Election 2020

Two days after I announced the End of Jeff Mackler's Campaign (posted 9/15), the candidate resurrected himself with a short piece entitled Socialist Action 2020 Presidential Candidate Jeff Mackler: No to Trump’s Coup Threat! (posted 9/17). He repeats every Democratic talking point in the book:

Socialist Action is in no way indifferent to Trump’s threat to cancel the 2020 election or to ignore its results on election day should he lose, or attempts to undermine the right to vote by defunding the Post Office to make the prompt counting of ballots difficult or using U.S. Supreme Court rulings to approve racist gerrymandering of districts and other undemocratic measures aimed at reducing the vote of Black and Latinx people. While we have always exposed the reactionary nature of bourgeois elections and all their anti-democratic aspects, we are far from the point of ceding this institution to would-be tyrants like Trump.

Mr. Mackler's supposed defense of free elections is hypocrisy on steroids. Trotskyists--including Socialist Action--put no faith in "bourgeois elections," and participate in them only until they can put together a big enough mob to overthrow the system illegally, after which all elections will be banned. Or if not, then after the Revolution Mr. Mackler will win with 99.9% of the vote. The remaining 0.1% will be put in front of a firing squad.

My original post elicited a comment from UNAC Blog (United National Antiwar Coalition), which looks like an ultraleft front group for Socialist Action. The comment reads in full,

It seems that during this time, as we go through COVID, have had a massive response to cop killings and racism, as jobs are lost, rents coming due and the capitalist parties moving to the right and showing no way forward, the example of an independent socialist campaign - even a small one- is better than none at all.

I have no complaint about a small, independent socialist campaign--I only insist that it be competently run, especially if it claims the Trotskyist banner. "Competent" means, among other things, choosing a candidate with some minimal level of charisma.

I'll suggest that the Socialist Workers Party campaign of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett fits the bill. They're small, socialist, and in the larger scheme of things completely inconsequential. But they're out on the campaign trail, they seek endorsements from outside their own movement, and I believe they'll be on the ballot in at least a few states. 

If you don't like them, then vote for the Green Party.

True to form, Mr. Mackler hasn't been heard from since Sept. 17th--so I'll stand by my claim that the campaign is moribund. (By the way, whatever happened to Heather Bradford, who was initially chosen as his running mate? Unfortunately she left in the Socialist Resurgence split (h/t commenter John B)and is now a designated non-person--likely one of those destined for the firing squad after the Revolution.)

But back to the Democratic talking points that Mr. Mackler so proudly regurgitates in his lede paragraph.

Mr. Trump has never vowed to remain in office illegally. He has promised to appeal close election results all the way to the Supreme Court, which is his right. This becomes "undemocratic" only if he disobeys a court order--which he's never done and almost certainly won't do. (If he does then everybody, including me, will oppose him.) The Democrat's fearmongering about Trump organizing a coup is just that--fearmongering. (Indeed, it looks more plausible that the Dems organized a coup against Trump beginning in 2016.)

Likewise, the post office is not being defunded. It's got plenty of money through the end of the fiscal year, i.e., through the election. The debate is over next year's funding.

For somebody who is trying to "reduc[e] the vote of Black and Latinx people", Mr. Trump is sure spending a lot of time and money to recruit them as voters. He's gone out of his way to blame only Antifa (the all-white fascist grouping) for the violence, only rarely mentioning Black Lives Matter (the half-white fascist grouping). He's made numerous promises to help the Black community economically--and unlike the Dems, Trump tries hard to keep his promises.

It's worth noting that both Blacks and Latinos are very much in support of the police--unlike the white fascist-types that want to "defund the police." Not even Al Sharpton supports BLM on this issue. Kamala Harris can't make up her mind, and Joe Biden has no mind to make up.

Just recently, Joe Biden compared Mr. Trump to Joseph Goebbels. In other words, the accusations against Trump have gotten so extreme and so far removed from reality that it looks likely to backfire on them.

The New York Times claims to have detailed information about Trump's tax returns, from which the bottom line is that there's nothing in there that we didn't know already. He has no big investments in Russia. He didn't launder money through Russia. He took a big loss on his casinos, which he has been able to deduct from his subsequent income meaning that he's paid no income tax in recent years. He's being audited because of a large refund he got ten years ago, which if he loses he'll be on the hook for $100 million.

