Do You WANT TO SEE One Of The Republicans Win In 2016? If So, Backing Hillary Is The Way To Go [View all]

[Segami]

Greg Sargent raised the warning signals, based on a new poll released yesterday by Stan Greenberg, that core Democratic voters-- particularly millennials (but also unmarried women and minorities-- are not as energized by the 2016 elections yet as core Republican voters. Perhaps that's because anti-establishment Democrats have come to the conclusion that their party's horribly flawed establishment candidate is inevitable, while Republicans have all but vanquished her equivalent (Jeb) and will probably pick an altogether anti-establishment candidate, if not "outsiders" Trump or Carson, then Texas neo-fascist Ted Cruz.

The Democratic establishment strategy is always "but we have the lesser-of-two-evils." And that's true. Bernie summed up the conundrum on ABC's This Week Sunday when he told viewers, when asked about the party's establishment-backed candidate, that "on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day. But having said that, we have very significant differences, and the key difference is I see a nation in which we have a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality." Bernie is the Democrats' anti-establishment candidate, even to the point of leaving big money from wealthy progressives on the table."

Sanders' refusal to engage in big money politics provides a striking contrast to Clinton. Northern California trails only Washington and New York, and arguably Southern California, as a campaign cash target for her campaign. And its huge financial role was underscored last week by a 900-person, hour-and-a-half gathering headlined by Clinton at a manor deep in Silicon Valley on Wednesday afternoon and a 290-person event at a Napa winery on Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, the Vermonter's lack of interest in the region's cash is a phenomenon that jibes with his campaign's singular focus on Iowa and New Hampshire this fall. But by not sending emissaries-- and not even stopping by the San Francisco area for one of his signature megarallies-- the insurgent Vermont senator is missing out on potentially millions of dollars.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/bernie-sanders-silicon-valley-fundraising-215619

When Bernie told ABC News viewers that the key difference between Hilary and himself is that he sees "a nation in which we have a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality," the implication is that she doesn't. Or that, at the very least, stressing over it isn't her top priority. David Dayen's American Prospect article, Bring Back Antitrust, on the prevalence of "market concentration" (monopolies) as a driving force in American business, helps explain why it should be and why progressives are so much more excited about Bernie than about... the establishment candidate. "Market concentration," he wrote, "has a powerful impact on the day-to-day lives of every American, not just because monopolists have pricing power. Monopolies can also stunt innovation, degrade quality of service, increase inequality, and concentrate political power. But in a segmented economy, monopoly pricing power and suppression of innovation in some sectors can co-exist with competitive markets elsewhere. As for low inflation, much of it reflects depressed wages, in some ways driven by market concentration. So the consumer is hit twice-- once in the paycheck and again at the store. And the Internet, for all of its ability to facilitate shopping around, has facilitated platform monopolies or near-monopolies such as Amazon and Google, with other anti-competitive effects. ...American progressives have long had an ambivalent view of bigness. The split was evident in the presidential election of 1912. Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt’s idea was to allow some concentration to most efficiently distribute goods, but to let experts regulate those firms for the public benefit. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and his adviser Louis Brandeis, saw concentrated power as dangerous, and held that monopolies that unduly restricted competition should be broken up.

~snip~

Can anti-monopoly sentiment be revived? When New York’s Working Families Party first recruited Zephyr Teachout to run for governor, she said she would only do it if she could talk about monopolies. “They polled it, and they were correct that nobody knew what I was talking about,” Teachout says. But when she eventually ran an insurgent campaign against incumbent Andrew Cuomo, she was determined to talk about it anyway. “The minute you got past the sound-bite level, people responded to the concentration of power,” Teachout says. They did campaign events at places where people paid their cable bills, using the pending Comcast–Time Warner merger, eventually abandoned, as the hook. She engaged farmers in upstate New York about monopsony power, and discussed Amazon and big banks on the stump. And it resonated. After only one month of campaigning, Teachout won 35 percent of the vote, with particular strength in upstate counties where farming issues were prominent. “The Tea Party talks to people and says, ‘You’re out of power because government is taking it away from you,’” Teachout says. “Far too often, Democrats say, ‘You’re wrong, you’re not out of power.’ That’s dissonant with our lived experience. You’re out of power … because your priorities don’t matter and JPMorgan’s do.”

http://prospect.org/article/bring-back-antitrust-0

But here's where the source of Clinton's backers and her corporate-oriented campaign contributions come into play-- and why the Politico story about Bernie not wanting to chase Silicon Valley money is so important. This chart from the Greenberg poll was all over the internet yesterday. Understanding the "whys" behind it... less so. If you feel we need to bring back antitrust, please consider a contribution to the candidates who see eye-to-eye with you on that.




cont'

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