I was listening to NPR yesterday, as one does, and the reporter talking about the presidential race played a clip of a pro-Trump ad that talks about Vice President Kamala Harris as a “San Francisco liberal.”
I knew we were going to get this. I knew they would attack her for her roots in this city, which is a favorite right-wing foil.
It reminded me of the week that Rep. Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker of the House. Reporters on Capitol Hill wanted to know about her record, and one of them called me and asked what I thought about a San Francisco liberal serving in one of the most powerful jobs in the nation.
I said that everyone on the right and the left needs to chill: Nancy Pelosi is not a Marxist, not a leftist, not even, as I would define the term, a “San Francisco liberal.” She’s a mainstream Democrat, an incredibly smart political strategist who will see her constituency as the center of the Democratic Party and will work to increase the party’s majority by moving away from the progressive side and into the swing districts.
That was true then, and it’s true now.
I got called by Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, and suddenly, I had my 15 minutes of fame on national right-wing media, and they tried to make me look stupid, as they do, but I repeated:
I’m a San Francisco liberal, and I know what I’m talking about.
Nancy Pelosi is not a “San Francisco liberal.”
I doubt Fox News is ever going to call me again; I wasn’t a model guest. But I could tell them the same thing I told KPFA last week: Kamala Harris is not a Marxist, or a Socialist, of even a San Francisco progressive (which is a more meaningful term than “liberal” these days.) She ran as a law-and-order alternative to liberal (and yes, at one point, Marxist) District Attorney Terence Hallinan.
Other than her opposition to the death penalty (which is pretty much a given in this city), she was never the sort of criminal-justice reformer that, say, Chesa Boudin was. As state attorney general, she opposed efforts to free innocent people, and opposed Prop. 47, which raised the threshold for thefts to be considered felonies.
She was, and is, a pretty mainstream Democrat.
At one point, she was in favor of single-payer healthcare, and at one point, when I asked her during the primaries about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth tax, she told me “Elizabeth is onto something.”
No more. That will not be part of the platform. Nor will Medicare for All.
The attacks on her as a leftist will be part of the overall racist, sexist, assault on a brilliant woman of color who could be the next president. But these ads San Francisco-red-baiting Harris will not be remotely accurate.
(And, of course, the left hasn’t been running San Francisco anyway.)
And for all the media hand-wringing, what’s wrong with being a progressive in national politics anyway? Sen. Bernie Sanders has some advice for the Democrats. From an oped I just got in my inbox:
in the midst of all the political gossip on TV and in the newspapers, what Americans will not encounter is a serious discussion of the multiple economic crises facing the 60% of our fellow citizens who live paycheck to paycheck – the working class of this country. What you will not hear about is why, in the richest country in the history of the world, so few have so much while so many have so little. What you will not hear about is the pain, the stress, the anxiety that tens of millions of Americans experience on a daily basis, and how governmental decisions can improve their lives.
In order to combat a political system which ignores so many of the most important concerns facing the majority of our people, my campaign recently commissioned a poll in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It asked some pretty basic questions: what are the major concerns that you and your families have? What would you like your government to do about them?
The results of the poll are not surprising, and not unlike other polls done over the years.
They show that, at the time of huge income and wealth inequality, unprecedented corporate greed, a failing healthcare system, a grossly unfair tax structure, an extremely high rate of childhood poverty, and too many seniors struggling to pay for their basic necessities, the American people want strong governmental action which addresses the longstanding needs of working families.
In other words, it turns out that progressive economic proposals are extremely popular – not only among Democrats but also among independents, Republicans, and even the most ardent Trump supporters.
One of the key findings of the poll is that, on core economic issues, by a wide margin, voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who favors expanding Social Security benefits by making the wealthy pay the same tax rate as the working class. They strongly support a candidate who favors expanding Medicare to cover vision, dental, and hearing needs, who favors cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half by making sure that Americans pay no more than what they pay in Europe or Canada, and who favors hiking taxes on the rich and multinational corporations so that they pay their fair share.
In other words: campaigning on an economic agenda that speaks to the needs of working families is a winning formula for Kamala Harris and Democrats in November. Indeed, it is the formula that could give Harris the sort of victory that sweeps in a Democratic Senate and House and allows her to govern in the best tradition of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Joe Biden’s Build Back Better program.
Is the choice of Tim Walz a step in that direction? Sanders thinks so—and let’s remember, in the primaries he won some of the swing states that Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.
I read the headline in this NYTimes story and I really wanted to like it: “Will A.I. kill meaningless jobs?” And is that so bad?
Emma Goldberg writes:
In 2013, the now deceased radical anthropologist, David Graeber, gave the world a distinct way to think about this problem in an essay called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” This anticapitalist polemic by the man who had helped coin Occupy Wall Street’s iconic “99 percent” slogan went viral, seemingly speaking to a widely felt 21st Century frustration. Mr. Graeber developed it into a book that delved deeper on the subject.
He suggested that the economist John Maynard Keynes’s dream of a 15-hour workweek had never come to pass because humans have invented millions of jobs so useless that even the people doing them can’t justify their existence. A quarter of the work force in rich countries sees their jobs as potentially pointless, according to a study by the Dutch economists Robert Dur and Max van Lent. If workers find the labor dispiriting, and the work adds nothing to society, what’s the argument for keeping these jobs?
Then sadly, very sadly because this is the central issue of the A.I. revolution, Goldberg misses the point.
Keynes argued that technology would replace drudgery jobs, and humans could work a lot less. Essential to his argument—and missed in modern discussion—was that the benefits of this productivity would be shared more or less equally, that the workers who were displaced by machines would have enough money that they didn’t have to work as much.
That, of course, would require government intervention in the economy, which was the essence of Keynes’ work, because capitalism on its own doesn’t allow for a middle class or for shared prosperity.
What we have seen since 1980 in this country is the opposite.
It’s easy to have A.I. take over drudge jobs. It’s easy, in theory, to have that productivity bump go to pay off the workers who were replaced, so that nobody has to work as much anymore.
That would require a society where the wealth created by replacing workers doesn’t all go to the very, very top.
Economists like to say that technological revolutions destroy some jobs, but create new ones. The craftspeople and farmers displaced by the Industrial Revolution (and Enclosure) in England moved to cities and got jobs in factories, that were, by any standard, brutal and exploitive; they lost the fruit of their labor. The digital revolution made a few people very, very rich, and left much of the rest of society far worse off.
I think A.I. is going to be disruptive on a level we haven’t yet seen, destroying the jobs of both blue-collar and executive-level workers. We can let that happen, or we can tax the profits and redistribute it.
Nobody in the mainstream media seems willing to talk about this.
