The Chris Moeller Archives

The most important political phrase of this generation is "wine cave"

During the final weeks of the last millennium, the cable television channel A&E used their Biography series to count down their editors’ list of the most important people of the last thousand years. For #1, they settled on German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press and started the paper printing revolution. The logic behind the choice was that his invention (in or around the year 1440) led to the circulation of the millions of volumes of documents that then informed all other areas of the arts and sciences. It was the most vital “agent of change” during the age.

Something similar exists in American politics, an overarching issue that impacts all others and must be considered the most important. Though I’m personally partial to military policy and the opposition to empire-building as a number one voting issue, a larger umbrella one is the legalized bribery that has been impacting nearly every decision made by our government. The corruption is so pervasive that that it’s increasingly recognized as inherent to the structure and eternally beyond the grasp of reform.

It’s long been the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, ostensibly the party of working people in the U.S., that you have to dirty your hands in a corrupt game. Since 1981, Democrats have been committed to trying to raise money from the same Wall Street sources that fund their Republican opponents. Becoming Junior Reagans cost them the permanent majorities they had held in Congress since the New Deal, and the additional cost for America was creating the first generations in history to be worse off financially than their forebears. But on the plus side, a lot of Washington insiders have gotten really rich.

Two candidates running for president under the electoral apparatus of the Democratic Party are challenging this precept. Both now front-runners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have vowed not to accept money from billionaires. Unlike their opponents, they’re leaning entirely on small contributions to fund their respective campaigns and not accepting large donations to make up for any financial disadvantage. They both hold the crazy belief that political corruption might be an issue in a political race against Donald Trump.

One of their opponents, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Fort Wayne, Indiana, appears to have been built in a laboratory as an experimental model to test how gullible Democratic primary voters are. He’s a theoretical study into how truly wedded to empty rhetoric and unlikely-to-be-fulfilled promises a group of angry voters can conceivably be. Buttigieg promises an end to racial disparities in police hiring, but the Fort Wayne municipality features an extreme imbalance between the racial makeup of the city and its police force. He’s pledged diversity on his senior staff, but his Fort Wayne cabinet is almost completely white. With polls showing an almost infinitesimal number of African-American supporters for the Pete campaign, it combated that reality by mocking up a campaign advertisement featuring endorsements from African-American pols who have offered nothing of the kind. But hey, listen to what he says he’s going to do.

Pete has no political record upon which to run. He vaguely promises to deliver a Midwestern vote for the party even though he was trounced by 25 percentage points in his only statewide race in Indiana in 2012, and he seems to be intended as an option for voters on the middle-right who are afraid of health care as a human right, and to take the place of Joe Biden, whose increasingly-doddering behavior can no longer be easily hidden, and who faces-- even before a hypothetical series of televised debates against the Bully Trump-- an impeachment trial subpoena and televised testimony before the Senate this winter regarding the Biden family’s financial hustle in Ukraine.

Pete rides to the front of the pack with the approval of the traditional news media. Trained Washington observers argue that the Democratic primary debate has begun its traditional and natural “shift to the political middle,” but that shift, in reality, comes just from the rest of the pack positioning themselves from their previous flank to the left of Biden now to the right of the surging Warren and Sanders. To replace Biden as the darling of the “mainstream," Buttigieg does have the advantage of being whatever candidate you want him to be. As an inspired unknown politico a year or two ago, he supported Medicare-for-all. Now he attacks it, saying it would remove “choice.” I suspect he’ll have found his natural calling by the year 2022, if not before-- that of a generously-paid Washington lobbyist.

Pete’s historical legacy as a candidate instead will be in having been the featured guest at the great “wine cave” fundraising event of 2019. If you’re not familiar, he’s been targeted by Sanders and Warren this month for having entertained a private fundraiser-- no media allowed-- at the home of a pair of California billionaire winemakers, Kathryn and Craig Hall. Kathryn was once Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s ambassador to Austria. The event was held in the presence of the couple’s extravagant chandelier-- 1,500 Swarovski crystals(?)-- and in their vineyard’s “wine cave.” The photos of the set table were lovely. Someone leaked the photos-- again, a private affair. Bottles of the Cabernet Sauvignon that were served at the event sell for as much as $900.

