Why Democrats lose (draft)

Just a minute ago, my man Tim Facebooked a link to an interview with State Sen. Nina Turner titled “Can Dems Learn From Their 2016 Mistakes If They Do Not Acknowledge Them?”

Here’s my response. It’s what I could write in about ten minutes and could be better said with more editing, but in the interests of contributing to the discussion here we go.

What mistakes? The party apparatus keeps getting paid.
 
These “mistakes” are a lot less puzzling if you let go of the assumption that the Democratic Party exists to win elections or to make life better for working people. If instead you assume that the Party exists to act as the “straight man” for the Republicans and to take up space that should be occupied by a progressive party, it makes a lot more sense.
 
I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories for two reasons:
 
  • They usually make no sense in terms of motivations. As Jamie likes to say, “Why would they be using ‘chemtrails’ for mind control when they already run your water supply? Why do things the hard way?”
  • They tend to require a really complex backstory to even try to explain. Way too many moving parts. Lots of coincidences.
But here’s the thing. This here “conspiracy” comes down to two REALLY OBVIOUS things that you can check out for yourself:
 
  • American politics is stuck in a two-party mold because of how the Constitution works. Strong Presidency, a Congress that doesn’t lend itself to coalitions, single-member House districts, etc. Second place counts for nothing, so you have to play for a majority, so there’s no room for a major third party. It’s called Duverger’s Law.
  • Rich and powerful people want politics to go their way and make them richer and more powerful. Duh.
Put those together and it makes sense that you’ll get one party that works for rich people and another party that gets paid to lose. Doesn’t that make more sense than Democrats—who literally make their careers by being good at politics!—pursuing policies that most people don’t want, shutting down their own progressive candidates, and not even contesting vote rigging, election fraud, and disenfranchisement?
 
It also explains why cities are run so badly even though they’re almost exclusively run by the enlightened Democrats. The party organization gets the bulk of its funding from people who want cities to fail.

Why I don’t donate at the supermarket checkout

You know how it goes when you’re paying at the supermarket and they ask if you want to throw in a buck for Harvest For Hunger and sort of feel like a bad person for saying no?

Don’t.

A lot of people don’t remember that local supermarkets used to make their own donations to food charities instead of asking you to pay at the register. And that didn’t start until they lost several high-profile price fixing lawsuits in the 1980s.

Here’s one, Rosen v. Fisher Foods (1982):

[T]he settlement further provides for a charitable food payment program. Under the provisions of this plan to the extent that Certificates are not redeemed in any given year, the settling defendants will make contributions of food or cash… to charitable organizations that give away food to the needy…. [I]n no year shall these food payments total less than $300,000.

That’s right. The major local supermarket chains colluded to jack up the price of food, got caught, and were forced to settle by handing out literally millions of dollars in dollar-off coupons and making donations to food charities in partial compensation for the harm they caused in so doing.

The amazing thing is that when the settlements were fulfilled, the stores kept making those “donations” but only by soliciting the very same customers they’d been cheating for years. And they have the gall to claim credit for it.

Unbelievably, the supermarket chains found a way to settle a huge liability, call it a public relations win, and get their customer base to pay for it all.

If you want to help, please do! But make your gift directly to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank instead of rewarding the crooked store chains.

 

Lessons from Memphis’s experiments.

Someone drew my attention recently to this cool street renovation in Memphis: “Memphis’s Spectacular Street Experiments are Moving Toward Permanance!” Exclamation point mine!

There are things to like about this.

It’s a good idea to make the improvements durable but temporary. You can see how it works out in real life before overcommitting.

That inset photo of the “demonstration” phase shows a good practice. Don’t just put bike lanes out and expect everyone to get what they’re about. (Hi, Cleveland.)

Also: It’s pretty.

Now if you want to do something like this in Cleveland, I’m wondering about a few things.

A thing about Cleveland is that we never, ever make driving more inconvenient. Cutting down driving lanes is not acceptable. “And in 2014 the city ran a one-year trial that converted half of an expressway along the Mississippi to a walking-biking path.” <– so not Cleveland

Would a similar project here increase land values in a way that facilitates windfall speculation? Then it would be easy to find a CDC to lead it and provide political cover. (But it would still have to be car-friendly. First things first.)