He has done nothing illegal--or even unethical. He's simply followed the rules the way they were written, which is what taxpayers do everywhere.

I predict Mr. Trump will win reelection, perhaps by a large electoral vote margin. The reason is (as Conrad Black puts it) that the Biden-Harris ticket is unfeasible. Biden is clearly in mental decline. He can't speak extemporaneously to the media--not even friendly media. He's increasingly unable to even read from a teleprompter. He is simply incapable of being president, regardless of any ideology. He can't state any reason for his candidacy except that he hates Trump.

The Democratic strategy is to a) let Trump destroy himself with his supposedly outrageous comments, and b) to tar him with whatever scandal they can come up with. Meanwhile, Biden is supposed to sit in his basement and appeal to his image as being "a nice guy" who's "one of us." The problem with this is that Trump is a known quantity--the man is an open book. There is no new information to be had about the man, and the notion there's some smoking gun somewhere is an illusion.

This won't work. Trump-hatred will not win a majority of voters, and without a positive reason people won't vote for Mr. Biden. The basement campaign will fail.

What's more mysterious to me is why they're keeping Ms. Harris under wraps. After all, given Joe's age and obvious infirmities, Kamala is likely to be president within the first term. Nobody really knows who she is, and I think the public is too risk averse to take a chance on a complete unknown.

So here's Mr. Mackler's chance! As bad as he is as a candidate, he is better than Joe Biden. At least he had the courage to go up against Paul Duddridge, which is more than I can say for cowardly Joe. And even though his program is completely wacko, at least there is one. The man has something to say.

Mr. Mackler's meager virtues notwithstanding, this blog endorses Donald J. Trump for President.

Further Reading:

• The New Socialist Resurgence Grouplet
• Heather Bradford on Abortion
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again

The Revenge of the Lumpen Proletariat

Let's get the silly stuff out of the way up front. In a Militant article (published by the Socialist Workers Party--SWP) entitled What is the political road forward for workers in 2020, Seth Galinsky writes

The party’s candidates call for the unions to fight for a government-funded public works program to create millions of jobs at union scale, building schools, hospitals and other things workers need. They say we need to organize to cut the workweek with no cut in pay, to prevent further layoffs.

To accomplish this, they advocate a united front with the Tooth Fairy and her reserve army of Magic Unicorns who can build schools, hospitals, and other things workers supposedly need (but don't really) at no cost whatsoever. Because otherwise their proposal is such a misallocation of economic resources that it will drive us all into dire poverty.

Being socialists, they have to make demands like this, which puts them in common league with the entire far Left along with much of the Democratic Party, all of whom live in the Land of Wishful Thinking.

But once you get past the pro-forma BS, Mr. Galinsky's article, along with a more substantive piece by Naomi Craine (Violent course of antifa, Black Lives Matter threat to working class) begin to make a whole lot of sense. I write here not so much to disagree with them, but rather to expand on the ideas.

Ms. Craine has actually been to Kenosha. She writes

On Aug. 29, I attended a rally in Kenosha protesting the cop shooting of Jacob Blake Jr. on Aug. 23. It had been called by Blake’s family to oppose police brutality and to urge a halt to arson and violence carried out by anarcho-radical forces earlier in the week. At an Aug. 25 protest, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse had shot three Black Lives Matter supporters, killing two.

Although the Aug. 29 rally was called a “Peace March,” one of the speakers, who was not identified by name, declared, “If you kill one of us, it’s time for us to kill one of yours.” He went on to bait Caucasians at the action and closed his speech with the slogan, “Race first.” Several black-clad individuals, some openly carrying weapons, participated as a group in the rally.

Ms. Craine is more diplomatic than I will be, but she correctly hints that BLM (at least the core group) is a fascist gang. I use the word advisedly--not as an epithet--because they subscribe to the fascist meme: We're poor because the foreigners stole all the money. Here "foreigners" is a stand-in for some other racial or ethnic group--often Jews. In France today it's Muslims. For BLM it's "white people", who used to get called "honkies." (BLM doesn't like Jews much, either, though I think dedicated antisemitism is more the specialty of Antifa--another fascist gang, as Ms. Craine points out.)

BLM is not a civil rights organization. They don't believe in civil rights at all--certainly not freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, or even freedom of thought. Their creed is what's mine is mine--and what's yours is mine, too.