Coupled with news of the event was a report on Huffington Post that one of Buttigieg’s staffers and long-time allies sent an email to a wealthy potential donor promising better access to the candidate if he were to pony up a size-able contribution before the campaign really takes off. Pay-for-play, some call that. According to Axios, the Buttigieg campaign calls donations “investments.” Like so many other well-financed campaigns, they argue that the money being given doesn’t qualify as pay-for-play, yet they explicitly refuse to take money from fossil fuel executives, registered lobbyists, or corporate political action committees. So…yeah… what exactly are we to deduce of donations from, say, insurance executives, or pharmaceutical reps?

It’s all enough to make normal people shake their heads in familiar disappointment, but DNC hacks and some wealthy celebrities, from inside their bubbles, rushed to defend Pete, his wealthy backers, and their entire way of life. This is how Obama raised money, they tell us. This is how Nancy Pelosi does it. We need every dollar at our disposal to help defeat Donald Trump. 

Really? Is that how it works? We need billionaires’ maxed-out contributions to less popular candidates to help defeat opponents whose financial sheets better reflect voter support than Wall Street support? And Trumpism is so terrible that every weapon should be deployed against it, up to and including selling off the government itself? Like a Vietnamese village being torched, evidently, the United States government must be destroyed in order to be saved.

Dollars aren’t needed to defeat Trump. Not those dollars, anyway. The most votes wins the election, not the most dollars. Trump didn’t need the most dollars to knock off Jeb Bush and John Kasich in 2016. Sanders didn’t need the most dollars to beat Hillary-- he only needed the DNC’s proverbial thumb to be removed from the scale.

The age of corporate money controlling politics has subsided to a small degree. At least there's a ray of hope in this area. It’s perhaps an unexpected consequence of the deeply unpopular Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, but more so, an outgrowth of the explosion of small campaign donations made possible through online voter connections, as well as some courageous campaign decisions made more recently by Sanders, Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a handful of others. One might argue-- and Bernie and Liz likely both would-- that corporate dollars not taken actually lead to more individual dollars being offered, and ultimately, to more votes. Why else do Sanders and Warren lead so lopsidedly in the number of small donations received? I believe that contributors to their campaigns know that the donations truly matter, even when none of us qualify for special privilege.

The school of thought from the other side of the equation seems to be that the only true form of political corruption is what breaks the law. Of course, that implies that the system as a whole hasn’t been formally rigged and won’t continue to be rigged. That would seem to be an unpopular theory, however, with the American people, whose support the campaigns are all vying for. A recent survey by the GS Strategy Group found that 54 percent of Americans categorize “corruption in our political system” as an extremely serious problem. That was much more than any other single issue, more than health care costs, climate change, immigration, you name it. It’s the Johannes Gutenberg issue. In the New York Times in 2015, 85% of Americans said the campaign finance system needs “fundamental changes” or to be “completely rebuilt.” Are the party insiders and the billionaire contributors just purposefully ignorant of this popular perception, or do they really not get it?

How do we think Kathryn Hall became ambassador to Austria in the first place? She and her husband have given over two million dollars to Democratic candidates since the 1980's. The winery hosts an annual event for Nancy Pelosi. Before Pelosi was house speaker, Jim Wright of Texas was, during the ‘80's, and Craig Hall gave generously to him. That helped Hall avoid prison when his savings and loan went under, but the special favors led to Wright having to resign as speaker. Buttigieg has no federal office to surrender, but he’s a new favorite of Kathryn and Craig. Who gets to choose who our next president will be? Them? Or you and me and the whole lot of us?

The traditional news media has no clue how to handle this style of corruption having been made an issue. It’s been their way of life too-- pay-for-play. Where do those dollars get spent, after all? On media buys. Sanders’ team created the URL domain ‘peteswinecave.com," and their hyperlink leads to Sanders' contribution page. Warren endured the return rhetorical punches from Buttigieg, such as they were, on the debate stage. Are the two senators hypocrites because they’ve hosted high-dollar fundraisers in the past? You can decide that for yourself. Is Barack Obama a hypocrite because he used to oppose gay marriage and then came around to support it? Sanders and Warren are denouncing the practice now, and Buttigieg is still defending it.

A President Sanders or a President Warren, in 2021, won’t be beholden to anybody but their respective army of small-dollar contributors. A President Buttigieg would have welcomed the biggest dollars he could get-- from anybody, and, once more, you’d better get to him now before his campaign really takes off. The Iowa Caucuses will arrive the first Monday in February and it might be hard to get Pete on the phone after that.

posted by CM @ 11:09 PM 0 comments

What do Vermont and Iowa have in common?

