1. This tweet storm is going to be about why people have such a hard time understanding Trump. It's because they don't understand Obama.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
2. Trump is in many ways a pre-1930s Republican, uniting farmers, workers, and big biz behind tariffs and anti-immigration walls.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
3. Or at least that's his rhetoric. What he may do is impossible to know. He seems a lot like the anti-Treaty of Versailles irreconcilables.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
4. What people don't get is that the Dem Party he's facing is NOT the party of the New Deal. It is NOT the party of the people anymore.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
5. The party of the people was assaulted in the 1970s and killed over the next 20 years by the neoliberals. It died with Clinton's election.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
6. I documented the underlying ideological change here, from an anti-monopoly party to a pro-monopoly party: https://t.co/IJUV5jwCDC
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
7. You can see this everywhere if you look. The leaders of the party are from NY and SF, the centers of concentrated monopoly capital.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
8. The revolt in 2010, 2014, and 2016 was largely rural. These were the final revolts that started in the early 1980s.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
9. Carter and Volcker wiped out farms en masse. Farmers in 1979 tried to shut down DC with tractors over high interest rate policies.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
10. Reagan, Bush amplified the financial concentration trend, and Clinton took it global. Obama in 2008 largely ran against this.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
11. Obama's campaign in 2008 was organized AGAINST monopoly. He said he'd renegotiate NAFTA. He beat Clinton in Iowa going after big ag.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
12. But he governed consistent with the ideology of the neoliberals. He broke his promises to stop this concentration.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
13. The foreclosure fraud epidemic caused mass suffering. The failure to jail any bankers were unjust. But they were part of a vision.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
14. This vision was that of technocracy, or a set of credentialed people who are smarter and better than you making key decisions.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
15. Deplorables, or fake news, or voters as ignorant are ideological statements – part of this vision of people as incapable of self-gov't.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
16. But this vision is NOT consistent with populism. It conflicts w/corruption as conflicts of interest, revolving door, privatization.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
17. Geithner, for instance, cheated on his taxes. Banks close to him saw a stock price boost when he was appointed. https://t.co/iML9ysIF5j
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
18. He ran a foreclosure program designed to steal money from people and hand it to banks under the guise of helping avoid foreclosures.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
19. People who think that Trump was appealing to the working class solely based on their ignorance are ignorant of this track record.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
@matthewstoller That's unpossible. Larry Summers tells me corporations operated within the law up until the Carrier deal.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) December 3, 2016
20. This is right. Larry Summers is an autocrat. This is autocratic thinking. https://t.co/1Ui1EGGrFk
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
21. Until people are willing to internalize the policy framework of Clinton and Obama, they cannot rebut the arguments from Trump.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
22. Because fundamentally, Trump's pitch is that the rule of law is a joke and that having a strongman on your side is all that matters.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
23. This is now the attitude of the financial and business elite. That law is for little people. They can just hire smart lawyers.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
24. It is ALSO how the Clinton and Obama frameworks were organized. There is a difference though b/n them and Trump.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
25. The way that neoliberals deliver social justice is through the dole, or what we call Obamacare, transfer payments, job training.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
26. This is a variant of humiliating people with charity. It is explicitly not what the party of the people was about.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
27. Paul Krugman's "Let them eat transfer payments" is the slight of hand he always plays with events like Carrier.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
28. They are voting against their self-interest. But their self-interest isn't the dole! They want jobs! They want self-government.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
29. Trump is pitching not self-government, but a wall to protect them against neoliberals and a strongman to mock their enemies.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
30. It's not really what they want. Trump was not popular. But it's their version of the neoliberal deal of symbolic racial diversity.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
31. The ignorance is a choice, a choice that your facts don't matter. Just like you've decided that foreclosures/offshoring doesn't matter.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
32. The thing is, neoliberalism and Trumpism are BOTH incompatible with self-government, except among a select few. Few want either.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
33. Until we can recognize that it is concentrated financial power – monopoly – extending power over all of us, we will dance to their tune.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) December 3, 2016
Photo by The Library of Congress
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14 Responses to The Autocratic Failure
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Obamacare is for making private insurance available and affordable. Job training is for making better-paying jobs available. Hoe is either of those the dole?
Bribing a company with tax money to create jobs? That’s the dole.
