Stop It Already — Joe Manchin Is the Democratic Party
How is Joe Manchin different from the average Democrat?
The Jimmy Carter Syndrome
Rick Perlstein, the political historian, recently wrote about Jimmy Carter and inflation. If you understand what Perlstein said about Carter, you understand Joe Manchin and the Democrats and why this is such a con game.
Back in 1977, according to Perlstein, Labor Secretary Ray Marshall emphatically advised President Carter that inflation is not caused by budget deficits. Marshall advised Carter of this because Carter felt that budget deficits had to be reduced in order to deal with inflation. It is (and was) nonsense.
Despite Marshall’s advice and a mountain of evidence, Carter proceeded forward to reduce inflation by not spending enough for people during a very economically challenging time. Carter dishonestly suggested that reducing the deficits was the ticket to economic growth. It was plain wrong.
Years later, when Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama inherited massive deficits, inflation was quite low. Yet, they too focused on budget deficits. By the time of Obama, the game was old.
There was some increased spending in 1977 under Carter. Additionally, under Clinton and Obama during their administrations, there was some modest government spending but, mostly, policies that promoted inequality advanced in America. These “new” fiscal conservative Democrats bonded foremost with the corporate sector and did minimal for ordinary citizens and workers to help them advance.
Joe Manchin, who is catching hell for playing the game, is just doing what Democrats always have done over the last 40 years.
According to the writer Norman Solomon, when Arthur Laffer, the economist who created “supply-side economics” endorsed Clinton for president in 1992, everyone should have known the Democrats would never alter society in the way it needed to be altered. The ascent of Bill Clinton and in turn, the New Democrats, to the office of president, according to Solomon represented a continuation of “extreme inequities” and “unequal opportunities” for most Americans.
Clinton was mostly about “minor reform” but “major rhetoric” according to Solomon. Yet, Clinton mostly maintained the status quo on behalf of the wealthy and he proved that corporate interests were dominant, controlling both parties. Obama was mostly the same.
This is the Democratic Party. This is what Joe Manchin is doing. He is not out of step with the Democratic Party. He is out of step with Americans who embrace an agenda that puts people before profits and workers before a few global billionaires and corporate shareholders.
He is out of step with democratic socialism. He is out of step with progressive ideas that help ordinary citizens. He is in step with neoliberalism, the anti-worker, anti-people economic system the Democrats sold their souls to decades ago.
Biden’s Blues
If you are wondering where the irony is in all of this, it is that President Joe Biden is the politician who originally recommended Jimmy Carter to be president. He founded the first of the new Democrats, the neoliberals who run the party today. Biden is also the architect of the party’s triangulation politics.
Now, Biden, realizing some of his own errors politically in the past and his party’s commitment to austerity, (at least according to many observers) can’t fix the political culture he once promoted.
Yet, Biden doesn’t have the votes to pass his important social spending bill and doesn’t have the votes to blow up the filibuster to work around Manchin. Democrats can’t even muster fifty votes to do a reconciliation passage of their spending package.
Inflation and Greed
According to Jon Schwarz of FAIR, the media watchdog network, the now aggressive moves on inflation by the Federal Reserve and others are to fight back against workers (labor). It’s a corporate move.
The moneychangers don’t like the fact that workers are striking, demanding more wages and benefits, and do not like that workers have the leverage to make demands and to turn down low-paying, bad jobs. The corporate solution is to raise interest rates, forcing businesses to fire workers, creating tension amongst labor, and getting back in control.
The moneychangers don’t like full employment or low employment. The moneychangers don’t like workers having options. They are using inflation as justification to stop the surging economy and to not invest in workers and ordinary Americans with government spending. It is a mistake and based on the same fallacy that drove Jimmy Carter from office with bad policy decisions.
Libertarian economist Scott Sumner takes a similar view as Labor Secretary Ray Marshall did in 1977 when he advised President Carter that inflation and government spending are not related. He notes that during WW II, there was inflation and high government spending but the two had no relationship to one another. Decades later in the early 1980s, inflation was very high but government spending was a paltry sum. In other words, the relationship between inflation and federal spending is nil.
To be even more clear, Sumner states the following: “Deficits tended to be low during the Great Inflation, and then rose sharply in the 1980s, as inflation fell sharply. Deficits again soared over the last few years, again without high inflation.” The Great Inflation period is the late 1970s.
Jon Schwarz, of FAIR, and writing for The Intercept, is more clear about what is going on:
“…inflation generally accompanies economic booms, when the unemployment rate is low and workers have the market power to demand higher pay. That’s what’s happening now: As prices increased 6.2 percent over the past year, wages for regular people went up 5.8 percent. In other words, inflation barely touched their purchasing power. And with almost 300 labor strikes in the U.S. so far this year, workers are leveraging their power to demand better compensation at historic rates.”
Manchin’s Dishonesty
So why are Joe Manchin, politicians, and some commentators opposed to the spending package and holding up government spending as the great evil in the world suddenly? The answer is the Jimmy Carter syndrome explained earlier.
All Manchin talked about after rejecting the spending package are budget deficits and inflation. This is his worry. But really, it isn’t. This is a corporate worry — the moneychangers. Manchin is just carrying their water. They want to stop the workers in their tracks.
While people who criticize Manchin point to his connections to the coal industry and the poverty of his state and the dystopian life there, they are missing the real target. Manchin is doing what he is doing for more than his coal profits or campaign donations. He is doing what he is doing because he can do it and survive politically and it is the bigger goal.
Joe Manchin is from West Virginia. The state might as well be Mississippi in the upper South. It voted overwhelmingly for the previous president. It votes Republican except for Joe Manchin, who represents the state like he is a Republican though he is a Democrat. The Republican Party opposes the spending package because it will help voters and Biden will take another victory lap.
Joe Manchin can’t vote with Biden. He can hold up the spending package and he can tell his voters, at least the ones that matter, “Look at how I stood up to those flunkies in Washington D.C. for you. For my people.” West Virginia doesn’t like Biden. And shaming Manchin will never work. Joe Manchin, not Joe Biden, is holding all the cards.
But let's not get this twisted. Most of the Democrats are cozy with corporate interests as well. It is their downfall. It is why the military budget never shrinks each year. It is why Trump’s massively unpopular corporate tax cuts of 2017 are not on the chopping block even in this package to help workers and ordinary people. Corporations get what they want on Capitol Hill.
One man is not holding this package up. Our elected officials are. And that includes the Democratic Party which makes sure every year any shift to more people-oriented policies don’t happen.
One senator from West Virginia with no ethics doesn’t need to step aside; the whole Senate needs to be abolished. It is one thing America needs immediately.
Sources
Scott Sumner, “Excessive debt doesn’t cause inflation,” Econlib, March 9, 2019 — https://www.econlib.org/excessive-debt-doesnt-cause-inflation/
Norman Solomon, False Hope, Common Courage Press 1994