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welcome to reality trivia
demo politics
january 2022
President barack obama: “You get the politicians you deserve,”
“And if you don’t vote and you don’t participate and you don’t pay attention, then you’ll get policies that don’t reflect your interests.”
The comments came during a discussion about leadership.
“The mark of a good leader is somebody who is able to empower other people,”
“So often we think of leadership as somebody at the top who is ordering other people around … but it turns out, for me at least, what made me understand leadership was when I could see somebody who thought they didn’t have a voice, thought they didn’t have influence or didn’t have power, and teach them how to speak up on the things that were affecting their lives.'
the democratic party
There are no substantial political differences between the Democrats and Republicans. We have only the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism. It only depends on how you want it dressed up. -The One-Choice Election
BY CHRIS HEDGES
demo headlines
august
ECONOMY Democrats’ New Version of Infrastructure Bill Claws Back Trump Tax Cuts for Rich
MARIJUANA Dems Introduce Bill to Decriminalize Pot, “Restore Lives” Harmed by Prohibition
setting the agenda for the corporate democratic party!!!
No More Fucking Around. We elected you. Start acting like it (what I want to see today from Dems
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin @ECMcLaughlin (Founder, Gaia Project for Women's Leadership) - du
Instead of shouting into the ethers and dropping f-bombs all over Twitter, I'm gonna tell you what I want to see today from the Dems.
1) I want immediate implementation of @ElieNYC's brilliant idea of federalizing a force of OB/GYNs in Texas.
2) I want Manchin and Sinema stripped of committee assignments unless and until they vote to end the filibuster.
3) I want Dianne Feinstein pressured into resignation before the Sept. 14 recall election deadline so that Gavin Newsom can appoint her successor and this stupid charade of pretend confidence can end.
4) I want the DSCC and the DCCC to play hardball. No money for campaigns if you vote outside the agenda. If McConnell can make this happen, so can we.
5) I don't want to hear the word bipartisanship ever again from President Biden. Not ever. Not ever ever ever.
6) I want Roe v. Wade codified into federal law with legislation introduced TODAY.
7) I want the Green New Deal passed and codified.
8) While we're at it, NATIONWIDE MASK MANDATE.
9) I want every member of Congress who spoke at the 1/6 rally stripped of Committee assignments.
10) I want every member of Congress who voted to overturn the election stripped of Committee assignments.
11) I want the sergeant at arms of the Senate and the House empowered to detain anyone who interferes with the 1/6 committee, including by defying subpoenas. This power was used in the past and needs to be reinstated for 1/6 witnesses, including Reps.
That's for starters. But I'm just gonna say this: we've seen what they can and will do. We've known it forever and now it's bearing fruit.
NO MORE FUCKING AROUND. WE ELECTED YOU. START ACTING LIKE IT.
VOTING RIGHTS. I meant to include and did not. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate today or write the tombstone for America.
And the For the People Act, obviously.
LET’S GO.
1) I want immediate implementation of @ElieNYC's brilliant idea of federalizing a force of OB/GYNs in Texas.
2) I want Manchin and Sinema stripped of committee assignments unless and until they vote to end the filibuster.
3) I want Dianne Feinstein pressured into resignation before the Sept. 14 recall election deadline so that Gavin Newsom can appoint her successor and this stupid charade of pretend confidence can end.
4) I want the DSCC and the DCCC to play hardball. No money for campaigns if you vote outside the agenda. If McConnell can make this happen, so can we.
5) I don't want to hear the word bipartisanship ever again from President Biden. Not ever. Not ever ever ever.
6) I want Roe v. Wade codified into federal law with legislation introduced TODAY.
7) I want the Green New Deal passed and codified.
8) While we're at it, NATIONWIDE MASK MANDATE.
9) I want every member of Congress who spoke at the 1/6 rally stripped of Committee assignments.
10) I want every member of Congress who voted to overturn the election stripped of Committee assignments.
11) I want the sergeant at arms of the Senate and the House empowered to detain anyone who interferes with the 1/6 committee, including by defying subpoenas. This power was used in the past and needs to be reinstated for 1/6 witnesses, including Reps.
That's for starters. But I'm just gonna say this: we've seen what they can and will do. We've known it forever and now it's bearing fruit.
NO MORE FUCKING AROUND. WE ELECTED YOU. START ACTING LIKE IT.
VOTING RIGHTS. I meant to include and did not. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate today or write the tombstone for America.
And the For the People Act, obviously.
LET’S GO.
the corporate democratics party!!!
OP-ED ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH
Democrats Propose Medicare for a Few More Instead of Demanding Medicare for All
BY Ana Malinow, Truthout
PUBLISHED August 6, 2021
Health care activists were uniformly disappointed, albeit not surprised, when President Joe Biden, in initially proposing the American Families Plan, failed to include in the legislation his major campaign promise to prioritize expanding Medicare.
The response from Democrats was as swift as it was tepid. Instead of fighting for real health care reform, the House and Senate wrote letters respectfully requesting the administration to tweak the plan around the edges: lower the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60; decrease prescription drug costs; place an out-of-pocket cap on health care costs; and expand coverage to include dental, vision and hearing.
The letter failed to acknowledge the administration’s own desire to make increases to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange subsidies permanent, not to mention expanding Medicare to cover everyone, and include all medically necessary services, prescription drug coverage and long-term care. This should be what Congress is fighting for as COVID-19’s Delta variant brings the pandemic raging back with a fourth wave. Shamefully, they are not.
Why are progressive Democrats proposing such incrementalist reforms? What does this signify for Medicare for All supporters, and what are the prospects for such a program in the future? Rather than inspire, Democrats scold and deflate the energy necessary to win. Rather than organize, they ask for crumbs, get even less, and then blame activists for not supporting their “leaders’” plans.
Even the $3.5 trillion package Democrats are assembling, which addresses some health care concerns, still falls far short of what is needed to save a health care system besieged by a pandemic.
Weak Proposals Leave Much on the Table
Lowering the eligibility age to 60 sounds good. After all, it would add 23 million Americans to Medicare. However, of those, 75 percent already have private health insurance, 12 percent have Medicaid and 7.8 percent are uninsured. In other words, only 1.8 million individuals in this age group would gain health coverage that do not already have it. The proposal is even weaker than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, when she offered to lower the age to 50 or 55 even without the presence of a global pandemic.
It is unclear what the bulk of the new beneficiaries, over 17 million individuals who have private health insurance through their employers, would choose to do. Do they buy supplemental coverage, or will they become cherry-picked by Medicare Advantage plans?
The Office of the Inspector General reported that private Medicare Advantage plans continue to inflate risk-adjustment payments, cheating tax payers out of billions of dollars every year. Medicare Advantage companies, ready to enroll a healthier, younger group, are watering at the mouth with yet another proposal to increase profits and continue to drain the Medicare Trust Fund. (We are told funding will not come from the Trust Fund, although it is unclear how that would work.)
Are Democrats using tax dollars to expand Medicare simply to increase profits of corporations? Is this the message they want to send to the public as we gear up for midterm elections?
Equally unknown is what would happen to the 3 million people on Medicaid who would be newly eligible for Medicare. True, these low-income beneficiaries will have access to broader networks under traditional Medicare, but will certainly be exposed to more out-of-pocket costs, including premiums, deductibles, co-pays, prescription drug costs, and for some, a lack of dental, hearing or vision coverage.
Only a criminal health care system would deny dental, vision and hearing coverage at the time in one’s life when these are needed the most. No doubt Medicare needs to be improved, but this incrementalist approach makes it harder to mobilize a public that supports improved and expanded Medicare for All.
A program that only produces a small (and questionable) net gain of coverage for some, leaves the majority of the population without any incentive to join the fight. The July 24 rallies in over 50 cities, largely shunned by Democrats and corporate media, show people are ready to move for Medicare for All, not Medicare for a Few More.
The Fight That Will Mobilize the Nation
Democrats’ request, which the president agrees with, states that Medicare should have the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and maintain the savings that would be achieved by such price negotiations — up to $450 billion over a decade — to pay for the improvements and expansions to Medicare. Sen. Bernie Sanders and 16 other Democratic senators write that their demands present “an historic opportunity to make the most significant expansion of Medicare since it was signed into law.”
Really? Democrats can make this a truly historic opportunity by doing everything they can to instead pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021, which would establish a national health insurance program for all U.S. residents from birth or residency; cover all medically necessary services including inpatient, outpatient, prescription drugs, mental health and substance use services, reproductive health care, gender-affirming care, dental, vision, hearing, physical therapy and long-term care; eliminate all premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance; abolish obscene profit-making from our health care system; reduce classism and racism by eliminating a means-tested program for the poor; save over 68,000 lives every year; eradicate medical bankruptcy; and save $458 billion every year.
Passing H.R.1976, the Medicare for All Act of 2021, is the kind of history-making this country needs from Democrats right now. The pandemic is still here, and we cannot delay any longer.
The response from Democrats was as swift as it was tepid. Instead of fighting for real health care reform, the House and Senate wrote letters respectfully requesting the administration to tweak the plan around the edges: lower the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60; decrease prescription drug costs; place an out-of-pocket cap on health care costs; and expand coverage to include dental, vision and hearing.
The letter failed to acknowledge the administration’s own desire to make increases to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange subsidies permanent, not to mention expanding Medicare to cover everyone, and include all medically necessary services, prescription drug coverage and long-term care. This should be what Congress is fighting for as COVID-19’s Delta variant brings the pandemic raging back with a fourth wave. Shamefully, they are not.
Why are progressive Democrats proposing such incrementalist reforms? What does this signify for Medicare for All supporters, and what are the prospects for such a program in the future? Rather than inspire, Democrats scold and deflate the energy necessary to win. Rather than organize, they ask for crumbs, get even less, and then blame activists for not supporting their “leaders’” plans.
Even the $3.5 trillion package Democrats are assembling, which addresses some health care concerns, still falls far short of what is needed to save a health care system besieged by a pandemic.
Weak Proposals Leave Much on the Table
Lowering the eligibility age to 60 sounds good. After all, it would add 23 million Americans to Medicare. However, of those, 75 percent already have private health insurance, 12 percent have Medicaid and 7.8 percent are uninsured. In other words, only 1.8 million individuals in this age group would gain health coverage that do not already have it. The proposal is even weaker than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, when she offered to lower the age to 50 or 55 even without the presence of a global pandemic.
It is unclear what the bulk of the new beneficiaries, over 17 million individuals who have private health insurance through their employers, would choose to do. Do they buy supplemental coverage, or will they become cherry-picked by Medicare Advantage plans?
The Office of the Inspector General reported that private Medicare Advantage plans continue to inflate risk-adjustment payments, cheating tax payers out of billions of dollars every year. Medicare Advantage companies, ready to enroll a healthier, younger group, are watering at the mouth with yet another proposal to increase profits and continue to drain the Medicare Trust Fund. (We are told funding will not come from the Trust Fund, although it is unclear how that would work.)
Are Democrats using tax dollars to expand Medicare simply to increase profits of corporations? Is this the message they want to send to the public as we gear up for midterm elections?
Equally unknown is what would happen to the 3 million people on Medicaid who would be newly eligible for Medicare. True, these low-income beneficiaries will have access to broader networks under traditional Medicare, but will certainly be exposed to more out-of-pocket costs, including premiums, deductibles, co-pays, prescription drug costs, and for some, a lack of dental, hearing or vision coverage.
Only a criminal health care system would deny dental, vision and hearing coverage at the time in one’s life when these are needed the most. No doubt Medicare needs to be improved, but this incrementalist approach makes it harder to mobilize a public that supports improved and expanded Medicare for All.
A program that only produces a small (and questionable) net gain of coverage for some, leaves the majority of the population without any incentive to join the fight. The July 24 rallies in over 50 cities, largely shunned by Democrats and corporate media, show people are ready to move for Medicare for All, not Medicare for a Few More.
The Fight That Will Mobilize the Nation
Democrats’ request, which the president agrees with, states that Medicare should have the power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and maintain the savings that would be achieved by such price negotiations — up to $450 billion over a decade — to pay for the improvements and expansions to Medicare. Sen. Bernie Sanders and 16 other Democratic senators write that their demands present “an historic opportunity to make the most significant expansion of Medicare since it was signed into law.”
Really? Democrats can make this a truly historic opportunity by doing everything they can to instead pass the Medicare for All Act of 2021, which would establish a national health insurance program for all U.S. residents from birth or residency; cover all medically necessary services including inpatient, outpatient, prescription drugs, mental health and substance use services, reproductive health care, gender-affirming care, dental, vision, hearing, physical therapy and long-term care; eliminate all premiums, deductibles, co-pays and co-insurance; abolish obscene profit-making from our health care system; reduce classism and racism by eliminating a means-tested program for the poor; save over 68,000 lives every year; eradicate medical bankruptcy; and save $458 billion every year.
Passing H.R.1976, the Medicare for All Act of 2021, is the kind of history-making this country needs from Democrats right now. The pandemic is still here, and we cannot delay any longer.
Biden's pick for intelligence chief, Avril Haines, is tainted by drones and torture
Haines is affable and intelligent. She was also a key figure in drone killings and helped cover up U.S. torture
By MEDEA BENJAMIN - MARCY WINOGRAD - salon
DECEMBER 30, 2020 10:00AM (UTC)
Even before President-elect Joe Biden sets foot in the White House, the Senate Intelligence Committee may start hearings on his nomination of Avril Haines as director of national intelligence.
Barack Obama's top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013, and then CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015, Haines is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. She is the affable assassin who, according to Newsweek, would be summoned in the middle of the night to decide if a citizen of any country, including our own, should be incinerated in a U.S. drone strike in a distant land in the greater Middle East. Haines also played a key role in covering up the U.S. torture program, known euphemistically as "enhanced interrogation techniques," which included repeated wate boarding, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, dousing naked prisoners with ice cold water and rectal rehydration.
For these reasons, among others, the activist groups CODEPINK, Progressive Democrats of America, World Beyond War and Roots Action have launched a campaign calling on the Senate to reject her confirmation.
These same groups ran successful campaigns to dissuade Biden from choosing two other warmongering candidates for critical foreign policy positions: China hawk Michèle Flournoy as Secretary of Defense and torture apologist Michael Morell as CIA director. By hosting calling parties to Senators, launching petitions and publishing open letters from Democratic delegates, feminists — including Alice Walker, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem — and Guantánamo torture survivors, activists helped derail candidates who were once considered shoo-ins for Biden's cabinet.
Now activists are launching a similar challenge against Avril Haines.
In 2015, when Haines was CIA deputy director, CIA agents illegally hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to thwart its investigation into the spy agency's detention and interrogation program. Haines overruled the CIA's own inspector general in failing to discipline the CIA agents who violated the U.S. Constitution's separation of powers. According to former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, she not only shielded the hackers from accountability but even awarded them the Career Intelligence Medal.
And there's more. When the exhaustive 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was finally complete, after five years of investigation and research, Haines took charge of redacting it to deny the public's right to know its full details, reducing the document to a 500-page, black-ink-smeared summary.
This censorship went beyond merely "protecting sources and methods"; it avoided CIA embarrassment, while ensuring her own career advancement.
Moreover, Haines supported torture apologist Gina Haspel as Trump's CIA director. Haspel ran a secret black site prison in Thailand where torture was regularly inflicted on detainees. Haspel also drafted the memo ordering the destruction of almost 100 videotapes documenting CIA torture.
As David Segal of Demand Progress told CNN, "Haines has an unfortunate record of repeatedly covering up for torture and torturers. Her push for maximalist redactions of the torture report, her refusal to discipline the CIA personnel who hacked the Senate and her vociferous support for Gina Haspel — which was even touted by the Trump White House as Democrats stood in nearly unanimous opposition to the then-nominee to lead the CIA — should be interrogated during the confirmation process."
This sentiment was echoed by former Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who was a member of the Intelligence Committee when it finished the torture report. "If our country is going to turn the page on the dark chapter of our history that was the CIA's torture program, we need to stop nominating and confirming individuals who led this terrible program and helped cover it up," he said.
Another reason Haines' nomination should be rejected is her support for the proliferation of killer drones. There has been a concerted effort by former Obama colleagues to paint Haines as a voice of restraint who tried to protect civilians. But according to former CIA whistleblower Kiarikou, Haines regularly approved the drone bombings that killed not only suspected terrorists but entire families, including children, who died as collateral damage."It was Avril that decided whether it was legal to incinerate someone from the sky," said Kiriakou.
---
There are many other reasons to reject Haines. She advocates intensifying crippling economic sanctions on North Korea that undermine a negotiated peace, and "regime change" — hypothetically engineered by a U.S. ally — that could leave a collapsed North Korea vulnerable to terrorist theft of its nuclear material. She was a consultant at WestExec Advisors, a firm that exploits government connections to help companies secure plum Pentagon contracts. She was a consultant with Palantir, a data-mining company that facilitated Trump's mass deportations of immigrants.
