Coop Scoop: Toilet Paper and the Midterms
Will high gas prices make democracy irrelevant
[Note to readers: The previously announced reformat of the Coop Scoop with new subscription levels has been postponed until mid-November to allow full access during the mid-terms]
The Coop Scoop by Marc Cooper is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
October 26, 2022
By Marc Cooper
With less than two weeks to go before these consequential mid-terms, I think it appropriate to say that at times of a national existential crisis, I would prefer to have some other, some more substantial party ally than the Democrats.
That said, the run up to this election evokes in me certain associations with the political situation in Chile that produced Pinochet’s coup (for those who don’t know, as a young man in 1971 I went to Chile and became translator for socialist President Salvador Allende and left the country eight days after the 1973 coup under the protection of the UN High Commission on Refugees).
The coup came at a time when Chile was not only deeply divided but also in a state of chaos brought on by a right wing opposition bent on sabotage and disruption. As the wealthy conservative factions hoarded everything they could, shortages became common in food, ciggies and other commodities. Inflation? Yeah. About a thousand per cent. Yes, you read that right. My rent at the time on a luxury high rise condo was about $2 a month thanks to the anemic Chilean peso.
But what the Right really used to mobilize its forces was the issue of toilet paper – papel confort in Chilean dialect.
It was in short supply. And in order to stem hoarding and the black market, the government rationed the TP and most people (other than the wealthy) had to queue for it.
Two weeks after the coup. Two years after the coup. And today, 50 years later, with Pinochet’s 17 year dictatorship now history, with Chileans still trying to repair the damage from it, you can go to the high-tone neighborhoods of Santiago where the pampered will still tell you how they miss Pinochet and how if anybody was hurt, they must have done something wrong. And within 5 minutes of convo you can bet some version of this line will emerge: “You know, we had to stand in line for toilet paper! For toilet paper.”
If you ask why Pinochet and tortured and disappeared so many, you get pretty much the same answer. “It was a civil war…and.. we had to stand in line for toilet paper!”
[Just for the record: There was no civil war. There were only government-led massacres. And much of the middle class not to speak of the truly wealthy, never lacked for anything in Chile.
They helped create the black market and would procure whatever they needed by simply buying it. One of the most ironic moments back then was a 1971 “Pots and Pans March” staged by the Chilean right wing. Quite a spectacle as the heavily made up and bejeweled matrons of the upper neighborhoods marched shoulder to shoulder with their much darker and shorter live-in servants banging empty pans while an allied pro-fascist youth brigades took to the streets with steel helmets and num-chucks.]
You can probably now guess where this is going. Look, I fully understand that Chile in 1971-3 is hardly equivalent to the U.S. 2016-2022… except… in both cases it has allowed me to watch the emergence and growth of a mass anti-democratic and pro-fascist social movement.
I don’t think we are headed for a Pinochet-style dictatorship, but when the Republicans take all or part of congress in two weeks, we will go a few more steps down the road toward illiberal, authoritarian rule. And when the news reports are written after the election, there will be beaucoup vox pop included about the outrageous gas prices driving the pro-Maga vote.
Yay! Gas prices! The new toilet paper! Gas prices. They are on the news now every day and every night. Indeed, air head TV anchors are now using the prices as overall economic and political indicators! And if you live anywhere near an American city, drive down a main street and you are bombarded on nearly every corner with super-sized gas price numbers in your face.
As I write this, I am looking at an online price chart and I see that in almost all European counties, governed by the Right, the Center, or Social Democrats, gas costs more than it does today in Vancouver, Washington where I see it is $4.79.
Same story with inflation. Our 9% inflation rate isn’t much fun and definitely puts pressure on family budgets. It is, however, somewhat lower than it is in Germany, Spain and the entire Eurozone with the Netherlands running a fever at nearly 15%.
Better minds than mine are hesitant to predict the outcome of the midterm vote but it seems we can already draw two lessons: Not much good news is expected from them. And the primary factor in what the Republicans win will be: Gas prices (Praise Jesus we don’t have a TP crisis as I shudder to think what that would provoke. So far, MAGA is using tp only as a canvas).
To be crystal clear: I have no problem with people being pissed off by high prices and inflation for very obvious reasons. As one wag put it last week: Inflation is a wrecking ball for all incumbent governments.
But one would hope, or imagine, or speculate that at a time in history when all of the world’s knowledge or at least its data are immediately available in the smart phone in our hands, some more deliberate thought might be invested in the way people choose to vote. Punishing an incumbent for something you don’t like by voting against them seems totally rational unless you are not thinking about what you are voting for and what that change will mean.
Or as Granny used to put it: Only dumbfucks jump from the frying pan into the fire. As if those voting out of anger for Republicans this fall, can somehow explain exactly which Republican policies are going to lower gas prices, kill inflation and suppress crime.
We know there are no such Republicans policies but that is not going to stop millions from making that decision.
Far be it from me to dis the voters, so let’s put the onus of the situation on the political class. It was incumbent on the Democrats (notice the past tense) to fully explain the economy as it is before the GOP distorted it and made it their issue.
Instead, they have spent the last six months running away from any honest discussion of prices increases. When is the last time you saw Biden or Harris or any cabinet member holding up a chart about GLOBAL inflation and calmly explaining this is a by product of people being given huge cash subsidies during the pandemic as well as from pandemic-disrupted supply lines. And more recently aggravated by the war caused by Russian imperialism.
I’m not really surprised by this Democratic failure as the party and the administration has pretty much proved itself incapable of generating any sustained “message” – previously known as a good reason to vote for the party.
