Ojeda Wants to Protect US from Vipers
Just caught an episode of David Doel's podcast where he clips some MSNBC segments of an interview with Richard Ojeda. While I think Ojeda has the right tone needed for our times, I think there is a lot of finessing which needs to take place on the Progressive left to take back the narrative and framing away from the neoliberals. As for conservatives, ... forget them, they are dinosaurs holding on to their last vestiges of power using corruption, bribes, nationalistic rhetoric, and electoral hijinks. It is a thorough waste of time for lefties to pursue the votes of conservatives, the conservatives will never vote other than Republican, they do not have the open minds to do anything else. Moderate conservatives are maybe more interesting, but if they can be pursuaded to vote for a leftist socialist they will more likely be independents who could swing vote, and that's fine, but appealing to them with a centrist neoliberal message is frickin bananas. The vast un-tapped reservoir of people who hardly ever vote are from the radical left/working class base. They are the ones who do not vote, because they simply cannot morally support anyone in either of the mainstream parties.
While Ojeda perfectly captures the anger and frustration of lefties who have no champions among the political elite, other than side-lined folks like Bernie and Warren, his anger risks alienating folks who will likely fail to see the reason for his anger. Make no mistake, just as people in the rust belt and de-industrialized wastelands of the USA were fed-up enough to vote for the Orange Clown King despite hating the guy, there is good reason for this leftist anger. The mainstream Democratic Party is fully right-wing, there is no denying this based on transparent policy and voting records. The Dems favour economic austerity just as much as the Republicans. Let there be no doubt, economic austerity is "sold" via propaganda as analogous to a family who are spending beyond their means having to "tighten their belt" and budget and save. But in a macro-economy this is false and dangerous reasoning, it can literally kill people (through economic impoverishment and depression).
The government and It's Federal Reserve are not like a family with a fixed income. A government needs to run big deficits in times of economic depression in order to circulate money and fuel the economy. You cannot use austerity to do this (unfortunately like we see in the real case studies of the European Union imposing austerity on Cyprus and Greece, and likely also soon to Italy), because austerity sucks money out of the bulk of the economy while perversely vacuuming up all excess profit and distributing it up the food chain to the bankers and financiers. It really is perverse (and on this conservatives and neoliberals are equally poisonous) since it is like taking money off the poor who will likely spend every cent they have and giving it instead to the wealthy capitalists and rentiers who are highly likely to store that money in interest bearing accounts. It starves the economy, making private business think pessimistically (there is less demand for their goods) and so incentivise private business to act conservatively and not expand and hire workers, thus further increasing austerity, it is a fatal downward spiral to absolute base level subsistence where people are spending only on what they need to survive (and sometimes less). Neoliberal austerity will always be a reverse Robin Hood economic policy. There is nothing good about economic austerity. It is an insane and simplistic and wrong attempt to model an entire economy as like a family household budget. It is worse than childish, for it is cynical and morally and ethical reprehensible. Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher are/were not the great iron ladies of Europe, they are/were among the worst instantiations of the banality of evil in recent times. Their policies have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor people, while plunging several more million into borderline poverty, while massively increasing the wealth of the capitalist and rentier classes who do zero real productive work for the economy.
To see how much neoliberal/conservative policies have wreaked social havoc, just take one sector of the economy: housing. How have rising house prices helped the poor? Answer: the housing market has thrown thousands of families out of thier homes. How has this effected the wealthy Answer: it has given them previously undreamed of wealth. How have house price crashes helped the poor? Answer: not one bit, since the poor defaulting on their mortgages are the cause of the crashes in the first place. How have housing price crashes affected the rich? Answer: some have lost out, but plenty more have gained huge profits from predatory vampire buy-ups in the wake of the crashes, and how is that possible? Answer: because neoliberal governments have doled out cash to prop up the failing banks. That is corporate social welfare. This is what neoliberals like the Thatcherites, the Reaganites, the Blairites and the Clintonites do: they dispense corporate social welfare to the wealthy elite and thrust austerity and shrinking means-tested austerity-conditions welfare onto the poor. Why? Because in the neoliberals reptilian eyes the wealthy must deserve their wealth and be rewarded for it, while the poor are clearly just lazy and deserve to be punished for being poor. You know... in a market- driven world the worthy will prosper and the lazy will lag behind, right?
It is time the working class woke up and realised what is being done by these lizard-brained neoliberals of both centrist political parties. In a market-driven economy the rich get richer and the poor may just get a little richer, but in real terms they get poorer because of the
So what Ojeda is saying is mostly good stuff. But I worry about some of the criticisms his rhetoric will draw from the disingenuous mainstream. Sadly this matters, because despite the rise of alternative online media, the mainstream are still providing most of the source material in the networks of online news and current affairs. What online media are producing is a lot of bloated ill-informed opinion, along with heavy doses of extremist propaganda. (What are you reading this very second? It behoves you to not just accept what I am writing without critical appraisal and independent research.)
Ojeda talks about needing to fight the neoliberals and get vicious. Basically I agree with this as a broad stroke attitude. But it has to be finessed, not wildly used to stir up gross resentment for all politics. Politics is the art of governing, so it is something every citizen should be involved in if they think they want a democracy. Currently most supposedly democratic nations are not true democracies, they are oligarchies with a cloak of democracy. Wolves in sheeps clothing. Ojeda's message is that the sheep do not need to be passive, and should not think of themselves any more as sheep. The citizens need to step up and become the shepherds.
So being vicious is the wrong framing (and I think not really what Ojeda means). A leftist candidate like Ojeda needs to be ruthless in defence of his people and vicious in attacking corrupt neoliberals and conservatives, but the framing of this should be in terms of protection: Ojeda is protecting ordinary people from the vipers of capitalism and neoliberalism, and (using the correct framing) when your child is attacked by a cobra you are not being nasty by decapitating that predator, you are defending the innocents. If the USA becomes more social democratic (e.g., fair elections, non-predatory banks, crack downs on predatory rentiers and financiers, investment in productive areas of the economy rather than corporate welfare for the blood-sucking financial leeches, more cooperatives, profit sharing with all workers, universal healthcare and education, green new deal, federal job guarantee, regulatory action with teeth on environmental issues) then there would be no need for Ojeda to be "vicious".
Someone ought to talk to Ojeda and push him further left on economic policy and electoral and campaign finance reform. He could then in 2020 be "Bernie's Bernie" pushing Bernie's campaign to be more fierce and strong in championing the working class and raising people out of poverty, inadequate housing, joblessness and drug addiction. But without using the false promises of neoliberal trickle-down economics. The predicted "trickle-downs" are always a "couple of years away," like the promise of fusion power. The you get a financial crash, and then again it's "a couple of years away". Always a few years away. Time to reject that sort of bullshit and get real about a social democracy and social and economic justice. Neoliberalism and market-capitalism is a bloated fat greedy snake that has tried to devour all the sheep, it needs to be euthenized. Time to replace that snake with the Lion of democracy. Or, to use another metaphor, if the world of politics was sport, then democracy would be that most ubiquitous of sports objects, the ball, it comes in many shapes and sizes, but all the fun games use one.
Ojeda and Bernie could be the dynamic duo who kick the wonderful ball of democracy ball rolling, a ball that has hardly budged since the time of ancient Athens when it was first imperfectly articulated and horribly flattened and misshapened. From fading cynical X-geners to alienated snowflake Millennials, it is our time to show the Baby Boomers how wrong, greedy and selfish they were, it is our time in history, and we can do little better with this time than to pick up that neglected weird and wonderful ball of social democracy and play with it in the most hackerish spirit possible.