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saikat chakrabarti
The Cautionary Tale of Saikat Chakrabarti
The campaign did not turn out as hoped for the individual who helped catapult Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into Congress and co-founded Justice Democrats.
Jun 09, 2026
As those active in the field will often say, politics is a tough business – it ain’t for everyone. Saikat Chakrabarti, would-be successor to retiring San Francisco Representative and past Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is a recent case in point: a candidate who seemed a perfect fit for the city’s political scene, yet failed to win one of the two slots in the November final. What is unusual about the Chakrabarti story is while we’re all too familiar with political figures who have mastered the art of winning and holding office at the expense of developing a clear vision of why they’re doing it, his problem has largely been the reverse.
Chakrabarti brought two major assets to the race: ideas and money. Some of his past ideas had been quite impactful. After significant involvement in Bernie Sanders’ seminal 2016 presidential campaign, he co-founded Brand New Congress to recruit new congressional candidates, one of whom was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While Brand New Congress proved ephemeral, Justice Democrats, a subsequent organization he also co-founded, has proven to have staying power, continuing to promote Sanders-stripe candidates – with notable successes. Chakrabarti’s money derives from his role as a founding engineer of the then-start-up Stripe, a payments processing company. He is known to be a centimillionaire.
The connection with Ocasio-Cortez went on to became substantial, as he served as her campaign manager, chief of staff following her 2018 upset election to Congress, and a principal in the formulation of the Green New Deal legislation that she introduced in the House. Unfortunately, Chakrabarti himself did not fare so well within the walls of the House as he had without. He soon drew fire within the Democratic Caucus for sending out tweets criticizing other House members by name. Although he had previously shown great facility in dealing with both “big picture” political questions as well as the mechanics of campaigning, the curriculum doesn’t stop there. What he had apparently failed to understand was that while members of Congress may choose to criticize their colleagues by name, their staff are not expected to do so without the approval of the elected representative. Before her first year in office was out, he and Ocasio-Cortez would part ways. He went on to work on Green New Deal-type issues in an outside organization. Neither would subsequently speak in great detail about the parting. She did not endorse his congressional run.
In October 2025, Chakrabarti formally announced his candidacy for the San Francisco congressional seat. It was widely expected that the Speaker Emerita would not be running for re-election, but then she had surprised many by running for the term she was now serving after losing the speakership to the Republicans and stepping down from party leadership – and had made no statement regarding her 2026 intentions. Chakrabarti’s move forced the hand of State Senator Scott Wiener whose desire to succeed Pelosi was well known. (It had also previously been widely assumed that when Wiener did run he would ultimately get the nod of the Pelosi-Willie Brown establishment wing of the party, something that did not happen, presumably in part due to his announcing for the seat before Pelosi indicated her intention to leave it.)
To one unfamiliar with the details of San Francisco politics the Chakrabarti candidacy would likely have seemed a welcome development for the a left that has long been frustrated by city’s domination by what they considered the corporate-oriented wing of the Democratic Party – here was a big picture candidate with the capacity to run a high budget campaign. (Chakrabarti put in something like $10 million of his own money over the course of the campaign.) And he even seemed to recognize the fundamental truth that the wealthy will generally deny to their dying days – that all value comes from labor, telling supporters at his kick-off rally, “I ended up making a lot of money, and that was a profoundly weird and radicalizing experience,” but “I did not work harder than my teacher or a nurse or the people cleaning our offices ...I just won the startup lottery.”
But the campaign did not turn out as hoped. At the time of this writing the latest tally shows him at 17 percent, trailing Weiner at 41 percent and Supervisor Connie Chan at 29 percent. Chan, who much of the city’s left ultimately rallied around, might never have run if Chakrabarti had actually proved to be that hoped-for candidate. So what went wrong? Well, for one thing it wasn’t that his potential base refused to vote for a wealthy candidate who appeared to be trying to buy the office. Billionaire gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, who spent over $200 million on his race, carried San Francisco by a 38-25 percent margin over statewide frontrunner Xavier Becerra, the voters apparently deciding that he been putting his ill-gotten gains to good use.
A San Francisco Chronicle post mortem maintained that Chakrabarti’s problem was that he didn’t meet the right people. An article painting the city’s politics as special – which they are, just like every other city’s politics are special – described “San Francisco’s bare-knuckled political scene that is famously described as a ‘knife-fight in a phone booth’” to which “San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung added a telling detail ... ‘It’s a knife fight in a phone booth where you know everybody in the phone booth.’” The article goes on to say that, “Chakrabarti didn’t reach out to Tung,” and “More surprisingly, he didn’t reach out to [former Supervisor Aaron] Peskin, who is deeply wired into the city’s left.” Here the Chronicle ever so slightly touches on the real story, one that was covered by the city’s online publications, particularly 48 Hills and Mission Local.
Unmentioned in the Chronicle article is the fact that Peskin had been the candidate of the left in the city’s 2024 mayoral election and not only did Chakrabarti fail to meet Peskin, but he supported his opponent, the winner and current mayor Daniel Lurie (who has just successfully led the opposition to a ballot question proposing an increase to the rate and scope of the city’s Overpaid Executive Tax that is levied on companies with executives making more than 100 times the median employee compensation.) Perhaps even more importantly though, Chakrabarti also supported the candidate who supplanted Dean Preston on the city’s Board of Supervisors. Preston, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had been the city’s elected official most prominently championing the type of politics that Chakrabarti proclaimed that he was all about. And not just did he support Bilal Mahmood against Preston in 2024, but he donated to his campaign funds – plural because while contributions to supervisorial races are limited to $500, candidates can and often do simultaneously run campaigns for the Democratic County Central Committee, a race run without that contribution limit – the money spent on one race obviously redounding to the benefit of both. Chakrabarti contributed not only the maximum $500 to Mahmood’s supervisorial campaign, but also an additional $10,000 to his successful DCCC campaign in which he ran on what 48 Hills called “the right-wing corporate slate that took over the local Democratic Party” – ironically the same one that Party Chair Nancy Tung ran on.
It’s an unfortunate story really. The tangle of policy, principle, friendship, relationships, and future prospects that may go into endorsement decisions can be a thorny matter for anyone involved in politics, but in this case the opposition to Preston was really not a close question. For many it was simply disqualifying – after all, if he was off on this, what else might he be off on? Absent such egregious errors Chakrabarti might have been the candidate the San Francisco left was hoping for; he was talking a more radical talk than Chan does. Hopefully he’ll go on to make further useful policy contributions. Who knows maybe he’ll even try the electoral route again some time. But if he does, maybe he will have learned by then that there’s more to it than just knowing which way you’d vote on the big bills. Politics is a tough business – it ain’t for everyone.
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The Political Opportunity of a Lifetime—Don't Blow It
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Apr 06, 2026
The 2026 and 2028 elections can and should be the beginning of something transformational.
We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.
The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.
But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.
Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.
So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.
The question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick.
Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.
Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.
But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.
But you’ve got to understand how we got here.
Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.
It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.
We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.
And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.
If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.
That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.
We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.
Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.
But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.
Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.
These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.
But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.
We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.
So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.
This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Let’s back the fighters.
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'Long-Overdue': Pelosi to Retire After Four Decades in Congress
Pelosi's progressive challenger called it the start of a "generational shift" in the Democratic Party.
Nov 06, 2025
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling it quits after nearly four decades in Congress. On Thursday, the longtime Democratic leader announced that her 20th term in Congress will be her last and that she will not run for reelection in 2026.