We have heard endless suggestions, recipes and outlines over the past months on what a winning message would be from the Democrats. Should it be the economy or as newsies prefer “kitchen table issues” ( a hoary, stupid phrase that should be retired). Or should it be “Democracy.” Or should it be dissing Donald Trump Or hyping the early or later accomplishments of the Biden administration?
Yada yada yada. The real answer is: All of The Above. The Democrats should have put up a unified, hard hitting comparison of both parties, offering voters a clear choice, and emphasizing what it would mean to empower more Republicans:
Accelerated erosion of democracy.
Rollbacks of all social insurance programs from social security, to medicare, medical, ACA, WIC and so on down the line.
Rollback of personal constitutional rights from an increasingly tainted judiciary. Threats to same sex marriages and other LGBT issues.
The comparisons are endless. Almost none have been made. The administration failed early on to explain the truly sweeping success it had early on in public health, in cash subsidies etc etc. And it was downright embarrassing to keep hearing Joe Biden mumble on and on and on about his “good friends” in the Republican Party and how wonderful bi-partisanship was.
That sort of set the tone for the rest of the Dems about how far they should or should not go in characterizing the Republican Party for what it had really become: a well-financed organization set on holding power by any means necessary including serial lies and disinformation.
It's all rather ironic that Republicans should be holding the edge in an election just at time when its advanced stage four inner rot has been most fully exposed.
We should readily acknowledge the outstanding work of the Jan6 Committee, and that of Comrade Liz Cheney, who have been relentless in exposing the criminal nature of the Trump administration and its toadies in congress.
This committee seems to be the only functioning, living piece of an otherwise Zombie Congress and we are the better off for it. It has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that the siege on January 6 was not just a rally that got out of control, but was rather a honed weapon to be used in a long-planned attempt by the White House to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and allow Trump to illegally claim a second term.
And it now seems painfully obvious that it has been the work of the Jan6 committee that has nudged, nay, forced the Department of Justice to take Trump’s role in the coup attempt seriously— something that apparently Merrick Garland would have preferred to just shine on.
The lying, the deception, the corruption of the Secret Service, the news that the FBI was chock full of Trump sympathizers and did not act on advance warnings of a riot, the phony elector scheme, the disregard for the constitution among the Trump inner circle, the drunken misadventures, of America’s Mayor (of Palookaville?), the criminal insouciance of the entire Republican Party to close its eyes to Jan6, the execrable Justice Thomas and his crooked wife, the secret docs being shuffled around at Mar-a-lago, the idiot responses from the GOP establishment that this is a case of “misplaced papers,” the hypocrisy of Republican pols who sought the safety of Mother Pelosi’s skirts on Siege Day but who now claim she provoked the riot.
All of it, literally all of it, the whole oozing, stinking, rotting pus-filled sac of diseased politics has been ripped out, labelled and put on public display in the bright sunshine.
In a more normal moment, perhaps in a country whose political life was not so infantilized and trivialized by an unholy alliance of Corrupt Pols and a Dysfunctional Media, this pile of crap being made public would cause any political party to immediately collapse and probably disappear.
Yet, it still attracts about 50% of the vote. Amazing, really. And it does not speak very well of the electorate who, I’m sorry, must also accept some accountability, just like the criminals it elects.
According to some recent polls, somewhere around 55% of Americans think that democracy in danger. Very few are willing to cast their votes on that issue and Democrats have fumbled any messaging on the issue. That the Democrats are under the gun in this election., with the other party led by a lunatic and and peopled with all kinds of crazies. this election should be a cakewalk for the Democrats.
But several decades after jettisoning any notion of it being a party of working Americans, the chickies have come home to roost. As they enter the midterms, the Dems find themselves stripped of white working class support and diminishing support from Latinos and even the most loyal of Dem voters, Blacks. You don’t fix that in six month and most certainly in the two weeks left in the campaign.
I’ll bookend this screed with yet another reference to Chile. In the final days of the Allende government with tension very high, and with the military starting to show dangerous signs of restlessness, the Chilean Communist Party began a campaign called No To Civil War (the communists by the way were the most conservative faction of the Allende government). The Party began broadcasting a marathon on university television encouraging people to come down to the tv station and sign petitions opposing civil war. This seemed kind of ridiculous to many of us also in or supporting the government.
At the time, I went with a British pal to g visit Hugo Blanco, a revolutionary guerrilla leader who 10 years previous had organized an insurgent army of Peruvian peasants and who was now living in exile in Santiago.
When we asked his opinion of the No To Civil War Campaign, he sat back in his chair, lit a cigarillo, and laughed, saying, “I don’t know. If you think it is going to rain, you should best put your petition aside and instead get yourself an umbrella.”
A pithy line, for sure. I am not suggesting Americans take up arms to oppose MAGA. My wishes are much more modest. I want the midterms to be over, I want Democrats, liberals and progressives to soberly accept any losses incurred, and then I hope – against hope itself—that when the smoke clears, the center-left coalition in this country can take a deep breath, honestly assess what went wrong, and then dig in – seriously—to build the sort of engaged citizens movement we will need to avoid catastrophe in 2024. Perchance, to dream. ++
The year ahead of us is going to be consequential. 2023 could easily determine the course of the country for decades to come.
I want to have the resources available to properly cover what is coming.
Indeed, I would like to spend a week reporting only for Coop Scoop from Georgia and maybe Arizona for obvious reasons.
That costs money. Period.
In mid-November I will create a new paywalled section for paid subscribers. I am not ending the free Coop Scoop. That will continue. But I will be adding extra content for paid subs, including a projected podcast on the history of US interventions abroad.
Paid subs will have access to the podcast, as well as additional text posts. Six Ask Me Anything zoom meet ups a year.
I suggest you get ahead of the curve and subscribe now. It’s very likely sub rate will increase next month with the redesign.