So here's the rub: an authentic call for unity would force to the surface the long simmering conflict in the Democratic party, between the free market "Chicago School" corporatist faction, and the Progressive tradition, with its emphasis on public infrastructure and a rational regulation of commerce. The language of the Progressive movement is always right up front in today's Democratic politics, but then policy is cast in terms of market based solutions, as if there were no inherent conflict. It doesn't take much poking and prodding to uncover the very undemocratic influences of corporate interests on unregulated markets, and the futility of Progressive economic democracy under this model.
Although none of the Democratic Presidential contenders were all that far from their camp, Barak Obama has had the most backing from the Chicago School faction, and now Obama has reciprocated with the appointment of Milton Freidman disciple Austan Goolsbee as chief economic adviser. Are we bringing the Chicago School program in on a Democratic platform? How is that supposed to work?
Please don't take this an attack on Obama, but rather a call to arms to drive the Chicago School out of Democratic politics.
Naomi Klein on the Chicago School:
Monday, June 16, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Why the Texas Railroad Commissioner is the most important campaign in 2008
Railroad Commissioner Candidate Mark Thompson came before the Texas Democratic State Convention like a Pilgrim lost in the big city. Uncomfortable in front of a microphone and unaccustomed to speaking to a crowd, Mark had to sort of squeeze in between unity speeches, to try to explain just what a Railroad Commissioner is, and why we should care. In his disarming sincerity, Mark Thompson made the most important speech of the whole show.
Party Unity was the message of the day and everyone was trying hard really hard to stay "on message", so attendees were uplifted by passionate calls for lower gas prices and less Republicans. If someone had strayed off message, they might would have called the activists out on their individual convictions in an attempt to forge their singular concerns into a common cause of Progressive economic democracy: break the glass ceiling, diffuse discrimination, open access to health care, take back our country; a common vision of the political party as an instrument to protect the lives and livelihood of citizens, with the diverse party factions pulling the same harness. Unity.
The problem with this lovely dream is the wee conflict between the Progressive ideals of economic democracy and those of the corporate model which has become the facts-on-the-ground of the Democratic party ever since Jimmy Carter's deregulation of natural gas, trucking and airlines, presumably to trump Nixon's first big step of unleashing deregulation on health care and the dollar. After 12 long years of all manner of deregulation, Democrats were led out of the kinder, gentler desert by Joe Lieberman's Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) which promised third-way prosperity in exchange for unquestioning worship of the market model. Bill Clinton, (who despite this I still count among my friends), carried forward the DLC economic agenda, and delivered NAFTA. Now our Progressive roots are as a distant memory, and so seems only natural when a son-of-a-mill-worker bunks with the hedge funds, Hillary hangs with the day-traders and a-change-you-can-believe-in cashes in with the Chicago Board of Trade. Even the yellow dogs seem to prefer a market based approach over who gets to sleep on the porch. Some folks think the Progressive movement is part of the MPEG protocol.
Economic democracy of the Progressive movement has become party window dressing. All Democrats talk the talk, but most prefer to leave it up to the "marketplace of ideas" to decide who gets a place in the tent, and in the end, the corporations are the market makers. Apart from holdouts in the Labor wing, most of us act like Prophets of the Market Economy, casting reform proposals in terms of market based solutions, from cap and gown to cap and trade: let the market rule. We distinguish ourselves from Republicans in that we Democrats promise to bring fairness and "transparency" to the corporatist model of government. So there's the rub: an authentic call for unity would force to the surface this long simmering conflict between the in-markets-we-trust corporatist movement, and the not-dead-yet Progressive approach to reform, with its emphasis on public infrastructure and a rational regulation of commerce.
Without intending a challenge to the corporatist leadership of the party, Mark Thompson had it down cold, and laid it out, plain. "The Texas Railroad Commission was created in the Golden Age of the Texas Progressives". I think it never occurred to many of us that there ever was such a thing as a Golden Age of Texas Progressives. So why did they do it? "To keep the railroads from strangling the farmer, to protect their property from monopoly power". The railroad commission now oversees the oil and gas industry, where the Lord knows his work is yet undone. Since we don't have any railroads left, we don't need salvation from their rates, but we do need a party that is unified in the conviction to prevent the strangulation of public life by the hydra-headed monopoly powers of our times. Now we're talking unity.
The Texas Railroad Commissioner might not be the most important office up for election in 2008, but if Mark Thompson is the one who is speaking clearly of the vision of a Progressive economic democracy, then I guess he's running the most important campaign in the election.
Party Unity was the message of the day and everyone was trying hard really hard to stay "on message", so attendees were uplifted by passionate calls for lower gas prices and less Republicans. If someone had strayed off message, they might would have called the activists out on their individual convictions in an attempt to forge their singular concerns into a common cause of Progressive economic democracy: break the glass ceiling, diffuse discrimination, open access to health care, take back our country; a common vision of the political party as an instrument to protect the lives and livelihood of citizens, with the diverse party factions pulling the same harness. Unity.
