Yves here. Lambert promises he will still produce a detailed look at Kamala’s acceptance at the Democratic National Convention. In the meantime, others are kicking its tires. And at least some on what passes for the left are finding it wanting.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
During her nearly 40-minute-long speech on the final day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her economic plan for the nation as “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”
I deliberately chose not to watch her speech, preferring instead to read it. The ebullience at this year’s DNC was infectious. The Democratic Party is leaning into some of the language of progressive economic populism and is energized by a younger, more enthusiastic nominee. But reading Harris’s speech rather than watching it, helped bring some distance from the joy and clarified that the party is still not embracing the language of progressive economic populism and continues to use the destructive language of the right.
The term “opportunity economy” is itself the problem. It’s a phrase that former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used to defend Donald Trump’s economic agenda in 2019. Florida’s Chamber of Commerce, a staunchly pro-business outfit, has used it as well.
The word “opportunity” means a chance, the creation of circumstances to make something possible. We live in a nation where racial segregation is technically illegal, which means people of color have the “opportunity” to attend elite schools, apply for jobs, build wealth, retire comfortably, and pass their wealth to their children. Those opportunities have existed for decades. But data shows over and over that they don’t translate into reality, especially for Black and Brown people in the U.S. The racial wealth gap, for example, remains high. There are structural barriers that remain firmly in place, and that require very specific government intervention to dismantle. Will Harris embrace such a dismantling?
Harris proudly related during her DNC speech that she “took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure, and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation.”
But she took on banks as a prosecutor, not as a legislator or executive. And her homeowner bill of rights was, once more, based on the ideas of “opportunity.” In a 2017 op-ed she explained that the bill of rights was based on “six bills designed to give Californians a fair opportunity to work with their banks, modify their loans, and keep their homes.”
Harris pointed out at the DNC that she “stood up for veterans and students being scammed by big, for-profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of their wages, the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse.” Again, all were commendable achievements made during her role as a prosecutor and Attorney General of California. Will she stand up for the rights of veterans, students, workers, and seniors, or simply afford them opportunities for justice?
There is a huge difference between “opportunities” and “rights.” The former is a pro-corporate, pro-business term that is perfectly consistent with an individualist capitalist economy that has “winners” who make use of opportunities for wealth-building and “losers” who fail to do so. But “rights” is a word that insists on basic standards of fairness that everyone deserves. It encompasses an idea that capitalism hates: that people have the right to healthcare, childcare, education, homes, good wages, union jobs, and a stable climate. There are no winners and losers.
There was little talk of such rights at the Convention. In fact, even the New York Times noticed that Democrats avoided bringing up Medicare-for-All and the idea that everyone—not just a subsection of the population—has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare. The Times’s Noah Weiland pointed out, “Her avoidance of a policy that had been central to progressive Democratic aspirations underscores how quickly she has sought to define her candidacy while appealing to more moderate voters, and how Medicare-for-All proposals have effectively left the Democratic mainstream for now.”
Instead of asserting that everyone has the right to taxpayer-funded healthcare Harris said, “We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.”
It sounds as though she and her party have given up on expanding government healthcare to all and instead gone on the defense against the Republican Party’s attacks on Medicare and the ACA.
Harris’s second favorite word, after “opportunity” was “freedom.” She used it a dozen times in her speech, recasting “rights” as “freedoms.” She referenced the “The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride.” She also touted, “The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”
Clearly, Harris was attempting to reclaim the word “freedom” from the GOP, a formation that has been pulled toward the extreme right by Republican lawmakers who label themselves as members of the “Freedom Caucus.” Freedom is akin to opportunity.
Indeed, Harris’s failure to make a full-throated embrace of progressive economic populism was a failed “opportunity.” The conditions were ripe for her to lean in to language centered on the rights of people given that we have witnessed a cultural sea change on the failures of capitalism.
This change was apparent at the 2024 DNC as well. One need only examine how Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was received this year compared to the last two conventions. When Sanders spoke at the 2016 DNC in Philadelphia, his role was to placate progressives in the party who had supported his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He urged his voters to back Hillary Clinton, the centrist candidate who would go on to lose the electoral college vote to Donald Trump in spite of winning the popular vote. Only months earlier, leaked internal emails from the Democratic National Committee revealed just what the party’s insiders thought of Sanders—and it wasn’t pretty.
Then, four years ago, his role at the 2020 DNC in Wisconsin was to defend Joe Biden’s candidacy against Trump. He remarked, “Many of the ideas we fought for, that just a few years ago were considered ‘radical,’ are now mainstream.”
But this year, even though his role was once more to convince his supporters to back a mainstream Democratic candidate, Sanders’s prime-time address at the 2024 DNC in Chicago sounded remarkably mainstream. The New York Times recognized him as an insider, saying that he seemed to have “a sense of vindication that the Democratic Party, as he sees it, has finally recognized that many progressive causes are broadly popular with Americans.”
Sanders hasn’t changed, but the party’s rhetoric has. Slate’s Alexander Sammon pointed out that, “There were very few themes in Sanders’s speech that other Democratic speakers hadn’t already covered on Monday and Tuesday.” Although the DNC’s tenor was markedly different from four and eight years ago—Sanders now sounded like he fit in, largely because the tenor, if not the substance, of his political leanings have become mainstream.
Meanwhile, Harris’s language of “opportunity agenda” leans right. She shared at the DNC, “My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means. Yet, we wanted for little and she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us, and to be grateful for them.” Such words could easily have been said by a Republican and reflect the party’s ideas about “fiscal responsibility.”
