The Absence of the Left in U.S. Politics

For convenience, we often think of politics in terms of "right" and "left"--a classification that stems from the position of legislators in the chambers of the French legislature when the right were royalists and the left were not. For our purposes here, though, it's probably more accurate to call the left the party of labor, while the right is the party of business or capital. 

Complaints about the predominance of the right (capital) over the left (labor), elicit protests from those capital has convinced. And the spending on marketing to convince the public that capital (the right) is a persecuted minority virtually no limit. The Kochs, the epitome of the political right, spent a reported $889 million on politics in 2016, for just one example.

The Kochs are extremists, too. Their father, Fred Koch, patented the processes by which we still refine crude oil into useful products. As the CEO of Koch Industries, Fred built refineries all over the world, including for Hitler and Stalin. He reportedly hated the Russians, but loved the Germans. He even hired a German nanny to raise his sons. That nanny was a Nazi--no, not a stern disciplinarian, a member of Hitler's party. 

So raised-by-a-Nazi Kochs are pretty hard right, and helped found numerous right-wing think tanks, including Cato (libertarian), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heritage, Manhattan, Mercator, etc. They also were founding members of the John Birch Society--an organization that called Dwight Eisenhower a commie (or commie dupe). For a little perspective, I'd say Attilla the Hun would be slightly to the left of the Kochs. 

Complain about the dominance of right-wing propaganda, and you'll hear "What about George Soros?"...the "lefty" who supposedly balance this right-wing bias. But Soros' political spending in 2016 was reportedly only $27 million--a lot of money, but Kochs spent more than 30 times more in that election. Soros is also no friend of labor. He made his bones speculating in currency, and is a capitalists' capitalist. 

An actual lefty would be someone like Bernie Sanders, a New Deal Democrat who understand that monopolies in particular are best run by the state. This is evident in the Sacramento region where a  publicly-owned utility (SMUD) supplies power. Privately-owned PG&E supplies the nearby areas with electricity. SMUD is 35% cheaper, and its executives are not consulting with criminal attorneys about their lack of maintenance leading to negligent homicides as their power lines spark forest fires. Lest you think Sacramento is just getting what it's paid for, SMUD's chief executive is paid far less than PG&E's CEO too.

Single payer healthcare--something that Sanders and a majority of the American population support--would also be cheaper and better. It's not at all controversial that Canadians have longer life spans and pay roughly half what the U.S. spends, per-capita, on health care.

The "progressive" ideas discussed or supported by Biden--from protecting the climate to providing child care, from better health care to fairer taxation, from gun control to voting rights--are all supported by two thirds or more of Americans. 

Yet pundits typically complain about anything resembling labor-friendly or socialism-based as though it would be more costly, or more bureaucratic, or just plain bad. Even the word ("socialism") is enough to turn most people off. The preponderance of news simply ignores the possibility.