IT’S A TRAP! SPEAKING THEIR LANGUAGE PART I

The call:

This is a genuine question. This is a real question. If Bernie Sanders is the nominee there will be hundreds of millions of dollars spent to say every vote he’s taken, and to say he wants to raise your taxes. He just said the other night on the forum, honestly, I will raise your taxes.

And the response:

And there will be hundreds of millions of dollars spent against Hillary Clinton, and they will say the same thing about her. What Bernie Sanders can do, speaking with integrity and credibility and an authenticity that Secretary of State Clinton can’t, is marshal that political revolution even before he’s elected, which is to mobilize, and this will be an election of mobilization not persuasion, mobilize millions of people to ramp up their giving to him and be un-bought and liberated to advance bold ideas.

It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure watching Chris Hayes banter back and forth with other political policy wonks on his show, often playing devil’s advocate, pointing out the obvious elephant in the room. Listening to The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel respond to his question, I am struck by the utter simplicity of her initial point: the attacks will be the same regardless of who wins the nomination. I am reminded of this little nugget from a piece I wrote just after the 2012 election:

When the Bush tax cuts were originally supposed to sunset in 2010, the Republicans played their tried and true “tax and spend liberal” card to flip the switch and claim that allowing the tax cuts to expire was in fact Obama raising taxes. A clear majority of the country was not in favor of extending the tax cuts for the wealthy, but Bush & Co. were crafty enough to design the tax cuts as a reduction of rates across the board. The tax cuts for the lower tax brackets were a pittance next to the windfall for the 1%, but tethering the two together allowed Republicans to push the idea that Obama would be “raising taxes” on everyone.

The “tax and spend liberal” narrative that I mention above has been used in every single election cycle that I have witnessed. It isn’t particularly concerned with what or how much those taxes specifically are, or who it is that will pay them (or avoid paying them). The narrative persists even when candidates who have pledged not to raise taxes renege on their pledge, and – raise taxes. It’s a conflict narrative – liberals raise taxes, conservatives do not. Democrats expand government, Republicans shrink government. Vote for more taxes or less taxes, vote for more government or less. Of course, a little comparative research into how these two parties allocate our taxes quickly reveals that this who spends more narrative is nonsense. Republicans have even taken to attacking other Republicans for not being true conservatives, in a desperately cynical attempt to distance themselves from the “big government” crony capitalist policies of recent Republican administrations.

Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge is a well known recent example of this narrative, but the mythos of it tracks all the way back to the Boston Tea Party: the quintessential anti-taxation protest that sparked the Revolutionary War, and the ideological anchor for the Tea Party movement. Here’s the thing: the “destruction of the tea” as it was referred to, was a “no taxation without representation” protest, not simply anti-tax. Colonists with no representation in the British Parliament were being taxed without their consultation or consent. The Tea Act of 1773 actually cut taxes on British tea with the objective of undermining the lucrative sale of smuggled tea by colonists, leaving only minimal (but highly symbolic) tariffs in place. Significantly more complicated than tax or no tax.

While the narrative has most commonly been employed as a Republican talking point to universally discredit Democrats, candidate Barrack Obama famously pledged not to raise taxes on households earning less than $250,000 during the 2008 election cycle. He was joined in 2008 by Hillary Clinton who has now doubled down on the pledge in 2016. During recent debates the narrative has been used to discredit Bernie Sanders’ policy proposals by insinuating that his policies would levy high taxes on the middle class. During the recent CNN Iowa Town hall, Anchor Chris Cuomo characterizes Bernie’s single payer Medicare for all proposal as “one of the biggest tax hikes in history” and goes on to question Bernie, not once, but three times (paraphrasing): “What about the idea that you’re bringing back the era of big government, and making it bigger than ever?”

