@John I’m not telling you anything strange. Midterms are based on turnout. Parties win when their coalition is fired up, lose when portions of their coalition are demoralized. I’m not saying there was some hidden preference for full social democracy. I’m saying a lot of people who had voted for Obama felt let down and didn’t rouse themselves for the midterms. 1/
@John Structurally it’s very normal for first-term midterms to be bad, because fresh candidates fire up voters with promise when running for election then voters are disappointed because reality is hard. It’s not some preference of left vs right. It’s both parties. Obama endured this phenomenon turbo-charged, both because he ran so inspirationally, and governed so disappointingly. /fin
@John Pretty simple is badly wrong. Left vs right is not a sufficient analysis of politics. Obama was shellacked in the 2010 midterms because he had already betrayed the public on housing and finance. Parts of the his coalition who turned out for his inspiring change Presidency were demoralized, and didn’t turn out. Midterms are about turnout. The public didn’t rebuke Obama’s “leftism” (nonexistent beyond R propaganda). They rebuked Obama for his actions and stayed home.
@John I don’t think Obama did what the public wanted managing the financial crisis. He didn’t think so either. In his own words, he stood athwart the pitchforks. If by democracy you include plutocracy, the monied interests putting pressure on him, explaining to him in pseudotechnical terms what he had to do or else, sure, but i see little exoneration in that. He had the power to make different choices. He seriously considered making different choices. He did what he did.
@John Congress had nothing at all to do with it. This wasn’t ACA.
The choices Obama made surrounding the financial crisis were purely executive. It was purely an executive decision not to take banks into receivership. He had the power. (There was a hooha over maybe not “bank holding companies”, but they had no negotiating power to resist if he played hardball with bank subsidiaries.) 1/
@John Congress, in TARP, had insisted on programs intended to help struggling homeowners. That law was passed, and funded. The Obama administration never spent the money! Instead, they used those programs to, in Geithner’s words, “foam the runway” for the banks. What that meant in practice is they encouraged borrowers to apply, which slowed banks’ recognition of bad loans. 2/
@John But the banks preferred that the principal relief those programs were intended to provide never was provided. They did not want to render malleable mortgage principal, on the theory of “moral hazard”, that would invite borrowers who could pay to seek relief. Ironically, they harmed homeowners by advising them to do just that, to fall into delinquency, jacking up penalties and late fees, to apply for the programs. 3/
@John But Geithner went along with the banks, and the programs basically denied all the relief, just slowed the process. Congress allocated the money, Obama didn’t spend it because “financial stability”, the banks thought it would harm them. Instead homeowners were made often worse off through the Obama Administration’s management of programs designed to help them. Obama *defied* Congress to be bad on this stuff. /fin
@John I think we’re just going to have to disagree about this one. I endured the Obama presidency, particularly his first term, as a painstaking catastrophe, betrayal in drips on the issues I followed most and most cared about.
I think he destroyed the moral fabric of the country. He ran so beautifully, so eloquently, as a change agent, the defended and reinforced and imposed brutal economic arrangements when they were collapsing under their own contradictions. 1/
@John By doing so, in my view, he discredited idealism, the possibility of positive change rather than zero-sum victory of my people over yours. I think that is what gave us Trump, quite directly. If there are going to be winners and losers in a stratified society, what team do I have to join so my kids will be among the winners? Trump’s racism was one answer to that question. 2/
@John Anyway, you’ll probably find it unfair and tiresome, but you can read me longform on this. My whole archive is full of the agony in real time, but a recent take is here. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/11/30/obama-was-the-most-destructive-political-figure-of-my-lifetime/index.html /fin
I think Kamala is going for Obama -> Trump voters who felt betrayed by Obama’s economic “centrism”.
There are technocratic questions to answer surrounding some of the ideas she is mooting. But those technocratic questions can be answered. There are in fact ways of discouraging sharp price increases without imposing ceilings that drive goods to shortage, for example.