"For decades, I've cherished the privilege of representing our magnificent city in the United States Congress," Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a video tribute to her constituents in San Francisco. "That is why I want you, my fellow San Franciscans, to be the first to know I will not be seeking reelection to Congress. With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative."
The departure of the 85-year-old Pelosi, the first and only woman to ever hold the speaker's gavel, comes at a critical crossroads for the Democratic Party, when the brand of corporate-friendly centrism she came to embody faces a crisis of credibility after failing to withstand the return of President Donald Trump, and an increasingly muscular progressive flank seeks to reshape the party in its image.
"Starting out as a progressive, Pelosi has steadily drifted to the center over the decades, coinciding with her rise up the party ranks, the gradual rise of her net worth, and even San Francisco’s transformation into an unaffordable playground for the rich," wrote Branko Marcetic in Jacobin when she stepped down from the role as the Democratic leader in 2022.
Once a proponent of universal healthcare, Pelosi will likely be remembered as one of the foremost obstacles to achieving Medicare for All, which she fought tooth and nail to block, with the support of the health insurance industry, during her final four years as speaker.
As the climate crisis grows more urgent and increasingly destructive, Pelosi will be remembered as the person who derided the nascent "Green New Deal" effort to transition America's economy toward renewables as "the green dream or whatever they call it."
As the Democratic Party's base reckons with its near-total shift against Israel following more than two years of genocide in Gaza, Pelosi—who previously backed funding for the Iraq War against the grassroots of her party—will be remembered as the person who, suggested that Democrats protesting for a ceasefire were spreading “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s message” and should be investigated by the FBI.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rampages through American cities—including her beloved San Francisco—tormenting immigrants and citizens alike, Pelosi will be remembered for her role bending to Republican demands during the last government shutdown in 2019, to hand the agency more funding as part of a power play against the progressive "Squad" members who wanted to see the agency abolished or defunded.
And at a time when Americans struggle with a surging cost of living, Pelosi will be remembered as one of the people who profited most from her position at the heights of power. In 2024, she and her husband raked in more than $38 million from stock trading, more than any other member of Congress in either party, and remained a persistent defender of the humble elected representative's right to use their immense wealth of insider knowledge for personal gain.
Pelosi's retirement announcement comes at a moment when the Democratic establishment, particularly its congressional leaders—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Pelosi's successor, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)—face historic unpopularity with their own voters.
A survey published by Pew Research at the beginning of October found that 59% of self-identified Democrats disapprove of the job their leaders are doing. A previous poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that Democrats believe there was a large gulf between their governing priorities, like universal healthcare, affordable childcare, and higher taxes on the rich, and those of the party.
Pelosi's announcement comes just two days after the most significant triumph in decades for the progressive movement she tried to crush, with the democratic socialist state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani being comfortably elected as New York City's next mayor despite Pelosi's refusal to endorse.
"This is an appropriate response to Mamdani’s win," New Republic writer Indigo Oliver said of Pelosi's retirement on social media. "Chuck Schumer should follow Pelosi’s lead."
Even prior to her retirement becoming official, momentum was building behind a more progressive candidate to take Pelosi's seat as well: Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who some have described as a "clone" of Mamdani, though he too has been met with criticism for his coziness with San Francisco's powerful tech sector.
"Pelosi’s retirement marks the end of an era in San Francisco politics and the beginning of a long-overdue generational shift," said an email from the Chakrabarti campaign.
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CNN Cuts Off Pelosi Primary Challenger's Discussion of NSPM-7
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said one viewer.
Oct 21, 2025
Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive organizer who is challenging US Rep. Nancy Pelosi for the House seat she has held since 1987, was met with stone-faced stares and laughter on CNN when he spoke during a panel discussion Monday about the Trump administration national security memo that one journalist said amounts to a "declaration of war" on the president's political opponents.
Chakrabarti was joined by author and historian Max Boot, journalist Bata Ungar-Sargon, commentator and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin, and former spokesperson for the George W. Bush administration Pete Seat in a panel discussion hosted by Sara Sidner.
The discussion covered the weekend's No Kings rallies, racist texts attributed to a nominee of President Donald Trump, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) raids in cities across the country before turning to the administration's recent strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea, which it says have been aimed at stopping drug trafficking and which have killed dozens of people.
Chakrabarti said the administration's policy of bombing boats in the Caribbean—vessels that, Vice President JD Vance admitted, could very well be fishing boats—to kill people the White House has claimed without evidence are "narco-terrorists," raises alarm about the president's push to unilaterally define who qualifies as a "terrorist."
Trump's policy in the Caribbean, Chakrabarti suggested, represents just one way in which the president is attempting to designate groups as terrorists. In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's killing—which he baselessly blamed on left-wing groups—he signed an executive order in September designating "antifa"—an anti-fascist ideology embraced by autonomous groups and individuals—as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that there is no such legal designation in the US.
Days later, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which focuses on left-wing and anti-fascist organizations and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
The memo has recently garnered outrage from Democratic lawmakers, more than 30 of whom signed a letter condemning Trump's threats against progressive groups and organizers, but it has received little attention in the corporate media, and Chakrabarti's fellow guests on CNN Monday displayed little recognition of what he was talking about when he raised alarm about NSPM-7.
"Here's what concerns me—Trump is saying, 'I can define who's a terrorist, and that means I can kill him.' At the same time, we're seeing executive orders defining whole parts of Democratic Party as domestic terrorists," said Chakrabarti. "Here we're seeing NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech, is extremist speech."
While claiming to protect the US from drug traffickers, he added, the administration has created "a task force of 4,000 agents who are being taken off of drug trafficking and human trafficking, and the actual crime, and being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist things."
"Do you think that's okay?" he asked the other panelists. "Can you put two and two together about what's going on here?"
Pelosi primary challenger @saikatc raises NSPM-7 on CNN just now:
"NSPM-7, which says any anti-American or anti-capitalist or anti-Christian speech is extremist speech. We have a task force of 4,000 agents...being put on prosecuting those people who are saying anti-capitalist… pic.twitter.com/3lj26pRIQh
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
None of the other guests responded, and Seat looked blankly at Chakrabarti before Sidner said the show was going to a commercial break.
"We will answer that question, coming up," Sidner said, laughing. "We're going to leave it there for that conversation."
When the show returned, the conversation turned to Ukraine and Russia.
"Look how CNN shut down his question and moved on," said commentator Guy Christensen.
Ken Klippenstein, who has reported on NSPM-7 and tracked mentions of the memo in the corporate press—some of which have downplayed the threat—expressed alarm that "the moment NSPM-7 comes up, [the] CNN anchor laughs nervously and ends the segment."
On Tuesday, however, Klippenstein reported that the "NSPM-7 dam" in the corporate media was continuing to break, with CNN airing a second segment that mentioned the memo.
The NSPM-7 dam continues to break, with a second CNN segment referencing the directive.
Former homeland security chief of staff @MilesTaylorUSA says: " NSPM-7 that was issued by the White House last month says that people who directly or indirectly support those domestic… pic.twitter.com/CXEVWxJpOu
— Ken Klippenstein (NSPM-7 Compliant) (@kenklippenstein) October 21, 2025
"This would be like if George W. Bush had said CodePink was al-Qaeda," explained former national security official Miles Taylor, "or people protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were associated with the Islamic State."
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Critics Ask If Trump and Musk Are 'Intentionally Crashing the Economy'
"If you think back at the last economic crashes... the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," noted one progressive commentator.