I do not believe BLM is a mass organization. Ignore the supposed widespread support it seems to enjoy--most of that is just feel-good virtue signaling by suburban liberals on college campuses, aka useful idiots. The actual organization is only a few thousands, perhaps ten thousand, people. A competent government committed to civil order could put them down in a jiffy.

I don't believe BLM speaks for Black people. Even Al Sharpton is separating himself from them. Their goal is a race war--which Blacks will lose big time simply because they're only 12% of the population. There are some suckers in the white community who are falling for the race war shtick--fortunately they're an even smaller minority. But the longer government stays on the sidelines, the closer we get to an actual race war.

Ms. Craine writes

It is in the course of these fights and broader struggles in the years ahead working people will learn how to defend ourselves in disciplined ways from assaults by the bosses and cops who protect their rule. And we will see more clearly the middle-class character and dangerous anti-working-class course of antifa and the Black Lives Matter leadership.

The first sentence is tooth-fairy Trotsky-talk. But the second sentence is more true than Ms. Craine realizes, blinded as she is by Marxist language. Redefining terms will clarify much.

Who she calls "working people," I will refer to as folks with a positive net worth. It doesn't have to be much: some equity in a house; a small 401K account; or even just a marketable skill that can earn a living. Maybe it's a small fishing boat. Whatever it is, these folks are Trump's base--the blue-collar worker who lives in the bungalow in a working class part of town.  Think Archie Bunker if you must.

And the folks she calls "middle class" I'll refer to as the lumpen proletariat--people who don't own anything, not even a marketable skill. Of course that includes the homeless bums and the welfare queens--among many other people who are simply incapable of taking care of themselves. We can all feel sorry for those folks, but they're not the problem.

The worrisome lumpens appear on the surface to be middle class--think Meathead. They include those who've buried themselves in student loans with no chance of ever paying them back. Or others who can't live within their means and are now hopelessly in hock to credit card companies. Or the many who have fallen off the academic ladder--college dropouts--who despite all that "education", know nothing that can earn them a living. Or ladies age 30 who are still in grad school working on that post-modern Jane Austen monograph. Or those who have finished grad school--PhD in hand--and are now competing in the impossible academic job market. Or the guys majoring in "Black Studies," who have learned nothing more than to see themselves as victims.

These lumpens--these are the dangerous folks. They're the true Meatheads of our age, having no chance of ever earning an honest living. And of course they're bitter, and angry, and above all, envious. Compare them with my wife's immigrant relatives--Uber drivers, orderlies, food service workers--all of whom own their own homes and cars and have a little money in the bank. And they have children and grandchildren. Naturally the lumpens are green with envy! That's why they take it out on restaurant patrons, as Ms. Craine mentions.

Or the spoiled off-spring of the upper-middle class who have only menial jobs to look forward to, and now riot with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (don't you just love that transgressive "k"!). Because at bottom they're stupid and they feel entitled. They never went through the school of hard knocks. They've never had to earn a living.

Those are the people who join Antifa and BLM, for just as Marx predicted, it's the lumpen proletariat who are the soldiers for fascist gangs.

Further Reading:

• Is Jeff Mackler a Racist?
• Louis Proyect and the More-Poverty Solution
• A Nation of Shopkeepers

Jeff Mackler Quits 2020 Race!

Jeff Mackler (Source)

It appears that Socialist Action's (SA) candidate for president, Jeff Mackler--the most pathetic presidential candidate ever in the history of presidential candidates--has dropped out. 

It was the honorable thing to do.

The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and Breitbart have all failed to mention the auspicious event. Indeed, an announcement hasn't even appeared on Socialist Action's own website! Mr. Mackler's campaign was that unnewsworthy.

So the scoop is mine--I'm apparently the first (and only) media channel to report Mr. Mackler's withdrawal. For that matter, I was nearly the only place besides SA itself where his campaign got any mention at all.

I'd be happy to reprint, link to, or comment on any press release or article post explaining the move. But there has been none.

One wouldn't have to make excuses for the decision. SA, a grouplet of about 60 people, simply doesn't have the resources to run an election campaign--not even one that compares favorably with other Trotskyist grouplets. And then they chose a uniquely bad candidate--an 80 year old with a hacking cough whose YouTube videos are about as interesting as watching paint dry.

Even Joe Biden is a better candidate (though I suppose that's arguable).

