With the Win-Win Machine, Most of Us Actually Lose

by Roy Eidelson

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Somewhere, deep in the bowels of our nation’s capital, today’s Democratic Party establishment keeps close guard over a hulking, fearsome, and often temperamental machine. With hundreds of moving parts, it’s surprising that the elaborate contraption has only one purpose: to take bold and popular policy proposals that could improve millions of lives, chew them up, and then spit out much feebler versions that don’t materially threaten the status quo. Servicing this apparatus isn’t cheap. But that’s not a problem because so many corporate behemoths—Wall Street, Big Oil, health insurers, Big Pharma, defense contractors, and beyond—are more than happy to foot the bill. They’re also very generous when it comes to tipping the machine’s operators, which apparently is how the Win-Win Machine got its name.

Given how well this arrangement works for its beneficiaries, the Democratic leadership understandably finds it unsettling whenever progressive candidates—having won office despite the considerable obstacles routinely erected by the Democratic National Committee and its offshoots—enter Congress but refuse to get their hands dirty by helping out with the Win-Win Machine. Indeed, worries about the machine’s future—and the buckets of money it reliably brings—are undoubtedly part of the impetus behind a post-election narrative being promoted by establishment Democrats. They claim that support for “socialism” among progressive candidates—in the form of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other efforts to counter injustice and inequality—is the reason the party failed to expand its control of the House or win back the Senate.

But the evidence doesn’t fit this self-serving account. Around the country, progressive candidates—and policies—flourished. Noteworthy winners in their races include Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Pramila Jayapal in Washington, Cori Bush in Missouri, Marie Newman in Illinois, Katie Porter and Ro Khanna in California, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones in New York. As Bernie Sanders wrote a week after Election Day, “It turns out that supporting universal health care during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change is not just good public policy. It also is good politics.”

Nevertheless, the seemingly coordinated blame-the-Left propaganda we’re now hearing was entirely predictable—because it soothes the billionaire class. And for those politicians who prioritize comfort over consequence in their careers, that may be what matters most. So progressives are portrayed as misguided and misinformed, as out of touch with what Americans really want, and as proponents of dangerous reforms. In sharp contrast, so-called centrists are depicted as having been unjustly victimized and as blameless for the party’s shortcomings. The don’t-rock-the-boat Democrats who encourage this view have a clear goal: to demoralize, marginalize, ostracize, and intimidate those members who they fear will muck up the Win-Win Machine.

Meanwhile, for the many millions of Americans who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden’s “nothing will fundamentally change” platform yet voted for him anyway because they understood the necessity of preventing another horrific four years of Donald Trump, this open hostility toward a progressive agenda undermines their interests, their values, and their aspirations. If Biden now selects only corporate-friendly, status-quo-defending advisors and Cabinet members, and if he touts watered-down bipartisan “solutions” as stunning successes, it will further cement the betrayal.

Of course, none of this suggests that Trump, Mitch McConnell, and other Republican Party leaders are any better. Indeed, they’re much worse. Consistently ruthless and single-minded in pursuing a narrow and greed-driven agenda, they count on fearmongering, racist dog-whistling, and appeals to blind patriotism to attract the intolerant and the disillusioned. Even with Trump gone, there’s little reason to expect that this GOP strategy will change.

But this reality doesn’t mean that we have to wholeheartedly embrace and defend Democratic politicians who condemn their progressive counterparts while jeopardizing the common good by deferring to the divergent preferences of their largest donors. Instead, let’s insist that these Democrats begin the new era ahead by finding a more suitable home for their anti-democratic Win-Win Machine.

Two options quickly come to mind: toss the entire contraption into the Potomac, or install it in the Smithsonian for public viewing—as a reminder of how a political party can lose its way by abandoning its core principles and its most vulnerable constituents.

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Roy Eidelson is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. His book Political Mind Games: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible is now available as afree PDF. Follow him on Twitter at @royeidelson.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 3

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

by Stefan Schindler

Standing before Michelangelo’s statue of David, the poet Rilke said: “I must change my life.”  A Catholic bishop, after reading the Dalai Lama’s autobiography, said in his New York Times book review: “We must change our lives.”