Vermont and Iowa are similar in at least three ways. We both have a prominent city called Burlington. We both host lower-development-level, minor league baseball teams. And at least until next month, we’re kind of sharing Bernie Sanders.

These three things coalesced yesterday when the Democratic presidential hopeful, campaigning heavily in Iowa, met with former minor league baseball players and local civic leaders in our Burlington, on the topic of trying to save 42 U.S. minor league baseball teams from the Major League Baseball chopping block. This number amounts to roughly a quarter of the total number of MLB-affiliated minor league clubs, collectively the MiLB. MLB’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, seemingly ran out of Major League-host cities to exploit for taxpayer-funded stadia, so now he’s attacking the smaller towns that have already taken on more of the burden of our protracted globalized economic collapse. Iowa has three teams (and cities) being threatened, each along the Mississippi River-- Burlington, Clinton, and Davenport (of the Quad Cities).

Bernie grew up an avid baseball fan in Brooklyn, New York, so he knows from an early age the devastation of a professional baseball team and community institution packing up and leaving, as the Dodgers did for California after the 1956 season. As the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, Bernie helped bring an MLB-affiliated minor league team to town. He said the team helped bring “a sense of community” to the city.

Manfred’s contentions on this matter are phony ones. He and his employers-- the 30 MLB club ownerships, are claiming that the ballparks in these specified smaller towns don’t measure up to what MLB “prospects” deserve. Supposedly, minor league club owners have gone cheap on clubhouse amenities, weight-training equipment and the like, and “riding the bus” in the minor leagues is no longer adequate treatment of a future big leaguer.

But here are the items Manfred is hiding from the debate in his attack upon the minor leagues:

1) MLB is in the middle of an Ivy League MBA-powered revolution in regards to the quantitative analysis of player development. The cartel of club owners has decided that they don’t need so many minor league affiliate clubs to house the ones that matter. Now that they’ve “solved” the durable problem of guessing which prospects will make it to the Show and which ones won’t, they don’t see the need to pay even the puniest of salaries to the extra players that fill out these rosters at the lower levels. The players that blossom late and against the “odds” are too few and far between to be worth the investment.

2) To this end, the Majors and the Minors are negotiating a new 10-year partnership this off-season, and MLB wants to push more of the cost of paying players onto the lower-level clubs. An ongoing class-action lawsuit by former minor league players alleges that owners are paying these players below minimum wage. When travel time is factored into their pay, according to the suit, the pay winds up below what’s allowable by law. Some players live on signing bonuses received sometimes a few years prior, and only if their perceived potential dictated a signing bonus to begin with. Others are living six or seven men to a house to save money and to keep their baseball dreams alive into their mid-20s. The minor league minimum salary is as low as $1,100 per month, especially in many of the lower-level leagues with cities on the cut list.

Where Bernie is trying to save Manfred and the owners from themselves is that Major League Baseball seems to be forgetting that their affiliates serve them in an additional capacity beyond their feeder players. The teams located in these towns help to grow the game for Major League ballpark attendance and to help booster the sport's notoriously-sagging national television ratings. In an era when a size-able number of children would rather sit and eat green beans than watch a baseball game, minor league teams are providing a vibrant, up-close, and inexpensive entry point into the sport. It’s shocking to consider that the owners of the MLB clubs aren’t already horrified by the headlines this negotiation is producing.

In our Midwest Burlington yesterday, at a round-table meeting, Bernie reminded the power class of MLB through the media that local governments across the U.S. already give teams “hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare.” Additionally, the United States Congress permits Major League Baseball to operate outside of antitrust laws, and no other major professional sports league in North America gets to do that. This inexplicable monopoly exemption, based on a premise already faulty in 1922 that Major League Baseball was not engaged in “interstate commerce,” has been shockingly long-lasting, but should never be considered a permanent condition. Congress could choose to revoke the exemption at any time, and then it would fall to the courts to determine whether or not a 21st century monopoly league that Forbes estimates to have cleared $10.3 billion in revenue in 2018 is still not interstate commerce.

The MLB plan amounts to a retraction of the sport of baseball. In addition to ditching 42 professionally-affiliated teams, the plan reduces the amateur player draft to 20 rounds of selections, and limits each organization to only 150 total players. Gone are the Rookie Leagues so the newly-drafted players would go to MLB team facilities instead, all of which are located in either Florida or Arizona-- where nobody watches baseball in the summer.

