Feel the Bern

[Yonadav]

I don't think that there would be any chance at all that Bernie would ask Howard Schultz the billionaire to be his running mate. They are not ideologically compatible. Schultz is a fan of the New Dems and wants them to get back into power.

Is there really such a wide divide between the various sub-factions of the Demcratic party? I don't think so. Their biggest sticking point is basically their support for free trade vs a more protectionist approach to it. Those position can be conciliated by adding minimal wage and work conditions to negotiations about free trade and limit them to similarly developped countries like the EU, Japan, Canada, the UK and a few others. Political candidacy should not be domitated by dogmatism. It weakens the broad alliances required to win in a two party system.

Yeah, there's a pretty wide divide between the New Democrats and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. New Democrats are basically Reaganites with some socially liberal positions mixed in. The New Dems are like the Republican Party of the Reagan era. It's not just about trade. It's tax policies. It's social safety net policies. Pretty much everything. The Democratic Party is pretty much split into two different parties that are only united by their opposition to the Republicans.

I think that your views on trade are naive. During the renegotiation of NAFTA, one of the sticking points was wages that would be paid to Mexican auto workers. The new NAFTA requires them to be paid something like $15 an hour. There was a good deal of discussion about it being sort of a moot point, because there is no way of enforcing it.  An awful lot of the things in trade agreements are just words on paper.  

The Green New Deal will almost certainly require us to engage in a good deal of protectionism. Strict environmental regulation is something that inherently needs to be protected. You can't expect someone to invest a lot of money into manufacturing that is going to be subject to strict environmental regulatation, and then tell them that people in other nations who aren't subject to such strict environmental regulation are going to be competing freely with them. We've already fucked up on this concept royally.

And most economists agree that protectionism is necessary when a nation is trying to build up its industry. South Korea was fiercely protective of its industries while building them up. They dropped their protections after they had built up a productive advantage. If we are going to establish green industries, we are going to need to be fiercely protective of them.