Counsel on political leadership. The Democrats need a whole new slate.

The current leadership slate of the Democratic Party needs to go. The world is changing and all we are getting from the leadership is alphabet soup advocates, tree huggers, neo-cons wearing woke bobbleheads, and trust fund babies seeking suntans from solar panels.

The Democrats have long left the non-asset holding labor class. They give that class lip service with talk of “reparations”, “closing the wealth gap” and “raising the minimum wage”; all concepts that are pretty much dead-on arrival as public policy.

Take closing the wealth gap. Democrats never define “wealth.” They leave open the perception that wealth has to do with income. Wealth is not income. On the one hand, wealth is an accumulation of productive assets that can be deployed to create income where the income is reinvested into buying more assets. On the other hand, wealth exists for the individual where she can sustain herself solely on the claims on income she owns via stocks, bonds, or leaseholds.

The reality is that households who have little or no wealth are exponentially behind those who have accumulated the bundles of twigs necessary to live independent of labor while passing down assets to their children. The sixty percent of us Americans living paycheck to paycheck will not get there via a couple election cycles and political rhetoric.

This leads to the minimum wage argument, another narrative of futility offered by the current leadership. Democrats often offer the example of the spread between the pay of chief executive officers and administrative staff, citing CEO pay as a factor of 100 or 1000 times that of a secretary or mailroom clerk.

Democrats advocating a tighter compensation spread never present the inconvenient truth: that investors in a going concern demand that the executives responsible for deciding questions of capital allocation expect a certain pedigree and caliber of executive officer and that executive officer will expect compensation to match her caliber of education and experience.

The mailroom clerk cannot expect to be paid a tighter spread with that of an executive officer.

Lastly, take reparations. I will address this idea in greater depth during the silly season, but for now, let’s look at this one portion of the issue. How will Democrats address the irony of justifying slavery by granting backpay to descendants of American slaves brought to these shores from Africa? Paying a black person today for the forced work his ancestor did 400 years ago is supposed to repair the physical and mental pain the descendant is enduring today because of the capital that was stolen from his ancestor.

As a political argument and a political ask, reparations, like closing the wealth gap and increasing minimum wage does not produce a shift in political power. Will the reparations argument bring more blacks to the polls? Democrats seem to be doing well garnering the black vote. Vast majorities of Blacks have turned out to vote for Democrats without having reparations on the ballot. The Democrats appear to be doing just fine painting the Republicans as the singular manifestation of evil. Why offer Blacks reparations or any other incentives?

Voters in general and Black voters in particular have allowed the Democratic leadership to get away with offering low hanging fruit disguised as something rare and valuable. In a political economy based on credit-capitalism where the government issues debt in order to raise capital for financing vote getting programs and wars, Democratic leadership should have as its primary focus strengthening the thread of the nation-state via its capital allocation (banking) system.

As I see it, there are three primary classes of voter in this political economy: the productive asset class, the paper asset class, and the non-asset class.

The productive asset class owns farming, fishing, and mining, and other primary economy machinery and facilities which the class uses to produce goods and services. The productive asset class also owns or leases the land these facilities are located on and hires the labor that uses machinery and facilities.

The paper asset class lives off of the claims on income (residuals, dividends, coupons, rents) produced by stocks, bonds, and leases. They may hold this paper long term as investors or trade these pieces of paper over a shorter term.

Finally, the non-asset class rely on wages for sustenance, exchange currency (dollars) for goods and services, live day to day, and need low-rate credit to fill in the gaps between pay days.

Government’s validity is derived by how best it maintains the cohesion of these classes. Government is the State’s primary tool for managing people.

And rather than government managing people by implementing party platforms that have nothing to do with credit-capitalism, the focus should be on changing the rules for how capital flows through the banking utility system.

This modification will not occur, especially in favor of the non-asset owning and productive asset classes until we have new Democratic Party leadership that understands the reality of how this political economy works.

Alton Drew

23 April 2023

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