What Country Is Reid Hoffman Fleeing To? I hope It's Far
NY-17 is one of the bluest districts in the country with a Republican congressional incumbent. The PVI is D+3 and the partisan lean is D+7. In 2022 the progressive Democratic incumbent, Mondaire Jones, was a shoo-in for reelection. But a redistricting left DCCC chair’s Sean Patrick Maloney’s district slightly less blue so he announced he was moving into Jones’ district and Jones should go primary Jamaal Bowman if he wanted to stay in Congress.
Jones did abandon his district but not to primary Bowman; instead he moved far away into a new district than spans Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, a district drawn with the idea of electing an Asian. A strong progressive, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, was in the race, as was a politically moderate billionaire, Dan Goldman, and 10 other Democrats. By jumping into the race, Mondaire— who came in third— split the progressive vote and threw the race to Goldman, who beat Niou by 1,306 votes (2 points). Careerism at its finest!
Meanwhile, Maloney, a clueless know-it-all, a careerist and “moderate,” lost NY-17 (which had just voted 60% for Biden) to Republican Mike Lawler, 143,550 (50.29) to 141,730 (49.65%). His own, less blue district, NY-18, was won by Democrat Pat Ryan. This cycle, Jones moved back to NY-17 to take on Lawler. Though Jones out-raised him, $8.9 million to $7.7 million, outside money was in Lawler’s favor, $15 million to $11 million. Jones made a mess of his campaign, breaking with the Progressive Caucus which had endorsed him and then withdrew the endorsement, and joined the corrupt corporate New Dems. He came across as angry, confused, more interested in his own career than in the constituents' lives and what was left of his brand was in tatters. Lawler cleaned his clock:
Lawler- 197,243 (52.2%)
Jones- 173,444 (45.9%)
I knew Jones slightly from having interviewed him for a Blue America endorsement when he first ran. I liked him and we endorsed him but he didn’t seem to like me at all. I guess I rubbed him the wrong way and there was never a relationship between Blue America and Jones after the initial endorsement. In the 2022 race we endorsed Niou before Jones jumped in. This cycle we considered endorsing him but noticed that he was taking corporate-conservative positions and was very different from the Mondaire Jones we had helped win in 2020. We decided not endorse in the race. Several months before the election, another organization whose endorsement committee I’m on conducted a group interview with Jones and I was part of the team interviewing him. When I was introduced and asked him a question about a billionaire tax he didn’t answer the question but started shouting that I’m destroying the Democratic Party by opposing Israel’s position in Gaza. I was flabbergasted, especially since foreign policy isn’t something this organization considers.
Jones was a few months ahead of his time in blaming progressives for a bad cycle for corporate Democrats like himself... and Kamala. This week, Caitlin Flanagan, in an essay titled The Democrats’ Billionaire Mistake, also noted that Mark Ruffalo’s anger at the Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians was harmful to Kamala’s campaign. Flanagan consulted a young friend, a politics prodigy named Noah.
Industrial decline began long before NAFTA, of course, but it was an efficient engine for taking away jobs. Corporations did what they always do, if they’re allowed to do it, which is chase cheap labor. Their response to union efforts and worker resentment was to say, You better just keep working or we’ll send your jobs away.
“No one at the Democratic convention talked about NAFTA,” Noah said. “How could they? They’re too in love with Bill Clinton.”
Bill Clinton spent his first year in office aggressively lobbying [with his attack dog, Rahm Emanuel] for the passage of NAFTA. He curried favor with Wall Street, and in 1999 signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall regulations enacted after the 1929 stock-market crash, which helped lead to the 2007–08 financial crisis and the Great Recession. He ushered in the era of the billionaire-friendly Democratic Party, which was somehow going to coexist with— and benefit— the members of its traditional stronghold: the working class.
Clinton once held a lot of credibility with the working class, but that was a long time ago. And yet the party remains so convinced of his popularity that it sent him to Michigan to campaign.
And then there’s Hillary. “Noah, why in the world is Hillary Clinton still taken seriously by the Democratic Party?”
“I have no idea! She lost an election; her entire worldview has been rejected; people don’t like endless free trade that sends their jobs overseas; they don’t like the endless wars, like the Iraq War, which she voted for. People don’t want that anymore. She’s stuck in a previous era that people have moved away from.”