Anyway, I infer the event because all mention of Mr. Mackler's campaign has been dropped from the SA website. The wayback machine still works--I don't think they've deleted anything. But you'll find no mention or links on the front page.

They do post an article written by Mr. Mackler (The Democratic & Republican Conventions: A Socialist Fact Check) dated September 3rd, which ends with this ridiculous exhortation:

For the first time in a long, long while, the fighting forces to do so are in motion as never before. They have appeared in the streets in unprecedented number – estimated at 15-26 million – and won the hearts and minds of tens of millions more. They carry with them the potential to achieve wondrous victories that can be coalesced in new and independent forms of struggle aimed at a direct challenge to capitalist rule, including the organization of a mass, independent Black political party and the rebirth of a fighting labor movement free from its current stifling bureaucracy and advancing on the class struggle road. Join us! Join Socialist Action! Vote Jeff Mackler for president in 2020!

So some time between Sept. 3rd and today the Political Committee, or the Campaign Committee, or the National Committee, or some other Brezhnevian committee decided to airbrush Mr. Mackler's campaign out of history.

You can get away with that if you control all the media, as Mr. Brezhnev himself did. Or you can get away with it if nobody cares what you say or holds you to no account. And but for me that latter appears to be the case. So there you have it--it is my honorable task to preserve those 15-26 million potential SA sympathizers from serious folly!

The consequential decision that remains is Who are the five dozen SA comrades gonna vote for in November? My suggestion would be Donald J. Trump, but I doubt they'll take my advice. 

My second choice for them are their former comrades in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who are running Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett for prez and veep, respectively. Apart from SA's antisemitism, their campaign platform is identical to whatever Jeff Mackler was doing. Yes--the SWP's campaign is just as quixotic and silly as Mr. Mackler's, but at least it's competently executed. They'll even be on the ballot in a few places.

Anyway, good bye Mr. Mackler. I'll miss you--you were good for laughs. But I don't think anybody else will. May you enjoy your retirement.

Further Reading:

• Jeff Mackler Interviewed by Paul Duddridge
• Boring Jeff Mackler Runs for President Again
• Old White Man Runs for President

Trotskyists on the Economy

"Capital" by Viktor Deni (1919)
(Source: Socialist Action)

Articles by Jason Koslowski (No Return to Normal for the Capitalist Economy, published in Left Voice) and Nick Baker (In the Worst of Times, the Billionaire Elite Plunder Working Class America, published in Socialist Action) are the subject of this post.

Both authors are very angry that the stock market is rising. Mr. Koslowski's lede:

The economy might be collapsing in the middle of a deadly pandemic, but the stock market is booming.

Likewise, Mr. Baker's opener:

In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before.

Mr. Koslowski's otherwise excellent piece offers this claim:

While stocks keep climbing, the ruling class is raking in staggering amounts of money. Amazon, for instance, posted a profit of $5.4 billion for April, May, and June, and on July 20, Jeff Bezos made $13 billion in just a single day. (Links in original, here and in quotes below)

How Mr. Bezos could earn $13 billion when the company only made $5.4 billion is not explained. Of course the comparison is apples and oranges: the earnings are real money, while Mr. Bezos' increased horde is unrealized (and unrealizable) paper profits.

Mr. Baker makes the same claim, albeit without links to support his case. And that's the big difference between the two: Mr. Koslowski sources all his data with useful and relevant links. Mr. Baker cites nothing and permits himself much latitude for exaggeration. Otherwise the two articles say pretty much the same thing, which makes me wonder why they are in semi-competing organizations.

Contrary to what Misters Koslowski and Baker say, the stock market is much more than just a casino for the wealthy. The S&P 500 is probably the best long-term investment anybody can make--all Americans should own a bit of the S&P 500 through an index fund. Because even if you don't own it yourself, the S&P 500 is a direct reflection of the American economy. If it crashes, we all go down with it--not just the very rich.

Anybody with a 401K (e.g., me) depends directly on the S&P 500 for their retirement--that's tens of millions of people! Even those with defined benefit pensions (e.g., most public employees, but not me) rely on the index, because monies that governments are supposed to contribute toward their retirement will inevitably be invested in stocks. If the market doesn't rise fast enough, then not even public employees will get their pensions (see, e.g., Illinois). So a rising market is a bright spot for the economy--I think it's odd that our comrades find it to be a problem.