Cuomo’s heavy handed initial formulation of this “question” even offers former President Clinton (with obvious implications) as a direct foil to Sanders:

Right. Senator, then the pushback becomes how you pay. Now, in this room, you’re preaching to the converted somewhat, right? These are presumptively Democrats. But, you will hear people say that your paying for it is actually punitive. You’re going to punish people who make money, you’re going to punish the financial district, you’re going to punish and wind up changing the idea of an open and free economy ’cause you’re going to punish them for speculating. Which means they won’t speculate as much, which means you won’t get as much activity. And, if you do a checklist of how you pay for everything, what you’re doing is amassing the biggest government ever, after President Clinton said the era of big government was over, seems like Bernie Sanders is saying, not only it’s over, I’m going to do it bigger than ever.

Wow. What a pile on. Sanders did an admirable job of responding to Cuomo’s long-winded commentary, but is there an alternative to speaking their language? “But just to be clear, you are going to raise taxes to do this?” “Yes, we will raise - we will raise the - we will raise taxes, yes, we will. But...” As Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi famously exclaims, “It’s a TRAP!” The question is intended to draw Sanders into a narrative specifically designed to be beyond his control. While I applaud the Sanders campaign for coming at these issues head on, courageously redefining (or is it simply accurately defining?) and reappropriating terms commonly used to discredit and defame (socialist, revolution, electability, etc.), I do believe there could be more emphasis on the introduction of narratives that have not been pre-defined by the opposition.

For example: you get what you pay for. When the Kucinich campaign put forward a not-for-profit single payer Medicare for all proposal in 2004, the core of their narrative was to point out that the health insurance industry makes their profits not by providing health care, but rather by denying coverage. So the underlying problem is not simply cost, but that you are actually paying the insurance industry to deny you health care. You get what you pay for.

Rather than taking a defensive posture within a conflict narrative designed to constrain the dialogue, why not script a different narrative entirely? Maybe talk about Social Security (taxes) raided to fund emergency appropriations for the Iraq War, in attempts to validate a bogus privatization campaign by jeopardizing program solvency? Or how ’bout the majority of taxes allocated for research & development being used to subsidize the weapons industry rather than to find cures for cancer, AIDS, Ebola, etc.? Or maybe taxes used to subsidize the destruction of food in order to stabilize market price, rather than as an incentive to feed the hungry. Taxes used to subsidize the fossil fuel and meat industries to perpetuate a myth of profitability, masking their true costs, both financially and in terms of the continuation of life on our planet. You get what you pay for.

I prefer this narrative (and this is just one possible alternative narrative), because it tracks back to the idea that taxes are supposedly collected in order to pay for something we want instead of defaulting to the idea that taxes are simply some kind of punitive measure forced on the citizenry, a penalty we pay for the privilege of living in the United States. Our government may currently operate like an oligarchy, a plutocracy, but it was clearly not intended to be a monarchy where we all pay fealty to some oppressive overlord. If our government is truly of the people, by the people, for the people, then we must be clear that our system of taxation should benefit us.

“I don’t see how you can be serious about raising working and middle-class families’ incomes if you also want to slap new taxes on them—no matter what the taxes will pay for.” I could give Clinton the benefit of the doubt here, and just attribute her rhetorical commentary to a lack of vision in terms of how our system of taxation should benefit us. Maybe she actually can’t imagine how pooling our resources will reduce our individual costs, how standing together protects us from the predatory practices of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries? If she really is as versed in the particulars of universal health care as she claims, I’m pretty sure she understands this. And this is why it is so disturbing that she cynically chooses to go with the “tax and spend liberal” narrative here.

Our government splits spending into two categories, mandatory and discretionary. So called entitlement programs (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) fall under mandatory spending, this money will be spent, it is not simply an option if it turns out we have enough cash on hand. The Republican (& Democrat?) personal responsibility narrative would have us believe that everything should be discretionary spending, on the budgetary chopping block. The government can’t spend money it doesn’t have. But this is ridiculous on a couple levels. One – our government is actually spending money it “doesn’t have” all the time. That’s just how it works. That is why we pay taxes – to give our  government money it doesn’t have. And two – this isn’t like an individual buying a flat screen TV or some fancy new shoes, we are talking about people’s lives here.