All of that is tomorrow’s work. Today she is saying whose side she’s on. I think it could deliver a landslide. I’m delighted.
i really like my fediverse community. i really miss a lot of people, and miss out on discussions i’d like to be part of, that have migrated to BlueSky.
i’d love it if there were some good way to bridge between here and there. i have no idea how tall on order that would be.
“In 2005, when D.R. Horton sold a record number of homes, it made $1.47 billion. In 2023, when it built roughly half as many, its profit was a little over three times as high, or $4.7 billion. And this dynamic isn’t because it focused on the high end, its overall market share was twice as high in 2023!” @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder
“The [crypto] industry mobilized this year, forming a network of independent expenditures under the umbrella of Fairshake to weaponize a broken campaign finance system to their advantage. Fairshake has become the single largest outside spender in this year’s elections thus far, with $120 million in cash on hand, even greater than the notoriously well-armed American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).” #LukeGoldstein @ddayen https://prospect.org/power/2024-08-15-democrats-complete-big-crypto-reset/
“so many children dream of moving to Hollywood, becoming an executive, and destroying all copies of a movie they didn’t work on. truth be told, I remember sitting on the floor of my living room, watching the Oscars, imagining deleting the nominees for the tax breaks.” https://www.thewrap.com/coyote-vs-acme-warner-bros-discovery-filmmakers-respond/
Is Grok’s new image-generating AI willing to produce scenes including Xi Jinping?
I recall Midjourney chose to prevent this, while leaving most Western political figures fair game. I wonder whether Elon, with his strong economic dependencies on China, wouldn’t make the same choice.
(i’d test it out but hell no i don’t pay musk for any premium features.)
Nausea.
Screenshot of tweet by Steven Walker @swalker_7: DEVELOPING: New College of Florida dumped hundreds of library books this afternoon. The school also emptied the college's Gender and Diversity Center, tossing hundreds of their books. Working to file a story now.
The right to seek justice in public courts should never have been treated as alienable. It’s long past time to undo the mistake. ht @mav https://www.npr.org/2024/08/14/nx-s1-5074830/disney-wrongful-death-lawsuit-disney
( i’ve written about the idea here https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9416.html )
( thanks @brendan for pointing out the duplicate link in the version of this that i first posted! edited. )
“Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decided that Google’s Android app store is an illegal monopoly in Epic v. Google, [Federal District Judge James] Donato held his final hearing on remedies today… ‘We’re going to tear the barriers down, it’s just the way it’s going to happen,’ said Donato. ‘The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing.’” @seanhollister https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220491/epic-google-android-app-store-monopoly-remedies-hearing ht @manton
who really owns Congress?
a package of napkins, branded in giant letters “Big Napkin”
Great reading on the Robinson-Patman Act, a law passed by Congress that Presidential administrations since Reagan and US courts just… stopped enforcing:
From @pluralistic “The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street” ¹
From @maxmmiller #BryceTuttle “Stopping Excessive Market Power Before It Grows Into Monopoly” ²
(trying again with your cool footnotes @marick!)
¹ https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities
² https://prospect.org/economy/2024-08-13-stopping-excessive-market-power-monopoly/
@Jonathanglick Suggests some avenues for reform! Perhaps they can be for-profit divisions or oligopolistic, but not both. Perhaps big in media must, as in pretty much every other sphere, imply some degree of public control.
(“Regulation” is, after all, a usurpation of control rights despite notional private ownership, creating hybrid ownership from a control perspective.)
@Jonathanglick The press has gotten (I know, sounding like a Trumpist again) very bad. They've twisted their role of holding accountable political figures to mean ginning up any kind of scandal. Embarrassing the politician or candidate stands in for "asking the tough question", regardless how unimportant from a public-interest perspective the source of embarrassment might be.)
@Jonathanglick (I haven’t thought it out enough to be sure that I agree. I’m certainly not sure I disagree! Even when conditions aren’t propitious, I think it useful to keep track of what we want. Conditions change, and we might have some influence when we change them.)