A New Era for the Center-Left

Part 10

Part One is here.

Part Two is here.

Part Three is here.

Part Four is here.

Part Five is here.

Part Six is here.

Part Seven is here.

Part Eight is here.

Part Nine is here.

Let us summarize what has gone before:

1. The old Democratic Party does not have the tools nor the resources to change the direction of America: they do not have the power to tax the ultra-rich, they do not have the vision to put forward a comprehensive new vision, and they do not even have the power to protect core parts of their constituency.

2. The new Republican Party is in a haze because to support their constituents requires that they trash the federal bureaucracy and deliver unsafe products at high prices gained by tariffs knowing full well that they are going to roast the planet for quarterly stock prices.

3. The new outline is visible but there are enough people who believe that they will be on the inside gaining money and thinking that they will, somehow, escape the worst of what is going to happen.

4. The science however is very clear: within 100 years there will be a gain of about 1.5°C on top of what has already happened, which is almost 1.5°C. That means 3°C is currently in the picture if current trends are held to. In addition to this there are political situations that have made the Towards financial security impossible, because now the towards home ownership is too steep and not enough people can attain it. This benefits the sellers at the expense of ruination for much of the buying public.

Let us take these points in order:

The old Donks are constrained by making only modest increases in the tax structure. They may be able to raise by 10% the taxes on the ultra-wealthy, but they know when they are tossed from office that these will be reversed to be “normal” tax structure that is the Neoconservative Era established by Thatcher-Reagan but was foreshadowed before by liberal parties around the globe. However, the list of priorities that needs to be undertaken requires that taxes be raised to 70% on the highest levels of income, which is to say $1 million or more. This is the level of money that it will take to gain universal health insurance, a modest retirement, an electrical style power grid, and the necessities that that entails such as EV cars, and urbanite cities, and link this together by various different transportation options. This is a large project.

That means that the old Democratic Party, which was sufficient through the neoconservative era, is now out of options because they have sold off all of the liberty for their temporary security. The ball works of the Supreme Court and the bureaucracy are either done for or will be done for after this term of Trump. There is nothing left to sell.

This means that there are two mistakes:

1. Is to castigate the old Democratic party for not doing more for their people, but in fact they did as much as they could given that they did not want to antagonize their opposite numbers. The twin pillars of Clinton and Obama did as much as they could. While there is the tendency to berate them, further left politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were not able to gain enough traction to be elected. The reason for this is that the fossil fuel economy had not gained enough traction among the electorate even though politicians such as Albert Gore realized that something needed to be done. There is a small majority of the electorate who is willing to go down this road, but many of the institutions are not willing to go down this road, and I am specifically referencing the Supreme Court in Bush v Gore. The problem is we need a large majority. And that the dirty needs to be dealt with by the intelligentsia, the scientific community, and the entertainment complex. Unless you want Kid Rock to be your generation’s soundtrack.

2. The other mistake is the opposite direction of digging that conservatism will triumph because it always has in the past. The problem is that conservatism cannot make the necessary improvements and investments. The problem with conservatism is that its base is too small to run the country and it is, primarily, retired. There needs to be new blood to engage in new ideas and communicate them to the electorate.

Now we must make clear that the Phant Party is living in a delusional state. This is not the first time this has happened nor will it be the last. The German Empire in 1914 thought that it could dominate the continent and install Berlin as the focal point for a new order. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany, imperialist Japan, and Fascist Italy bought that they would be able to conquer the world even though if looked at objectively this was a pipe dream. The order imposed by the USSR was also unsustainable because the populace had to live on sub-standard living conditions, food, and the basic necessities of life. And this is only in the 20^th century. One could go on into the 21^st century and back into the 19^th century for other examples.

The reason that the right and hard right are delusional is because the planet will not sustain another 1.5°C. Their delusion is that they can keep out the people who are most pressed by climate change by force if necessary. This is a delusion. The actuality is that India and most especially China can burn oil as well and they will do so if there is not an overwhelming consensus to stop them. China and the US are the two countries that make much of the climate change possible.

That does not mean that if they can lie, and let us call a spade a spade, they can get a social consensus for a time. And remember the electorate is more than willing to listen because they know that the conservative Democratic party is not going to secure them the standards that they know they need to have. The electorate does not study events or read scientific papers, and therefore they are a blank slate and if one side can simply lie, they will do that. And the Phant Party has an elaborate infrastructure to do just that including Meta, Amazon, and now Microsoft. As well as more niche players such as Joe Rogan.