Mar 05, 2025
Are U.S. President Donald Trump, top adviser Elon Musk, and allied oligarchs deliberately trying to tank the economy in order to line their own gilded pockets?
More and more observers from both sides of the political aisle are asking the question this week as the U.S. president implemented steep tariffs on some of the country's biggest trade partners, threatened a global trade war, and is taking chainsaw to government spending and programs—policies that, while inflicting economic pain upon nearly everyone else, could dramatically boost their already stratospheric wealth.
Numerous observers have likened it to the " disaster capitalism" examined in Naomi Klein's seminal 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—politicians and plutocrats exploit the chaos of natural or human-caused crises to push through unpopular policies like privatization and deregulation that harm the masses while boosting the wealth and power of the ruling class.
Economic alarm bells were already ringing before Trump's 25% tariffs on most products from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on China—for a total of 20%—took effect on Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures and threats of more to come.
Then, during his rambling joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Trump threatened to impose reciprocal tariffs on every nation on Earth starting April 2 (because he "didn't want to be accused of April Fools' Day") if those countries did not lower barriers to trade with the United States.
@jamellebouie Replying to @C. Stetzer ♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse
New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson called Trump's sweeping tariffs "one of the biggest gambles of his presidency," and a move "that risks undermining the United States economy."
But what if that's the whole point?
"I've been entertaining this theory a little bit more lately, because [Trump's] economic moves seem so stupid and terrible and counterproductive without thinking that he is intentionally trying to cause harm," progressive political commentator Krystal Ball—who also has a degree in economics and is a certified public accountant— said Tuesday on the social media site X.
Ball cited an X
post by Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) House seat who worked on Wall Street for six years and helped found the online payment processing company Stripe, in which he accused Trump of "manufacturing a recession."
"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him," Chakrabarti added. "Creating that state is hard in a large, dynamic, powerful economy with too many actors who can oppose him. So he's accelerating concentrating money and power into the hands of his loyalists while he crashes the rest out."
Responding to this, Ball asserted that "at this point, until proven otherwise, the primary actor in the government and the economy is actually Elon, so I think it makes sense to think of Elon's incentives here and what he may actually want to accomplish."
"If you think back at the last economic crashes—both in Covid and in the 2008 financial crash—while initially everyone suffered, including the rich, out of both, the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," she noted.
"So in 2008, not only did they get their own custom bailout, but they were able to buy housing stock at absurdly low prices," Ball recalled. "The rich got richer than ever, inequality skyrocketed, and the big banks got bigger than ever."
"Same deal with the Covid-era recession," she continued. "So, while again, everyone suffered initially, there was a huge bailout package which, yes, did benefit ordinary people, but if you look at who came out really on top... you could see people like Elon Musk, people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg getting far wealthier. Their net worths, which were already very high, skyrocketed beyond anyone's wildest dreams."
Indeed, as Common Dreams reported, 700 billionaires got $1.7 trillion richer during two years of pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2022, Musk got 10 times richer, while Zuckerberg's net worth more than tripled and Bezos' grew by nearly $80 billion, according to Forbes.
"Here's the other piece that's worth thinking about as well," Ball added. "Crash and crisis leads to governments and authoritarian leaders claiming more power for themselves. They can use the crisis and the emergency as a justification for taking on extraordinary powers and for taking extraordinary measures... measures that can be custom fit to primarily benefit oligarchs like Elon Musk."
"So I don't know guys, while we're running around here going... 'can't they understand how this is going to be devastating for the economy,' maybe they do understand," she concluded, "and maybe that's kind of the point."
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Progressive Saikat Chakrabarti to Challenge Nancy Pelosi in 2026
The Democratic Party, said AOC's former chief of staff, "needs a bold vision for how to raise living standards, quality of life, and security for all Americans."
Feb 05, 2025
"Twenty terms in Congress is enough."
That's according to the campaign website of Saikat Chakrabarti, the progressive political adviser who announced Wednesday that he plans to challenge 84-year-old former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the 2026 cycle.
Chakrabarti's website traces his journey from being born in Fort Worth, Texas, to immigrants from India, to moving to San Francisco after college to work as a software engineer, to his experiences in politics—supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) 2016 presidential campaign, co-founding Justice Democrats, and serving as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D-N.Y.) campaign manager and chief of staff.
Watching U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk "freely unleash chaos in their illegal seizure of government, it's become clear to me that the Democratic Party needs new leadership," Chakrabarti said in a long post on Musk's social media platform, X. "I don't understand how D.C.'s Democratic leaders are so paralyzed and unprepared for this moment after living through President Trump's first term—and after Trump and Elon warned us exactly what they planned to do."
"I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago," he asserted, noting Pelosi's
reported role in recently thwarting Ocasio-Cortez's rise to ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
"Now, the things that defined the American Dream—being able to afford healthcare, education, a home, and raise a family—are impossible for most people," said Chakrabarti. "And the Republican Party is overtly conspiratorial and anti-democracy. The Democratic Party needs to stop acting like it's competing against a normal political party that plays by the rules, and it needs a bold vision for how to raise living standards, quality of life, and security for all Americans."
After working for Ocasio-Cortez, "I returned to San Francisco where for five years I've led a policy think tank that develops comprehensive solutions to the problems that both America and San Francisco face," he said. "Now, I want to bring those solutions to Congress. I'm going to run a very different kind of campaign than most. Instead of spending hours each day doing 'call time' with big money donors—I'm going to spend every day talking with voters. I know! What a radical idea!"
"I'll be talking about the problems we need to solve for San Francisco, for America, and also about the future of the Democratic Party—and how it can provide an alternative vision of change from Trump and MAGA," Chakrabarti continued. "In addition to daily conversations with district residents, I'll also be holding weekly Zoom calls open to anyone to talk about national issues and the future of the Democratic Party."
Chakrabarti directed supporters to his campaign website, Saikat.us, where they can sign up to join a Zoom call, volunteer, or organize a house meeting in San Francisco—and he pledged to "never to share your data with anyone, or spam you with breathless pleas for money." The site highlights that he will not be accepting any corporate political action committee (PAC) money.
"I know it might seem it's a little early to start running. But the fact is, it's almost impossible to defeat incumbents in our system—even at a time when both Congress and the Democratic Party stand at record-low approval ratings," he said. "Winning this campaign will require months of organizing—online and on the street—to connect with every single voter in San Francisco."
Pelosi
filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 midterms in November, just over a week after Democrats' devastating losses in the latest general elections. Although Pelosi was easily elected to her 20th term last year, Republicans retained the House and took control of the Senate and the White House.
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What We Can Learn From the First New Deal to Make the New One Better
Whether it is called "Build Back Better" or a "Green Industrial Policy" or, indeed, a Green New Deal, it is imperative to reject the false dichotomy of "jobs against climate."
Apr 14, 2021
Metaphors matter. As a metaphor, the "New Deal" has been mobilized both in response to climate change and in support of President Biden's rescue and infrastructure initiatives. It needs examination if it is to go from serving as a mere slogan to defining a coherent program. Compelling invocation of the New Deal turns on:
- Building state capacity for implementing interventions in the market economy;
- Navigating potential conflicts in overlapping missions; and
- Managing inescapable tradeoffs between efficiency versus effectiveness.
For a long generation from Pearl Harbor, the language of war provided the liberating rationale for mobilization of resources by the American state. Liberating, because a legitimate war frees state actors from the constraints of prospective cost-benefit analysis, where the costs are always easier to quantify than the putative benefits. "Whatever it takes" is the message.
