how other prominent liberal critics expiated their guilt.

Continue reading “The Guilt-Laden Post-Mortems”

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Playing Politics with Nuclear Energy

Democrats are divided on using nuclear energy to stop climate change

 On Climate, Sanders and Warren Must Go Nuclear

 Why Nuclear Power Must Be Part of the Energy Solution

The 3,122-megawatt Civaux Nuclear Power Plant in France, which opened in 1997

In his latest denial of reality, Trump got out his sharpie and altered Hurricane Dorian’s direction to send it 650 miles west to Alabama. And naturally he refuses to admit he was wrong. The press is having a field day.

For a much longer timeframe, the opponents of nuclear power have engaged in a similar denial of reality and good scientific evidence. They have mounted protests and lobbied Congress for years and are now coming up against the overpowering reality of climate change. Nuclear will have to be in the energy mix, whether they like it or not. We cannot mitigate the problem without it.

Now, most of these deniers are Democrats and so the presidential candidates have walked on eggshells over this issue. Finally in the recent CNN climate town halls, Cory Booker and Andrew Yang came out in favor of pursuing nuclear and developing the technology. Others waffled; Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren said no. Perhaps, as their understanding of energy options deepens, they will change their tune. Or maybe not: there are lots of votes out there that might go against them if they go nuclear.

Nuclear now provides 20 percent of US total energy output. And yet, says the Union of Concerned Scientists, “nearly 35 percent of the country’s nuclear power plants, representing 22 percent of US nuclear capacity, are at risk of early closure or slated to retire.” The reasons? They are unprofitable, costly to operate, need upgrading. But you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Nuclear produces near-zero emissions, its biggest selling point. It doesn’t shut down when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. The two downsides people point to are: the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the storage of waste. Storing nuclear waste is something we know how to do. The problem is political, per the evidence of Yucca Mountain.

And we have learned something from both meltdowns and their aftereffects. One, similar events could and should never happen again. Surprisingly, the health consequences have been much less severe than expected. Two, safety will not come cheap, and new power plants are expensive. New, smaller modular reactors may be the answer; thorium as a fuel poses less storage risk than uranium.

It will take a hardnosed view of energy policy and a commitment to state-owned nuclear power plants to get us to anything like scale in an effective climate policy. Scientists and many planners know this. France did it in the ‘80s, and the transformation worked.

I think the lefties on the Democratic side may be getting the message, slowly. Eric Levitz wrote a very good summary of the problems and processes here. He says:

The political center’s ideological hangups are a much bigger obstacle to rational climate policy than the left’s. As David Wallace-Wells writes, the gap between “political realism” and scientific realism on climate policy is vast and ever-growing. We have procrastinated past the point when incremental, nudge-based approaches to emissions reduction could be described as serious. . . . We have already put enough carbon in the climate to ensure that our planet will grow increasingly inhospitable for the rest of our lives, and the longer we wait to find an alternative means of powering our civilization, the more inhospitable it will become, and the more human beings will needlessly suffer and die. The available evidence suggests that decarbonizing at a remotely responsible pace will require us to transcend the neoliberal era’s taboo against ambitious state planning and industrial policy. . . .

We know what happens when a country committed to scaling up renewables decommissions its nuclear plants—it starts burning more coal.

P.S. The Future Looks Like Salt Reactors

P.P.S. Some of the real problems with nuclear that I didn’t address.