Republicans Don't Want to Save Jobs

By Paul Krugman, The New York Times

16 April 20

Billions for oil, nothing for nurses and teachers.

ecent job losses have been nothing short of apocalyptic. Almost 17 million workers — more than 10 percent of the work force — filed for unemployment benefits over the course of just three weeks. Independent economists suggest that the unemployment rate may already be close to 20 percent, which is similar to its level in the depths of the Great Depression.

So how are the Trump administration and its allies responding to this Covid-19-generated jobs crisis? Are they taking it seriously? Or are they doing what they did as the pandemic spread — dithering and refusing to take necessary action out of some combination of wishful thinking and political pettiness?

You can probably guess the answer.

READ MORE

What the Green Party Could Do, Instead of Challenging Biden

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

15 April 20

o distract myself from wondering if my chest is tightening, I sometimes think about other things that could go really wrong this year. The list is long, but somewhere near the very top is the thought that the President could somehow eke out a close election victory, despite—well, despite everything.

There’s no guarantee it won’t happen. The Democrats didn’t find a perfect candidate, and there’s going to be an endless blizzard of Facebook lies, and team Trump is topnotch at voter suppression. But there are ways to lessen the odds a little, and a good one would be to not have a third-party challenge from the left this year, at least in the six or seven battleground states that are going to make the difference. That means asking the Green Party to stand down in those places. People with impressive left credentials—Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ron Daniels—did this already, in January, in a well-argued open letter. But it didn’t seem to work: the Party’s most likely Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, declared that he would run even if the Democrats nominated Bernie Sanders, who, Hawkins told an interviewer, had been “a little slow” in his plans for reform. Hawkins has run many times for governor of New York, and also for the House and the Senate from that state, while never getting more than five per cent of the vote. (He did come in a respectable second in a Fourth District city-council race in his home town of Syracuse, in 2013.) “Recognizing the danger of Trump does not mean that electing any damned Democrat should trump all other considerations,” Hawkins said. So I probably won’t be able to persuade him, either, but let me at least offer the suggestion that there’s a particularly useful reform that Greens—and others interested in a more vibrant politics—could be working on, instead, this autumn.

To understand why this reform—ranked-choice voting—seems so important to me, let me say that, by ideology, I’m pretty much a Green. One of my favorite politicians anywhere is Bob Brown, a former member of the Australian Senate, who, in 1972, helped found what was arguably the first Green Party (and also saved a large portion of Tasmania’s classic wilderness). I’ve given speeches on behalf of German Greens and European Union Greens and local Green parties in many states and cities, and, whenever Canada holds an election, I stay up to watch the returns from the island district in the Pacific, off Vancouver, just to make sure that Elizabeth May, who for many years led the nation’s Green Party, has retained her seat. So I’m about as small-“g” green as green gets, having spent my adult life working on the greatest environmental crisis in the history of our civilization, the rapid heating of our planet.

But I haven’t supported the Green Party in national elections in this country, and that’s because of the way our electoral laws work. The obvious difference between the United States on the one hand and most of Europe on the other is that we have a de-facto plurality-winner-take-all two-party system that makes it all but impossible for a small party to make a non-perverse difference, while European countries have parliamentary systems with electoral mechanisms that encourage small parties to play constructively pivotal roles. Time and again, by winning five or ten or twenty per cent of the vote, and a like share of seats, the Greens who operate in parliamentary democracies have ended up with enough representatives to give them bargaining power when it came time to form coalition governments. And those bargains make big differences: having the Greens in a power-sharing government was a major reason that Germany pioneered renewable energy; currently, in British Columbia, a Green-Liberal coalition has bolstered opposition to giant pipelines.

In the United States, winning a few percentage points of the vote gets you nothing, except a chance to argue about whether you were the spoiler. Ralph Nader, in 2000, and Jill Stein, in 2016, have roundly insisted that they weren’t, arguing that the Democrats who were defeated in crucial states by margins smaller than their vote totals there did not run skillful enough campaigns. Relitigating that history seems less essential than looking ahead: the last poll I saw for Wisconsin showed that the race between a Democrat and Trump, for the state that many analysts predict will sway the election, was currently within three percentage points. So, if a Green Party candidate is on the ballot and attracts even a smidgen of support—well, it could end very badly indeed. And why would you take that chance this year?

That’s not to say that America wouldn’t be better off with more electoral alternatives. We clearly would. And to get them we needn’t wait for some unlikely constitutional change that might produce a parliamentary system. Instead, we can work to get more states to follow the lead of Maine, which last year introduced a ranked-choice voting system for most elections. Here’s how it works: if there are ten candidates on your ballot, you list your choices from one to ten. You can proudly vote for the Green candidate as your No. 1 choice for Congress, and, if she comes in last, you haven’t lost your vote or spoiled someone else’s chances. That’s because that vote would then be eliminated and your second-ranked vote would be counted instead, and so on, until someone has won a majority.

