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Progressives
march 2022
The great tragedy of the moment is not rooted in the Republican Party’s self-cannibalization. It’s with a Democratic Party that “successfully” suffocated responsible answers to the crises consuming our world. Indeed, as Hillary Clinton’s selection of the milque toast Tim Kaine as her vice president shows, the Dems have put forward a candidate who embodies an establishment widely recognized as having betrayed the majority of the American public.
alan minsky ~ Common Dreams
The Democratic Party has let people down in every way.
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!
thomas frank
How Bipartisan Economic Policy Fuels White Working Class Support for Trump
Historian Gerald Horne
I think it's been a bipartisan policy. As we've already discussed, if you look at corporations fleeing abroad, particularly manufacturing plants, that's been a bipartisan policy, assisted not only by Bill Clinton but by the GOP majorities in Congress. If you look at the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Obama is pushing right now and may actually pass [incompr.] lame-duck session in December, that will receive a significant percentage of Republican Party votes. It will receive a goodly number of Democratic Party votes as well.
I think that your steelworker needs to realize that what he needs to do is begin, along with thousands, hopefully millions of others, in building an alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans that will be based and grounded upon propelling working-class interests, be it black or white or brown or whatever. And until we take up that very difficult task, I daresay we'll always be grumbling and we'll always be in trouble.
link to congressional progressive CAUCUS
the only ones in the party who have not soldout
https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/
PROGRESSIVE HI - LITES
Sanders Calls $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Bill a “Pivotal Moment” in History
progressive news
*SANDERS VOWS TO REINTRODUCE MEDICARE FOR ALL AS BIDEN EXTENDS PRIVATIZATION PLOY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Bernie Sanders Encourages Workers to “Rise Up and Fight Back” in New Op-Ed
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*OIL AND GAS HEIR FUNDING SUPER PAC ATTACKING NINA TURNER
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Mainstream Dems seek to crush the left
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Progressives Tell Biden “No Climate, No Deal” on Infrastructure Plan
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Sanders Blames “Rigged Economy” for CEO Pay Hikes Amid Worker Pay Cuts in 2020
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PROGRESSIVES VOW TO FIGHT MANCHIN AND SINEMA HOLDING UP STIMULUS OVER $15 WAGE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'ERR ON THE SIDE OF HELPING PEOPLE': AOC SLAMS BLUE DOG DEMOCRAT FOR OPPOSING $2,000 RELIEF CHECKS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS WILL HAVE REAL POWER
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*AOC: NANCY PELOSI NEEDS TO GO, BUT THERE’S NOBODY TO REPLACE HER YET
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*THE LIBERAL CLASS' FAUSTIAN BARGAIN: PROFIT FROM THE RAVAGES OF NEOLIBERALISM WHILE WE DESCEND INTO CHRISTIANIZED FASCISM(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Why some liberals and arms-control experts are backing war profiteers for Biden's Cabinet(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PROGRESSIVES PRAISE EARLY BIDEN PICKS, BUT WORRY HIS TEAM IS STACKED WITH “CORPORATISTS”(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*CONGRESSIONAL PROGRESSIVES ARE REVAMPING THEIR CAUCUS WITH AN EYE TOWARD 2021
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Progressives unveil 2021 agenda to pressure Biden
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PROGRESSIVE BOSTON DOCTOR SEEKS TO UNSEAT “DO-NOTHING MODERATE DEMOCRAT” IN CONGRESS(excerpt below)
*Sanders: “Richest 1 Percent Is Responsible for 70 Percent of All Unpaid Taxes”
(ARTICLE BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
True Dough - Demo Underground
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Sanders Vows to Reintroduce Medicare for All as Biden Extends Privatization Ploy
BY Jake Johnson, Common Dreams - truthout
PUBLISHED March 21, 2022
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday said he intends to reintroduce Medicare for All legislation in the U.S. Senate in the coming days as the Biden administration moves ahead with a Medicare privatization scheme and millions of Americans remain at imminent risk of losing their insurance once pandemic protections expire.
“In the midst of the current set of horrors — war, oligarchy, pandemics, inflation, climate change, etc. — we must continue the fight to establish healthcare as a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in a Twitter post. “I will soon be reintroducing our Medicare for All legislation.”
Sanders’ announcement came weeks after Biden’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said that instead of terminating a Medicare privatization experiment hatched under the Trump administration, it would rebrand the pilot program and make minor changes that critics — including physicians and Medicare for All advocates — say would leave the scheme’s most dangerous components intact.
Meanwhile, millions of people across the U.S. are set to lose Medicaid benefits once the federally declared coronavirus public health emergency (PHE) expires. In January, the Biden administration extended the PHE through April 16, but it’s unclear whether there will be another extension.
Writing for The Daily Poster earlier this month, healthcare policy writer Libby Watson warned that “the potential scale of this mass disenrollment could be huge: The Urban Institute estimated in September that up to 15 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage when the PHE ends.”
“The Georgetown Center for Children and Families estimated in a report released in February that 6.7 million children are likely to lose coverage,” Watson added. “Many of the new enrollees over the past few years will genuinely no longer be eligible — not a surprise, since the income limits for Medicaid are very low — but many others who are eligible will lose coverage anyway.”
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, progressives have argued that the best way to prevent such disastrous health insurance churn is to establish a single-payer system under which everyone is guaranteed comprehensive coverage regardless of income or other factors.
Last March, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) reintroduced Medicare for All legislation in the House with the backing of more than half of the chamber’s Democratic caucus. Despite strong support for the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has yet to allow a floor vote.
Jayapal and Dingell are among the progressive lawmakers urging President Joe Biden to terminate the Medicare privatization experiment, which is now known as ACO REACH.
In an analysis released just before Jayapal and Dingell re-upped their bill last year, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen estimated that hundreds of thousands fewer people would have died of Covid-19 in the U.S. if the country had a Medicare for All system.
“Under Medicare for All, everyone would have consistent coverage regardless of their employment status or employer,” Public Citizen’s report noted. “And because Americans would have their choice of providers, instead of facing the narrow networks their employers choose for them, they would face fewer challenges getting care, especially during a pandemic where some hospitals and providers are overwhelmed by demand.”
“In the midst of the current set of horrors — war, oligarchy, pandemics, inflation, climate change, etc. — we must continue the fight to establish healthcare as a human right, not a privilege,” Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote in a Twitter post. “I will soon be reintroducing our Medicare for All legislation.”
Sanders’ announcement came weeks after Biden’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said that instead of terminating a Medicare privatization experiment hatched under the Trump administration, it would rebrand the pilot program and make minor changes that critics — including physicians and Medicare for All advocates — say would leave the scheme’s most dangerous components intact.
Meanwhile, millions of people across the U.S. are set to lose Medicaid benefits once the federally declared coronavirus public health emergency (PHE) expires. In January, the Biden administration extended the PHE through April 16, but it’s unclear whether there will be another extension.
Writing for The Daily Poster earlier this month, healthcare policy writer Libby Watson warned that “the potential scale of this mass disenrollment could be huge: The Urban Institute estimated in September that up to 15 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage when the PHE ends.”
“The Georgetown Center for Children and Families estimated in a report released in February that 6.7 million children are likely to lose coverage,” Watson added. “Many of the new enrollees over the past few years will genuinely no longer be eligible — not a surprise, since the income limits for Medicaid are very low — but many others who are eligible will lose coverage anyway.”
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, progressives have argued that the best way to prevent such disastrous health insurance churn is to establish a single-payer system under which everyone is guaranteed comprehensive coverage regardless of income or other factors.
Last March, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) reintroduced Medicare for All legislation in the House with the backing of more than half of the chamber’s Democratic caucus. Despite strong support for the bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has yet to allow a floor vote.
Jayapal and Dingell are among the progressive lawmakers urging President Joe Biden to terminate the Medicare privatization experiment, which is now known as ACO REACH.
In an analysis released just before Jayapal and Dingell re-upped their bill last year, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen estimated that hundreds of thousands fewer people would have died of Covid-19 in the U.S. if the country had a Medicare for All system.
“Under Medicare for All, everyone would have consistent coverage regardless of their employment status or employer,” Public Citizen’s report noted. “And because Americans would have their choice of providers, instead of facing the narrow networks their employers choose for them, they would face fewer challenges getting care, especially during a pandemic where some hospitals and providers are overwhelmed by demand.”
Bernie Sanders Encourages Workers to “Rise Up and Fight Back” in New Op-Ed
BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 5, 2022
In an op-ed published on Tuesday, longtime labor advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) set a New Year’s resolution for himself and the working class: to “rise up together” and confront corporate power in 2022.
2021 was a watershed year for the labor movement, Sanders noted in his op-ed for The Guardian. Workers for John Deere, Nabisco, Kaiser Permanente, Kellogg and more striked or authorized a strike last year, making strides toward fairer working conditions. Another major victory was won by Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, who formed the company’s first-ever union.
“While the corporate-owned media may not be actively reporting it, working people all over the country, with extraordinary courage and determination, are taking on corporate greed, and they are winning,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders detailed ongoing efforts in places like West Virginia, where roughly 450 steel workers at a company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Special Metals, have been striking since October. The company has offered “an outrageous and insulting contract” with no pay raises this year, while it quadruples health care premiums and reduces time off.
The senator also pointed to a bakery workers’ strike in California, where about 100 workers – the majority of whom are Latina women – are striking against Rich Products Corporation for forcing them to work up to 16 hours a day. Employees at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, who work similarly long hours, have been on strike since April. After facing pressure from Wall Street investors during a restructuring deal, workers suffered a pay cut of over 20 percent on average in 2016.
While refusing to treat their workers fairly, these companies have all raked in enormous profits, Sanders pointed out. Last year, Special Metals made $1.5 billion and Rich Products made $4 billion. Meanwhile, Warrior Met has paid out $1.4 billion in shareholder dividends since 2014.
Workers currently face ever-increasing corporate greed, a devastating pandemic and a political system that is rapidly deteriorating – and as class warfare is “intensifying,” organizing is more critical than ever. “The stakes are just too high,” Sanders wrote. “Despair is not an option. We must stand up and fight back.”
Change can be achieved through the labor movement and through transformative social movements, Sanders went on, adding that corporate greed and growing oligarchy are the enemy of these movements.
“The greatest weapon our opponents have is not just their unlimited wealth and power. It is their ability to create a culture that makes us feel weak and hopeless and diminishes the strength of human solidarity,” Sanders wrote. “And here is our new year’s resolution. Like the thousands of workers who stood up and fought courageously in 2021, we will do the same. No one individual is going to save us. We must rise up together.”
The lawmaker has been a staunch supporter of the labor movement for years, and has stood with workers as they fought for better conditions and wages in 2021. In November, he traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan, to stand with striking Kellogg workers in the 11th week of their strike; in late December, he sent a letter to Buffett asking the Berkshire CEO to intervene in his company’s contract negotiations by offering a fair agreement to workers.
As 2021 came to an end, Sanders continually pushed workers to stand in solidarity with each other. “I’ve got news for the ruling class: you cannot have it all,” he warned on Twitter. “The working class is fighting back.”
During his presidential campaign in 2020, Sanders made the labor movement a central plank of his platform, vowing to end so-called “right to work” laws and aiming to double union membership during his first term. Union membership has been declining for decades, and was at a dismal 10.8 percent in 2020. This has led to a decline – of about $3,250 – in the median workers’ annual wage since 1979.
2021 was a watershed year for the labor movement, Sanders noted in his op-ed for The Guardian. Workers for John Deere, Nabisco, Kaiser Permanente, Kellogg and more striked or authorized a strike last year, making strides toward fairer working conditions. Another major victory was won by Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, who formed the company’s first-ever union.
“While the corporate-owned media may not be actively reporting it, working people all over the country, with extraordinary courage and determination, are taking on corporate greed, and they are winning,” Sanders wrote.
Sanders detailed ongoing efforts in places like West Virginia, where roughly 450 steel workers at a company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, Special Metals, have been striking since October. The company has offered “an outrageous and insulting contract” with no pay raises this year, while it quadruples health care premiums and reduces time off.
The senator also pointed to a bakery workers’ strike in California, where about 100 workers – the majority of whom are Latina women – are striking against Rich Products Corporation for forcing them to work up to 16 hours a day. Employees at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, who work similarly long hours, have been on strike since April. After facing pressure from Wall Street investors during a restructuring deal, workers suffered a pay cut of over 20 percent on average in 2016.
While refusing to treat their workers fairly, these companies have all raked in enormous profits, Sanders pointed out. Last year, Special Metals made $1.5 billion and Rich Products made $4 billion. Meanwhile, Warrior Met has paid out $1.4 billion in shareholder dividends since 2014.
Workers currently face ever-increasing corporate greed, a devastating pandemic and a political system that is rapidly deteriorating – and as class warfare is “intensifying,” organizing is more critical than ever. “The stakes are just too high,” Sanders wrote. “Despair is not an option. We must stand up and fight back.”
Change can be achieved through the labor movement and through transformative social movements, Sanders went on, adding that corporate greed and growing oligarchy are the enemy of these movements.
“The greatest weapon our opponents have is not just their unlimited wealth and power. It is their ability to create a culture that makes us feel weak and hopeless and diminishes the strength of human solidarity,” Sanders wrote. “And here is our new year’s resolution. Like the thousands of workers who stood up and fought courageously in 2021, we will do the same. No one individual is going to save us. We must rise up together.”
The lawmaker has been a staunch supporter of the labor movement for years, and has stood with workers as they fought for better conditions and wages in 2021. In November, he traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan, to stand with striking Kellogg workers in the 11th week of their strike; in late December, he sent a letter to Buffett asking the Berkshire CEO to intervene in his company’s contract negotiations by offering a fair agreement to workers.
As 2021 came to an end, Sanders continually pushed workers to stand in solidarity with each other. “I’ve got news for the ruling class: you cannot have it all,” he warned on Twitter. “The working class is fighting back.”
During his presidential campaign in 2020, Sanders made the labor movement a central plank of his platform, vowing to end so-called “right to work” laws and aiming to double union membership during his first term. Union membership has been declining for decades, and was at a dismal 10.8 percent in 2020. This has led to a decline – of about $3,250 – in the median workers’ annual wage since 1979.
the fight against corporate democrats!!!
OIL AND GAS HEIR FUNDING SUPER PAC ATTACKING NINA TURNER
Samson Energy’s chair has donated $1.25 million to the Democratic Majority for Israel super PAC, which endorsed Turner’s opponent Shontel Brown.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook - the intercept
July 16 2021, 5:00 a.m.
THE LARGEST DONOR to the super PAC backing centrist Democratic candidate Shontel Brown in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District special election is an oil and gas executive who belongs to a billionaire family. Activists worry the donations could compromise Brown’s support for progressive climate policy.
Stacy Schusterman, heir and chair of Samson Energy, a fossil fuel company that owns at least 11 oil and gas wells in Wyoming, donated $1.55 million to Democratic Majority for Israel in 2019 and 2020, a super PAC that has in turn spent over $660,000 on ads supporting Brown and attacking her Democratic primary opponent Nina Turner, according to an Intercept review of federal campaign finance records. Schusterman is the super PAC’s largest individual donor.
Schusterman’s fortune comes from a much larger oil and gas business. Her father, Charles Schusterman, founded Samson Investment in 1971 in Tulsa, and the family owned it for 40 years until they sold it to the private equity megafirm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for $7.2 billion in 2011, earning the family a huge windfall. Charles died in 2000; his wife (and Stacy’s mother) Lynn is worth $3.4 billion.
After the sale, Stacy Schusterman started the much smaller Samson Energy from her father’s fortune, investing in oil wells in Louisiana, Texas, and Wyoming. The wells Samson Energy has drilled in Wyoming have been a source of controversy as they are very close to residential areas in Cheyenne, the state’s largest city. Wayne Lax, vice president of the Cheyenne Area Landowner’s Coalition, told Wyoming Public Media in December 2019, “At some point, common sense needs to take over and large, dangerous industrial developments just weren’t meant to go into this densely populated a residential area.”
She’s also been an avid supporter of DMFI super PAC. The super PAC, which formally endorsed Brown in February, has spent millions going after other progressive candidates in previous elections. The group spent $1.4 million attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary and an additional $1.5 million during that election cycle to support moderate Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel and attack his progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman. (Bowman went on to win that election.) Schusterman donated $250,000 to DMFI as the group was aggressively spending against Bowman, and $1 million in December 2019 — right before they launched aggressive attack ads against Sanders; her donations were not publicly available until after the primary. Schusterman donated an additional $300,000 to DMFI on December 18, 2020.
While Democratic Majority for Israel describes itself as working to “maintain and strengthen support for Israel among Democratic leaders including presidential and congressional candidates,” much of the group’s ad spending has not focused on a candidate’s support for Israel and has instead launched various attacks on candidates perceived to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Evan Weber, a spokesperson for the youth-driven climate organization Sunrise Movement, which has endorsed Turner, panned DMFI’s role in the primary. “DMFI has shown time and time again that it’s nothing more than a front group for corporate, big-moneyed interests who will go to any lengths to stop progressives, especially progressive women of color, from having more power in our society,” Weber said. “Nina Turner is a backer of the Green New Deal and a signer of the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge. Shontel Brown is getting backed by a super PAC loaded up with dirty oil & gas money. The choice for voters in Ohio’s 11th district couldn’t be more clear.”