From World War II through the Korean conflict and the 40-year Cold War, including the War on Cancer, this metaphor did its job. The overriding importance of the mission outweighed the economic calculus of opportunity cost versus net present value of expected returns. In this spirit, World War II was won "on the unorganized momentum of American Democracy," not by the efficient allocation of scarce resources amongst competing demands. But after Vietnam, the endless quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Drugs, and the Global War on Terror, the language of war has lost its rallying force. It has been debased. This why retrieval of the "New Deal" as a metaphor to propel action is so relevant today.
In folk memory, FDR's New Deal combined relief, reform, and positive investment in one great seamless demonstration of the progressive potential of vigorous government. In reality, it was complicated and conflicted. Multiple references to FDR's own statement of purpose in his 1932 campaign hint at recognition:
The country needs and unless I mistake its temper the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all try something.
The successive experiments that characterized the New Deal during FDR's first two terms, prior to the onset of World War II, illustrate the conflicts--even contradictions--that may be expected to result from improvising policy responses to crisis. Consideration of those policy responses focuses attention on three prime lessons for any administration that seeks to devise and execute grand programs, whether in response to systemic financial and economic collapse, a viral pandemic, or climate change.
(Re)Building State Capacity
New Deal: At the onset of the Great Depression, the economic footprint of the Federal Government was minimal: expenditures were less than 2% of retrospective estimates of GDP. Apart from the armed forces totaling some 260,000, Federal civilian employment at 500,000 (half of whom worked for the Post Office) was only 1% of the employed labor force of 50 million. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the share of federal expenditures had almost doubled, but that was because GDP had declined in nominal terms by almost 50%.
This meant that the new agencies created during the famous First Hundred Days were starting from scratch. For example, the Public Works Administration (discussed at greater length below), created by legislation on June 16, 1933, hired some 6,000 staff in two months. The Deputy Administrator, Henry M. Waite, subsequently recalled:
First they hired lawyers, many lawyers--more than 100 for the Washington office alone...
After the lawyers came the engineers...
Added to all these were the platoons of accountants, clerks, stenographers, and typists, until there were more than 2,300 jammed into the Interior Department building.[3]
Another 3,700 new recruits staffed the PWA's 10 regional offices.
The same was true of all the other alphabet soup of Administrations, Agencies, Bureaus, and Commissions created under conditions of extreme urgency. Inevitably the Federal programs had to look to the states for support in implementation. But, constrained by their constitutional requirements to balance their budgets, state expenditures fell with the Depression-forced reduction in their tax revenues. And so, in critical instances as we shall see, partnerships with business became a fact of life.
In one crucial respect, however, FDR's capacity to mobilize state authority was unchallenged. Massive Democratic majorities in Congress backed his executive initiatives through his First Term, even though the power wielded by the Southern segregationist components of his coalition were manifest in every piece of New Deal legislation. Substantial congressional opposition only emerged in the late 1930s, as Southern Democrats increasingly aligned with a Republican minority much strengthened in the 1938 off-year election.
Today: In 2018, Michael Lewis correctly anticipated the crisis of state capacity that confronted the Biden Administration in January 2021. That crisis was compounded by two processes operating on two very different timescales.
A generation-long effort to restrict the scope and scale of the Federal Government's engagement with the market economy was aggressively pursued whenever Republican Administrations and/or Republic majorities in Congress held power, from 1981 on. And from the Carter Administration, which initiated the first rollback of market regulations, through the Clinton Administration and even to some extent during the Obama Administration, Democratic neoliberals acquiesced.
Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department were starved of funds. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was closed. As Matt Stoller has documented, government officials were mandated to defer to increasingly concentrated private contractors with the expected consequences in terms of rent extraction both by suppliers and the consultants increasingly invited into the process.
During the four years of the Trump Administration, the attack on state capacity accelerated in new ways. On the one hand, any existing element of the Federal Government that could be deemed concerned with responding to climate change was proposed for liquidation, as was the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Additionally, whether or not Congress (as with ARPA-E) refused to confirm such initiatives, the Trump Administration pursued a less transparent course.
Across the Federal Government, new rules and regulations were promulgated to reduce the reach of the "Administrative State," deemed pernicious by construction. And Trump appointed senior personnel dedicated to opposing the mission of those agencies they had been chosen to lead. To the extent possible, they were granted civil service status to render it more difficult for the new Administration to remove and replace them.
Everywhere access to expert scientific and technological policy guidance was minimized if not totally foreclosed. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is a case in point: it took 18 months from Trump's inauguration for any Director to be appointed and once appointed there is "scant evidence" evidence that the Director,
tried to mitigate any of the administration's most controversial policies relating to science and innovation. The list includes its chaotic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, rolling back a slew of environmental regulations, restricting immigration, and proposing deep cuts in the budgets of most federal research agencies.
The Biden Administration has an enormous challenge just to undo the damage wrought in the past four years. But there is a further, transcendent component of state capacity, one that for the most part FDR did not have to confront, at least until he was challenged to pledge, during the 1940 presidential campaign, that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This is the matter of basic trust in the country's political leadership.
President Biden may be constructing a path towards rebuilding trust through success in delivering the Coronavirus vaccines to the arms of the American public as well as delivering the retroactive insurance payments provided by the American Rescue Plan. Demonstration of what a competent state can deliver in pursuit of a well-defined mission is a necessary step. So far, it appears that the President has met the most critical test: Under Promise and Over Perform. The broad public support he has earned stands in stark contrast with the almost unanimous opposition of Republicans in the narrowly divided houses of Congress.
Strategic Missions
New Deal: FDR's New Deal encompassed three strategic missions: recovery from the Depression, reform of particular aspects of the market economy, and regime change in the fundamental structure of the American political economy. A necessary condition for freedom to act was an assertion of nationalist autonomy: escape from the "golden fetters" of the gold standard and refusal to stabilize the international value of the dollar against sterling or the franc.
On December 31, 1933, the New York Times published an open letter from John Maynard Keynes to President Roosevelt. The core of the message was delivered in the third paragraph:
You are engaged on a double task, Recovery and Reform;--recovery from the slump and the passage of those business and social reforms which are long overdue. For the first, speed and quick results are essential. The second may be urgent too; but haste will be injurious, and wisdom of long-range purpose is more necessary than immediate achievement. It will be through raising high the prestige of your administration by success in short-range Recovery, that you will have the driving force to accomplish long-range Reform. On the other hand, even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action, before you have had time to put other motives in their place....
Keynes' economic genius was not fully matched by his political insight, even in Britain where he failed to win over the political and administrative leadership of the country to overt policies of macroeconomic stabilization until World War II. FDR, by contrast, recognized that the context of crisis was necessary to enable the profound structural reforms to the American political economy that he proposed.
The central policy to which Keynes addressed himself was the National Recovery Administration, Part 1 of the National Industrial Recovery Act passed in June 1933. The NRA proposed a comprehensive system of "codes of fair competition" that were required to include: (1) a specified minimum wage, (2) a specified maximum number of working hours per week, and (3) recognition of the workers' right to collective bargaining. The goal was simultaneously to restore the profitability of employers and to increase the purchasing power of employees. The means were the legal cartelization of markets, both for goods and labor services.