Thom Hartmann wrote a piece month’s ago pointing out that the question isn’t if we are going to spend the money on health care, it is how we are going to spend it, and who is going to get paid. This isn’t about personal responsibility or fiscal responsibility, and it’s not about hard choices and self-sacrifice, it’s ultimately about who is going to control our tax dollars and what we choose to spend them on. Do we want perpetual war (more than 50% of our taxes)? Do we want to continue subsidizing industries that are destroying our planet? Do we want to continue sinking our health care dollars into an insurance industry that profits from denying us health care? How ’bout a pharmaceutical industry profit model that prioritizes illness over wellness? Do we allow 1%, whether in Republican or Democratic guise, to continue dictating austerity policy to us with catastrophic results, or do we stand up and take back our government and our taxes?
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Related articles:
Hillary Clinton’s no-tax pledge is Republican policy sprinkled with Third Way politics by Jon Green
These Quakers Are Asking Tougher Questions Than Many in the Press by Lee Fang
The Most Disingenuous Attack on Bernie Yet by Thom Hartmann
Bernie Sanders for President – The Nation

SNAKE OIL SALESMEN

Monday morning, back to work. The day before the election, a week after the storm. So many still in darkness. Challenging times like these can be opportunities to reflect on the decisions we have made and the path before us. I sincerely hope that we do not miss this opportunity in a rush back to the comfort of our normal routine.

Health Care, Education, Energy, Environment, Jobs... During the 2008 election cycle I produced two campaign videos to draw attention to the essential differences between Kucinich policy positions and the obligatory bullet points found on each of the other democratic primary candidates respective websites. For example, when Dennis Kucinich talked about “universal health care,” he was talking about a not-for-profit single payer system: Medicare for all - House Resolution 676. Barack Obama and media covering the primary used the term “universal health care” interchangeably with the newly minted “affordable health care,” obscuring the definition of the term “universal” and making it next to impossible to have a conversation about the relative differences of the policies. Later in the primary (long after Kucinich had been vanquished from the debate), we learned that this was a special enforceable mandate free kind of affordable. The five points were spelled out phonetically in the videos to poke fun at their over use and mis-use, to mock the arrogance of a political system that time and again presents these same bullet points as a bottled panacea to cure all that ails us. They treat us like children, too ignorant to understand the finer points of our own suffering. As is often the case with real children, we are rarely consulted and included in these adult discussions of our fate. We are relegated to the status of “swing state” campaign stop backdrop, selected as a scripted validation of whatever political point needs to be made.

In 2012 this already deficient five point perennial campaign platform has been narrowed even further, all other issues funneled through one single point - jobs. Health care in the USA continues to exist primarily as a benefit of a “good job,” rather than as a function of the common good. The power of this incentive (coupled with the scarcity of “good jobs”) keeps many tethered to jobs (and treatment on the job) they would otherwise reject. Education “reform” is predicated on the idea of lifting young people out of poverty by enabling them to compete for these “good jobs.” Absent from this argument is any discussion of how education enriches and empowers our youth (and our society) through creative and critical thought, regardless of economic outcomes. It has been suggested that a college education may be as key to attaining the highly specialized jobs of the 21st Century as secondary education was in the 20th century. Between this and the retraining of workers to keep up with technological progress, how much life will we actually spend learning to live? Most outrageous, in light of the recent storm, is how the issues of energy and environment have been consumed whole by this focus on jobs. Democrats and Republicans (and a complacent media) conveniently limit any discussion to the relative economics and job potential of their respective “plans.” Environmental, health and safety concerns have all been labeled “job killing.” In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, some economists are even talking about a potential bump to the economy in particular sectors...