But if the center-left has had feelings those feelings are magnified by the electorate: and in a number of ways. First off the net migration of the country is towards the areas which are most affected by climate change. The insurance companies have noticed this and have caught off insurance coverage in areas that are too risky to insure. And remember, the job of insurance is to collect income on the premiums and make good profits because on average they collect more from the premiums than is paid out for damages. That is to say, insurance is a marketplace and if the marketplace cannot raise enough premiums to pay out damages they will stop. The electorate is also deluded because they want to buy fossil fuel vehicles because that is what they know. There is an infrastructure to deal with all of the problems of fossil fuel vehicles and various points of entrance for different economic levels. This means that while the electorate may be delusional, they do not yet see a path for them to do otherwise.

The conservative Democratic party thought that voluntary use of electric infrastructure would be enough, however, the problem is that there are businesses that rely on the inefficiencies of the marketplace and will not go willingly into bankruptcy. You can get several engineering degrees from MIT in how to manage inefficiencies to your advantage. That means that it will be a catastrophe, such as the stock market crash of 1929 and the war that followed as an example. There is still time to avoid this outcome, but it is getting very, very, very late to do so.

Now for the science. It has been clear since the 1950s the outlines of global warming and the effects that it will have. It is been since the late 19^th century that many people had clues that this could happen, and the bump up during World War II was noticed by a few scientists. The basis for the natural climate was discovered by Milutin Milanković during the First World War. There have of course been improvements and mathematics that are based on the insights. There are even plans on how to make changes in the economic, social, political, and cultural landscape such as from @profgalloway.com. There is a cottage industry in tracking the changes on a global and local level, such as @rahmstorf.bsky.social‬ and @michaelemann.bsky.social‬. There are Senators such as @warren.senate.gov, @sanders.senate.gov, @schiff.senate.gov, and @markey.senate.gov, as well as a host of others. There are explainers such as the well-known @xkcd.com.

This means that as an individual you have limited options but there is a well-funded opposition but it needs to lead not be an adjunct to the older Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama. The reason that I can say that the older Democratic party is defunct is in the polls as to how much behind the US is after Biden. The old Democratic newspapers and magazines were chanting how much better the United States was under Biden. And perhaps for the elite of the old Democratic Party, this was perhaps true. The problem is that the Democratic party needs to be on the side of the smaller store owner and most especially on the side of the working class. But the working class is clearly not doing so well as one can see from the Social Security numbers cited before: in the vast mass of the country the working class does not have the ability to invest in a new economy when they are barely struggling in the old economy. The solution last time was getting involved in World War II, and I hope that this is not the solution that the leadership of the Democratic party is hoping for.

Again, the science is quite clear and the questions are asked by people who know nothing and want to be assured that their decision to hold fast to the fossil fuel economy is still an option. After all, that is what they hear from their news media and figures of interest. The problem is they are completely wrong. Not marginally wrong. Not wrong. But over the waterfall kind of wrong. This however is holstered by people whose job it is to manufacture the illusion of consent by pumping out a people that can only be described as prevarication support for an illegal, immoral, hidebound way of doing business. Yes, I know that they need to make money in some way, but they have chosen to be the blackest form of art in pursuit of a group of individuals who kill their customers for profit. It’s good work if you can get it and can live with your conscience if you have any.

We need to speak of problems that are perpetual: one is where there are limited resources and we have to make choices about where the resources go. Another one is there is constant tension between unskilled people who want to emigrate and skilled people who want to emigrate. The problem is that the people who are displaced want justice and protection, but in the end when they are old and retired they want new people to work the jobs to pay for healthcare and retirement. Which means new people have to come in to do that. The third one is when there is a war because the best people to fight the war are young but they have not got the benefits of being in society as much as old people have. This means you need to make a promise, and not promised costs money and the old people don’t want to give up all that they have but they still want protection from the young people. These problems will continue to exist no matter how we set up the society. The conservative way is to bar the door but the problem with that is that it solves the short-term problem of protecting people who will otherwise lose their jobs. It fails at the long-term problem of how to pay for healthcare and retirement. This means that a balancing act between letting anybody in and letting nobody in needs to be struck especially because locking people up has severe consequences: children for example do not decide which side of the border to be born on. This means that there will always be compromise on these issues for time immemorial.

There are as well is in the theory for example, in economics which are exploited by the wealthy, because after all that is how you get to be wealthy: find gaps in what is still legal, but of questionable morality, and exploit them to the limit. Under normal conditions this is an advantage: if you find a gap, then society can close the gap and you get the money from exploding the gap while it exists. As a kind of rough and ready fairness which so long as the society gains is equitable after a fashion. Though having political cartoons skewer the politicians for not closing the gap fast enough often helps.

So what do we propose that is different from the reactionary Republican party that now governs?