Often neglected by economic analysts of the NRA is that the author of its source-text was no New Deal radical but rather Gerard Swope, President of General Electric. In September 1931, Swope had proposed a national assemblage of trade associations under the supervision of the Federal Trade Commission with authority comparable to the NRA's codes. Following where Swope had led, the NRA precisely operationalized Adam Smith's famous remark: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Given the constrained state capacity of the New Deal, the industry committees mandated by the NRA were dominated by business. The tobacco industry, already notorious for its political clout, succeeded in preventing any code from emerging. In the oligopolistic heavy industries--steel, autos--the Administration's only bargaining chip, exemption from anti-trust enforcement, was irrelevant. By the summer of 1934, after a transient surge in prices and wages, noncompliance was rampant. A year later, the Supreme Court declared the NRA and other New Deal interventions on the supply side of the market economy unconstitutional. By denying that the federal government had the authority to respond to the crisis, the Court transformed a policy fiasco into a popular political cause.
As the incipient recovery appeared to stall and in response to the Court's challenge, FDR launched the substantially more radical "Second New Deal" of 1935, encompassing the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations ("Wagner") Act, the Banking Act of 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. Recovery resumed in a timely fashion for FDR's triumphant reelection in 1936: Recovery and Reform marched hand in hand. Although the extent to which the Supreme Court "followed the election returns" is contested, in the event the Court broadly validated the constitutionality of the Second New Deal.
Today: The immediate strategic priority facing the Biden Administration embodies no conflict: to accelerate Recovery from the pandemic in order to Restore economic prosperity. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, however, combines funding for enhanced vaccination programs and retroactive insurance payments for those economically damaged by public health lockdowns with a host of progressive reforms. Measures such as expanded child and earned income tax credits may be formally time-limited, but they suggest this Administration knows how to exploit crisis for progressive ends, very much in the spirit of the second phase of FDR's New Deal.
Looking Forward, Response to climate change, Inequality of income and wealth, and Racial Justice may seem bound to compete for priority. But, not unlike the first New Deal's haphazard integration of recovery and reform and President Biden's own American Rescue Plan, programs to "green" the U.S. economy can serve both to reduce inequality and promote racial justice. The specific mix of programs and the ways of financing them are what matter. Integration of such priorities can be approached by concentrating direct state funding and indirect state subsidies, financed by progressive taxation, to deliver green infrastructure preferentially to those constituencies without the resources to protect themselves from the impact of climate change. These include abandoned rural towns as much as formerly redlined central city neighborhoods.
One central initiative--reflexively recommended by almost all conventional economists--is a carbon tax high enough to endogenize the costs that generating carbon dioxide imposes on the environment. Get the prices right, mainstream economics asserts, and the market will take care of the rest, efficiently allocating resources to serve the multiplicity of demands. But resource allocation is not all that markets do. They also distribute the returns generated by the employment of those resources.
One unconventional, Nobel-prize winning economist, Joe Stiglitz, identifies the crucial flaw in the argument for a carbon tax:
carbon taxes have distributive implications. In particular, it may be (if carbon consumption increases less than in proportion to income), and be perceived to be, regressive.
The politics of a carbon tax are further complicated because the distributional consequences are not only "vertical," adversely affecting the poor more than the rich, but also "horizontal," with differential impacts on people with similar incomes but different degrees of dependence on carbon-generating sources. One obvious example is the difference between city-dwellers with access to public transportation and rural populations utterly dependent on their cars. Any resort to taxing carbon is bound to be complicated by rebates and exemptions and augmented by regulations such as increased fuel efficiency standards or even--as in the UK--by prospective banning of hydrocarbon fueled automobiles.
Consideration of a carbon tax as the solution calls attention to the third dimension along which we can learn from the first New Deal. This is the inevitable tension between Efficiency and Effectiveness. In economic terms, a Carbon tax, indeed, would be theoretically the most efficient response. But when it comes to responding to crisis, Efficiency can be the enemy of Effectiveness. FDR's New Deal offers a most relevant case in point.
Efficiency versus Effectiveness
New Deal: The National Industrial Recovery Act had two parts. In addition to the NRA, it also created the Public Works Administration with an unprecedented appropriation of $3.5 billion. Recall that at the time, total Federal annual expenditures were less than $2 billion. What is more, dramatizing the conflicts engendered by aggressive experimentation, the Economy Act of 1933 has already been passed to reduce Federal expenditures by $500 million, honoring a campaign pledge to restore confidence by balancing the budget, whose deficit was the result of the collapse in tax receipts. FDR squared the circle by establishing an Emergency Budget, which included the PWA, distinct from the traditional one.
As Administrator of the PWA, FDR named his Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Ickes was a committed progressive who had left the Republican Party to join Teddy Roosevelt's third-party campaign in 1912 and never returned. He inherited an Interior Department that was deeply tainted by corruption, most recently by the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Harding Administration: the then Secretary had been bribed to lease naval oil reserves under the Department's supervision to private oilmen. Ickes was determined to reconstruct the Department's reputation as subject neither to financial nor political influence. And this determination carried over to the PWA.
A project proposed for PWA funding passed through a sequence of detailed analyses - engineering, legal, economic, financial -, before it worked its way up to FDR himself for final approval. For Ickes, this was a feature, not a bug. His biographer puts it well:
Ickes firmly held that speed was less important than stability, permanence, and a fair return to the government for its investment.
After six months, only $110 million of the appropriation had actually been spent. Business Week remarked that "Mr. Ickes is running a fire department on the principles of a good, sound bond house."
Under "Honest Harold," however, the PWA delivered a host of great works, from the Triboro Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel in New York to the Grand Coulee Dam and San Francisco Bay Bridge in the far west, and all without scandal. The PWA, indeed, represented efficiency in the expenditure of public moneys for public goods. But measured unemployment was still above 20% when the first appropriation ended in 1935. In response, FDR turned to a man, Harry Hopkins, who was temperamentally Ickes's opposite while also possessed of relationships with those big city machines that Ickes had dedicated himself to fighting. And Hopkins had already demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in the early days of the New Deal.
In October 1933, with few signs of recovery visible, $400 million had been pulled out of the PWA to fund the Civil Works Administration, the New Deal's first program of "work relief." Under Hopkins, the CWA put more than 4 million men to work at PWA wages (well above the paltry level of relief payments) in barely three months. It was, in fact, so effective in spending its money that it ran out of cash and closed down in March 1934.
Now, frustrated by the slow pace of recovery and appropriately alert to the rise of radical voices such as Louisiana's Huey Long, FDR asked and got $4.8 billion for a new program of work relief. The Works Progress Administration was led by Hopkins over Ickes's staunch objections. It was inevitably politicized, both by the need to rely on local proposals for projects and Hopkins' own propensity for alliance with local political powers. It was all the more effective as the result, giving work to more than 5 million men over its first three years.
The broad range of projects, including public art and entertainment as well as road improvements and sewage works, led critics to label it the sponsor of "boondoggles." In 1935, Ickes suggested to Vice President Garner that "the way the money was administered might mean the defeat of the administration next year." As usual, FDR understood the politics, remarking: "If we can boondoggle our way out of the Depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of Americans for many years to come."
The PWA and the WPA exemplify the programmatic and institutional alternatives for how to mobilize resources for strategic purposes. During the first New Deal, they turned out to be complements, although they were hardly planned as such. On a project by project basis, with each project of grand scale and logistical complexity, the PWA represented efficiency in the allocation of large quanta of capital: a model for the future. Given the overriding priority of getting men off relief and into work, the WPA demonstrated effective response to urgent need.
In fashioning any comprehensive response to climate change, President Biden will need to avoid sacrificing effectiveness in pursuit of efficiency, especially as Republican opposition is likely to fixate on programs they oppose in principle as wasteful boondoggles in practice. Yet effective response to climate change will necessarily include grand projects of transformational infrastructure, where manifestly wasteful inefficiency may threaten to undermine support for the mission itself. The next New Deal will need both its PWA and its WPA.
