The Unintended Consequence of Dianne Feinstein

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A politically savvy acquaintance says while she has admired Dianne Feinstein, she was disappointed in Feinstein's response to a request for reparations for slavery, never mind for hugging Lindsay Graham. She called Feinstein "mealy mouthed."... Harsh words indeed from the politically savvy!

My acquaintance attends a relatively liberal Methodist church, and believes in action, not just talk, so it would be exactly in her wheelhouse to have the church recruit politically active community members to make a more compassionate society. And that's exactly what happened in the Bay Area - a local council of churches surveyed their members to find people already concerned with public policy, and found Dianne Feinstein. This church council was among those urging her to run for office, first for the San Francisco board of supervisors. There, she was the board's first female president, and after mayor Moscone was assassinated by Dan White, she became the mayor of San Francisco, beginning her ascent to the U.S. Senate.

For those who don't remember the history, I recommend Rick Perlstein's Reaganland. In it he tells about the assassination of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and a trial in which the greatest sympathy was extended to the assassin. We may not see it now, but in the '70s, gays and marijuana smokers in San Francisco were often persecuted by law enforcement.

In that assassination trial, it appeared as if the prosecution deliberately failed to make its case, while the defense persuaded a jury that White's junk food diet excused climbing in through a window to avoid metal detectors, then firing a gun loaded (and reloaded) with hollow point bullets at Moscone and gay supervisor Harvey Milk. The gay community was outraged at the "twinkie defense," but White got sentenced for manslaughter, not premeditated murder, and he got out on parole early.

After the assassinations of Moscone and Milk came "...Jonestown, within the space of ten awful days. 'What scares me about the City Hall murders,' a gay journalist observed, 'is that they were so much like Jonestown. They were both cult murders. In Jones it was a suicide cult. In San Francisco it was a cop cult.'

"The new mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who had mentored Supervisor White, appeared to side with the cop cult. She gave an interview to Ladies' Home Journal arguing against too much gay visibility: 'It's fine for us to live here respecting each other's lifestyles, but it doesn't mean imposing them on others....She fired [then San Francisco Police] Chief Gain [who was trying to make the police less abusive to gays], hiring an old-line Irish cop to replace him. Cops declared open season on gays: violent raids, random ID checks at bars, wearing T-shirts reading 'FREE DAN WHITE' visible under their uniforms." (from Reaganland, by Rick Perlstein)

Somehow that doesn't sound like the compassion churches would preach. So Feinstein's votes for the Iraq War, and other questionable positions are not exactly outliers. In fairness, her political instincts have kept the 87-year-old Senator in one political office or another for nearly five decades now, so it may be quibbling to say that sanctioning murders by her political protege (Dan White), or sanctioning an illegal war in the Middle East entirely represent her public policy leanings, but it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate either. For example, she voted to make the surveilance state (the "Patriot Act") permanent. A long political career would give anyone reason for regret--and Feinstein does say she regrets her Iraq vote.

As for reparations - the opposition to paying African Americans (more correctly "Kidnapped Americans") for their ancestors' suffering usually devolves to the objections about fairness and "Fiscal Responsibility^tm". "We didn't own slaves lately, and someone who doesn't deserve it in the present will get compensation" is the fairness argument, but one cannot dispute that the enormous wealth of the Southeastern U.S. originated with slave labor. That region's present occupants didn't exactly deserve that, either. In slave times, there were more millionaires per capita in Mississippi than in New York; paying Kidnapped Americans for their ancestors' work is just redressing the historical balance.

The "Fiscal Responsibility^tm" argument assumes the federal government--a sovereign, fiat money creator with a floating exchange rate--is somehow fiscally constrained. "We must collect taxes before we can have new programs" is Nancy Pelosi's "Pay-Go" principle, and Feinstein's own stated position that we must balance the budget. 

But where do people get the dollars to pay taxes if government doesn't spend them into the economy first? It can't be "tax & spend." The government must "spend first, then retrieve some dollars in taxes." Among other things, this means the monopoly producer of legal dollars is distinct from households, and is fiscally unconstrained.

If you doubt that lack of constraint, please tell us where our government got the $16 - $29 trillion that bailed out the banks in 2007-8. The figures are from the Federal Reserve's audit, mandated by the congressional odd couple: Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul. No tax rise accompanied this extension of credit to the financial sector, and no inflation surge followed either.

So why don't we have our fiscally unconstrained government direct the world's most powerful economy to provide economic justice? Two words: Labor discipline. The message austerity sends is "You had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty, perhaps even homelessness and starvation...and if you're extra ornery, we'll put you in a cage." The U.S. puts people in cages at five times the world's per-capita average. It's not to prevent crime--demographically identical Canadians have about the same as U.S. crime--it's for labor discipline.

So bipartisan, and entirely unnecessary federal fiscal austerity Feinstein proposes is the whip in the hands of the smug patricians who run public policy. Thanks to the pandemic, though, this mealy-mouthed "Fiscal Responsibility^tm" excuse is wearing thin. Perhaps Senator Feinstein's welcome in California politics is wearing thin too.

Meanwhile, what do we call the dollars left out in the economy, not retrieved in taxes? Answer #1: The dollar financial assets of the population (i.e. their savings). Answer #2: National 'debt.' It's analogous to a bank account: That's the depositor's asset, but to the bank, it's a liability. 

The good news is that the Methodist's 2020 "Social Principals" no longer call for reducing national savings accounts...er, I mean national 'debt.' The Methodists are no longer in league with the austerity practices of the "Fiscal Responsibility^tm"crowd. That's something to celebrate.