Craig Holman, an ethics lobbyist at progressive watchdog Public Citizen, said the outside spending by DMFI was upending the race. “Nina Turner had been enjoying a comfortable lead for Congress in this Ohio district, reflecting her constituents’ support for progressive policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal,” Holman said.
“But that lead has been fading as the Democratic Majority for Israel super PAC has raised huge amounts of special interest money from outside the district and is spending much of that money late in the election cycle targeting Turner.”
Oil and gas executives like Schusterman can use their funding as a way to build relationships with members of Congress, Holman said, adding that candidates “know where that money is coming from and they know how it’s being used to promote them. And it’s pretty hard to turn your back on that.”
Schusterman’s involvement in the congressional race through DMFI has left some skeptical that Brown will in fact advocate for a Green New Deal once in Congress. The Green New Deal finances a transformation of infrastructure in the U.S. that would significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption, impacting the profits of oil and gas companies like Schusterman’s Samson Energy.
While Brown, a member of the Cuyahoga County Council, has said she supports the “principles” of a Green New Deal, she has not signed on to the popular “No Fossil Fuel Money” pledge that was signed by Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential primaries. Turner, a former Ohio state senator, has supported the Green New Deal and signed the pledge. Turner has been endorsed by a number of notable progressives, including Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Brown did tell the Wall Street Journal in March that she would vote for the Green New Deal if it came up for a vote, but appears to not have made environmental issues a central focus of her campaign, except for an environmental justice forum she participated in in April.
Some of Brown’s notable backers have deep ties to fossil fuel interests. Brown’s most prominent supporter, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, received $228,000 from electrical utility interests in 2019 and 2020, and $62,500 from oil and gas interests, according to OpenSecrets. (Electrical utilities are still very fossil fuel-heavy, with about 80 percent of U.S. electricity coming from fossil fuel sources.) Another one of Brown’s endorsers, newly minted Louisiana Rep. Troy Carter, was removed from the No Fossil Fuel pledge website after he repeatedly accepted campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests. Hillary Clinton, who has also endorsed Brown, helped lead the push for shale gas while she was secretary of state, according to Mother Jones. Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas, another Brown endorser, was the fifth highest recipient of oil and gas money among congressional Democrats in 2019-2020.
The Congressional Black Caucus PAC, which endorsed Brown on July 7, has on its board Michael Williams and Al Wynn, who have worked as lobbyists for the petroleum and coal industries, respectively.
Brown’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Schusterman, for her part, did not say what her position was on the Green New Deal, but said through a spokesperson that she supported President Joe Biden’s climate agenda and had made “investments” in “clean tech” and “efforts to protect the environment.” The spokesperson said, “Stacy’s support for DMFI, and the candidates it endorses, is based on her commitment to a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and the shared values and interests of these two democratic allies.” The spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Schusterman’s oil wells near residential areas in Wyoming.
A spokesperson for Democratic Majority for Israel said they strongly support the Paris climate accord and Biden’s climate efforts. They declined to say whether the group supports the Green New Deal.
Stacy Schusterman, heir and chair of Samson Energy, a fossil fuel company that owns at least 11 oil and gas wells in Wyoming, donated $1.55 million to Democratic Majority for Israel in 2019 and 2020, a super PAC that has in turn spent over $660,000 on ads supporting Brown and attacking her Democratic primary opponent Nina Turner, according to an Intercept review of federal campaign finance records. Schusterman is the super PAC’s largest individual donor.
Schusterman’s fortune comes from a much larger oil and gas business. Her father, Charles Schusterman, founded Samson Investment in 1971 in Tulsa, and the family owned it for 40 years until they sold it to the private equity megafirm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for $7.2 billion in 2011, earning the family a huge windfall. Charles died in 2000; his wife (and Stacy’s mother) Lynn is worth $3.4 billion.
After the sale, Stacy Schusterman started the much smaller Samson Energy from her father’s fortune, investing in oil wells in Louisiana, Texas, and Wyoming. The wells Samson Energy has drilled in Wyoming have been a source of controversy as they are very close to residential areas in Cheyenne, the state’s largest city. Wayne Lax, vice president of the Cheyenne Area Landowner’s Coalition, told Wyoming Public Media in December 2019, “At some point, common sense needs to take over and large, dangerous industrial developments just weren’t meant to go into this densely populated a residential area.”
She’s also been an avid supporter of DMFI super PAC. The super PAC, which formally endorsed Brown in February, has spent millions going after other progressive candidates in previous elections. The group spent $1.4 million attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary and an additional $1.5 million during that election cycle to support moderate Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel and attack his progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman. (Bowman went on to win that election.) Schusterman donated $250,000 to DMFI as the group was aggressively spending against Bowman, and $1 million in December 2019 — right before they launched aggressive attack ads against Sanders; her donations were not publicly available until after the primary. Schusterman donated an additional $300,000 to DMFI on December 18, 2020.
While Democratic Majority for Israel describes itself as working to “maintain and strengthen support for Israel among Democratic leaders including presidential and congressional candidates,” much of the group’s ad spending has not focused on a candidate’s support for Israel and has instead launched various attacks on candidates perceived to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Evan Weber, a spokesperson for the youth-driven climate organization Sunrise Movement, which has endorsed Turner, panned DMFI’s role in the primary. “DMFI has shown time and time again that it’s nothing more than a front group for corporate, big-moneyed interests who will go to any lengths to stop progressives, especially progressive women of color, from having more power in our society,” Weber said. “Nina Turner is a backer of the Green New Deal and a signer of the No Fossil Fuel Money pledge. Shontel Brown is getting backed by a super PAC loaded up with dirty oil & gas money. The choice for voters in Ohio’s 11th district couldn’t be more clear.”
Craig Holman, an ethics lobbyist at progressive watchdog Public Citizen, said the outside spending by DMFI was upending the race. “Nina Turner had been enjoying a comfortable lead for Congress in this Ohio district, reflecting her constituents’ support for progressive policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal,” Holman said.
“But that lead has been fading as the Democratic Majority for Israel super PAC has raised huge amounts of special interest money from outside the district and is spending much of that money late in the election cycle targeting Turner.”
Oil and gas executives like Schusterman can use their funding as a way to build relationships with members of Congress, Holman said, adding that candidates “know where that money is coming from and they know how it’s being used to promote them. And it’s pretty hard to turn your back on that.”
Schusterman’s involvement in the congressional race through DMFI has left some skeptical that Brown will in fact advocate for a Green New Deal once in Congress. The Green New Deal finances a transformation of infrastructure in the U.S. that would significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption, impacting the profits of oil and gas companies like Schusterman’s Samson Energy.
While Brown, a member of the Cuyahoga County Council, has said she supports the “principles” of a Green New Deal, she has not signed on to the popular “No Fossil Fuel Money” pledge that was signed by Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential primaries. Turner, a former Ohio state senator, has supported the Green New Deal and signed the pledge. Turner has been endorsed by a number of notable progressives, including Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Brown did tell the Wall Street Journal in March that she would vote for the Green New Deal if it came up for a vote, but appears to not have made environmental issues a central focus of her campaign, except for an environmental justice forum she participated in in April.
Some of Brown’s notable backers have deep ties to fossil fuel interests. Brown’s most prominent supporter, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, received $228,000 from electrical utility interests in 2019 and 2020, and $62,500 from oil and gas interests, according to OpenSecrets. (Electrical utilities are still very fossil fuel-heavy, with about 80 percent of U.S. electricity coming from fossil fuel sources.) Another one of Brown’s endorsers, newly minted Louisiana Rep. Troy Carter, was removed from the No Fossil Fuel pledge website after he repeatedly accepted campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests. Hillary Clinton, who has also endorsed Brown, helped lead the push for shale gas while she was secretary of state, according to Mother Jones. Rep. Marc Veasey of Texas, another Brown endorser, was the fifth highest recipient of oil and gas money among congressional Democrats in 2019-2020.
The Congressional Black Caucus PAC, which endorsed Brown on July 7, has on its board Michael Williams and Al Wynn, who have worked as lobbyists for the petroleum and coal industries, respectively.
Brown’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Schusterman, for her part, did not say what her position was on the Green New Deal, but said through a spokesperson that she supported President Joe Biden’s climate agenda and had made “investments” in “clean tech” and “efforts to protect the environment.” The spokesperson said, “Stacy’s support for DMFI, and the candidates it endorses, is based on her commitment to a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and the shared values and interests of these two democratic allies.” The spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Schusterman’s oil wells near residential areas in Wyoming.
A spokesperson for Democratic Majority for Israel said they strongly support the Paris climate accord and Biden’s climate efforts. They declined to say whether the group supports the Green New Deal.
Mainstream Dems seek to crush the left
The empire strikes back: Mainstream Dems try to crush the left in Buffalo and Cleveland
Progressive Black women are poised to win in two struggling heartland cities — and old-line Democrats aren't happy
By NORMAN SOLOMON - salon
PUBLISHED JULY 2, 2021 5:50AM (EDT)
Nina Turner and India Walton (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Alana Adetola Arts Photography)
The two biggest cities on the shores of Lake Erie are now centers of political upheaval. For decades, Buffalo and Cleveland have suffered from widespread poverty and despair in the midst of urban decay. Today, the second-largest cities in New York and Ohio are battlegrounds between activists fighting for progressive change and establishment forces determined to prevent it.
For Buffalo's entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent Byron Brown, who has a deplorable track record. "I am a coalition builder," Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city's power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.
"This is organizing," Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. "When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo — this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I'm talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us."
To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she came out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like food access, pandemic recovery, education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo's levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Brown had looked like such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican even bothered to run, so Walton's name will be the only one on the November ballot.
Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from real estate developer Carl Paladino — whose estimated net worth is around $150 million --a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton's victory incensed Paladino, who has made it clear that he vastly preferred the Black incumbent to the Black challenger. "I will do everything I can to destroy [Walton's] candidacy," Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.
In tacit alliance with Paladino — while keeping the affluent Republican businessman at arm's-length — Brown announced on Monday evening that he plans to mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor's office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements "the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it's been in over 25 years." Then he began scare-mongering.
"I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community," Brown said. "People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor's office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don't want an unqualified, inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand."
Such attacks, with their echoes of Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, are likely to be at the core of Brown's strategy for winning the general election. But he'll have to do it in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, "to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall." It added: "Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city's future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on Nov. 2."
Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden's HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.
On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, went out of his way to make clear that he doesn't want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner's main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.
Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos in an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn's self-conception but nothing much about Turner. "What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party," he said. "When I spoke out against sloganeering, like 'Burn, baby, burn' in the 1960s and 'defund the police,' which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I'm against that."
In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked hard to block. "Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary," the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.
The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls "the commodification of health care" is a major reason.
In mid-June, Turner "launched her television spot entitled 'Worry,' in which she talks about how her family's struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All," the Daily Poster reported. "The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner's primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray — a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All."
Whether Clyburn's endorsement will have a significant impact on Cleveland voters is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and House Democrats' chief deputy whip, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — who, like Turner, was a national co-chair of Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign — is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: "They're afraid of a politician that can't be bought."
For Buffalo's entrenched leaders, a shocking crisis arrived out of the blue on June 22 when socialist India Walton won the Democratic primary for mayor, handily defeating a 15-year incumbent Byron Brown, who has a deplorable track record. "I am a coalition builder," Walton said in her victory speech that night. But for the city's power brokers, she was a sudden disaster.
"This is organizing," Walton said as rejoicing supporters cheered. "When we organize, we win. Today is only the beginning. From the very start, I said this is not about making India Walton mayor of Buffalo — this is about building the infrastructure to challenge every damn seat. I'm talking about committee seats, school board, county council. All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us."
To the people running City Hall, the 38-year-old victor seemed to come out of nowhere. Actually, she came out of grassroots activism and a campaign that focused on key issues like food access, pandemic recovery, education, climate, housing and public safety. And for corporate elites accustomed to having their hands on Buffalo's levers of power, there would not be a GOP fallback. Brown had looked like such a shoo-in for a fifth term that no Republican even bothered to run, so Walton's name will be the only one on the November ballot.
Alarm sirens went off immediately after election night. The loudest and most prominent came from real estate developer Carl Paladino — whose estimated net worth is around $150 million --a strident Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for governor, who became notorious in 2016 for racist public comments about Michelle and Barack Obama. Walton's victory incensed Paladino, who has made it clear that he vastly preferred the Black incumbent to the Black challenger. "I will do everything I can to destroy [Walton's] candidacy," Paladino said, and he urged fellow business leaders in Buffalo to unite behind Brown as a write-in candidate.
In tacit alliance with Paladino — while keeping the affluent Republican businessman at arm's-length — Brown announced on Monday evening that he plans to mount a write-in campaign to stay in the mayor's office. Brown cited among his mayoral achievements "the fact that the tax rate in Buffalo is the lowest it's been in over 25 years." Then he began scare-mongering.
"I have also heard from voters that there is tremendous fear that has spread across this community," Brown said. "People are fearful about the future of our city. They are fearful about the future of their families. They are fearful about the future of their children. And they have said to me that they do not want a radical socialist occupying the mayor's office in Buffalo City Hall. You know, we know the difference between socialism and democracy. We are going to fight for democracy in the city of Buffalo. The voters have said that they don't want an unqualified, inexperienced radical socialist trying to learn on the job on the backs of the residents of this community. We will not let it happen. It will not stand."
Such attacks, with their echoes of Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump, are likely to be at the core of Brown's strategy for winning the general election. But he'll have to do it in conflict with the formal apparatus of his party in Buffalo. After the write-in campaign announcement, the Erie County Democratic Party issued an unequivocal statement about India Walton, "to strongly affirm once again that we are with her, now and through the general election in the fall." It added: "Last Tuesday, India proved she has the message and the means to move and inspire the people of Buffalo. It was a historic moment in Western New York politics. The voters heard her message and embraced her vision for the city's future, and we look forward to working with her and her team to cross that final finish line on Nov. 2."
Two hundred miles away, in northeast Ohio, the clash between progressives and corporatists has been escalating for several months, ever since Rep. Marcia Fudge left a congressional seat vacant when she became President Biden's HUD secretary. Early voting begins next week, and the district is so heavily Democratic that the winner of the Aug. 3 primary is virtually certain to fill the vacancy this fall.
On Tuesday, the No. 3 Democrat in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, went out of his way to make clear that he doesn't want the frontrunner in the race, progressive stalwart Nina Turner, to become a colleague in Congress. Though nominally endorsing Turner's main opponent, Shontel Brown, the clear underlying message was: Stop Turner.
Clyburn went beyond just making an endorsement. He provided some barbed innuendos in an interview with the New York Times, which reported comments that say something about Clyburn's self-conception but nothing much about Turner. "What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party," he said. "When I spoke out against sloganeering, like 'Burn, baby, burn' in the 1960s and 'defund the police,' which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I'm against that."
In fact, Democrats are overwhelmingly in favor of programs being championed by Turner, none more notably than Medicare for All, a proposal that Clyburn and many of his big funders have worked hard to block. "Clyburn has vacuumed in more than $1 million from donors in the pharmaceutical industry — and he previously made headlines vilifying Medicare for All during the 2020 presidential primary," the Daily Poster pointed out on Wednesday.
The corporate money behind Clyburn is of a piece with the forces arrayed against Turner. What she calls "the commodification of health care" is a major reason.
In mid-June, Turner "launched her television spot entitled 'Worry,' in which she talks about how her family's struggle to pay health care bills led her to support Medicare for All," the Daily Poster reported. "The very next day, corporate lobbyists held a Washington fundraiser for Turner's primary opponent, Shontel Brown. Among those headlining the fundraiser was Jerome Murray — a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Association, which has been backing a nationwide campaign to reduce support for Medicare for All."
Whether Clyburn's endorsement will have a significant impact on Cleveland voters is hard to say, but it signaled that high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can. His move came two weeks after Hillary Clinton endorsed Brown, who has also received endorsements from the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Joyce Beatty, and House Democrats' chief deputy whip, Rep. Pete Aguilar. On the other hand, a dozen progressive members of the House have endorsed Turner, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico — who, like Turner, was a national co-chair of Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign — is a strong supporter of Turner for Congress. This week, summing up the fierce opposition from power brokers who want to prevent a Turner victory, Cruz used words that equally apply to the powerful interests trying to prevent India Walton from becoming the next mayor of Buffalo: "They're afraid of a politician that can't be bought."
Progressives Tell Biden “No Climate, No Deal” on Infrastructure Plan
BY Jake Johnson, Common Dreams - truthout
PUBLISHED June 10, 2021
Progressive members of Congress on Wednesday signaled they would be willing to withhold their votes from any infrastructure package that skimps on climate action after one of President Joe Biden’s top advisers suggested that key green energy proposals could be excluded from an eventual bill.