About a week ago I watched a news program that brought together Mike Caputo, Vice President of The United Mine Workers of America and Tyson Slocum, director of the Public Citizen Energy Program. Mr. Caputo spoke in depth about the 70,000 - 100,000 dollar jobs with excellent health care and benefits, as well as the families and the economies of entire communities that depend on these jobs. Mr. Slocum pointed out that, despite wide acceptance of the science of climate change, the politics and economics of energy policy dominates the discussion specifically because the US is the largest fossil fuel producer on the planet. I enjoy watching this show because of the host’s ability to bring people together in constructive dialogue, but here there didn’t seem to be time to go much deeper than presenting two sides of the argument. One thing that really struck me was when Caputo mentioned that the jobs that wind farms create are minuscule compared to coal mining. I haven’t fact checked this claim myself, but I thought about how he might actually be making a sustainability argument for coal jobs, after all coal needs to be mined continuously as it is used. Wind power? Not so much. But isn’t that part of the point? Is the labor intensive nature of mining actually an asset? If in fact we are maintaining an industry that is detrimental not only to the planet (and all life on it), but also to the long term health and safety of those involved in it, can’t we find other (perhaps better?) ways to address the issue of job security for these workers? Can we do this in a way that is mindful of the dignity and self worth that is engendered through work? I faced some of these feelings myself when the economy crashed and I couldn’t find work. It can be challenging and frightening facing the prospect that the work you have spent most of your life doing may simply no longer be necessary. All of this got me thinking about the underlying hopes and fears of all involved, wondering what could be accomplished if our politicians were not consistently framing the argument as a battle between environmentalists and those directly affected in terms of their livelihood. Everyone involved and affected must be included in the discussion, and after Hurricane Sandy there will likely be many more in the United States who will have reason to participate in this discussion. And what of the millions affected by Sandy and multiple storms this season outside the US? They must be involved in this discussion as well. This isn’t about government bureaucrats making decisions that adversely affect the lives of citizens (as it is commonly spun); this is, at its heart, about a 1% that profits from the desperation of those who are made to prioritize their immediate survival over their survival a year, ten years, 50 years from now…

Romney claims he will win the election if he wins Ohio. When I read articles about Romney family holdings in a company that manufactures voting machines, it is hard not to hear his claim as back story to validate another stolen election. Key to stealing an election is the appearance of a close race, and that is just what the pundits are spinning about Ohio. When Romney and Obama got into a pissing match over who loves coal more in the second CPD debate, they were talking to “coal voters” throughout south eastern Ohio and West Virginia. Notably their focus was on the coal industry itself rather than the welfare of these workers and their families. Is this really about jobs, or is it a cynical manipulation of the fears of these men and women? Are they making a case for the prosperity of these workers or are they relying on the fear of a lost job to drive these workers into the voting booth? And if this is the case, how does this relate to policies that keep these families dependent enough to submit to this manipulation? During the match, neither candidate addressed the mining disasters that have made the headlines recently, and how the corporations responsible in those cases get fined, rather than shut down. Not surprisingly neither of them addressed acid rain, mountain top removal, or climate change either. The singular focus on jobs dominates the discussion, wiping away all other concerns. Month after month of “opinion polls” pushing this single word to the top of the pile, conditioning us to accept that only the most pressing, most desperate, of concerns need be addressed. Everything else is extravagance, a burden we can’t afford to even talk about. So says the austerity model.

Matthew Fox writes in his book The Reinvention of Work:

Under the pressure of the world economic crunch that is creating a worldwide depression, the grave danger looms that we will seek only jobs–jobs at any price–and ignore the deeper questions of work such as how, why, and for whom we do our work.

