Updated for a report that Hillary Clinton has clinched the Democratic nomination. This count includes ‘superdelegates.’[1] Updated again for a later but otherwise similar story which includes Bernie Sanders’ reaction,[2] referring to an apparently overrated effort to flip those superdelegates[3]
Darrin Bell, Candorville, June 6, 2016, GoComics, fair use.
Many of the attacks on Hillary Clinton are indeed misogynist. They mostly come from right-wingers. That said, Todd Gitlin believes it is not “certain,” but “very likely,” that Bernie Sanders’ supporters, fed up with the status quo, will vote for her.[4]
I hope not. Whether Trump or Clinton wins the presidency, an unbroken pattern of progressively worse presidents will continue. The path of accepting the “lesser of two evils” is what preserves a bipartisan system that serves the establishment by limiting the range of acceptable political discourse such that there is, in fact, little difference between the parties.[5] The reason that Trump now falls within that range, howls of protest notwithstanding,[6] is that the Democrats have moved ever farther to the right,[7] pushing the Republicans ever farther to the right, while utterly neglecting and deriding Progressives[8] who have no viable alternative and Republicans have exploited authoritarian populist anger and allowed it to fester while favoring a neoliberal agenda.[9]
On news that the Associated Press is claiming that Clinton has clinched the nomination, she reportedly said, “We have six elections tomorrow and we are going to fight hard for every single vote especially right here in California!”[10] I have previously seen but not archived grumbling that the networks would call the nomination for Clinton when the polls close in New Jersey, which was apparently a sure bet for her. This is claimed to discourage Californians from voting, where the polls close three hours later, and survey results reportedly showed a tight race,[11] although I would point out that many Californians will already have submitted absentee ballots. By the same logic now, voters in all six of those primaries will be effectively disenfranchised in the Democratic race, since their votes will not affect the nomination.
That merely adds insult to injury. The Democrats have done everything they can to ensure Clinton’s coronation.[12]
There are two serious problems here: First, staggered primary voting assigns undue importance to early voting states at the expense of late voting states. On the one hand, this staggering enables campaigns to cover territory more strategically and thoroughly. On the other, the country’s most populous state, California, effectively has no say.
Second, the two-party system has left us with two horrendous candidates, both of whom will commit mass war crimes, both of whom will advance the corporate agenda at the expense of ordinary people, and neither of whom will seriously address the existential threat of climate change. It ought not be too much to ask for a candidate who will be responsible on these issues.
I wouldn’t place much stock in Bernie Sanders’ effort to flip superdelegates anyway, but apparently this effort isn’t even as much as he cracks it up to be.[13]
There’s not a lot that’s been hitting my radar lately. On Saturday, I even had time to update my unemployment spreadsheet. Even today, it seems kind of thin.
There may be a real temptation to simply dismiss this coverage as journalists making something out of nothing because the Libertarian Party’s chances are so limited. The trouble with that is that were news operations to decide to decline to cover this as a “non-event” of little significance, they would reinforce the two-party system. They do this anyway with horse race coverage that gives prominence to survey results and thus to major party contenders at the expense of a debate on issues and by diminishing the prospects for Libertarians (let alone the Green Party) to even get on the ballot or reach a fifteen percent approval threshold for candidates to appear in the debates. And we certainly saw its operation in favoring a “mainstream” candidate in mainstream coverage of the contest between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.[1]
So it’s interesting to see this coverage now as the mainstream candidates’ approval ratings are dismal.[2]
Invoking the fifth amendment—which refers to a basic human right—has always been viewed with suspicion anyway because it’s hard to think of situations where innocent people might choose to invoke it, but “because of quirks of the legal system, [Bryan Pagliano’s] decision to stay quiet could be seen as an implicit confirmation that he or the State Department had done something wrong.”[3]
Here’s why I think Friday’s report was noise: By relying on non-seasonally adjusted numbers, I get a lot of noise. And I get a better picture of the overall trends. The report doesn’t really change those trends; what it does suggest is that we have reached a turning point within the normal up-and-down variation (figures 1-4). The one thing that’s weird in all of this is that the employment-to-population ratio has been rising even as the labor market participation rate has been declining (figures 3-4). I think this suggests that people who are really having trouble finding jobs are really having trouble finding jobs—so much so that they’re dropping out of the labor force—while, for everyone else, the labor market is at least keeping them employed. One thing to notice, however, is that the ratio of jobs needed to openings available remains high (figure 5); this is definitely not an economy that’s producing jobs for everyone who wants them.
Fig. 1. Non-seasonally adjusted unemployment since 1948Fig. 2. Non-seasonally adjusted unemployment since 1994.Fig. 3. Employment to Population ratio.Fig. 4. Labor Market Participation RateFig. 5. Ratio of jobs needed to openings.