Harris also touted a “middle-class tax cut” in attempting to distinguish herself from Trump’s tax cuts for the rich. But tax cuts for the middle class is a core GOP talking point—even if the party usually delivers for the already-rich in spite of its promises to the not-so-rich.
In truth, Harris is likely more economically progressive than she let on. She has backed the Child Tax Credit, a program that was popular and remarkably effective. But she made no mention of it at the DNC. Her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is known for his economically progressive policies.
Granted, party conventions these days appear to be tailored to appease a sliver of the American public: the undecided voters in swing states whose all-important ballots will help determine who wins the electoral college, and thus, the presidency. In the context of such an undemocratic system, politicians will always feel pressure to tack toward the center, as winning the popular vote does not guarantee victory.
But we live at a time when momentum is building for fulfilling the economic “rights” of people via such ideas as universal basic income plans, and reparations for Black people. A broad movement of progressives has for years demanded that the Democratic Party distinguish itself from the GOP by making a full-throated defense of the values it claimed to stand for. Rather than leaning rightward by using the Republican-style language of “opportunity” and “freedom,” the Democratic Party could lean left and center the “rights” of people.
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If her speech were an album, it would be called “Bland on Bland”. At least I remembered Sarah Palin’s speech for a whole ten minutes after she delivered it. Not even 10 seconds for Ms Harris.
Thank you for remembering my speech, albeit for ten minutes. I completely forgot it immediately.
Sarah, your comment needs a grammatic signifier—;)
The couple minutes of the Dem convention that I saw terrified me. Harris or her handlers want to start a war.
Their homage to W, who
lusted afterwanted to burnish his record as a wartime president? That was just one step on his road to perdition, where so many thousands of others were hurt or killed.Thousands? The US killed millions.
I’m reminded of your item a few years ago
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/revenge-places-dont-matter.html
“The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter”
I think that a key part of Kamala’s speech was where she said-
‘I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and Artificial Intelligence, that America — not China — wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen — not abdicate — our global leadership.’
So in the same way that Biden said that he was running the world, Kamala will seek to do the same though “global leadership” i.e. telling other countries what to do. And certainly China will be in her gun-sights. Actually if will be all those different factions in Washington that will be setting the real agenda. Kamala will just be the public face and do the pr spin so that it all looks better.
Who around the world would take Kamala Harris seriously?
She has the opposite of gravitas, and her principles seem to change with the wind.
An empty pantsuit who was asked to leave the Situation Room. Insiders knew.
Not a big fan of Kami but I’d like to see some proof of that assertion. And it’s not this :
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/clown-show-kamala-harris-was-dismissed-intense-meetings/
There’s plenty of negative things to say about her without making stuff up.
Yves,
Does NC commenting policy restrict sources to only those approved by commenters?
Basing a comment on a published source, like Gateway Pundit, whether likable or not, does not constitute making things up.
Gateway Pundit is known to be partisan verging on off its rocker and loose with the facts, like Daily Beast (which has been caught out Making Shit Up) but possibly more so. So yes, I would be leery of ANY story from a highly partisan source if lacking in corroboration anywhere else UNLESS they has a named source for their find and the person was plausibly in a position to know.
One of these days I’d like to see a prominent politician say the word “cooperate” instead of “competition” when it comes to other countries. I like competing in games I will, even now at my advanced age, go full-out in sports or whatever as a game and shake hands with my opponent, or if it’s martial arts (too old for that now) bow to them.
Humanity need cooperation and not competition which, for the US, always leads to war and more cowbell (money for the MIC).
opportunity to compete (for a limited number of opportunities to experience success) seems to be the vision of domestic as well as international affairs.
Life’s a competition. Then you die.
(which perhaps helps to make the warlike rhetoric more intelligible; maybe the pandemic policy, too)
I’m not sure whether this needs an “end snark” tag. It might be a plausible interpretation of elite thinking.
You, too, have the opportunity to compete for the chance to be appointed by Democratic Party insiders as their candidate to be the next President. You’ve just gotta tick all the right boxes!
These days it is mostly zero-sums games where you can only win if somebody else loses. No room for win-win negotiations.
Caitlin Johnstone talks about cooperation versus competition in a lot of her writings (https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/). I’ve started using it in many of my conversations with my radical right friends ( yes, I have a few, and we have some lively conversations!). I do believe I’ve made more inroads with them when I stress that cooperation is better for all of us.
This would require diplomacy — a capacity it appears that the United States lost entirely due to a generation of neglect and disuse during “the unipolar moment.”
‘I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and Artificial Intelligence, that America — not China — wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen — not abdicate — our global leadership.’
A chilling statement. The conception and purpose and vision of the United Nations was precisely that the future, that development, be shared among nations. President Xi repeatedly talks about “community with a shared future.”
‘I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and Artificial Intelligence, that America — not China — wins the competition for the 21st century, and that we strengthen — not abdicate — our global leadership.’
As to this promise to lead the on space and Artificial Intelligence, is the promise at all realistic? I do not think the mathematics and science that must go along with this promise can be at all assured without having an open research and development system, and America has become moving to an increasingly closed system in space exploration and AI.
She only makes sense if one looks at the 21st century as some kind of geopolitical Super Bowl where there needs to be a winner and a loser. These people are despicable.