But Haines' record on torture and drones, alone, should be enough for senators to reject her nomination. The unassuming spy — who got her start at the White House as a legal adviser in the Bush State Department in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq — might look and sound more like your favorite college professor than someone who enabled murder by remote control or wielded a thick black pen to cover up CIA torture. But a clear examination of her past should convince the Senate that Haines is unfit for high office in an administration that promises to restore transparency, integrity and respect for international law.
Barack Obama's top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013, and then CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015, Haines is the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. She is the affable assassin who, according to Newsweek, would be summoned in the middle of the night to decide if a citizen of any country, including our own, should be incinerated in a U.S. drone strike in a distant land in the greater Middle East. Haines also played a key role in covering up the U.S. torture program, known euphemistically as "enhanced interrogation techniques," which included repeated wate boarding, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, dousing naked prisoners with ice cold water and rectal rehydration.
For these reasons, among others, the activist groups CODEPINK, Progressive Democrats of America, World Beyond War and Roots Action have launched a campaign calling on the Senate to reject her confirmation.
These same groups ran successful campaigns to dissuade Biden from choosing two other warmongering candidates for critical foreign policy positions: China hawk Michèle Flournoy as Secretary of Defense and torture apologist Michael Morell as CIA director. By hosting calling parties to Senators, launching petitions and publishing open letters from Democratic delegates, feminists — including Alice Walker, Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem — and Guantánamo torture survivors, activists helped derail candidates who were once considered shoo-ins for Biden's cabinet.
Now activists are launching a similar challenge against Avril Haines.
In 2015, when Haines was CIA deputy director, CIA agents illegally hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to thwart its investigation into the spy agency's detention and interrogation program. Haines overruled the CIA's own inspector general in failing to discipline the CIA agents who violated the U.S. Constitution's separation of powers. According to former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, she not only shielded the hackers from accountability but even awarded them the Career Intelligence Medal.
And there's more. When the exhaustive 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was finally complete, after five years of investigation and research, Haines took charge of redacting it to deny the public's right to know its full details, reducing the document to a 500-page, black-ink-smeared summary.
This censorship went beyond merely "protecting sources and methods"; it avoided CIA embarrassment, while ensuring her own career advancement.
Moreover, Haines supported torture apologist Gina Haspel as Trump's CIA director. Haspel ran a secret black site prison in Thailand where torture was regularly inflicted on detainees. Haspel also drafted the memo ordering the destruction of almost 100 videotapes documenting CIA torture.
As David Segal of Demand Progress told CNN, "Haines has an unfortunate record of repeatedly covering up for torture and torturers. Her push for maximalist redactions of the torture report, her refusal to discipline the CIA personnel who hacked the Senate and her vociferous support for Gina Haspel — which was even touted by the Trump White House as Democrats stood in nearly unanimous opposition to the then-nominee to lead the CIA — should be interrogated during the confirmation process."
This sentiment was echoed by former Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., who was a member of the Intelligence Committee when it finished the torture report. "If our country is going to turn the page on the dark chapter of our history that was the CIA's torture program, we need to stop nominating and confirming individuals who led this terrible program and helped cover it up," he said.
Another reason Haines' nomination should be rejected is her support for the proliferation of killer drones. There has been a concerted effort by former Obama colleagues to paint Haines as a voice of restraint who tried to protect civilians. But according to former CIA whistleblower Kiarikou, Haines regularly approved the drone bombings that killed not only suspected terrorists but entire families, including children, who died as collateral damage."It was Avril that decided whether it was legal to incinerate someone from the sky," said Kiriakou.
---
There are many other reasons to reject Haines. She advocates intensifying crippling economic sanctions on North Korea that undermine a negotiated peace, and "regime change" — hypothetically engineered by a U.S. ally — that could leave a collapsed North Korea vulnerable to terrorist theft of its nuclear material. She was a consultant at WestExec Advisors, a firm that exploits government connections to help companies secure plum Pentagon contracts. She was a consultant with Palantir, a data-mining company that facilitated Trump's mass deportations of immigrants.
But Haines' record on torture and drones, alone, should be enough for senators to reject her nomination. The unassuming spy — who got her start at the White House as a legal adviser in the Bush State Department in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq — might look and sound more like your favorite college professor than someone who enabled murder by remote control or wielded a thick black pen to cover up CIA torture. But a clear examination of her past should convince the Senate that Haines is unfit for high office in an administration that promises to restore transparency, integrity and respect for international law.
Blame for Democrats' down-ballot losses lies with the party, not social movements
After unexpected Democratic defeats, the finger-pointing starts: But grassroots movements aren't to blame
By JENIFER FERNANDEZ ANCONA - salon
DECEMBER 1, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
In the aftermath of many down-ballot Democratic losses, from U.S. Senate races to the House to several state legislatures Democrats were hoping to flip, we are in the finger-pointing phase of the 2020 election. While some are blaming grassroots social and political movements, the fact is that this is the second cycle in a row in which Democrats had no clear positive and substantive message to offer voters.
While Republicans seized on racial fear and division to tell a compelling, if bleak, story to moderate white America — and even some swaths of communities of color, including Black, AAPI and Latino voters — Democrats completely failed to tell an equally compelling narrative based on movement priorities such as economic justice, climate justice or criminal justice reform.
What we know about movements — whether it's the movement for Black lives or the youth-driven Sunrise Movement for climate justice — is that it's their job to create new space for what's possible in society. Martin Luther King Jr. and the leaders of the civil rights movement did not craft their message in terms of what they thought was politically feasible in the mid-1960s, but rather as bold vision and rallying cry that attracted millions of people.
Movements come out of real-life experience, and are often born in pain and injustice. Organized Black communities, despite years of calling for reform, watched an innocent Black man choked to death under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. Organized young people, seeing their futures crumble before their eyes under the weight of climate change, have had enough of government, largely led by people over 60, doing nothing to stop it.
We cannot blame movements for shouting from the rooftops what they need. But we can blame the Democratic Party and the political establishment for not choosing to occupy the space that is being created by movements to make a persuasive argument to voters on these and other critical issues.
A study of the message landscape and advertising campaigns of both sides reveals that Democrats running for Senate and House seats in 2020 did not even try to align their message with the majority of Americans who believe, for example, that policing in America needs major changes. Or the two-thirds who believe that government should do more to address the climate crisis. There was no clear story about the largest structure affecting Americans' lives — our grossly unequal economy — and Democratic ads did not mention the racial reckoning and inflection point that gripped the country for the better part of 2020.
Instead, most Senate and House Democrats ran primarily on a promise to protect people with pre-existing conditions so they could still have health care — a worthy cause, but not exactly swinging for the fences — and on the promise of "bipartisanship" and working with the other side of the aisle to "clean up Washington." Too often, rather than focusing on their own story, Democrats spent precious air time refuting attacks from the right, and thereby inadvertently lending more credence to the other side's frames.
The other side of the aisle, meanwhile, told a very clear story that was specifically designed to stoke racial fear and resentment, while appealing to Americans who are struggling economically. Of course their story was false, but it was easy to understand: Democrats will raise your taxes, taking money out of your pockets, and they are doing it to appease all these angry Black and brown people, who by the way will break into your home and attack you. When you call the police, no one will answer. Literally.
You can't win in a fight that you don't even bother to engage in. What Democrats need to learn from the 2020 cycle is that in this moment, with American society facing multiple existential crises at once, movements will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible. It's the party's job to tell an engaging, positive and politically persuasive story that works with that tide, rather than against it.
While Republicans seized on racial fear and division to tell a compelling, if bleak, story to moderate white America — and even some swaths of communities of color, including Black, AAPI and Latino voters — Democrats completely failed to tell an equally compelling narrative based on movement priorities such as economic justice, climate justice or criminal justice reform.
What we know about movements — whether it's the movement for Black lives or the youth-driven Sunrise Movement for climate justice — is that it's their job to create new space for what's possible in society. Martin Luther King Jr. and the leaders of the civil rights movement did not craft their message in terms of what they thought was politically feasible in the mid-1960s, but rather as bold vision and rallying cry that attracted millions of people.
Movements come out of real-life experience, and are often born in pain and injustice. Organized Black communities, despite years of calling for reform, watched an innocent Black man choked to death under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. Organized young people, seeing their futures crumble before their eyes under the weight of climate change, have had enough of government, largely led by people over 60, doing nothing to stop it.
We cannot blame movements for shouting from the rooftops what they need. But we can blame the Democratic Party and the political establishment for not choosing to occupy the space that is being created by movements to make a persuasive argument to voters on these and other critical issues.
A study of the message landscape and advertising campaigns of both sides reveals that Democrats running for Senate and House seats in 2020 did not even try to align their message with the majority of Americans who believe, for example, that policing in America needs major changes. Or the two-thirds who believe that government should do more to address the climate crisis. There was no clear story about the largest structure affecting Americans' lives — our grossly unequal economy — and Democratic ads did not mention the racial reckoning and inflection point that gripped the country for the better part of 2020.
Instead, most Senate and House Democrats ran primarily on a promise to protect people with pre-existing conditions so they could still have health care — a worthy cause, but not exactly swinging for the fences — and on the promise of "bipartisanship" and working with the other side of the aisle to "clean up Washington." Too often, rather than focusing on their own story, Democrats spent precious air time refuting attacks from the right, and thereby inadvertently lending more credence to the other side's frames.
The other side of the aisle, meanwhile, told a very clear story that was specifically designed to stoke racial fear and resentment, while appealing to Americans who are struggling economically. Of course their story was false, but it was easy to understand: Democrats will raise your taxes, taking money out of your pockets, and they are doing it to appease all these angry Black and brown people, who by the way will break into your home and attack you. When you call the police, no one will answer. Literally.
You can't win in a fight that you don't even bother to engage in. What Democrats need to learn from the 2020 cycle is that in this moment, with American society facing multiple existential crises at once, movements will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible. It's the party's job to tell an engaging, positive and politically persuasive story that works with that tide, rather than against it.
Enough cowardice: Democrats must forge ahead, without caring what the Trumpers say
Trump's delusional supporters will rage and scream no matter what. Democrats should quit trying to make peace
By BOB CESCA - salon
NOVEMBER 24, 2020 1:00PM (UTC)
Even after the landslide defeat of Donald Trump, Republicans across the board continue to be terrified by Trump's disciples. Fear of the Red Hats has always been one of the primary reasons why the rest of Trump's party has refused to speak out against his ongoing horror show. It's not the only reason, but it's one of the more potent ones.
It's fascinating to observe how thoroughly they've painted themselves into a corner. While leading Republicans are in love with Trump's policies, not to mention the cover the Red Hats gave them to pass their agenda, they're privately disgusted by the president's total lack of personal restraint and constant self-sabotage.
In fact, Carl Bernstein wrote this week that 21 Senate Republicans have "privately expressed their disdain for Trump." Underscore "privately." Bernstein name-dropped Sens. Rob Portman, Lamar Alexander, Ben Sasse, Roy Blunt, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, John Thune, Mitt Romney, Mike Braun, Todd Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Martha McSally, Jerry Moran, Pat Roberts and Richard Shelby. Most of them have voted with Trump across the board, and only a few — Collins, Murkowski, Romney and Sasse, most notably — have dared to publicly criticize him. Why? Cowardice before the fury of the Red Hats.
The dispiriting enormity of Trump's following (73.8 million in this election) means the rest of the GOP can't win without the Trumpers. So Republicans routinely clam up whenever Trump crosses another Rubicon — thousands and thousands of Rubicons at this point. By clamming up, they empower Trump to curb-stomp more and more of our democratic values, while they quiver in the corner afraid of Trump deploying his Red Hats against them in another late-night tweetstorm. They're locked in a MAGA-induced torpor, unable to act even if they wanted to. After four years of irreparable damage to the country, they're impotent and powerless to stop this weirdo tyrant as he annihilates the integrity of our elections — tweet by tweet, and frivolous lawsuit after hilariously frivolous lawsuit.
While it's pathetic, infuriating and completely unpatriotic, I at least understand why they're doing it. What I don't understand is why the Normals are afraid of Trump's Red Hats, too.
Even before the 2020 election, Democratic leaders, as well as select cable news pundits, have too often repeated a variation on: "Don't do [x] because it'll make Trump's supporters angry." It's been trotted out as an excuse for not impeaching Trump and for pardoning Trump, and as a reason to argue against prosecuting Trump and his henchmen after the new administration is sworn in. Fear of the Red Hats is possibly why NBC News' Chuck Todd felt obligated this past weekend to refer to Joe Biden as the "apparent winner" of the election, days and days after Biden was declared the actual winner of the election by Todd's own network. Simply put: The truth and integrity of the press is being subverted by an irrational fear of screeching Twitter trolls who don't know the difference between "they're," "there" and "their."
Elsewhere, George Washington University Law School professor Randall Eliason published an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which he argued that prosecuting Trump would be a catastrophic error, noting, "Trump and his supporters would inevitably characterize any investigations as a corrupt attempt by the Biden administration to 'take out' a potential 2024 rival." The only response to this is: So what? They're doing that today with the 2020 election. What's another knee-jerk grievance on top of all the others?
Eliason isn't the only one. There will be many more with similarly serious warnings. And the emerging conventional wisdom on this front is entirely based on a fear of the Red Hats and their incoherent rage.
The tragic reality of the Biden years will be this: The Red Hats are going to scream about literally everything anyway. They already are. History has taught us that appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive, and trying to unilaterally play nice will only end in unilateral pantsing. In their deluded, brainwashed minds, Biden stole the election from Trump, while professional stooges like Charlie Kirk and Breitbart are already hyping up their fanboys about inevitable "persecutions" that will follow. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has expressed outrage over the New York attorney general's comprehensive investigation into Trump's alleged financial crimes. Fox News and the other pro-Trump propaganda outlets will link Biden to all of it, whether Biden wants to be linked or not.
If they don't have actual Biden scandals to latch onto, they'll make 'em up. And since they'll indiscriminately lose their shpadoinkle anyway, why not uphold the rule of law and proceed forward with accountability — whether in the form of bipartisan commissions, congressional reports or actual grand jury indictments? In other words, rather than refusing to investigate anyone and being accused of investigating everyone, why not damn the torpedoes and proceed, full steam ahead? Again, stop fearing what they'll say and just do the damn thing.
Trump's actions have been unprecedented, including the fact that he himself broke the tradition of not investigating previous administrations when he ordered Bill Barr and U.S. attorney John Durham to investigate Barack Obama and "the oranges" of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe. (Notice how the Republicans never flinched over the liberal response to the Durham investigation.) Unprecedented crimes deserve bold, unwavering accountability.
We've never had a president so flagrantly violate the law on countless occasions, from a dozen instances of obstruction of justice enumerated in the Mueller report to Trump's extortion plot in the Ukraine debacle that led to his impeachment. His negligence in the face of the pandemic alone should warrant extensive investigation, and there are myriad other crimes likely waiting to be discovered. Should there be civil or criminal accountability for deliberately deceiving the public on the threat of the pandemic, as revealed by Bob Woodward? What happens if evidence is uncovered that Trump sold national security secrets to an enemy?
Unprecedented times deserve unprecedented accountability. Walking away and burying the past in the past is an excellent way to guarantee another Trump in the future — likely one who's worse than the first Trump.
Americans tend to respond to strong, unflinching leadership, and tend to condemn weakness and half-measures. So whether it's the incoming attorney general or a congressional committee or a state and local probe, if the evidence leads to indictments, Democrats should just own it and ignore the shrieking. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson once said, "[Mitch McConnell] doesn't care about screaming." The Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would do well to employ the same strategy. Hold fast, power through and stop caring about the screaming.
After all, while there are nearly 74 million Trumpers, there are 80 million Biden voters.
Since 2015, Trump supporters have shown us who they really are. We've learned that they'll go along with whatever the world's most notorious con man says, no matter how ignorant, no matter how destructive, no matter how contradictory. They will continue to gratuitously worsen the spread of the pandemic, and they will absolutely continue to repeat counterfactual gibberish fed to them by the conservative entertainment complex, including dozens of made-up reasons to impeach Biden. They'll never see the light. They'll never accept an olive branch. They're gone.
Given all this, we need to stop fearing these people. If the evidence points to prosecutions, then we need to encourage the investigators to prosecute. When the next election rolls around, we need to give our leaders, including Joe Biden, the electoral cover they need by prioritizing winning at all costs. That, and a series of post-Trump reforms, is the only way to course-correct the trajectory of the republic. Cowardice will only make matters worse.
It's fascinating to observe how thoroughly they've painted themselves into a corner. While leading Republicans are in love with Trump's policies, not to mention the cover the Red Hats gave them to pass their agenda, they're privately disgusted by the president's total lack of personal restraint and constant self-sabotage.
In fact, Carl Bernstein wrote this week that 21 Senate Republicans have "privately expressed their disdain for Trump." Underscore "privately." Bernstein name-dropped Sens. Rob Portman, Lamar Alexander, Ben Sasse, Roy Blunt, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, John Cornyn, John Thune, Mitt Romney, Mike Braun, Todd Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley, Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Martha McSally, Jerry Moran, Pat Roberts and Richard Shelby. Most of them have voted with Trump across the board, and only a few — Collins, Murkowski, Romney and Sasse, most notably — have dared to publicly criticize him. Why? Cowardice before the fury of the Red Hats.
