Quick Post About Idiocracy

I don't have time to write a couple thousand words on this right now, so I'm just going to do 3 bullet points: 

• In the movie Idiocracy, the "villains" are not people who are stupid because of genetics or class or poverty. They are people who revel in their own ignorance and reject intellectualism. It's unfortunate that Judge chose the rural poor to represent these people, but to be fair, this movie was made before Palin and Trump right around the height of Larry the Cable Guy's popularity, so the proudly ignorant redneck was the most visible archetype at the time. 
• Things in the world of the movie don't improve because Luke Wilson's character institutes a eugenics program, they improve because people reject ignorance and acknowledge the value of intelligence and learning. 
• The manufactured clickbait contrarianism of your think piece is based on a premise that's weak even by the standards of clickbaity contrarian think pieces.

Let's Talk About Superdelegates And Stop With The Clickbait

Today my feed is full of stories about the DNC "awarding superdelegates" to Hillary Clinton. All the headlines suggest that something shady's going on, and all the links go to clickbait websites masquerading as lefty news outlets (USUncut, AddictingInfo, and similar sites). I'm the first to admit that by all appearances the DNC is manipulating the primary race in Hillary Clinton's favor. However, "awarding superdelegates" is not one of those things, because saying the DNC is "awarding" superdelegates to Clinton is a lot like saying that CNN is "awarding" Florida to a nominee on the night of the general election. It merely means that based on the information available, the DNC believes that these superdelegates will go to Clinton. Just as CNN has no power to decide who gets Florida's electoral votes, the DNC has no power (well, no official power, but we'll get to that) to decide who the superdelegates vote for.

As you probably know, delegates in a primary election are a lot like electoral votes in the general election. The main difference is that in all but two states (Nebraska and Maine), a state's electoral votes are all-or-nothing. You either get all of Ohio's electoral votes or none of them. That's not the case with delegates, a fact conveniently ignored by many of those same sites last week so they could run stories about Clinton "winning" Iowa despite a very small margin. "Winning" a state in the primary doesn't actually mean much because the pledged delegates get split. Hillary "won" Iowa, but it only means she got 2 more delegates than  Sanders, which is some infinitesimally small percentage of the 4,763 delegates up for grabs. 

The other difference between primaries and general elections is the inclusion of superdelegates, of which there are a little over 800 this year [Correction: apparently it's 712. I thought 807 for some reason, but didn't confirm (which is why I gave a ballpark figure)], including both Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders himself (so we know Bernie's getting at least one superdelegate). Unlike the pledged delegates, the superdelegates aren't obligated to vote for a specific candidate. They can vote for whichever candidate they want to support. The DNC can't tell them who to vote for, and therefore can only "award" them to Clinton in the sense of announcing how many of them have expressed support for Clinton. 

That being said, about half of the superdelegates are elected members of the DNC, most of the rest are democratic governors and members of Congress, and a handful are "distinguished party leaders" that are hand-picked by the DNC (and presumably includes former Presidents like Bill Clinton). In other words, the superdelegates are mostly party loyalists who will probably vote for the candidate that the DNC wants as nominee. While the inclusion of superdelegates certainly can subvert the will of the voters, that's kind of the point. The idea is that superdelegats are there to provide a check against the possibility that a popular but "unelectable" candidate will win the nomination. Just like with electoral votes, the subversion of the popular will is a feature, not a bug (at least according to the "distinguished leaders" who put the system in place).

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No, It' Not

So apparently this is going on in response to something that happened at a football game:

If Beyonce (or the Black Lives Matter movement) were saying that the problem with the police is that they're incompetent dullards who are so racist that they instantly shoot every minority they encounter, this may be a valid criticism. Of course, Beyonce hasn't said that. She's expressed concern that the police have a tendency to deal more harshly with minorities, which frequently leads them to murder unarmed people. When this happens, they almost always get away with it and usually keep their jobs. Beyonce knows that she can rely on the police to escort her to the game without shooting her because they all know she's Beyonce. Her criticism have to do with the fact that if her husband takes a walk in the wrong neighborhood at night without some obvious way of signalling he's fucking Jay-Z, he's more likely to be stopped by the police than a white guy. If he says or does anything to spook the apparently very-easily frightened (if their accounts of these situations are believed) cops involved, he's more likely to get shot than a white guy, and the officer who did the shooting is less likely to be prosecuted than if he'd shot a white guy (though not by much; the police get away with murdering white people a lot too, but a cop who shot a white guy as famous as Jay-Z is would at least lose his job). But yeah, that's basically exactly the same as claiming the police just go around randomly shooting black people for fun.

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Not The Messiah

Someone one Facebook asked Bernie supporters to explain how all this "free' socialist stuff is going to work if Sanders gets elected. I posted this wall of text in response (I said I was sorry). I figured I'd post it here for anyone who's interested (and for Bernie supporters who need to be reminded that President Superman isn't a thing that will ever happen). And yeah, I realized after typing it that "people who are really into curling when the Winter Olympics are happening" would be a better analogy than Superbowl Sunday-only football fans, but I don't have time to change it at the moment. 

In all likelihood, Sanders isn't going to get most of what he wants accomplished. Contrary to the rhetoric that happens every four years, The President isn't very powerful for reasons Justin's already mentioned. With Democrats, the cycle is especially vicious because they're sort of like the people who are huge fooball fans on Superbowl Sunday and never watch a game the rest of the year. There's probably also some discouragement over the fact that all the things that the Messiah of the moment promised during the campaign aren't happening. In any case, Democrats don't show up for the mid-terms, the Republicans take (or keep) control of Congress, and the corporate media tells us that the mid-term elections are the American public showing that they don't want Democratic policies. Achievement unlocked: Stats Quo Maintained. 