Genocide 2.0, WAR to save FRACKING & crush AGW-mitigating competition (EU & China; but basically: renewable, efficient, sustainable & regenerative) surveillance & authoritarian kleptocracy, controlled by international finance, Atlantic Council, WTO, Likud, CFR… Oilgarch’s. It reminded me far more of Fannie Lou Hamer’s MS delegates, than poor draft-age protests of Daley’s fascist kleptocracy? She’s like a really poorly thrown together RoboCop, spewing debunked hasbara we never believed, but we’re expected to buy into, being affluent white yuppies (since, that’s ALL they’ve EVER even pretended to acknowledge?) It’s Hillary’s DEAD eyes & Biden’s slavering zombie sneer portrayed by yet another hammerhead thug, eagerly anticipating unleashing MAGA Sturmabteilung on all us PASC indentured untermenschen?
yeah, I got a nudge from this claim by the author
In truth, Harris is likely more economically progressive than she let on.
sure she is /s ….maybe have that stockholm syndrome looked at…
I watched the speech, partly because I have never seen Harris speak.
It struck me, that if you close your eyes and change up the voice a little – and adjust certain biographical details – the exact same speech might have been given by Hillary Clinton back during her 2016 campaign. The same emphasis on identity over specifics; the same pitch of “vote for me because Trump is evil”; the same right-wing corporate dog whistles (my ears especially perked up when she gave the “my family lived on a budget…but wanted for nothing” line; here, it is useful to stress that her mother wasn’t a random dishwasher, but a not-quite-lowly scientist at the Berkeley National Laboratory); the same emphasis on “opportunity” over “rights”; the same tough-sounding language on boosting defence spending and “fighting against authoritarianism” or whatnot.
Oddly enough, virtually no mention of China and very little of Russia. Iran is now the Big Bad we are going to defend the world against, apparently.
Even some of the verbal tics were the same – whenever she tries to emote, she ends up shouting instead. Somewhat less of the Clinton monotone delivery, however, from a purely auditory standpoint it was like a bizarre mix of Clinton, Liz Warren’s oddly drawn out syllables, and that automatic help desk voice reading through menu options. Clearly the woman needs a lot of practice in public speaking, though unless she wins Pennsylvania OR both Arizona and Nevada (looking at the RCP map), that might not really be an issue for her past November.
But if she does win, then I am guessing we will finally get to see a Hillary Clinton presidency – followed by a Republican victory in 2028.
You say It sounded like a. speech by Killary? You don’t supposed it’s because the same people wrote It?
Yes, it’s a brand.
I had thought the Clintons first supported her after Biden withdrew, though I guess I hadn’t noticed Biden first supported her. But Imo she will fully support her donors, as did Obama, even if he might have wanted a wider selection. I add that if you want to guess what her policies would be, just look at her list of big donors.
Imo it’s still trump’s to lose, and seems Maine might be a swing, meaning he could lose the rust belt and PA and still reach 270.
“Taxpayer funded healthcare” – not understanding why Sonali Kolhatkar used that term. Good points, otherwise, and a much-needed exposure of how Democrats have adopted Republican lingo.
One term that I’ve detested for years is “access to”, even prior to Sen. Bernie Sanders calling it out as a meaningless term. And I have pointed this out to candidates and the elected to no avail or reply except for once, years ago. A local SC Congressional candidate (who lost) finally switched from “access to affordable healthcare” to “Healthcare is a human right”. Maybe it was because I linked to the GOP platform at that time which had the same exact “access to affordable healthcare” and questioned whether the candidate was running on the correct ticket.
It’s my understanding from reading about fiat currencies and currency issuers like the USA (thanks to Naked Capitalism originally) that federal taxes are not required as revenue and do not actually ever fund anything. So, reading or hearing “taxpayer-funded” for any federal spending initiative causes my brain to freeze.
My view (YMMV) is that “Taxpayer funded healthcare” here is synonymous with “Single-payer healthcare,” which is the only way to make healthcare a right in the USA. Back in my childhood, healthcare was effectively a right.
The Health Department in the middle of downtown saw any patient who walked through the door. Local family practitioners, as they were known at the time, volunteered in rotation to supervise this care as part of their obligations to both Hippocrates and the local community that made them rich by any standard of the day. The local hospital, run then by the Hospital Authority and now a very rich regional healthcare “system” given cover by a toothless Hospital Authority, without question provided healthcare to “indigents” who lacked health insurance (in the USA a grievous category mistake with origins in the competition for war industry workers during WWII). There would be no indigents except for those who wanted to be in a political economy founded on rights rather than opportunities. And the rich would still be rich, although not so rich as to own houses in Oahu, Chicago, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard! I know from family experience this practice extended at least into the late-1980s after an uninsured but gainfully employed relative was injured in an accident, after which attempts to collect ran into the reality that a carpenter had no way to pay off that large the, catastrophic now, hospital “debt.”
Anyway, the speech was a perfect reflection of Liberalism, so people ate it up. Especially the PMC afflicted with TDS – apparently the core constituency of the modern Democrat Party…a group of people whose imagination extends as far as the ends of their noses. Until their “opportunities” dry up. This is coming. After which the whining about the unfairness of it all will commence, along with a vague realization that Rawls was very right in his concept of the “veil of ignorance.”
Thank you for this, though it delineates a long and disturbing arc of American decline.
What a dreadful waste of opportunity and human potential.
The problem is their definition of success and the near total corruption of every institution people are supposed to be clamoring to succeed within.
And in some cases it’s not “corruption of”. The institutions are inherently corrupt.
It’s the shit people turn a blind eye to or participate in – like thinking and going along with PE shenanigans as if any of it is making things worthy of a society.
People involved in US foreign pokicy consider themselves “successes”- no matter how vile or ineffective their policies.