The dispiriting enormity of Trump's following (73.8 million in this election) means the rest of the GOP can't win without the Trumpers. So Republicans routinely clam up whenever Trump crosses another Rubicon — thousands and thousands of Rubicons at this point. By clamming up, they empower Trump to curb-stomp more and more of our democratic values, while they quiver in the corner afraid of Trump deploying his Red Hats against them in another late-night tweetstorm. They're locked in a MAGA-induced torpor, unable to act even if they wanted to. After four years of irreparable damage to the country, they're impotent and powerless to stop this weirdo tyrant as he annihilates the integrity of our elections — tweet by tweet, and frivolous lawsuit after hilariously frivolous lawsuit.
While it's pathetic, infuriating and completely unpatriotic, I at least understand why they're doing it. What I don't understand is why the Normals are afraid of Trump's Red Hats, too.
Even before the 2020 election, Democratic leaders, as well as select cable news pundits, have too often repeated a variation on: "Don't do [x] because it'll make Trump's supporters angry." It's been trotted out as an excuse for not impeaching Trump and for pardoning Trump, and as a reason to argue against prosecuting Trump and his henchmen after the new administration is sworn in. Fear of the Red Hats is possibly why NBC News' Chuck Todd felt obligated this past weekend to refer to Joe Biden as the "apparent winner" of the election, days and days after Biden was declared the actual winner of the election by Todd's own network. Simply put: The truth and integrity of the press is being subverted by an irrational fear of screeching Twitter trolls who don't know the difference between "they're," "there" and "their."
Elsewhere, George Washington University Law School professor Randall Eliason published an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which he argued that prosecuting Trump would be a catastrophic error, noting, "Trump and his supporters would inevitably characterize any investigations as a corrupt attempt by the Biden administration to 'take out' a potential 2024 rival." The only response to this is: So what? They're doing that today with the 2020 election. What's another knee-jerk grievance on top of all the others?
Eliason isn't the only one. There will be many more with similarly serious warnings. And the emerging conventional wisdom on this front is entirely based on a fear of the Red Hats and their incoherent rage.
The tragic reality of the Biden years will be this: The Red Hats are going to scream about literally everything anyway. They already are. History has taught us that appeasement only makes the aggressor more aggressive, and trying to unilaterally play nice will only end in unilateral pantsing. In their deluded, brainwashed minds, Biden stole the election from Trump, while professional stooges like Charlie Kirk and Breitbart are already hyping up their fanboys about inevitable "persecutions" that will follow. Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, has expressed outrage over the New York attorney general's comprehensive investigation into Trump's alleged financial crimes. Fox News and the other pro-Trump propaganda outlets will link Biden to all of it, whether Biden wants to be linked or not.
If they don't have actual Biden scandals to latch onto, they'll make 'em up. And since they'll indiscriminately lose their shpadoinkle anyway, why not uphold the rule of law and proceed forward with accountability — whether in the form of bipartisan commissions, congressional reports or actual grand jury indictments? In other words, rather than refusing to investigate anyone and being accused of investigating everyone, why not damn the torpedoes and proceed, full steam ahead? Again, stop fearing what they'll say and just do the damn thing.
Trump's actions have been unprecedented, including the fact that he himself broke the tradition of not investigating previous administrations when he ordered Bill Barr and U.S. attorney John Durham to investigate Barack Obama and "the oranges" of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe. (Notice how the Republicans never flinched over the liberal response to the Durham investigation.) Unprecedented crimes deserve bold, unwavering accountability.
We've never had a president so flagrantly violate the law on countless occasions, from a dozen instances of obstruction of justice enumerated in the Mueller report to Trump's extortion plot in the Ukraine debacle that led to his impeachment. His negligence in the face of the pandemic alone should warrant extensive investigation, and there are myriad other crimes likely waiting to be discovered. Should there be civil or criminal accountability for deliberately deceiving the public on the threat of the pandemic, as revealed by Bob Woodward? What happens if evidence is uncovered that Trump sold national security secrets to an enemy?
Unprecedented times deserve unprecedented accountability. Walking away and burying the past in the past is an excellent way to guarantee another Trump in the future — likely one who's worse than the first Trump.
Americans tend to respond to strong, unflinching leadership, and tend to condemn weakness and half-measures. So whether it's the incoming attorney general or a congressional committee or a state and local probe, if the evidence leads to indictments, Democrats should just own it and ignore the shrieking. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson once said, "[Mitch McConnell] doesn't care about screaming." The Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would do well to employ the same strategy. Hold fast, power through and stop caring about the screaming.
After all, while there are nearly 74 million Trumpers, there are 80 million Biden voters.
Since 2015, Trump supporters have shown us who they really are. We've learned that they'll go along with whatever the world's most notorious con man says, no matter how ignorant, no matter how destructive, no matter how contradictory. They will continue to gratuitously worsen the spread of the pandemic, and they will absolutely continue to repeat counterfactual gibberish fed to them by the conservative entertainment complex, including dozens of made-up reasons to impeach Biden. They'll never see the light. They'll never accept an olive branch. They're gone.
Given all this, we need to stop fearing these people. If the evidence points to prosecutions, then we need to encourage the investigators to prosecute. When the next election rolls around, we need to give our leaders, including Joe Biden, the electoral cover they need by prioritizing winning at all costs. That, and a series of post-Trump reforms, is the only way to course-correct the trajectory of the republic. Cowardice will only make matters worse.
Will Biden fight — or just surrender?
Chris Hedges on the task ahead: Will Biden surrender to plutocrats and paralysis?
Pulitzer-winning author: Biden and the Democrats will "just dig themselves deeper," fueling a fascist comeback
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - salon
NOVEMBER 12, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
...The Biden administration will also have to take the first steps to remedy the social, cultural, institutional, political problems that made Trump's neofascist movement possible, and nearly won Trump a second term. Of course, Biden's most immediate problem is the coronavirus pandemic and the human and economic destruction it has caused.
In total, American democracy is sick. One of the most virulent of the diseases afflicting America is white supremacy. Today's Republican Party, and the right wing more generally, are enemies of multiracial democracy and want to create a type of 21st-century apartheid state in which white people rule over nonwhites with impunity.
Writing at the Boston Review, Reed Hundt, chair and CEO of the nonprofit Making Every Vote Count, describes these underlying problems:
Racism and democracy are conjoined on the ballot. The majority of Americans don't think that America should be a racist society or that race should be the defining parameter of either of the two major political parties. Yet a minority identifies partisan politics with racial attitudes, so for that minority the two are conjoined. Of course, you don't have a box to check that says, "Are you for or against racism?" or, "Are you for or against democracy?"
But while it's certainly true that voting has always been tribal, now we have a party that is almost exclusively identified with white people. That party also prefers minority rule, which the current system gives them a chance to fulfill. That's the party of Donald Trump. It's anti-majoritarian and it smacks of racism in all practical effect. And the way for Trump to win, it turns out, is to thwart democracy and to appeal to racist attitudes.
Democratic Party voters and other liberals, progressives and good Americans also have high expectations for Joe Biden's presidency. Many members of the coalition that Biden assembled are deeply suspicious of the new president-elect, and fear he will surrender to his old habits of compromise. Matt McManus writes at Jacobin:
We should be under no illusions that the president-elect and his team will attack the inadequacies of a neoliberal status quo that was allowed to fester into the rot of Trumpism. At best we can hope that Biden will reverse some of the damage Trump caused. But while it would be foolish to put much faith in the Biden administration, socialists and progressives can do a lot to shift the political terrain under Biden and ensure the electoral options are better next time around. …
The real work of politics involves building new coalitions for progressive causes while entrenching support for our policies, rebuilding institutions such as labor unions that can serve as permanent power centers for the Left, and above all working to democratize both the broader culture and politics.
---
Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States. I am glad that Trumpism has been stopped for now, assuming Biden is actually permitted to take office in January. But I do not feel like anything has been won. Is this what victory is supposed to feel like?
The only thing we have ensured happening, especially with Republican control of the U.S. Senate, is paralysis. Moreover, Joe Biden does not want to create great change anyway. If you look at his record throughout his entire career, he has been nothing but a tool for the credit card companies, the war industry and similar interests. Biden is not going to change. Biden must also confront the judiciary.
Donald Trump has appointed almost 20% of the federal judges. Trump has got six of the nine Supreme Court justices, who are right out of the Federalist Society. The Supreme Court has powers it should not over the political process. My fear is that what the Biden presidency sets up is a route for a competent fascist. Trump may instinctually be a fascist, but ideologically he's empty. Trump does not have an ideology.
He's just a narcissist. He can't focus on anything. He's his own worst enemy. He's impulsive. He can't even read three lines in a briefing book. But that phenomenon of Trumpism exists, with or without Trump.
The exit polls are very interesting in that regard. First, Trump had a small decline in support from white male voters. Trump received 26% of his votes from non-whites. He took a third or so of the Latino vote. He doubled his support among Black women, from 4% to 8%. Trump's support among white women rose from 53% to 55%. Black men voted for Trump too, that number jumped from 13% to 18%.
All that happened even with Donald Trump openly catering to white supremacy, many accusations against Trump by women accusing him of rape and sexual assault, and Trump's open misogyny. And even though Donald Trump rescinded some of the rights of LGBTQ people, his support among that community rose from 14% to 28%.
Polling also suggests that the only reason Donald Trump lost the election is because of the pandemic which was the top issue for a significant percentage of the voters who supported Biden. Those voters whose top issue was the economy voted for Trump.
Examining those figures, we need to then ask what they portend about the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The divides in this country are not only about race. The dynamic is right-wing proto-fascist populism. There are also divides of geography. Sixty percent of the Trump vote was in rural areas. Such a divide is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia. This divide in America is also a function of the dislocation of the working poor and the working class, which was created by the two parties. The failure, which I expect, under the incoming Biden administration to address this dislocation, despair, alienation and rage — all of which are legitimate — is fertile ground for a competent fascist, one probably cloaked in Christian garb.
The errors with the polls reveal that we need more qualitative research, such as ethnography and focus groups, to get a real sense of how individuals and communities are thinking and feeling about politics. We also need pollsters and other researchers who are actually from the communities they are trying to understand. There should also be an asterisk on the exit polls, because Republicans were much more likely to vote in person, thereby skewing the answers. With those qualifiers having been noted, the next version of Donald Trump will be much more dangerous given his broadening base of support. There is something attractive about Trumpism, even for nonwhites.
It is the hyper-masculinity. That is the core essence of fascism. There is no coherent ideology with fascism. Fascism mutates and changes. In the lead-up to power, the Nazis were striking in Berlin, along with the communists. The Nazis put "socialist" in their name, The National Socialist Party, as a way of becoming more appealing. To reduce Trump's version of fascism solely along lines of race is to miss the forces that are pushing people into the arms of the neofascists. Racism is an element in the form of mythologies about whiteness and self-exaltation, and the other myths about identity and origin. But what people who follow fascists are really looking for is a sense of empowerment.
Donald Trump fulfilled that role, not as a political leader, but as a traditional cult leader. Members of the cult want their cult leader to break all the rules. The power of the cult leader becomes an extension of the follower's own identity and power. All moral autonomy is surrendered to the cult leader. That is the dynamic in this country with Donald Trump and his movement. Therefore, there are fewer ways in American society to communicate with one another across lines of politics and other identities. When Donald Trump, from the White House — in what was an absolutely remarkable moment — denounced the electoral process as fraudulent, what was really frightening is that there are tens of millions of Americans who believe him. {...} READ MORE
In total, American democracy is sick. One of the most virulent of the diseases afflicting America is white supremacy. Today's Republican Party, and the right wing more generally, are enemies of multiracial democracy and want to create a type of 21st-century apartheid state in which white people rule over nonwhites with impunity.
Writing at the Boston Review, Reed Hundt, chair and CEO of the nonprofit Making Every Vote Count, describes these underlying problems:
Racism and democracy are conjoined on the ballot. The majority of Americans don't think that America should be a racist society or that race should be the defining parameter of either of the two major political parties. Yet a minority identifies partisan politics with racial attitudes, so for that minority the two are conjoined. Of course, you don't have a box to check that says, "Are you for or against racism?" or, "Are you for or against democracy?"
But while it's certainly true that voting has always been tribal, now we have a party that is almost exclusively identified with white people. That party also prefers minority rule, which the current system gives them a chance to fulfill. That's the party of Donald Trump. It's anti-majoritarian and it smacks of racism in all practical effect. And the way for Trump to win, it turns out, is to thwart democracy and to appeal to racist attitudes.
Democratic Party voters and other liberals, progressives and good Americans also have high expectations for Joe Biden's presidency. Many members of the coalition that Biden assembled are deeply suspicious of the new president-elect, and fear he will surrender to his old habits of compromise. Matt McManus writes at Jacobin:
We should be under no illusions that the president-elect and his team will attack the inadequacies of a neoliberal status quo that was allowed to fester into the rot of Trumpism. At best we can hope that Biden will reverse some of the damage Trump caused. But while it would be foolish to put much faith in the Biden administration, socialists and progressives can do a lot to shift the political terrain under Biden and ensure the electoral options are better next time around. …
The real work of politics involves building new coalitions for progressive causes while entrenching support for our policies, rebuilding institutions such as labor unions that can serve as permanent power centers for the Left, and above all working to democratize both the broader culture and politics.
---
Joe Biden is now president-elect of the United States. I am glad that Trumpism has been stopped for now, assuming Biden is actually permitted to take office in January. But I do not feel like anything has been won. Is this what victory is supposed to feel like?
The only thing we have ensured happening, especially with Republican control of the U.S. Senate, is paralysis. Moreover, Joe Biden does not want to create great change anyway. If you look at his record throughout his entire career, he has been nothing but a tool for the credit card companies, the war industry and similar interests. Biden is not going to change. Biden must also confront the judiciary.
Donald Trump has appointed almost 20% of the federal judges. Trump has got six of the nine Supreme Court justices, who are right out of the Federalist Society. The Supreme Court has powers it should not over the political process. My fear is that what the Biden presidency sets up is a route for a competent fascist. Trump may instinctually be a fascist, but ideologically he's empty. Trump does not have an ideology.
He's just a narcissist. He can't focus on anything. He's his own worst enemy. He's impulsive. He can't even read three lines in a briefing book. But that phenomenon of Trumpism exists, with or without Trump.
The exit polls are very interesting in that regard. First, Trump had a small decline in support from white male voters. Trump received 26% of his votes from non-whites. He took a third or so of the Latino vote. He doubled his support among Black women, from 4% to 8%. Trump's support among white women rose from 53% to 55%. Black men voted for Trump too, that number jumped from 13% to 18%.
All that happened even with Donald Trump openly catering to white supremacy, many accusations against Trump by women accusing him of rape and sexual assault, and Trump's open misogyny. And even though Donald Trump rescinded some of the rights of LGBTQ people, his support among that community rose from 14% to 28%.
Polling also suggests that the only reason Donald Trump lost the election is because of the pandemic which was the top issue for a significant percentage of the voters who supported Biden. Those voters whose top issue was the economy voted for Trump.
Examining those figures, we need to then ask what they portend about the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The divides in this country are not only about race. The dynamic is right-wing proto-fascist populism. There are also divides of geography. Sixty percent of the Trump vote was in rural areas. Such a divide is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia. This divide in America is also a function of the dislocation of the working poor and the working class, which was created by the two parties. The failure, which I expect, under the incoming Biden administration to address this dislocation, despair, alienation and rage — all of which are legitimate — is fertile ground for a competent fascist, one probably cloaked in Christian garb.
The errors with the polls reveal that we need more qualitative research, such as ethnography and focus groups, to get a real sense of how individuals and communities are thinking and feeling about politics. We also need pollsters and other researchers who are actually from the communities they are trying to understand. There should also be an asterisk on the exit polls, because Republicans were much more likely to vote in person, thereby skewing the answers. With those qualifiers having been noted, the next version of Donald Trump will be much more dangerous given his broadening base of support. There is something attractive about Trumpism, even for nonwhites.
It is the hyper-masculinity. That is the core essence of fascism. There is no coherent ideology with fascism. Fascism mutates and changes. In the lead-up to power, the Nazis were striking in Berlin, along with the communists. The Nazis put "socialist" in their name, The National Socialist Party, as a way of becoming more appealing. To reduce Trump's version of fascism solely along lines of race is to miss the forces that are pushing people into the arms of the neofascists. Racism is an element in the form of mythologies about whiteness and self-exaltation, and the other myths about identity and origin. But what people who follow fascists are really looking for is a sense of empowerment.
Donald Trump fulfilled that role, not as a political leader, but as a traditional cult leader. Members of the cult want their cult leader to break all the rules. The power of the cult leader becomes an extension of the follower's own identity and power. All moral autonomy is surrendered to the cult leader. That is the dynamic in this country with Donald Trump and his movement. Therefore, there are fewer ways in American society to communicate with one another across lines of politics and other identities. When Donald Trump, from the White House — in what was an absolutely remarkable moment — denounced the electoral process as fraudulent, what was really frightening is that there are tens of millions of Americans who believe him. {...} READ MORE
OPINION
We were told Joe Biden was the 'safe choice'. Why did he barely scrape through?