Today: Response to the Coronavirus to date provides an illustrative cross-cutting chronicle of failure and success:
- First, failure to orchestrate access to key supplies--masks, ventilators - generated a fiasco of competitive bidding by state governments and amongst federal agencies as President Trump sought to deny a national responsibility that the presidential election demonstrated he could not evade.
- But then the "Warp Speed" program of vaccine development combined efficiency and effectiveness. Multiple parallel projects were funded by pre-production procurement contracts as well as R&D grants and covered the spectrum from traditional approaches to the innovative mRNA technologies deployed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
- Third, however, delivery of vaccines into arms reverted to the same fragmented, inefficient and ineffective process that characterized the first months of the pandemic until the new Administration brought some coherent rigor to the task.
- Throughout, the diverse array of "non-pharmaceutical" regulations and guidelines across the American landscape--and opposition thereto - confirmed that the pandemic response would express, not override, political polarization.
Even in the absence of the political polarization that has infected the American government, fashioning programs that appropriately balance between efficiency and effectiveness would be hard. Yet the difficulty may be somewhat eased because, when it comes to climate change, it appears that the public is ahead of many politicians.[17] Of the sample polled by a consortium of Yale and George Mason Universities, 75% support rejoining the Paris Agreement, 66% say developing clean energy sources should be a high or very high federal priority; 55-82% support a broad range of regulatory and tax initiatives to encourage a reduction in carbon-generating production and consumption.
On every subject, the partisan split between Democrats and Republicans is visible. As with the American Rescue Plan, Biden's appeals to bipartisanship are likely to resonate more outside than inside Washington. And it is suggestive that 66% of those polled "support the Green New Deal," although understandably at this stage "only 18% say they have heard 'a lot' about it.
In 1933, evidence of crisis was unavoidable even for those most insulated by wealth: the Dow Jones Index had declined by 88% from its 1929 high; Hoovervilles of the homeless were found in public parks across the nation's cities; and the banks were closing everywhere. The mandate for action was manifest. Today, building and maintaining the mandate will be an essential element of all responsive initiatives. What will be comparable to the New Deal is the wide range of programs of varying degrees of relevance to the multiple missions facing the Biden Administration post-pandemic.
Princeton University has recently published a comprehensive agenda for achieving "Net-Zero America" by 2050. The report presents an array of programs under 6 headings:
- End-use energy efficiency and electrification
- Clean electricity: wind & solar generation, transmission, firm power
- Bioenergy and other zero-carbon fuels and feedstocks
- CO2 capture, utilization, and storage
- Reduced non-CO2 emissions
- Enhanced land sinks
Of these, some call out for the sort of meticulous planning and careful implementation that characterized the PWA's grand projects. Such will be the case with the necessary requirement to expand and extend and harden electricity grids nationally (even in Texas) and to deploy software to manage intermittent sources of electricity. But with other initiatives, especially when they concern the gains available from mass electrification at the residential and retail level, effectiveness should dominate efficiency.
One example of the latter, referenced in the Princeton Report, is the plan for "Rewiring America" conceived by Saul Griffith and his colleagues: to bring electrification to American households funded by subsidized credit. Using electricity alone for heating, cooking, and transportation would not only contribute massively to the Net-Zero goal. The process of universal electrification would generate millions of "green jobs" and yield significant reductions in the cost of living. But the very distributed nature of the program--like the WPA--is bound to generate some degree of waste: unrepaid loans, faulty installations. Public tolerance of such necessary inefficiency will turn on broad public acceptance of the mission.
One example of an initiative that can serve all three missions would directly draw on a first New Deal model. Then, the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to Americans ignored by the public utilities as uneconomic to serve. Today, the "digital divide" reveals an inverse correlation between income and access to broadband internet that intersects the urban-rural divide. When the pandemic closed schools across the country, the impact of the Digital Divide on access to education and prospective life chances was devastating. At the same time, the positive effect of virtual working and meeting on carbon-generating travel adds to the case for a "Broadband Access Administration" that would serve all three missions.
The Princeton Report correctly recognizes the need for frontier innovation of critical technologies. Two examples are grid-scale energy storage and carbon capture and sequestration. Here the history of the American innovation economy offers a compelling model. The US Defense Department's support for all the emergent technologies that combined to make the Digital Revolution was not limited to funding R&D. It included programs of procurement--of computers, semiconductors, software--before they were cheap and reliable enough for the commercial markets. The American state pulled the suppliers down the learning curve, preferentially favoring young, entrepreneurial companies like Texas Instruments and Intel over the established giant incumbents, IBM and ATT. This was the model implicitly and effectively followed by Project Warp Speed.
There is another opportunity for the Biden Administration to learn from the Obama Administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Not only is that "stimulus bill" now recognized as having been sub-scale. But the "green" elements buried within it were misconceived. The Act extended nine-figure loan guarantees to a set of GreenTech ventures. One of them was Tesla, which paid off its loans from the massive private funding that Elon Musk subsequently mobilized. Two others, sadly, were Solyndra in solar panels and A123 in advanced battery technology. Both went bust in highly visible fashion. Procurement contracts to follow R&D grants were the available alternatives, against which they might have been able to secure conventional venture capital and incidentally avoid political embarrassment if they nonetheless failed.
One strategic issue will confront President Biden in a more nuanced and complex fashion than that which faced FDR: go it alone or collaborate. In 1933, international collaboration would have meant freezing the American state in the face of calamity, even while protectionist programs of national economic defense were proliferating globally: from the UK's abandonment of free trade in favor of Imperial Preference to Nazi Germany's autarchic determination to escape from the Versailles Treaty.
The choice is more complex today, not only because climate change is existentially global, as symbolically acknowledged by Biden's return to the Paris Agreement. At the practical level of implementation, forty years of globalization have left the US bereft of the high-tech manufacturing base that had been constructed over the previous forty years. The combination of free-trade political economics and shareholder-maximization financial economics made abandonment of that strategic resource both economically logical and politically acceptable. Doubling down in strategic opposition to China's rise, therefore, has costs that go to the heart of an effective response to climate change.
To begin with, China generates 29% of the world's annual production of CO22; the US follows with 16%. No global response to the global problem can leave out either. Beyond that fact, a recent paper in Science magazine asserts an obvious hypothesis:
Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement will require net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 and substantial reductions before then. It will also require collaboration with China, which has emerged as the global leader in the mass production of low-carbon energy technologies (LCETs). In part because of China's investments in manufacturing, the LCETs required to meet climate targets have become increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuel sources.
As the authors acknowledge, "some attribute China's rapid rise in LCET sectors to unfair industrial policies--such as forced technology transfer requirements, massive subsidies, and outright intellectual property (IP) theft." Pragmatically, nonetheless, we are where we are.
A wise man once said that political leadership resides in fashioning third alternatives to seemingly intractable dilemmas. Such alternatives may exist on each side. Necessarily inefficient US investments aimed at rebuilding at home the capacity that now exists in China may well prove the effective game-theoretic approach towards strategic collaboration. It will likely be matched by China's equally inefficient determination to reach the frontier in semiconductor design and fabrication in order to reduce its strategic dependence on the US.