“An infrastructure package that goes light on climate and clean energy should not count on every Democratic vote,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a Green New Deal supporter, tweeted in response to National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy’s suggestion Tuesday that climate policies proposed in Biden’s original American Jobs Plan — such as a clean electricity standard — could be left on the cutting room floor as the president seeks a compromise deal with a bipartisan group of senators.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the lead House sponsor of the Green New Deal resolution, echoed Heinrich, declaring, “[Republican Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers are not worth setting the planet on fire for.”
“I know some Dems may disagree with me,” Ocasio-Cortez added in an apparent jab at Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a member of the bipartisan group that Biden turned to after cutting off infrastructure negotiations with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) on Tuesday.
As CNBC reported earlier this week, a dark money group backed by billionaire oil mogul Charles Koch is lobbying Manchin to oppose much of the Democratic agenda, including a sweeping bill to protect and expand voting rights.
“President Biden and Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake with GOP senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who has backed progressive calls for $10 trillion in infrastructure and climate spending over the next decade.
With such slim congressional majorities, Democrats can’t afford many defections if they hope to pass an infrastructure and climate package amid unanimous Republican opposition. In the Senate, they can’t lose a single vote.
“No climate, no deal,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted Wednesday.
Despite the GOP’s repeated failure to propose a viable alternative to Biden’s American Jobs Plan, the president plans to continue his push for a bipartisan deal by negotiating with a group of 20 senators led by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and Manchin.
The bipartisan group is reportedly working on a $900 billion infrastructure framework, less than half of the roughly $2.2 trillion in spending Biden called for in his opening offer. It’s unclear how much of the funding under the bipartisan framework would go toward electrical vehicle development, the retrofitting of homes and commercial buildings, clean energy investments, and other priorities Biden included in his initial package.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a member of the bipartisan group, told reporters Wednesday that the 20 senators do not intend to include tax hikes on corporations or the rich in their proposal — a likely non-starter for progressives and the White House. Romney confirmed that Republicans would not accept tax increases as part of any infrastructure deal.
Biden’s decision to shift his attention to the bipartisan group came days after dozens of activists with the youth-led Sunrise Movement rallied at the White House — and at one point blockaded the entrance — to demonstrate their opposition to any watered-down infrastructure deal with the GOP.
After new data showed that atmospheric carbon dioxide reached its highest level in over four million years during the month of May, Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash warned in a statement Tuesday that “Biden will either pass a historic infrastructure package with climate at its core, or he will have to look us in the eyes and tell us why he failed to do everything possible to stop the climate crisis while he had the power to do so.”
“Anything less than a robust jobs and climate package is a death sentence for our generation,” said Prakash. “Whether it’s Capito or Romney, it should come as no surprise that the GOP wants to strip climate from the infrastructure package because he is literally working with a party of climate deniers. We can’t wait for them to come around to the science on this and we will continue to fight until he delivers on the climate mandate he promised us.”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who last week said he would “have a very hard time” voting for a bill significantly smaller than Biden’s original American Jobs Plan, tweeted Wednesday that “this is literally a matter of life or death.”
“Our plan on climate needs to be built to sustain our planet,” Bowman added, “not the fossil fuel industry.”
“An infrastructure package that goes light on climate and clean energy should not count on every Democratic vote,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a Green New Deal supporter, tweeted in response to National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy’s suggestion Tuesday that climate policies proposed in Biden’s original American Jobs Plan — such as a clean electricity standard — could be left on the cutting room floor as the president seeks a compromise deal with a bipartisan group of senators.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the lead House sponsor of the Green New Deal resolution, echoed Heinrich, declaring, “[Republican Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell and the Koch brothers are not worth setting the planet on fire for.”
“I know some Dems may disagree with me,” Ocasio-Cortez added in an apparent jab at Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a member of the bipartisan group that Biden turned to after cutting off infrastructure negotiations with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) on Tuesday.
As CNBC reported earlier this week, a dark money group backed by billionaire oil mogul Charles Koch is lobbying Manchin to oppose much of the Democratic agenda, including a sweeping bill to protect and expand voting rights.
“President Biden and Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake with GOP senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who has backed progressive calls for $10 trillion in infrastructure and climate spending over the next decade.
With such slim congressional majorities, Democrats can’t afford many defections if they hope to pass an infrastructure and climate package amid unanimous Republican opposition. In the Senate, they can’t lose a single vote.
“No climate, no deal,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted Wednesday.
Despite the GOP’s repeated failure to propose a viable alternative to Biden’s American Jobs Plan, the president plans to continue his push for a bipartisan deal by negotiating with a group of 20 senators led by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah.), Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and Manchin.
The bipartisan group is reportedly working on a $900 billion infrastructure framework, less than half of the roughly $2.2 trillion in spending Biden called for in his opening offer. It’s unclear how much of the funding under the bipartisan framework would go toward electrical vehicle development, the retrofitting of homes and commercial buildings, clean energy investments, and other priorities Biden included in his initial package.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), a member of the bipartisan group, told reporters Wednesday that the 20 senators do not intend to include tax hikes on corporations or the rich in their proposal — a likely non-starter for progressives and the White House. Romney confirmed that Republicans would not accept tax increases as part of any infrastructure deal.
Biden’s decision to shift his attention to the bipartisan group came days after dozens of activists with the youth-led Sunrise Movement rallied at the White House — and at one point blockaded the entrance — to demonstrate their opposition to any watered-down infrastructure deal with the GOP.
After new data showed that atmospheric carbon dioxide reached its highest level in over four million years during the month of May, Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash warned in a statement Tuesday that “Biden will either pass a historic infrastructure package with climate at its core, or he will have to look us in the eyes and tell us why he failed to do everything possible to stop the climate crisis while he had the power to do so.”
“Anything less than a robust jobs and climate package is a death sentence for our generation,” said Prakash. “Whether it’s Capito or Romney, it should come as no surprise that the GOP wants to strip climate from the infrastructure package because he is literally working with a party of climate deniers. We can’t wait for them to come around to the science on this and we will continue to fight until he delivers on the climate mandate he promised us.”
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who last week said he would “have a very hard time” voting for a bill significantly smaller than Biden’s original American Jobs Plan, tweeted Wednesday that “this is literally a matter of life or death.”
“Our plan on climate needs to be built to sustain our planet,” Bowman added, “not the fossil fuel industry.”
Sanders Blames “Rigged Economy” for CEO Pay Hikes Amid Worker Pay Cuts in 2020
BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 11, 2021
Anew report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) finds that at 51 of the S&P 500 companies with the lowest median wages, CEOs received 29 percent higher salaries in 2020 while the median worker suffered a 2 percent pay cut.
CEO compensation among the 51 companies averaged $15.3 million in 2020, the report finds. Workers’ median salary, meanwhile, was $28,187 — 2 percentage points lower than it was in 2019.
The companies with the highest average CEO pay were, paradoxically, the ones that ended the year with net losses. Among the group, 16 “profit-losing, rule-bending corporations had the highest average CEO pay, at $17.5 million,” the IPS writes.
Of the 100 S&P 500 with the lowest median wages, IPS found that Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta received the largest compensation in 2020. His $55.9 million compensation comes partially due to board members restructuring finances to boost Nassetta’s pay despite the company’s profits suffering overall.
While the company laid off 32,000 employees from its workforce, Hilton also slashed median worker pay from $43,695 to $28,608. This caused Hilton’s CEO-to-worker salary ratio to balloon to an astonishing 1,953 to 1. According to the report, Hilton’s board rationalized giving Nassetta a higher salary by claiming that not doing so would have “impaired the awards’ ability to retain key talent.”
Overall, on average, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio in 2020 at the 51 companies in question was a whopping 830 to 1.
By contrast, in 2019, the average CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 320 to 1 at the largest 350 firms in the U.S. — and even that is exorbitantly high by historical standards. In 1965, according to one metric, the ratio was 21 to 1, and in 1989 it was 61 to 1, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) writes. Overall, from 1978 to 2019, CEO compensation, including stock awards, rose 1,167 percent. Typical worker pay at these corporations only increased by 13.7 percent in the same time period.
A report by EPI released last month found that decreasing unionization may be fueling the problem of low worker pay. In 2017, the report found, workers were actually making less per hour than they did in 1979 when adjusted for inflation, and overall were making the equivalent of $3,250 less per year while working full time. As workers’ pay has decreased, the report says, so has unionization and collective bargaining.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called the IPS’s findings “absurd” on Tuesday. “This is a rigged economy,” he wrote on Twitter.
To help relieve the problem of skyrocketing CEO pay, the IPS report authors recommend passage of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. The bill, introduced by Sanders in March, tackles the issue of widening CEO-to-worker pay ratios by ratcheting up the corporate tax rate for companies with pay ratios of 50 to 1 or higher.
Under the bill, companies whose CEOs are paid 50 to 100 times their employees’ median salary would have their tax rate hiked by 0.5 percent. That percentage slowly rises until it reaches a max of 5 percent at a 500 to 1 ratio.
“Taking steps to tax extreme CEO-worker pay gaps would encourage large corporations to narrow their divides, either by lifting up compensation at the bottom of the corporate pay ladder, shrinking pay at the top, or, better yet, taking both steps together,” writes the IPS. “Such taxes on extreme pay ratios, at this point in time, could also generate significant revenue to invest in a more equitable Covid recovery.”
Putting a limit on CEO pay is popular among the public. According to a Sanders press release on the bill, 62 percent of Americans, including 66 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans, favor limiting the CEO-to-worker pay ratio to 6 to 1.
CEO compensation among the 51 companies averaged $15.3 million in 2020, the report finds. Workers’ median salary, meanwhile, was $28,187 — 2 percentage points lower than it was in 2019.
The companies with the highest average CEO pay were, paradoxically, the ones that ended the year with net losses. Among the group, 16 “profit-losing, rule-bending corporations had the highest average CEO pay, at $17.5 million,” the IPS writes.
Of the 100 S&P 500 with the lowest median wages, IPS found that Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta received the largest compensation in 2020. His $55.9 million compensation comes partially due to board members restructuring finances to boost Nassetta’s pay despite the company’s profits suffering overall.
While the company laid off 32,000 employees from its workforce, Hilton also slashed median worker pay from $43,695 to $28,608. This caused Hilton’s CEO-to-worker salary ratio to balloon to an astonishing 1,953 to 1. According to the report, Hilton’s board rationalized giving Nassetta a higher salary by claiming that not doing so would have “impaired the awards’ ability to retain key talent.”
Overall, on average, the CEO-to-worker salary ratio in 2020 at the 51 companies in question was a whopping 830 to 1.
By contrast, in 2019, the average CEO-to-worker salary ratio was 320 to 1 at the largest 350 firms in the U.S. — and even that is exorbitantly high by historical standards. In 1965, according to one metric, the ratio was 21 to 1, and in 1989 it was 61 to 1, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) writes. Overall, from 1978 to 2019, CEO compensation, including stock awards, rose 1,167 percent. Typical worker pay at these corporations only increased by 13.7 percent in the same time period.
A report by EPI released last month found that decreasing unionization may be fueling the problem of low worker pay. In 2017, the report found, workers were actually making less per hour than they did in 1979 when adjusted for inflation, and overall were making the equivalent of $3,250 less per year while working full time. As workers’ pay has decreased, the report says, so has unionization and collective bargaining.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) called the IPS’s findings “absurd” on Tuesday. “This is a rigged economy,” he wrote on Twitter.
To help relieve the problem of skyrocketing CEO pay, the IPS report authors recommend passage of the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. The bill, introduced by Sanders in March, tackles the issue of widening CEO-to-worker pay ratios by ratcheting up the corporate tax rate for companies with pay ratios of 50 to 1 or higher.
Under the bill, companies whose CEOs are paid 50 to 100 times their employees’ median salary would have their tax rate hiked by 0.5 percent. That percentage slowly rises until it reaches a max of 5 percent at a 500 to 1 ratio.
“Taking steps to tax extreme CEO-worker pay gaps would encourage large corporations to narrow their divides, either by lifting up compensation at the bottom of the corporate pay ladder, shrinking pay at the top, or, better yet, taking both steps together,” writes the IPS. “Such taxes on extreme pay ratios, at this point in time, could also generate significant revenue to invest in a more equitable Covid recovery.”
Putting a limit on CEO pay is popular among the public. According to a Sanders press release on the bill, 62 percent of Americans, including 66 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans, favor limiting the CEO-to-worker pay ratio to 6 to 1.
Progressives Vow to Fight Manchin and Sinema Holding Up Stimulus Over $15 Wage
BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 23, 2021
On Wednesday, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough is set to meet with Democrats and Republicans as they argue their case on whether or not to keep the $15 federal minimum wage proposal in the stimulus. MacDonough’s decision, which could come soon after the meeting, on what’s known as the “Byrd rule” will determine whether or not the minimum wage hike will live in the stimulus bill or whether it will have to be a separate bill (and subject to the filibuster).
But the Byrd rule isn’t the only hurdle that advocates of the $15 minimum wage will have to jump if MacDonough approves the provision for reconciliation. Progressives advocating for the wage hike will have to fight their own party, as centrist senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) are resistant to the proposal.
Sinema this month told Politico that the wage increase is “not appropriate” to include in the stimulus bill — mostly because she’s a big fan of the filibuster that many Democrats and progressives have been advocating to abolish. “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” she said.
Manchin said on Monday that, if the parliamentarian rules favorably toward keeping the wage increase, he would fight to lower it to $11 instead. He argues that that benchmark is more reasonable for his home state of West Virginia.
Progressives, however, aren’t willing to compromise on the wage hike. On Tuesday, Politico reported that progressive House representatives and aides to budget chair Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) say that they’re ready to fight a compromise that might come from the center on the minimum wage. Sanders hinted at this when he was asked about the wage hike on Monday, saying “I think we’re going to pass it as it is.”
As progressives gain more power and influence than ever in modern politics, staying steadfast on the $15 minimum wage is a flex of that power. And, with Joe Biden in agreement on the wage hike — though he may not be as ready to fight for it as progressives seem to be — it seems that the two centrist senators are the ones holding the stimulus package hostage with their opposition to the long-awaited hike to the minimum wage.
Progressives like Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) have raised their objections to the two centrist Democrats’ stance. In response to Manchin wanting to greatly lower the minimum wage hike, Jones tweeted: “This is unacceptable. The $15 minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular with the American people. One person should not be allowed to hold relief hostage.”
Progressives have also disputed Manchin’s claim that the lower wage hike would be better for his state, as some pointed to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, which says that the minimum wage hike proposal would help lift the wages of about 255,000 workers in West Virginia and would especially benefit people of color. Others pointed out that, in 2014, Manchin supported a raise of the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016. In seven years, his ambitions only grew by less than a dollar.
Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25. It has not been raised for nearly 12 years, the longest it has remained stagnant. In the meantime, the cost of living has gone up by nearly 20 percent across the country.
Research from MIT says that a living wage in Manchin’s state is closer to $15 an hour than $11 — $13.93 an hour is what the MIT report says someone without kids needs to earn just to survive in West Virginia, which also ranks 15th in terms of lowest average costs of living in the country. On average, according to the same MIT research, a living wage for a single adult in the U.S. was $15.41 per hour in 2020. That number goes up each year and multiplies for individuals with children.
Many progressive advocates have been critical of the current $15 an hour proposal, saying that it doesn’t go far enough. The current version of the wage hike in the stimulus bill slowly hikes up the wage until it reaches $15 an hour in 2024, which some have said is too late. They also point out that, if wages had kept up with the rate of productivity, it would be over $24 an hour today.
But the Byrd rule isn’t the only hurdle that advocates of the $15 minimum wage will have to jump if MacDonough approves the provision for reconciliation. Progressives advocating for the wage hike will have to fight their own party, as centrist senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) are resistant to the proposal.
Sinema this month told Politico that the wage increase is “not appropriate” to include in the stimulus bill — mostly because she’s a big fan of the filibuster that many Democrats and progressives have been advocating to abolish. “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” she said.
Manchin said on Monday that, if the parliamentarian rules favorably toward keeping the wage increase, he would fight to lower it to $11 instead. He argues that that benchmark is more reasonable for his home state of West Virginia.
Progressives, however, aren’t willing to compromise on the wage hike. On Tuesday, Politico reported that progressive House representatives and aides to budget chair Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) say that they’re ready to fight a compromise that might come from the center on the minimum wage. Sanders hinted at this when he was asked about the wage hike on Monday, saying “I think we’re going to pass it as it is.”
As progressives gain more power and influence than ever in modern politics, staying steadfast on the $15 minimum wage is a flex of that power. And, with Joe Biden in agreement on the wage hike — though he may not be as ready to fight for it as progressives seem to be — it seems that the two centrist senators are the ones holding the stimulus package hostage with their opposition to the long-awaited hike to the minimum wage.
Progressives like Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) have raised their objections to the two centrist Democrats’ stance. In response to Manchin wanting to greatly lower the minimum wage hike, Jones tweeted: “This is unacceptable. The $15 minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular with the American people. One person should not be allowed to hold relief hostage.”