Obamacare:
1) Medicaid expansion — obviously qualifies as “the dole”
2) subsidies — ditto
3) mandate + rate limits: instead of taking money from taxpayers, transfers money from the healthier to the sicker.
It’s not like Obamacare made health care any cheaper overall — at most it (debatably) reduced the rate of growth. Increased affordability came from wealth transfers.
transfers money from the healthier to the sicker.
This mechanism is often referred to as “insurance”.
If someone is on dialysis and is guaranteed to have 60K of health care expenses in the year but can buy a policy for 20K, that’s not insurance.
“If someone is on dialysis and is guaranteed to have 60K of health care expenses in the year but can buy a policy for 20K, that’s not insurance.”
Actually, it is and it always has been — or at least it always has been as long as there has been such a thing as health insurance.
Since the beginning, premiums have only been allowed to fluctuate so far beyond a means of total projected expenditures. Pretty much everyone who is undergoing treatment for expensive and/or chronic conditions (cancer, MS, HIV, etc) will pay into the system far less than they will take out in services, and everyone (including the insurer) knows that going in to each policy year. That’s not a new function of Obamacare, that’s the way the system works, because there’s no other way *for* it to work. If you had your insurance canceled 0r got $60,000 annual premiums any time you had more than a grand or two a year in premiums, you wouldn’t buy insurance. You’d just pay out of pocket and cross your fingers you wouldn’t have something go terribly wrong.
It’s why some kind of mechanism that mandates coverage and premiums from younger, healthier people is required in a healthcare system that’s built almost entirely on insurance premiums — not only in order to be able to accept pre-existing conditions, but in order to curb the exponential premium growth of adverse selection.
There’s a difference between a policyholder who ends up using more than he pays in (that’s normal risk) and a policyholder who from the beginning is using more than he will pay in. No one’s going to write me a home policy as my house is burning down or a life policy when I have a terminal diagnosis — if I wasn’t already a customer, any money given to me at that point is aid. Imposing guaranteed issue, community rating, and coverage mandates qualifies as a health care provision system but looks much less like health *insurance*.
I’m not even arguing against Obamacare, just responding to the idea (here brought up by Mike S) that simply because insurance companies pool risk and flatten the risk curve somewhat for business reasons, that means that any kind of cost-sharing arrangement is just part of the insurance biz. That’s not a serious argument.
When treating cancer is as easy as battling a house fire, let’s return to this analogy.
That’s not the dole, either.
Irrespective of whether PPACA was a policy success or not, it wasn’t a political one. I disagree with Stoller on whether it’s a “dole” problem, though. I think it’s mostly a clarity problem that resulted from a political miscalculation. They thought that they could simply push it through without regard to public opinion, and people would love it because it would work. The technocratic problem Stoller refers to.
What it needed was to be more flat-out doleish. Simple, straightforward. Single-payer, or that public option as a backdoor way to it. They’d probably have paid a price for that as well, but I’m not sure how they could have paid more of one than they did. If they had it all to do over again, maybe they would have. But simple, straightforward, and impossible to undo.
Of course, the main reason they didn’t was because they couldn’t round up all of their party’s votes (perhaps in part due to the corporate friendships Stoller alludes to). And they didn’t know then what they know now (if I’m right), but going forward I think an increased emphasis on simplicity and policy transparency, rather than simply assuming it’ll work and people will come around.
Say they had gone single-payer.
I’m curious how long it would have had to survive for it to become impossible to undo for a unified Republican government.
I have a feeling they’d have found ways to get it done long after we’d have thought it was impossible.
Under Bush the R’s made a run at Social Security. Ryan is apparently going to push hard to gut medicare. So no amount of time is enough. There is nothing short of not doing any HCR that would have prevented the R’s from trying to kill it.
Under Bush they failed before they even really got started, and Part D was added to Medicare. We’ll see what Ryan does, but I like Medicare’s odds better than PPACA’s.
True. But the point is there is really never enough time to prevent R’s from going after a certain program. Nothing is well established enough.
I think going after Medicare will be a disaster for the R’s but what do i know. Heck they are likely to try to keep the popular parts of the ACA somehow.
I was kind of rooting for hm to be largely right, because I’m coming from the same general place as he is on this election…
…But, man, there is a lot of wrong in there. That’s always kind of how it is with Matt Stoller. A viewpoint I have sympathy with, expressed in a torrent of underconsidered rant-parts.