This is not some impossible dream of a reform—pundits used to say “as Maine goes so goes the nation,” and, indeed, last year, after Maine adopted the plan, so did New York City, with the support of seventy-three per cent of its voters. “Before the pandemic, R.C.V. was gaining momentum, with efforts teed up in several states to advance it via ballot initiative or legislative lobbying,” Josh Silver, the director of the electoral-reform campaign RepresentUs, said. “A ballot initiative for R.C.V. is likely in Alaska this year, and possibly in North Dakota and Massachusetts. There is a huge opportunity for legislative lobbying efforts in many other states, blue and red, as evidenced by the deep-red Utah legislature’s vote to allow their cities to enact R.C.V.” That is to say, Green enthusiasts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could skip Presidential campaigning and, instead, push their legislatures hard to put R.C.V. on the agenda. The pandemic has only increased the urgency, because the one drawback of a now necessary vote-by-mail system is that candidates sometimes drop out of elections after you’ve mailed in your ballot. Silver again: “This happened to millions of voters in this year’s primary, and R.C.V. fixes it. We must lean in hard to this opportunity.”

If we managed to enact this reform, the result would be a much better system in many ways. One is that you could really build small progressive parties without potential supporters worrying that they’d inadvertently elect Trumpish figures; if the Greens, or any third party, are ever going to have a real breakthrough on a national level, it will be because people can vote for them without fear, real or imagined, of being a spoiler. But there’s another reason, too, which I got to see close up while covering elections as a young city-hall reporter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which for decades was the only major city in the country to use R.C.V. It’s that these elections not only allow for more ideological diversity but also tend to reduce the truly hateful divisiveness that’s become such a feature of our elections. If you’re a candidate in a ranked-choice election, you have a strong incentive not to be a sneering jerk to your competitors, because that kind of behavior reduces your chances of getting crucial No. 2 votes. You have to make your case, and you have to at least understand someone else’s.

Obviously, campaigning for R.C.V. is less sexy than campaigning for President, and it will take a little while (though the whole Green Party project seems premised on a kind of radical patience). If the Party insists on running a Presidential candidate in the few states where it really matters, I hope people will not waste their votes on them. That’s not because I think Joe Biden is a hero; it’s because I think he’s not only better than the alternative but also pushable. Politics doesn’t end on Election Day—if you’re serious about change, politics in some ways begins once the votes are counted, with the less exciting business of prodding politicians to keep promises or opening up the political space for them to do what they want. In that world, which is always the real world, the job is to elect a politician whom you have a chance of pushing, one who might take advantage of openings that movements can provide.

So, for instance, I had no problem working hard to elect Barack Obama as President (and Joe Biden as Vice-President), and also no problem helping gather some of the largest demonstrations of their Administration outside the White House. We were pushing for Obama to keep his pledge to be a climate activist by opposing the construction of the Keystone Pipeline; he eventually came on board. That was a hugely important development in the fight against climate change—and it launched similar movements around the world. With Trump’s election, of course, that kind of opening ceased—there’s no point pushing someone who takes pride in destruction. Now, there’s a very real chance that the pipeline will be built. Magnify that scenario across all the issues of the day and you see why most climate activists I know just shake their heads at the thought of a third-party challenge this November.

It took me a while to reach that point. In the first Presidential election I ever voted in, in 1980, I voted for Barry Commoner, of the Citizens Party (albeit in the safely blue state of Massachusetts). But the results of that and subsequent elections convinced me that Americans would do well to avoid third parties at the national level until our electoral structure shifts. That’s why, I think, Bernie Sanders has run for President as a Democrat and has always insisted that he would support the Party’s eventual nominee. As he told Biden on Monday afternoon, in his endorsement announcement, “I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every Independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy.” (He has also shown that you can change politics in dramatic ways from within the Democratic Party.) After Sanders lost in 2016 Democratic primary, I campaigned strenuously for Hillary Clinton across the swing states of the Midwest, and it was there that I began to worry that the Green Party was doing just well enough to threaten real trouble. So, that October, I wrote about the importance of voting for Clinton, even if she wasn’t your first choice. I don’t want to wait that long this time, and I know from reading the work of such long-standing Green activists as Ted Glick that there’s an active debate within the Green Party about the wisdom of competing in this year’s Presidential election.

I hope it’s never necessary to write any take on this subject again. And not because the Greens or other idea-oriented parties disappear but because we rebuild our electoral system in easily doable ways that would allow for better elections.