The problem with this lovely dream is the wee conflict between the Progressive ideals of economic democracy and those of the corporate model which has become the facts-on-the-ground of the Democratic party ever since Jimmy Carter's deregulation of natural gas, trucking and airlines, presumably to trump Nixon's first big step of unleashing deregulation on health care and the dollar. After 12 long years of all manner of deregulation, Democrats were led out of the kinder, gentler desert by Joe Lieberman's Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) which promised third-way prosperity in exchange for unquestioning worship of the market model. Bill Clinton, (who despite this I still count among my friends), carried forward the DLC economic agenda, and delivered NAFTA. Now our Progressive roots are as a distant memory, and so seems only natural when a son-of-a-mill-worker bunks with the hedge funds, Hillary hangs with the day-traders and a-change-you-can-believe-in cashes in with the Chicago Board of Trade. Even the yellow dogs seem to prefer a market based approach over who gets to sleep on the porch. Some folks think the Progressive movement is part of the MPEG protocol.
Economic democracy of the Progressive movement has become party window dressing. All Democrats talk the talk, but most prefer to leave it up to the "marketplace of ideas" to decide who gets a place in the tent, and in the end, the corporations are the market makers. Apart from holdouts in the Labor wing, most of us act like Prophets of the Market Economy, casting reform proposals in terms of market based solutions, from cap and gown to cap and trade: let the market rule. We distinguish ourselves from Republicans in that we Democrats promise to bring fairness and "transparency" to the corporatist model of government. So there's the rub: an authentic call for unity would force to the surface this long simmering conflict between the in-markets-we-trust corporatist movement, and the not-dead-yet Progressive approach to reform, with its emphasis on public infrastructure and a rational regulation of commerce.
Without intending a challenge to the corporatist leadership of the party, Mark Thompson had it down cold, and laid it out, plain. "The Texas Railroad Commission was created in the Golden Age of the Texas Progressives". I think it never occurred to many of us that there ever was such a thing as a Golden Age of Texas Progressives. So why did they do it? "To keep the railroads from strangling the farmer, to protect their property from monopoly power". The railroad commission now oversees the oil and gas industry, where the Lord knows his work is yet undone. Since we don't have any railroads left, we don't need salvation from their rates, but we do need a party that is unified in the conviction to prevent the strangulation of public life by the hydra-headed monopoly powers of our times. Now we're talking unity.
The Texas Railroad Commissioner might not be the most important office up for election in 2008, but if Mark Thompson is the one who is speaking clearly of the vision of a Progressive economic democracy, then I guess he's running the most important campaign in the election.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Mario Gallegos, Not Ducking the Obvious.
Anyone who heard Mario Gallegos speak on Saturday evening of the Texas Democratic State Convention got a chance to see leadership in action. Most who spoke to the questions dividing the party, basically said that all this was unimportant (in light of the Big Bad Republicans). Many Hillary supporters didn't hear the last part clearly, and only heard that their concerns were not important in the new, unified party. I suppose this wasn't the intention of the speakers, but that doesn't solve the problem.
Not ducking the obvious, Gallegos stated that the "this year's primary was a big fight, and the fight has followed us into this hall". He continued with an appeal to his fellow Clinton delegates to invest their aspirations in the Obama campaign. Not to bury their differences, but to carry their fight forward with the Obama candidacy. He spoke with evident sincerity and sensitivity. Then he turned his attention to the party leadership, when he said that unity was a natural result when Democratic legislators stood together in the people's interest. The delicate point implied: of how our problems often derive from the failure of leadership to act in the interests of the people. I understood this as an appeal to the party leadership to reform the party's presidential campaign to become a vehicle suitable to carry forward the aspirations of the Clinton delegates, showing a way around the difficulties.
If someone had run into the Austin Convention Center to announce that the sun went down at the end of the day, that would tell 20,000 Democrats in 2008 just about as much as an honored speaker telling us that Bush is Bad and MaCain is the Same. I am grateful to Mario Gallegos for rising above the mundane, to address the delegation in a meaningful way.
Not ducking the obvious, Gallegos stated that the "this year's primary was a big fight, and the fight has followed us into this hall". He continued with an appeal to his fellow Clinton delegates to invest their aspirations in the Obama campaign. Not to bury their differences, but to carry their fight forward with the Obama candidacy. He spoke with evident sincerity and sensitivity. Then he turned his attention to the party leadership, when he said that unity was a natural result when Democratic legislators stood together in the people's interest. The delicate point implied: of how our problems often derive from the failure of leadership to act in the interests of the people. I understood this as an appeal to the party leadership to reform the party's presidential campaign to become a vehicle suitable to carry forward the aspirations of the Clinton delegates, showing a way around the difficulties.
