Category Archives: Economics/Class Relations

GOP Congressman Investigates Undisclosed Gold Market Intervention by China and the Exchange Stabilization Fund Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) Calls Out Fed & Treasury for Dodging Questions on Gold Activities

Washington, DC (July 31, 2018) – A member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee is calling out the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury for dodging questions about their activities involving America’s gold reserves.

In a letter dated July 27, Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) wrote to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, after receiving perfunctory responses to his April 24th letter, noting “a few questions were either not addressed at all or not fully addressed.”

In particular, the Fed and Treasury would not articulate any U.S. policy toward gold and refused to comment on historical U.S. State Department documents pointing to a U.S. policy of “driving gold out of the world financial system in favor of the Federal Reserve Note or Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.”

In his follow-up letter, Rep. Mooney provided evidence of involvement by the Exchange Stabilization Fund in the gold market and called attention to “the recent correlation of the gold price with the price of the Chinese yuan and the valuation of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.”

“Do these correlations reflect surreptitious intervention in the U.S. currency markets by China and currency manipulation by China?” Mooney asked.

Mooney also provided a 2009 letter from then Fed Governor Kevin M. Warsh acknowledging the existence of Fed documents on gold swaps (while simultaneously refusing to provide them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee).

Mooney asked Chairman Powell to reconcile the Marsh acknowledgement with his July 12, 2018, letter, including Powell’s assertion that “The Fed does not engage, nor has it ever engaged, in gold swaps.”

Rep. Mooney noted the Treasury did not appropriately answer his question regarding prior audits of America’s gold reserves.  In his July 11, 2018 response, Acting Assistant Treasury Secretary Brad Bailey merely discussed audits of gold compartment seals, and Mooney responded that a cursory examination of seals is “neither an inventory nor an audit of our nation’s gold.”

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The Latin Americanization of the United States 2

by • American Decline, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Military, Police State/Civil Liberties, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Keith Preston

Everyone knows that one of the principal grievances of the right-wing involves the substantial amount of immigration from Latin America to the United States that has taken place in recent decades. The commonly voiced concern is that the traditional “white” (Northern European) majority will lose its majority status, and that persons of Latin American ancestry (combined with people of color generally) will become the demographic majority. Whether this is good or bad is an individual value judgment, but the criticisms often obscure other, perhaps more substantive ways in which the United States is coming to resemble Latin America.

The traditional class system of Latin America is one where the very rich plutocratic elites live in opulence and luxury, and rule over an impoverished working class, an extraordinarily large underclass of the extreme poor and permanently unemployed, and a small middle class of professionals and technocrats. This is precisely the same kind of class system that the United States is developing, particularly in California which is widely considered to be the bellwether of the nation.

In traditional Latin American societies, the elite rule for the sake of pursing their own class interests, without any pretense of interest in the needs of the masses. To the degree that elections are held at all, the candidates are merely functionaries of the plutocracy. US politics is rapidly coming to resemble this model.

The police and the army are the traditionally dominant force in Latin American societies, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the military industrial complex and police state have assumed a comparable role in the United States.

The one noticeable difference is that in many traditional Latin American societies, the Catholic Church hierarchy provided the ruling class with its self-legitimating ideology. In the United States, organized religion is becoming an increasingly marginal force with the new self-legitimating ideology of the state being the totalitarian humanist ideology of the new clerisy.

Interestingly, Latin America has experienced a great deal of liberalization and progress in the past few decades, while the United States has increasingly gone backward. Perhaps Americans need to start emigrating to Latin America.

Image result for latin american dictatorships

An Anarchist Survey of Amazon: Crashing the Party and Amazon Go Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

It’s Going Down

Since the conclusion of our previous survey, two interesting events occurred in various Amazon facilities. In one instance, a fulfillment center was torched in the British Midlands. In another instance, coordinated strikes hit Amazon in Germany and Northern Italy. All of this preceded the holiday sales blitz and threw Amazon into internal chaos. At the end of the holiday season, all Amazon could tout was its toxic accomplishment of shipping one billion commodities and selling “tens of millions” of talking Alexa units. When the shopping extravaganza was over, the corporate employees of Amazon were rewarded with a lavish spectacle to sooth their overworked souls.

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In Praise of Jeff Bezos Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Sean Gabb

According to a report on the BBC website, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the richest man in the world, with an alleged personal fortune of £113bn. The usual suspects have raised their arms in outrage at the news. Oxfam drew fresh attention to its report from 2017, in which it called “for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few.” A few weeks earlier, The Guardian had lamented:

Amazon’s website is, in the west, the dominant platform for online retail sales…. This is bad for democracy. Commerce ought to reside in markets governed by regulations set by democratic political process not those chosen by the world’s richest man, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos.

My view is that Mr Bezos, together with Bill Gates and various other people whose names it will be briefer to let my readers guess than for me to enumerate, is one of the greatest men alive. He has increased the wealth and happiness of countless millions. He is helping to bring into being a world that, just one generation ago, the boldest science fiction writers were cautious to describe. He has earned every penny of his great fortune.

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Keith Preston: Trump’s trade war a ‘double-edged sword’ Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy with China and Europe is a “double-edged sword,” bolstering domestic manufacturing and narrowing the trade deficit while hitting the American consumer with rising prices, says an analyst.

“Tariffs on imports have multiple economic effects and depending on what kind of economic values you assign to a particular policy, they can be beneficial or they could be negative,” Keith Preston, chief editor and director of AttacktheSystem.com, said in an interview. More…

EVACUATING UTOPIA: A History of Christian Anarchism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Lecture delivered by Wayne John Sturgeon at the second international conference of the National-Anarchist Movement, England, June 23, 2018.

“Isn’t the world already

At Peace and aren’t we

The only warring faction?”

-Crass

Improvements made straight roads,

but the crooked roads without improvement,

are the roads of genius.

-William Blake

INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin this lecture with a quote from a contemporary theologian, Alasdair Macintyre, who made the following candid observation in reference to our own times, when writing on the fall of the western Roman Empire:

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Utah, Texas, and Wyoming Top 2018’s ‘Sound Money Index,’ Which Was Just Released by the Sound Money Defense League Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags:

Utah, Texas, and Wyoming Top 2018’s ‘Sound Money Index,’ Which Was Just Released by the Sound Money Defense League

The 2018 Sound Money Index is the first index of its kind, ranking all 50 states using 9 indicators to determine which states offer the most pro-sound money environment in the country

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Keith Preston: US relies on military–industrial complex for manufacturing jobs Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Military, Uncategorized • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The United States relies on the country’s military–industrial complex for manufacturing and factory employment, an American analyst in Virginia says.

Maintaining the massive US arms industry is motivated not just by military purposes, but also for preserving American jobs and economic growth, said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“The military–industrial complex…is a central component of the United States economic system,” Preston told Press TV on Thursday.

“Military production is a big part of the economy,” he said. “Essentially they’re not so much because they serve any military purpose as much as someone is getting paid for producing the weapons or they’re the source of preserving jobs and employment either within the military or within the civilian sector.”

US manufacturing, and in particular by the US arms industry, has always relied on government funding in one form or another.

Roughly 10 percent of the $2.2 trillion in factory output in the United States goes into the production of weapons sold mainly to the US Defense Department for use by the armed forces.

The US military is planning to install a massive radar that officials say is designed to identify missile attacks against the US mainland, Military.com reported Wednesday.

The $1 billion system is supposed to spot incoming missile warheads fired for Hawaii and other US states and send the information to ground-based interceptor missile systems in Alaska, which will then try to shoot them down, the report said.

Experts have argued that a larger face would allow the radar to distinguish between warheads and decoys more precisely.

The news of comes fays after Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, met in Singapore earlier this month and issued a declaration agreeing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Robert Stark talks about The YIMBY Movement & The Alt-Center 1

by • Economics/Class Relations, Environment, Left and Right, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Technology • Tags: ,

The Stark Truth. Listen here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Stark joined with Cartrell Payne(aka The Adventure Kid) to discuss the YIMBY movement, the Alt-Center, and how those issues relate.

Topics:

California Senator Scott Wiener’s housing-transit measure Derailed
Factions of the YIMBY movement including left leaning housing advocates, real estate developers, and the Market Urbanist
Left Wing anti-gentrification activists and their alliance with NIMBY’s
Cartrell’s observations on gentrification in Memphis, Tennessee
The hypocrisy of pro-immigration Limousine Liberal NIMBY’s, and how that combination exacerbates the housing crisis
How the YIMBY movement is also very pro immigration
Income Inequality in California and the mass exodus of the middle class
The film Falling Down which is set in LA in the early 90’s and a warning of a dystopian future
What makes California great and can it be saved?
The New Great Migration of Black Americans back to The South
White Middle Class Conservative NIMBY’s, their motivations, and how they are sabotaging their own self interest
Why YIMBYism and immigration restriction are compatible, and why the Alt-Center should take up those causes
Why YIMBYs need to address aesthetic concerns
Why YIMBYism is compatible with environmental and historic preservation
Citylab and City Journal; their writings on urbanism and political agendas
Why mass transit is inefficient in LA and other Sun Belt cities
The political and cultural flaws of both Blue and Red States
A vision of an Alt Center which include alternative economics, pro middle class policies, New Urbanism, environmentalism, SWPL culture, and socially centrist
Cartrell’s political orientation as an Old School Southern Democrat minus the racism
Cartrell’s critique of both the Black Liberal Establishment and Black Conservatives
Conservative views on the poor and police issues and Conservative Class Cucks
The early 20th Century Populist movement
Norman Mailer’s plan for breaking up New York City which addressed both the concerns of the Left and the Right

Robert Stark talks to Giovanni Dannato about Pragmatic Dissidence Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right • Tags: ,

The Stark Truth. Listen here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Giovanni Dannato blogs at Colony of Commodus and is the author of APOSTASY and A Kingdom For the Introvert. Follow Giovanni on Twitter.

Topics:

Giovanni’s New Alt-Dissident Fantasy Fiction
The theme of Heaven and Hell as an analogy for those who are within the system and those outside of it
The importance of creating a cultural vision beyond political policies
Alt-Centrist Scum Will Rise
The importance of focusing on what works over having a rigid ideology
There’s No Power Without “Downward Distribution”
How wealth distribution has a history going back to Ancient Mesopotamia
The flaws of conservative individualism and why people must co-operate as tribes
The limited demographic of conservationism and how to create a broader coalition
Rejecting both Right Wing Social Darwinism and Left Wing Egalitarianism
How to effectively distribute wealth(ex. Smart Socialism and State Capitalism)
How to effectively take care of mediocre people and the “losers” of society
Why economic “handouts” are necessary to gain political support and maintain a functional society
How better urban planning can address economic and class problems
The concept of the urban gene shredder and how to address it
The importance of having a leisure economy for innovation
The need for a specialized economy that utilizes a wide variety of personality types

Forget the Russophobia/Russophilia: There is Only One System 6

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

In recent times, there has been a great deal of concentration on Russia as either the embodiment of evil, or as humankind’s last best hope. Russia is being portrayed by Democrats as the puppetmasters behind Trumpism, by the “antifascists” as the new headquarters of world fascism, and by some on the Right as the saviors of (pick one) the white man, traditional values, Christianity, etc. Meanwhile, some on the far Left have assumed a Cold War-era stance by proclaiming Russia to be the leadership of the global anti-imperialist resistance.

All of these points of view are wrong. The reality is that Russia is merely another player in the global-super-capitalist empire. How can a nation that is a member of the G20, and which holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council be anything else? It is true that Russia has become increasingly resurgent in recent years after the dismal period of the 1990s. But Russia is still a long way from having the power it had even during the Soviet era (which was only made possible by Western aid in the first place), much less presenting a credible threat to American hegemony.

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Trans Mountain pipeline opponents vow to keep fighting Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized • Tags:

Apparently, this is what “progressive” government looks like under Justin Trudeau’s totalitarian humanist regime.

By Justine Calma

Grist.Org

Canada is coughing up $3.5 billion to buy the floundering Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project from Kinder Morgan. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had vowed “to get that pipeline built,” but pipeline resistance groups aren’t backing down, either.

“This is a declaration of war against indigenous people because they’re not recognizing our own sovereignty,” says Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc midwife and mother of four. “So we are putting on our war paint and we are putting on our battle gear and we’re going to fight.”

The Houston-based company had stopped all non-essential spending on the project last month after facing broad opposition from environmental groups, indigenous communities, and the province of British Columbia. Canada says it plans to fund construction of the project until it can find another buyer to take over. If completed, it would nearly triple the pipeline’s capacity to transport crude and refined oil from Alberta to B.C.

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Review: Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations • Tags: , ,

By Kevin Carson

Center for a Stateless Society

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso, 2015, 2016).

I approached this book with considerable eagerness and predisposed to like it. It belongs to a broad milieu of -isms for which I have strong sympathies (postcapitalism, autonomism, left-accelerationism, “fully automated luxury communism,” etc.). So I was dismayed by how quickly my eager anticipation turned to anger when I started reading it. Through the first third of the book, I fully expected to open my review with “I read this book so you don’t have to.” But having read through all of it, I actually want you to read it.

There is a great deal of value in the book, once you get past all the strawman ranting about “folk politics” in the first part. There is a lot to appreciate in the rest of the book if you can ignore the recurring gratuitous gibes at horizontalism and localism along the way. The only other author I can think of who similarly combines brilliant analysis with bad faith caricatures of his perceived adversaries is Murray Bookchin.

I quote at length from their discussion of folk politics:

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The Last Communist City Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

What class relations really look like under Stalinism.

By Michael J. Totten

City-Journal

Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.

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The Elites and Inequality: The Rise and Fall of the Managerial Class Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

By Neeva Parvini

Quillette

In analysing the political upheavals across Europe and America in the past several years, it has become customary to talk about ‘the elites’ and about ‘inequality’. This article will explore both concepts in political and socio-economic analysis, and posits that certain elites in the West need narratives of inequality to maintain their stranglehold on power. It concludes by suggesting that we are witnessing the passing of an old and increasingly irrelevant class of elites, whose wild attempts to cling onto the old order will see them lash out in unpredictable directions.

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Capitalism is Collectivist Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

By Samuel Miller-McDonald

One of the central tenets of late-20th century consumer capitalism is the sanctity of the individual. Margaret Thatcher declared that “There’s no such thing as society, there are individual men and women.” Ayn Rand’s philosophy glamorized anti-social übermenschen who stand against everyone else. Friedrich von Hayek thought mild social welfare policy could be compared to Nazi fascism because they are both “collectivist.” Libertarians promote “individual freedom” with a level of brand discipline that would make Apple proud.

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Nobody ‘stealing’ your jobs, you spend too much on wars, Alibaba founder tells US Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

Corporate welfare and imperialism are killing the US working class, says a Chinese billionaire.

Russia Today

Nobody ‘stealing’ your jobs, you spend too much on wars, Alibaba founder tells US
Alibaba executive chairman Jack Ma, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2017 © Ruben Sprich / Reuters
Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma believes that improper distribution of funds and hyper inflated US military spending, not globalization or other countries “stealing” US jobs, is behind the economic decline in America.

The Chinese business magnate earlier in January met with US President-elect Donald Trump, who has bemoaned the loss of American industry and jobs due to the outsourcing of labor to countries like Mexico and China. Ma, however, has a different view of what is behind the US economic decline.

The Real Villain Behind Our New Gilded Age Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

The new robber barons are upon us. 2018 is so 19th century.

By Eric Posner and Glen Weyl

New York Times

The comedian Chris Rock once said, “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Populist revolts throughout the world may not count as street riots, but they do reflect disenchantment with not just our government but also liberal democracy itself.

In the past two decades, growth rates in the United States have fallen to half of what they were in the middle of the 20th century. The share of income accruing to the top 1 percent has nearly doubled since the 1970s, while the share of income going to all workers has fallen by nearly 10 percent.

These are the marks of our new Gilded Age. It’s tempting to blame impersonal market forces such as globalization and automation for widening inequality. But the true villain would be familiar to anyone who lived through the previous one: market (that is, monopoly) power.

Image
An 1880 political cartoon from a New York paper depicting Standard Oil — one of the great monopolies of the 19th century — as a “horrible monster, whose tentacles spread poverty, disease and death.”

The U.S.-China Trade Conflict Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized

I agree with this summary of the problem as far as US-China trade relations go, but I disagree that the solution is a return to retrograde 19th century mercantilism. The solution is to recognize that all forms of state interference in the economy have a net effect of upward distribution of wealth, and to act accordingly, i.e. by attacking the state from the bottom up.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

President Trump is right to confront China on the trade issue.  China has long been dumping materials such as steel on the American market, and it has been acquiring technology we have developed by means open and surreptitious.  Together, China’s predatory trade policies have devastated American manufacturing and largely destroyed our blue collar middle class.  Here in Cleveland we have seen whole factories bought by Chinese, torn down, and re-erected in China.  What were good-paying American jobs became Chinese jobs.

At the same time, America needs China at the grand strategic level.  To meet the threat posed by Fourth Generation war, we need an alliance of all states.  The core of such an alliance must be the three greatest powers, Russia, China, and the U.S.

Nor should we wish to damage China’s economy.  The world is teetering on the edge of a global debt crisis.  Such a crisis is most likely to begin in China, whose recent prosperity is built on a $15 trillion mountain of debt, much of it bad.  A debt crisis in China will quickly spread.  It is likely to end in a world-wide depression to rival that of the 1930s.  America, which like China continues to pile up both public and private debt, will not be exempt.  America tomorrow will be Greece today, with the added nightmare of hyperinflation as the federal government seeks to pay off its debts with worthless money.  That is a future we should do our utmost to avoid. 

I think there is a way out of this seeming dilemma.  What is it?  Managed trade.

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Member of House Monetary Policy Committee Questions U.S. Treasury and Fed on Gold Activities Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: ,

Washington, DC (April 25th, 2018) – A U.S. Representative posed several pointed questions to the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury this week as to their activities involving America’s gold, including, apparently, efforts to “drive gold out of the world financial systems in favor of the Federal Reserve Note or Special Drawing Rights issued by the International Monetary Fund.”

In a letter dated April 24, Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) wrote to Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, raising concerns about their policy to devalue the Federal Reserve Note, via “inflation targeting,” and requesting information about the United States’ use of, and position on, gold.

“The purchasing power of our currency has fallen some 97% since Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, with an acceleration in the rate of decline occurring since the early 1970s when the final link to gold was severed,” wrote Mooney.

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Senator Ted Cruz’s Bill to Remove the Inflation Tax from Capital Gains Addresses a Symptom but Not the Cause Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags:

Washington, DC (April 13, 2018) – U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has just announced he will introduce a bill to end taxes on capital “gains” that are simply a result of inflation.

Cruz’s inflation-indexing bill seeks to “expand economic growth and encourage more investment into the economy, helping create more opportunities for hardworking Americans.”

“If you invest a thousand dollars, and then ten years later you sell whatever you have invested in for two thousand dollars, right now, you are taxed on that full gain, ignoring inflation, and ignoring the fact that inflation has eaten away a big chunk of that gain,” Sen. Cruz said.

The Sound Money Defense League lauded the measure for acknowledging the problem created by the official policy of devaluing the purchasing power of the Federal Reserve Note “dollar” and for taking a reasonable first step to addressing it.

“Because of inflation, much of what is taxed as capital gains is not a real gain, but rather a nominal gain created by the Federal Reserve System through its policy of serial devaluation,” said Jp Cortez, Policy Director at the Sound Money Defense League.

“We praise Senator Cruz for advancing a bill that addresses a symptom of Federal Reserve currency debasement,” continued Cortez. “However, the fundamental solution is a return to sound money in America, i.e. gold and silver, as intended by our nation’s Founding Fathers.

“Until we strip central bankers of their abusive power to create money out of thin air, our nation’s investors, savers, pensioners, and wage-earners will be robbed of their assets through the insidious inflation tax.”

The Sound Money Defense League is an Idaho-based public policy group working nationally to bring back gold and silver as America’s constitutional money. Visit Soundmoneydefense.org for more information.

The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Uncategorized

I agree with the author of this article that there’s likely no compromise in the Red/Blue tribal civil war, and that it will likely the Blue tribe that wins with the US increasingly becoming a one-party state under the Democrats. Although I don’t share his optimism about the outcome of all that given that his preferred model, California, is developing a Third World class system (see Joel Kotkin here and here).

By Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira

Medium

he next time you call for bipartisan cooperation in America and long for Republicans and Democrats to work side by side, stop it. Remember the great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future, and realize that today such bipartisan cooperation simply can’t get done.

In this current period of American politics, at this juncture in our history, there’s no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward. The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago.

In the early 2000s, California faced a similar situation to the one America faces today. Its state politics were severely polarized, and state government was largely paralyzed. The Republican Party was trapped in the brain-dead orthodoxies of an ideology stuck in the past. The party was controlled by zealous activists and corrupt special interests who refused to face up to the reality of the new century. It was a party that refused to work with the Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way.

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

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