A great many people did not vote for Joe Biden, they voted against Trump. We have to recognise how narrow this win was
Naomi Klein - THE GUARD1AN
11/8/2020
These have been a harrowing few days. And these days have been more harrowing than they should have been. As we all know, Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries based on the claim that he was the safest bet to beat Donald Trump. But even if the Democratic party base was much more politically aligned with Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, in their support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, for racial justice, the party was sure that Bernie Sanders was too risky. And so, as we all remember, they banded together and gave us Biden.
But I think that after days of gnawing our fingers down to the quick, it’s fair to say that Biden was not safe at all, as we always knew. Not safe for the planet, not safe for the people on the front lines of police violence, not safe for the millions upon millions of people who are seeking asylum, but also not even safe as a candidate.
Defeating Trump is a really important popular victory. A great many people did not vote for Joe Biden, they voted against Trump, because they recognize the tremendous threat that he represents. And the fact that the movements that are behind so much of that political victory are not able to even just take a moment and feel that victory, because they are already under attack by the Democratic establishment, as it seeks once again to abdicate all responsibility for ending us in the mess that we are in, is really its own kind of a crime. People should not have to be fighting off these attacks. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should not have to be on Twitter all day, making the point that it is not the fault of democratic socialists that the Democratic party has underperformed in the way that it has.
In fact, she and so many others should be taking a bow for the incredible organizing and leadership that they’ve shown in this period.
Biden was a risky candidate for the same reasons Hillary Clinton was a risky candidate. He was risky because of his swampy record because he had so little to offer so many people in such deep crisis. It seems he has secured an electoral victory by the skin of his teeth but it was a high risk gamble from the start. And not only is the left not to blame. We are largely responsible for the success that has taken place, not the Lincoln project, which has, as David Sirota said, set fire to $67m in this election by trying to reach suburban Republican voters.
We are the levees holding back the tsunami of fascism.The wave is still gaining force, that’s why this is such a difficult moment to celebrate. We need to shore up those levees, and we also need to drain energy away from their storm. So how do we do that?
We need to, I think, recognize first of all that, though we may be dealing with the same kind of corporate Democrats as we were in 2008, we are not the same. We have changed. Our movements have grown. They grew during the Obama years, and they grew during the Trump years, they have grown in size but they’ve also grown in vision. In the vision of defund the police, moving the resources from the infrastructure of incarceration, of policing, of militarism to the infrastructure of care. Vision work has happened. The vision work behind the Green New Deal has happened. And of course the movement supporting Medicare for All.
Even as we approach this juncture with so much fatigue, we have to remind ourselves that we have changed. That the presence of “the Squad” is a difference from the Obama and Biden years. Obama and Biden did not have to contend with Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and now Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. So I think where we go from here is, we need more coordination in all of this rising power.
I think about that moment in 2018, when the Democrats took back the House of Representatives. They were expecting their victory parade and instead had their offices occupied by the Sunrise movement and [Ocasio-Cortez] greeting them and pledging to introduce Green New Deal legislation. That sort of inside-outside pincer is what we need to be replicating again and again and again. That is a glimpse of the kind of dynamic that we will need if we are going to win the policies that are actually enough to begin to keep us safe.
What we have seen with the failure of the Democratic party to do the one thing that we look to from a political party, which is be good at winning elections. I don’t need to outline all the things we had going in our favor but this election should have been a repeat of Herbert Hoover’s loss in 1933. We are in the grips of a pandemic, a desperate economic depression and and Trump has done absolutely everything wrong.
This should have been a sweep. It should have been the sweep that we were promised. And the fact is, the Democratic leadership bungled it up on every single front. It wasn’t just a mistake. They did not want to offer people what they needed, They are much more interested in appeasing the donor class than they are in meeting the needs of their constituents, who need them now more than ever.
But I think that after days of gnawing our fingers down to the quick, it’s fair to say that Biden was not safe at all, as we always knew. Not safe for the planet, not safe for the people on the front lines of police violence, not safe for the millions upon millions of people who are seeking asylum, but also not even safe as a candidate.
Defeating Trump is a really important popular victory. A great many people did not vote for Joe Biden, they voted against Trump, because they recognize the tremendous threat that he represents. And the fact that the movements that are behind so much of that political victory are not able to even just take a moment and feel that victory, because they are already under attack by the Democratic establishment, as it seeks once again to abdicate all responsibility for ending us in the mess that we are in, is really its own kind of a crime. People should not have to be fighting off these attacks. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should not have to be on Twitter all day, making the point that it is not the fault of democratic socialists that the Democratic party has underperformed in the way that it has.
In fact, she and so many others should be taking a bow for the incredible organizing and leadership that they’ve shown in this period.
Biden was a risky candidate for the same reasons Hillary Clinton was a risky candidate. He was risky because of his swampy record because he had so little to offer so many people in such deep crisis. It seems he has secured an electoral victory by the skin of his teeth but it was a high risk gamble from the start. And not only is the left not to blame. We are largely responsible for the success that has taken place, not the Lincoln project, which has, as David Sirota said, set fire to $67m in this election by trying to reach suburban Republican voters.
We are the levees holding back the tsunami of fascism.The wave is still gaining force, that’s why this is such a difficult moment to celebrate. We need to shore up those levees, and we also need to drain energy away from their storm. So how do we do that?
We need to, I think, recognize first of all that, though we may be dealing with the same kind of corporate Democrats as we were in 2008, we are not the same. We have changed. Our movements have grown. They grew during the Obama years, and they grew during the Trump years, they have grown in size but they’ve also grown in vision. In the vision of defund the police, moving the resources from the infrastructure of incarceration, of policing, of militarism to the infrastructure of care. Vision work has happened. The vision work behind the Green New Deal has happened. And of course the movement supporting Medicare for All.
Even as we approach this juncture with so much fatigue, we have to remind ourselves that we have changed. That the presence of “the Squad” is a difference from the Obama and Biden years. Obama and Biden did not have to contend with Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and now Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. So I think where we go from here is, we need more coordination in all of this rising power.
I think about that moment in 2018, when the Democrats took back the House of Representatives. They were expecting their victory parade and instead had their offices occupied by the Sunrise movement and [Ocasio-Cortez] greeting them and pledging to introduce Green New Deal legislation. That sort of inside-outside pincer is what we need to be replicating again and again and again. That is a glimpse of the kind of dynamic that we will need if we are going to win the policies that are actually enough to begin to keep us safe.
What we have seen with the failure of the Democratic party to do the one thing that we look to from a political party, which is be good at winning elections. I don’t need to outline all the things we had going in our favor but this election should have been a repeat of Herbert Hoover’s loss in 1933. We are in the grips of a pandemic, a desperate economic depression and and Trump has done absolutely everything wrong.
This should have been a sweep. It should have been the sweep that we were promised. And the fact is, the Democratic leadership bungled it up on every single front. It wasn’t just a mistake. They did not want to offer people what they needed, They are much more interested in appeasing the donor class than they are in meeting the needs of their constituents, who need them now more than ever.
Senate bill would guarantee paychecks to laid-off workers for rest of 2020 ‘to avoid another Great Depression’
May 21, 2020
By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
“We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the bill’s lead sponsors.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Mark Warner, Doug Jones, and Richard Blumenthal on Thursday unveiled legislation aimed at stemming coronavirus-induced mass layoffs in the United States by guaranteeing paychecks and healthcare benefits to laid-off and furloughed workers for the rest of 2020.
The Paycheck Security Act—introduced with support from senators across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic caucus, and with the notable backing of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—would massively expand the existing Employee Retention Tax Credit to cover wages, salaries, and benefits for laid-off or furloughed workers up to $90,000 per year.
The tax credits would be refundable and advanceable, meaning employers would not have to wait to file payroll taxes to receive the payment.
“The most important thing we can do for workers and our economy is keep as many people as possible connected to their jobs, paychecks, and healthcare.”
—Sara Nelson, Association of Flight Attendants
According to a summary (pdf) of the bill released by Sanders’ office, the payroll credit would be available to “employers who have experienced at least a 15 percent drop in gross receipts compared to the same quarter in 2019.” The legislation would also provide businesses with a refundable tax credit to cover operating costs like rent, utilities, and maintenance.
“We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic,” Sanders said in a statement. “In order to avoid another Great Depression, Congress must act boldly and aggressively to ensure that every American worker receives their paycheck and health insurance until this crisis is over.”
It’s unclear whether the legislation can gain enough support to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but the idea of having the federal government cover company payrolls has won the backing of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
---
The Senate bill comes just days after Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Tuesday introduced the Paycheck Recovery Act in the House with 93 original co-sponsors, including a number of moderates. Instead of leveraging the Employee Retention Tax Credit, Jayapal’s bill would provide businesses with direct grants through the IRS to cover the wages and benefits of laid-off and furloughed workers up to 90,000 per year.
“Mass unemployment is a policy choice, and we must choose differently by passing an urgent proposal that matches the scale of this crisis while delivering certainty and direct relief to workers, businesses of all sizes, and the economy,” Jayapal said in a statement. “The Paycheck Recovery Act will end mass unemployment, put workers back on their paychecks and health care and keep businesses from closing permanently.”
Jayapal fought hard for the inclusion of her paycheck guarantee proposal in HEROES Act, which passed the House last week, but was ultimately rebuffed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Jayapal joined several moderate House Democrats in voting against the HEROES Act in part because she said the bill would not do nearly enough to curb mass unemployment.
As The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported Tuesday, the significant support Jayapal’s paycheck guarantee plan has garnered from moderate Democrats in swing districts “represents a new threat to House Democratic leadership’s domination of the caucus.”
“For years, Pelosi has insisted that if it were up to her, the party would go further left than it does, but that the imperatives of reelection require moderating legislation for the members she calls ‘majority makers,'” Grim wrote. “But if those majority makers get out ahead of Pelosi, that rationale would evaporate, and the dictates of making and keeping a majority would militate in their direction.”
“The politics of fighting on behalf of jobs is an obvious winner,” Grim added.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Mark Warner, Doug Jones, and Richard Blumenthal on Thursday unveiled legislation aimed at stemming coronavirus-induced mass layoffs in the United States by guaranteeing paychecks and healthcare benefits to laid-off and furloughed workers for the rest of 2020.
The Paycheck Security Act—introduced with support from senators across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic caucus, and with the notable backing of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—would massively expand the existing Employee Retention Tax Credit to cover wages, salaries, and benefits for laid-off or furloughed workers up to $90,000 per year.
The tax credits would be refundable and advanceable, meaning employers would not have to wait to file payroll taxes to receive the payment.
“The most important thing we can do for workers and our economy is keep as many people as possible connected to their jobs, paychecks, and healthcare.”
—Sara Nelson, Association of Flight Attendants
According to a summary (pdf) of the bill released by Sanders’ office, the payroll credit would be available to “employers who have experienced at least a 15 percent drop in gross receipts compared to the same quarter in 2019.” The legislation would also provide businesses with a refundable tax credit to cover operating costs like rent, utilities, and maintenance.
“We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic,” Sanders said in a statement. “In order to avoid another Great Depression, Congress must act boldly and aggressively to ensure that every American worker receives their paycheck and health insurance until this crisis is over.”
It’s unclear whether the legislation can gain enough support to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, but the idea of having the federal government cover company payrolls has won the backing of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.).
---
The Senate bill comes just days after Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on Tuesday introduced the Paycheck Recovery Act in the House with 93 original co-sponsors, including a number of moderates. Instead of leveraging the Employee Retention Tax Credit, Jayapal’s bill would provide businesses with direct grants through the IRS to cover the wages and benefits of laid-off and furloughed workers up to 90,000 per year.
“Mass unemployment is a policy choice, and we must choose differently by passing an urgent proposal that matches the scale of this crisis while delivering certainty and direct relief to workers, businesses of all sizes, and the economy,” Jayapal said in a statement. “The Paycheck Recovery Act will end mass unemployment, put workers back on their paychecks and health care and keep businesses from closing permanently.”
Jayapal fought hard for the inclusion of her paycheck guarantee proposal in HEROES Act, which passed the House last week, but was ultimately rebuffed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Jayapal joined several moderate House Democrats in voting against the HEROES Act in part because she said the bill would not do nearly enough to curb mass unemployment.
As The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim reported Tuesday, the significant support Jayapal’s paycheck guarantee plan has garnered from moderate Democrats in swing districts “represents a new threat to House Democratic leadership’s domination of the caucus.”
“For years, Pelosi has insisted that if it were up to her, the party would go further left than it does, but that the imperatives of reelection require moderating legislation for the members she calls ‘majority makers,'” Grim wrote. “But if those majority makers get out ahead of Pelosi, that rationale would evaporate, and the dictates of making and keeping a majority would militate in their direction.”
“The politics of fighting on behalf of jobs is an obvious winner,” Grim added.
Democratic Senators Demand Answers on Trump’s Secretive Border Expulsions
After ProPublica’s report, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee ask the Department of Homeland Security to explain why it thinks emergency powers granted to the CDC allow it to bypass existing asylum laws.
by Dara Lind - propublica
April 8, 12:28 p.m. EDT
Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are demanding information about what they call an “unprecedented expansion of executive power” by the Trump administration at the the U.S.-Mexico border, after a ProPublica story revealed how the administration has used emergency powers to bypass asylum law and summarily expel thousands of migrants.
In a letter written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., he and nine colleagues give the Department of Homeland Security until April 15 to explain why it believes it can use one section of U.S. law — which gives emergency powers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prohibit the entry of people or things that might “introduce” infectious disease — to preempt the government’s obligation under another section of federal law protecting migrants fearing persecution in their home countries.
“We are deeply concerned that DHS is blatantly misinterpreting its limited authorities under the CDC’s Title 42 order to override existing federal statutes — a move with no known precedent or clear legal rationale,” the letter states. “Making matters worse, this unprecedented expansion of executive power appears to be entirely hidden from public and Congressional oversight.”
Since March 20, citing the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus in border facilities that aren’t designed for medical care, the Border Patrol has adopted a policy of pushing migrants back to Mexico as quickly as possible. Mexico has agreed to accept not only its own citizens but citizens of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; the four countries make up the overwhelming majority of immigrants who cross into the U.S. without papers.
The Trump administration says that the CDC’s emergency powers, which are under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, allow it to take this approach. The CDC issued an order under Title 42 to bar unauthorized immigrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico without inspection.
But the Trump administration has offered few details publicly about how the operation actually works. ProPublica’s report, based on a leaked internal Border Patrol memo, offers the most complete picture to date of what the memo calls “Operation Capio.”
The memo instructs agents that in nearly all cases, people caught trying to enter the U.S. should be “expelled” under Title 42 rather than processed under existing immigration law. Migrants who fear persecution in their home countries have no ability to get humanitarian protections in the U.S., and they will be returned with no chance to explain their fears. Migrants who “spontaneously” express a fear of torture in their home countries can be allowed to stay and seek legal status in the U.S., but only if the Border Patrol agent finds their claim “reasonably believable” and gets approval from a senior official.
Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a comment for the original story, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told ProPublica that agents had the authority to exempt particular migrants from expulsion for humanitarian reasons — which is contradicted by the text of the memo, as well as reports from other media outlets and briefings given to congressional staff.
In the letter, the senators say that under the plan reported by ProPublica, “executive branch officials can all but ignore the requirements of long-standing federal laws pursuant to an executive branch interpretation of a statute enacted in 1944.”
The letter asks Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to present the internal legal analysis showing that the CDC’s emergency powers preempt existing immigration laws — or to explain, if no such analysis exists, why the administration concluded that it could bypass federal law without a formal opinion. It also demands weekly reports detailing how many people are being expelled under this policy and how many of them are single adults, members of families or unaccompanied children.
“Operation Capio” has allowed the Trump administration to reduce the number of people held in Customs and Border Protection facilities. According to statistics circulated within the government this week, there were 408 people held in CBP facilities on April 1 — down from 3,282 on March 18.
There are an additional 35,671 immigrants being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention — some of whom were apprehended crossing the border and are fighting deportation (or who cannot be deported) and some of whom were apprehended within the U.S. The novel coronavirus has spread into several ICE facilities, with 30 cases (19 detainees and 11 staff) confirmed across 16 facilities as of April 7. Under pressure from advocates and Democrats to slow the spread of the coronavirus by releasing detainees, ICE told Congress this week that it has identified about 600 medically vulnerable detainees for potential release, and that about 160 were released as of March 30.
In a letter written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., he and nine colleagues give the Department of Homeland Security until April 15 to explain why it believes it can use one section of U.S. law — which gives emergency powers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to prohibit the entry of people or things that might “introduce” infectious disease — to preempt the government’s obligation under another section of federal law protecting migrants fearing persecution in their home countries.
“We are deeply concerned that DHS is blatantly misinterpreting its limited authorities under the CDC’s Title 42 order to override existing federal statutes — a move with no known precedent or clear legal rationale,” the letter states. “Making matters worse, this unprecedented expansion of executive power appears to be entirely hidden from public and Congressional oversight.”