If someone had run into the Austin Convention Center to announce that the sun went down at the end of the day, that would tell 20,000 Democrats in 2008 just about as much as an honored speaker telling us that Bush is Bad and MaCain is the Same. I am grateful to Mario Gallegos for rising above the mundane, to address the delegation in a meaningful way.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Minority Report from the Texas State Democratic Convention
As the remaining activists among 12,000 plus delegates, alternates and guests who attended the Texas State Democratic Convention filed out on the night Saturday, June 7th, everyone had heard the call for party unity, but there wasn't much enthusiasm. Many of the Clinton delegates left with the feeling of having been cheated, and many of the Obama delegates were annoyed and indignant with the Clinton campaign for not having given up earlier. It was not uncommon to hear Obama delegates say, effectively, if Obama looses in November, it will be Clinton's fault: not the most optimistic start of the election season. So while unity was the theme of the day, there is still a big unanswered question: unity over what?
The one point of common agreement was about how bad the Republicans are. For some, that is enough. But what I found in talking to individual delegates, both Obama and Clinton, was the diversity of motives people had for being there. A lot of different passions drove folks from the local Precinct Caucus to the County Convention, to the State Convention. Every person I spoke to had intensely personal motives which represented their aspirations, not their fears. The calls from the podium for unity tended more toward appeals to fear: the consequences of loosing to the Republicans (again), whereas the appeals to the positive stayed vague, to avoid the sharp edges of internal controversy. Of course it is easier to invoke the image of a single fear (McBush) than to speak directly to the hopes and dreams of the participants, which, as it turns out, are not entirely shared.
For many delegates, the possibility of the first African American president was for them, by far, more motivating than the fear of loosing to the Republicans, and while this was a sentiment that was appreciated by everyone there, it was not the defining reason why many people came. The same is true of those who found themselves in Austin, for the first time involved in politics, because of the hopes that a woman might for the first time be president; again an aspiration appreciated by all, but not a defining vision for many of the participants. These are examples of the most obvious reasons why some people were there, and many others had different distinct motivations which were, for them, questions of passionate concern; passions that, while generally appreciated by others, were not shared to the same degree.
The task of leadership is to forge a common vessel into which these distinct passions might come together to form a common cause. When that is not possible, the task of leadership is to find a way to accommodate the majority to the legitimate hopes and dreams of those who still find themselves outside the orbit of the common cause, by forging compromises to build a willingness of people with dissimilar dreams to pull the same harness. In these respects, leadership in Austin was weak, some will say, absent.
The most notable act of leadership in the context of the event was the unambiguous call for reconciliation by Hillary from Washington on Saturday. At that point, the initiative was in the hands of the Obama leadership to address the Obama delegates in a unity speech, to call upon the Obama activists to make the hopes and dreams of the Clinton activists their own, to impress on them that the only possible basis for real unity, was for the Clinton activists to come to see that their aspirations might be realized in the Obama campaign. That would not only have been true, it would also have been smart politics, because it would have handed the initiative back to Clinton delegates, and given them the opportunity to see if they could find their voice in the Obama campaign. Better to have invited them in for an argument, then to leave them out in the rain.
Instead the opposite occurred. Absent the call on the Obama campaign to find room under the tent for the aspirations of the Clinton delegates, the refrain that "our differences are small compared to our differences with the Republicans" had a corrosive effect, quite opposite from the intention of the many speakers who said that. It was in this atmosphere that, during the roll call vote for the election of State Party Chair Saturday night, one of the vote counters designated by the Guadalupe County delegation chair was told to sit down and shut up by the SD25 chair, to stand down from vote counting, for no other reason than because she was a Hillary supporter. This was after hour after hour of unity speeches. It is ironic that the SD25 chair was in take-command mode in response to a text-message from Chicago, ordering the Obama delegation to support Boyd Richie in that election, instead of supporting Roy Lavern Brooks, the Obama candidate for State Party Chair. Many Obama delegates new to politics who were pumped on the "time for change" theme did not appreciate that orders from Chicago should determine the outcome of that Texas race. The incident certainly showed that if the Obama leadership wanted something to happen, they had the organizational discipline to follow through.
Certainly all of us who were there can tell anecdotes from the Convention that reflect the brighter side of what happened at Austin: there was a lot of positive exchange of views as well. I am speaking to those aspects of events where the work was left undone. When I talked about these questions to Obama supporters outside our delegation on the floor Saturday, folks generally listened politely, and asked "When are you going to get over it?" One delegate from Hays County asked me, "Well, if you were up there, what would you say to the Clinton people?" I said, Anything I could say, Clinton already said in the Washington speech. Now is the time for Obama people to talk to the Obama people about what they're willing to do to get more Obama people. Are you willing to do that?" He just shrugged his shoulders.
