Plastic Straws and Socialism As 2020’s Straw Man

California Congressman Devin Nunes (Ru-CA 22) took to Twitter on Saturday complaining about a waitress asking his table if they wanted straws for their beverages, ending his comment with “Welcome to Socialism in California!”

Nunes, who spent much of 2018 running interference for President Trump to minimize the scope and impact of investigations by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was rehearsing the GOP’s main talking point in the 2020 elections, namely slinging the term “socialism” early and often.

His pitiful plea about having to request a straw stems from the Republican tenet holding dirty energy production as a benefit while ignoring the ongoing dangers of climate change. And, of course, the Congressman will get points from the Trumpanista camp for bashing California.

https://twitter.com/DevinNunes/status/1104581433618661376

Last year Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1884, prohibiting full-service restaurants from providing single-use plastic straws unless they are requested.

“It is a very small step to make a customer who wants a plastic straw ask for it,” Brown wrote in his signing message, “And it might make them pause and think again about an alternative. But one thing is clear, we must find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate single-use plastic products.”

Single use plastic such as straws, plastic soda cups and cutlery represent the greatest source of plastic pollution, with 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flowing into oceans annually from coastal regions. Roughly 8% of the world’s oil production is used to make plastic and power the manufacturing of it, a figure is projected to rise to 20% by 2050.

A major push is underway in the U.S.to produce more plastics and other petrochemicals. The goal? To create new demand from industry for the raw materials produced by fracked shale wells.

Via Resilience.Org, an organization concerned with the interconnected environmental, energy, economic, and equity crises of the 21st century:

Virtually all plastic — 99 percent of it, according to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) report — comes from fossil fuels. And a growing slice comes from fracked oil and gas wells and the natural gas liquids (NGLs) they produce.

The report concluded that plastics bring toxic or carcinogenic health risks to people at every stage.

People can be sickened not only when plastics are produced, in other words, but also while plastic is actively used by consumers and then again after it’s thrown out, where plastic trash often breaks down into smaller and smaller bits that can contaminate the food chain and make its way into people’s bodies.

Increasing plastics production also speaks to the dirty little secret about fracking, namely that even though the fracking industry has set new records for U.S. oil production, it continues to lose huge amounts of money.

https://twitter.com/rcpopple/status/1055190252392919040

It’s another shell game, funded by those same friendly banks that brought us the housing bubble leading into the last recession.

So, yes, Rep. Dunes is right, we are talking about impending socialism here. It’s socialism for the rich, where the many pay for the screw ups of the few, who get off scot free and pay themselves bonuses on their way out to some tax free island.

https://twitter.com/DevinNunes/status/1104896245561155586

***

“Socialism” will be the Republican Party’s pejorative term for Democrats and the policy proposals brought forth by candidates for the 2020 elections.

The tactics are from an old playbook, dating back to the great depression. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out in 2015:

And, by the way, almost everything [FDR] proposed was called “socialist.” Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country was “socialist.” The concept of the “minimum wage” was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as “socialist.” Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.” Yet, these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.

Here’s a little more context via The Nation:

The Republican Party is currently firmer in its accusation that the Democrats are steering the nation “towards socialism” than it was during Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare of the 1950s, when the senator from Wisconsin was accusing Harry Truman of harboring Communist Party cells in the government. Truman had stirred conservative outrage by arguing that the government had the authority to impose anti-lynching laws on the states and by proposing a national healthcare plan.

But what really bugged the Republicans was that Truman, who had been expected to lose in 1948, had not just won the election but restored Democratic control of Congress. To counter this ominous electoral trend, conservative Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that their campaign slogan in that year’s Congressional elections would be “Liberty Against Socialism.” They then produced an addendum to their national platform, much of which was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging that Truman’s Fair Deal “is dictated by a small but powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who have no concept of the true foundation of American progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests and real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.”

Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his policies were outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform, which had proven to be wildly popular with the electorate. “If our program was dictated, as the Republicans say, it was dictated at the polls in November 1948. It was dictated by a ‘small but powerful group’ of 24 million voters,” said the president, who added, “I think they knew more than the Republican National Committee about the real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.”

All of this context brings me to my final points for today.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism bashers lost their boogeyman. Post Cold War voters don't view it as the ideology of our enemies, even when Venezuela's Maduro is made into the political piňata of the moment.

Make America Great Again by “freeing” the market may get the juices flowing for the Trumpian faithful, but for people saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, working a job with mediocre wages and few benefits, and no obvious way out from under, capitalism just isn’t looking so hot.

Here’s Paul Waldman, writing at the Washington Post op-ed page, to bring it all home:

...when they hear the word "socialist," Americans are more likely to think of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Joseph Stalin or Fidel Castro. In other words, someone who admires the social democratic systems they have in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, and would like to see something similar here: a capitalist economy, but one that isn't structured so much to benefit the wealthiest elite and includes a stronger system of social supports. Which isn't nearly as terrifying.

If Trump decides to run against socialism in 2020, he’ll be repeating what Republicans did over the past few decades, except condensed into the space of a year or so. The policies he’ll be describing as socialist, such as higher taxes for the wealthy and giving more people health coverage, already have wide support, and with his own low approval ratings he’s unlikely to persuade people to change their views on those policies. Instead of destroying the Democratic nominee by pinning on her a label that everyone agrees is horrific, he’s much more likely to make socialism more popular than ever.

Which is why actual socialists — or democratic socialists, who are almost certainly far greater in number in the United States right now than the pure variety — should be more than happy to see Trump wage a war on socialism. It’s the best advertisement they can get.

***

Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post mailed to you check out the simple subscription form and the right side of the front page.

Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com