Progressives have also disputed Manchin’s claim that the lower wage hike would be better for his state, as some pointed to an Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, which says that the minimum wage hike proposal would help lift the wages of about 255,000 workers in West Virginia and would especially benefit people of color. Others pointed out that, in 2014, Manchin supported a raise of the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016. In seven years, his ambitions only grew by less than a dollar.
Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25. It has not been raised for nearly 12 years, the longest it has remained stagnant. In the meantime, the cost of living has gone up by nearly 20 percent across the country.
Research from MIT says that a living wage in Manchin’s state is closer to $15 an hour than $11 — $13.93 an hour is what the MIT report says someone without kids needs to earn just to survive in West Virginia, which also ranks 15th in terms of lowest average costs of living in the country. On average, according to the same MIT research, a living wage for a single adult in the U.S. was $15.41 per hour in 2020. That number goes up each year and multiplies for individuals with children.
Many progressive advocates have been critical of the current $15 an hour proposal, saying that it doesn’t go far enough. The current version of the wage hike in the stimulus bill slowly hikes up the wage until it reaches $15 an hour in 2024, which some have said is too late. They also point out that, if wages had kept up with the rate of productivity, it would be over $24 an hour today.
'Err on the side of helping people': AOC slams Blue Dog Democrat for opposing $2,000 relief checks
Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams - raw story
December 30, 2020
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York pilloried Rep. Kurt Schrader after the Oregon Democrat voted against an amendment to increase one-time direct payments to most Americans from $600 to $2,000, which passed the House on Monday when 44 Republicans joined 231 Democrats in supporting the bill now awaiting action in the Senate.
Schrader opposed the Caring for Americans With Supplemental Help (CASH) Act because, according to the lawmaker—whose net worth hovered close to $8 million in 2018—"people who are making six figure incomes and who have not been impact[ed] by Covid-19 do not need checks."
Just over an hour after voicing his disapproval of bigger relief checks for the majority of U.S. households, Schrader voted in favor of overriding President Donald Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), greenlighting more than $740 billion in military spending for fiscal year 2021—and perfectly encapsulating what the ostensibly centrist, national security-minded Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of Democratic lawmakers to which Schrader belongs, means by "fiscal responsibility."
"First of all, aid starts phasing out at $75,000," Ocasio-Cortez began in her rebuttal to Schrader's statement, which was riddled with erroneous assertions. "It's already tied to outdated income information, don't make it worse," she continued, alluding to the fact that eligibility is based on 2019 tax returns.
Although individuals with incomes in the six-figure range are in fact not eligible for a full relief check, contrary to what Schrader suggested, Ocasio-Cortez reminded the Blue Dog Democrat that people who made $100,000 or more "also had income disrupted." Besides, she asked, "Is this really a good reason to block aid for millions?"
According to Schrader, the CASH Act "is an ineffective and poorly targeted approach to aiding Americans in distress." He described the measure as "clearly a last-minute political maneuver by the president and extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, who have been largely absent during months of very hard negotiations."
Schrader was one of two House Democrats to vote against the amendment to increase relief checks from $600 to $2,000. He was joined by outgoing Rep. Daniel Lipinski of Illinois and both voted to override Trump's NDAA veto, along with 210 other Democratic representatives.
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on Monday night applauded the 20 House Democrats who "had the courage... to vote no on the bloated defense budget," which he said contributes to "changing the culture of endless war and calling for more investment instead in the American people."
Schrader took a misleading jab at left-leaning lawmakers, accusing them of choosing "to tweet their opinions instead of coming to the table to get aid in the hands of Americans and small businesses that need it most," a bizzare claim given that direct payments to struggling people were "not even on the table" prior to the efforts of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs.
In addition to correcting the false information underlying Schrader's stated reasons for opposing the CASH Act, Ocasio-Cortez told the conservative lawmaker: "If you're going to err, err on the side of helping people."
Schrader opposed the Caring for Americans With Supplemental Help (CASH) Act because, according to the lawmaker—whose net worth hovered close to $8 million in 2018—"people who are making six figure incomes and who have not been impact[ed] by Covid-19 do not need checks."
Just over an hour after voicing his disapproval of bigger relief checks for the majority of U.S. households, Schrader voted in favor of overriding President Donald Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), greenlighting more than $740 billion in military spending for fiscal year 2021—and perfectly encapsulating what the ostensibly centrist, national security-minded Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of Democratic lawmakers to which Schrader belongs, means by "fiscal responsibility."
"First of all, aid starts phasing out at $75,000," Ocasio-Cortez began in her rebuttal to Schrader's statement, which was riddled with erroneous assertions. "It's already tied to outdated income information, don't make it worse," she continued, alluding to the fact that eligibility is based on 2019 tax returns.
Although individuals with incomes in the six-figure range are in fact not eligible for a full relief check, contrary to what Schrader suggested, Ocasio-Cortez reminded the Blue Dog Democrat that people who made $100,000 or more "also had income disrupted." Besides, she asked, "Is this really a good reason to block aid for millions?"
According to Schrader, the CASH Act "is an ineffective and poorly targeted approach to aiding Americans in distress." He described the measure as "clearly a last-minute political maneuver by the president and extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, who have been largely absent during months of very hard negotiations."
Schrader was one of two House Democrats to vote against the amendment to increase relief checks from $600 to $2,000. He was joined by outgoing Rep. Daniel Lipinski of Illinois and both voted to override Trump's NDAA veto, along with 210 other Democratic representatives.
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on Monday night applauded the 20 House Democrats who "had the courage... to vote no on the bloated defense budget," which he said contributes to "changing the culture of endless war and calling for more investment instead in the American people."
Schrader took a misleading jab at left-leaning lawmakers, accusing them of choosing "to tweet their opinions instead of coming to the table to get aid in the hands of Americans and small businesses that need it most," a bizzare claim given that direct payments to struggling people were "not even on the table" prior to the efforts of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the Congressional Progressive Caucus to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs.
In addition to correcting the false information underlying Schrader's stated reasons for opposing the CASH Act, Ocasio-Cortez told the conservative lawmaker: "If you're going to err, err on the side of helping people."
For the First Time, the Progressive Caucus Will Have Real Power
New rules will help Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) turn the caucus into a force to be reckoned with.
JOEL BLEIFUSS - in these times
DECEMBER 29, 2020
The Democratic majority in the House is shaping up to be one of the most progressive — and partisan — ever, as members of the 117th Congress assume office January 3. While some moderate Dems lost their House seats, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) gained members, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) and Cori Bush (Mo.), both members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yes, Beltway pundits will bellyache about the death of cross-party comity. But in Congress, bipartisanship does not serve the interests of the majority of Democrats, especially those who suffer the effects of structural racism and generational poverty. Look no further than three “crowning” bipartisan achievements of the 1990s: the 1994 crime bill, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall bank regulation. The latter came home to roost in 2008, enabling the financial crisis. The George W. Bush administration’s subsequent $700 billion bank bailout rescued Wall Street but did nothing for the 10 million families who lost their homes.
Fast forward 12 years and we are again headed toward economic catastrophe. The Covid-19 pandemic and the expiration of pandemic-related unemployment benefits will move 14 million Americans one step closer to deep poverty and homelessness. This level of economic destitution has not been seen since the 1930s.
One difference between the Covid-19 Recession and the 2008 Great Recession is that progressives in Congress have since gotten their act together. The CPC has restructured itself (starting January 3) into a disciplined, small‑d democratic political operation that will push progressive legislation on the inside while helping raise a ruckus on the outside.
Under new rules approved in November 2020, the CPC will no longer be led by two co-chairs. For the 117th Congress, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) will lead. Another change requires members to vote as a bloc on issues supported by two-thirds of the caucus. Should a member fail to adhere to this rule at least 66% of the time, they could face expulsion. In addition, members must attend CPC meetings and respond to requests from the caucus whip (currently Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar) about where they stand on issues.
If some CPC members find the new rules unacceptable, no sweat. Jayapal made clear she “would rather have people who are really committed to the Progressive Caucus in the caucus and participating rather than sort of just having it as a label.”
Bowman greeted news of the reforms with a tweet: “Ready to flex our muscle and join the era of collective progressive power.”
Jayapal, who entered Congress in 2016 (after a 20-year career as a community organizer), admits in an interview with Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger, that it will become all but impossible to pass progressive legislation should Republicans control the Senate. “Then we have to use an inside/outside strategy like the one I was part of when we got Obama to agree to [the Dream Act],” Jayapal says. “We may have to be the wind behind the sails that helps Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deliver change through executive action, if we can’t do it legislatively.”
Because the Democratic majority in the House is so slim — just 13 seats — a united CPC could even extract the concessions from House leadership so desperately needed right now: eviction moratoriums, student debt relief, unemployment assistance.
These types of policies are anathema to party centrists, who apparently would rather captain a sinking ship than surrender any control to partisans in steerage. But providing actual economic relief is essential to prevent Democratic losses in the midterms and 2024. Movement-backed Democrats must be disciplined and organized in working with the new president, who inherits a crisis.
Otherwise, a shipwreck is imminent.
Yes, Beltway pundits will bellyache about the death of cross-party comity. But in Congress, bipartisanship does not serve the interests of the majority of Democrats, especially those who suffer the effects of structural racism and generational poverty. Look no further than three “crowning” bipartisan achievements of the 1990s: the 1994 crime bill, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall bank regulation. The latter came home to roost in 2008, enabling the financial crisis. The George W. Bush administration’s subsequent $700 billion bank bailout rescued Wall Street but did nothing for the 10 million families who lost their homes.
Fast forward 12 years and we are again headed toward economic catastrophe. The Covid-19 pandemic and the expiration of pandemic-related unemployment benefits will move 14 million Americans one step closer to deep poverty and homelessness. This level of economic destitution has not been seen since the 1930s.
One difference between the Covid-19 Recession and the 2008 Great Recession is that progressives in Congress have since gotten their act together. The CPC has restructured itself (starting January 3) into a disciplined, small‑d democratic political operation that will push progressive legislation on the inside while helping raise a ruckus on the outside.
Under new rules approved in November 2020, the CPC will no longer be led by two co-chairs. For the 117th Congress, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) will lead. Another change requires members to vote as a bloc on issues supported by two-thirds of the caucus. Should a member fail to adhere to this rule at least 66% of the time, they could face expulsion. In addition, members must attend CPC meetings and respond to requests from the caucus whip (currently Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar) about where they stand on issues.
If some CPC members find the new rules unacceptable, no sweat. Jayapal made clear she “would rather have people who are really committed to the Progressive Caucus in the caucus and participating rather than sort of just having it as a label.”
Bowman greeted news of the reforms with a tweet: “Ready to flex our muscle and join the era of collective progressive power.”
Jayapal, who entered Congress in 2016 (after a 20-year career as a community organizer), admits in an interview with Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger, that it will become all but impossible to pass progressive legislation should Republicans control the Senate. “Then we have to use an inside/outside strategy like the one I was part of when we got Obama to agree to [the Dream Act],” Jayapal says. “We may have to be the wind behind the sails that helps Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deliver change through executive action, if we can’t do it legislatively.”
Because the Democratic majority in the House is so slim — just 13 seats — a united CPC could even extract the concessions from House leadership so desperately needed right now: eviction moratoriums, student debt relief, unemployment assistance.
These types of policies are anathema to party centrists, who apparently would rather captain a sinking ship than surrender any control to partisans in steerage. But providing actual economic relief is essential to prevent Democratic losses in the midterms and 2024. Movement-backed Democrats must be disciplined and organized in working with the new president, who inherits a crisis.
Otherwise, a shipwreck is imminent.
AOC: NANCY PELOSI NEEDS TO GO, BUT THERE’S NOBODY TO REPLACE HER YET
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to Jeremy Scahill on the Intercepted podcast.
Aída Chávez - thew intercept
December 16, 2020, 3:01 a.m.
...Pelosi cruised to reelection in a virtual caucus vote last month and will face a full House floor vote for the speakership in January. She’s expected to remain speaker but has almost no room for error, after a disastrous performance in the general election cost the caucus at least a dozen seats. With a single-digit majority, she can only afford to lose a handful of Democratic votes on the House floor or else she’ll be short of the required 218, which would then throw the contest back to the caucus.
The rest of Pelosi’s octogenarian leadership team, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, has held these top positions for over a decade and won their slots without any opposition. On the Senate side, Schumer won reelection unanimously.
Ocasio-Cortez argued that there are no viable alternatives for House or Senate leadership at the moment because the caucus’s current leaders spent a number of years concentrating power without any “real grooming of a next generation of leadership.”
“A lot of this is not just about these two personalities, but also about the structural shifts that these two personalities have led in their time in leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The structural shifts of power in the House, both in process and rule, to concentrate power in party leadership of both parties, frankly, but in Democratic Party leadership to such a degree that an individual member has far less power than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
This dynamic is what pushes the “really talented members of Congress that do come along” to leave or run for statewide office instead. But Pelosi has also indicated that this upcoming term could be her last, “and the left isn’t really making a plan for that either,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “So I do think that it’s something that we really need to think about.”
If progressives do threaten to withhold their support from Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez said, their demand shouldn’t be merely for a floor vote on Medicare for All, which is sure to fail. Instead, she believes, progressives should fight some of the bigger structural obstacles in the way of Medicare for All, like pay-go, an austerity provision that makes it difficult for Democrats to pass more ambitious policies, or replacing conservative Democratic Rep. Richie Neal as head of the Ways and Means Committee. “We are currently negotiating to get and work towards real material concessions for the left that can move things into place, to help build power for the next two years,” she said.
The New York congresswoman shot down the possibility of running for the position any time soon. “The House is extraordinarily complex and I’m not ready,” she said. “It can’t be me. I know that I couldn’t do that job.”
Asked about President-elect Joe Biden bringing in hawkish members of the Obama administration, as well as officials from companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, Ocasio-Cortez said: “It’s horrible.”
“And I think it’s also part of a larger issue that we have right now, which is … the Biden administration is bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, which depending on where you are in the party, may sound nice, I guess,” she said. “But I think what a lot of people fail to remember is that we now have a Biden administration that’s bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, but when Obama was making appointments, he was bringing back a lot of Clinton appointees.”
Dozens of people, including some from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Facebook, and Google, have quietly been added to the Biden transition team in recent weeks, Politico reported on Monday.
This same cast of characters and their way of doing things, she added, is “a huge reason why we got Donald Trump in the first place. In addition to just the racism that was waiting to be reanimated in this country, [there] was just an extreme disdain for this moneyed political establishment that rules Washington.”
She also expressed frustration with congressional inaction on coronavirus relief and the failure to provide aid for those who are struggling, pointing to both the GOP’s “barbarity” and the Democrats’ strategic blunders. Ocasio-Cortez was the only Democrat in Congress to come out against the CARES Act, opposing it for both strategic and policy-related reasons. Democrats lost nearly all their leverage in pandemic relief negotiations, she argued, because the massive bailout gave Wall Street, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the Trump administration everything they wanted. It was the party’s “rage-inducing” hypocrisy on the issues, from military spending and mass surveillance to right-leaning economic stances, that led her to run for office in the first place.
“For me personally, it was when I was waitressing and I would hear Democrats talk about why the Affordable Care Act was so amazing all the time and how this is the greatest thing ever and the economy is doing wonderfully,” she said. “Frankly, it is the same trick that Trump pulls, which is, you know, people touting the Dow as a measure of economic success when we’re all getting killed out here.”
The rest of Pelosi’s octogenarian leadership team, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, has held these top positions for over a decade and won their slots without any opposition. On the Senate side, Schumer won reelection unanimously.
Ocasio-Cortez argued that there are no viable alternatives for House or Senate leadership at the moment because the caucus’s current leaders spent a number of years concentrating power without any “real grooming of a next generation of leadership.”
“A lot of this is not just about these two personalities, but also about the structural shifts that these two personalities have led in their time in leadership,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The structural shifts of power in the House, both in process and rule, to concentrate power in party leadership of both parties, frankly, but in Democratic Party leadership to such a degree that an individual member has far less power than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
This dynamic is what pushes the “really talented members of Congress that do come along” to leave or run for statewide office instead. But Pelosi has also indicated that this upcoming term could be her last, “and the left isn’t really making a plan for that either,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “So I do think that it’s something that we really need to think about.”
If progressives do threaten to withhold their support from Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez said, their demand shouldn’t be merely for a floor vote on Medicare for All, which is sure to fail. Instead, she believes, progressives should fight some of the bigger structural obstacles in the way of Medicare for All, like pay-go, an austerity provision that makes it difficult for Democrats to pass more ambitious policies, or replacing conservative Democratic Rep. Richie Neal as head of the Ways and Means Committee. “We are currently negotiating to get and work towards real material concessions for the left that can move things into place, to help build power for the next two years,” she said.
The New York congresswoman shot down the possibility of running for the position any time soon. “The House is extraordinarily complex and I’m not ready,” she said. “It can’t be me. I know that I couldn’t do that job.”
Asked about President-elect Joe Biden bringing in hawkish members of the Obama administration, as well as officials from companies like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, Ocasio-Cortez said: “It’s horrible.”