For those of you who are perhaps feeling angry at the suggestion that there is a failure of leadership by the Obama campaign, consider that there is not much fruit in the question of blame, only a question of what needs to be done in order to achieve the unity required to win in November. A pledge to support the party's nominee does not an activist make: an activist is someone who has their aspirations invested in a campaign. When a Republican or Independent voter tells you that they don't identify their interests with the Obama campaign, are you going to stand there and ask them "Well, when are you going to get over it?"
The one point of common agreement was about how bad the Republicans are. For some, that is enough. But what I found in talking to individual delegates, both Obama and Clinton, was the diversity of motives people had for being there. A lot of different passions drove folks from the local Precinct Caucus to the County Convention, to the State Convention. Every person I spoke to had intensely personal motives which represented their aspirations, not their fears. The calls from the podium for unity tended more toward appeals to fear: the consequences of loosing to the Republicans (again), whereas the appeals to the positive stayed vague, to avoid the sharp edges of internal controversy. Of course it is easier to invoke the image of a single fear (McBush) than to speak directly to the hopes and dreams of the participants, which, as it turns out, are not entirely shared.
For many delegates, the possibility of the first African American president was for them, by far, more motivating than the fear of loosing to the Republicans, and while this was a sentiment that was appreciated by everyone there, it was not the defining reason why many people came. The same is true of those who found themselves in Austin, for the first time involved in politics, because of the hopes that a woman might for the first time be president; again an aspiration appreciated by all, but not a defining vision for many of the participants. These are examples of the most obvious reasons why some people were there, and many others had different distinct motivations which were, for them, questions of passionate concern; passions that, while generally appreciated by others, were not shared to the same degree.
The task of leadership is to forge a common vessel into which these distinct passions might come together to form a common cause. When that is not possible, the task of leadership is to find a way to accommodate the majority to the legitimate hopes and dreams of those who still find themselves outside the orbit of the common cause, by forging compromises to build a willingness of people with dissimilar dreams to pull the same harness. In these respects, leadership in Austin was weak, some will say, absent.
The most notable act of leadership in the context of the event was the unambiguous call for reconciliation by Hillary from Washington on Saturday. At that point, the initiative was in the hands of the Obama leadership to address the Obama delegates in a unity speech, to call upon the Obama activists to make the hopes and dreams of the Clinton activists their own, to impress on them that the only possible basis for real unity, was for the Clinton activists to come to see that their aspirations might be realized in the Obama campaign. That would not only have been true, it would also have been smart politics, because it would have handed the initiative back to Clinton delegates, and given them the opportunity to see if they could find their voice in the Obama campaign. Better to have invited them in for an argument, then to leave them out in the rain.
Instead the opposite occurred. Absent the call on the Obama campaign to find room under the tent for the aspirations of the Clinton delegates, the refrain that "our differences are small compared to our differences with the Republicans" had a corrosive effect, quite opposite from the intention of the many speakers who said that. It was in this atmosphere that, during the roll call vote for the election of State Party Chair Saturday night, one of the vote counters designated by the Guadalupe County delegation chair was told to sit down and shut up by the SD25 chair, to stand down from vote counting, for no other reason than because she was a Hillary supporter. This was after hour after hour of unity speeches. It is ironic that the SD25 chair was in take-command mode in response to a text-message from Chicago, ordering the Obama delegation to support Boyd Richie in that election, instead of supporting Roy Lavern Brooks, the Obama candidate for State Party Chair. Many Obama delegates new to politics who were pumped on the "time for change" theme did not appreciate that orders from Chicago should determine the outcome of that Texas race. The incident certainly showed that if the Obama leadership wanted something to happen, they had the organizational discipline to follow through.
Certainly all of us who were there can tell anecdotes from the Convention that reflect the brighter side of what happened at Austin: there was a lot of positive exchange of views as well. I am speaking to those aspects of events where the work was left undone. When I talked about these questions to Obama supporters outside our delegation on the floor Saturday, folks generally listened politely, and asked "When are you going to get over it?" One delegate from Hays County asked me, "Well, if you were up there, what would you say to the Clinton people?" I said, Anything I could say, Clinton already said in the Washington speech. Now is the time for Obama people to talk to the Obama people about what they're willing to do to get more Obama people. Are you willing to do that?" He just shrugged his shoulders.
For those of you who are perhaps feeling angry at the suggestion that there is a failure of leadership by the Obama campaign, consider that there is not much fruit in the question of blame, only a question of what needs to be done in order to achieve the unity required to win in November. A pledge to support the party's nominee does not an activist make: an activist is someone who has their aspirations invested in a campaign. When a Republican or Independent voter tells you that they don't identify their interests with the Obama campaign, are you going to stand there and ask them "Well, when are you going to get over it?"
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