And it’s often because they care most about “opportunities”.
“My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means.”
Keeping the Thatcher narrative and ceding the debate for more ruinous austerity for the huddled masses all the while pouring billions to the war machine, the MIC, and subsidies for the oligarchs.
The good old household budget. It doesn’t pertain to anything on a national level. Kamala is not stupid so she knows full well she is pandering to the skeptics. Can you imagine what an uproar of confusion might ensue if she said, “My mother borrowed the money we needed to spend into our future as well as maintain a decent life and Mama was wise enough to get a good, low, long term interest rate.” I can only hope she is softening her real agenda to portray it as something any wise mother would do. The IRA – the Inflation Reduction Act, which is another well-thought-out rendition of the GND – is going to require lotsa financing, that only a mother could love, and rightly so. If the IRA can transform our MIC into a GIC the world can be reborn. It could be born again capitalism. I like that thought. Makes me smile.
If even Bernie Sanders couldn’t seem to get his head around the idea that a federal government financial standing is not anything like a household budget despite having Stephanie Kelton as an adviser, it’s most likely that Chameleon Kamala will most likely pursue a Clintonian fixation for a budget surplus totally unmindful of its recessionary effect.
I did not listen to the speech. I have not, and shall not, read the speech. The entire exercise in PR that was the convention and is Harris’s candidacy comes to this: Nothing Will Fundamentally Change.
Just need to catch her saying that on video like Biden was…
I didn’t watch the speech but sounds like the now bog standard third way nostrum: “learn to code.” Don’t bitterly cling to guns and religion but accept this offered equal opportunity to fit into a world where the wealthy have all the power and you can get ahead–like me–by playing ball with them.
But then the wealthy literally selected her to be candidate and are now donating hundreds of millions to make sure she won’t deviate from their agenda. So what else could one expect?
Neither candidate is of course out to challenge this power structure but Trump at least seems willing to be less internationalist about it. And his opposition to open borders acknowledges that the current border policy further reduces the power of the lowers by introducing still more competition for the jobs that they don’t have.
The one power that the masses do still have in this country is the power to vote and by voting out the current crowd of plutocrats the public can at least give them pause.
>>>The one power that the masses do still have in this country is the power to vote and by voting out the current crowd of plutocrats the public can at least give them pause.
Just as Prime Minister Imran Khan was elected? The United States’ government assisted and supports the overthrow of the duly elected Prime Minister, and I have no doubt that some are planning the same for the likely Trump-Vance-Kennedy Administration. As Lambert says, it is best that they not go up together on the same airplane.
On Kamala’s “failed” opportunity, I think that her opportunity is really to subvert American political philosophy with its emphasis on individual liberty and protection from the government, not of the government.
While arguing over the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, people forget, or chose to ignore, that the system, most especially the Bill of Rights, is designed to protect the nation, and the individual in it, from their government by delineating and then guaranteeing what are call Natural Rights, which are those God given, natural rights (or the universe, reality, or whatever you choose to be real and supreme), they are not given by the state or ultimately by anyone else. They are yours, not to be taken away. Much as the right of selfdefense is assumed. Lumping other into category of natural rights, making it a hodgepodge of “rights” weakens all of them, demanding that the government provide for all your rights, makes the government not only the guaranteer, but the provider and determinator or controller of them as well. It will likely becomes a “you will own nothing and you will be happy” as thought of by the World Economic Forum
I think that if the backers of Kamala Harris’ speech writers were not of a malign aim, they would have gone back to President FDR’s proposed Four Freedoms:
1) Freedom of speech and expression
2) Freedom of worship
3) Freedom from want
4) Freedom from fear
In the modern age, unlike during the age of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War, they were a much more serious, grounded ideas. Mass unemployment, hunger, burning cities, and wars with authoritarian/totalitarian governments that still might have plausibly win. In the modern, more far intellectually degraded and corrupt age, the use of the word rights instead of freedoms, is more dangerous as natural rights generally means the right to do something, the right to speak, the right to be armed, the right to defend yourself in a fair trial, and so one. Restated, natural rights means that I have the right to speak, but while FDR’s Freedom from Fear would mean no corporate goon squad, police, or soldier breaking down your door, the modern Neoliberal establishment would make it Freedom from Frightening (mis-dis-any) Information thus trumping your speech.
But again, if the goal was freedom for all, with liberty under the law, Kamala Harris would not have done that speech.
Instead of constructing the best situation or environment for people to live in and decide their own futures, using ones rights to put a fence around the government ability to act on the individual, it seems that the goal is to construct what it thinks is the best situation or environment for the people to exist in and use the new “rights” to put a fence around the people’s ability to act on the government.
Well, I would say we are eff’d, again. I must say, after reading the article here about RFK Jr’s withdrawl- and comments, and observing and reading and experiencing more than enough of and about Trump, I am stumped at folks expressing support and a vote for Trump. I must have a huge blind spot, and need at least several more of those Red Pills from the Matrix.
I think Jill Stein comes the closest to representing my world view, and I am fully and dishearteningly aware that view isn’t even a minority view- it’s a blipy rounding error.
Regardless of all the kabuki, the Uniparty, and Empirical America, the Military/ Industrial state, and BAU will continue.
The one takeaway after watching four nights run dnc — yes I watched all four, whereas I couldn’t engage for 10 minutes of RNC Trump one-ring circus— the one takeaway we had at our hearth of the TeeVee, was,
Isn’t it nice that Harris’ dog and pony show is so abbreviated? 75 days is plenty long!