And yet she wields a particular power at the most elite levels of the party. In the rooms where the rounds of toast are always spread with roasted bone marrow and the “California varietals” are always Kistler and Stag’s Leap, and where the sons and daughters are always about to graduate from Princeton or rescue an African village or marry a hedge funder or become an analyst at McKinsey— in those lovely rooms, where the doors close with a muffled click of solidity, Hillary Clinton still wears the ring to be kissed.
She was perhaps the first person to launch a woke argument during a presidential campaign, ridiculing Bernie Sanders’s intention to break up big banks by asking: “Would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” Seeing that argument in its infant form, made by a woman who several times collected $225,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, is a reminder of how stupid and morally bankrupt it is.
For that matter, why does the party keep dragging Liz Cheney everywhere like she’s Piltdown Man? Yes, there are Republicans who don’t like Trump, but they don’t hold much sway with Democratic voters. Nicolle Wallace and Bill Kristol do not a coalition make.
One thing the party needs to learn is that no one, anywhere, ever wants to be reminded of the Iraq War.
“It was disastrous to use her so heavily,” Noah told me. “She represents the establishment, the ruling class that people rejected during this populist moment. These people aren’t popular. That’s why Donald Trump runs the Republican Party, not the Cheneys or the Bushes.”
He’s a second-year law student! Why couldn’t the leaders of the Democratic Party see these obvious mistakes?
Harris’s campaigning with Liz Cheney allowed Trump to say, as he did many times, that the Democrats are tied to the Cheneys and their endless wars, and liable to send your kid off to die in a foreign conflict. Trump ran as an anti-war politician, but he certainly wasn’t one the last time he held office. He did most of the things Liz Cheney would have wanted him to do: He ripped up the Iran nuclear deal, and increased military spending numerous times. He was more hawkish on Russia than Barack Obama was, and increased sanctions against the country. I’m not saying any of these things were necessarily wrong, but it certainly wasn’t John and Yoko on a bed-in for peace.
But all of these are mere blunders when compared with the real problem. The sign that needs to be Scotch-taped to a window at the Democratic National Committee should say: It’s the billionaires, stupid. What ails us is that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and 40 years of allowing private equity and an emergent billionaire class to have untrammeled power has created— in the country of opportunity— a level of income inequality that borders on the feudal. Changing that is supposed to be the work of the Democratic Party, but three decades ago, it crawled into bed with the billionaire class and never got out.
Billionaires are, of course, precious snowflakes, each one made by God and each one unique. But one thing unites almost all of them, be they Republican billionaires or Democratic billionaires: They want to protect a tax code that keeps their mountains of money in a climate-controlled, locked room.
Mark Cuban was a huge and very visible Harris supporter, but for a Democrat, he took some strange turns. He wanted Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, out of her post. Khan has taken on corporate monopolies that block competition and filed some of the most aggressive antitrust litigation in a generation, and has been especially critical of Big Tech. “By trying to break up the biggest tech companies, you risk our ability to be the best in artificial intelligence,” Cuban told a reporter. The response to that was so severe that he backpedaled by saying that he was “not trying to get involved in personnel.” Personnel? She’s the chair of the FTC, not a booker on Shark Tank. Breaking up the monopolies that rule Big Tech would be very bad for Cuban, but probably give the rest of us some breathing room. (On the other team, Vance said he agreed with some of Kahn’s positions.)
…[I]t’s not the trans athletes or the immigrants or the wokeism that lost the Democrats this election. It’s the rigged economy that has had its boot on the throat of working people for decades. Billionaires, even our very special Democratic billionaires, care about all kinds of things— and many of them peel off a lot of dollars for worthy causes, no doubt— but their political involvement usually comes with a specific price: that the party leaves alone the tax code that safeguards their counting houses.
And, really, after all the billionaires have done for the Democrats, is that too much to ask?
I felt buoyed yesterday when I read that one of the worst of those Democratic billionaires, anti-progressive sociopath Reid Hoffman— who influenced Kamala is the worst directions and who spent mountains of money to try, almost entirely unsuccessfully, to elect conservative Democrats, is talking about leaving America. Go! Go! Go! Never come back! Theodore Schleifer reported that “Hoffman, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on politics over the last few years, has told friends and allies that he is weighing a move overseas.” He’s scared of retribution from Señor T, though “it’s unclear how much moving abroad would protect him or his assets from Trump’s wrath.”
