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In 2014 when I was a House aide to Rep. Alan Grayson I worked on a bill to end the militarization of police. It went down badly, with a 355-62 vote. We were opposed by everyone. vanityfair.com/news/politics/…
The politics here were simple. There were police leaders who opposed taking military-trade weapons, but enough police leaders like their toys and Democrats didn't want to tell them no because Democrats want to please the people around them not make policy.
Oh and no one ever lost a primary because of the vote. Democratic voters don't actually want what you might think they want.
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Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
Also protesters get to make their case publicly. There's a lot of merit in having an open society, even though it's messy.
Comparisons between US and Hong Kong protesters need better context. Hong Kong protesters are dealing with a totalitarian government. There aren't going to be acknowledgments of kidnapping and torture by the CCP, and anyone who speaks out is at risk. That's just quite true here.
In the U.S., top military and ex-military leaders openly speak out in favor of protesters. Please do not discount the value of these kinds of social and legal norms, they are hard-won.
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Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
The disagreement between @mattyglesias and @ddayen over whether the CARES Act 'worked' is ideological. The CARES Act replaced permanent jobs with temporary incomes. Use of terms like 'worked' obscures the disagreement. vox.com/2020/5/29/2127…
Yglesias basically likes incomes without work.

"There’s been emphasis in the media on the problems with filing for benefits and the broken-by-design underlying structure of these systems. But the message of this data is that, on the whole, it worked." vox.com/2020/5/29/2127…
What @ddayen examines is the shift in power when everyone's dependent on the state for income. He's deeply uncomfortable with an architecture that strips productive power from small business and workers while giving them temporary incomes. prospect.org/coronavirus/un…
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Matt Stoller
@matthewstoller
My solution is to focus on where power really lives, which is in the banks and corporations. I guarantee you that if the stock market performance hinged on reducing police violence things would be calm as fuck.
There's a lot of moral grandstanding going on around civil disorder but the claim of institutional racism is accurate. We have a bureaucratic and political problem based on who has the power to tax/spend and who doesn't. It's not about what's in our hearts.
In 2012 I published a piece called The Housing Crash and the End of American Citizenship outlining the collapse of our social contract and predicting the rise of authoritarian trends and social disorder. None of this is unexpected.
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