To answer the original question, most of Bernie's programs are funded by raising taxes on those who make over $250K, closing off-shoring and hedge fund loopholes, and taxing Wall Street trading (which might also reign in the kind of casino gambling that caused the 2008 crash). His medical plan also pays for itself by forcing drug companies to negotiate with the federal government and implementing single-payer, which cuts out the overhead private insurers spend on advertising and CEO pay. Taxes will go up, but you won't have to pay insurance premiums if you want health care, so most households will pay less overall. 

But none of that's going to happen during Bernie's term, so why vote for him? There are a couple of reasons. For one, change can happen if there's enough popular support. Many of the things Bernie proposes are popular. The problem is that there's a sort of gentleman's agreement between politicians to pretend there's not popular support. If there's a vocal movement and the President makes it clear that the Congress is the bottleneck, it can scare Congress into acting to keep their seats (or get voted out if they don't because there's enough of an uproar to convince people there's a Superbowl happening during the mid-terms). Sanders will use the bully pulpit so hard Teddy Roosevelt will come back from the dead to high five him. 

Also, Sanders has said this isn't just about electing a president, it's about creating a movement. Most of the grassroots activity from a presidential campaign stops the day after the election. Sanders is trying to build machinery that will keep going after he's elected. I'm not really well-versed in the details, but apparently he's done it with his campaign machinery for lower offices, so hopefully he can repeat it here. Basically, he's playing the long game. He knows he might not get campaign reform or universal health care during his presidency, but he's trying to lay the groundwork for it to happen eventually. 

And yes, Obama did make the same kind of promises only to continue Bush administration policies once he got elected, all politicians make big promises, etc. etc. The main difference is that with Obama, we were betting on a guy without much of a track record. Sanders has been pushing for the same things in different offices for decades, so I don't think he'll suddenly change his mind if he gets elected.

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An Important Difference Between Hillary and Bernie's College Plans

I’m not sure if it came up in the most recent debate, but at least two of the others have included an exchange between Clinton and Sanders about free college tuition. For anyone who doesn’t know, Sanders favors making public college tuition free to all Americans. When this has come up during the debates, Clinton has countered by saying that free tuition should only be available to those whose family can’t afford to pay, then pointing out that under Bernie’s plan, Donald Trump’s children would be entitled to free tuition (the horror!).

On the surface, the idea that little Donnie Trump, Jr. can go to college on the taxpayer’s dime seems unfair. After all, thanks to his business savvy, hard work, dedication, father’s money, and opportunistic use of U.S. bankruptcy law, Trump has managed to make enough money to bankroll his own presidential campaign. Why the hell should my taxes pay for his kids to go to college? Rabble! Rabble! Rabble!

If you can manage to keep your gut in check for a minute and think with your brain instead, you’ll realize that the “your tax dollars are paying for Kid Trump’s college tuition” scare story is truthiness, or something very close to it. For one thing, how many of you actually believe that a Trump (or DuPont/Bush/Kennedy/whatever) is going to go to one of the public schools covered under Bernie’s plan? I’m guessing it’s about as likely as Martin O’Malley winning the Democratic primary. These people go to private schools so they can network with other Mayflower-Bottomtooth families, not some public university with cafeterias that don’t even have a sommelier.

And even if Don Jr. does want to go to Middle Dakota State, so what? The proposal to provide free college education to all Americans is, at least in Bernie’s ideology, based on the idea that all Americans have the right to a college education. From that point of view, suggesting that the children of the wealthy shouldn’t have access to a free public university education because they can afford it on their own is like trying to ban them from checking out a book at the public library because they’ve got the money to buy a copy on Amazon.

What Hillary’s doing comes incredibly close to actually being the kind of class warfare that Republicans like to accuse Democrats of, but like most class warfare in American politics, it’s the poor--not the wealthy--who are really under attack. By attacking Sander’s plan by imagining the unlikely event of Donald Trump’s kids getting a taxpayer funded education, Clinton distracts people from the fact that a need-based college tuition plan encourages animosity between the middle class and the poor. When everyone (or almost everyone) has equal access (at least in theory) to a government program or service, there’s no shame in taking advantage of it. That’s why you rarely hear anyone outside of the libertarian fringe seriously suggesting that we should do away with the Post Office or child tax credits or the public school system; they’re things we’re all entitled to as American citizens.

When you make something need-based and only offer the service to those below a certain income level, on the other hand, you create (in tea party rhetoric) “makers” (even though those who wear the title most proudly have never even made their own morning coffee) and “takers.” It turns the people who are eligible for the service into freeloaders in the minds of those who aren’t. Instead of everyone’s taxes paying for everyone’s kids to go to college, suddenly the middle manager’s taxes are paying for the janitor’s kid to go to college. (Not really, of course--under Bernie’s plan, it’s Wall Street speculators who would be taxed to pay for college, but finding that would require taking the time to understand how the system works; it’s much easier to just bitch about poor people “stealing” taxes that you don’t actually pay). Rabble! Rabble! Rabble! Gadsden Flag!

I’m guessing that most of you can work out for yourselves how corporate-friendly neo-liberal moderate candidates benefit from providing the middle class with reasons to direct blind rage downward. There are more straightforward and obvious profit motives at work in regards to other programs that establishment Democrats want to keep need-based rather than universal (most notably government subsidized health care), but in general anything that keeps the 99% fighting among themselves is good for business. Hillary isn’t concerned that Bernie’s plan will allow Donald Trump’s kid go to college on the taxpayer dime, she’s worried that letting Joe the Plumber’s kid go to school on the taxpayer dime will give him one less reason to resent George the Pizza Guy, which might give them both time to realize that Trump’s companies are getting a much bigger government handout than what it would take to send Little Donnie to college.

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