“And I think it’s also part of a larger issue that we have right now, which is … the Biden administration is bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, which depending on where you are in the party, may sound nice, I guess,” she said. “But I think what a lot of people fail to remember is that we now have a Biden administration that’s bringing back a lot of Obama appointees, but when Obama was making appointments, he was bringing back a lot of Clinton appointees.”
Dozens of people, including some from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Facebook, and Google, have quietly been added to the Biden transition team in recent weeks, Politico reported on Monday.
This same cast of characters and their way of doing things, she added, is “a huge reason why we got Donald Trump in the first place. In addition to just the racism that was waiting to be reanimated in this country, [there] was just an extreme disdain for this moneyed political establishment that rules Washington.”
She also expressed frustration with congressional inaction on coronavirus relief and the failure to provide aid for those who are struggling, pointing to both the GOP’s “barbarity” and the Democrats’ strategic blunders. Ocasio-Cortez was the only Democrat in Congress to come out against the CARES Act, opposing it for both strategic and policy-related reasons. Democrats lost nearly all their leverage in pandemic relief negotiations, she argued, because the massive bailout gave Wall Street, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the Trump administration everything they wanted. It was the party’s “rage-inducing” hypocrisy on the issues, from military spending and mass surveillance to right-leaning economic stances, that led her to run for office in the first place.
“For me personally, it was when I was waitressing and I would hear Democrats talk about why the Affordable Care Act was so amazing all the time and how this is the greatest thing ever and the economy is doing wonderfully,” she said. “Frankly, it is the same trick that Trump pulls, which is, you know, people touting the Dow as a measure of economic success when we’re all getting killed out here.”
The liberal class' Faustian bargain: Profit from the ravages of neoliberalism while we descend into Christianized fascism
Chris Hedges and Scheer Post - alternet
December 07, 2020
Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.
This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d'état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class's moral and political cowardice.
The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Antony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as Secretary of State? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama's memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to "offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling" as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the "climate portfolio" at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House's economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?
The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany's drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world's largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.
The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.
Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse's killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.
We stand on the cusp of a frightening authoritarianism. Social unrest, given a continuation of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, the siphoning off of diminishing resources to the bloated war machine, political stagnation and the failure to contain the pandemic and its economic fallout, is almost certain. Absent a left-wing populism, a disenfranchised working class will line up, as it did with Trump, behind its counterfeit, a right-wing populism. The liberal elites will, if history is any guide, justify state repression as a response to social chaos in the name of law and order. That they, too, are on the Christian Right and the corporate state's long list of groups to be neutralized will become evident to them when it is too late.
It was Friedrich Ebert and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, siding with the conservatives and nationalists, that created the Freikorps, private paramilitary groups composed of demobilized soldiers and malcontents. The Freikorps ruthlessly crushed left-wing uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle, Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia and the Ruhr. When the Freikorps was not gunning down left-wing populists in the streets and carrying out hundreds of political assassinations, including the murder of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, it was terrorizing civilians, looting and pillaging. The Freikorps became the antecedent of the Nazi Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm, a former Freikorps commander.
All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.
Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.
This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. The German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher in the 1930s said that fascism "is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings" and succeeds by "mobilizing human stupidity." This mobilized stupidity, accompanied by what Rainer Maria Rilke called "the evil effluvium from the human swamp," is being amplified and intensified in the siloed media chambers of the right. This hate-filled rhetoric eschews reality to cater to the desperate desire for emotional catharsis, for renewed glory and prosperity and for acts of savage vengeance against the phantom enemies blamed for our national debacle.
The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora's box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, "once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target."
This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.
The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.
Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.
This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d'état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class's moral and political cowardice.
The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Antony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as Secretary of State? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama's memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to "offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling" as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the "climate portfolio" at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House's economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?
The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime, a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany's drift into fascism. Biden, bereft like von Papen of new ideas and programs, will eventually be forced to employ the brutal tools Biden as a senator was so prominent in creating to maintain social control – wholesale surveillance, a corrupt judicial system, the world's largest prison system and police that have been transformed into lethal paramilitary units of internal occupation. Those that resist as social unrest mounts will be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already are being censored, including through algorithms and deplatforming on social media. The most ardent and successful dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be criminalized.
The shock troops of the state, already ideologically bonded with the neofascists on the right, will hunt down and wipe out an enfeebled and often phantom left, as we saw in the chilling state assassination by U.S. Marshals of the antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, who was unarmed and standing outside an apartment complex in Lacey, Washington, in September when he was shot multiple times. I witnessed this kind of routine state terror during the war in El Salvador. Reinoehl allegedly killed Aaron Danielson, a member of the far-right group Patriot Prayer during a pro-Trump rally in Portland, Oregon in August.
Compare the gunning down of Reinoehl by federal agents to the coddling of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two protesters and injuring a third on August 25 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Police officers, moments before the shooting, are seen on video thanking Rittenhouse and other armed right-wing militia member for coming to the city and handing them bottles of water. Rittenhouse is also seen in a video walking toward police with his hands up after his shooting spree as protesters yell that he had shot several people. Police, nevertheless, allow him to leave. Rittenhouse's killings have been defended by the right, including Trump. Rittenhouse, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for his legal fees, has been released on $2 million bail.
We stand on the cusp of a frightening authoritarianism. Social unrest, given a continuation of neoliberalism, the climate crisis, the siphoning off of diminishing resources to the bloated war machine, political stagnation and the failure to contain the pandemic and its economic fallout, is almost certain. Absent a left-wing populism, a disenfranchised working class will line up, as it did with Trump, behind its counterfeit, a right-wing populism. The liberal elites will, if history is any guide, justify state repression as a response to social chaos in the name of law and order. That they, too, are on the Christian Right and the corporate state's long list of groups to be neutralized will become evident to them when it is too late.
It was Friedrich Ebert and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, siding with the conservatives and nationalists, that created the Freikorps, private paramilitary groups composed of demobilized soldiers and malcontents. The Freikorps ruthlessly crushed left-wing uprisings in Berlin, Bremen, Brunswick, Hamburg, Halle, Leipzig, Silesia, Thuringia and the Ruhr. When the Freikorps was not gunning down left-wing populists in the streets and carrying out hundreds of political assassinations, including the murder of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, it was terrorizing civilians, looting and pillaging. The Freikorps became the antecedent of the Nazi Brownshirts, led by Ernst Röhm, a former Freikorps commander.
All the pieces are in place for our own descent into what I suspect will be a militarized Christianized fascism. Political dysfunction, a bankrupt and discredited liberal class, massive and growing social inequality, a grotesquely rich and tone-deaf oligarchic elite, the fragmentation of the public into warring tribes, widespread food insecurity and hunger, chronic underemployment and unemployment and misery, all exacerbated by the failure of the state to cope with the crisis of the pandemic, combine with the rot of civil and political life to create a familiar cocktail leading to authoritarianism and fascism.
Trump and the Republican Party, along with the shrill incendiary voices on right-wing media, play the role the antisemitic parties played in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century. The infusion of anti-Semitism into the political debate in Europe destroyed the political decorum and civility that is vital to maintaining a democracy. Racist tropes and hate speech, as in Weimar Germany, now poison our political discourse. Ridicule and cruel taunts are hurled back and forth. Lies are interchangeable with fact. Those who oppose us are demonized as human embodiments of evil.
This poisonous discourse is only going to get worse, especially with millions of Trump supporters convinced the election was rigged and stolen. The German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher in the 1930s said that fascism "is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings" and succeeds by "mobilizing human stupidity." This mobilized stupidity, accompanied by what Rainer Maria Rilke called "the evil effluvium from the human swamp," is being amplified and intensified in the siloed media chambers of the right. This hate-filled rhetoric eschews reality to cater to the desperate desire for emotional catharsis, for renewed glory and prosperity and for acts of savage vengeance against the phantom enemies blamed for our national debacle.
The constant barrage of vitriol and fabulist conspiracy theories will, I fear, embolden extremists to carry out political murder, not only of mainstream Democrats, Republicans Trump has accused of betrayal such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp and those targeted as part of the deep state, but also those at media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times that serve as propaganda arms of the Democratic Party. Once the Pandora's box of violence is opened it is almost impossible to close. Martyrs on one side of the divide demand martyrs on the other side. Violence becomes the primary form of communication. And, as Sabastian Haffner wrote, "once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target."
This, I suspect, is what is coming. The blame lies not only with the goons and racists on the right, the corporatists who pillage the country and the corrupt ruling elite that does their bidding, but a feckless liberal class that found standing up for its beliefs too costly. The liberals will pay for their timidity and cowardice, but so will we.
Why some liberals and arms-control experts are backing war profiteers for Biden's Cabinet
Progressives are covering for Tony Blinken and potential Pentagon chief Michèle Flournoy. It's a terrible gamble
By NORMAN SOLOMON - salon
DECEMBER 1, 2020 10:00AM (UTC)
No matter who ends up winning Senate confirmation for top positions on incoming President Joe Biden's "national security" team, an ominous dynamic is already underway. Some foreign policy specialists with progressive reputations are voicing support and evasive praise for prospective Cabinet members — as though spinning through revolving doors to broker lucrative Pentagon contracts is not a conflict of interest, and as though advocating for an aggressive U.S. military posture is fine.
Rationalizations are plentiful, but the results are dangerous. It's an insidious process, helping to set low standards for the incoming administration. Enablers now extol potential Cabinet picks who've combined pushing for continuous war and hugely expensive new weapons systems with getting rich as dealmakers for the military-industrial complex.
As journalists have brought to light, Antony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy shamelessly teamed up to cash in while rotating through high positions at the State Department and Pentagon. At the same time, Blinken (Biden's nominee as secretary of state) and Flournoy (a likely nominee as secretary of defense) have backed nonstop U.S. warfare.
Flournoy is grimly notable for urging potentially catastrophic military brinkmanship with China. Like her unabashed pursuit of wealth from the weapons industry, her dangerously aggressive approach toward China is anything but a secret. Yet in her current quest to run the Pentagon, she has received unequivocal support from numerous individuals who are respected in progressive circles, including those with avowed dedication to beating swords into plowshares.
From the top of the influential and well-heeled Ploughshares Fund, Joe Cirincione and Tom Collina have jumped onto the Flournoy bandwagon. Days ago, Cirincione proudly tweeted news coverage of the "Open Letter on Our Support for Michèle Flournoy to Be the Next Secretary of Defense," which he had signed along with Collina and 27 other "nuclear experts."
Other signatories of the open letter included Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as well as Arms Control Association board chair Tom Countryman and executive director Daryl Kimball. Former Defense Secretary William Perry also signed.
Cirincione's tweet, touting the pro-Flournoy open letter, ran into pushback from longtime peace activist Marcy Winograd, who tweeted back: "Joe, pls read her essay, 'How to Prevent a War in Asia,' which should be retitled 'How to Start a War in Asia.' Did you know she wants to continue to send 'defensive' weapons to Saudi Arabia while we 'pivot' to SCS [South China Sea] & more war games next to 2 nuclear powers?"
The reply from Cirincione offered little more than wishful thinking about Flournoy. "I disagree with many of the positions she has taken in the past," he wrote. "She is, however, the best qualified candidate for the position; the one most likely to implement serious changes should President Biden order them. Dems have also moved away from the Clinton policies she favored."
While Flournoy still awaits word on whether she'll get the nod from Biden for the Pentagon job, Tony Blinken — the man with whom she co-founded the influence-peddling outfit WestExec Advisors — is already the designated nominee for secretary of state. Oddly, two of Blinken's most high-profile progressive boosters for the job have worked in key roles for Bernie Sanders, a leader second to none in challenging corporate greed.
Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, tweeted that the selection of Blinken was a "solid choice." And Sanders' top foreign-policy adviser in his Senate office, Matt Duss, declared: "This is a good choice. Tony has the strong confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding U.S. diplomacy. It will also be a new and great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots."
That's a common rationale for supporting potential Cabinet members, despite the fact that their records and policy prescriptions are contrary to progressive principles. In effect, we're supposed to be grateful — and mollified — that at least they talk with us.
At the Council for a Livable World — which says that it "promotes policies to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons and to minimize the risk of war" — the executive director, former Massachusetts congressman John Tierney, told the group's members that Blinken is a good guy: "I, and our organization, have worked with him over the years, and I trust that he can restore and rebuild a State Department badly damaged by the Trump administration."
What does all this praise and access-drooling amount to?
Here's a cogent assessment from Winograd, a tireless antiwar activist: "Progressives may be tempted to trade truth for access to the powerful and privileged, thinking they can influence the course of events if they bite their tongue when Flournoy talks of fighting and prevailing in a war with China. But this sort of thinking is misguided. The power progressives hold must be wielded now before it's too late, before Flournoy is crowned and the U.S. slips further into decline, mired in a high-stakes high-tech arms race — or worse, another endless war, this one with a nuclear-armed nation of over 1.3 billion people."
Disturbing information about Flournoy and Blinken has long been available. And just this weekend, the New York Times published a devastating in-depth news article that shed more light on their direct financial involvements, which amount to classic conflicts of interest.
Many progressive activists and organizations have mobilized since the election to offer well-documented opposition to highly dubious potential members of the Biden Cabinet, including contenders for "national security" posts. Outside the Beltway bubble, grassroots groups are organizing to put up a fight against nominees who have repeatedly pledged and shown their allegiance to the warfare state.
Joe Biden's historic value was to defeat Donald Trump, and progressives played a vital role in that defeat — while often being candid about the many awful parts of the Biden record. Now progressives should emphatically challenge every odious aspect of the Biden administration, every step of the way.
Rationalizations are plentiful, but the results are dangerous. It's an insidious process, helping to set low standards for the incoming administration. Enablers now extol potential Cabinet picks who've combined pushing for continuous war and hugely expensive new weapons systems with getting rich as dealmakers for the military-industrial complex.
As journalists have brought to light, Antony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy shamelessly teamed up to cash in while rotating through high positions at the State Department and Pentagon. At the same time, Blinken (Biden's nominee as secretary of state) and Flournoy (a likely nominee as secretary of defense) have backed nonstop U.S. warfare.
Flournoy is grimly notable for urging potentially catastrophic military brinkmanship with China. Like her unabashed pursuit of wealth from the weapons industry, her dangerously aggressive approach toward China is anything but a secret. Yet in her current quest to run the Pentagon, she has received unequivocal support from numerous individuals who are respected in progressive circles, including those with avowed dedication to beating swords into plowshares.
From the top of the influential and well-heeled Ploughshares Fund, Joe Cirincione and Tom Collina have jumped onto the Flournoy bandwagon. Days ago, Cirincione proudly tweeted news coverage of the "Open Letter on Our Support for Michèle Flournoy to Be the Next Secretary of Defense," which he had signed along with Collina and 27 other "nuclear experts."
Other signatories of the open letter included Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as well as Arms Control Association board chair Tom Countryman and executive director Daryl Kimball. Former Defense Secretary William Perry also signed.
Cirincione's tweet, touting the pro-Flournoy open letter, ran into pushback from longtime peace activist Marcy Winograd, who tweeted back: "Joe, pls read her essay, 'How to Prevent a War in Asia,' which should be retitled 'How to Start a War in Asia.' Did you know she wants to continue to send 'defensive' weapons to Saudi Arabia while we 'pivot' to SCS [South China Sea] & more war games next to 2 nuclear powers?"
The reply from Cirincione offered little more than wishful thinking about Flournoy. "I disagree with many of the positions she has taken in the past," he wrote. "She is, however, the best qualified candidate for the position; the one most likely to implement serious changes should President Biden order them. Dems have also moved away from the Clinton policies she favored."
While Flournoy still awaits word on whether she'll get the nod from Biden for the Pentagon job, Tony Blinken — the man with whom she co-founded the influence-peddling outfit WestExec Advisors — is already the designated nominee for secretary of state. Oddly, two of Blinken's most high-profile progressive boosters for the job have worked in key roles for Bernie Sanders, a leader second to none in challenging corporate greed.
Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, tweeted that the selection of Blinken was a "solid choice." And Sanders' top foreign-policy adviser in his Senate office, Matt Duss, declared: "This is a good choice. Tony has the strong confidence of the president-elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding U.S. diplomacy. It will also be a new and great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots."
That's a common rationale for supporting potential Cabinet members, despite the fact that their records and policy prescriptions are contrary to progressive principles. In effect, we're supposed to be grateful — and mollified — that at least they talk with us.
At the Council for a Livable World — which says that it "promotes policies to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons and to minimize the risk of war" — the executive director, former Massachusetts congressman John Tierney, told the group's members that Blinken is a good guy: "I, and our organization, have worked with him over the years, and I trust that he can restore and rebuild a State Department badly damaged by the Trump administration."
What does all this praise and access-drooling amount to?
Here's a cogent assessment from Winograd, a tireless antiwar activist: "Progressives may be tempted to trade truth for access to the powerful and privileged, thinking they can influence the course of events if they bite their tongue when Flournoy talks of fighting and prevailing in a war with China. But this sort of thinking is misguided. The power progressives hold must be wielded now before it's too late, before Flournoy is crowned and the U.S. slips further into decline, mired in a high-stakes high-tech arms race — or worse, another endless war, this one with a nuclear-armed nation of over 1.3 billion people."