Sometimes the main impact of a fancy streetscape upgrade is to signal where the favored neighborhood will be. I wouldn’t be surprised if land prices shot up around Marshall and Monroe less because of the actual improvements than because of the signal effect.

From a cyclist’s point of view, this feature only highlights what Cleveland never does. The commitment wasn’t to make cycling safer and easier, it was to put in 70 miles of “bikeways” including ordinary, unprotected, unmaintained, fading lines in the road: “Cleveland plans to add 70 miles of bikeways by the end of 2017.” If the city can claim a victory for sustainability by hitting the 70 mile mark, then they will.

So am I skeptical?

Yeah, I’m skeptical. From this one article, I see a cool design that lends itself to multiple street uses and looks nice.

City planning aficionados like innovative designs and multiple uses. I do too.

But I don’t know how it affects people who already live there, I don’t know what priorities are being neglected to make this happen, and I don’t know who’s profiting from it.

I’m definitely skeptical about translating this pretty design into something practical for Cleveland without consideration of those concerns, plus Cleveland’s obvious inability to maintain a basic level of pavement maintenance and lane striping. It’s cool, but I’m not remotely convinced.

 

Exactly two things wrong with Cleveland

I’ve lived here going on 32 years and I’m finally figuring out some things that should have been obvious much sooner.

Real Estate is a Cost, not a Solution

Cleveland insists on doing “economic development” backwards. We put boatloads of money and effort (and displacement) into large and small construction projects that are supposed to “drive development.” That is not how economics works. If you’re classically trained, you read Ricardo, Malthus, and George; they say “the rent of land is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out, but to what the tenant can afford.”

The point is that real estate is an extractive endeavor, not a productive one. When you put buildings first, the developers get all the money. Period. This is why we are still poor.

Misapplied technocracy

Cleveland is always looking for a controversy-free technocratic way of avoiding the most glaring political and social problems. We can have a thousand slideshows on why (let’s just say) an express bus to Solon is a good thing, but nobody wants to address the fact that Solon is designed to be inaccessible because people there wanted it that way. Tweak it all you want and they’ll tweak back, faster and more cheaply.

Same goes for nonsense like the Corruption Corridor, which got sold on technocratic grounds but is a social and economic nightmare. Ditto things like the timing of traffic signals on the Health Line (because we don’t dare inconvenience car drivers) and our pathetic implementation of bike lanes (same). These all went badly because the decision makers blew off all equity concerns and did what was easiest.

It’s really simple.

When you use planning jargon to avoid making political decisions like “is segregation okay?” and “are poor people mere obstacles?” and “who benefits from this new highway?” you are enabling the worst possible decisions.

Summary, two main points.

  1. If your “economic development” program has a lot of land transactions and construction in it, you’re working for the real estate people, not the public.
  2. If your “regional planning” doesn’t start by addressing equity and political concerns, you will create a dysfunctional mess that (among other things) puts all the jobs where nobody can get to them.

Most of our political leaders simply don’t understand these two things. They get ahead by being friends with everyone and not offending people with power, but nothing about this system cultivates problem solving. So we get politicians who are cuddly but not big thinkers.

Additionally: The Community Development Corporations (CDCs) don’t have much influence over Point 2, but they’re a big part of the Point 1 problem. They have an incentive to do land deals because a) they get paid to do land deals; and b) it’s kind of hard to justify the “development” part of the job if you start saying no to real estate people.

Edited to add…

I just read Jason Segedy’s analysis titled “Today is Yesterday’s Tomorrow,” which is almost the exact opposite of what I’ve written here and perfectly complementary. I’m saying the political system is such a disaster that our own leadership is causing decay; Jason’s saying that urban decay is endemic to a sprawling society.

I think we’re both right. Cities like Cleveland are up against national trends that outrageously favor outer suburbs, and the political culture here promotes a stupid, counterproductive approach to resisting those trends.

Notably, real estate developers are the bad guys both in my analysis and in Jason’s. I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that maybe real estate itself is the problem.