Conclusion
Saikat Chakrabarti was the co-author of the plan for a "Green New Deal" brought to public attention by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has summarized the shared purpose of the initiators:
(1) Create a plan that Democratic presidential candidates would have to respond to, creating pressure on them to have a race to the top against each other on climate proposals. We aimed to have an order of magnitude increase in the ambition of climate proposals being put out by presidential candidates and, through that, dramatically change the scale of what would be "politically acceptable."
(2) Introduce (but really reintroduce) a new approach to solving climate change that didn't pit jobs against climate, but made the project of solving climate change the same as growing, upgrading and developing our economy, creating millions of high wage jobs in the process.
The tactical political initiative worked: through the presidential primaries that candidate Biden wound up dominating climate change gained traction as a salient issue. The central strategic insight is more remarkable and resonates with FDR's rejection of Keynes' advice to separate explicitly Recovery from Reform. Given the intensely conflicted state of the American political economy today, it reaches beyond the terms set by Chakrabarti. Any opportunity to serve the two missions that overlap in political space with response to climate change--reducing inequality and pursuing racial justice--may only be addressed by implementing the broad and inclusive agenda of investment and employment that response to climate change legitimizes.
Whether it is called "Build Back Better" or a "Green Industrial Policy" or, indeed, a Green New Deal, it is imperative to reject the false dichotomy of "jobs against climate." However it is branded, if response to climate change is truly to renew the grand promise and the meaningful--if incomplete--achievements of the first New Deal, it will do so by addressing the cumulative inequities that have reached intolerable levels of social and cultural and political stress. Somehow, President Biden seems to have intuited this simple, profound truth. Without any doubt, efforts to implement that agenda will be contested every step of the way and not a few will fail. But as FDR put it almost 90 years ago, "above all try."
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House Progressives Urged to 'Wield Their Power' to Fight Senate Sabotage of Covid-19 Relief Bill
"Democrats as a whole will pay the electoral price if they fail. The costs will not be simply borne by a few moderates who buck the Democrats' popular agenda items."
Mar 04, 2021
With the Senate poised to vote on a coronavirus relief bill stripped of an overwhelmingly popular provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025, progressive House Democrats will soon face a choice: Reluctantly swallow an aid package lacking a much-needed pay increase for some 30 million workers, or use their significant leverage to fight for changes.
On Friday--ahead of a final vote on the Senate package that's expected to come this weekend--eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus joined all 50 Republicans in blocking Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) attempt to reattach a $15 minimum wage provision to the $1.9 trillion relief legislation over the advice of the unelected Senate parliamentarian, who opined last week that the measure runs afoul of budget reconciliation rules.
"They should wield their power. Make the bill better, for the substance and the politics."
-- Ady Barkan
Despite warnings of the "truly dangerous" precedent that would be set if Democrats allow a handful of so-called moderates to tank provisions with broad party support, Sanders and other outspoken Senate backers of the $15 minimum wage push have not said they would be willing to vote against a relief package that doesn't include the pay raise, which is strongly backed by major labor unions and grassroots advocacy groups.
"Democrats who give up on a $15 minimum wage could easily end up with a jobs package that is too small and too late," Joe Dinkin, campaigns director with the Working Families Party, cautioned in a blog post earlier this week, arguing Democrats must "go big or go home."
"Democrats as a whole will pay the electoral price if they fail," Dinkin argued. "The costs will not be simply borne by a few moderates who buck the Democrats' popular agenda items."
Once the Covid-19 relief bill returns to the House--which passed an aid package containing the $15 minimum wage proposal last month--Democratic lawmakers must decide whether to simply pass the Senate version as is or attempt to reverse the damage inflicted by the upper chamber. As of late Friday afternoon, conservative Senate Democrats and Republican lawmakers were also pushing for cuts to the relief bill's unemployment benefits.
Outside progressives are urging House Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), to use their numbers to push for changes to the legislation, arguing that a failure to fight for the popular pay increase would leave low-wage workers without a long-overdue raise and potentially imperil Democrats' chances in the 2022 midterms.
"The failure to enact those agenda items will hurt Democrats up and down the ballot, in at least two ways," Dinkin wrote. "First, it would leave Democrats with a thin affirmative record of success to run on. And second, without serious governmental action, the economy as a whole will be much weaker, which favors the party out of power, who can run on 'change.'"
In a series of tweets earlier this week, progressive activist Ady Barkan implored progressives to "wield their power" to "make the bill better, for the substance and the politics."
"If Manchin can threaten to withhold his vote," said Barkan, "so can Elizabeth [Warren], Bernie [Sanders], and the Squad+."
The Daily Poster's David Sirota, who served as a speechwriter for Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, argued Thursday that congressional progressives must "make clear no bill will pass" unless the $15 minimum wage provision is included. With narrow majorities in the House and Senate, Democratic leaders would be forced to take the demands of progressives seriously should they decide to act as a bloc, Sirota contended.
"Yes, the Covid relief bill must pass. It includes desperately needed help for Americans who are struggling," Sirota wrote. "Precisely because the bill is so desperately needed and a must-pass initiative, there is absolutely no reason to believe it would permanently die. If a Covid relief bill with no minimum wage is voted down in the House, lawmakers can immediately go back and revise the legislation and bring it right back up."
"For those who rightly demand a serious minimum wage increase," Sirota continued, "this is the way to have a real shot at making it happen right now."
Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), echoed Barkan and Sirota in a series of tweets on Friday, pointing to both the minimum wage provision and Senate Democrats' move to further restrict eligibility for direct relief payments at the behest of a small faction of conservatives in the caucus.
"I still can't get over why $15 minimum wage isn't in the bill and why we are reducing the checks. We are literally negotiating with ourselves. Both of these things are hugely popular in West Virginia and Arizona but somehow we don't have leverage to negotiate?" Chakrabarti wrote, noting the home states of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
"A $15 minimum wage was already a compromise. Now some Democrats are blocking it... We have the House, Senate, and White House. Blocking more help for people is unjustifiable."
--Rep. Cori Bush
"Everyone's afraid Manchin will 'tank the bill,'" Chakrabarti noted. "Then threaten to put him in that position and explain to his voters why he's blocking Covid relief because it also includes a policy that is very popular with his voters. He won't do it. He will cave."
While a few House progressives have individually fumed at the Senate's decision to remove the $15 minimum wage provision from the relief package at the behest of the unelected parliamentarian, the CPC leadership has not yet indicated any willingness launch an organized effort to reverse the change when the legislation returns to the House.
"A $15 minimum wage was already a compromise. Now some Democrats are blocking it," Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a freshman CPC member, tweeted Thursday. "$1,400 survival checks was already a compromise. Now some Democrats have taken them away from 17 million people. We have the House, Senate, and White House. Blocking more help for people is unjustifiable."
Speaking to Politico's Sarah Ferris last week, Ocasio-Cortez floated the possibility of a progressive revolt in the case of a move by Senate Democrats to strip the $15 minimum wage from the relief package on their own, without a ruling from the parliamentarian.
"There's a scenario, where if our party is voluntarily trying to strip this provision, where we take a stand against it," said Ocasio-Cortez.
But grassroots advocacy groups have argued that by refusing to use their power to overrule the parliamentarian--a Senate staffer with no constitutional authority--Democrats in Congress and in the White House are effectively killing the minimum wage provision themselves.
"As president of the Senate, Vice President Harris has the constitutional power to disregard the recommendation of the Senate parliamentarian and include this provision in the Covid relief legislation," a women of color-led coalition of dozens of progressive organizations wrote in a letter to Biden and Harris last week.
"The vast bipartisan majority of Americans support this policy," the letter continues. "President Biden simply must rise up for the communities who turned out in record numbers to elect him and support the vice president in taking this action on behalf of his administration."