For the past decade or so, Bernie has been talking about the billionaire class, not the Republican billionaire class or the Democratic billionaire class— just the billionaire class. There’s no place in a Democracy for billionaires.A progressive tax structure should have taken care of that. As Bernie noted in a new interview with John Nichols. “The Democratic Party is, increasingly, a party dominated by billionaires, run by well-paid consultants whose ideology is to tinker around the edges of a grossly unjust and unfair oligarchic system. If we are ever going to bring about real change in this country, we have got to significantly grow class consciousness in America. The questions that have to be asked [by activists who are serious about developing a powerful alterative to the Republicans] are: ‘Why in the wealthiest country in the history of the world are 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck? Why do 60,000 people a year die because they don’t get to a doctor on time? Why can’t young people afford higher education?’ Those are the issues that have got to be talked about, that have got to be carried into the political sphere. And the Democratic Party— with few exceptions— is by and large not interested in doing that… There was a time in history— under FDR, even [under] Harry Truman, all the way up to Kennedy— where the Democratic Party was the party of the working class. I don’t think very many people believe that is the case today. In fact, what this last campaign was about was the Democrats doing much better among upper-income people, while the Republicans did much better in working-class communities.
Unfortunately, Trump had an appeal to working-class people. But his ‘solutions’ will make a bad situation even worse.”
Worse? How? That’s a book but yesterday, you may have seen news reports about how Elon Musk wants to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a goal delineated by Project 2025. Since inception, the Elizabeth Warren brainchild has put something like $17.5 billion back into Americans’ pockets. Born out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis— a disaster fueled by predatory lending, deceptive financial practices, and inadequate oversight— the CFPB is watchdog for consumers, working to ensure that financial markets operate fairly and transparently, so, obviously hated by the billionaire class and the banksters. Its clear mandate is— protect individuals from abusive practices in mortgages, credit cards, student loans and other financial products—in anathema to the predators. It’s been one of the most consequential regulatory agencies in modern U.S. history.
The CFPB has held payday lenders accountable for targeting vulnerable communities with sky-high interest rates and hidden fees. Without its oversight, millions of Americans would remain trapped in cycles of debt. They also exposed and penalized companies like Navient for deceptive practices, helping student borrowers secure fairer repayment terms and protections and by implementing stricter rules on mortgage servicers, the CFPB has prevented wrongful foreclosures and ensured transparency in lending practices, all the while fighting against discriminatory lending practices that disproportionately harm communities of color.
The CFPB secured $3.7 billion in penalties and refunds after exposing Wells Fargo’s widespread mistreatment of customers, including: illegally repossessing cars, wrongfully freezing or closing bank accounts and charging improper overdraft fees and other junk fees.Earlier they had fined Citibank $700 million for misleading credit card customers with deceptive marketing and overcharging for add-on services they didn’t need. In the Navient case, the student loan giant was ordered to pay $1.85 billion in debt relief and restitution for steering borrowers into expensive, long-term repayment plans instead of informing them about affordable income-driven repayment options. They successfully pressured banks to reduce or eliminate overdraft fees while pushing for new rules requiring transparency in credit card late fees, which could save consumers billions annually. They’ve been a thorn in the side of payday lenders, with their sky-high interest rates. They fined ACE Cash Express $10 million for coercing borrowers into taking out additional loans to pay off existing debt, a predatory “debt trap” tactic and their rules limit how often lenders can roll over loans. Without their oversight, these lenders would again be operating unchecked, preying on low-income families.
Musk's call to abolish it under the guise of “efficiency” and “freedom” is solely because the CFPB's oversight poses a direct challenge to the unchecked power of corporations. Eliminating it would strip Americans of a crucial defender against fraud and abuse and embolden financial institutions to resurrect predatory practices that hurt working families. What could be more Republican? The CFPB is a testament to how government can work for the people when it prioritizes public good over corporate greed. Abolishing it isn't just an attack on an agency— it’s an assault on the millions of Americans it protects. The fight to save the CFPB is a fight to preserve accountability, fairness, and justice in financial markets. Dismantling the CFPB isn’t about liberating consumers but rather returning them to a state of financial oppression. As George Orwell and Hannah Arendt might warn, the erosion of institutional safeguards is often the prelude to greater exploitation and tyranny.
Congressional Republicans say they plan to target the bureau with their own legislative overhaul to smash the leadership structure and curtail its investigative powers. Others just want to abolish it entirely.