We need less two-year election runups.
The ‘information’ and promises is all horse-apples and empty promises: truncate it. Congress is where the action is, and they are all bought and busy nest-feathering carrying legislation and priorities for the monied financial class.
Publicly funded, three month election cycle, ranked- choice voting might help.
Having what congress and the executive branch and military get as employee benefits extended to all Americans might help( Medical care, vision, dental, etc.)
Term limits.
No more electoral college.
Tax reform over a ten year period– where each year the percentage increases- the individual tax payer gets to have an increasing percentage say in where she wants her tax dollars allocated. Let Americans point the direction they want the country to proceed. After 10 years, 50% of every dollar in tax is directed by taxpayer, 50% by congress to their general fund.
Anyway, I need better coffee — low energy after all last weeks Noose.
May all you NC’ers have a great low – smoke end of summer weekend!
First, Jill Stein is not on the ballot in quite a few large-ish states, such as New York, Georgia, and Virginia, so your implicit hectoring of readers for not saying they will vote for Stein seems misplaced. https://monthlyreview.org/product/beyond-leviathan/
Second, some people have been indoctrinated to believe that third parties in the act as spoilers. For Stein, it would be for Team D. So they would argue that your enthusiasm for Stein amounts to support for Trump, Mind you, I have always voted for third parties. and think this charge is overblown.
Third, you seem to ignore the motivations of many of the readers here. Do you see pro-Trump tribalism? What you see is antipathy for the Democrats, and a refusal to support them when they squeal “Orange Man bad!” instead of presenting serious policies to help ordinary people, particularly after they stomped on and pissed all over Sanders twice.
The hearing for Georgia Green Party ballot access for the Stein campaign was last Thursday. I was there as an elector whose credentials were challenged, and it looks like the three points that were brought against us were sufficiently responded to that they will not be an issue. The last minute Hail Mary of disaffiliation is something that is being looked into right now, but it also shouldn’t be much of an issue.
We should be hearing about the judgements for the De la Cruz, West and RFK Jr. (now irrelevant) campaigns ballot access issues, along with our own, sometime next week.
https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgias-green-party-scrambles-for-ballot-access-as-challengers-attempt-to-bar-the-way/VIZUA6O4VVA4LDXO4O2L5BNTYE/?utm_cohort=evening_campaign_1-evening_cohort_1-d91ae7d9d52ac3cbb554fa3c0038439a4993b5eb7dcb78cfa1914add46625349&utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EveningRead&utm_content=10858081
So hope lives for a line to choose at the top of the ballot! Not that I expect Jill Stein to make the ballot. Thank you for the update. I had missed this, since I find the modern AJC to be a virtual fishwrap.
Isn’t it funny how the Democrat Party wants to keep the competition out of its elections…
Judging from the hearing, there will be a ballot line for the Georgia Green Party; all their initial challenges were ultimately mooted by the Democratic party attorney, himself. Internal Green Party politics will be the determining factor as to whether or not Stein will avail herself of the Georgia party nomination, which, believe it or not, is in doubt. Sad to say, in this particular case the Democratic party is not going to be the problem.
In 2020 I voted green for the first time. I’ve concluded dems must lose multiple times before progressives once again have any chance in that party. Meanwhile, I’m not convinced their current alignment is the lesser evil given their current fondness for foreign wars and censorship.
How realistic is leverage over a Harris WH via 3rd party vote?
Or would a repeated realignment with the DNC not rather further the demise of the genuine left?
I don’t understand the question. If Kamala wins the election, a third party has zero leverage. The US is set up to be a two party system. The only way for a third party to have leverage is if it were to threaten to destroy one of the existing parties.
Something I found really interesting yesterday was how the Harris campaign didn’t bother to answer the phone calls from the RFK campaign, but is actively trying to recruit Cornell West. It looks to me that they are trying to shore up the black vote, but he just isn’t having it.
re: leverage
Possible pressure via electoral college – “you get our votes only in return for progressive policies“ – an argument by Cornel West and others last year.
A third party will not get any electoral college votes. Each state is winner take all.
As usual, my communication was crappy.
Not hectoring anyone. I won’t vote Dem out of disdain and frustration.
But, in the same –but different vein, couldn’t possibly vote for Trump, all the more strongly.
Whether Stein is on my Ballot or not, I can still vote for her (and she is on the ballot in Montana).
I certainly will vote down ballot- we have a very radically right wingnut state legislature and administration, who needs the boot.
Apologies to all.
I remember two primary items from the KH speech and the convention. The word LETHAL, to describe her US military. And Robert Johnson’s interview on BackGround Briefing, August 20, where he states that it was Clinton and Obama who drove the blue collars into Trumps target range, by sending their jobs overseas and later by evicting them from their homes in order to save Wall Street Bankers. Because LETHAL means never ending wars. War was supposed to result in peace, never happens. And the Dems will always bring back our favorite traitors to smoosh in our faces. Remember Clinton speaking at Nixon’s funeral?
My better half had her speech on in the kitchen and I heard that part about the “chance to compete” which made me run from the room before I started breaking things. Few minutes later I came back in to get something from the fridge and she was yammering on about how everybody would be lifted up, up some such stale platitude.
Well competition implies that some will lose and be left behind, and as noted, is some pretty Republican rhetoric. I much prefer her second sentiment. So which is it? Does she even know? Does she even see the contradictions in her own speech? Did she even skim through it before reading it off the teleprompter?
And if she truly believes the rhetoric about making everyone’s life better, why aren’t we hearing any specific policies that will provide concrete material benefits for everyone?