Since March 20, citing the risk of spreading the novel coronavirus in border facilities that aren’t designed for medical care, the Border Patrol has adopted a policy of pushing migrants back to Mexico as quickly as possible. Mexico has agreed to accept not only its own citizens but citizens of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; the four countries make up the overwhelming majority of immigrants who cross into the U.S. without papers.
The Trump administration says that the CDC’s emergency powers, which are under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, allow it to take this approach. The CDC issued an order under Title 42 to bar unauthorized immigrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico without inspection.
But the Trump administration has offered few details publicly about how the operation actually works. ProPublica’s report, based on a leaked internal Border Patrol memo, offers the most complete picture to date of what the memo calls “Operation Capio.”
The memo instructs agents that in nearly all cases, people caught trying to enter the U.S. should be “expelled” under Title 42 rather than processed under existing immigration law. Migrants who fear persecution in their home countries have no ability to get humanitarian protections in the U.S., and they will be returned with no chance to explain their fears. Migrants who “spontaneously” express a fear of torture in their home countries can be allowed to stay and seek legal status in the U.S., but only if the Border Patrol agent finds their claim “reasonably believable” and gets approval from a senior official.
Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a comment for the original story, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told ProPublica that agents had the authority to exempt particular migrants from expulsion for humanitarian reasons — which is contradicted by the text of the memo, as well as reports from other media outlets and briefings given to congressional staff.
In the letter, the senators say that under the plan reported by ProPublica, “executive branch officials can all but ignore the requirements of long-standing federal laws pursuant to an executive branch interpretation of a statute enacted in 1944.”
The letter asks Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to present the internal legal analysis showing that the CDC’s emergency powers preempt existing immigration laws — or to explain, if no such analysis exists, why the administration concluded that it could bypass federal law without a formal opinion. It also demands weekly reports detailing how many people are being expelled under this policy and how many of them are single adults, members of families or unaccompanied children.
“Operation Capio” has allowed the Trump administration to reduce the number of people held in Customs and Border Protection facilities. According to statistics circulated within the government this week, there were 408 people held in CBP facilities on April 1 — down from 3,282 on March 18.
There are an additional 35,671 immigrants being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention — some of whom were apprehended crossing the border and are fighting deportation (or who cannot be deported) and some of whom were apprehended within the U.S. The novel coronavirus has spread into several ICE facilities, with 30 cases (19 detainees and 11 staff) confirmed across 16 facilities as of April 7. Under pressure from advocates and Democrats to slow the spread of the coronavirus by releasing detainees, ICE told Congress this week that it has identified about 600 medically vulnerable detainees for potential release, and that about 160 were released as of March 30.
Tom Perez Put Corporate Lobbyists in Charge of the DNC’s Budget
BY David Moore, Sludge - truthout
PUBLISHED March 30, 2020
Last week, Mike Bloomberg transferred the leftover $18 million from his presidential campaign to the Democratic National Committee to use in the general election — over 23 times the maximum amount that an individual could give to a national party using all available channels.
The DNC justified Bloomberg’s donation because it came from his shuttering presidential campaign committee, a maneuver that campaign finance experts described as unprecedented in its size.
How will this windfall be spent? In short: however DNC Chair Tom Perez decides.
Headed into what is sure to be the most expensive election in history, there remains no independent oversight of the DNC chair’s expenditures or the party’s multi-million dollar contracts.
The DNC Budget and Finance Committee, whose members are appointed by Perez and the Executive Committee, is charged with approving party expenditures over $100,000, reviewing the budget on an on-going basis, and making periodic reports. The DNC bylaws call for the committee to work with the national chairperson and Executive Committee on disclosing leadership of contractors and “avoidance of conflicts of interest.”
But multiple current and past DNC members told Sludge that the committee is not fulfilling its duties. The committee is not delivering written reports to members on the effectiveness of the chair’s expenditures, according to the DNC members, and its minutes or process on avoidance of conflict of interest are not independently verifiable or publicly documented online.
Sludge reviewed a list of the ten DNC Budget and Finance Committee members as of September 2019, which the DNC does not make public, and found that several members work through lobbying and finance to advance the interests of industries that are represented by the DNC’s top vendors. The committee contains one fossil fuel industry lobbyist, a powerful former airport retail and construction lobbyist, a head investment banker at a firm behind multi-billion-dollar oil deals, and one fossil fuel industry investment officer. Six of the ten are at-large DNC members or party officers, who are put forward as a slate by the chair, and not individually elected by a state or regional delegation.
So far this election cycle, the DNC has reported spending $112.6 million, with nearly 150 recipients at the threshold of $100,000 or above that requires approval from the Budget and Finance Committee.
The DNC’s fourth-largest outside recipient, at $3.7 million, is law firm Perkins Coie, whose major corporate clients include Amazon, Boeing, Facebook, and Google — four of the top 20 spenders on federal lobbying last year — as well as Conoco, Honeywell and Microsoft. A recent Sludge investigation found that Perkins Coie, with deep ties to Democratic Party leadership, maintains an extensive oil and gas practice, providing legal services to oil companies such as Texaco and Valero and lobbying for a coalition of small oil refineries to be exempted from renewable energy fuel standards.
Perkins Coie’s political law practice, which exclusively represents Democratic groups and politicians, has brought in over $21 million this cycle from nearly 250 campaign committees, including over $3.3 million from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and over $2.8 million from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Perkins Coie’s services were engaged last year by many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, with payments totaling around $3.5 million from the campaigns of Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee, and John Delaney, as well as the super PAC of Tom Steyer.
A Sludge review of FEC records on March 1 found that two dozen Perkins Coie employees donated over $27,000 to the Biden for President campaign, four of them at the maximum. Two dozen gave to Amy Klobuchar’s campaign, one at the maximum; over 100 donated to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, mostly in small donations under $200. 21 employees gave close to $14,000 to Pete Buttigieg in the primary; just two Perkins Coie employees donated to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, one of them in three donations of $27, for a total of $381.
On the first day of this year, the firmwide chair of Perkins Coie’s political law practice, Marc Elias, donated $20,000 to each of the DCCC and the DSCC. Last year, eight employees of Perkins Coie contributed nearly $19,000 to the DNC.
Perkins Coie’s senior media relations manager acknowledged receiving a request for comment from Sludge, but did not respond to a short list of questions about how the firm served the DNC budget committee in implementing its ethics rules or discussing recipients’ potential conflicts of interest with corporate clients.
The DNC’s tenth-largest outside recipient last year was communications agency Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI), paid $1.5 million for digital programs and digital acquisition.
Founded by the digital marketers of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, BPI was paid nearly $760,000 to help launch the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), a dark money group formed by the pharmaceutical, hospital, and health insurance industries to stop single-payer Medicare for All. Its other clients have included energy company Exelon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, McDonald’s, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
In 2017, BPI’s client Exelon paid over $4.1 million to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a trade association representing the largest electricity companies nationwide including Duke Energy and Berkshire Hathaway. According to DeSmog, EEI was part of a multi-year campaign to combat net metering policies and fight against the transition to distributed solar power.
BPI client McDonald’s is a member of the National Restaurant Association, a trade group that has lobbied against wage increases in more than 30 states. While the Democratic platform states, “We believe that Americans should earn at least $15 an hour and have the right to form or join a union,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which coordinated business opposition for members including McDonald’s, did not endorse the $15 wage level. Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on to become global chief communications officer for McDonald’s before just recently joining Bully Pulpit Interactive as senior counsel based in Chicago.
Bully Pulpit Interactive spokesperson Sarah McHaney told Sludge, “When we worked for PAHCF, it was an organization dedicated to building upon Obamacare. Reasonable people can disagree on the best way to provide health care for all Americans but building upon Obamacare is a path that many Democratic candidates, including our presumptive nominee, support.”
However, during BPI’s consulting period from June 2018 through December 2018, PAHCF made its launch announcement and prominently featured Mike Bloomberg’s statement that “to replace the entire private system where companies provide health care for their employees would bankrupt us for a very long time.” In January 2019, the Washington Post reported that PAHCF was formed to stop momentum towards single-payer universal healthcare.
Democratic primary voters in 20 states in a row told pollsters this year that they supported a single-payer healthcare system. In another long standing tie between DNC leadership and the health insurance industry, James Roosevelt III, an at-large DNC member on the Executive Committee and longtime co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, is a policy chair of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurers’ trade association that was a founding member of PAHCF.
The DNC’s second-largest disbursement, after direct mail firm RWT Productions with $13.5 million, was to American Express, with $7.5 million.
In the previous election cycle, the PAC of American Express gave slightly more than half of its $521,000 in donations to Republican candidates at the federal level; in the current election cycle, that amount is up to 55% of its $263,000 in donations through March 6, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year, American Express disclosed nearly $1.4 million in federal lobbying, which included lobbying on the Stop Wall Street Looting Act sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and co-sponsored by four Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The Chamber of Commerce and 47 other financial industry lobbying groups joined in opposition to the bill, which sought to fundamentally reform the private equity business.
Also in the top ten DNC vendors, alongside various payroll and financial services like ADP, Voya, and Utilpro, is voter file company NGP VAN, with $2 million to date. Digital strategy firm Blue State Digital, co-founded by Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign manager Joe Rospars, took in $538,995 from the national party. The Democratic National Convention Committee has reported over $2.2 million from the DNC, though with the coronavirus pandemic, whether the July convention in Milwaukee gathering 50,000 people can be safely held is doubtful.
Other noteworthy DNC expenditures include the following: $1.4 million for Amazon Web Services, another $1.2 million on Amazon, $1.2 million on Lexis Nexis, over $900,000 on Facebook, $569,000 on investment firm Willis of New York, and $7,742 with consulting firm Precision Strategies, co-founded by Joe Biden’s new campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. DNC Chair Tom Perez was paid $149,008.
Who Approves the Party’s Budget?
Members of the DNC Budget and Finance Committee are appointed by the DNC Executive Committee, which Sludge previously found itself contains at least 17 members with principal positions or past positions representing corporate interests.[...]
READ MORE
The DNC justified Bloomberg’s donation because it came from his shuttering presidential campaign committee, a maneuver that campaign finance experts described as unprecedented in its size.
How will this windfall be spent? In short: however DNC Chair Tom Perez decides.
Headed into what is sure to be the most expensive election in history, there remains no independent oversight of the DNC chair’s expenditures or the party’s multi-million dollar contracts.
The DNC Budget and Finance Committee, whose members are appointed by Perez and the Executive Committee, is charged with approving party expenditures over $100,000, reviewing the budget on an on-going basis, and making periodic reports. The DNC bylaws call for the committee to work with the national chairperson and Executive Committee on disclosing leadership of contractors and “avoidance of conflicts of interest.”
But multiple current and past DNC members told Sludge that the committee is not fulfilling its duties. The committee is not delivering written reports to members on the effectiveness of the chair’s expenditures, according to the DNC members, and its minutes or process on avoidance of conflict of interest are not independently verifiable or publicly documented online.
Sludge reviewed a list of the ten DNC Budget and Finance Committee members as of September 2019, which the DNC does not make public, and found that several members work through lobbying and finance to advance the interests of industries that are represented by the DNC’s top vendors. The committee contains one fossil fuel industry lobbyist, a powerful former airport retail and construction lobbyist, a head investment banker at a firm behind multi-billion-dollar oil deals, and one fossil fuel industry investment officer. Six of the ten are at-large DNC members or party officers, who are put forward as a slate by the chair, and not individually elected by a state or regional delegation.
So far this election cycle, the DNC has reported spending $112.6 million, with nearly 150 recipients at the threshold of $100,000 or above that requires approval from the Budget and Finance Committee.
The DNC’s fourth-largest outside recipient, at $3.7 million, is law firm Perkins Coie, whose major corporate clients include Amazon, Boeing, Facebook, and Google — four of the top 20 spenders on federal lobbying last year — as well as Conoco, Honeywell and Microsoft. A recent Sludge investigation found that Perkins Coie, with deep ties to Democratic Party leadership, maintains an extensive oil and gas practice, providing legal services to oil companies such as Texaco and Valero and lobbying for a coalition of small oil refineries to be exempted from renewable energy fuel standards.
Perkins Coie’s political law practice, which exclusively represents Democratic groups and politicians, has brought in over $21 million this cycle from nearly 250 campaign committees, including over $3.3 million from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and over $2.8 million from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Perkins Coie’s services were engaged last year by many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, with payments totaling around $3.5 million from the campaigns of Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee, and John Delaney, as well as the super PAC of Tom Steyer.
A Sludge review of FEC records on March 1 found that two dozen Perkins Coie employees donated over $27,000 to the Biden for President campaign, four of them at the maximum. Two dozen gave to Amy Klobuchar’s campaign, one at the maximum; over 100 donated to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, mostly in small donations under $200. 21 employees gave close to $14,000 to Pete Buttigieg in the primary; just two Perkins Coie employees donated to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, one of them in three donations of $27, for a total of $381.
On the first day of this year, the firmwide chair of Perkins Coie’s political law practice, Marc Elias, donated $20,000 to each of the DCCC and the DSCC. Last year, eight employees of Perkins Coie contributed nearly $19,000 to the DNC.
Perkins Coie’s senior media relations manager acknowledged receiving a request for comment from Sludge, but did not respond to a short list of questions about how the firm served the DNC budget committee in implementing its ethics rules or discussing recipients’ potential conflicts of interest with corporate clients.
The DNC’s tenth-largest outside recipient last year was communications agency Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI), paid $1.5 million for digital programs and digital acquisition.
Founded by the digital marketers of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, BPI was paid nearly $760,000 to help launch the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), a dark money group formed by the pharmaceutical, hospital, and health insurance industries to stop single-payer Medicare for All. Its other clients have included energy company Exelon, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, McDonald’s, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
In 2017, BPI’s client Exelon paid over $4.1 million to the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a trade association representing the largest electricity companies nationwide including Duke Energy and Berkshire Hathaway. According to DeSmog, EEI was part of a multi-year campaign to combat net metering policies and fight against the transition to distributed solar power.
BPI client McDonald’s is a member of the National Restaurant Association, a trade group that has lobbied against wage increases in more than 30 states. While the Democratic platform states, “We believe that Americans should earn at least $15 an hour and have the right to form or join a union,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which coordinated business opposition for members including McDonald’s, did not endorse the $15 wage level. Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on to become global chief communications officer for McDonald’s before just recently joining Bully Pulpit Interactive as senior counsel based in Chicago.
Bully Pulpit Interactive spokesperson Sarah McHaney told Sludge, “When we worked for PAHCF, it was an organization dedicated to building upon Obamacare. Reasonable people can disagree on the best way to provide health care for all Americans but building upon Obamacare is a path that many Democratic candidates, including our presumptive nominee, support.”
However, during BPI’s consulting period from June 2018 through December 2018, PAHCF made its launch announcement and prominently featured Mike Bloomberg’s statement that “to replace the entire private system where companies provide health care for their employees would bankrupt us for a very long time.” In January 2019, the Washington Post reported that PAHCF was formed to stop momentum towards single-payer universal healthcare.
Democratic primary voters in 20 states in a row told pollsters this year that they supported a single-payer healthcare system. In another long standing tie between DNC leadership and the health insurance industry, James Roosevelt III, an at-large DNC member on the Executive Committee and longtime co-chair of the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee, is a policy chair of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurers’ trade association that was a founding member of PAHCF.
The DNC’s second-largest disbursement, after direct mail firm RWT Productions with $13.5 million, was to American Express, with $7.5 million.
In the previous election cycle, the PAC of American Express gave slightly more than half of its $521,000 in donations to Republican candidates at the federal level; in the current election cycle, that amount is up to 55% of its $263,000 in donations through March 6, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year, American Express disclosed nearly $1.4 million in federal lobbying, which included lobbying on the Stop Wall Street Looting Act sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and co-sponsored by four Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The Chamber of Commerce and 47 other financial industry lobbying groups joined in opposition to the bill, which sought to fundamentally reform the private equity business.
Also in the top ten DNC vendors, alongside various payroll and financial services like ADP, Voya, and Utilpro, is voter file company NGP VAN, with $2 million to date. Digital strategy firm Blue State Digital, co-founded by Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign manager Joe Rospars, took in $538,995 from the national party. The Democratic National Convention Committee has reported over $2.2 million from the DNC, though with the coronavirus pandemic, whether the July convention in Milwaukee gathering 50,000 people can be safely held is doubtful.
Other noteworthy DNC expenditures include the following: $1.4 million for Amazon Web Services, another $1.2 million on Amazon, $1.2 million on Lexis Nexis, over $900,000 on Facebook, $569,000 on investment firm Willis of New York, and $7,742 with consulting firm Precision Strategies, co-founded by Joe Biden’s new campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon. DNC Chair Tom Perez was paid $149,008.
Who Approves the Party’s Budget?
Members of the DNC Budget and Finance Committee are appointed by the DNC Executive Committee, which Sludge previously found itself contains at least 17 members with principal positions or past positions representing corporate interests.[...]