A well-capitalized company ("high" stock price) can borrow money to finance operating expenses, or sell more shares to raise money for new ventures. Such companies are creditworthy. Conversely, a poorly-capitalized company ("low" stock price) can't do any of those things and is one step away from bankruptcy.

Misters Koslowski and Baker think it's all a bubble. The former puts it this way:

In part, the stock market’s surge has been because capitalists were buying back their own stocks. Buy-backs are a method for driving up stock prices and making more money for investors — so much so that the central bank of the U.S., the Federal Reserve, had to restrict such moves. [The "restriction" applies only to banks, which are required to keep cash on hand.--ed] 

Buybacks are a way of returning money to shareholders, and they're common because they're tax-advantaged over dividends. Apart from the tax implications, there is no difference between a buyback and an increased dividend. A company like Apple has a huge cash horde that it doesn't need--and buying back from shareholders is an indirect way of putting that money to work in other industries.

Apparently our two authors agree with conspiracy theorists on the right about the malevolent Fed--always scheming secretly to cheat the investor/working man. Mr. Koslowski writes,

The Federal Reserve has given away trillions of dollars by buying capitalist firms’ bonds and other financial instruments to “heat up” the economy. And Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed a $2.2 trillion “aid” bill of taxpayer money to support those in need — cash that was, overwhelmingly, a gift to the ruling class itself. [The link is informative--ed.]

The Fed is buying corporate bonds, which means it is lending money to companies. It is not "given away." While many argue that this exceeds the Feds mandate--which narrowly interpreted says that they should only lend money to banks--the counter-argument is that the Fed should lend to any temporarily illiquid organization (not just banks), but never to an insolvent company. The problem is that it's hard to tell the difference.

For example, are airlines illiquid or insolvent? The former supposes that post-pandemic air travel will go back to the way it was, and then it is an appropriate government responsibility to lend the airlines money to get them through the crisis. The latter suggests that air travel patterns are permanently altered, and therefore many existing airlines will go bankrupt anyway. The government should not lend them additional money because it will never get paid back.

One can ask the same question about renters who lost their job because of the pandemic: are they illiquid or insolvent? If they're going to get their old jobs back soon enough, then they're illiquid, and the government should definitely lend them money (or equivalently, mandate an eviction moratorium). On the other hand, they're insolvent if the old jobs are never coming back. At that point a loan will never do because insolvent people can never pay it back. Instead the government will likely have to issue some kind of welfare check.

Misters Baker and Koslowski misunderstand two things. First, they fail to realize that bailing out the airlines and bailing out renters is really the same problem. The point is to avoid bankruptcy, which in the case of renters will lead to the bankruptcy of the landlords, who in turn can't pay their mortgages causing the banks to go bankrupt. And likewise with the airlines, who won't be able to cover their existing debts and operating expenses.

Mass bankruptcy is very bad for any economy and could cause a deep and prolonged depression. Preventing that is the core function of the Federal Reserve.

The second error our authors make is they assume large firms, e.g., airlines, are neither illiquid nor insolvent. In their mind's eye the corporations are like the cartoon at the top of the page--they're just hording cash that they could easily use to finance everything if they only wanted to--but they're too greedy to even try. It's like Jeff Bezos keeps piles of gold coins in his basement, for which he has no other use than to swim in them after lunch. This picture does not match reality.

Mr. Koslowski asks an important question.

What does all this mean for the working class and oppressed? 

First, it means more austerity. In other words, we’ll see intensified attacks on public, tax-funded services, like public education, and probably on social services like medicare, medicaid, and social security.

And this is true if there are mass bankruptcies. Companies will close, workers will lose their jobs, tax receipts will decline, the money supply will shrink catastrophically, and above all, the stock market will crash. The resources necessary to support the social safety net simply won't exist anymore.

To prevent this dire outcome, one has to hope that the Fed is successful. The assumption that, e.g., airlines and renters are illiquid rather than insolvent has to be correct. If it is, then the ship will right itself soon enough. And if not, then the Fed is just throwing good money after bad and making things worse.

A rising stock market indicates that investors believe it's a liquidity problem rather than a solvency problem. Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy since a good share price makes companies solvent. So we should all hope the market keeps on going up.

Is it just my imagination, but does the cartoon character above look like an African or a Jew?

Further Reading:

• Robots and AI
• Let Them Eat Little Bits of Green Paper
• Unionizing Hotels?