Once again, a pox on all their houses.
It is surely not surprising that politicians deliver platitudes when they are not lying. What is much, much more surprising is that their audiences cheer, and more surprising still, that people think that platitudes and lies are worth voting for.
The supply side tide will lift all boats. Reagan is forever.
Of course Project 2025 is just a throwback to Ronnie and some have pointed out that many of its provisions are things the Dems now agree with it. The Third Way itself was a raising of the white flag to the Repubs back when conventional wisdom said the Dems would forever after rule the House and the Repubs the White House. The Clintons sought to triangulate their way out of that one and their spawn like Obama and Kamala are still doing it. This works well for future ex-president bank accounts (Kirn says that with their Netflix stock the Obamas may be pushing half a billion) but doesn’t have much to do with the good of the country. One might well ask whether we are, if George Clooney himself is worth half a billion, on the right path. It’s just possible that resources are increasingly misallocated.
“But reading Harris’s speech rather than watching it, helped bring some distance from the joy and clarified that the party is still not embracing the language of progressive economic populism and continues to use the destructive language of the right.”
I don’t think both parties can break the big money bind and, both are Corpos as described in Sinclair Lewis’ It Cant Happen Here
Brings to mind some speech where Theodore Roosevelt was mocking the other party ‘Oh let us handle the storm’
“Anything You Can Do” by Irving Berlin
Anything you can do, I can do better than You can do,
I can do, we can do, I can do, much much better than You.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
I can do anything better than you.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can, yes I can.
Anything You can be I can be greater.
Sooner or later, I’m greater than you.
No, you’re not.
Yes I am.
No you’re not.
Yes I am.
No you’re not.
Yes I am, yes I am.
I can shoot a partridge with a single cartridge.
I can get a sparrow with a bow and arrow.
We can do most anything.
Can you bake a pie?
No.
Well Neither can I.
Anything you can sing I can sing louder.
I can sing anything louder than you.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Sure I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can
I’m superior, no you’re inferior.
I’m the big attraction, oh no you are the small.
I’m the major one, oh no you’re the minor one,
I can beat you at anything’, and that’s not all.
Anything you can buy, I can buy cheaper.
I can buy anything cheaper than you.
Fifty cents.
Forty cents.
Thirty cents.
Twenty cents.
No you can’t.
Yes I can, yes I can.
Anything you can dig, I can dig deeper.
I can dig anything deeper than you.
Thirty feet.
Forty feet.
Fifty feet.
I can drink my liquor faster than a flicker.
I can do it quicker and get even sicker.
I can live on bread and cheese.
And only on that?
Yep.
So can a rat.
Any note you can reach, I can go higher.
I can sing anything higher than you.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
Anyone you can lick, I can lick faster.
I can lick anyone faster than you.
With your fist?
With my feet.
With your feet?
With an axe.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
I can do anything better than you.
No you can’t.
Yes We can.
No you can’t.
Yes We can.
No you can’t.
Yes We can, yes We can.
I wonder if Kamala has obtained a copy of the questions that will be asked during the upcoming debate?
Paging Donna Brazile …
So in this context, “opportunity” serves the same symbolic purpose as “access”, or “fighting for.” Empty slogans devoid of material benefits. Joyful noises from the Dems.
Perhaps it’s more substantive than that. Interpreting “opportunity to compete” through the lens of an analysis such as that of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, it might be a way of narrowing people’s focus to what they must do to “get ahead” of their peers in the competition for “limited good,” turning their attention away from the ways that the powerful shape the economy for their own purposes.
How long before we hear . . . ” access to opportunity”?
We can’t have ” progressive economic populism”, cannot pay for it and “protect” Israel’s right to clear Palestine of Palestinians and Kiev’s right to de-Russify novoroosiye and store US nukes 600 km from Moscow.
Harris/Walz is PNAC front and center!
Hope and change…. got us US troops in Syria forever.
What wil Harris/walz give US?
“This is what she has to say in order to be elected.”
—ALL my Dem friends. They will not admit that what she says is quite possibly what she means. Ahh…the pleasures of JOY. Looking forward to the first post-election comment about now having to hold her feet to the fire, etc.
I’m still waiting for her first press conference. / ;)
As it’s a mistake for her to allow questions she’s not able to answer, I suspect there won’t be any. Like Biden she seems limited to reading the teleprompter… granted, she seems a little more accomplished at that skill than Biden.
Though she said “price gauging” when she was supposed to read “price gouging.” Maybe she heard that at a cocktail party, “what’s wrong with gauging what consumers will pay?”
right out of the bill clintons playbook. most likely his speech writer wrote it for the hole in the mattress.
“an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”
On GPS: Bill Clinton on creating economic opportunities for all in America
Fareed Zakaria, GPS
Former President Bill Clinton talks to Fareed about reducing inequality in America by creating opportunities across social and economic lines.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2022/09/17/exp-gps-0918-bill-clinton-reducing-inequality-in-america.cnn
Every phrase is subject to imagination of concept, analysis, interpretation, context and critique. I’ve just done that slightly with the above phrase memorialized by Marx by replacing his with their, someone may critique that by itself. The fuller context is this:
So, it is still utopian because we are very much still in, actually increasingly in the strictures of the narrow horizon of bourgeois right. So I find it worthwhile to find words that can be understood in a modern context. Bourgeois might be better understood today with another word. To me, it means the powerful, whatever the word.
As I see it, Anarchists understand bourgeois right in terms of power dynamics. Power is the problem, no matter who wields it.