What’s particularly galling is the PR angle being taken by the league that says this is about the brick-and-mortar facilities and the treatment of the players. It's not. MLB wants fewer players and they want their responsibility to pay them to be trimmed. If the commissioner’s negotiation position is still flexible, as he says it is, it seems that’s where the additional tax burden for you and me will come into play. They’ll save a few clubs and cities, to be sure. Which communities will fork over the cash-- and which ones won’t? Those are your winners and your losers. In the meantime, the MLB position in negotiation is to drag all 42 of them through the mud-- claiming that their contributions to the partnership have been less than sufficient. Is attendance down in some of these markets? I imagine. Who’s to blame? Is it the lack of promotion at the local level, or is it Major League Baseball’s penchant for denigrating its own product and failing to grow national interest?

Last week, 106 congresspeople signed a letter to Manfred calling for MLB to reconsider its cuts. The text of the letter gently referenced the business' antitrust exemption. For Major League Baseball, this is the first fight before a larger one. They’re challenging minor league club owners now to save on their own costs (while league revenue has never been higher), and after 2021, the collective bargaining agreement with players-- Major League players-- expires as well. Hopefully we’ll still have a fully-loaded minor league system by then, one with 160 teams and featuring fair pay for work provided. While we're hoping, I'll order a President Sanders also.

posted by CM @ 7:13 PM 0 comments

Government as an obscenity

For Democrats, impeachment is a distraction that allows the party to fall in line behind Donald Trump and the Wall Street fat cats and military-industrial state that serve as the political base for both the president and his political “opposition.” While they were busy lining up impeachment articles before the news media in the middle of a primary season, Congressional Democrats voted in favor of Trump’s NAFTA Part 2 this week, and a key House panel approved a plan to repeal the provision of the Trump tax law that put a higher tax burden on wealthy homeowners-- the cap on the write-off from their federal tax bill. Yes, the more expensive your house, the bigger your tax break, going forward. Congratulations.

Even more offensively, Congress is voting this week for a $22 billion defense budget increase over fiscal year 2019. It’s an authorization in full of $738 billion to grow the empire at the point of violent attack-- and yes, last week President Trump cut food stamps. Gone from the military funding bill is a provision that would have prohibited U.S. military support for the Saudi war on Yemen, and one that would have banned the sale of air-to-ground munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudis have evidently weathered the political storm that formed 14 months ago when their royal sovereign ordered the cold-blooded murder of a Saudi-born United States citizen named Jamal Khashoggi.

This is what #resistance looks like in Washington D.C. It’s a town where Donald Trump called the Clinton Foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”-- after he donated to it. It’s a town where any and all progressive action can be killed without even getting past the “progressive” political party. Dozens of potentially-impeachable offenses have been committed by the president, but none of them have warranted impeachment hearings up until now except for the one connected to Trump digging up dirt on the Biden family financial hustle in Ukraine. Uncle Joe is the only Trump victim that matters.

In other war news this week, the president has signed an executive order defining Jewish people as a nationality (rather than a religious group) for the purposes of federal civil rights law, a move brazenly designed to chill free speech and punish political criticism of the apartheid state of Israel on college campuses. The new definition of anti-Semitism would include comparing “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” The measure is anti-Semitic by its very nature because it assumes that Jews in the U.S. are a separate nationality-- effectively ex-pat citizens of Israel rather than American.

And still in other war news, the Washington Post delivered to readers this week the “Afghanistan Papers,” a detailed account of how the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have been deliberately misleading the American public about the level of military and state-building progress in Afghanistan since 2002. Make no mistake about it-- this is nothing less than the Pentagon Papers Redux, exposure of a Vietnam-era-level of government deceit. The new “Papers” paint a picture of yet another long, expensive, and unnecessary war against brown people, another one that has no military solution, and most importantly, a government that has privately known for nearly twenty years that there is no military solution. What it is instead then is mass murder.

The Afghanistan War-- the Democrats’ war-- the Obama war-- has now cost nearly a trillion dollars, with the true cost being an additional trillion. What will be the result of this Washington Post exposition? I’ll refer you back to the $22 billion defense budget increase for fiscal year 2020.

posted by CM @ 9:03 PM 0 comments