READ MORE
The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia
Bill Blum - truthdig
3/11/2020
Now that the Michigan Democratic primary is over and Joe Biden has been declared the winner, it’s time to read the handwriting on the political wall: Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, and Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up once again come the party’s convention in July. Sanders might influence the party’s platform, but platforms are never binding for the nominee. Sanders has lost, and so have his many progressive supporters, myself included.
I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders’ triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist — even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders — to head its ticket.
Funded by wealthy donors, run by Beltway insiders and aided and abetted by a corporate media dedicated to promoting the notion that Sanders was “unelectable,” the Democratic Party never welcomed Sanders as a legitimate contender. Not in 2016 and not in 2020. In several instances, it even resorted to some good old-fashioned red-baiting to frighten voters; the party is, after all, a capitalist institution. Working and middle-class families support the Democrats largely because they have no other place to go on Election Day besides the completely corrupt and craven GOP.
Now we are left with Donald Trump and Biden to duke it out in the fall. Yes, it has come to that.
In terms of campaign rhetoric and party policies, the general election campaign will be a battle for America’s past far more than it will be a contest for its future. The battle will be fueled on both sides by narratives and visions that are illusory, regressive and, in important respects, downright dangerous.
Of the two campaigns, Trump’s will be decidedly more toxic. The “Make America Great Again” slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the “Keep America Great” slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory that ignores our deeply entrenched history of patriarchal white supremacy and brutal class domination.
The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column, because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term.
As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism “is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism.” Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht’s theory.
Trumpism similarly meets the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic 2004 study, “The Anatomy of Fascism”:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:
Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles.
To grasp what neoliberalism means, it’s necessary to understand that it does not refer to a revival of the liberalism of the New Deal and New Society programs of the 1930s and 1960s. That brand of liberalism advocated the active intervention of the federal government in the economy to mitigate the harshest effects of private enterprise through such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That brand of liberalism imposed high taxes on the wealthy and significantly mitigated income inequality in America.
Neoliberalism, by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions.
Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age.
As transformational a politician as Barack Obama was in terms of race, he too pursued a predominantly neoliberal agenda. The Affordable Care Act, Obama’s singular domestic legislative achievement, is a perfect example of neoliberal private-public collaboration that left intact a health industry dominated by for-profit drug manufacturers and rapacious insurance companies, rather than setting the stage for Medicare for All, as championed by Sanders.
Biden never tires of reminding any audience willing to put up with his gaffes, verbal ticks and miscues that he served as Obama’s vice president. Those ties are likely to remain the centerpiece of his campaign, as he promises a return to the civility of the Obama era and a restoration of America’s standing in the world.
History, however, only moves forward. As charming and comforting as Biden’s imagery of the past may be, it is, like Trump’s darker outlook, a mirage. If Trump has taught us anything worthwhile, it is that the past cannot be replicated, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.
I am nothing if not a realist. The idea that Sanders might have become the Democratic candidate was always a fantasy, not unlike my youthful dreams of one day becoming an NFL quarterback. Even after Sanders’ triumph in the Nevada caucuses, I never thought the party establishment would ever allow a socialist — even a mild social democratic one, such as Sanders — to head its ticket.
Funded by wealthy donors, run by Beltway insiders and aided and abetted by a corporate media dedicated to promoting the notion that Sanders was “unelectable,” the Democratic Party never welcomed Sanders as a legitimate contender. Not in 2016 and not in 2020. In several instances, it even resorted to some good old-fashioned red-baiting to frighten voters; the party is, after all, a capitalist institution. Working and middle-class families support the Democrats largely because they have no other place to go on Election Day besides the completely corrupt and craven GOP.
Now we are left with Donald Trump and Biden to duke it out in the fall. Yes, it has come to that.
In terms of campaign rhetoric and party policies, the general election campaign will be a battle for America’s past far more than it will be a contest for its future. The battle will be fueled on both sides by narratives and visions that are illusory, regressive and, in important respects, downright dangerous.
Of the two campaigns, Trump’s will be decidedly more toxic. The “Make America Great Again” slogan that propelled Trump to victory in 2016 and the “Keep America Great” slogan he will try to sell this time around are neo-fascist in nature, designed to invoke an imaginary and false state of mythical past national glory that ignores our deeply entrenched history of patriarchal white supremacy and brutal class domination.
The fascist designation is not a label I apply to Trump cavalierly. I use it, as I have before in this column, because Trump meets many of the standard and widely respected definitions of the term.
As the celebrated Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1935, fascism “is a historic phase of capitalism … the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive and most treacherous form of capitalism.” Trumpism, along with its international analogs in Brazil, India and Western Europe, neatly accords with Brecht’s theory.
Trumpism similarly meets the definition of fascism offered by Robert Paxton in his classic 2004 study, “The Anatomy of Fascism”:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:
- A cult of traditionalism.
- The rejection of modernism.
- A cult of action for its own sake and a distrust of intellectualism.
- The view that disagreement or opposition is treasonous.
- A fear of difference. Fascism is racist by definition.
- An appeal to a frustrated middle class that is suffering from an economic crisis of humiliation and fear of the pressure exerted by lower social groups.
- An obsession with the plots and machinations of the movement’s identified enemies.
- A requirement that the movement’s enemies be simultaneously seen as omnipotent and weak, conniving and cowardly.
- A rejection of pacifism.
- Contempt for weakness.
- A cult of heroism.
- Hypermasculinity and homophobia.
- A selective populism, relying on chauvinist definitions of “the people” that the movement claims to represent.
- Heavy usage of “newspeak” and an impoverished discourse of elementary syntax and resistance to complex and critical reasoning.
Joe Biden is not a fascist. He is, instead, a standard-bearer of neoliberalism. As with fascism, there are different definitions of neoliberalism, prompting some exceptionally smug mainstream commentators like New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait to claim that the concept is little more than a left-wing insult. In truth, however, the concept describes an all-too-real set of governing principles.
To grasp what neoliberalism means, it’s necessary to understand that it does not refer to a revival of the liberalism of the New Deal and New Society programs of the 1930s and 1960s. That brand of liberalism advocated the active intervention of the federal government in the economy to mitigate the harshest effects of private enterprise through such programs as Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That brand of liberalism imposed high taxes on the wealthy and significantly mitigated income inequality in America.
Neoliberalism, by contrast, deemphasizes federal economic intervention in favor of initiatives calling for deregulation, corporate tax cuts, private-public partnerships, and international trade agreements that augment the free flow of capital while undermining the power and influence of trade unions.
Until the arrival of Trump and his brand of neo-fascism, both major parties since Reagan had embraced this ideology. And while neoliberals remain more benign on issues of race and gender than Trump and Trumpism ever will be, neoliberalism offers little to challenge hierarchies based on social class. Indeed, income inequality accelerated during the Obama years and today rivals that of the Gilded Age.
As transformational a politician as Barack Obama was in terms of race, he too pursued a predominantly neoliberal agenda. The Affordable Care Act, Obama’s singular domestic legislative achievement, is a perfect example of neoliberal private-public collaboration that left intact a health industry dominated by for-profit drug manufacturers and rapacious insurance companies, rather than setting the stage for Medicare for All, as championed by Sanders.
Biden never tires of reminding any audience willing to put up with his gaffes, verbal ticks and miscues that he served as Obama’s vice president. Those ties are likely to remain the centerpiece of his campaign, as he promises a return to the civility of the Obama era and a restoration of America’s standing in the world.
History, however, only moves forward. As charming and comforting as Biden’s imagery of the past may be, it is, like Trump’s darker outlook, a mirage. If Trump has taught us anything worthwhile, it is that the past cannot be replicated, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.
Everyone Got Super Tuesday Wrong. Here Are the Three Biggest Surprises.
by Robert Reich | the smirking chimp
March 8, 2020
1. The expectation was for a long, drawn-out primary with many candidates. But more quickly than anyone expected, the Democratic primary has come down to Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
2. Joe Biden was all but counted out before last week. A crucial endorsement from Congressman James Clyburn helped him cruise to a resounding victory in South Carolina. After his moderate rivals Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out to back him on the eve of Super Tuesday, he came roaring back.
3. And the Democratic establishment – I’m talking about the Democratic National Committee, the major Democratic funders and bundlers, the platoons of political consultants and advisers, pundits and op-ed writers, and corporate media – suddenly came down like a ton of bricks on Bernie Sanders and rallied around Joe Biden to help give Biden decisive victories in key states.
Neither Biden nor Bernie is a perfect candidate. Bernie’s personality grates on some, while Biden’s policy history turns off some. In the coming contest between Bernie and Biden, younger and older Democrats have very different ideas about who can best defeat Trump. The generation gap is huge. The biggest problem with Biden’s electability is he is practically incapable of connecting with young people. In Massachusetts on Tuesday, Biden won just 18 percent of voters under 45; in Texas, just 16 percent of voters under 45; in Minnesota, just 17 percent; in California, an appalling 8 percent. Sanders does almost as poorly among voters over 65.
The eventual nominee will have to bridge the divide between these factions within the party. Bernie must find a way to tailor his populist message in a way that will appeal to older voters, and black voters in particular. Even with strong policies on racial justice and equality, Bernie’s message still has not resonated with black voters. If he wants to be the nominee, something must change.
And the only way Biden can win the presidency is if he reaches out to young, progressive Democrats, and inspires them. This poses a huge lift: Biden’s establishment message of maintaining the status quo is as uninspiring as it gets for young voters who have only ever experienced the worst of our politics and the economy. In 2016, the Democrats’ presidential nominee had a similar message and similar problems with young voters. We cannot afford a repeat of a centrist candidate who stands for more of the same.
Perhaps Trump is so loathsome that whoever emerges as the Democratic candidate will attract enough votes to consign Trump to the trash bin of history regardless of their limitations. But we would be foolish to count on that.
2. Joe Biden was all but counted out before last week. A crucial endorsement from Congressman James Clyburn helped him cruise to a resounding victory in South Carolina. After his moderate rivals Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out to back him on the eve of Super Tuesday, he came roaring back.
3. And the Democratic establishment – I’m talking about the Democratic National Committee, the major Democratic funders and bundlers, the platoons of political consultants and advisers, pundits and op-ed writers, and corporate media – suddenly came down like a ton of bricks on Bernie Sanders and rallied around Joe Biden to help give Biden decisive victories in key states.
Neither Biden nor Bernie is a perfect candidate. Bernie’s personality grates on some, while Biden’s policy history turns off some. In the coming contest between Bernie and Biden, younger and older Democrats have very different ideas about who can best defeat Trump. The generation gap is huge. The biggest problem with Biden’s electability is he is practically incapable of connecting with young people. In Massachusetts on Tuesday, Biden won just 18 percent of voters under 45; in Texas, just 16 percent of voters under 45; in Minnesota, just 17 percent; in California, an appalling 8 percent. Sanders does almost as poorly among voters over 65.
The eventual nominee will have to bridge the divide between these factions within the party. Bernie must find a way to tailor his populist message in a way that will appeal to older voters, and black voters in particular. Even with strong policies on racial justice and equality, Bernie’s message still has not resonated with black voters. If he wants to be the nominee, something must change.
And the only way Biden can win the presidency is if he reaches out to young, progressive Democrats, and inspires them. This poses a huge lift: Biden’s establishment message of maintaining the status quo is as uninspiring as it gets for young voters who have only ever experienced the worst of our politics and the economy. In 2016, the Democrats’ presidential nominee had a similar message and similar problems with young voters. We cannot afford a repeat of a centrist candidate who stands for more of the same.
Perhaps Trump is so loathsome that whoever emerges as the Democratic candidate will attract enough votes to consign Trump to the trash bin of history regardless of their limitations. But we would be foolish to count on that.
Congressional Democrats introduce emergency paid sick leave legislation
Joan McCarter
Daily Kos Staff
Friday March 06, 2020 · 11:00 AM PST
It's not the full-on stimulus bill that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called for and that is definitely needed to respond to the economic and social upheaval coronavirus is threatening, but Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rosa DeLauro also have a plan to make American business step up. The Democrats want to ensure that coronavirus patients can stay home when they’re sick without losing wages. This would make the U.S. join every other industrialized nation on earth in requiring sick leave.
Murray's home state of Washington is ground zero for the disease in the U.S. From her position as ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, she and DeLauro—chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for funding the Department of Labor—have introduced a bill to require paid sick leave for all workers. They would have to allow workers to accrue seven days of leave during the work year, but would also require an additional 14 days, immediately available, in the event of a public health crisis.
"The coronavirus is highly contagious and the problem isn't going away anytime soon," said Murray. "Workers want to do the right thing for themselves, their families, and their communities—so especially in the middle of public health crises like this, staying home sick shouldn't have to mean losing a paycheck or a job. This bill would immediately give workers the ability to care for themselves, their families, and help keep their communities safe. We need to pass it without delay."
DeLauro pointed out that the "lack of paid sick days could make coronavirus harder to contain in the United States compared with other countries that have universal sick leave policies in place." Which is pretty darned obvious to anyone with a lick of sense, so of course it's not something the U.S. Republican Party has ever allowed. Yet. Here's what this bill does:
Murray's home state of Washington is ground zero for the disease in the U.S. From her position as ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, she and DeLauro—chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for funding the Department of Labor—have introduced a bill to require paid sick leave for all workers. They would have to allow workers to accrue seven days of leave during the work year, but would also require an additional 14 days, immediately available, in the event of a public health crisis.
"The coronavirus is highly contagious and the problem isn't going away anytime soon," said Murray. "Workers want to do the right thing for themselves, their families, and their communities—so especially in the middle of public health crises like this, staying home sick shouldn't have to mean losing a paycheck or a job. This bill would immediately give workers the ability to care for themselves, their families, and help keep their communities safe. We need to pass it without delay."
DeLauro pointed out that the "lack of paid sick days could make coronavirus harder to contain in the United States compared with other countries that have universal sick leave policies in place." Which is pretty darned obvious to anyone with a lick of sense, so of course it's not something the U.S. Republican Party has ever allowed. Yet. Here's what this bill does:
- Require all employers to allow workers to gradually earn seven days of paid sick leave.
- Require all employers to provide an additional 14 days of paid sick leave, available immediately at the beginning of a public health emergency, including the current coronavirus crisis.
- Ensure paid sick leave covers days when your child's school is closed due to a public health emergency, when your employer is closed due to public health emergency, or if you or a family member is quarantined or isolated due to a public health emergency.
Noam Chomsky: "The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago"
In an interview with Wallace Shawn, Noam Chomsky explains how elitism and atomization have created political rifts
NOAM CHOMSKY - WALLACE SHAWN - salon
FEBRUARY 22, 2020 7:00PM (UTC)
The following transcript is excerpted from their conversation, which can be read in full in the just-released book "Internationalism or Extinction," edited by Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar and Paul Shannon.
WALLACE SHAWN: Many of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and climate change have a built-in resentment toward people who've been well educated and who may be better off economically. How do we reach them?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That's serious. That is a very interesting phenomenon; it has to be dealt with sensitively and with understanding. As I mentioned, 40% of the population say it can't be a problem because of the Second Coming. Now that's a deep cultural problem in the United States. People who know something about US history should all... we should all understand it.
It's very important to realize that this country was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but it was overwhelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was far and away the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it's a very insular country. There aren't many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away from those bad guys, enormous internal resources which nobody else had. There were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there are a lot of reasons for it, but it's there and you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters.
These are people who have just been cast aside, nobody does anything for them. The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies. Working-class males are — we are supposed to call them "middle class" in the United States, the phrase "working class" is a four-letter word here — but working-class males who are supporting Trump are actually supporting policies which are going to devastate them. Just take a look at the economic policies, the fiscal policies and others. But it's true that they are cast aside, and their values are being attacked. Their values are in many ways culturally traditional and pre-modern in the Western sense, but they are being attacked. One of the few refuges they have is the church. They are the church in a traditional community so you can't just laugh at it, it's serious. It has to be dealt with.
There is a very interesting book that just came out by Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist, who went to a pretty terribly impoverished area in Louisiana and lived there for six years and studied the people sympathetically. This is deep Trump country, and her results are quite interesting. For example, these are people who are being devastated by chemical and other pollution from the petrochemical industry, but they are strongly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency. When she asks why, they have reasons. They say, "Look, what is the Environmental Protection Agency? It's some guy from the city with a Ph.D. who comes out here and tells me I can't fish but he doesn't go after the petrochemical industries. So, who wants them? I don't want them taking away my job and telling me what I can do and speaking to me with the cultivated accents meanwhile I'm under attack by all this stuff."
These attitudes are serious. They are significant. They deserve respect and not ridicule, and I think they can be addressed. For example, I think that say in the 1930s, I'm old enough to remember, in many ways, it was kind of like now; poverty was much greater. The depression was much worse than the current recession. In fact, it was a much poorer country than it is now.
I was very hopeful. My own family, many of them were unemployed working class; most workers were unemployed, but they were hopeful.
They had a sense that things are going to get better. There were labor actions, the CIO's organizing, there were left political parties, the unions were providing real services: a couple of weeks in the country, educational groups, workers education, ways for people to get together – somehow we'll get out of all this. That's lacking. It has become a very atomized society. People are alone in it: used to be their TV sets, now it's their cell phones or iPhones or whatever. They're very atomized, isolated, makes them feel very vulnerable.