1. Everybody must vote. Not sections of the public that one or the other party wants but all of them. One-third of people do not vote and this must be corrected immediately. This is not the principle of either be new Republican Party or the old Democratic Party.

2. Everyone must have healthcare to the level of the other developed countries. This helps us import people from other developed countries, saves us huge amounts of money, and allows capital to go to other places where it will be of vastly more benefit than it currently is. This most especially includes the idea that women must make the choice about each individual pregnancy because it is the individual choices that are made that create the society.

3. We must go to an electrical economy rather than a fossil fuel economy. This has a time limit and even sections that have been electrified need to be better done because extracting “rare earth” elements is, at present, inefficient and destructive.

4. We must have an equal basis for everyone to participate: in a matter which race, no matter which sexual orientation. And we will find other kinds of discrimination including the disabled and the transgendered and these two must be given an equal chance, not the “we say it’s equal but it’s not” that currently reigns.

5. Be prepared for random events which need our attention. To reason that the United States is successful is a cause we have room to reallocate resources on the fly.

There is in this range all sorts of left: for the capitalist, there is the shift from fossil fuel to electrical and the opportunities that we don’t even know exist, for the socialist there is the entire universe of healthcare where only a small fraction can be capitalized for some form of benefit, for the Marxian there is always the margins where people are left out of the society and should not be. This range from moderate left to socialist left is, I submit, the best way of running the society that we live in and the one which we shall live in. This means of course that what is “right” needs to be changed: because after all there are going to be people who want freedom more than liberty, and whatever group asserts control there will be the opposite number who will gather around a right-wing party. And we on the left need to realize that not all problems can be solved by left-wing ideas, this is natural to the point of a Republic which is democratically elected.

Let us admit a single fact: the Republican Party under Trump requires that several groups. of people's fundamental rights and we cannot live with that in our United States. For the moment people are willing to loot the corpse of the old fossil fuel economy even though that ends badly. part of the reason this has happened is that the old Democratic party could not communicate, could not allocate, and could not define the new economy and new society that we are already in. That means that a new Democratic party must define these three things, but it must do that within a broad tent. The major themes are universal participation, healthcare, the electrical economy, and equality for all.

And in the spirit of the past, we must commit everything that we have even though the short term may be bleak and filled with terror. This is because the tools of economics, society, and culture will triumph over the greed and self-centeredness of the present.

Let us take these points in order:

The old Donks are constrained by making only modest increases in the tax structure. They may be able to raise by 10% the taxes on the ultra-wealthy, but they know when they are tossed from office that these will be reversed to be “normal” tax structure that is the Neoconservative Era established by Thatcher-Reagan but was foreshadowed before by liberal parties around the globe. However, the list of priorities that needs to be undertaken requires that taxes be raised to 70% on the highest levels of income, which is to say $1 million or more rather than reducing the verdant to be paid by the wealthiest .001%. This is the level of money that it will take to gain universal health insurance, a modest retirement, an electrical style power grid, and the necessities that entail such as EV cars, and urbanite cities, and link this together by various different transportation options. This is a large project.

That means that the old Democratic Party, which was sufficient through the neoconservative era, is now out of options because they have sold off all of the liberty for their temporary security. The ball works of the Supreme Court and the bureaucracy are either done for or will be done for after this term of Trump. There is nothing left to sell.

This means that there are two mistakes:

1. Is to castigate the old Democratic party for not doing more for their people, but in fact they did as much as they could given that they did not want to antagonize their opposite numbers. The twin pillars of Clinton and Obama did as much as they could. While there is the tendency to berate them, further left politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were not able to gain enough traction to be elected. The reason for this is that the fossil fuel economy had not gained enough traction among the electorate even though politicians such as Albert Gore realized that something needed to be done. There is a small majority of the electorate who is willing to go down this road, but many of the institutions are not willing to go down this road, and I am specifically referencing the Supreme Court in Bush v Gore. The problem is we need a large majority. And that the dirty needs to be dealt with by the intelligentsia, the scientific community, and the entertainment complex. Unless you want Kid Rock to be your generation’s soundtrack.

2. The other mistake is the opposite direction of digging that conservatism will triumph because it always has in the past. The problem is that conservatism cannot make the necessary improvements and investments. The problem with conservatism is that its base is too small to run the country and it is, primarily, retired. There needs to be new blood to engage in new ideas and communicate them to the electorate.

Now we must make clear that the Phant Party is living in a delusional state. This is not the first time this has happened nor will it be the last. The German Empire in 1914 thought that it could dominate the continent and install Berlin as the focal point for a new order. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany, imperialist Japan, and Fascist Italy bought that they would be able to conquer the world even though if looked at objectively this was a pipe dream. The order imposed by the USSR was also unsustainable because the populace had to live on sub-standard living conditions, food, and the basic necessities of life. And this is only in the 20^th century. One could go on into the 21^st century and back into the 19^th century for other examples.