So, if all of these issues are being funneled through this single point, what happens when we remove jobs from the equation? Just for kicks, what happens with climate change if all coal miners the world over were to suddenly find themselves independently wealthy? What if all the tax payer money we spend subsidizing the mythical “clean coal” was spent instead to provide a cushion for miners to decide what they want to do without it being a question of economic survival for their families and their towns? And I’m not talking about a bridge loan here, or a program to retrain these workers, or a mandatory resume writing seminar to get your unemployment check. I’m talking about dignity, and respect, and a well deserved reward for years of hard work. What if health care was independent of your job so you could make career choices based on what you want to do rather than what type of benefit package you can get? What if we dealt with child poverty (which is of course family poverty, community poverty, etc.) before we sent children to school, rather than as the ultimate objective of education, so that our youth could instead focus on how best to contribute their unique genius to our society? When our politicians speak of “winning the future” through education fueled innovation, what kind of message are we sending to our youth? Are we at all concerned about their freedom to build the life, the world, they desire? Or are we just priming them to take their role in saving the existing system from collapse? What is the impact on innovation when an entire generation of young people seek MBAs based on the ratio of return for their education dollar? And finally, what impact would removing this singular focus on jobs from the equation have on our elections? If your boss sends you a memo “encouraging” you to vote for a particular candidate, is it ok for you to send  a reply “encouraging” your boss to mind their own business? Which issues rise to the top of your list when the issue of jobs is removed? How many of them are issues of economics? What would it take for you to prioritize the ones that are not?   

One percent power players love to use the term “redistribution of wealth” to attack those seeking economic justice, but they never use this term to refer to the enormous direct and indirect government subsidies (tax breaks, tax credits, loans, incentives, deals, etc.) their own corporations receive. Occupy Wall Street chants, “Banks got bailed out - we got sold out!” This is a somewhat different response from the Wall Street vs. Main Street narrative I heard over and over after the crash. The idea of taxing Wall Street a small percentage on transactions, in order to generate funds to offset the damage done to Main Street is clearly a downward spiral. Getting a kickback from the guy who is robbing you will not get back the home or the job you lost. And he can always gouge you more (put you into debt) to pay off your cut... It’s important to recognize that the bailout is a redistribution of wealth, from the tax payers to the wealthy. It is the same redistribution of wealth that happens when public resources and services are privatized, directing our tax dollars into the bank accounts of private corporations, rather than back into the hands of our citizens. The OWS chant doesn’t ask for a corporate handout (is that an oxymoron?) or a government bailout for the people. The People’s Bailout, the Rolling Jubillee, comes from the people directly. I remember Bush senior talking about “a thousand points of light” and thinking what an asshole. But that was a time when those thousand points responded (when they actually did respond) more out of sympathy, pity, charity. The thousands of points of light I witness in Occupy are coming from empathy. Many in the movement have experienced or are experiencing the same suffering that they are responding to directly, and progressively more and more folks throughout the country are having similar personal experiences that move them to take action. The “safety net” is no longer keeping them safe and in its place they are seeking to build communities of trust and mutual aid. Within these communities they can be who they want to be and do the work they want to do. The adversity they face is simultaneously an opportunity for greater solidarity, for deeper connection. Occupy Sandy is a wonderful example of this dynamic.

From Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s book Your Money or Your Life:

And they call this making a living? Think about it. How many people have you seen who are more alive at the end of the work day than they were at the beginning? Do we come home from our “making a living” activity with more life? Do we bound through the door, refreshed and energized, ready for a great evening with the family? Where’s all the life we supposedly made at work? For many of us, isn’t the truth closer to “making a dying”? Aren’t we killing ourselves–our health, our relationships, our sense of joy and wonder–for our jobs? We are sacrificing our lives for money–but it’s happening so slowly that we barely notice. Graying temples and thickening middles along with dubious signs of progress like a corner office, a private secretary or tenure are the only landmarks of the passage of time. Eventually we may have all the comforts and even luxuries we could ever want, but inertia itself keeps us locked into the nine-to-five pattern. After all, if we didn’t work, what would we do with our time? The dreams we had of finding meaning and fulfillment through our jobs have faded into the reality of professional politics, burnout, boredom and intense competition.

My political advisor astutely suggested that I look into what is being done in other countries to address the dignity of coal workers AND the continued existence of life on this planet. Due to the storm I have not been able to research this point, but I will certainly look into it and post my findings when I have my phone and internet back up and running. This post is dedicated to him on his birthday.
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Still haven’t gotten around to the research above, but came across a related article today that I really enjoyed - read it here