In an appearance on CNN Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)--the CPC whip--stressed that Democrats must continue to fight for the $15 minimum wage proposal because "that's what we have a mandate for."
"Things don't survive if you don't fight for them," Omar said of Biden's doubts that the minimum wage increase would make it through reconciliation. "That's why we're here, is to fight for them to survive, because it's tied to the survival of the people that we represent. They, economically, are struggling and we have a moral obligation to do everything that we can to make sure that we can alleviate their struggles."
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Biden's Performance Critiqued: Tackling Hunger Seen as Key Measure on the Left
"Honestly, if Biden is able to keep his own campaign promises," says Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti, "that'll be pretty good."
Dec 10, 2020
With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic driving up national hunger--in addition to other health and financial impacts--one progressive weighed in Thursday on how the left should judge the presidency of soon-to-be-sworn-in Joe Biden by suggesting: "'How many people stop going hungry' is a good one."
So said Saikat Chakrabarti, president of progressive think tank New Consensus, in an interview with Politico Magazine. There are, he noted, "50 million people at risk of going hungry this winter. So that should be cause enough to try to solve the problem."
"Honestly, if Biden is able to keep his own campaign promises--if he's able to actually create millions of high-wage jobs, get us out of a depression and the pandemic--that'll be pretty good. And I think it will show in 2022," said the Justice Democrats co-founder and former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"If he's able to make a real difference in people's lives, and get people in places like Janesville, Wisconsin, from making $12 an hour back to making $40 or $50 an hour," Chakrabarti posited, "people will vote for him and for Democrats because they'll know that we actually did something with the power we were gifted."
Chakrabarti's interview covered his optimism about potential progressives policy gains even if a pair of January runoff races in Georgia enable Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to stay in power and try to block Biden's agenda, as well as his thoughts on "the current state of the left" and what's changed over the past two years.
In 2018, seven Justice Democrats--three incumbents and the four young, progressive women of color collectively called the Squad--won seats in Congress. This year, Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) not only all held onto their seats, but they were joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, and Marie Newman in Illinois.
"The people who've become leaders of the left in U.S. politics, they're in real seats of power now. The Justice Democrats have 10 members in Congress," he said. "Now they can negotiate as mature partners at a table. They have real power. That's a healthy place to be, and I think it's a really good place to be, especially if they're able to productively create change for the vast majority of Americans over the next two years--not just wins for the left, but everybody."
As for Biden, last month Chakrabarti's New Consensus released a memo detailing how, with or without the Senate, the next president can tackle "the task of rebuilding and renewing our republic, its supply chains and productive capacities, and its social fabric--what you have aptly called 'the Soul of our Republic.'"
"After decades of unremitting deindustrialization and infrastructural degradation , along with the social unraveling that such decline always brings," the memo tells Biden, "our nation is in need of a thorough public health and industrial-infrastructural reconstruction--what you've called a 'Building Back Better .'"
The president-elect, Chakrabarti told Politico, "can essentially do what both Barack Obama and George W. Bush did with the Fed in 2008 during the recession, when the federal government--the executive branch, the Treasury--worked with the Fed to basically create a financing scheme of creating liquidity and low-interest, long-term loans to bail out Wall Street banks in a crisis."
"Biden should do that exact same thing with the Fed," he said, "but instead of loans to bail out banks, create long-term investments and loans into American industry and into jobs to do exactly what Biden just campaigned on: build electric-car manufacturing plants, build clean-steel plants, build solar panel factories, build all these means of creating jobs in every community all across America."
"And also, use our Federal Reserve bank to provide low-interest financing to small businesses," he added. "This is a way to give them the money they need to survive past this pandemic and rebuild the economy in a way that roars."
Outlining the memo at The Nation, Chakrabarti noted: "This may sound unusual to some, but would in fact be returning the Fed to its original mission as a network of regional development banks. This is how we spur the next generation of start-ups in everything from electric vehicles to artificial intelligence, creating millions of high-wage jobs, just as Biden has envisioned in his plan to 'Build Back Better.' Further, since this money is provided in the form of low-interest loans to businesses, as the economy recovers and businesses prosper, the Fed will make its money back--with interest."
"By providing the Fed with an actual plan for making money directly available to Main Street instead of just Wall Street," he added, "Biden can have not just a faster recovery, he can also show the American people within his first two years that he is fighting with every tool at his disposal to create a booming, high-wage, and more sustainable economy that is building the industries of the future. Will Biden lead the charge?"
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Refusal by Pelosi to Consider Universal Cash Payments in Response to Coronavirus Pandemic 'Maddening,' Say Progressives
"This is a total failure of Democratic Party leadership."
Mar 18, 2020
Progressives erupted with frustration and anger Wednesday over days of reporting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not consider cash payments for Americans without means-testing despite the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that has ground the U.S. economy almost to a standstill.
President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have taken the opportunity to outflank Pelosi and House Democrats on the payments, leading to anger from the left.
"I truly don't know how to describe how maddening it is that Republicans and Trump officials are to the left of Congressional Dem leadership on this issue," tweeted activist Jordan Uhl.
Direct cash payments would be a salve to the gaping wound left in the U.S. economy by the pandemic.
"We are the wealthiest nation in human history, and have the lowest borrowing costs of any major government on the planet, and thus, can easily afford to contain the pandemic and keep our people well provisioned simultaneously," Eric Levitz wrote Tuesday for New York Magazine. "All we need is for Congress to overcome its superstitions about deficits, and supply the economy with the many trillions of dollars in stimulus that even many center-right economists say we need."
As the crisis has deepened, the political ground on cash payments has shifted substantitally, with bipartisan Congressional support for the proposal.
As the Washington Post reported, proposals from the White House and Pelosi both have some restrictions, though the California Democrat's plan appears more complicated:
On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told congressional Republicans that the White House was putting together a package that would send out $250 billion in checks by the end of April, though they would be means-tested to some degree, meaning wealthier families wouldn't get them.
[...]
Separately, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports a more targeted approach to those hit hardest by any economic downturn, as opposed to money sent to every American, and Pelosi wants this done via refundable tax credits, expanded unemployment, and possibly direct cash payments as well.
"Nancy Pelosi is officially to the right of Tom Cotton on economic support for American families," HuffPost reporter Zach Carter tweeted on Sunday. "This is a total failure of Democratic Party leadership."
Pelosi's deputy chief of staff Drew Hammill on Twitter Tuesday emphasized that any aid "MUST be targeted" for the Speaker to approve it, drawing further anger from the left.
"Why?" asked New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. "If we agree that the crisis is stark and immediate, and we know that precise targeting takes time and administrative effort, why make that a requirement when you can simply disburse the funds *now* and collect from high-income recipients *later*?"
New Consensus president Saikat Chakrabarti was flabbergasted at Pelosi's resistance to payments for all Americans.
"This crazy obsession in Dem leadership with looking 'reasonable' by not 'doing too much' is about as impractical and insane as you can get in the face of a pandemic," Chakrabarti tweeted.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has proposed a $2 trillion package including direct payments to Americans. Journalist Walker Bragman on Wednesday noted the absurdity of Trump being closer to Sanders on relief than Democratic leadership.
"Trump, who bungled the early response to coronavirus, is starting to take actions resembling Bernie Sanders' proposals--monthly checks, ramping up production via the Defense Production Act, freezing foreclosures and evictions," said Bragman. "All while Dems push things like tax rebates. Baffling."
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