The reason that the right and hard right are delusional is because the planet will not sustain another 1.5°C. Their delusion is that they can keep out the people who are most pressed by climate change by force if necessary. This is a delusion. The actuality is that India and most especially China can burn oil as well and they will do so if there is not an overwhelming consensus to stop them. China, the US, EU are the main emitters though as China moves up the value chain other countries need to curb their emissions.

The problem with the new Republican party is that they are endlessly willing to lie, and let us call a spade a spade, for political benefit. The Phant Party has an elaborate infrastructure to do just that including Meta, Amazon, and now Microsoft. As well as more niche players such as Joe Rogan. this again underlines that science must have a place along with Republican governance, Democratic election, and an electorate that is to be the whole rather than apart.

But if the center-left has had feelings those feelings are magnified by the electorate: and in a number of ways. First off the net migration of the country is towards the areas which are most affected by climate change. The insurance companies have noticed this and have caught off insurance coverage in areas that are too risky to insure. And remember, the job of insurance is to collect income on the premiums and make good profits because on average they collect more from the premiums than is paid out for damages. That is to say, insurance is a marketplace and if the marketplace cannot raise enough premiums to pay out damages they will stop. The electorate is also deluded because they want to buy fossil fuel vehicles because that is what they know. There is an infrastructure to deal with all of the problems of fossil fuel vehicles and various points of entrance for different economic levels. This means that while the electorate may be delusional, they do not yet see a path for them to do otherwise.

The conservative Democratic party thought that voluntary use of electric infrastructure would be enough, however, the problem is that there are businesses that rely on the inefficiencies of the marketplace and will not go willingly into bankruptcy. You can get several engineering degrees from MIT in how to manage inefficiencies to your advantage. That means that it will be a catastrophe, such as the stock market crash of 1929 and the war that followed as an example. There is still time to avoid this outcome, but it is getting very very very late to do so.

Now for the science. It has been clear since the 1950s the outlines of global warming and the effects that it will have. It is been since the late 19^th century that many people had clues that this could happen, and the bump up during World War II was noticed by a few scientists. The basis for the natural climate was discovered by Milutin Milanković during the First World War. There are even plans on how to make changes in the economic, social, political, and cultural landscape such as from @profgalloway.com. There is a cottage industry in tracking the changes on a global and local level, such as @rahmstorf.bsky.social‬ and @michaelemann.bsky.social‬. There are Senators such as @warren.senate.gov, @sanders.senate.gov, @schiff.senate.gov, and @markey.senate.gov, as well as a host of others. There are explainers such as the well-known @xkcd.com.

This means that as an individual you have limited options but there is a well-funded opposition but it needs to lead not be an adjunct to the older Democratic Party of Clinton and Obama. The reason that I can say that the older Democratic party is defunct is in the polls as to how much behind the US is after Biden. The old Democratic newspapers and magazines were chanting how much better the United States was under Biden. And perhaps for the elite of the old Democratic party, this was perhaps true. The problem is that the Democratic party needs to be on the side of the smaller store owner and most especially on the side of the working class. But the working class is clearly not doing so well as one can see from the Social Security numbers cited before: in the vast mass of the country the working class does not have the ability to invest in a new economy when they are barely struggling in the old economy. The solution last time was getting involved in World War II, and I hope that this is not the solution that the leadership of the Democratic party is hoping for.

Again, the science is quite clear and the questions are asked by people who know nothing and want to be assured that their decision to hold fast to the fossil fuel economy is still an option. After all, that is what they hear from their news media and figures of interest. The problem is they are completely wrong. Not marginally wrong. Not wrong. But over the waterfall kind of wrong. This however is holstered by people whose job it is to manufacture the illusion of consent by pumping out a people that can only be described as prevarication support for an illegal, immoral, hidebound way of doing business. Yes, I know that they need to make money in some way, but they have chosen to be the blackest form of art in pursuit of a group of individuals who kill their customers for profit. It’s good to work if you can get it and can live with your conscience if you have any.

But there are as well in the theory for example, in economics which are exploited by the wealthy, because after all that is how you get to be wealthy: find gaps in what is still legal, but of questionable morality, and exploit them to the limit. Under normal conditions this is an advantage: if you find a gap, then society can close the gap and you get the money from exploding the gap while it exists. As a kind of rough and ready fairness which so long as the society gains is equitable after a fashion. Though having political cartoons skewer the politicians for not closing the gap fast enough often helps.