These are the kind of things that can be overcome by organization and activism. My own feeling [is] that the Trump supporters and the Sanders supporters could have been a unified bloc. Proper approaches to the problem take effort, sensitivity, and understanding of the kind for example that Hochschild showed with her sympathetic account of where these people are coming from and why. It's easy, say in the New Yorker, to have a cartoon about Trump and how ridiculous it is, but that's missing the point. Maybe it looks ridiculous, but he is reaching people for reasons and we should be interested in the reasons.
Actually, it's the same story, to turn to something else, with young Muslims in the West who are joining the jihad movements. It's not enough to scream at them; there are reasons. If you look at the circumstances in their lives, you can see the reasons and they can be addressed.[...]
WALLACE SHAWN: Many of the people who do know about the consequences of nuclear war and climate change are quite well-educated people who are resented by a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts on how, I mean there is a class difference that Trump supporters who laugh at the idea of global warming and climate change have a built-in resentment toward people who've been well educated and who may be better off economically. How do we reach them?
NOAM CHOMSKY: That's serious. That is a very interesting phenomenon; it has to be dealt with sensitively and with understanding. As I mentioned, 40% of the population say it can't be a problem because of the Second Coming. Now that's a deep cultural problem in the United States. People who know something about US history should all... we should all understand it.
It's very important to realize that this country was a cultural backwater until World War II. [Until then,] if you wanted to study physics, you went to Germany. You wanted to become a writer, an artist, you went to Paris. There were exceptions of course but it was overwhelmingly true, and it was true even though the United States was far and away the richest, most powerful country in the world and had been for a long time. [There are] all kinds of historical reasons for that: it's a very insular country. There aren't many countries where you can travel 3,000 miles and be in about the same place where you left, not running into any different culture or language or anything like that. Protected by oceans, we keep away from those bad guys, enormous internal resources which nobody else had. There were a lot of waves of immigrants that became integrated and so on, so there are a lot of reasons for it, but it's there and you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it, and there is no point railing about atheism. These are issues that have to be understood, and it has to be understood that the churches really mean something to people, plenty of people, including the Trump supporters.
These are people who have just been cast aside, nobody does anything for them. The Democrats abandoned the working class decades ago. Republicans may take a populist line, but they are much more opposed to working people than even the Democrats in policies. Working-class males are — we are supposed to call them "middle class" in the United States, the phrase "working class" is a four-letter word here — but working-class males who are supporting Trump are actually supporting policies which are going to devastate them. Just take a look at the economic policies, the fiscal policies and others. But it's true that they are cast aside, and their values are being attacked. Their values are in many ways culturally traditional and pre-modern in the Western sense, but they are being attacked. One of the few refuges they have is the church. They are the church in a traditional community so you can't just laugh at it, it's serious. It has to be dealt with.
There is a very interesting book that just came out by Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist, who went to a pretty terribly impoverished area in Louisiana and lived there for six years and studied the people sympathetically. This is deep Trump country, and her results are quite interesting. For example, these are people who are being devastated by chemical and other pollution from the petrochemical industry, but they are strongly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency. When she asks why, they have reasons. They say, "Look, what is the Environmental Protection Agency? It's some guy from the city with a Ph.D. who comes out here and tells me I can't fish but he doesn't go after the petrochemical industries. So, who wants them? I don't want them taking away my job and telling me what I can do and speaking to me with the cultivated accents meanwhile I'm under attack by all this stuff."
These attitudes are serious. They are significant. They deserve respect and not ridicule, and I think they can be addressed. For example, I think that say in the 1930s, I'm old enough to remember, in many ways, it was kind of like now; poverty was much greater. The depression was much worse than the current recession. In fact, it was a much poorer country than it is now.
I was very hopeful. My own family, many of them were unemployed working class; most workers were unemployed, but they were hopeful.
They had a sense that things are going to get better. There were labor actions, the CIO's organizing, there were left political parties, the unions were providing real services: a couple of weeks in the country, educational groups, workers education, ways for people to get together – somehow we'll get out of all this. That's lacking. It has become a very atomized society. People are alone in it: used to be their TV sets, now it's their cell phones or iPhones or whatever. They're very atomized, isolated, makes them feel very vulnerable.
These are the kind of things that can be overcome by organization and activism. My own feeling [is] that the Trump supporters and the Sanders supporters could have been a unified bloc. Proper approaches to the problem take effort, sensitivity, and understanding of the kind for example that Hochschild showed with her sympathetic account of where these people are coming from and why. It's easy, say in the New Yorker, to have a cartoon about Trump and how ridiculous it is, but that's missing the point. Maybe it looks ridiculous, but he is reaching people for reasons and we should be interested in the reasons.
Actually, it's the same story, to turn to something else, with young Muslims in the West who are joining the jihad movements. It's not enough to scream at them; there are reasons. If you look at the circumstances in their lives, you can see the reasons and they can be addressed.[...]
The ‘pro-life swing voter’ some moderate Democrats chase is a myth
By Daniel Schultz, Religion Dispatches @ Raw Story - Commentary
February 20, 2020
A thing that I do not understand is why journalists assume that Democratic presidential candidates absolutely must respond to pro-life activists, or deal with The Abortion Problem. I sometimes think it’s because they teach you in journalism school that every four years Swing Voters sprout from the earth like cicadas demanding propitiation. And if the Swing Voters are not sufficiently placated, all manner of hell will break loose, like Swing Voters clinging to God & guns or refusing to speak to responsible centrist journalists in Midwestern diners so the poor scribblers can’t expense their rice pudding. Things happen!
Because of these beliefs, articles like this one blossom eternally:
In a party that’s shifted leftward on abortion rights, Democratic presidential hopefuls are offering different approaches to a central challenge: how to talk to voters without a clear home in the polarizing debate over the government’s role in the decision to end a pregnancy.
We’re told that the party is moving “leftward” on abortion, and is thus in danger of leaving some voters behind. What we’re not told is why Democrats—or readers, really—should care, particularly because there’s little evidence across various pollsters, from PRRI to Gallup to Pew, that Democratic voters are trending toward restricting abortion rights.
So it goes:
The praise for Klobuchar suggests that Democrats who have heeded rising worry within their base about GOP-backed abortion limits by pitching significant new abortion-rights policies may risk alienating religious voters who are otherwise open to supporting their party over President Donald Trump. Voters in that group looking for an appeal to “common ground” on abortion, as former President Barack Obama put it during his 2008 campaign, have heard few of those statements during the current Democratic primary.
Let’s set aside the misleading premise of the “different approaches” referred to here. As evidence of the assertion of the risk of “alienating religious voters,” we hear from four anti-choice activists in the article, plus one Republican advising the Democrats on which nominee seems most moderate.
One of the activists (Kim Daniels) is a former spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This doesn’t mean her ideas are invalid, of course, but the Bishops are well-known to slant heavily to the right on this issue, and they certainly tangled often with Pres. Obama, especially around the reproductive mandates in the ACA. Could any of this background have affected Daniels’ perspective? Why should Democrats constantly have to conciliate their right wing? We’re not told. What are the risks of doing so? We don’t learn that either.
Another activist, Chris Crawford, is interviewed about asking Amy Klobuchar whether she would welcome pro-life voters. Crawford, as it turns out, is a former national field director for the Susan B. Anthony List, who, well, let them tell it:
However, Klobuchar’s comments left some abortion-rights and anti-abortion activists cold. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List tweeted that the Minnesota senator is “still extreme & out-of-touch,” pointing to her record of abortion-rights votes[.]
Could it be that Crawford was being strategic in his questioning and reaction to Klobuchar’s response? It certainly could! Again, it might be helpful to know something of his background in making that assessment.
Kristen Day of Democrats for Life is quoted as saying there are atheists in her coalition. Again, oh really? How many? Who are they? The Dems for Life website is silent on its membership, but does list five advisory board members, all of whom appear to be Catholics.
The last activist interviewed is Charles Camosy, who we are told “recently left the board of Democrats for Life in frustration over what he saw as the party’s absolutist approach to abortion.” He didn’t just do that—he left the party altogether. Why exactly should Democrats be interested in the opinion of a member of the American Solidarity Party? How many people do these activists represent? It’s unclear that they’re representative of much at all.
Meanwhile, only one reproductive rights advocate is interviewed. No religious supporters of choice are included, despite their being plentiful and friendly with microphones. Where are their voices? Are only pro-life Catholics worth an interview? Are only pro-life Catholics truly Christian? Remember, the article frames it as the “risk [of] alienating religious voters,” a misleading and inaccurate statement.
I want to be quite clear that the people mentioned are all entitled to their opinion, and they have as much right to press for their views as any other Democrat. But this article makes far too many common mistakes. It’s unbalanced. It takes people with clear agendas at their word. It imputes support for those people outside their own circle without much evidence. And worst of all, it does this:
An AP-NORC poll taken in December found that 45% of Catholics backed significant restrictions that would make abortion illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or threats to a mother’s life. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults, 17% said that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, a number that rises to 25% among self-identified conservative or moderate Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year.
This is also not evidence that Democrats must heed the cries of the pro-life vote. Again, let’s math: That 45% of Catholics are for restrictions is irrelevant; not all Catholics are Democrats. That 17% of Democrats think abortion should be outlawed is more relevant, but 25% of conservative or moderate Democrats? By Pew’s own calculations, that’s a little more than 12% of all Democrats and leaners.
In other words, according to the very data enlisted to show that Democratic candidates have something to worry about on the abortion issue, 88% of all Democratic voters think abortion should be legal in some form. And by the heuristic I’ve developed based on this PRRI survey, if 20% of Democratic pro-lifers say they won’t vote for a pro-choice candidate, that adds up 2.4% of the party, a little lower than the 4% who approve of Pres. Trump’s job performance.
I’ll break it to you nicely: those aren’t Swing Voters, either. And even if they were, what’s nearly always ignored in such discussions is the opportunity cost of trying to placate pro-life Democrats. How many pro-reproductive-rights Dems, in other words, are so turned off by the failure to stake out a clear moral position on the issue that they vote for another candidate or stay home?
So, to return to the original point, I do not understand why journalists persist in telling us that Democratic presidential candidates absolutely must respond to pro-life activists. Nor do I understand why they don’t tell us that the vast majority of Democrats are on the same page as their candidates when it comes to this issue. It would be much more accurate reporting buying into a lot less tendentious spin. But I guess “Democrats in array” stories sell about as well as “dog bites man.” Stop the presses and find me a Swing Voter to bite this party!
Because of these beliefs, articles like this one blossom eternally:
In a party that’s shifted leftward on abortion rights, Democratic presidential hopefuls are offering different approaches to a central challenge: how to talk to voters without a clear home in the polarizing debate over the government’s role in the decision to end a pregnancy.
We’re told that the party is moving “leftward” on abortion, and is thus in danger of leaving some voters behind. What we’re not told is why Democrats—or readers, really—should care, particularly because there’s little evidence across various pollsters, from PRRI to Gallup to Pew, that Democratic voters are trending toward restricting abortion rights.
So it goes:
The praise for Klobuchar suggests that Democrats who have heeded rising worry within their base about GOP-backed abortion limits by pitching significant new abortion-rights policies may risk alienating religious voters who are otherwise open to supporting their party over President Donald Trump. Voters in that group looking for an appeal to “common ground” on abortion, as former President Barack Obama put it during his 2008 campaign, have heard few of those statements during the current Democratic primary.
Let’s set aside the misleading premise of the “different approaches” referred to here. As evidence of the assertion of the risk of “alienating religious voters,” we hear from four anti-choice activists in the article, plus one Republican advising the Democrats on which nominee seems most moderate.
One of the activists (Kim Daniels) is a former spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This doesn’t mean her ideas are invalid, of course, but the Bishops are well-known to slant heavily to the right on this issue, and they certainly tangled often with Pres. Obama, especially around the reproductive mandates in the ACA. Could any of this background have affected Daniels’ perspective? Why should Democrats constantly have to conciliate their right wing? We’re not told. What are the risks of doing so? We don’t learn that either.
Another activist, Chris Crawford, is interviewed about asking Amy Klobuchar whether she would welcome pro-life voters. Crawford, as it turns out, is a former national field director for the Susan B. Anthony List, who, well, let them tell it:
However, Klobuchar’s comments left some abortion-rights and anti-abortion activists cold. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List tweeted that the Minnesota senator is “still extreme & out-of-touch,” pointing to her record of abortion-rights votes[.]
Could it be that Crawford was being strategic in his questioning and reaction to Klobuchar’s response? It certainly could! Again, it might be helpful to know something of his background in making that assessment.
Kristen Day of Democrats for Life is quoted as saying there are atheists in her coalition. Again, oh really? How many? Who are they? The Dems for Life website is silent on its membership, but does list five advisory board members, all of whom appear to be Catholics.
The last activist interviewed is Charles Camosy, who we are told “recently left the board of Democrats for Life in frustration over what he saw as the party’s absolutist approach to abortion.” He didn’t just do that—he left the party altogether. Why exactly should Democrats be interested in the opinion of a member of the American Solidarity Party? How many people do these activists represent? It’s unclear that they’re representative of much at all.
Meanwhile, only one reproductive rights advocate is interviewed. No religious supporters of choice are included, despite their being plentiful and friendly with microphones. Where are their voices? Are only pro-life Catholics worth an interview? Are only pro-life Catholics truly Christian? Remember, the article frames it as the “risk [of] alienating religious voters,” a misleading and inaccurate statement.
I want to be quite clear that the people mentioned are all entitled to their opinion, and they have as much right to press for their views as any other Democrat. But this article makes far too many common mistakes. It’s unbalanced. It takes people with clear agendas at their word. It imputes support for those people outside their own circle without much evidence. And worst of all, it does this:
An AP-NORC poll taken in December found that 45% of Catholics backed significant restrictions that would make abortion illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or threats to a mother’s life. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults, 17% said that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, a number that rises to 25% among self-identified conservative or moderate Democrats, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year.
This is also not evidence that Democrats must heed the cries of the pro-life vote. Again, let’s math: That 45% of Catholics are for restrictions is irrelevant; not all Catholics are Democrats. That 17% of Democrats think abortion should be outlawed is more relevant, but 25% of conservative or moderate Democrats? By Pew’s own calculations, that’s a little more than 12% of all Democrats and leaners.
In other words, according to the very data enlisted to show that Democratic candidates have something to worry about on the abortion issue, 88% of all Democratic voters think abortion should be legal in some form. And by the heuristic I’ve developed based on this PRRI survey, if 20% of Democratic pro-lifers say they won’t vote for a pro-choice candidate, that adds up 2.4% of the party, a little lower than the 4% who approve of Pres. Trump’s job performance.
I’ll break it to you nicely: those aren’t Swing Voters, either. And even if they were, what’s nearly always ignored in such discussions is the opportunity cost of trying to placate pro-life Democrats. How many pro-reproductive-rights Dems, in other words, are so turned off by the failure to stake out a clear moral position on the issue that they vote for another candidate or stay home?
So, to return to the original point, I do not understand why journalists persist in telling us that Democratic presidential candidates absolutely must respond to pro-life activists. Nor do I understand why they don’t tell us that the vast majority of Democrats are on the same page as their candidates when it comes to this issue. It would be much more accurate reporting buying into a lot less tendentious spin. But I guess “Democrats in array” stories sell about as well as “dog bites man.” Stop the presses and find me a Swing Voter to bite this party!
the party of wimps!!!
Dems to largely end investigations after Trump impeachment acquittal
February 17, 2020
By Common Dreams - raw story
House Democrats are pivoting away from investigations of President Donald Trump and toward economic issues and healthcare for the 2020 general election in November, according to a New York Times report, and shelving—for now—intentions to subpoena former National Security Advisor John Bolton and, in the eyes of critics, giving the president carte blanche on his machinations in the Justice Department.
The shift toward so-called “kitchen table issues” and a deprioritization of investigations raised eyebrows as political observers noted that Trump has only been emboldened by acquittal and that DOJ is currently roiled in a scandal over the president’s pressuring of Attorney General William Barr on prosecutions.
“Dems are gonna ‘run on healthcare’ while letting Bill Barr turn the Justice Department into muscle for the Trump organization,” tweeted Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer.
As Common Dreams reported, Trump’s meddling in DOJ prosecutions and sentencing guidelines has presented career prosecutors with a dilemma over how to proceed in a department that by all appearances has lost its independence. On Sunday, over 1,100 former DOJ officials signed an open letter to Barr asking him to resign over Trump’s interference.
“House Dems did literally the narrowest possible impeachment they could,” said Crooked Media‘s Brian Beutler. “The overwhelming majority of Trump’s corruption remains uninvestigated. And they have now made the decision to normalize his dictatorial control over DOJ.”
The Times reported that House Democrats will bring Barr in for testimony:
Democrats have summoned Mr. Barr to testify before the Judiciary Committee on March 31. In a harshly worded letter sent to Mr. Barr on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the panel’s chairman, signaled that Democrats planned to question Mr. Barr about overruling prosecutors on Mr. Stone’s recommended sentence and Mr. Barr’s willingness to accept information about Ukraine from Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, among other matters.