As a matter of compassion, I don’t critique powerless people by their intelligence, only those who seek power. I don’t think KH is stupid, I don’t even think that DJT is stupid, though he is vile. W was pretty marginal (I’m being kind), he was not smart enough to be vile, but he succeeded (in that) anyway. Change can only come when the powerful are hobbled (which comes from the hubris of their own greed). There was an opportunity in 2008, I didn’t support BO, I understood, somehow, what he was about. His was a major failed opportunity. I can’t support any of them. I believe JS’s heart is in the right place. There are others, they are all blocked.
I’m just a powerless girl whose ears often burn. Woe is us, because we are running out of time.
Much ado about the same ol’ empty platitudes and false promises – happens every election. Sonali. Kolhatkar means well, but if she expects any of the things that so-called “progressives” want, she will be sorely disappointed – again. Harris is a great distraction: a “black woman” and a woman of “south Asian descent” it could be a “historic” moment for democracy. The irony of this woman fully supporting the genocide of brown folks is not lost.
There is no such thing as meaningful choice in the sham charade and freak show of US Elections Inc. It is a slap in the face, an insult to the intelligence. But I don’t take it personal, it’s strictly business. One must be thoroughly corrupt in order to be accepted into thoroughly corrupt institutions.
Sadly, millions still believe in fairy-tales and will go and vote for one of the two mendacious scumbags. It is a waste of time to pay attention to the contrived, stage-managed spectacle. No matter what happens, the Washington Consensus will prevail, the Genocide will continue, kleptocracy, oligarchy, housing crisis, health care crisis etc. etc. will only get worse. I would love to be more optimistic, but there is no evidence to support such an attitude.
Vote early, vote often, and vote Genocide!
The DNC is a neo-liberal and neoconservative organization. You will not find progressive economic policies there. The Dems did not fight to for a minimum wage increase and let Manchin kill the Child Tax Credit. The only thing they have going for them is Khan. She is only there bc of Elizabeth Warren.
There is a weird political realignment happening. The Dems have moved so far right and have become a transgender cult that many of us are forced to leave the party and go to Trump. I’ll take a socially conservative populist party.
I’d prefer the Justice Party or We the People.
feature, not a bug.
Kamala is the perfect vehicle for entrenched DC interests, whether political or financial.
Reminds me of my kids when they were toddlers….you give them 2 options (that you are equally happy with), to the kid they have an illusion of choice and control.
Same with Harris, her “advisors” will prrsent her with choices that are within the DC Overton Window
..Madame President, should we give Israel $1 or $1.5 billion in the latest tranche?
The fact that so many so called “leftists” are already giddy for this person and immediately tossed in their support makes me realize that anyone near the Democratic organization and says they are progressive is just a sheepdog. What did AOC , Sanders, Green get for tossing in their support? Job security, that is it.
I am still shocked that over eighty percent of Sanders’ voters in ’16 went on to vote for Clinton. If Sanders et al are sheepdogs then they have an awful lot of sheeple to work with.
and on the R side: so many are conned by cheap rhetoric and lies as well. So-called patriotic conservatives bow down and boot-lick the Lobby and Israel, and cheer-lead for genocide and giving 10s of billions to Israel; the so-called conservative SCOTUS who make a mockery of the constitution and rule of law. But millions still believe the fairy-tales.
The resonance with Clinton wasn’t lost on me. I expect Harris to lose to Trump in similar ways, mostly involving hubris and a condescending dismissive tone regarding any criticism. Chest lah vee as they say in Oklahoma.
As was remarked some years ago, the ACA was the liberal Democrat way to ensure that Medicare For All was dead in the water for a generation.
And then with the Pandemic, we actually had limited universal care through the expansion of Medicaid programs, and Democrats… let that expired as soon as they possibly could!!
That’s our Democrats! To be a fervent Democrat supporter is to have no historical memory of past behaviors, even behaviors only a year or two past.
Yes, and it’s rich that they’re in part basing their campaign on fear-mongering the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, while promising to protect the Heritage Foundation’s ACA, procured via their sainted Obama.
These #McResistance imbeciles are deluded, morally vain/blind, and led by Judas goats.
This is what empires in decline look like.
When thinking of Harris, I can’t help but be reminded of Mondale’s critique of Hart in the Democratic primaries in 1984, using an ad slogan of the time: “where’s the beef?”
The genius of a campaign based upon words like ‘hope’, ‘opportunity’ and ‘freedom’ is that they are largely devoid of meaning, and enable people to project their various aspirations onto the relevant candidate. It might well work. Like so many hacks from the California Democratic party, there is a tendency to elevate buzzwords above content, and I daresay that this is a function of the state having become so diverse that only the most empty and intangible expressions can be deployed to assemble a sufficiently broad coalition to secure victory.
However, because Harris is a largely talentless and vacuous placewoman, whose tenure as vice president has been characterised by her comparative invisibility and desire to evade responsibility, I strongly suspect that even if she is elected (now a distinct possibility) she will be found out quite quickly, especially if she reaps the whirlwind of Biden’s disastrous foreign policies which, if she is lucky, will result only in significant price rises. Her emphasis on the ‘cost of living’ is especially ‘weird’ given that she has simultaneously been supporting policies like the re-shoring of production, the containment of China or bellicosity in the Middle East which are more likely to secure higher retail prices. I daresay that both she and her entourage are largely oblivious to that contradiction.
The choice between Harris and Trump is perhaps as dismal as anything since at least Harding and Cox in 1920 (omitting Trump and Clinton or the younger Bush and McCain). If de Maistre was right, and countries get the politicians they deserve, what does this choice say about what the West has become?