I hit the publish button on this post by mistake at a little after 3 am. I left the post up because I didn’t want to go to the hassle of fixing it and I think Yves Smith’s article[1] really is important. But pretty much everything other than that article and the Candorville cartoon has been added since.
[Hillary] Clinton inherits the mantle of a [limousine] liberalism that has hollowed out the American economy and metastasized the national security state. It has confined the remnants of any genuine egalitarianism to the attic of the Democratic Party so as to protect the vested interests of the oligarchy that runs things.[2]
Something to notice about the opposition to Hillary Clinton is that it isn’t just a preference for Bernie Sanders. People really don’t like her policies or her record.[3] This doesn’t just show up among young voters at University of California, Davis, but among relatively well-off progressives whom Yves Smith counts among her readers at Naked Capitalism.
Darrin Bell, Candorville, June 2, 2016, GoComics, fair use.
I basically agree with Smith’s article here in Politico but would add, with quite some emphasis, that if I must have a president, that s/he must not be a war criminal. It’s neoconservatism that’s been adopted as a mainstream ideology and that has embraced neoliberalism as a moral imperative that’s at issue here. It’s all criminal and the criminality is compounded as elites further enrich themselves through their criminality. In general, I support restorative justice in emphasizing root causes rather than punitive measures.[4] But all of these mother fuckers need to go up against the wall.
I don’t know how it is within commercial polling operations or think tanks. My only exposure to either is from the outside. Within academia, I believe we would probably across the board take the doubts being expressed about survey results this year[5] very seriously. But I would emphasize another point:
[Donald] Trump channels the hostility generated by that neoliberal indifference to the well-being of working people and its scarcely concealed cultural contempt for heartland America into a racially inflected anti-establishmentarianism. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders targets Clintonian liberalism from the other shore.[6]
We already know there is an antipathy toward the elite this year that simply hasn’t gained traction in most other years. As Steve Fraser writes, “[t]o a degree then, Trump and Sanders are competing for the same constituencies, which should surprise no one given how far the collateral damage of neoliberal capitalism has spread.”[7] Which is also to say that in nominating Clinton, the Democratic Party is, to an unknown degree, conceding folks who feel a rage toward the status quo—not just Yves Smith’s well-off progressives[8]—to the Republicans. This is a dynamic that almost certainly undermines the assumptions that pollsters can usually rely upon. I think pollsters almost certainly know to question those assumptions this year. But to question those assumptions is not to have an adequate answer.
I parse Jane Goodall’s message differently from how Kate Good portrays it. Good writes, “What Jane does in this email is connect with [Thane] Maynard on a human level, empathizing with the gravity of the choice he made and highlighting how this sad event must have also affected the gorillas that knew Harambe.”[9] Good, I should emphasize, is writing for One Green Planet, which insists on being (sometimes sickeningly) upbeat. And to her credit, she (along with others[10]) nonetheless criticizes the keeping of gorillas in zoos.[11] And to be fair, here is a brief Associated Press story on the message that substantially supports Good’s reading:
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Jane Goodall Institute has released an email sent by the primatologist and conservationist to the director of the Cincinnati Zoo expressing empathy with him over the weekend shooting of a gorilla in an effort to protect a small child who entered the primate’s habitat.
In the message to zoo director Thane Maynard dated Sunday, May 29, the day after the shooting, Goodall writes that she feels sorry for Maynard having to defend a shooting that he “may disapprove of.” Goodall says it looked like the gorilla was putting an arm around the child and calls it “a devastating loss.”
Goodall also asks about the reaction of the other gorillas and whether they were allowed to express grief.
Goodall is known for her decades of studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania.[12]
What I notice is that Goodall, having viewed the video and who is certainly one of the foremost experts on gorillas in the world, thought “it looked as though the gorilla was putting an arm around the child — like the female who rescued and returned the child from the Chicago exhibit” and that the zoo director was “having to try to defend something [he] may well disapprove of.”[13]
Admittedly, the decision to kill Harambe was a decision that had to be made very quickly, but I was concerned a gun may have been too close at hand and that alternatives were maybe not close enough. It looks to me like Goodall, while bending over backwards to be diplomatic, may agree.
Jane Goodall’s message to the Cincinnati Zoo, via One Good Planet, June 2, 2016, fair use.
[4]Wanda D. McCaslin and Denise C. Breton, “Justice as Healing: Going Outside the Colonizers’ Cage,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, eds. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 511-529.↩
The first thing that has to be said is that neither Bill Kristol nor David French have confirmed that French will be running. That said, a split in the #NeverTrump movement like over Kristol’s alleged pick seems particularly unpropitious.[1] At this point, I think their best hope—not that they can stand to do it—would be to throw in their lot with the Libertarian Party.