But, the Times added, that is the extent to which Democrats would like to take things, preferring instead to focus on healthcare and jobs. To that end, party leaders brought Steven Rattner, a financier whose firm manages former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assets, to show lawmakers a PowerPoint presentation on how to speak on economic issues to everyday Americans.
As for Bolton, Democrats appear ready to move on from the former White House advisor’s testimony.
On February 5, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) told CNN that the House still intended to subpoena Bolton on what Bolton knew and when about the president’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Trump’s political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. But Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told the Times that the House has no plans to do so and that the caucus’ focus is largely shifting to domestic issues.
“I’ve been very clear and I think the speaker has, and other leaders, that our focus should continue to be on the ‘For the People’ agenda, which we articulated to the American people in advance of November 2018,” said Jeffries.
The shift toward so-called “kitchen table issues” and a deprioritization of investigations raised eyebrows as political observers noted that Trump has only been emboldened by acquittal and that DOJ is currently roiled in a scandal over the president’s pressuring of Attorney General William Barr on prosecutions.
“Dems are gonna ‘run on healthcare’ while letting Bill Barr turn the Justice Department into muscle for the Trump organization,” tweeted Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer.
As Common Dreams reported, Trump’s meddling in DOJ prosecutions and sentencing guidelines has presented career prosecutors with a dilemma over how to proceed in a department that by all appearances has lost its independence. On Sunday, over 1,100 former DOJ officials signed an open letter to Barr asking him to resign over Trump’s interference.
“House Dems did literally the narrowest possible impeachment they could,” said Crooked Media‘s Brian Beutler. “The overwhelming majority of Trump’s corruption remains uninvestigated. And they have now made the decision to normalize his dictatorial control over DOJ.”
The Times reported that House Democrats will bring Barr in for testimony:
Democrats have summoned Mr. Barr to testify before the Judiciary Committee on March 31. In a harshly worded letter sent to Mr. Barr on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the panel’s chairman, signaled that Democrats planned to question Mr. Barr about overruling prosecutors on Mr. Stone’s recommended sentence and Mr. Barr’s willingness to accept information about Ukraine from Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, among other matters.
But, the Times added, that is the extent to which Democrats would like to take things, preferring instead to focus on healthcare and jobs. To that end, party leaders brought Steven Rattner, a financier whose firm manages former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s assets, to show lawmakers a PowerPoint presentation on how to speak on economic issues to everyday Americans.
As for Bolton, Democrats appear ready to move on from the former White House advisor’s testimony.
On February 5, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) told CNN that the House still intended to subpoena Bolton on what Bolton knew and when about the president’s scheme to pressure Ukraine into announcing an investigation into Trump’s political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. But Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told the Times that the House has no plans to do so and that the caucus’ focus is largely shifting to domestic issues.
“I’ve been very clear and I think the speaker has, and other leaders, that our focus should continue to be on the ‘For the People’ agenda, which we articulated to the American people in advance of November 2018,” said Jeffries.
Speakers can get Hazardous Duty Pay, right?
Ted Rall | December 18, 2017
‘I was duped’: Congressman urges colleagues to snub ‘No Labels’ — the ‘corporate org working against Democrats’
Bob Brigham - raw story
04 DEC 2018 AT 17:52 ET
The “No Labels” organization was slammed by a leading Democrat — who is urging his colleagues to avoid the controversial group.
“I was duped,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) wrote in the Huffington Post on Tuesday.
“Look, I get it. No Labels is slick, and I got duped,” he admitted. “But no other current or newly elected member of Congress should fall for its shtick.”
“No Labels is a centrist, corporate organization working against Democrats with dark, anonymous money to advance power for special interests. Period,” he noted. “So newly elected members, learn from my mistakes.”
The group urges Democrats to join the so-called, “Problem Solver’s Caucus.”
He even suggested the group needs a warning label.
“No Labels needs a label: ‘Warning: Wolf in sheep’s clothing inside. Join at your own risk.'”
The column was published one day after The Daily Beast published an expose on the group.
The Beast also obtained a donor list for No Labels.
“I was duped,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) wrote in the Huffington Post on Tuesday.
“Look, I get it. No Labels is slick, and I got duped,” he admitted. “But no other current or newly elected member of Congress should fall for its shtick.”
“No Labels is a centrist, corporate organization working against Democrats with dark, anonymous money to advance power for special interests. Period,” he noted. “So newly elected members, learn from my mistakes.”
The group urges Democrats to join the so-called, “Problem Solver’s Caucus.”
He even suggested the group needs a warning label.
“No Labels needs a label: ‘Warning: Wolf in sheep’s clothing inside. Join at your own risk.'”
The column was published one day after The Daily Beast published an expose on the group.
The Beast also obtained a donor list for No Labels.
Sam Stein✔
@samstein
Exclusive. We’ve obtained the donor list for No Labels. It’s filled with the biggest names in private equity and hedge funds https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-no-labels-went-from-preaching-unity-to-practicing-the-dark-arts …
6:23 AM - Dec 3, 2018
@samstein
Exclusive. We’ve obtained the donor list for No Labels. It’s filled with the biggest names in private equity and hedge funds https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-no-labels-went-from-preaching-unity-to-practicing-the-dark-arts …
6:23 AM - Dec 3, 2018
It’s Time for Democrats to Abandon Stale Centrist Politics Once and For All
While the Democratic establishment is blindly attempting to revive the neoliberal Third Way, the party’s base is embracing socialism.
BY MILES KAMPF-LASSIN - in these times
9/10/18
If there’s one thing establishment Democrats excel at, it’s covering their ears and whistling the tired tunes of centrism. Despite having experienced colossal electoral losses, the wholesale rejection of their neoliberal politics and the resurgence of a bold left-wing populism across the country, centrist true believers are doing everything in their power to keep the party’s progressive insurgency at bay—even if that means stamping out the newfound energy breathing life back into the party.
Take the Opportunity 2020 conference, hosted in late July in Columbus, Ohio, by Third Way, a centrist think tank. At the gathering, moderate Democrats—including lawmakers and party bigwigs like billionaire real estate developer Winston Fisher, co-host of this conference-turned-consolation session—convinced themselves that their brand of tepid, business-friendly policies is what the public really wants.
Rather than targeting rampant inequality, organizers embraced an economic message of “opportunity” to ensure that each person has a chance to succeed—never mind the skewed playing field that favors the few.
New Democracy, a fellow centrist group, also held a July meeting to plan its counteroffensive to the growing left wing of the party. That group's message? According to Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Il.), it boils down to, “the center is sexier than you think.”
Sexiness aside, what would Third Way’s Wall Street-funded vision of opportunity consist of? A privatized retirement fund, a venture-capital-style bank for underserved communities and a volunteer program for retirees called “Boomer Corps.” If this doesn’t sound like a program up to the task of solving the economic crisis facing the working class, conference speaker Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) made clear the gathering’s real message, a rebuke to the party’s insurgent left wing: “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich. I want to be rich!”
While plenty of Americans undoubtedly want to be rich, more and more are waking up to the fact that the current system depends on them remaining poor. And they’re sick of it: An August poll shows that, for the first time since Gallup started asking the question 10 years ago, Democrats now view socialism more favorably than capitalism.
During this year’s Democratic primaries, left challengers running on bold progressive agendas won across the country, from Ben Jealous in Maryland to Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York.
These candidates have embraced an emerging left-wing consensus platform, including Medicare for All, free public college, a $15 minimum wage and massive investments in renewable energy. A number of them, including Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, openly ran as democratic socialists who called out the failure of capitalism to provide working people a dignified life.
This shift to the left isn’t just evident in the primary results. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign helped popularize an array of progressive policies, and they’ve been gaining steam ever since. Universal, single-payer healthcare, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage now boast the support of a majority of Americans.
The corporate interests bankrolling the Democratic Party establishment remain adamantly opposed to such proposals. It’s no surprise, then, that the party’s centrist wing is terrified. The political enterprise they’ve spent their careers building runs counter to the big,
universal, redistributive policies being supported by the Democratic base—and by the progressive candidates in the media spotlight.
The party’s future success hinges on the Left exerting its burgeoning power—in the streets and the ballot box—in a way unseen in recent American political history. That’s the real opportunity Democrats face in 2018 and 2020.
Take the Opportunity 2020 conference, hosted in late July in Columbus, Ohio, by Third Way, a centrist think tank. At the gathering, moderate Democrats—including lawmakers and party bigwigs like billionaire real estate developer Winston Fisher, co-host of this conference-turned-consolation session—convinced themselves that their brand of tepid, business-friendly policies is what the public really wants.
Rather than targeting rampant inequality, organizers embraced an economic message of “opportunity” to ensure that each person has a chance to succeed—never mind the skewed playing field that favors the few.
New Democracy, a fellow centrist group, also held a July meeting to plan its counteroffensive to the growing left wing of the party. That group's message? According to Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Il.), it boils down to, “the center is sexier than you think.”
Sexiness aside, what would Third Way’s Wall Street-funded vision of opportunity consist of? A privatized retirement fund, a venture-capital-style bank for underserved communities and a volunteer program for retirees called “Boomer Corps.” If this doesn’t sound like a program up to the task of solving the economic crisis facing the working class, conference speaker Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) made clear the gathering’s real message, a rebuke to the party’s insurgent left wing: “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich. I want to be rich!”
While plenty of Americans undoubtedly want to be rich, more and more are waking up to the fact that the current system depends on them remaining poor. And they’re sick of it: An August poll shows that, for the first time since Gallup started asking the question 10 years ago, Democrats now view socialism more favorably than capitalism.
During this year’s Democratic primaries, left challengers running on bold progressive agendas won across the country, from Ben Jealous in Maryland to Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Andrew Gillum in Florida and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York.
These candidates have embraced an emerging left-wing consensus platform, including Medicare for All, free public college, a $15 minimum wage and massive investments in renewable energy. A number of them, including Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, openly ran as democratic socialists who called out the failure of capitalism to provide working people a dignified life.
This shift to the left isn’t just evident in the primary results. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign helped popularize an array of progressive policies, and they’ve been gaining steam ever since. Universal, single-payer healthcare, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage now boast the support of a majority of Americans.
The corporate interests bankrolling the Democratic Party establishment remain adamantly opposed to such proposals. It’s no surprise, then, that the party’s centrist wing is terrified. The political enterprise they’ve spent their careers building runs counter to the big,
universal, redistributive policies being supported by the Democratic base—and by the progressive candidates in the media spotlight.
The party’s future success hinges on the Left exerting its burgeoning power—in the streets and the ballot box—in a way unseen in recent American political history. That’s the real opportunity Democrats face in 2018 and 2020.
NANCY PELOSI PROMISES THAT DEMOCRATS WILL HANDCUFF THE DEMOCRATIC AGENDA IF THEY RETAKE THE HOUSE
David Dayen - the intercept
September 4 2018, 6:00 p.m.
IN THE FIRST outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats would pursue if they take the majority in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made the public a big promise, vowing to handcuff her party’s progressive ambitions, including in the event that a Democratic president succeeds Donald Trump, by resurrecting the “pay-go” rule that mandates all new spending is offset with budget cuts or tax increases.
Along the way, she is playing into the hands of Republican strategists eager to warn voters that Democrats’ top priority is raising taxes.
Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code.
According to Axios, Pelosi “is committed to reviving” pay-go, which she instituted as a standing rule upon taking over the House in 2007. Though she waived the rule to pass the economic stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession, most of the other major legislative initiatives of the early Obama era — including the Affordable Care Act — were paid for. In 2010, Obama took this even further by signing the Statutory Pay As You Go Act. It enables presidents to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates the rule.
When Republicans took over the House, they changed pay-go to “cut-go,” applying offsets only to spending instead of tax cuts, mandating that spending must be offset with budget cuts instead of tax increases. That still left the statutory law, which retained those aspects, but Republicans waived it for the Trump tax cuts. The move was a formalization of the trend: Deficit fears stop Democrats from moving forward on social programs, while Republicans plow ahead with tax cuts when they get to power.
Pelosi’s planned legislative package for the beginning of a potential House takeover would include establishing ethics and lobbying reforms, lowering the costs of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs, and spending $1 trillion for infrastructure investment. The latter two would cost money, and under pay-go it would all have to be offset.
That’s not necessarily a problem — liberals have plenty of ideas for how to raise revenue. But it puts them in a box, having to propose tax increases that Republicans gleefully broadcast. Meanwhile, Republicans, unconcerned with deficits, get to play Santa Claus, without having to match tax cuts with anything unappealing.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, resisted this dynamic in March when introducing a debt-free college bill, saying, “I don’t play the pay-for game. … I just reject the idea that only progressive ideas have to be paid for. We can work on that as we go through the process, but I think it’s a trap.” Under Pelosi’s standard, that trap would be set as a matter of House rules.
Progressives have grown incensed by Pelosi’s insistence on budget neutrality. “The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now, given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said to The Hill in June. He argues that, unlike Republicans who are happy to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion without offsets, Democrats would try to solve nagging problems with unnecessary shackles. Grijalva called it “irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs.”
A new vanguard of economists in Washington, including former Bernie Sanders staffer Stephanie Kelton, has argued that under modern monetary theory, public spending is only constrained when the economy is running at full capacity and inflation starts to rise — which is not remotely the case today. Public deficits, she points out, are just another way of talking about private surpluses. She has warned of the dangers of balanced budgets that take money from the hands of ordinary people, and has made some headway inside Washington. Kelton has been involved in strategy sessions with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and remains close to Sanders, who would chair the Budget Committee if Democrats take the Senate. But Pelosi has been unmoved.
In a statement, Kelton said that “pay-go is a self-imposed, economically illiterate approach to budgeting.” Republicans, she said, know this, which is why “they have unabashedly used their power to expand deficits and, hence, deliver windfall gains for big corporations and the already well-to-do.”
She continued, “Instead of vowing budget chastity, Democrats should be articulating an agenda that excites voters so that they can unleash the full power of the public purse on their behalf.”
Along the way, she is playing into the hands of Republican strategists eager to warn voters that Democrats’ top priority is raising taxes.
Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code.
According to Axios, Pelosi “is committed to reviving” pay-go, which she instituted as a standing rule upon taking over the House in 2007. Though she waived the rule to pass the economic stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession, most of the other major legislative initiatives of the early Obama era — including the Affordable Care Act — were paid for. In 2010, Obama took this even further by signing the Statutory Pay As You Go Act. It enables presidents to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates the rule.
When Republicans took over the House, they changed pay-go to “cut-go,” applying offsets only to spending instead of tax cuts, mandating that spending must be offset with budget cuts instead of tax increases. That still left the statutory law, which retained those aspects, but Republicans waived it for the Trump tax cuts. The move was a formalization of the trend: Deficit fears stop Democrats from moving forward on social programs, while Republicans plow ahead with tax cuts when they get to power.
Pelosi’s planned legislative package for the beginning of a potential House takeover would include establishing ethics and lobbying reforms, lowering the costs of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs, and spending $1 trillion for infrastructure investment. The latter two would cost money, and under pay-go it would all have to be offset.
That’s not necessarily a problem — liberals have plenty of ideas for how to raise revenue. But it puts them in a box, having to propose tax increases that Republicans gleefully broadcast. Meanwhile, Republicans, unconcerned with deficits, get to play Santa Claus, without having to match tax cuts with anything unappealing.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, resisted this dynamic in March when introducing a debt-free college bill, saying, “I don’t play the pay-for game. … I just reject the idea that only progressive ideas have to be paid for. We can work on that as we go through the process, but I think it’s a trap.” Under Pelosi’s standard, that trap would be set as a matter of House rules.
Progressives have grown incensed by Pelosi’s insistence on budget neutrality. “The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now, given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said to The Hill in June. He argues that, unlike Republicans who are happy to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion without offsets, Democrats would try to solve nagging problems with unnecessary shackles. Grijalva called it “irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs.”
A new vanguard of economists in Washington, including former Bernie Sanders staffer Stephanie Kelton, has argued that under modern monetary theory, public spending is only constrained when the economy is running at full capacity and inflation starts to rise — which is not remotely the case today. Public deficits, she points out, are just another way of talking about private surpluses. She has warned of the dangers of balanced budgets that take money from the hands of ordinary people, and has made some headway inside Washington. Kelton has been involved in strategy sessions with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and remains close to Sanders, who would chair the Budget Committee if Democrats take the Senate. But Pelosi has been unmoved.
In a statement, Kelton said that “pay-go is a self-imposed, economically illiterate approach to budgeting.” Republicans, she said, know this, which is why “they have unabashedly used their power to expand deficits and, hence, deliver windfall gains for big corporations and the already well-to-do.”
She continued, “Instead of vowing budget chastity, Democrats should be articulating an agenda that excites voters so that they can unleash the full power of the public purse on their behalf.”
US @RepMaxineWaters has consistently stood on the right side of history. Here she is marching w/Cesar Chavez & @UAW members in opposition to job cuts & plant closings. Waters has a record of standing boldly on the side of economic & social justice. Her critics have no such record.
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