Disturbing information about Flournoy and Blinken has long been available. And just this weekend, the New York Times published a devastating in-depth news article that shed more light on their direct financial involvements, which amount to classic conflicts of interest.
Many progressive activists and organizations have mobilized since the election to offer well-documented opposition to highly dubious potential members of the Biden Cabinet, including contenders for "national security" posts. Outside the Beltway bubble, grassroots groups are organizing to put up a fight against nominees who have repeatedly pledged and shown their allegiance to the warfare state.
Joe Biden's historic value was to defeat Donald Trump, and progressives played a vital role in that defeat — while often being candid about the many awful parts of the Biden record. Now progressives should emphatically challenge every odious aspect of the Biden administration, every step of the way.
corporate demos obey their corporate masters!!!
the sellout continues
Progressives praise early Biden picks, but worry his team is stacked with “corporatists”
Left has been surprisingly supportive of Biden's choices so far — but some appointments seen as "betrayal"
By IGOR DERYSH - salon
NOVEMBER 24, 2020 11:00AM (UTC)
Progressives have had a mixed reaction to President-elect Joe Biden's early administration announcements as they seek to gain influence in the coming Democratic administration.
Biden sought to ally himself with the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., after a contentious primary fight and formed a task force to forge a more progressive platform for his administration. Sanders and Warren are not expected to receive administration appointments, however, both due to concerns that Republican senators would derail their nominations and that Republican governors in their states would then appoint GOP replacements.
Biden's early West Wing hires and Cabinet nominees have been greeted by progressives with a mix of praise and consternation about their corporate ties. Some leftists express concern that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, would be guided by "corporatists" who prioritize business interests. But they've also stressed that there is no question Biden's team is light years ahead of President Trump's administration, which has featured a revolving door of lobbyists and executives who undermined their agencies and sought to funnel taxpayer money to their corporate pals.
"Trump's government — run by the corporate lobbyists, for the corporate lobbyists — has devastated programs and rules that help working people," Warren said earlier this month. "Americans have made it clear: the last thing they want is for Washington to again hand over the keys to giant corporations and lobbyists."
Biden's selections have prioritized experience, diversity and coalition-building, a far cry from the Trump administration's war against the very agencies it leads.
Biden's team on Monday announced that he would name Antony Blinken, his former national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, as his secretary of state. Matt Duss, Sanders' foreign policy adviser, said Blinken was a "good choice" and praised Biden for selecting a diplomat who has "regularly engaged with progressive grassroots." Former Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir agreed that Blinken was a "solid choice."
But Blinken's corporate ties have drawn some handwringing from the left. Blinken, along with Michèle Flournoy, a former top Pentagon official and defense contractor executive, who is rumored to be the frontrunner to become Biden's defense secretary, founded WestExec Advisors after their time in the Obama administration.
That consulting firm, which includes numerous Obama alums, aims to help companies win Pentagon contracts and has extensive ties to a variety of defense contractors, The American Prospect reported. WestExec has also helped a number of Silicon Valley firms pitch the Pentagon for defense contracts, according to The Intercept.
Little else is known about the clients of the firm, which keeps its client roster secret and does not have to disclose their names as lobbying firm would. Watchdog groups have raised concerns over potential conflicts of interest arising from the firm's secret client list.
"It's a company that sells influence and connections," Mandy Smithberger of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight told ABC News. "Particularly for those who are going to go through the confirmation process, it's important to know who they were working for and the kind of work they were doing."(i.e. promotes bribery).
Biden also tapped Jake Sullivan, an ex-adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as his national security adviser. Sullivan has been praised as "brilliant" and an "all-star" but has his own corporate ties. Since 2017, Sullivan has worked for Macro Advisory Partners, a consulting firm that works with mining companies and sovereign wealth funds, among others, according to the American Prospect. Earlier this year, Sullivan worked with Uber to try to restrict contract workers from being entitled to benefits, according to the report.
Biden's team on Monday announced that Avril Haines, the former deputy national security adviser and deputy CIA director under Obama, would be his director of national intelligence. She has also served in the State Department and worked for Biden when he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A Cuban-American immigrant, Haines would be the first woman to serve in the position.
Haines also previously worked as a consultant for the controversial data-mining firm Palantir, a fact that was scrapped from her bio when she joined the Biden campaign, according to The Intercept. "Co-founded by a far-right, Trump-supporting tech billionaire, Palantir, whose business has benefited from a slew of government contracts, has been accused of aiding in the Trump administration's immigration detention programs in the U.S. and helping the Trump administration build out its surveillance state," the Intercept reported.
Biden has picked former Deputy Homeland Security Secretary and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Alejandro Mayorkas as his nominee to be secretary of Homeland Security. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro praised Mayorkas, who would be the first Latino to lead DHS, as a "historic and experienced choice." A former federal prosecutor, Mayorkas has also worked as a private attorney representing Fortune 100 clients and other high-profile companies. He was investigated in 2015 for intervening in visa cases on behalf of companies owned by Clinton's brother Anthony Rodham and longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia.
Biden also tapped Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the longtime former top diplomat to Africa and head of the U.S. Foreign Service, as his ambassador to the United Nations. Thomas-Greenfield has been widely praised for her experience and commitment to the Foreign Service, though The New York Times' Ken Vogel noted that she also served as senior vice president of a firm "that represented embattled Swiss-based mining giant Glencore," which is facing allegations of corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Biden's early selections also include former Secretary of State John Kerry, who has served as an adviser to Bank of America, as a climate czar; longtime aide Ron Klain, a venture capital executive, as White House chief of staff; longtime health care lobbyist Steve Ricchetti as a senior counselor; Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a top recipient of oil and gas money, as senior adviser; and former campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, the co-founder of Precision Strategies, which represents pharmaceutical and private equity firms, as deputy chief of staff.
Klain has largely drawn praise from progressives like Warren and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., but progressive groups have called Richmond's selection a "betrayal" and "really disappointing." Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told The New York Times that Ricchetti was "a figure so paradigmatically swampy that the writers of 'House of Cards' might reject his biography as overly stereotypical."
Progressives have also warned Biden against selecting "divisive" former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to his Cabinet and have expressed concerns about Biden's transition team, which includes executives from Amazon, Lyft, Facebook and other tech firms. A variety of progressive groups, including Demos, MoveOn, Our Revolution, Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party, sent a letter to Biden calling for him to avoid nominating "corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants" to top positions. Many others have called for Biden to bar officials from working on issues on which they had lobbied in the past two years, as Obama did. Biden has not been nearly as averse to lobbyists as Obama, and has resisted calls for a lobbyist ban.
Some House Democrats have also pressed the party leadership to push back on corporate influence within the coming Biden administration.
"If the C.E.O. of a fossil fuel corporation should not be put in charge of U.S. diplomacy or an oil lobbyist should not be put in charge of the Interior Department under a Republican administration, there is no reason to believe that an officer or lobbyist at a major bank or financial firm should be put in charge of financial policy under a Democratic administration," a group of Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., said in a letter to Senate leaders.
Other progressives have cautioned against litmus tests for administration picks.
"I understand the desire to have people that are ideologically aligned," Meredith McGehee, the head of IssueOne, a group seeking to limit money in politics, told The New York Times. "But when you start doing litmus tests on appointees it can backfire. You need to have appointees in the administration who can work with a range of people in Congress or you are not likely to get much done."
Moderate Democratic groups have also argued that a litmus test "makes it harder to get the diverse Cabinet" Biden and progressives want.
Others have argued that competency and experience are more important traits in administration appointments than ideological purity, particularly after Trump spent years crippling federal agencies.
"I need a team ready on Day 1 to help me reclaim America's seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face and advance our security, prosperity and values," Biden said in a statement on Monday after announcing his national security team. "These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative. Their accomplishments in diplomacy are unmatched, but they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."
As the left debates how much — or how little — to push the incoming administration, Washington lobbying firms are celebrating a return to normal after the Trump administration limited influence to a small number of well-connected firms, according to The New York Times. Some firms have hired officials close to Biden while others stand to benefit from longstanding connections to the administration.
Amid the battle between the left and the more corporate-friendly wing of the Democratic Party, progressives have vowed to continue organizing to push the Biden administration to keep its campaign promises.
"We're going to organize and demand that this administration — which I believe is decent and kind and honorable — keep their promise," Ocasio-Cortez told a group of activists last week. "Keeps its promise to young people. Keeps its promise to the movement for Black lives. Keeps its promise to working-class people across the United States."
RELATED: Biden’s Pick for Secretary of State Helped Lead the US Into the Iraq War: Antony Blinken -- a backer of the Iraq War with right-wing views on Israel -- is a return to the status quo ante.
Biden sought to ally himself with the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., after a contentious primary fight and formed a task force to forge a more progressive platform for his administration. Sanders and Warren are not expected to receive administration appointments, however, both due to concerns that Republican senators would derail their nominations and that Republican governors in their states would then appoint GOP replacements.
Biden's early West Wing hires and Cabinet nominees have been greeted by progressives with a mix of praise and consternation about their corporate ties. Some leftists express concern that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration, would be guided by "corporatists" who prioritize business interests. But they've also stressed that there is no question Biden's team is light years ahead of President Trump's administration, which has featured a revolving door of lobbyists and executives who undermined their agencies and sought to funnel taxpayer money to their corporate pals.
"Trump's government — run by the corporate lobbyists, for the corporate lobbyists — has devastated programs and rules that help working people," Warren said earlier this month. "Americans have made it clear: the last thing they want is for Washington to again hand over the keys to giant corporations and lobbyists."
Biden's selections have prioritized experience, diversity and coalition-building, a far cry from the Trump administration's war against the very agencies it leads.
Biden's team on Monday announced that he would name Antony Blinken, his former national security adviser and deputy secretary of state, as his secretary of state. Matt Duss, Sanders' foreign policy adviser, said Blinken was a "good choice" and praised Biden for selecting a diplomat who has "regularly engaged with progressive grassroots." Former Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir agreed that Blinken was a "solid choice."
But Blinken's corporate ties have drawn some handwringing from the left. Blinken, along with Michèle Flournoy, a former top Pentagon official and defense contractor executive, who is rumored to be the frontrunner to become Biden's defense secretary, founded WestExec Advisors after their time in the Obama administration.
That consulting firm, which includes numerous Obama alums, aims to help companies win Pentagon contracts and has extensive ties to a variety of defense contractors, The American Prospect reported. WestExec has also helped a number of Silicon Valley firms pitch the Pentagon for defense contracts, according to The Intercept.
Little else is known about the clients of the firm, which keeps its client roster secret and does not have to disclose their names as lobbying firm would. Watchdog groups have raised concerns over potential conflicts of interest arising from the firm's secret client list.
"It's a company that sells influence and connections," Mandy Smithberger of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight told ABC News. "Particularly for those who are going to go through the confirmation process, it's important to know who they were working for and the kind of work they were doing."(i.e. promotes bribery).
Biden also tapped Jake Sullivan, an ex-adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as his national security adviser. Sullivan has been praised as "brilliant" and an "all-star" but has his own corporate ties. Since 2017, Sullivan has worked for Macro Advisory Partners, a consulting firm that works with mining companies and sovereign wealth funds, among others, according to the American Prospect. Earlier this year, Sullivan worked with Uber to try to restrict contract workers from being entitled to benefits, according to the report.
Biden's team on Monday announced that Avril Haines, the former deputy national security adviser and deputy CIA director under Obama, would be his director of national intelligence. She has also served in the State Department and worked for Biden when he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A Cuban-American immigrant, Haines would be the first woman to serve in the position.
Haines also previously worked as a consultant for the controversial data-mining firm Palantir, a fact that was scrapped from her bio when she joined the Biden campaign, according to The Intercept. "Co-founded by a far-right, Trump-supporting tech billionaire, Palantir, whose business has benefited from a slew of government contracts, has been accused of aiding in the Trump administration's immigration detention programs in the U.S. and helping the Trump administration build out its surveillance state," the Intercept reported.
Biden has picked former Deputy Homeland Security Secretary and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Alejandro Mayorkas as his nominee to be secretary of Homeland Security. Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro praised Mayorkas, who would be the first Latino to lead DHS, as a "historic and experienced choice." A former federal prosecutor, Mayorkas has also worked as a private attorney representing Fortune 100 clients and other high-profile companies. He was investigated in 2015 for intervening in visa cases on behalf of companies owned by Clinton's brother Anthony Rodham and longtime Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia.
Biden also tapped Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the longtime former top diplomat to Africa and head of the U.S. Foreign Service, as his ambassador to the United Nations. Thomas-Greenfield has been widely praised for her experience and commitment to the Foreign Service, though The New York Times' Ken Vogel noted that she also served as senior vice president of a firm "that represented embattled Swiss-based mining giant Glencore," which is facing allegations of corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Biden's early selections also include former Secretary of State John Kerry, who has served as an adviser to Bank of America, as a climate czar; longtime aide Ron Klain, a venture capital executive, as White House chief of staff; longtime health care lobbyist Steve Ricchetti as a senior counselor; Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., a top recipient of oil and gas money, as senior adviser; and former campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon, the co-founder of Precision Strategies, which represents pharmaceutical and private equity firms, as deputy chief of staff.
Klain has largely drawn praise from progressives like Warren and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., but progressive groups have called Richmond's selection a "betrayal" and "really disappointing." Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, told The New York Times that Ricchetti was "a figure so paradigmatically swampy that the writers of 'House of Cards' might reject his biography as overly stereotypical."
Progressives have also warned Biden against selecting "divisive" former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to his Cabinet and have expressed concerns about Biden's transition team, which includes executives from Amazon, Lyft, Facebook and other tech firms. A variety of progressive groups, including Demos, MoveOn, Our Revolution, Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party, sent a letter to Biden calling for him to avoid nominating "corporate executives, lobbyists, and prominent corporate consultants" to top positions. Many others have called for Biden to bar officials from working on issues on which they had lobbied in the past two years, as Obama did. Biden has not been nearly as averse to lobbyists as Obama, and has resisted calls for a lobbyist ban.
Some House Democrats have also pressed the party leadership to push back on corporate influence within the coming Biden administration.
"If the C.E.O. of a fossil fuel corporation should not be put in charge of U.S. diplomacy or an oil lobbyist should not be put in charge of the Interior Department under a Republican administration, there is no reason to believe that an officer or lobbyist at a major bank or financial firm should be put in charge of financial policy under a Democratic administration," a group of Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., said in a letter to Senate leaders.
Other progressives have cautioned against litmus tests for administration picks.
"I understand the desire to have people that are ideologically aligned," Meredith McGehee, the head of IssueOne, a group seeking to limit money in politics, told The New York Times. "But when you start doing litmus tests on appointees it can backfire. You need to have appointees in the administration who can work with a range of people in Congress or you are not likely to get much done."
Moderate Democratic groups have also argued that a litmus test "makes it harder to get the diverse Cabinet" Biden and progressives want.
Others have argued that competency and experience are more important traits in administration appointments than ideological purity, particularly after Trump spent years crippling federal agencies.
"I need a team ready on Day 1 to help me reclaim America's seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face and advance our security, prosperity and values," Biden said in a statement on Monday after announcing his national security team. "These individuals are equally as experienced and crisis-tested as they are innovative and imaginative. Their accomplishments in diplomacy are unmatched, but they also reflect the idea that we cannot meet the profound challenges of this new moment with old thinking and unchanged habits — or without diversity of background and perspective. It's why I've selected them."
As the left debates how much — or how little — to push the incoming administration, Washington lobbying firms are celebrating a return to normal after the Trump administration limited influence to a small number of well-connected firms, according to The New York Times. Some firms have hired officials close to Biden while others stand to benefit from longstanding connections to the administration.
Amid the battle between the left and the more corporate-friendly wing of the Democratic Party, progressives have vowed to continue organizing to push the Biden administration to keep its campaign promises.
"We're going to organize and demand that this administration — which I believe is decent and kind and honorable — keep their promise," Ocasio-Cortez told a group of activists last week. "Keeps its promise to young people. Keeps its promise to the movement for Black lives. Keeps its promise to working-class people across the United States."
RELATED: Biden’s Pick for Secretary of State Helped Lead the US Into the Iraq War: Antony Blinken -- a backer of the Iraq War with right-wing views on Israel -- is a return to the status quo ante.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party
New York representative denies Movement for Black Lives and Green New Deal cost seats
Tom McCarthy
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 8 Nov 2020 05.21 EST
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.
Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
“If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election.
The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.
“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez and her closest allies in Congress – a four-woman group known as “the squad” who all won reelection last week – toed the party line while calling on grassroots activists to boost Biden and Democrats down-ticket.
The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging.
“If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”
Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”
Kasich is a former Republican governor of Ohio who campaigned for Biden, endorsing him as a centrist that moderate Republicans could get behind. Such an appeal might have had traction in some places, such as northern Michigan and western Omaha. But Trump beat Biden in Ohio by eight points and half a million votes.