I am still dismayed that despite lots of reasons and evidence, for the longest time I didn’t fully accept that the Democratic Party had been hollowed out and filled with people that had no intention of supporting ideas and programs that were its basic tenets for more than half the twentieth century. Think of it as the destruction of the party of FDR. Not until the debacle that was the Obama Administration. Sanders gave me some hope of the resurgence of my Democratic Party. But the Clintons, Biden, Pelosi Reid, et Al prevailed.
Here’s the thing, if I hadn’t been laid up I might not have been paying the same level of attention and might have bought all the BS excuses that were given for the Obama administration’s deeply ineffectual performance when it came to healthcare for all, protecting people from bank malfeasance, worker’s rights, and the willful destruction of America’s industrial ability, not to mention sham interest in women’s reproductive rights and climate change. I could go on, but for an administration that was very good at meeting the corporate based goals of the donor class it was really really bad at doing anything for people. But because of tradition and even history their excuses could seem plausible, if you didn’t get in the weeds.
Personally I believe that the Democrats don’t even put up a good front anymore. But then they do ave a particularly obsequious press running point. And they have worked hard to eliminate criticism, legally and illegally. This is a long way of saying that a fair number of the supposed unthinking sheeple could just be in denial, not just of how bad the Democrats are, but of how hard real change is. Kamala may be a Clinton creature, but she is running the Obama playbook. She is new,young, and brings change (none of which is true but that is the front.)
IMO, even with the shortened time frame, the press and the social media they have bought Harris still doesn’t have the political ability to keep this going.
Thanks for this!
> The term “opportunity economy” is itself the problem.
Exactly!
Further:
Exactly! (Emphases mine)
“Opportunity” is a “lotto ticket”! It is in no way tantamount to a guaranteed tangible material benefit!
And let me show another thing – the language of both sides of this country’s fetid duopoly is the same. In fact, when I first heard this “opportunity economy” thing being spun by Dems, I immediately recalled Trump and the GOP’s “opportunity zones”. Remember those (via reinventalbany.org)?
Excerpt:
My feeling is that taking the opportunity from a zonal to an economy-wide scale will mean taking the benefit to the wealthy to the next level as well. Earlier this week Lambert posted The Weirdness of Manufactured Joy in #2PMWaterCooler. The lines that first caught my eye were:
LOL
This country effectively functions as one humungous, familyblog psyop … yep. Thankfully, class struggles elsewhere didn’t just settle for “opportunity”. Wonder how things would have worked out for Russian or Chinese peasants if the “opportunity to build fortunes” was negotiated for with their respective oppressors. And oh by the way, the reason so many (have to) come here to build fortune is because of the US/USD hegemony. The psyop insures that the masses fully succumb to the “opportunity” mythology peddled by both liberals and conservatives.
You would think after all that trouble that they went through defenestrating the sitting president (couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy), that the least they could do would be to break with him on his most unpopular issues.
I listened to people say that Biden was uniquely bad on foreign policy, and if Harris would be a little better, but that seems to have been cope. I appreciate the twitter embed from a couple of days ago with her speed interwoven with his old ones where they used the exact same language to justify the same awful things that continue everywhere in the world.
The people who ousted him did it because he was a liability to the campaign. They were fine with him otherwise. There is no need to break with his policies. Especially because they can pretend that Harris is an outsider enough to ignore or paper over unpopular ideas without campaigning against them.
Yeah, I think you’re right here. We’ll see if it works; it may?
Does China have free college tuition like Germany has? If yes, good luck competing.
The answer is No but the fees are cheap and sometimes dropped.
https://www.china-admissions.com/chinese-university-tuition-fees/
Handy chart
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-free-college
“We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. ”
Will we instead go back to when Barack Obama tried to cut Social Security and Medicare with the Catfood Commision?
Or the multiple times Biden did from the senate?
Yep that was Obama’s biggest defeat. And a huge relief to anyone who cares about people.
“Will we instead go back to when Barack Obama tried to cut Social Security and Medicare with the Catfood Commision?”
Do we have to ask? Already, disability and retirement benefits don’t keep up with inflation, but the disposables aren’t dying fast enough. They want to speed it up.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/138235-simpson-bowles-bemoan-missed-opportunity-on-deficit/
I look forward to when we get a position statement out of Kamala on the debt/deficit spending. If she thinks the deficit matters, then her administration is not going to do anything ambitious. And will likely do a “Biden” and negotiate with the GOP when the GOP plays the game of chicken over the debt ceiling or defaulting on the debt, using that negotiation to buy her fiscal room to cut spending on the backs of the poor.
> If she thinks the deficit matters, then her administration is not going to do anything ambitious.
This, sadly, is a bipartisan given. So yes, another reason to dampen expectations.
Nationalize the energy companies and put all of their resources to the transition to sustainable energy. I didn’t hear that proposed. Behind the recognition of the Democrats’s false promises and limited program of hope and hokum is the corporate/ billionaire control of the economy. I didn’t hear the elimination of the oligarchy proposed. Humanity is facing so many existential threats, one wonders which one will do us in. We live in interesting times. A sad convention, but, of necessity, sad, as the beating back Project 25 and protecting Social Security and Medicare, and Biden’s climate proposals, are the best to hope for.
I think NC already went on record about how Harris “took on the big banks”, initially back in 2019 and with a refresher course the beginning of this month. Paging Jamie Dimon, anyone? Or is he lining up for a Treasury Secretary position?