Bob Lord

For months now, the Ready for Hillary crowd has been berating Sanders supporters about their votes in November. “Remember 2000!” “Do you really want President Trump?” “What about the Supreme Court?” And those are the less offensive arguments. What the Hillary supporters really think is that it’s just sour grapes for any Sanders supporter who won’t vote for Hillary.

Part of the problem, of course, is that they themselves are so fond of Hillary they can’t relate to how repulsive Hillary is to many Sanders supporters.

But put that aside.

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A few months back, in Dystopia in Seattle and the Perverse Productivity Effect, I described the logical flaws on both sides of the $15 minimum wage debate:

Developments related to Seattle’s recent decision to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour epitomize the ineptitude of our political discourse from both the right and the left, and reveal a dangerous disconnect from reality.

…

Those on the right are sort of “upside down Luddites.” I say this because they implicitly have a negative view of breakthroughs in productivity. They project that McDonald’s workers should be made to suffer with the introduction of kiosks to replace cashiers. In their worldview, the cashiers should be paid poorly enough to forestall the use of kiosks.

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America is not without its share of brilliant thought leaders. Unfortunately, rather than appearing in the New York Times, they’re generally relegated to obscure websites. So it is with Chris Hedges, who actually was with the Times until he was too vocal in his opposition to the Iraq war. The Times preferred writers more like its bipartisan pair of dunces, Tom Friedman and David Brooks.

For years now, Hedges has warned us of the sort of leader in store for us if supposed liberals continued to cozy up to corporate America, as Bill and Hillary Clinton do. In no uncertain terms, he told us, back in 2013, to expect someone the likes of Donald Trump.

From Chris Hedges: ‘Wall Street and Corporations Are Pulling the Strings’:

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More and more, the speculation is it will be Clinton vs. Trump in November. Personally, I’m not so sure. Email-gate is a long way from over and, even if it is, the predictions are all premised on static levels of relative popularity for Clinton and Sanders, while the reality is anything but. For more on that, check this piece in Jacobin. And Trump is by no means a shoe-in, with every Republican except Chris Christie out to take him down.

But let’s say it is Clinton vs. Trump. Consider the fundamentals.

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