The Ocasio-Cortez interview is full of frank impressions freely shared. Asked what her “macro takeaway” was from the election, she said: “Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a freefall to hell anymore.” Asked whether there was anything about the election that surprised her, she said: “The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realising what work we have to do.”
While there were concerns about the reliability of exit polls this year with so much voting happening over mail and the failure of polls generally, Trump appeared to have won white voters in 2020 by about as much as he did in 2016 – 15 points.
The coming period of presidential transition and the Biden administration’s early days will be crucial to determining whether the Democratic party will incorporate in a permanent way its grassroots progressive engine – or veer off down a path toward defeat, Ocasio-Cortez said.
“So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”
CONGRESSIONAL PROGRESSIVES ARE REVAMPING THEIR CAUCUS WITH AN EYE TOWARD 2021
With nearly 100 members, the CPC’s large size and loose requirements have been an obstacle to its ability to be a cohesive force.
Ryan Grim - the intercept
October 26 2020, 11:06 a.m.
THE CONGRESSIONAL PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS is restructuring in order to shape itself into a more cohesive fighting force come 2021, according to CPC members involved in designing the new strategy. A series of proposed reforms to the caucus’s leadership structure as well as membership requirements were sent to CPC members for approval on Sunday, members of the caucus said. The changes won’t go into force without two-thirds support of the current members, said CPC co-chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington.
The Progressive Caucus has grown steadily since its founding in 1991 and now includes nearly 100 Democratic members of Congress, as the “progressive” label has gained currency in recent years. That size has also paradoxically been a weakness, as the group has been unable to enforce or motivate discipline, particularly as many of those who have joined are not active in the caucus and don’t subscribe to its core tenets.
Shortly after winning her 2018 primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the group that backed her, Justice Democrats, identified the group’s size as a hindrance, with Ocasio-Cortez suggesting a “sub-caucus” of Democrats willing to buck party leadership and take down legislation might be more effective. No sub-caucus was formed this term, but the CPC did work to block legislation it found insufficient — at times extracting concessions, at other times getting steamrolled. Its biggest success came on HR3, the fight over drug pricing, when the CPC forced Pelosi to move its way by credibly threatening to take down the bill.
Jayapal said that HR3 was “definitely a significant moment” in the shaping of the CPC’s approach to organizing in the caucus, and it required not just a threat but a set of demands that were ready to go. “One of the things that’s really important in those last negotiating minutes is to drill down to a few things that are most important,” she said.
Under the current CPC rules, essentially any Democrat willing to write a small dues check — $4,000 per year — to the group can become an official member, regardless of their politics, their source of campaign financing, their voting record, or even their attendance at CPC meetings. The benefit for moderate Democrats who fear facing primary challengers from the left is that they can tout their membership as evidence of progressive bona fides without delivering anything substantive.
The proposed changes to the CPC are intended to move it in a tighter direction. “The point of the reform is to shed free riding members that claim CPC membership but aren’t actually progressive,” said one CPC member.
Jayapal said that the caucus may indeed shrink if the reforms are implemented. “It may. We’re ready for that to happen,” she said. “I just would rather have people who are really committed to the progressive caucus in the caucus and participating rather than sort of just having it as a label.”
The task force is also pushing to move from the co-chair leadership structure that has been in place since 2005 to a single chair, arguing that the CPC is at a tactical disadvantage because its two chairs must coordinate before making a move, and quickness is often essential on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Mark Pocan, the other co-chair, said, for instance, a press release may be ready to go by 10 a.m., but getting both members and their staffs to sign off amid a busy day could take until later afternoon. “And by then the press release isn’t even relevant anymore,” he said. “A lot of cooks are in the kitchen and often all we’re doing is making a grilled cheese.”
Having two co-chairs also creates opportunities for opponents to undermine the caucus, he said. “Recently we had two people from … another caucus, I’ll just say … try to divide and conquer us, by talking to us separately and seeing if they could pick one of us off,” he said. “That’s not the first time that people have tried to work one chair or the other in trying to influence the caucus.” Pocan recently announced he would not stand for reelection as co-chair; Jayapal is expected to run again.
Nearly all other caucuses have only a single chair, which was also the CPC’s structure at its founding, when it had six members and was chaired by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont. Sanders was blocked early in his career from caucusing with the Democrats by Southern members who didn’t want to be associated with a socialist. Indeed, the political value of the progressive label had so bottomed out that anybody who would willingly label themselves as one was presumed to be telling the truth. That’s no longer the case, as the pendulum has swung back toward the progressive end inside the Democratic Party. Today, a number of members of the CPC are also members of the New Democrats Coalition, which is an ideological rival of the CPC built to be a bulwark against the progressive wing and in support of business interests.
Under the new rules, if a position wins two-thirds support among the CPC, members of the caucus will be expected to vote as a bloc, which would make it the first Democratic caucus to attempt to bind its members. Yet at the same time, members need only support the official position of the CPC two-thirds of the time before running afoul of the rules and risking expulsion.
Pushing CPC members to vote as a bloc is an effort to find enough strength in solidarity to make credible threats to leadership or to a potential Biden administration. On the GOP side, the Freedom Caucus has exercised its power by voting as a bloc. The difference, of course, is that the right-wing’s default posture toward government programs is one of destruction, so withholding votes is less difficult, said Pocan. It’s more difficult for progressive Democrats to say no to legislation that will benefit even a small number of people, and therein lies their negotiating handicap.
“It’s easy to tank something. It’s much harder to create something,” said Pocan. “One of the reasons that we’ve always not liked the comparison to the Freedom Caucus is they like to say ‘No.’ Quite honestly we like to say ‘yes’ to ideas, and have some ideas that we’re putting out there, and they’re just great at saying ‘No.’”
The new rules would also require CPC members to attend a certain number of meetings and to respond to whip requests, which are questions from caucus leadership about how a member feels about a particular bill or position. That such basic requirements are being written into the rules is a reflection of the current lack of participation. Some of that silence amounted to obstruction; a way to undermine a whip count was to simply ignore it. The new rules would strip the nonrespondents from the denominator, meaning a member who doesn’t respond can’t jam up the process. The caucus will also require members to vote for and sponsor a certain amount of progressive legislation.
The task force set up to write the new rules included Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Jamie Raskin, Barbara Lee, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Lloyd Doggett, Chuy Garcia, David Cicilline, Jayapal, and Pocan. The new rules, if approved, won’t go into effect until the next Congress.
The Progressive Caucus has grown steadily since its founding in 1991 and now includes nearly 100 Democratic members of Congress, as the “progressive” label has gained currency in recent years. That size has also paradoxically been a weakness, as the group has been unable to enforce or motivate discipline, particularly as many of those who have joined are not active in the caucus and don’t subscribe to its core tenets.
Shortly after winning her 2018 primary, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the group that backed her, Justice Democrats, identified the group’s size as a hindrance, with Ocasio-Cortez suggesting a “sub-caucus” of Democrats willing to buck party leadership and take down legislation might be more effective. No sub-caucus was formed this term, but the CPC did work to block legislation it found insufficient — at times extracting concessions, at other times getting steamrolled. Its biggest success came on HR3, the fight over drug pricing, when the CPC forced Pelosi to move its way by credibly threatening to take down the bill.
Jayapal said that HR3 was “definitely a significant moment” in the shaping of the CPC’s approach to organizing in the caucus, and it required not just a threat but a set of demands that were ready to go. “One of the things that’s really important in those last negotiating minutes is to drill down to a few things that are most important,” she said.
Under the current CPC rules, essentially any Democrat willing to write a small dues check — $4,000 per year — to the group can become an official member, regardless of their politics, their source of campaign financing, their voting record, or even their attendance at CPC meetings. The benefit for moderate Democrats who fear facing primary challengers from the left is that they can tout their membership as evidence of progressive bona fides without delivering anything substantive.
The proposed changes to the CPC are intended to move it in a tighter direction. “The point of the reform is to shed free riding members that claim CPC membership but aren’t actually progressive,” said one CPC member.
Jayapal said that the caucus may indeed shrink if the reforms are implemented. “It may. We’re ready for that to happen,” she said. “I just would rather have people who are really committed to the progressive caucus in the caucus and participating rather than sort of just having it as a label.”
The task force is also pushing to move from the co-chair leadership structure that has been in place since 2005 to a single chair, arguing that the CPC is at a tactical disadvantage because its two chairs must coordinate before making a move, and quickness is often essential on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Mark Pocan, the other co-chair, said, for instance, a press release may be ready to go by 10 a.m., but getting both members and their staffs to sign off amid a busy day could take until later afternoon. “And by then the press release isn’t even relevant anymore,” he said. “A lot of cooks are in the kitchen and often all we’re doing is making a grilled cheese.”
Having two co-chairs also creates opportunities for opponents to undermine the caucus, he said. “Recently we had two people from … another caucus, I’ll just say … try to divide and conquer us, by talking to us separately and seeing if they could pick one of us off,” he said. “That’s not the first time that people have tried to work one chair or the other in trying to influence the caucus.” Pocan recently announced he would not stand for reelection as co-chair; Jayapal is expected to run again.
Nearly all other caucuses have only a single chair, which was also the CPC’s structure at its founding, when it had six members and was chaired by then-Rep. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont. Sanders was blocked early in his career from caucusing with the Democrats by Southern members who didn’t want to be associated with a socialist. Indeed, the political value of the progressive label had so bottomed out that anybody who would willingly label themselves as one was presumed to be telling the truth. That’s no longer the case, as the pendulum has swung back toward the progressive end inside the Democratic Party. Today, a number of members of the CPC are also members of the New Democrats Coalition, which is an ideological rival of the CPC built to be a bulwark against the progressive wing and in support of business interests.
Under the new rules, if a position wins two-thirds support among the CPC, members of the caucus will be expected to vote as a bloc, which would make it the first Democratic caucus to attempt to bind its members. Yet at the same time, members need only support the official position of the CPC two-thirds of the time before running afoul of the rules and risking expulsion.
Pushing CPC members to vote as a bloc is an effort to find enough strength in solidarity to make credible threats to leadership or to a potential Biden administration. On the GOP side, the Freedom Caucus has exercised its power by voting as a bloc. The difference, of course, is that the right-wing’s default posture toward government programs is one of destruction, so withholding votes is less difficult, said Pocan. It’s more difficult for progressive Democrats to say no to legislation that will benefit even a small number of people, and therein lies their negotiating handicap.
“It’s easy to tank something. It’s much harder to create something,” said Pocan. “One of the reasons that we’ve always not liked the comparison to the Freedom Caucus is they like to say ‘No.’ Quite honestly we like to say ‘yes’ to ideas, and have some ideas that we’re putting out there, and they’re just great at saying ‘No.’”
The new rules would also require CPC members to attend a certain number of meetings and to respond to whip requests, which are questions from caucus leadership about how a member feels about a particular bill or position. That such basic requirements are being written into the rules is a reflection of the current lack of participation. Some of that silence amounted to obstruction; a way to undermine a whip count was to simply ignore it. The new rules would strip the nonrespondents from the denominator, meaning a member who doesn’t respond can’t jam up the process. The caucus will also require members to vote for and sponsor a certain amount of progressive legislation.
The task force set up to write the new rules included Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Jamie Raskin, Barbara Lee, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Lloyd Doggett, Chuy Garcia, David Cicilline, Jayapal, and Pocan. The new rules, if approved, won’t go into effect until the next Congress.
Progressives unveil 2021 agenda to pressure Biden
The policy platform is part of a strategy to push Biden to the left if he wins the presidency.
By HOLLY OTTERBEIN
POLITICO
10/08/2020 06:01 AM EDT
Black Lives Matter leaders, organized labor, progressive groups and members of the House Democratic “Squad” are unveiling a 2021 agenda Thursday, laying down markers for how big a Joe Biden administration could go on coronavirus aid, economic relief and more next year.
Known as the Working Families Party’s “People’s Charter,” the 1,000-word proposal calls for universal free health care, a jobs program employing 16 million people, retroactive hazard pay for essential employees and the reallocation of resources from policing toward education and other services. It also promotes giving the public an ownership stake in firms that receive bailouts, as well as buying out gas and oil companies, among other policies.
The platform, shared first with POLITICO, is the latest move from progressives as they prepare to wrangle with moderate Democrats over the scale of new government spending and programs if the party wins control of Washington. It’s part of a different strategy for progressives this year than in the 2016 election: putting more organizational muscle behind Biden than they put into backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but also vowing to turn around and place immediate pressure on Biden to stand with them on key issues if he is elected.
Eight members of Congress, including prominent progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, are backing the program. A handful of likely incoming House freshmen, along with the Service Employees International Union, Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives and climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, are also on board.
"There is no doubt we need to evict Donald Trump and immediately begin the work of repairing and rebuilding stronger,” said Pressley. “Our country is facing overlapping crises of public health, economic inequality and systemic racism. The People's Charter offers a pathway to work together toward healing and justice for everyone.”
Biden supports some of the planks of the proposal, such as free Covid-19 testing and a ban on evictions and foreclosures during the pandemic. But he has already come out against other items, such as implementing single-payer health care and reducing police funding.
“It’s putting a stake in the ground that we believe Joe Biden can become a New Deal 2.0 president,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), another member of Congress who has signed onto the plan. “He has talked about the crisis that Roosevelt faced. He has talked about wanting to have a new New Deal for the 21st century. That should be the direction he goes instead of the incrementalism of the ’90s.”
Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks, one of several local and state officials who are supporting the plan, added that “it’s something that gives voters some enthusiasm.”
Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the organization will promote the agenda as part of its campaign to persuade progressive voters to cast a ballot for Biden.
“We endorsed Elizabeth Warren and then we endorsed Bernie Sanders, so it’s not surprising that our party and our base have some policy differences with Joe Biden,” said Mitchell. “People, in order to be enthusiastic about voting, need to vote for something — and the People’s Charter provides folks with something that is outside of candidates’ politics to vote for. It also sets up conditions postelection to articulate that this election was a referendum on this agenda.”
Known as the Working Families Party’s “People’s Charter,” the 1,000-word proposal calls for universal free health care, a jobs program employing 16 million people, retroactive hazard pay for essential employees and the reallocation of resources from policing toward education and other services. It also promotes giving the public an ownership stake in firms that receive bailouts, as well as buying out gas and oil companies, among other policies.
The platform, shared first with POLITICO, is the latest move from progressives as they prepare to wrangle with moderate Democrats over the scale of new government spending and programs if the party wins control of Washington. It’s part of a different strategy for progressives this year than in the 2016 election: putting more organizational muscle behind Biden than they put into backing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but also vowing to turn around and place immediate pressure on Biden to stand with them on key issues if he is elected.
Eight members of Congress, including prominent progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, are backing the program. A handful of likely incoming House freshmen, along with the Service Employees International Union, Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives and climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, are also on board.
"There is no doubt we need to evict Donald Trump and immediately begin the work of repairing and rebuilding stronger,” said Pressley. “Our country is facing overlapping crises of public health, economic inequality and systemic racism. The People's Charter offers a pathway to work together toward healing and justice for everyone.”
Biden supports some of the planks of the proposal, such as free Covid-19 testing and a ban on evictions and foreclosures during the pandemic. But he has already come out against other items, such as implementing single-payer health care and reducing police funding.
“It’s putting a stake in the ground that we believe Joe Biden can become a New Deal 2.0 president,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), another member of Congress who has signed onto the plan. “He has talked about the crisis that Roosevelt faced. He has talked about wanting to have a new New Deal for the 21st century. That should be the direction he goes instead of the incrementalism of the ’90s.”
Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks, one of several local and state officials who are supporting the plan, added that “it’s something that gives voters some enthusiasm.”
Maurice “Moe” Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the organization will promote the agenda as part of its campaign to persuade progressive voters to cast a ballot for Biden.
“We endorsed Elizabeth Warren and then we endorsed Bernie Sanders, so it’s not surprising that our party and our base have some policy differences with Joe Biden,” said Mitchell. “People, in order to be enthusiastic about voting, need to vote for something — and the People’s Charter provides folks with something that is outside of candidates’ politics to vote for. It also sets up conditions postelection to articulate that this election was a referendum on this agenda.”
PROGRESSIVE BOSTON DOCTOR SEEKS TO UNSEAT “DO-NOTHING MODERATE DEMOCRAT” IN CONGRESS
Robbie Goldstein is challenging incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch, the most conservative member of the Massachusetts delegation.
Rachel M. Cohen
August 16 2020, 4:00 a.m.
WITH JUST OVER two weeks left until the Massachusetts Democratic primary, progressives across the country are focused on the high-profile primaries of Sen. Ed Markey, who is fending off a challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy, and Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, who is running against House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal.
Elsewhere in the state, other progressive challengers are struggling to attract similar attention. In the crowded House race to replace Kennedy, two progressives appear tied for third behind two more conservative Democrats. And in the Boston-area 8th Congressional District, Robbie Goldstein, a 36-year-old primary care physician, is scrambling to get his name out and convince voters he’s not running a long-shot bid.
On Wednesday, Goldstein’s campaign released a poll claiming he trailed just 7 percentage points behind nine-term moderate incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch. Conducted last weekend by Lincoln Park Strategies, the poll found that 29 percent of likely voters remain undecided. However, Lynch held a clear advantage when it came to name recognition, with roughly 70 percent of voters knowing who he was, compared to 40 percent recognizing Goldstein. Still, the pollsters concluded Goldstein “has a real chance to win” because among undecideds, 42 percent said they’d prefer to vote for a more progressive candidate, 71 percent said they’d prefer a pro-choice candidate, and 73 percent said they’d prefer a candidate who backs Medicare for All.
Goldstein’s case against Lynch rests on substantive policy differences, including Medicare for All and reproductive rights. The incumbent opposes single-payer health care, and while Lynch has criticized federal efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and “draconian” state-level abortion restrictions, he himself identifies as pro-life and believes ending pregnancies should be “legal and rare.”
Goldstein’s campaign argues that this race presents a viable opportunity to bring another progressive to Congress, even if Lynch is not as influential as other incumbents who’ve been toppled, like Reps. Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel. “I am constantly confounded by progressives’ infatuation with claiming these big headline victories instead of just winning and building power,” said Karen Clawson Cosmas, Goldstein’s campaign manager. “We can replace a do-nothing moderate Democrat with someone who is actually a champion of the issues of the progressive wing of the party.”
Lynch has long been the most conservative member of the Massachusetts delegation, though he argues that’s all relative for their deep blue state. “Calling me the least liberal member from Massachusetts is like calling me the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon,” Lynch quipped a decade ago in the Boston Globe.
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LYNCH, WHO GREW up poor in South Boston public housing and spent two decades as an ironworker, was first elected to Congress in 2001. He represents a district that over the last two decades has grown both more diverse and more gentrified. Following the 2010 Census, Lynch’s district boundaries were redrawn, and while Joe Biden won every city and town in the 8th Congressional District on Super Tuesday, Goldstein says there’s a real path to victory, since Warren and Bernie Sanders racked up more votes in the district overall than Biden.
An Irish Catholic proud of his ties to blue-collar workers, Lynch has voiced concerns about the party drifting too far left and is critical of the term “socialism,” which he warns could scare off older voters. Ferson argues that Lynch remains “well-in-tune” with his district and has handily defeated candidates who have run to his left in the past. In 2018, Lynch was challenged by Brianna Wu, a software engineer who ran on Medicare for All and tackling income inequality, and beat her with 71 percent of the vote.
The sharpest contrast between the two candidates revolves around health care. Ironically one of Lynch’s biggest vulnerabilities is that he was just one of 45 House Democrats to vote against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and of those Democrats, only three remain in Congress. Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the three, lost his primary in March to progressive challenger Marie Newman.
At the time, Lynch explained he voted no because he felt the final version gave too much power to the insurance industry and would lead to spiking prices, and he opposed how the bill taxed union health care plans and eliminated opportunities for state public options.
“I don’t think [Lynch] is as conservative as Lipinski, but I do think the thing that sticks with people here is him having voted against the Affordable Care Act, given how much activism there was around that,” said Jonathan Cohn, a leader with Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide advocacy group. “People remember that.”
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On issues of immigration, there are differences between the candidates too. Over the objections of President Barack Obama in 2015, Lynch voted to tighten vetting standards for refugees from Iraq and Syria, and in 2018 he voted in favor of a resolution lauding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even when 133 House Democrats just voted “present.” While Lynch has condemned President Donald Trump’s child separation policy and backed a 2019 resolution to establish standards of care at border facilities, some of his constituents say he’s moved too slowly, and been too quiet overall.
“He’s just not interested in engaging with constituents who are looking for someone with a sense of urgency,” said Tonya Tedesco, a Boston activist who organized trips to Lynch’s district offices last summer to press him on immigration. “We are in crisis mode and I do not know that he recognizes that.”
Elsewhere in the state, other progressive challengers are struggling to attract similar attention. In the crowded House race to replace Kennedy, two progressives appear tied for third behind two more conservative Democrats. And in the Boston-area 8th Congressional District, Robbie Goldstein, a 36-year-old primary care physician, is scrambling to get his name out and convince voters he’s not running a long-shot bid.
On Wednesday, Goldstein’s campaign released a poll claiming he trailed just 7 percentage points behind nine-term moderate incumbent Rep. Stephen Lynch. Conducted last weekend by Lincoln Park Strategies, the poll found that 29 percent of likely voters remain undecided. However, Lynch held a clear advantage when it came to name recognition, with roughly 70 percent of voters knowing who he was, compared to 40 percent recognizing Goldstein. Still, the pollsters concluded Goldstein “has a real chance to win” because among undecideds, 42 percent said they’d prefer to vote for a more progressive candidate, 71 percent said they’d prefer a pro-choice candidate, and 73 percent said they’d prefer a candidate who backs Medicare for All.
Goldstein’s case against Lynch rests on substantive policy differences, including Medicare for All and reproductive rights. The incumbent opposes single-payer health care, and while Lynch has criticized federal efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and “draconian” state-level abortion restrictions, he himself identifies as pro-life and believes ending pregnancies should be “legal and rare.”
Goldstein’s campaign argues that this race presents a viable opportunity to bring another progressive to Congress, even if Lynch is not as influential as other incumbents who’ve been toppled, like Reps. Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel. “I am constantly confounded by progressives’ infatuation with claiming these big headline victories instead of just winning and building power,” said Karen Clawson Cosmas, Goldstein’s campaign manager. “We can replace a do-nothing moderate Democrat with someone who is actually a champion of the issues of the progressive wing of the party.”
Lynch has long been the most conservative member of the Massachusetts delegation, though he argues that’s all relative for their deep blue state. “Calling me the least liberal member from Massachusetts is like calling me the slowest Kenyan in the Boston Marathon,” Lynch quipped a decade ago in the Boston Globe.
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LYNCH, WHO GREW up poor in South Boston public housing and spent two decades as an ironworker, was first elected to Congress in 2001. He represents a district that over the last two decades has grown both more diverse and more gentrified. Following the 2010 Census, Lynch’s district boundaries were redrawn, and while Joe Biden won every city and town in the 8th Congressional District on Super Tuesday, Goldstein says there’s a real path to victory, since Warren and Bernie Sanders racked up more votes in the district overall than Biden.
An Irish Catholic proud of his ties to blue-collar workers, Lynch has voiced concerns about the party drifting too far left and is critical of the term “socialism,” which he warns could scare off older voters. Ferson argues that Lynch remains “well-in-tune” with his district and has handily defeated candidates who have run to his left in the past. In 2018, Lynch was challenged by Brianna Wu, a software engineer who ran on Medicare for All and tackling income inequality, and beat her with 71 percent of the vote.
The sharpest contrast between the two candidates revolves around health care. Ironically one of Lynch’s biggest vulnerabilities is that he was just one of 45 House Democrats to vote against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and of those Democrats, only three remain in Congress. Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the three, lost his primary in March to progressive challenger Marie Newman.
At the time, Lynch explained he voted no because he felt the final version gave too much power to the insurance industry and would lead to spiking prices, and he opposed how the bill taxed union health care plans and eliminated opportunities for state public options.
“I don’t think [Lynch] is as conservative as Lipinski, but I do think the thing that sticks with people here is him having voted against the Affordable Care Act, given how much activism there was around that,” said Jonathan Cohn, a leader with Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide advocacy group. “People remember that.”
---
On issues of immigration, there are differences between the candidates too. Over the objections of President Barack Obama in 2015, Lynch voted to tighten vetting standards for refugees from Iraq and Syria, and in 2018 he voted in favor of a resolution lauding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even when 133 House Democrats just voted “present.” While Lynch has condemned President Donald Trump’s child separation policy and backed a 2019 resolution to establish standards of care at border facilities, some of his constituents say he’s moved too slowly, and been too quiet overall.
“He’s just not interested in engaging with constituents who are looking for someone with a sense of urgency,” said Tonya Tedesco, a Boston activist who organized trips to Lynch’s district offices last summer to press him on immigration. “We are in crisis mode and I do not know that he recognizes that.”
Sanders: “Richest 1 Percent Is Responsible for 70 Percent of All Unpaid Taxes”
BY Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
PUBLISHED July 9, 2020
A Congressional Budget Office report commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders and published Wednesday found the amount of unpaid taxes from 2011 to 2013 averaged around $381 billion per year, a revenue shortfall the Vermont senator called an “absolute outrage” that is largely the result of big corporations and “wealthy tax cheats” dodging their obligations.
“The richest 1% is responsible for 70% of all unpaid taxes,” Sanders said in a statement late Wednesday, pointing to a separate study of the so-called “tax gap” published last November.
The CBO analysis (pdf) out Wednesday found that massive Internal Revenue Service budget cuts and staff reductions over the past decade have resulted in a sharp decline in examination and enforcement of tax underpayment and avoidance.
“Enforcement activity for many high-income nonfilers has been reduced to a series of notices,” the report says. The CBO’s findings bolster reporting by ProPublica last year that found the IRS “now audits poor Americans at about the same rate as the top 1%” due in part to the high costs of examining the tax returns of the rich.
“The IRS examination rate for the largest corporations, those with $20 billion or more in assets, dropped by about half from 2010 to 2018,” Sanders’ office noted. “The wealthiest taxpayers, with more than $1 million in income, saw their audit rate cut by 63% during the same time period.”
If the federal government collected the hundreds of billions in unpaid taxes owed mostly by the richest Americans, Sanders pointed out, “we could fund tuition-free college for all, eliminate child hunger, ensure clean drinking water for every American household, build half a million affordable housing units, provide masks to all, produce the protective gear and medical supplies our health workers need to combat this pandemic, and fully fund the U.S. Postal Service.”
“That is an absolute outrage, and this report should make us take a long, hard look at what our national priorities are all about,” said Sanders. “Congress is leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes uncollected from the wealthy.”
The CBO found that boosting the IRS budget for audits and collections by $20 billion over the next decade would increase federal tax revenue by $61 billion—and, as a result, reduce the federal budget deficit by $40 billion.
“For every dollar we invest in getting the IRS the staffing and resources it needs, we get three dollars back in unpaid taxes. Make no mistake: the primary beneficiaries of IRS funding cuts are wealthy tax cheats and large corporations,” said Sanders. “Do not think for one second that the wealthiest country on Earth is unable to make critical investments to meet people’s basic needs in terms of healthcare, food security, education, and unemployment.”
“The richest 1% is responsible for 70% of all unpaid taxes,” Sanders said in a statement late Wednesday, pointing to a separate study of the so-called “tax gap” published last November.
The CBO analysis (pdf) out Wednesday found that massive Internal Revenue Service budget cuts and staff reductions over the past decade have resulted in a sharp decline in examination and enforcement of tax underpayment and avoidance.
“Enforcement activity for many high-income nonfilers has been reduced to a series of notices,” the report says. The CBO’s findings bolster reporting by ProPublica last year that found the IRS “now audits poor Americans at about the same rate as the top 1%” due in part to the high costs of examining the tax returns of the rich.
“The IRS examination rate for the largest corporations, those with $20 billion or more in assets, dropped by about half from 2010 to 2018,” Sanders’ office noted. “The wealthiest taxpayers, with more than $1 million in income, saw their audit rate cut by 63% during the same time period.”
If the federal government collected the hundreds of billions in unpaid taxes owed mostly by the richest Americans, Sanders pointed out, “we could fund tuition-free college for all, eliminate child hunger, ensure clean drinking water for every American household, build half a million affordable housing units, provide masks to all, produce the protective gear and medical supplies our health workers need to combat this pandemic, and fully fund the U.S. Postal Service.”
“That is an absolute outrage, and this report should make us take a long, hard look at what our national priorities are all about,” said Sanders. “Congress is leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes uncollected from the wealthy.”
The CBO found that boosting the IRS budget for audits and collections by $20 billion over the next decade would increase federal tax revenue by $61 billion—and, as a result, reduce the federal budget deficit by $40 billion.
“For every dollar we invest in getting the IRS the staffing and resources it needs, we get three dollars back in unpaid taxes. Make no mistake: the primary beneficiaries of IRS funding cuts are wealthy tax cheats and large corporations,” said Sanders. “Do not think for one second that the wealthiest country on Earth is unable to make critical investments to meet people’s basic needs in terms of healthcare, food security, education, and unemployment.”
The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party
By William J. Astore
From LA Progressive: Why did Donald Trump win the presidency? A big reason is that he was willing to take unpopular stances. He criticized the Afghan and Iraq wars in the strongest terms. He attacked Wall Street. He called for closer relations with Russia. Of course, to cite one example, when he became president, Trump willingly embraced Wall Street — no surprise here. Trump is not about consistency. The larger point is that he appeared authentic, or at the very least not tied to traditional politics of the mealymouthed, which involves focus groups and think tanks and polls and triangulation before any policy position is taken.
The Democratic Party has learned nothing from Trump’s success, nor for that matter from Bernie Sanders’s rise. It’s rejecting the energy and popularity of Sanders’s progressive platform for the tired bromides of economic competitiveness, moderate tax increases on the rich, and infrastructure improvements (which Trump has also called for). It’s refusing to critique America’s enervating and endless overseas wars. It’s even refusing to focus on serious social issues (too divisive!), as reported here at Mic Network:
The new [Democratic] agenda will be released under the title, “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.”
According to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, the plan “jettisoned social and foreign policy issues for this exercise, eschewing the identity politics and box-checking that has plagued Democratic campaigns in the past.”
Leaving social justice issues out of the platform is sure to anger many progressives in the party who have been pushing for issues like police brutality, systemic racism and transgender rights to be front-and-center on the Democratic agenda.
Likewise, the absence of any foreign policy agenda is likely to irk the left’s many critics of America’s never-ending wars.
What’s the point of voting for a Democratic Party that refuses to address such vitally important issues? And don’t you just love the unimaginative title of the plan?
A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.
If you have to repeat the word “better” four times, I’m less than convinced that the deal is actually “better.” It sounds like a used car salesman trying to sell a lemon. I’ll give you a better deal on this beat-up Yugo! At a better price, with a better warranty, with better loan payments! Sure … right.
I think I can come up with five “better” titles for the Democrats just off the top of my head. I’ll give it a whirl:
OK. Maybe not number 5. I’m not saying my titles are great — just that they hold some promise of raising ourselves to a higher level. We should be thinking about making a better America, not for skills or jobs or the economy, but for our children. For our and their collective futures. A little idealism, please! The fierce urgency of now!
Where’s the emotional appeal in “better” skills or a “better” job? It’s funny: I don’t recall the Founders talking about skills and jobs. They talked about personal liberty, about freedom, about coming together and raising new hopes. And they didn’t just talk — they acted. Give me liberty or give me death. Now that took guts!
I see no inspiration — and no guts — in the current Democratic Party establishment. And until the party finds some, they will continue to lose.
The Democratic Party has learned nothing from Trump’s success, nor for that matter from Bernie Sanders’s rise. It’s rejecting the energy and popularity of Sanders’s progressive platform for the tired bromides of economic competitiveness, moderate tax increases on the rich, and infrastructure improvements (which Trump has also called for). It’s refusing to critique America’s enervating and endless overseas wars. It’s even refusing to focus on serious social issues (too divisive!), as reported here at Mic Network:
The new [Democratic] agenda will be released under the title, “A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.”
According to the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, the plan “jettisoned social and foreign policy issues for this exercise, eschewing the identity politics and box-checking that has plagued Democratic campaigns in the past.”
Leaving social justice issues out of the platform is sure to anger many progressives in the party who have been pushing for issues like police brutality, systemic racism and transgender rights to be front-and-center on the Democratic agenda.
Likewise, the absence of any foreign policy agenda is likely to irk the left’s many critics of America’s never-ending wars.
What’s the point of voting for a Democratic Party that refuses to address such vitally important issues? And don’t you just love the unimaginative title of the plan?
A Better Deal: Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages.
If you have to repeat the word “better” four times, I’m less than convinced that the deal is actually “better.” It sounds like a used car salesman trying to sell a lemon. I’ll give you a better deal on this beat-up Yugo! At a better price, with a better warranty, with better loan payments! Sure … right.
I think I can come up with five “better” titles for the Democrats just off the top of my head. I’ll give it a whirl:
- No Guts, No Glory: A Bold New Plan for Our Country
- Soaring Together: Remaking Our Country, Reigniting Our Dreams
- America the Bountiful: Tapping Our Greatness — and Goodness
- Better Angels: Reviving America’s Nobility
- Comrade! March with Me to the Towers and Pitchfork the Rich!
OK. Maybe not number 5. I’m not saying my titles are great — just that they hold some promise of raising ourselves to a higher level. We should be thinking about making a better America, not for skills or jobs or the economy, but for our children. For our and their collective futures. A little idealism, please! The fierce urgency of now!
Where’s the emotional appeal in “better” skills or a “better” job? It’s funny: I don’t recall the Founders talking about skills and jobs. They talked about personal liberty, about freedom, about coming together and raising new hopes. And they didn’t just talk — they acted. Give me liberty or give me death. Now that took guts!
I see no inspiration — and no guts — in the current Democratic Party establishment. And until the party finds some, they will continue to lose.
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