Norman Mailer noted the contradiction at the heart of America’s ethical schizophrenia. As a largely self-defined Judeo-Christian nation, America pretends to worship the Prince of Peace, yet forgets that Jesus chased the money-changers out of the temple. America sacrifices its moral integrity on the altar of a perpetual and frenzied pursuit of profit. Today, the gap between rich and poor is larger than it was in the 1920s.

America’s unregulated banking system was the primary cause of the Stock Market Crash of 1929, causing the Great Depression of the 1930s, the devastation of the European economy, and the rise of fascism resulting in World War Two.

Justice Louis Brandeis said: “We can have great concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.”

Brandeis and Mailer point to democratic socialism as the only viable way to save America’s soul. Democratic socialism – roughly defined as egalitarian economics and a politics actually “for the people” – was embodied in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” FDR’s “New Deal” included a nation-wide system of Savings and Loans banks prohibited from the stock market gambling so insidiously inherent on Wall Street and resulting in periodic recessions ranging from modest to extreme.

The Savings and Loans were systematically destroyed during the Reagan presidency in what was called the S&L crisis, as part of the Republican Party’s counter-revolution against The Spirit of The Sixties and FDR’s legacy of economic justice.

 

Time to protest?


In 1965, the Vietnam Day Committee, an anti-war group in Berkeley, California, called for an International Day of Protest from October 15-16 to express revulsion against the Vietnam War.

Protest demonstrations around the country gradually evolved into a powerful anti-war movement that included servicemen rebelling against involvement in a war that they increasingly saw as immoral and unjust.

In 2011, we see an expanding series of protests against the powerful international banking and financial interests that are increasingly recognized as being at the roots of war, injustice, inequality, and the destruction of the planet. For a dramatic overview of the protests ignited by the economic crisis that has resulted in the largest profits ever accruing to the biggest financial institutions in one year, watch the video above.

In the US, there have been growing protests against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (see, for example), growing protests against Wall Street, and a coming together of the anti-war, anti-Wall Street/pro-peace, pro-democracy groups (see, for example).

These protests are not being conducted by violent fringe groups; they are students, teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, artists, musicians, community organizers, environmental groups, lay people, professionals—providing a broad representation of the 99% who are not benefiting from the wars and from the control of the government by banking and business institutions.

Their agenda is non-violent. Violence has come from the police and others in authority who are ready to quell protest, however legitimate the concerns of the protestors.  The way to keep violence out of protests is not to prevent protests but to bar the police from using violence.

The First Amendment to our Constitution prohibits, among other things,  interfering with the right of citizens to assemble peacefully and to petition the government for redress of grievances.  If Americans value their democracy, and respect their Constitution, it is important for them to support those rights, and to insure that members of the police/military establishment do not infringe on those rights.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

No causes to kill for

Gandhi in 1944
Gandhi in 1944 (Image in public domain)

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”     (Mahatma Gandhi, The story of my experiments with truth, 1927)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, often known as Mahatma (“Great Soul” in Sanskrit) was born October 2, 1869. In 2007, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution to create an International Day of Non-Violence on October 2 to commemorate his birthday.

In anticipation of his birthday, we provide a list of some of the relatively recent non-violent movements and their goals:

  • Martin Luther King’s campaign in the 1960s to achieve his dream: “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal'”
  • Anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s and 1980s—for example, at the Montague Nuclear Plant site where the actions of one man, Sam Lovejoy, led to cancellation of plans for a nuclear power plant
  • The Chinese pro-democracy movement of 1987-1989, most memorable for the protests in Tiananmen Square
  • The end of apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s
  • The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2010 and 2011
  • The current demonstrations against economic and political control of the United States by Wall Street

To start a non-violent campaign of your own, you may find the steps offered in this document helpful.

Non-violence can achieve results.

Some wonderful examples can be found in the book A force more powerful: A century of non-violent conflict by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology