Posted by subdee
https://www.metafilter.com/210619/A-birthday-In-this-economy
I received this email from Erica Payne of
Patriotic Millionaires today and enjoyed it so much, I thought I would share the entire text. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.
Dear [redacted],
Today is my birthday. Some people do not like their birthdays. I am not one of those people. I love my birthday. People have to be nice to you and you can pretty much do/say whatever you want (within reason).
Anyway, I'm 56 today, which is both old enough to know better and
too damn old to care. And I've got a few things to say... about Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and Jonathan Chait. Not necessarily in that order. So happy birthday to me. Buckle up.
Let's start with the confidently incorrect Jonathan Chait, a senior writer for The Atlantic whose piece this week—titled
Democrats Still Have No Idea What Went Wrong—is particularly obtuse, even by his standards (this is, after all, the guy who said, "If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly, do some good.") The subtitle of Chait's piece is "The party's progressives seem to think the problem is not with their platform but with the voters" and he goes on to cherry-pick little bits of various speakers' comments (including mine) from the Persuasion 2025 DC event on September 30th to weave together a story about how progressive support of various social positions and various types of humans doomed the Democratic Party to defeat. And he asserts, quite aggressively, that rather than admitting it, progressives are getting "defensive," denying poll results, and "dismissing" the "false consciousness" of "working-class voters facing economic stress." Chait pulled a quote from my presentation of the Patriotic Millionaires'
MONEY Agenda to make his point. Here's what he said:
"What's more, where voters do support regressive positions, Democrats should dismiss this as a kind of false consciousness. As various speakers argued, working-class voters facing economic stress tend to lash out at vulnerable targets. 'When people are psychologically insecure, they are incapable of being welcoming to people who are different than them,' the activist Erica Payne said. 'This is about money. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money.'"
I'm annoyed that Chait intentionally/unintentionally misrepresented both my point and the perspective of the
entire conference, and that he intentionally/unintentionally left out specifics about the conference that would likely affect, if not entirely change, any reader's perception of the entire topic. And I'm really sick of this kind of misdirection, so I'm taking my birthday to respond. But what I really want is to have a conversation with him, publicly, about this nonsense he and the rest of the confederacy of dunces is spouting. So if you know him, please forward him this email. And if you really want to know what I said, you can see a snippet of my remarks below:
This is about money, which Jonathan Chait would know if he actually listened to my presentation
First of all, history backs up what I said about psychological insecurity leading people to scapegoat others for their problems. It's not an accident that as inequality has increased around the world, so has
support for right-wing politicians, who blame groups like immigrants or ethnic and racial minorities for working people's financial woes. Nevermind the fact that "
the only minority destroying America is the billionaires."
Second of all, as we discussed in last week's
Closer Look, Democrats have absolutely, positively NOT moved too far left in terms of what people want for the economy. The complete opposite is true. People want
a higher minimum wage. They want
higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Their
support for labor unions is at a 60-year high. They want something to be done about out-of-control CEO pay. Want a wildly popular agenda that cuts across party lines? Start there.
On a side note, it's worth saying that it's not just the lack of money that adversely affects people's psyches, the abundance of money does as well. Professor Paul Piff from the University of California, Irvine is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the psychology of wealth and power. He has conducted
dozens of studies over the years that have demonstrated that people with more wealth tend to be more selfish and less empathetic towards others. Professor Piff actually spoke at our 2021 conference,
Power and Money in America, and discussed his famous rigged Monopoly game experiment. Check out a clip of his remarks below, starting at the 14:00 mark.
As I said at the Persuasion event, this is all about money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Anything that is not about money is just a distraction to keep you from thinking about money.
The problem in America today is NOT a room full of people who accept their fellow human beings in all of their beautiful complexity, and who believe, deep in their hearts, that none of us will be truly safe and free until everyone is safe and free—or, you know, all of the attendees at Persuasion 2025. The problem in America today is money. The problem in America today is that over many decades politicians of both parties have worked together to structure our economy in such a way that a small group of ever-richer people receive its benefits. The problem in America today is that
86% of people who live here are worried about the price of food, nearly
42% can't cover a $1,000 emergency expense and that
$80 trillion that rightfully belonged to everyone ended up in the pockets of the top 1%. And yes they are pissed. They should be. And, yes, when you are pissed and worried and scared, it is really hard to be nice to anyone. And the reality is that in order to maintain this unsustainable, immoral, and frankly stupid economy, the richest people in the country fund both sides of the so-called culture wars to distract people from the fact that they are stealing their money, destroying their futures, and harming their families.
And here's the thing, no one currently in charge has any intention of doing anything about it. Neither the Republicans who are currently in charge or the Democrats who were in charge before this, including in that "decade of nearly unchallenged [progressive] supremacy" to which Chait refers. Um. Excuse me, which decade was that exactly? And that's the actual problem we have to deal with.
In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by bashing Wall Street, Democrats' connections to Wall Street, and running to the left on trade and entitlements. Hillary couldn't counter him in large part because her husband, the best Republican president since Ronald Reagan, passed NAFTA, Wall Street deregulation, and huge cuts to welfare programs. In 2017, with full control of the federal government, Republicans on a party-line vote rewrote the entire federal tax code. In 2018, for the first time in American history
billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than every single other group of people in the country. Then here come the Democrats. They regained control of the House in 2019 by running against huge tax cuts for the rich; then in 2021 when they had full control they... oh yeah, didn't raise taxes on the rich or raise the minimum wage—the only two economic levers powerful enough to actually change the economic futures of working people.
Here's the hard truth. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party—as currently constructed—have any intention of dealing with the harsh economic reality that the vast majority of Americans currently suffer. They have no intention of restructuring the economy in any meaningful way. They have no intention of taxing their donors or raising the legal minimum wage for workers. Democrats lost in 2024 not because they are woke, but because they are complicit. And everyone knows it. Republicans won because inflation went nuts, Joe Biden went comatose and Kamala Harris spent at least one of her 107-day campaign sucking up to billionaires and another one publicly announcing that she thought they should pay lower tax rates than working people. They are not confused, they are culpable. They do not fight hard for the things that you want because they do not want those things. And with people like Jonathan Chait carrying water for the economic status quo, that is unlikely to change.
The last point I'll make about Chait specifically is that, on some really basic level, he lies by omission. There are two things he left out when he quoted me that I think are relevant. The first is my organizational affiliation. Chait refers to me in his piece as "the activist Erica Payne." That's it. "The activist." He doesn't mention Patriotic Millionaires, the group I founded and have led for 16 years. No mention of the hundreds of successful business leaders, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives whose perspective I represent. No mention of the 16-year effort this group of "proud traitors to their class" has executed to reform the political economy, never taking a position on "social" issues. The only time we even talk about social issues is when we explain to people that we don't talk about them, think about them, or take positions on them. We don't even take positions on how tax revenues should be spent. We think that government spending decisions should be made by regular people through their elected representatives. Our job as an organization is just to make sure that, whatever those expenses/investments are, that millionaires, billionaires and corporations pay for more of them. And to argue that most good tax policy has exactly nothing to do with revenue-raising anyway.
Maybe Chait did not mention the Patriotic Millionaires because he read our
piece from last week and knows we're right on the money about what's really wrong with the Democratic Party. Or maybe he just didn't think to mention that the group has caught on around the world with chapters now in the UK and Canada. He must have forgotten that we've testified in front of the
Senate Finance Committee—
twice!—and given speeches at the
United Nations, the
Vatican, and the Annual Meetings of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
And by the end of this year, our advocacy arm will have helped introduce two pieces of legislation capable of actually fixing what's wrong with this country: the
Equal Tax Act, which ends the preferential treatment of capital over labor in the tax code, and the "
First 45 Tax Free" idea—a cost of living tax cut for working people, paid for by millionaires. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) discussed the latter proposal during his opening session at the conference, something that no one reading Chait's article would know since he chose not to include this bold idea that could actually save the Democrats from themselves. He even failed to mention that Sen. Van Hollen was at the conference at all, which seems a little weird given all the
recent press the Senator has gotten lately for challenging establishment Democrats for their failures.
I could have chosen a lot of different ways to celebrate today, but instead I chose to sit in front of my computer screen for several hours to bitch about an article that tens of thousands of people read and probably forgot about. But hey, it's my birthday, and I'll rant if I want to.
Tonight, when I blow out the candles on the fourth birthday cake of my birth month, I will be wishing for Democrats to get their shit together, and for working people—in all the wonderful shapes and sizes they come in—to work together to beat the billionaires and get an economy they deserve. Will that take a big tent? Yes.
So if you're looking for one, come stop by ours.
As for Jonathan? He's just another trick candle, pretending to light the way.
Thank you for all you do,
Erica Payne
Founder and President, Patriotic Millionaires
https://www.metafilter.com/210619/A-birthday-In-this-economy
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