"Seven Projects" that will make money for developers

Rising: seven projects that will change the face of Cleveland

The fact that of seven “projects” every single one is a real estate deal is precisely what is wrong with Cleveland. Exactly zero cities have become prosperous from real estate development, unless the way you’re keeping score is by how well the developers are doing.

Also, nice swipe at the so-called “naysayers” there, who in this case are 100% on point.

Will they pave paradise and put up a parking lot?

2017 is Cleveland’s Year of Vibrant Green Space! Hooray!

Last year, 2016, was the Year of Sustainable Transportation. Highlights included:

  • New bike lanes on West 25th that make no sense whatsoever (okay, that was actually in 2015);
  • Starting construction on a $300,000,000.00 highway that goes from the East 55th station on the Red Line to the Cedar Hill (University Circle) station on the Red Line… instead of, you know, potentially upgrading the Red Line at far less cost; and
  • Opening the renovated Public Square, bisected by a stretch of Superior Avenue built only for buses… but blockading the bus lanes.

I don’t mean to be critical or anything, but I can’t help imagining how well this year will go. Will they cut down all the trees along MLK? Spray the zoo with Agent Orange? Pave over the Downtown Mall?

The possibilities are limitless!

 

 

Electoral College reform? nvm

Now that it’s clear that Hillary Clinton won a fairly solid majority of popular votes cast for President, but didn’t come very close to winning the all-important Electors, of course a lot of very good people are getting very interested in reforming, bypassing, or eliminating the Electoral College. They’re wrong. Here’s why.

Continue reading “Electoral College reform? nvm”

Media Literacy Quick Shot

There’s a lot of chatter over what is and isn’t “fake news.” I think people are missing the point when they start to pick and choose which publications they consider reliable though.

I guess it’s okay to say (for example) that the New York Times is usually pretty reliable because yadda yadda reasons. But that’s a) only a first approximation; and b) subject to the Judy Miller phenomenon, in which they trade on their credibility to feed you some kind of made-up bullshit.

A better idea than keeping a mental list of good and bad news operations is to LEARN HOW TO READ. How to distinguish fact from opinion from speculation. How to identify supporting facts. How to pick out innuendo and discard it. How to question the sources: “Who is this person? What do they claim to know? How do they claim to know it? What is their motivation for telling the truth? If they’re lying, how would we know? Who’s in a position to contradict them? Are they even telling us something they know about firsthand?”

Don’t tell me “This thing was on CNN so it must be right.” Tell me “There are two main facts here and the sources are named and they have reason to know what they’re talking about and they have no incentive to lie.”

End of today’s media lesson.

File under "do you even read what you wrote?"

So TIME‘s Person of the Year 2016 is Donald J. Trump. That makes sense. He “defines” the year in our culture.

Their description of runner-up Hillary R. Clinton, however, made me go “Do you even read what you wrote? At all?”

Charlotte Alter, a “journalist” for TIME, wrote this about Secretary Clinton:

Expectations certainly missed their target: the race between the first plausible female presidential candidate and a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” did not boil down to gender. In interviews across the country in the year leading up to the election, many voters suggested that shattering the glass ceiling wasn’t an urgent priority for them. Some took it as a given that a woman will be President one day, and it wasn’t worth electing someone they believed was the wrong woman just to show it could be done.

Did not. Boil down. To gender.

Look at Alter’s justification: If “glass ceiling” doesn’t win, if “a woman will be President” anyway someday, then it’s not about gender. This is exactly why it’s about gender. People in media read being a woman as some ticket that will get you cool things like the White House; they don’t view overt sexism as a real thing that matters. Which is why they write puff pieces about being “the first” this and that but hardly any analysis of what’s going on with the “alt right” racist white nationalist movement that is also heavy with those GamerGate dudes and the “pickup artist” culture.

It wouldn’t be exactly right to say this election was about gender. It was more about race, and there were a lot of other factors that my readers are already familiar with, but much of it boils down to toxic “bro culture.”

In fact, the article even quotes a Clinton supporter saying as much:

“Hillary did everything right, she checked all the boxes, and clearly that doesn’t really win,” says Ramsini, an attorney in Columbus, Ohio. “If a woman can’t beat this guy, then who can she beat?”

So yeah, kind of a weird statement that the election “didn’t boil down to gender.” It kind of did.